Obamas push to help educate girls around the

world
By Ellie Silverman, McClatchy Washington Bureau on 03.08.15
Word Count 669
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Pakistani Muslim girls attend a religious madrassa, or school, to learn the Quran, in Karachi, Pakistan, March 4, 2015. Religious schools in
Pakistan, most of them in mosques, are the only source of education for thousands of children. AP Photo/Fareed Khan

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama announced Tuesday
that the administration will expand a program to help adolescent girls across the world receive an
education.

The Let Girls Learn initiative will build on a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
campaign launched last year to provide an education to the more than 60 million girls not in
school. Existing government programs address topics such as education, leadership, nutrition and
protection against gender-based violence and forced marriages.

“I want to make sure that no girl out there is denied her chance to be a strong, capable woman
with the resources that she needs to succeed — that no girl is prevented from making her unique
contributions to the world,” President Obama said. “Every child is precious. Every girl is precious.
Every girl deserves an education.”

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The president and first lady said this issue is personal to them because they are the parents of two
daughters.

“I see myself in these girls. I see our daughters in these girls,” Michelle Obama said. “And like all of
you, I just can’t walk away from them. Like you, I can’t just sit back and accept the barriers that
keep them from realizing their promise.”

The Peace Corps will look for ways to overcome barriers that prevent girls from completing their
educations, including the cost of a uniform, school fees or a lack of textbooks, Peace Corps
Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet told reporters Monday night.

The organization’s nearly 7,000 volunteers in more than 60 developing countries already work
with communities through grass-roots training, Hessler-Radelet said.

“Peace Corps volunteers are in a unique position to break down barriers to girls education at the
community level,” Hessler-Radelet said. “They speak the local language, they understand the local
culture.”

The program will start with 11 countries the first year: Albania, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cambodia,
Georgia, Ghana, Moldova, Mongolia, Mozambique, Togo and Uganda. More countries will be
included the following year, according to the White House.

As part of the new initiative, Michelle Obama will travel to Japan and Cambodia later this month.
She said she will meet with Akie Abe, the wife of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and
Caroline Kennedy, the U.S. ambassador to Japan. In Cambodia, she said she will meet with Peace
Corps volunteers and visit a local school.

President Obama’s budget recommends $250 million in new and reallocated money for girls
programs worldwide, including education, said Tina Tchen, the first lady’s chief of staff.

USAID already invests $1 billion annually in international education, and the organization has
helped train more than 300,000 teachers worldwide and has provided more than 35 million
textbooks and teaching materials in a single year, said Susan Markham, USAID’s senior
coordinator for gender equality and women’s empowerment.

“Access to education is one of the foremost challenges we face as a global community,”

Representative Kay Granger, a Republican from Texas, said at the White House on Tuesday.

Gayle Smith, senior director for development and democracy for the National Security Council,
said improving education for girls has a positive economic impact and can widen the circle of
potential leaders of a given country.

“Whether it is the girls kidnapped in Nigeria or whether it is the incidents of rape in Darfur, there
are real issues here attended to the rights and security of these young girls and young women, so
that’s another key focus for us throughout the initiative,” Smith told reporters.

National security adviser Susan Rice said this initiative comes “at a vital moment.”

“We cannot allow these challenges to rob generations of young women of their future,” Rice said.
“Together let’s make sure that every child, no matter where they’re born or what they look like or
what their gender, has a chance to forge the future that they deserve, starting with an education.”

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Michelle Obama said she wants girls and boys in the U.S. to “understand the transformative power
of education” and to learn about the sacrifices girls worldwide must make to receive an education.

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Holocaust project focuses on what Americans
knew and when
By Sean D. Hamill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on 05.09.16
Word Count 1,160
Level MAX

Holocaust survivor Israel Loewenstein, 91, looks at a photo album at his home in Yad Hana, Israel, April 6, 2016. REUTERS/ Nir Elias

PITTSBURGH — When Beth Moody saw a recent ad on Facebook that the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum was asking “citizen historians” to crowdsource articles about the Holocaust
from 1933 to 1945 from local newspapers, she didn’t hesitate.

“I was already researching my family’s history through the Altoona (Pa.) paper and figured I’d just
look up these (Holocaust) events at the same time,” said Moody, 55, of Wilkinsburg, who is a Title
1 reading teacher at the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center.

