David S. Wyman is the author of several books on the responses of the United States to Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

's persecution of and programs to exterminate Jews.

Wyman earned an A.B. in history from Boston University

Boston University

Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...

 and a Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in history from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. From 1966 until his retirement in 1991, Wyman taught in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

University of Massachusetts Amherst

The University of Massachusetts Amherst is a public research and land-grant university in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States and the flagship of the University of Massachusetts system...

, where he also chaired the Judaic studies program. Wyman holds honorary doctoral degrees from Hebrew Union College

Hebrew Union College

The Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion is the oldest extant Jewish seminary in the Americas and the main seminary for training rabbis, cantors, educators and communal workers in Reform Judaism.HUC-JIR has campuses in Cincinnati, New York, Los Angeles and Jerusalem.The Jerusalem...

 and Yeshiva University

Yeshiva University

Yeshiva University is a private university in New York City, with six campuses in New York and one in Israel. Founded in 1886, it is a research university ranked as 45th in the US among national universities by U.S. News & World Report in 2012...

, both in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. He is currently chairman of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

Deborah Lipstadt

Deborah Lipstadt

Deborah Esther Lipstadt, Ph.D. is an American historian and author of the book Denying the Holocaust and The Eichmann Trial. She is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University...

 characterizes Wyman's book, Paper Walls; America and the Refugee Crisis, as having stood for many years as "one of the most important books," on American immigration policy in the Nazi years. In Paper Walls Wyman discusses the combination of antisemitism, nativistic nationalism, economic crisis and isolationism that made rescue inconceivable.

In his later work Wyman's position shifted, he came to believe that the attitude of American Jews during the Nazi era was to be faulted, and that the approach of the Bergson Group was the correct one. If American Jews had taken a more forceful approach, government policy could have been changed.

Major publications

• Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1968) ISBN 0870230409
• The Abandonment Of The Jews
  The Abandonment Of The Jews
  The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, published in 1984, is a book by David S. Wyman, former Josiah DuBois professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Wyman is currently the chairman of the David S...
  
  : America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (Pantheon, 1984) ISBN 978-0394428130

editor of:

• America and the Holocaust (thirteen volumes of the documents used in The Abandonment of the Jews (Garland, 1990)
• The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) ISBN 0801849691
• A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust, with Rafael Medoff
  Rafael Medoff
  Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which is based in Washington, D.C. and focuses on issues related to America's response to the Holocaust.-Academic career:...
  
  (The New Press, 2002) ISBN 978-1565847613

External links