In Well Worth Saving, Laurel Leff, associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University, explores the experiences of European, mostly Jewish, academics trying to navigate the United States’ complicated and frustrating immigration bureaucracy between 1933 and 1941. Their goal: to obtain a nonquota visa that would allow them, their wives, and minor children to bypass the quota system, which numerically limited immigration to the United States, and thus to escape Nazi persecution. The impediments were many and included time, geography, Nazi-induced unemployment, and poverty, State Department and academic antisemitism, legal restrictions on who qualified for nonquota status, and the age-old problem of few resources and great need. Leff's book is a rigorous examination of how these impediments affected the lives of refugee academics, how aid organizations mobilized to assist, and how most universities failed to mobilize. She relies almost exclusively on the case files of the aid organizations, which are treasure troves—more scholars should use them—but they also paint an incomplete picture of the experience of these refugee scholars and the tragic situation they faced.
The first part of Leff's book is organized more thematically than chronologically, contrary to what one might expect from a book describing an evolving refugee crisis. Two scene-setting chapters cover the elimination of Jewish scholars from the Nazi academy and the establishment of aid organizations in the United States dedicated to rescuing academics, most notably the Emergency Committee for Displaced Foreign Scholars. The University in Exile at the New School for Social Research, populated by displaced scholars, and the Rockefeller Foundation, providing necessary stipends for many refugees placed at universities, also play important roles. The next five chapters cover the various barriers to academic refugee immigration, from the role of university administrations often loath to accept foreign professors; to the effects that age, gender, scholarly prominence, and political persuasion had on academic placement; to the deeply depressing debates over whether certain scholars were “too Jewish” or “too foreign” to fit into American university life. Leff provides examples drawn from case file reports and correspondence, but paragraphs can jump from a 1933 example to one from 1942, with little explanation of the changing context that may have raised “the barriers to immigration even” higher.
The second half of the book flows more clearly, as Leff describes the heartbreaking situation of academics in Nazi-occupied territory, who faced an American university system that felt it had already done enough to accept German refugee scholars. The personal stories she highlights are undoubtedly the strongest part of the book, allowing Leff to showcase her storytelling talents and expose the rich details to be found in case files. Yet gaps remain. Leff describes the Berlin consul's reasons for denying a nonquota visa to historian Eugen Tauber, yet he “eventually received his visa” (126). State Department records—which Leff does not cite or seem to have consulted—show that the same American consulate in Berlin granted Tauber a nonquota visa in 1940. What changed that consular officer's mind? These bureaucratic debates and decisions were often invisible to the refugee aid organizations and thus omitted from their case files, but more varied archival research would have painted a more holistic picture of the scholar's experience.
Some claims fall flat, and the framing of the book is problematic. Although Leff acknowledges that rescue in the 1930s was a rescue from persecution, not murder—no one knew that the Holocaust was to come—her book's title and arguments still describe “life-and-death” decisions. In retrospect, this is what they were, of course, but this framing introduces a moralizing tone that inhibits a more nuanced analysis. Leff adds to this with blanket statements to highlight inaction, claiming with few examples that “Americans knew when the scholars were in hiding” or that “Americans knew when the scholars they were trying to help were in concentration camps” (68). She ends a paragraph about wartime State Department bureaucracy by noting that “a quarter of all Jews who were killed died between March 1942 and November 1943” (217), implicitly blaming the bureaucratic delays for their deaths. This is incorrect in several ways. Her source states that 25 percent of all Jews murdered were killed in a three-month period just in the Operation Reinhard camps; the total percentage of Holocaust victims murdered during the period Leff discusses is significantly higher. It is also irrelevant to her argument. These State Department delays did not affect Jews murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland who had been cut off from the possibility of US immigration for nearly a year by the war, the Nazi emigration restrictions, and the forced closure of US consulates. Leff's arguments are more convincing when she admits that everyone involved “had to make choices, and the choices were not easy” (258). This was a messy business; Leff is strongest when she acknowledges this instead of over-relying on the dichotomy of rescue or abandonment.
Leff also ignores a key actor in this process: Congress. She constantly criticizes the State Department for their interpretation of the 1924 immigration law, stating that consular officers “did not necessarily have to follow the guidelines” (121). They did, however, have to follow the law, and Leff faults them for doing so—for not ignoring a provision that stated that professors had to teach for two years immediately prior to receiving a nonquota visa (understandably difficult for Jewish professors fired from teaching positions), for not accepting librarians and archivists as professors, and for concluding that when the law said a scholar's wife could receive a nonquota visa, that meant only wife, not husband. Of course, these stipulations were written into the law and were unchanged by Congress, which failed to pass a bill in 1940 (S3542) meant to fix the “wife” problem. The law was undoubtedly discriminatory and contributed to the impossibility of escape for some academics, as did nativist and antisemitic views held by many State Department officials. But the noted restrictions were not merely State Department–created barriers (those existed as well, mostly in the name of national security)—they were barriers established and unchanged by Congress, which determined who legally qualified for the precious nonquota visas. In an appendix of organizations that “played a central role in determining whether refugee scholars could come to the United States” (261), Leff lists the State Department; she does not list Congress.
Like her 2005 book, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Influential Newspaper, Leff argues that institutions’ lack of recognition and attention to the Nazi threat represents a moral failure. For the most part, she is convincing: few Americans in positions of power emerge unscathed. Well Worth Saving will encourage future scholars to mine refugee case files and to learn more about their academic ancestors who narrowly escaped the Holocaust as well as those who were unable to do so. Despite the book's shortcomings, Leff has created a fitting tribute to them.
