It is common knowledge that America had an extremely discriminatory policy against Jewish refugees in the 1930s and ‘40s.
I think there's a sense this was relaxed somehow after World War II, because a lot of Holocaust survivors do end up in the United States.
But that was a long, arduous and contentious process that involves a lot of the key figures I write about in the book.
What happens in 1948 is that Congress passes the Displaced Persons Act,
essentially relaxing the 1924 immigration restrictions, allowing refugees into the United States.
But at the behest of Congress members and senators who were affiliated with #America#First, -- in particular William Ernest Langer from North Dakota, -- they wrote the act to exclude Eastern European Jews.
It actually privileged German displaced persons who had been expelled from what is now Poland, and Harry Truman vetoed it as essentially racist and antisemitic.
But his veto was overruled, and it wasn't until 1952 that these restrictions were relaxed.
That was because a lot of people on the right identified the potential for Jewish immigration in this country as opening the floodgates for Judeo-Bolshevism.
So it's a very different story than the traditional interpretation of the postwar period being a straight line to Jewish assimilation in the country,
as well as about the diminished power of the right, at least until Joe McCarthy.
McCarthy doesn't emerge out of nowhere. That's sort of the point.
You already have, immediately after World War II, the growing power of the farthest fringes of the right. https://www.salon.com/2024/04/20/a-prehistory-of-maga-mainstream-conservatives-never-really-purged-the-fascists/