Anti-Semitism In Ww2

882 Words4 Pages

Anti-Semitism is a global concern that directly affects us here in the United States. Anti-Semitism has been a major influence in shaping Jewish identity and sometimes Anti-Semitism has helped to set Jews back into the externally undervalued group from which they were trying to escape. Anti-Semitism has always been less prevalent in the United States than in Europe. The first governmental occurrence of anti-Jewish sentiment was noted during the American Civil War, when General Ulysses S. Grant issued an order of expulsion against Jews from the portions of Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi under his control (Chanes, 2004).
In September 1935, following Hitler’s rise to power in Nazi Germany, the German government enacted two separate …show more content…

“This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geo-political terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin (Wannsee Conference et al, 2015)” and culminated in the Holocaust which saw the killing of 90 percent of Jewish Poles and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe. The Holocaust was a massacre that exterminated about 12 million European Jews and included 1.5 million children …show more content…

In 1939, 83% of Americans were opposed to the admission of refugees (Wyman and Rosenzveig, 1996). America’s traditional policy of open immigration ended when Congress enacted restrictive immigration quotas in 1921 and 1924. The quota system allowed only 25,957 Germans to enter the country every year (Wyman and Rosenzveig, 1996).
After the stock market crash of 1929, rising unemployment caused anti-Jewish sentiment to grow, and President Herbert Hoover ordered strong implementation of visa regulations. The new policy decreased immigration considerably; in 1932 the United States issued only 35,576 immigration visas (Wyman and Rosenzveig, 1996). In 2017, it seems that Americans have learned nothing from history as it is repeating itself. The United States is trying to enforce a similar restriction against