The assimilationist dilemma: response of the American Jewish elite to antisemitism in Weimar Germany

Most Jews in the U.S. did not relate seriously to rising antisemitism in Germany in the 1920s. Focuses on the American Jewish Committee (AJC), whose President, Louis Marshall, did not express much concern about the situation. He and other Jewish leaders did not give a warm reception to the representative of the Centralverein, Alfred Weiner, when he arrived in the U.S. to solicit funds in July 1929, shortly before Marshall's death. The next President, Cyrus Adler, was somewhat more concerned, and Morris Waldman, Secretary of the AJC, presented a report on the dangers of Nazism at a special meeting in 1930, but the depression beginning in 1929 caused American Jews to concentrate on economics rather than on politics. Many American Jews, struggling to assimilate, were reluctant to discuss antisemitism, although they were aware that it existed to some extent in the U.S. as well.