When Rosen runs out of ammunition to fire at the Bergson Group, he resorts to his imagi nation. For example, he asserts that the group’s leaders “sat out the war in America, preferring to agitate for the overthrow of the British in Palestine rather than enlist and fight Nazis themselves.”
In truth, two of its five leaders enlisted and fought – one in the Battle of the Bulge, the other in the Normandy invasion – while the others were found physically unfit to serve (that is, 4-F). This information actually appears in two books that Rosen himself elsewhere cites – meaning that he had the facts about their military service at hand, yet nevertheless did not use them. That is certainly an unusual way to write history.
Perhaps Rosen’s most creative assault on the Bergson Group is his allegation that “Hecht and the Irgun disliked not only Roosevelt but also the Zionist movement as a whole, including Ben-Gurion, Weizman [sic], Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, and Golda Meir.”
It’s no secret that the Bergsonites were at odds with Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. But what are Dayan, Rabin, and Meir doing in that sentence? Bergson and his colleagues in the 1940’s may not have even heard of them. After all, during the Holocaust years, Dayan, Rabin and Meir were not the figures of international renown that they would later become. Dayan was a soldier in the Haganah, Rabin was serving in the Palmach, and Meir (then known as Myerson) was an official of the Histadrut labor union.
To a serious historian, it would not matter what Hecht or the other Bergson activists thought of Dayan, Rabin, or Meir. But for a polemicist whose intention is to make the Bergsonites look bad in the eyes of American Jewish readers, this is a clever (if perhaps too obvious) tactic: choose the names of the three Israelis who ae the most popular among American Jews, and then portray the Bergson Group as their enemies.
The rabbis who marched and the Bergson activists are not the only targets of Robert Rosen’s wrath. A significant portion of Saving the Jews is devoted to blasting historians who have dared suggest that President Roosevelt could have done more to aid Europe’s Jews. At one point, Rosen even goes so far as to impugn their patriotism, declaring that those who have criticized FDR’s response to the Holocaust are promoting “an anti-American version of history” and engaging in “America-bashing.” (Fifty-five Holocaust scholars recently signed a petition to Rosen’s publisher, protesting these slurs.)
In many of his attacks, Rosen misstates the historians’ positions in order to undermine their credibility. For example, Rosen accuses Prof. Henry L. Feingold (author of The Politics of Rescue) of calling President Roosevelt “a coward” and calling the Allies “unspeakable anti-Semites.” Yet Feingold has never used that language.
Likewise, Rosen claims that Prof. Deborah Lipstadt, in her book Beyond Belief, “refer[s] dismissively” to the December 1942 Allied statement confirming the Nazi genocide. According to Rosen, this is proof that mainstream historians refuse to give FDR appropriate credit for the few times that he issued statements about the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. But in fact Lipstadt included no less than ten pages about the declaration, the press coverage of it, and the factors behind its drafting and publication.
The 1942 Allied declaration, and the issue of FDR’s failure to speak out against the genocide, is emblematic of Rosen’s confused and contradictory rendering of the historical record.
On the one hand, he wrongly denounces Lipstadt and others for supposedly giving short shrift to the 1942 statement. “This declaration is barely quoted and hardly discussed by the Roosevelt critics in academe,” he writes. In fact, the declaration is discussed not only in Lipstadt’s book but in every major scholarly work about America’s response to the Holocaust.
