Publisher's Synopsis
In his 1990 book, The Jewish Question, Israeli Holocaust historian Alex Bein Warned: "[A]lmost all periods of great violence, at least since the Middle Ages, have caught the Jews by surprise and found them unprepared... the persecutions began with particular severity and intensity especially when the Jews position was so secure and their relationship to their environment well ordered that there was no thought of attacks and major violence-at least not in their country, their house." The Jewish Problem and its Final Solution traces two-thousand years of the history of the West's Jewish Problem from its emergence with the birth of Christianity in the first century to its adaptation by secularism beginning in the eighteenth century as the Jewish Question. The book describes Jewish disappointment at their promised emancipation, and the backlash of western society to accepting Jewish equality; the rise of antisemitic political parties in the nineteenth century and, in the 20th century, National Socialism with its intention to achieve the final solution to the West's millennial Jewish Problem. And finally, the book discusses the role of the United States in Germany's emerging and nearly successful state program intended to achieve the final solution to the West's Jewish Program. The book addresses troubling issues about the level and implications of popular antisemitism in the United States over those years; of Congress and administration actions resulting in the closing of America as refuge for Europe's condemned. In 1944 three Christian senior aides to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. drafted an official protest to President Roosevelt regarding his discriminatory refugee policy, "The Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews." It is consoling to believe that the Holocaust is, as many scholars prefer, an event unique in History. This book describes a pathology and prejudice born of religion, a superstition which inspired centuries of anti-Jewish persecution that survives today: a two-thousand-year history that is barely concealed in the bowels of Western culture as antisemitic stereotypes. As these stereotypes were used as propaganda to enlist support for Germany's Final Solution, they remain today in forms most of us recognize but dismiss. At his 2014 Rosh Hashana dinner hosted for mostly Jewish congressmen, administration officials and members of the media Vice President Biden reminded his audience, "Folks, there is no place else to go, and you understand that in your bones... There is really only one absolute guarantee, and that's the state of Israel." The threat of the Jewish Problem remains but with one difference: the Holocaust is now precedent for today. And for tomorrow.
