Prelude to Catastrophe ─ FDR's Jews and the Menace of Nazism

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first great hero of American Jews. Yet by the time Roosevelt died in office, six million European Jews had been murdered by the Nazis while neither FDR nor American Jews lifted so much as a finger to help them. This despite the fact that the Jews who so admired Roosevelt made up the richest, most influential Jewish community in the world, leaders in government, commerce, and the arts. How did the president, the nation he led, and American Jewry allow the Nazi's mass extermination to go forward?

There is no simple answer. But Robert Shogan takes a fresh approach to this conundrum by focusing on the behavior of a handful of Jews so close to Roosevelt and supposedly so influential that they could be considered "the President's Jews." The President's Jews were a varied assortment of contrasting personalities who had one particular trait in common: when it came to the fate of European Jewry they mostly operated behing the scenes. For the first time lifting the curtain on their actions, and, just as important, inactions, Prelude to Catastrophe enhances our understanding of this unprecedented tragedy

Most prestigious among the President's Jews was Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. Next was Felix Frankfurter, Harvard law professor and later supreme Court justice. Sam Rosenman was FDR's chief speechwriter from the time he was governor of New York. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau was an old Dutchess Country neighbor of Roosevelt's. Benjamin V. Cohen crafted the major financial reforms of the early New Deal. Their actions, and often inactions, illuminate the strengths and limits of interest-group politics, the system invented by FDR that dominated American politics for the remainder of the century. Taken broadly, the response of the President's Jews to the Nazi threat illustrates with heartbreaking intensity the dilemma of politics---the conflict between conscience and self-interest, between principle and expediency. With eight pages of black-and-white photographs

Robert Shogan, a former prize-winning national political correspondent for Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, has also written No Sense of Decency; Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal; Bad News: Where the Press Goes Wrong in the Making of the President; and several other highly praised books in American history. He has taught in the Washington Center of Johns Hopkins University and lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland