American Religious Responses to Kristallnacht

Based on work conducted by scholars as part of a Summer Research Workshop organized by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2007, this book takes a fresh look at how American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews responded to the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany and German-occupied territory in the 1930s. The essays focus specifically on American religious responses to the November 9-10, 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Today understood as the first act of the Holocaust because of its systematized brutality against Germany’s Jews, Kristallnacht, generated a dramatic response among mainline Protestants, Catholic clerical and lay leaders, Orthodox Jews, Protestant fundamentalists, and Jewish War Veterans. Together, the essays represent the first examination of multi-religious group responses to the beginnings of one of the pivotal moral events of the twentieth century, the Holocaust. They possess implications for the history of anti-Semitism globally and in the U.S., the history of interfaith cooperation and religious belief in America, the influence of American ideals on religious thought, and the impact of historical events on Jewish and Christian theology.

Maria Mazzenga has served as Education Archivist at the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives since 2005. After graduating with a Ph.D. in history from Catholic University in 2000, she taught U.S. history at Virginia Commonwealth University, George Mason University, and Catholic University. She has written several articles on American Catholicism and on the U.S. home front during the Second World War and is currently working on a book on American Catholic responses to the Holocaust.