Moody put in six hours over two days looking for articles on Newspapers.com from the now-
defunct Altoona Tribune. She found stories related to six of the 20 Holocaust-related events the
museum is asking people to look for.

It was what she did not find that will probably get the attention of the museum and scholars.

“The (Altoona Tribune) didn’t have anything about (the anti-Jewish riots in 1938 known as)
Kristallnacht, or the Jewish stars (that Jews had to wear), or the extermination camps; there was

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nothing, and I looked very closely,” she said.

Why papers like the Altoona Tribune chose not to run stories about such events — when other
papers did — is something that experts say will be studied closely. Scholars also want to know how
these publication decisions affected public policy actions. It has already spurred a debate in
Moody’s family.

“My (adult) daughter and I had a debate about this and why there was nothing,” she said. “My
daughter said, ‘Well, maybe it’s because they’re a little bigoted town over there.’ But I said, ‘If they
were bigoted, maybe they would have liked to hear about Kristallnacht.’”

This pogrom also is known as the Night of Broken Glass.

The museum’s historians hope the project, dubbed History Unfolded, officially announced April 5,
will inspire thousands of more volunteers like Moody to do similar research over the next two
years — leading to a 2018 exhibit entitled “Americans and the Holocaust.”

Since the project began quietly last fall, more than 1,000 articles have been reviewed, approved
and placed on the museum’s permanent project database on its website at
www.newspapers.ushmm.org.

Technology has made such a project possible, now that more newspapers’ archives are online.

But the museum hopes volunteers also will dig into those forgotten small-town papers that exist
only on plastic roles of microfiche or the original hard copies in binders at local libraries.

While there have been several studies of how the nation’s larger newspapers such as The New York
Times and Chicago Tribune covered the Holocaust, “we don’t really know anything about what
small-town newspapers and regional papers told their readers,” said Aleisa Fishman, a historian
with the museum working on the project.

It would be almost impossible to ask volunteers to just research “the Holocaust” because it’s too
broad. Instead, the staff last year came up with a list of 20 significant events during the 1930s and
1940s, with specific dates for volunteers to search for. The events range from the U.S. decision to
participate in the Olympic Games in Germany in 1936, to Kristallnacht in 1938, to deportation of
Hungarian Jews in 1944.

The goal, said Elissa Frankle, who is leading the museum’s project, is “to get at a question
historians have been posing for a long time: What did Americans know about the Holocaust and
when?”

Laurel Leff, an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University in Boston, thinks

“trying to find out what Americans knew about the Holocaust at the time is a really important
project.”

She is the author of “Buried by The Times,” a roundly praised 2005 book that found that The New
York Times altered and downplayed coverage of the Holocaust in part because of the views on
Judaism of its Jewish owner at the time, Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

Leff, who is Jewish, said she grew up being told that “Americans did not know about the
Holocaust” while it was ongoing.

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When she lectures, she often hears two disparate stories from audience members: One audience
member will stand up and say there was nothing in the newspapers about the Holocaust, while
another will say they knew about it and went to rallies because of the stories.

“I think for people who were engaged, there was no doubt about the truth,” she said. “But maybe
there were two Americas, and maybe even two Jewish Americas,” where some did and some did
not really know about the Holocaust at the time.

That viewpoint may have been demonstrated in some of the first articles submitted to History
Unfolded.

One article submitted about the opening of the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich on
March 23, 1933, came from Bangor, Maine’s Daily News and declared in the headline to a wire
story on the day that Dachau opened: “Mistreatment of Jewish Race in Germany Ends.”

Meanwhile, that same day in a paper in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a locally reported article with the
headline “Sympathy Service by Friends of Jews” noted the response at a local Presbyterian church
to what happened at Dachau.

“Those are very different views,” Frankle said.

There have been 20 articles already submitted and approved from Pittsburgh newspapers,
including 15 from The Pittsburgh Press, four from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and one from the
now-defunct Jewish Criterion.

Twelve of those articles were submitted by Charlie Stern, 29, a research analyst for the federal
government who lives in Overland Park, Kansas.

