Did the American Jewish Press Torpedo Rescue Opportunities?: Resettlement Plans for Jewish Refugees in Alaska and the Dominican Republic, 1938–1943

In widely reverberating studies, Shabtai Beit-Zvi and others¹ blamed the Zionists for the failure of schemes that would have resettled Jewish refugees in various territories. Are the charges grounded in evidence? And what role did the American Jewish press play in the matter? Below we attempt to probe the matter in all its aspects.

The Nazis termed 1938 the “fateful year” for good reason. Three events that year—the annexation of Austria, the refugee conference in Evian, and the Munich conference—revealed the world’s indifference to the plight of Jews and minorities. Thus, the Nazis felt free to tighten even further their noose on Jewish existence in Germany in a process that climaxed on Kristallnacht. The distress of Europe’s Jewish refugees escalated against the background of Western countries’ rigid immigration policies: Britain halted Jewish immigration to Mandate Palestine pursuant to the upturn in Arab unrest there and Western Europe lowered its immigration quotas. The U.S. had begun to limit immigration in 1921 by passing emergency legislation that in 1924 evolved into the Immigration Act, including the National Origins Act. The great economic crisis that began in 1929, aggravating isolationism and xenophobia that had begun to spread previously, led to additional restrictions in the immigration law and greatly broadened the definition of those who might become “burdens to the public.” It was not only the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews that inspired the implementation of this policy. On the contrary, strict interpretation by American bureaucrats, originating in antisemitic and nativist attitudes, made it difficult for Jewish refugees even to use the existing quotas at this stage.

Yet another Jewish hope was dashed at roughly this time when the USSR suddenly halted its two Jewish autonomous resettlement projects, that in the Crimea and that in Birobidzhan.² The stoppage, after years of expensive investments by American Jewish relief organizations, sounded an alarm for supporters of a Jewish national home in the Diaspora—unlike the Zionist venture that, despite hardships tracing to the state of war and the downturn in immigration, was pioneering its way to success.

Amid the impasse that hovered in the background on the eve of World War II, various sides raised dozens of proposals for the resettlement of Jewish refugees in sparsely populated territories around the world, mostly in underdeveloped tropical regions. Below, I discuss two such proposals that, although different in character, had the commonality of being sited in the Americas: the Alaska Plan, put forward by the U.S. on the eve of the war, and the Dominican Republic Plan, proposed by the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in the summer of 1938. The failure of these schemes, particularly the latter even after its implementation had begun, frustrated Jewish territorialist circles and even Zionist ones that had fleetingly believed in the viability of territorial solutions.³ These circles blamed the Zionist movement and American Jewry at large for the failure of these schemes—an accusation that still reverberates.

This article focuses on the response of the American Jewish press to the aforementioned schemes, a topic that has hardly been researched. The few studies in this field center on one program and use the press almost randomly. Here, I discuss two materially different schemes and a broader representative selection of references in the American Jewish press in both English and Yiddish.⁴ Hardly anyone who has written about American Jewry and the Holocaust has bothered to investigate non-English sources, thereby overlooking the greater centrality of the Holocaust theme in the Yiddish literature and press. In view of the wide circulation of the Yiddish daily press at the time, I will also examine a thesis raised by Yosef Chaikin in his book Idishe bleter in Amerika.⁵ Upon the Nazi rise to power and during World War II, Chaikin posits, all world Jewish organizations gagged themselves in their wish to demonstrate loyalty to their countries; only the Yiddish-speaking public freed itself from these fetters. Is this premise correct? Did the Yiddish press identify more strongly...