America’s Soul in the Balance

At the height of World War II, four lawyers in the U.S. Treasury Department discovered that the highly educated, patrician diplomats in the State Department had covered up reports of the Nazi extermination scheme—and then blocked the rescue of 70,000 Romanian Jews forcibly marched into the Nazi-conquered Ukraine and left to die of starvation and disease. The Treasury lawyers charged the diplomats with being “accomplices of Hitler.” The stakes were nothing less than the fates of countless European Jews, the historical reputation of FDR, and the soul of America itself.

Gregory J. Wallance uses rarely cited archival documents, memoirs, diaries, and transcripts to construct this gripping, nonfiction Washington political thriller. With exceptional narrative prowess, he examines the anti-Semitism and extraordinary heartlessness of the wartime State Department, whose behavior is a cautionary tale for world leaders weighing the costs of intervention to stop genocide.

The author is a partner at the law firm of Kaye Scholer LLP in New York; a former federal prosecutor; and the author of Two Men Before the Stormand Papa’s Game. He was a producer of the HBO movie “Sakharov,” which was an outgrowth of a 1979 human rights mission to the Soviet Union in which he represented families of refuseniks – Jews punished for attempting to emigrate to Israel – and personally presented legal petitions on their behalf to Soviet authorities.

Jessica Lang is Associate Professor of English and the William Newman Director of the Jewish Studies Center. Her specialization is in contemporary Jewish Literature, early American fiction, and women’s fiction.











When: Thu., Nov. 8, 2012 at 7:00 pm
Where: Museum of Tolerance
226 E. 42nd St.

Price: $10
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At the height of World War II, four lawyers in the U.S. Treasury Department discovered that the highly educated, patrician diplomats in the State Department had covered up reports of the Nazi extermination scheme—and then blocked the rescue of 70,000 Romanian Jews forcibly marched into the Nazi-conquered Ukraine and left to die of starvation and disease. The Treasury lawyers charged the diplomats with being “accomplices of Hitler.” The stakes were nothing less than the fates of countless European Jews, the historical reputation of FDR, and the soul of America itself.

Gregory J. Wallance uses rarely cited archival documents, memoirs, diaries, and transcripts to construct this gripping, nonfiction Washington political thriller. With exceptional narrative prowess, he examines the anti-Semitism and extraordinary heartlessness of the wartime State Department, whose behavior is a cautionary tale for world leaders weighing the costs of intervention to stop genocide.

The author is a partner at the law firm of Kaye Scholer LLP in New York; a former federal prosecutor; and the author of Two Men Before the Stormand Papa’s Game. He was a producer of the HBO movie “Sakharov,” which was an outgrowth of a 1979 human rights mission to the Soviet Union in which he represented families of refuseniks – Jews punished for attempting to emigrate to Israel – and personally presented legal petitions on their behalf to Soviet authorities.

Jessica Lang is Associate Professor of English and the William Newman Director of the Jewish Studies Center. Her specialization is in contemporary Jewish Literature, early American fiction, and women’s fiction.

Buy tickets/get more info now