The Accomplices

What the U.S. government and American Jews did – and didn’t – do to help Jews fleeing the Nazis is the subject of this blistering account by former New York Times political reporter Bernard Weinraub. In 1940, Hillel Kook arrived in the U.S. fresh from the underground resistance in Palestine. Changing his name to Peter Bergson, he sought aid for the rescue of European Jews from the Nazis. Shocked to find himself blocked by both the Roosevelt administration and the Jewish establishment, Bergson spearheaded an extraordinary campaign of public rallies, hard-hitting newspaper advertisements and lobbying in Congress in his one-man fight to save millions and end the conspiracy of silence and inaction that continues to haunt us to this day.