“The Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man”: Mainline American Protestants and the Kristallnacht Pogrom

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

Kyle Jantzen

Published:

2009

Publisher:

Palgrave Macmillan US

Within the literature that concerns itself with North American responses to the Holocaust, there exists a wide range of opinion. On one end of the spectrum is David Wyman’s verdict that the American reaction to Jewish plight amounted to abandonment, and on the other end is William Rubinstein’s insistence that it was a myth that anything significant could have been done to rescue Jews. Amid the lamentations over the weakness of North American responses to the Holocaust, it has been asserted that the Christian churches were especially culpable for their ambivalence toward and neglect of the Jews suffering persecution in Nazi Germany. To use a Canadian example, Irving Abella and Harold Troper argued that “most Canadians seemed indifferent to the suffering of German Jews and hostile to their admission to Canada,” then went on to assert that “the churches remained silent.”1

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