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Author Leff, Laurel, 1957- author.

Title Well worth saving : American universities' life-and-death decisions on refugees from Nazi Europe / Laurel Leff
Published New Haven : Yale University Press, [2019]
©2019

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Description 1 online resource (x, 357 pages) : portraits
Contents The Nazi University-- Rescue efforts -- Unsympathetic administrators -- World class and well connected -- Age, politics, gender, and money -- Too Jewish or foreign -- State Department barriers -- An international crisis -- More need, less help -- A last chance in France -- Security fears -- Final appeals
Summary A harrowing account of the profoundly consequential decisions American universities made about refugee scholars from Nazi-dominated Europe. The United States' role in saving Europe's intellectual elite from the Nazis is often told as a tale of triumph, which in many ways it was. America welcomed Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Carnap and Richard Courant, among hundreds of other physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, chemists, and linguists who transformed the American academy. Yet for every scholar who survived and thrived, many, many more did not. To be hired by an American university, a refugee scholar had to be world-class and well connected, not too old and not too young, not too right and not too left and, most important, not too Jewish. Those who were unable to flee were left to face the horrors of the Holocaust. In this rigorously researched book, Laurel Leff rescues from obscurity scholars who were deemed "not worth saving" and tells the riveting, full story of the hiring decisions universities made during the Nazi era
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Jewish refugees -- United States -- History -- 20th century
Political refugees -- United States -- History -- 20th century
Jewish scholars -- United States
Scholars -- United States.
World War, 1939-1945 -- Refugees -- United States
Universities and colleges -- United States.
Jewish refugees
Jewish scholars
Political refugees
Refugees
Scholars
Universities and colleges
United States
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780300249057
0300249055