Rafael Medoff The Brandeis Center Blog is pleased to welcome Dr. Rafael Medoff as our next guest blogger. Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which focuses on America’s response to the Holocaust. A prolific author, Medoff has written numerous books and articles. His most recent book is FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith, which is published by the Wyman Institute. The Wyman Institute has its own distinctive niche in Holocaust education, teaching the history of America’s response to the Shoah. The Institute explores America’s abandonment of Europe’s Jews during the Nazi era, efforts to promote their rescue, and the lessons of those experiences. The Institute tries to make the historical record accessible to a wider audience through exhibits, speakers, educational curricula, and other media, not to mention Medoff’s own prolific writing. FDR and the Holocaust is the latest major contribution to this effort. Among its many disconcerting revelations, FDR and the Holocaust shows that Roosevelt remarked in 1943 that “the complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany” were “understandable” because there were many Jews in law, medicine, and other fields in Germany. FDR also claimed in 1938 that the Jews were too prominent in Poland’s economy, which he blamed for anti-Semitism there. Because of his view that Jews should not be permitted to concentrate in professions, institutions, or regions, FDR promoted a quota on admitting Jewish students to Harvard in the 1920s. He also urged local leaders in Allied-liberated North Africa in 1943 to limit the entry of Jews into many professions. In 1943 endorsed a plan to “spread the Jews thin all over the world” so they would quickly assimilate. FDR and the Holocaust argues that Roosevelt’s private views explain his unwillingness to allow Jewish refugees to enter the United States up to then-prevailing legal limits during the Holocaust years. Appallingly, nearly 200,000 immigration quota places were left unused. We look forward to Dr. Medoff’s contributions to this blog.