“My grandfather came over (to the U.S.) from Germany in 1936 as these events were occurring,”
he said. “Basically, his story got me involved.”

His grandfather, Herbert Stern, who is Jewish and still alive at 96, had told him stories about what
he experienced in Berlin before he left, settled in Cincinnati with a cousin, and later joined the U.S.
Army and fought in Europe, including liberating two concentration camps.

Reading stories firsthand about some of the events his grandfather described “was powerful.”

Charlie Stern has submitted more than 100 stories to History Unfolded from various papers,
mostly Cincinnati papers, since he began searching in February.

The Pittsburgh stories “just came up on Newspapers.com when I would search on event search
terms; there was a lot of coverage of these events in Pittsburgh,” he said. “But I was struck that the
American public started knowing more about these events as the war progressed.”

As part of the project, the museum hopes to engage librarians, and high school and college
teachers and their students. The goal is to reach 20 percent of all high school students and half of
the libraries in the country with the project.

Alan Bush, a history teacher at North Dame High School in Easton, Pennsylvania, said he jumped
on the idea late last year when he heard about it from a friend. He has submitted some stories
from Easton papers and is about to get his classes involved.

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“Anytime you can add a local flavor to a history piece, it makes a difference with the students,” he
said.

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Why the U.S. Didn't Intervene in the Rwandan
Genocide
By Scott Baldauf, Christian Science Monitor on 05.16.17
Word Count 652
Level MAX

Family photographs of some of those who died are on display in the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in Kigali, Rwanda, April 5, 2014, 20
years after ethnic Hutu extremists killed neighbors, friends and family during a three-month rampage of violence aimed at ethnic Tutsis and
some moderate Hutus, leaving a death toll that Rwanda put at 1,000,050. AP Photo/Ben Curtis

The Clinton administration and Congress watched the unfolding events in Rwanda in April 1994 in
a kind of stupefied horror.

The United States had just pulled American troops out of a disastrous peacekeeping mission in
Somalia – later made famous in the book “Black Hawk Down” – the year before. It had vowed
never to return to a conflict it couldn’t understand, between clans and tribes it didn’t know, in a
country where the U.S. had no national interests.

From embassies and hotels in Kigali, diplomats and humanitarian workers gave daily tolls of the
dead, mainly Tutsis but also moderate Hutus who had called for tribal peace. The information
came in real time, and many experts say that the U.S. and the Western world in general failed to
respond.

"We knew before, during and after"

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“During World War II, much of the full horror of the Holocaust was known after the fact. But in
Rwanda, we knew before, during and after,” says Ted Dagne, a researcher at the Congressional
Research Service in Washington, who has traveled to Rwanda on fact-finding missions. “We knew,
but we didn’t want to respond.”

In an official letter written as late as June 19, 1994, the then-U.N. Secretary-General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali showed exasperation at the numbers of peacekeepers that member nations were
willing to provide.

“It is evident that, with the failure of member states to promptly provide the resources necessary
for the implementation of its expanded mandate, UNAMIR (the United Nations Assistance
Mission in Rwanda) may not be in a position, for about three months, to fully undertake the tasks
entrusted to it,” Boutros-Ghali wrote. Within a month of the writing of this letter, the genocide
ended, as Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front took full effective control of Rwanda.

U.S. support for a rapid-action force

Dagne, a congressional aide at the time, says that if the Clinton administration had called for a
rapid-action force to stop the killings in Rwanda, Congress would have supported him. Letters
from bipartisan panels of Congress back this up.

“We are writing to express our strong support for an active United States role in helping to resolve
the crisis in Rwanda,” wrote Representative Bob Torricelli, a Democrat from New Jersey, in a
letter of April 20, 1994, signed by Republicans and Democrats alike. “Given the fact that
approximately 20,000 people have died thus far in the tragic conflict, it is important that the
United States endeavor to end the bloodshed and to bring the parties to the negotiating table.”

But time and again in that spring and summer, President Clinton replied with more pleas for the
government and the rebels to stop the violence themselves, and suggested that the underarmed,
overstretched U.N. peacekeeping mission on the ground was the right group to lead the way.

“On April 22 ... the White House issued a strong public statement calling for the Rwandan Army
and the Rwandan Patriotic Front to do everything in their power to end the violence
immediately,” President Clinton wrote on May 25, 1994, to Representative Harry Johnston, a
Democrat from Florida. “This followed an earlier statement by me calling for a cease-fire and the
cessation of the killings.”

With Congress looking toward the president, and the White House looking toward the U.N.,
nothing was done, and the genocide ran its course.

“At the end of an administration, they write a report, and Rwanda was at the top of the failures list
for the Clinton administration, so this is something that they acknowledge themselves,” says
Dagne.

If there is a lesson learned from Rwanda, Dagne says, it is that the international community needs
to avoid giving the impression that it is willing or capable of rescuing civilians in a conflict. “It’s
important to build the capacity of people to do the job themselves (of protecting
themselves),” Dagne says. “We must not give the expectation that people will be saved.”

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What is Genocide, a Word First Used After World
War II?
By History.com on 05.16.17
Word Count 1,018
Level MAX

Ema Hasanovic, 5, a Bosnian Muslim girl, pays her respects near the coffin of her uncle in the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial in Bosnia-
Herzegovina, July 9, 2014. More than 20 years after Bosnia's war, Radovan Karadzic in 2016 was sentenced to 40 years in prison. U.N.
judges delivered verdicts in his genocide and war crimes trial for the acts he ordered as supreme commander of the Bosnian Serb armed
forces. AP Photo/Amel Emric

"Genocide," a term used to describe violence against members of a national, ethnic, racial or
religious group with the intent to destroy part or all of the group, came into general usage only
after World War II, when the full extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime against the
Jews of Europe during that conflict became known. In 1948, the United Nations declared genocide
to be an international crime; the term would later be applied to the horrific acts of violence
committed during conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and in the African country of Rwanda in the
1990s. An international treaty signed by some 120 countries in 1998 established the International
Criminal Court (ICC), which has jurisdiction to prosecute crimes of genocide.

Raphael Lemkin and the Nuremburg trials

The word genocide owes its existence to Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who fled the
Nazi occupation of Poland and arrived in the United States in 1941. As a boy, Lemkin had been

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horrified when he learned of the Turkish massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during
World War I. As an adult, he set out to come up with a term to describe Nazi crimes against
European Jews during World War II, and to enter that term into the world of international law in
the hopes of preventing and punishing such horrific crimes against innocent people. In 1944, he
coined the term "genocide" by combining "genos," the Greek word for race or tribe, with the Latin
suffix "cide" (to kill).

In 1945, thanks in no small part to Lemkin's efforts, the term genocide was included in the charter
of the International Military Tribunal set up by the victorious Allied powers in Nuremburg,
Germany. The tribunal indicted and tried top Nazi officials for "crimes against humanity," which
included persecution on racial, religious or political grounds as well as inhumane acts committed
against civilians (including genocide). After the Nuremburg trials revealed the horrible extent of
Nazi crimes, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution in 1946 making the crime of genocide
punishable under international law.

The U.N.'s Genocide Convention

In 1948, the U.N. approved its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide (CPPCG), which defined genocide as any of a number of acts "committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." This included killing or
causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, inflicting conditions of life
intended to bring about the group's demise, imposing measures intended to prevent births (i.e.,
forced sterilization) or forcibly removing the group's children. Genocide's "intent to destroy"
separates it from other crimes against humanity such as ethnic cleansing, which aims at forcibly
expelling a group from a geographic area (by killing, forced deportation and other methods).

The convention entered into force in 1951 and has

since been ratified by more than 130 countries.
Though the United States was one of the convention's
original signatories, the U.S. Senate did not ratify it
until 1988, when President Ronald Reagan signed it
over strong opposition by those who felt it would limit
U.S. sovereignty. Though the CPPCG established an
awareness that the evils of genocide existed, its actual
effectiveness in stopping such crimes remained to be
seen: Not one country invoked the convention during
1975 to 1979, when the Khmer Rouge regime killed
some 1.7 million people in Cambodia (a country that had ratified the CPPCG in 1950).

Yugoslavia and Rwanda

In 1992, the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia, and
Bosnian Serb leaders targeted both Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croatian civilians for atrocious
crimes resulting in the deaths of some 100,000 people by 1995. In 1993, the U.N. Security Council
established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague,
Netherlands. It was the first international tribunal since Nuremburg and the first to have a
mandate to prosecute the crime of genocide.

