America's fair share

During the 1930s and the war years, the mood of American Christians toward refugees - Jews as well as other Christians who were victims of the Holocaust - was generally apathetic. After 1947 though, church leaders showed sustained interest in the issue when they learned that eighty percent of the displaced persons (DPs) were not Jews but European Christians running away from communism. America's Fair Share is the first serious research focusing on the extraordinary period of organized mass immigration and resettlement that took place in the postwar years. Haim Genizi compares the activities of the major sectarian relief agencies and examines in detail their help to hundreds of thousands of DPs. Using neglected archival sources of church-related relief organizations, he studies the relations of Christian relief agencies with the American army in Europe and the DP Commission. He discusses the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, which differed from the traditional immigration policy based on the laissez-faire philosophy, and contends that it was purposely designed to discriminate against Jews. Finally, Genizi addresses the interfaith controversy that arose as to the admission of Nazi collaborators to the United States. The successful DP operation, which admitted and resettled almost a half million people during a short period of time, and in which church-related agencies played the major role, was a remarkable achievement. However, an examination of the considerations that led to this action shows that the motivations behind the DP program were not purely humanitarian. Genizi's comparison of America's impressive activities on behalf of DPs after the war with the negative attitude towardChristian and Jewish refugees during the Hitler era lends understanding to the real motivations behind the action and inaction of the American people.