Well Worth Saving, Laurel Leff
Well Worth Saving, Laurel Leff
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Well Worth Saving
American Universities’ Life-and-Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe

Author: Laurel Leff

Narrator: Suzanne Toren

Unabridged: 10 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/03/2019


Synopsis

A harrowing account of the profoundly consequential decisions American universities made about refugee scholars from Nazi-dominated Europe

The United States' role in saving Europe's intellectual elite from the Nazis is often told as a tale of triumph, which in many ways it was. America welcomed Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Carnap and Richard Courant, among hundreds of other physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, chemists, and linguists who transformed the American academy. Yet for every scholar who survived and thrived, many, many more did not.

To be hired by an American university, a refugee scholar had to be world-class and well connected, not too old and not too young, not too right and not too left and, most important, not too Jewish. Those who were unable to flee were left to face the horrors of the Holocaust. In this rigorously researched book, Laurel Leff rescues from obscurity scholars who were deemed "not worth saving" and tells the riveting, full story of the hiring decisions universities made during the Nazi era.

About Laurel Leff

Laurel Leff is associate director of the Jewish Studies Program and associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University. She is the author of Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Tracie

Leff writes of the fates of scholars and researchers who were not given refugee status when more of them could have been saved with non-quota visas. Some of the leaders of our most "prestigious" colleges and universities and the state department rejected academics who had lost jobs, especially women......more

Goodreads review by Daryl

A great history of saving many Jewish people before and during WW2. The powerful position the Rockefeller group played in saving many. A very good read......more