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From April to mid-July 1994, members of the Hutu majority in Rwanda murdered some 500,000
to 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority, with horrifying brutality and speed. As with the
former Yugoslavia, the international community did little to stop the crimes while they were
occurring, but that fall the U.N. expanded the mandate of the ICTY to include the International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), located in Tanzania. The Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunals
helped clarify exactly what types of actions could be classified as genocidal, as well as how criminal
responsibility for these actions should be established. In 1998, the ICTR set the important
precedent that systematic rape is in fact a crime of genocide; it also handed down the first
conviction for genocide after a trial, that of the mayor of the Rwandan town of Taba.

The International Criminal Court

An international statute signed in Rome in 1998 expanded the CPPCG's definition of genocide and
applied it to times of both war and peace. The statute also established the International Criminal
Court (ICC), which began sittings in 2002 at The Hague (without the participation of the U.S.,
China or Russia). Since then, the ICC has dealt with cases against leaders in the Congo and in
Sudan, where brutal acts committed by the janjawid militia against civilians in the western region
of Darfur have been condemned by numerous international officials (including former U.S.
Secretary of State Colin Powell) as genocide.

Debate continues over the ICC's rightful jurisdiction, as well as its ability to determine what
exactly constitutes genocidal actions. For example, in the case of Darfur, some have argued that it
is impossible to prove the intent to eradicate the existence of certain groups, as opposed to
displacing them from disputed territory. Despite such ongoing issues, the establishment of the ICC
at the dawn of the 21st century reflected a growing international consensus behind efforts to
prevent and punish the horrors of genocide.

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America's Response to the Holocaust is the
Subject of Great Debate
By History.com on 05.19.17
Word Count 1,206
Level MAX

Four years after the end of World War II, in 1949, Jewish war veterans protested a scheduled concert by a German pianist at Carnegie Hall
in New York City. AP Photo

The systematic persecution of German Jewry began with Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933.
Facing economic, social and political oppression, thousands of German Jews wanted to flee the
Third Reich, but they found few countries willing to accept them. Eventually, under Hitler's
leadership, some 6 million Jews were murdered during World War II.

American restrictions on immigration

America's traditional policy of open immigration had ended when Congress enacted restrictive
immigration quotas in 1921 and 1924. The quota system allowed only 25,957 Germans to enter the
country every year. After the stock market crash of 1929, rising unemployment caused
restrictionist sentiment to grow, and President Herbert Hoover ordered vigorous enforcement of
visa regulations. The new policy significantly reduced immigration; in 1932 the United States
issued only 35,576 immigration visas.

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State Department officials continued their restrictive measures after Franklin D. Roosevelt's
inauguration in March 1933. Although some Americans sincerely believed that the country lacked
the resources to accommodate newcomers, the nativism of many others reflected the growing
problem of anti-Semitism.

Of course, American anti-Semitism never approached the intensity of Jew-hatred in Nazi

Germany, but pollsters found that many Americans looked upon Jews unfavorably. A much more
threatening sign was the presence of anti-Semitic leaders and movements on the fringes of
American politics, including Father Charles E. Coughlin, the charismatic radio priest, and William
Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts.

Although the quota walls seemed unassailable, some Americans took steps to alleviate the
suffering of German Jews. American Jewish leaders organized a boycott of German goods, hoping
that economic pressure might force Hitler to end his anti-Semitic policies, and prominent
American Jews, including Louis D. Brandeis, interceded with the Roosevelt administration on the
refugees' behalf. In response, the Roosevelt administration agreed to ease visa regulations, and in
1939, following the Nazi annexation of Austria, State Department officials issued all the visas
available under the combined German-Austrian quota.

Responding to the increasingly difficult situation of

German Jewry, Roosevelt organized the international
Evian Conference on the refugee crisis in 1938.
Although 32 nations attended, very little was
accomplished because no country was willing to
accept a large number of Jewish refugees. The
conference did establish an Intergovernmental
Committee on Refugees, but it failed to devise any
practical solutions.

