The Student Struggle Against the Holocaust (review)

Rafael Medoff, founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, has for some years specialized in authoring, co-authoring, and editing volumes that expand upon various aspects of the history of American reactions to Nazi genocide. The present volume tells the story of three students at Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS)—Noah Golinkin, Jerry Lipnick, and Buddy Sachs—as they sought to press America’s Jewish leaders and organizations (and, ultimately the American public and the government itself) into action on behalf of Europe’s Jews. The seminarians each had different backgrounds, but all felt grievously wounded by the seeming indifference of the government and the timidity of Jewish organizations in pressing for rescue.

Golinkin, the acknowledged leader of the group, had come to America in 1938 and was most directly connected to those condemned to death by the Nazis. Golinkin and his band began agitating the issue of rescue among Jewish organizations, enlisted the aid of sympathetic faculty and students at Union Theological Seminary, the Protestant neighbor of JTS in New York’s Morningside Heights, and in other ways sought to shake up the American and American Jewish establishments. Medoff’s narrative weaves their efforts into the broader story of intra- and interorganizational struggles and the reactions of such key leaders as Rabbis Louis Finkelstein and Stephen S. Wise. Medoff also places the work of Golinkin, Lipnick, and Sachs within the context of other important stories: promotion of the famous rabbis’ march on Washington in 1943, the activities and vision of the Bergson group, and the chain of events that motivated the Treasury Department’s Josiah DuBois to write his “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews,” which in turn led to the creation of the War Refugee Board.

The Student Struggle Against the Holocaust serves a very useful purpose in bringing this stirring, heroic story to the fore, though its structure somewhat muddles its focus. It raises and details a standard of moral and ethical behavior that resonates with the contemporary world as well as that of the 1940s. Yet Medoff’s narrative accounts for at most half the book, and much of it involves the wholesale repotting of standard points of the “Wyman thesis” concerning the Allies and the American Jewish community.

The volume then reproduces the texts of a symposium, “Reflections on Three Remarkable Students,” held at the national meetings of the David S. Wyman Institute in 2008. They include personal reminiscences from the sons of Golinkin and Lipnick and lessons drawn from their example by David G. Roskies, Haskel Lookstein, and David Ellenson, among others. These are moving statements, ones that underline the value, not only at the time but also as a legacy, of the efforts of these students at the darkest hour of twentieth-century Jewish existence. They constitute important primary documents for those interested in the Holocaust and memory. However, the most valuable primary sources reside in the “Appendices,” where the editors have collected almost sixty pages of broadsides, journal articles, manuscript sermons, and other rarely seen material documenting the personal contributions of Golinkin, Lipnick, and Sachs.

These documents and the primary story are the key contributions The Student Struggle Against the Holocaust makes to the scholarly literature. Yet the celebratory nature of the volume and its placement against the backdrop of the “Wyman thesis” blunts to some extent openings to new insight that the details of the narrative and documents might have inspired. For instance, the role of non-Jews, both in lay and religious roles, receives very interesting attention in Medoff’s recounting of the JTS students’ work with their counterparts at Union Theological Seminary and the support of various Christian religious leaders and politicians for rescue. However, Christian support is treated simply as an exception to the rule rather than something to analyze more deeply. So, too, is the implicit expectation that more agitation would have produced...