The Life and Work of Ludwig Lewisohn: This dark and desperate age

A biography of Lewisohn (1882-1955), an American Jewish writer, editor, and critic. In vol. I, pp. 137-141 discuss Lewisohn's rejection for a university teaching post due to antisemitism. Pp. 278-282 relate to WASP critiques of this Jew for presuming to think he could understand American culture. Pp. 612-633 deal largely with his public criticism, from 1933, of the Nazi regime in Germany, including its genocidal attitude toward Jews. He hoped that the West would be moved to fight Hitler and provide refuge for Jews. In vol. II, ch. 40 (pp. 297-324), "Holocaust Revealed, " highlights Lewisohn's Zionism as a reaction to Jewish assimilation and to the Western, Christian world's indifference to the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust. He criticized the West's failure to oppose the rise of Nazism and to provide safe havens, as Roosevelt had promised, to Jews (e.g. in Hungary) whom Hitler had not yet murdered. Lewisohn's novel "Breathe upon These" (1944) blamed the British for closing the gates to Palestine in the faces of Jews who might have found refuge there.