First news of the Holocaust

The extermination of European Jewry began when the

German army invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.
The Nazis attempted to keep the Holocaust a secret,
but in August 1942, Dr. Gerhart Riegner, the
representative of the World Jewish Congress in
Geneva, Switzerland, learned what was going on from
a German source. Riegner asked American diplomats
in Switzerland to inform Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, one
of America's most prominent Jewish leaders, of the
mass murder plan. But the State Department,
characteristically insensitive and influenced by anti-Semitism, decided not to inform Wise.

The rabbi nevertheless learned of Riegner's terrible message from Jewish leaders in Great Britain.
He immediately approached Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, who asked Wise to keep the
information confidential until the government had time to verify it. Wise agreed and it was not
until November 1942 that Welles authorized the release of Riegner's message.

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Wise held a press conference on the evening of November 24, 1942. The next day, The New York
Times reported his news on its 10th page. Throughout the rest of the war, the Times and most
other newspapers failed to give prominent and extensive coverage to the Holocaust. During World
War I, the American press had published reports of German atrocities that subsequently turned
out to be false. As a result, journalists during World War II tended to approach atrocity reports
with caution.

American Jewish community responds

Although most Americans, preoccupied with the war itself, remained unaware of the terrible plight
of European Jewry, the American Jewish community responded with alarm to Wise's news.
American and British Jewish organizations pressured their governments to take action. As a
result, Great Britain and the United States announced that they would hold an emergency
conference in Bermuda to develop a plan to rescue the victims of Nazi atrocities.

Ironically, the Bermuda Conference opened in April 1943, the same month the Jews in the Warsaw
ghetto were staging their revolt. The American and British delegates at Bermuda proved to be far
less heroic than the Jews of Warsaw. Rather than discussing strategies, they worried about what to
do with any Jews they successfully rescued. Britain refused to consider admitting more Jews into
Palestine, which it administered at the time, and the United States was equally determined not to
alter its immigration quotas. The conference produced no practical plan to aid European Jewry,
although the press was informed that "significant progress" had been made.

Following the futile Bermuda Conference, American Jewish leaders became increasingly involved
in a debate over Zionism. But the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, led
by Peter Bergson and a small group of emissaries from the Irgun, a right-wing Palestinian Jewish
resistance group, turned to pageants, rallies, and newspaper advertisements to force Roosevelt to
create a government agency to devise ways to rescue European Jewry. The Emergency Committee
and its supporters in Congress helped publicize the Holocaust and the need for the United States
to react.

War Refugee Board

President Roosevelt also found himself under pressure from another source. Treasury Department
officials, working on projects to provide aid to European Jews, discovered that their colleagues in
the State Department were actually undermining rescue efforts. They brought their concerns to
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who was Jewish and a long-time supporter of
Roosevelt. Under Morgenthau's direction, Treasury officials prepared a "Report to the Secretary
on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews." Morgenthau presented the
report to Roosevelt and requested that he establish a rescue agency. Finally, on January 22, 1944,
the president issued Executive Order 9417, creating the War Refugee Board (WRB). John Pehle of
the Treasury Department served as the board's first executive director.

The establishment of the board did not resolve all the problems blocking American rescue efforts.
For example, the War Department repeatedly refused to bomb Nazi concentration camps or the
railroads leading to them. But the WRB did successfully develop a number of rescue projects.
Estimates indicate that the WRB may have saved as many as 200,000 Jews. One can only
speculate how many more might have been saved had the WRB been established in August 1942,
when Gerhart Riegner's message reached the United States.

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The American public discovered the full extent of the
Holocaust only when the Allied armies liberated the
extermination and concentration camps at the end of
World War II. And as historians struggled to
understand what had happened, attention
increasingly focused on the inadequate American
response and what lay behind it. It remains today the
subject of great debate.

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Opinion: After Holocaust, U.S. promised to protect
refugees; we're failing
By Rebecca Erbelding, Washington Post on 02.08.18
Word Count 888
Level MAX

Volunteers paint flags of the world for immigrant and refugee families learning English and preparing for the citizenship exams during a day
of service in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 15, 2018. Photo by: Keith Bedford/The Boston Globe via
Getty Images

Editor's Note: The opinions in this essay are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent
the views of Newsela or its editors. Political language, word choice and position belong to the
author alone.

