Well Worth Saving: American Universities' Life and Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe by Laurel Leff (review)

This important and thoroughly researched study undermines the longstanding triumphal narrative of refugee scholars from Nazi Germany finding a haven in American academia. The focus has largely been on American colleges' and universities' embrace of a few world-renowned scholars, such as Albert Einstein and Richard Courant. Yet such cases comprised only a minuscule percentage of the vast numbers forced out of German universities who sought positions in the United States. A major strength of Laurel Leff's book is the serious attention she devotes to recounting the travails of the sizeable number of talented European academics thwarted in their attempts to find refuge in America. Leff provides in-depth biographical studies of eight of these mostly forgotten scholars. She carefully analyzes the barriers American universities, the State Department, and the Roosevelt administration maintained that prevented not only access to academic positions in the United States but also entry into the country. As a result, a considerable number of refugee scholars were forced into hiding during the Holocaust in Germanoccupied territory, pushed into starvation, or murdered in annihilation camps or ghettos.

Leff also assesses the contributions and the limitations of organizations involved in finding academic employment for refugee scholars, the most important of which were the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars (EC) and the New School for Social Research's University in Exile, both founded in 1933, and the Rockefeller Foundation. These organizations made more of an effort to find positions for scholars discharged after Hitler came to power than the American universities themselves, which remained largely indifferent.

The mostly Jewish-funded EC, wary of university administrators' discomfort with—and often overt hostility to—Jews, provided partial financial support for temporary (two-year) appointments, with other institutions (often the Rockefeller Foundation), supplying the rest. Professors offered positions at American colleges and universities were eligible for non-quota visas, but Leff demonstrates how the State Department made these difficult to procure. There was no guarantee that the refugee scholar would be able to secure another position after the appointment (shortened to one year in 1940) ended. Insisting that it was "not an employment service," the EC would not distribute the names of refugee scholars seeking positions for universities to consider until 1940 (38).

Leff might have noted that the EC dissociated itself from political protests against Nazism, refusing, for example, the American Jewish Congress's invitation to become a sponsoring organization for the mass anti-Nazi rally at New York's Madison Square Garden in March 1934. In addition, the EC's secretary, Stephen Duggan, as a leading advocate for, and sponsor of, university student exchanges between the United States and Nazi Germany through the 1930s, helped to legitimize the Third Reich.

The book gives serious attention to the New School for Social Research's University in Exile, which lacked the resources to place as many refugees as the EC. Still, not having to rely on university departmental and administration hiring procedures, it could make appointments much more quickly. This was important because the State Department deliberately dragged out the visa process, consigning many applicants to arrest and death in Europe.

Leff provides gripping accounts of the many unsuccessful efforts of refugee scholars to gain even a temporary haven in American academia. In a period when American universities severely restricted Jewish student admissions, most departments adhered to a "one-Jew" rule (at best) regarding faculty appointments. Moreover, they showed no interest in Jews who did not adhere to the Christian image of a "gentleman." Administrators were suspicious of ardent anti-Nazis and, after 1940, of opponents of the Vichy regime.

Among the biographical portraits that Leff limns of scholars ignored in the standard celebratory accounts of the American response to the refugee academics are those of Russian-Jewish literary scholar and linguist Michel Gorlin; Vienna physicist Marie Anna Schirmann; historian Hedwig Hintze, the first female faculty...