The Jewish Trail of Tears The Evian Conference of ... - Haruth.com

immigration. The net result of the “world’s evident indifference” to the fate of stateless
refugees was to encourage the Reich to adopt a harsher and more extreme anti-Jewish
policy that would culminate in the pogrom of November 1938 and other acts of
violence. 35
Alan Dowty maintained that the agreement of international representations to
attend the meeting was accomplished “only by promising” that participating nations
would not have to permit the admission of refugees. The primary goal of the United
States in calling for the conference in the first place was “precisely to head off” any
pressure that would require America to liberalize its immigration policies. 36 David
Ticenor and John Hippel claimed that the Evian Conference was predestined to fail from
the outset due to terms of the official invitation that participating nations were not
expected to accept involuntary religious and political refugees. 37 Abraham Edelheit
regarded the meeting as an “empty gesture” of a “half-hearted” effort on the part of
Roosevelt that demonstrated that a “policy of doing nothing was counterproductive.” 38
David Vital deemed the assembly a “singularly futile, dishonest and to some
extent [a] cruel exercise” that resulted in two major accomplishments: the open
expression of “the universal refusal” to permit mass Jewish migration as a form of rescue
and secondly, the confirmation of the “now general disposition” to exclude Jews from the
“international political arena,” marking a reversal of Jewish Emancipation and integration
35 Moorehead. Human Cargo, 34
36 Dowty, Closed Borders, 89.
37 Tichenor, Dividing Lines, 161; Dippel, Bound Upon a Wheel, 225.
38 Edleheit, The Yishuv, 186, 190.
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