The Trump administration has proposed limiting the annual number of refugees resettled in the
United States to 45,000, citing national security concerns. While introducing new vetting
procedures for refugees, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen issued a statement on
Monday that the United States "must continue to fulfill its obligation to the global community to
assist those facing persecution." Modern American refugee policy was written in the wake of the
Holocaust, after Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered millions, including hundreds of
thousands of Jews who had applied to immigrate but were unable to navigate strict U.S. laws. Yet
it is almost certain that even before that, the United States in 1939 - while facing high

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unemployment, national security fears and an impending world war - admitted more refugees
fleeing persecution than we did in 2017 or will in 2018.

By 1938, Americans had suffered under the Great Depression for nearly a decade. After a partial
economic recovery in the mid-1930s, a new recession brought workforce unemployment back up
to 19 percent. As the world marked the 20th anniversary of the end of World War I in November of
that year, Nazi German leadership unleashed the Kristallnacht pogrom. Their followers destroyed
shops and synagogues, and arrested 30,000 Jewish men and boys, who were sent to concentration
camps.

Another war seemed inevitable. On the radio, singer Kate Smith debuted a new song with a verse
we've forgotten today: "While the storm clouds gather, far across the sea, let us swear allegiance to
a land that's free. . . . God bless America, land that I love." Americans did not want to be dragged
into another war, and many people worried that the Nazis, or the Japanese or the Soviets, might
have placed spies or saboteurs in their midst.

America's immigration laws had then been in place since the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which
designated the number of immigration slots open to people born in specific countries. That way,
the authors of the act argued, it wouldn't matter where an immigrant was living, only where they
were born, their "national origin." It was a way to restrict applicants born in southern and Eastern
Europe, Africa and the areas of Asia where immigration wasn't already banned, and to promote
applicants from countries that were whiter, who, they thought would be more easily assimilated.
Norway, from which President Donald Trump reportedly recently pined for more immigrants,
originally had an annual quota of 6,543 immigrants to the United States. In contrast, only 1,200
immigrants could come from the entirety of Africa.

In 1939, the United States admitted at least 43,450 Jews, almost all from Europe. But we know the
number only because immigrants arriving here had to list their own "race," and until 1943, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (now split into two different Department of Homeland
Security agencies) considered "Hebrew" a race. Plenty of people being persecuted by the Nazis as
Jews didn't self-identify as Jewish and would have listed themselves as "German" (for example),
so the actual number of refugees fleeing Nazism that year was clearly higher than 43,450.
Although the United States did not have a substantive refugee policy -- those fleeing persecution
had to follow the same steps as other immigrants -- Jewish refugees alone constituted more than
half of all immigration to the United States.

At the same time, more than 300,000 applicants sat on the German quota waiting list. In the
Johnson-Reed Act, U.S. officials had granted to Germany the second-largest quota of any country,
though the authors of the racist and anti-Semitic immigration law probably would not have done
so had they known that most of the applicants in the 1930s would be Jewish. Germany's 27,370
quota slots meant an 11-year wait for new applicants. Though neither they nor the U.S.
government knew it at the time, most of the people on the list in 1939 would not make it to
America; they would, instead, be killed in the Holocaust.

The Holocaust began in 1941 after American consulates were forced to close in Nazi territory. The
Washington Post first introduced Americans to the word "genocide" in December 1944. Most
people here would not see photographic evidence of the Holocaust until the concentration camps
in western Europe were liberated in 1945.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com.

Today, we know the Myanmar military is murdering the minority Rohingya population and tens of
thousands of Syrians are being "disappeared" by their own government. We have film,
photographs, evidence, testimony, witnesses.

In the 80 years since the refugee crisis of the late 1930s, the U.S. population has nearly tripled.
Instead of the 19 percent unemployment of 1938, the current unemployment rate is 4.1 percent.
Though the president engages in terrifying rhetoric on Twitter, world war does not seem
imminent. Our tools for weeding out potential spies and saboteurs are infinitely more
sophisticated.

The United Nations High Commission on Human Rights declared in 2016 that the ongoing
refugee crisis is the worst since World War II. We lament America's failure to admit more
European Jewish refugees before the Holocaust. Our descendants will be much harsher when they
look at America's inaction today.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com.