David Wyman

David S. Wyman (born 1929, Weymouth, Massachusetts) is the author of several books on the responses of the United States to Nazi Germany's persecution of and programs to exterminate Jews.

Wyman earned an A.B. in history from Boston University and a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University.^[1] From 1966 until his retirement in 1991, Wyman taught in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he also chaired the Judaic studies program.^[1] Wyman holds honorary doctoral degrees from Hebrew Union College and Yeshiva University,^[1] both in New York City. He is currently chairman of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C.^[2]

Deborah Lipstadt characterizes Wyman's book, Paper Walls; America and the Refugee Crisis, as having stood for many years as "one of the most important books," on American immigration policy in the Nazi years.^[3] In Paper Walls Wyman discusses the combination of antisemitism, nativistic nationalism, economic crisis and isolationism that made rescue inconceivable.^[3]

In his later work Wyman's position shifted, he came to believe that the attitude of American Jews during the Nazi era was to be faulted, and that the approach of the Bergson Group was the correct one. If American Jews had taken a more forceful approach, government policy could have been changed.^[3]

Major publications

• Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1968) ISBN 0870230409
• The Abandonment Of The Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (Pantheon, 1984) ISBN 978-0394428130

editor of:

• America and the Holocaust (thirteen volumes of the documents used in The Abandonment of the Jews (Garland, 1990)
• The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) ISBN 0801849691
• A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust, with Rafael Medoff (The New Press, 2002) ISBN 978-1565847613

Notes

External links