JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Did FDR try to rescue Europe’s Jews?

By Uriel Heilman · May 1, 2009

A new book on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's record on the Holocaust upends a widely held view that the wartime president was indifferent to the fate of Europe’s Jews, The New York Times reports:

The book, an edited collection of official documents, diaries, internal memos and more, contends that Roosevelt hatched a scheme in 1938 to rally the world’s democracies and relocate millions of European Jews to undeveloped areas in Latin America and Africa.

“It is a book that will change the consensus about the role of President Roosevelt,” said Deborah Lipstadt, a leading expert on the Holocaust, who has read some sections. It “compels historians — both those who have vilified F.D.R. and those who have sanctified him — to rethink their conclusions.”

The book, “Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1935-1945,” will undoubtedly reignite the charged debate over whether Roosevelt could have done more to rescue millions of Jews, Gypsies, gay people, dissidents and others who died in Nazi death camps. To his detractors, the refusal in June 1939 to take in any of the more than 900 Jews aboard the ocean liner St. Louis who were seeking a haven after Germany’s deadly Kristallnacht is much more emblematic of the United States’ response. Many of those passengers ultimately died.

This is the second of a three-volume set of Mr. McDonald’s papers being published by Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Full story here.

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When Israel banned torture

By Uriel Heilman · May 1, 2009

A former Israel correspondent for The New York Times, Serge Schmemann, recalls Israel's own debate about torture -- and ultimate rejection of it by the Israeli Supreme Court -- and what sort of model that presents for the United States:

Reading about the Bush administration’s convoluted attempts to justify torture takes me back to reporting I did 12 years ago on the anguished debate in Israel over its secret service’s use of violence in interrogations. That was two years before the Israeli Supreme Court banned the practice. “This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it,” wrote the president of the court, Aharon Barak.

I had interviewed Justice Barak for my article, and I recall with some shame my righteous certainty in those days that I came from a country that would never stoop to such methods.

Full column here.

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JTA’s 100 Most Influential Jewish Twitterers

By Adam Soclof · May 1, 2009

Despite the recent media buzz, the jury is still out on Twitter's potential to endure as an integral player in the social media landscape. While it's rate of growth rivals that of Facebook, a Reuters article yesterday claimed that Twitter is marred by a higher attrition rate than other social networking sites. And for every happy new Twitterer, there are plenty of naysayers lying in the wings (pun intended).

Curious, JTA set out to determine which Jewish bloggers, institutions and other entities had successfully staked their claim in Twitter realty. While not the first to conduct a Jewish or Israel-related Twitter ranking, the selection criteria used for our "Top 100 Jewish Twitterers" are multi-faceted.

Data Collection: Beginning on Thursday, April 2, 2009, hundreds of Twitter accounts tweeting content of Jewish and/or Israel-related interest were identified and gathered. Data were collected at approximately 12:00PM EST on Tuesday, April 28, 2009. Any accounts with fewer than 50 followers, a ratio of friend:follower greater than 2:1, or that had not tweeted in the 20 days prior to Tuesday, April 28, 2009 were excluded from consideration. Also not counted in this study were people of exceptional celebrity status (e.g. Matisyahu, Lenny Kravitz) or masters of social media whose Jewish identity, while undeniable, is buried by the sheer volume of tweets per hour that they generate (eg. Leah Jones, Michael Hoffman & Avi Kaplan). Remaining accounts were divided into three categories: Top 50 individuals, Top 25 organizations, and Top 25 newswire services.

Rankings: In addition to number of followers and friends, JTA took into account the ratio of followers to friends. Also incorporated into the rankings were "influence" and "clout", descriptive analytics derived for each account from the analytics site Twitalyzer. Regrettably, there were a handful of Twitterers whose accounts turned back error messages rather than Twitalyzer results. Among these few cases, the most common cause of error was account inactivity lasting for seven days. There were, however, a few exceptions (of note: Heeb Magazine).

Note that a valid Twitter account is required to view most Twitter profiles.Read More >>>

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