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Before the Holocaust, Britain had a chance to save Europe's Jews.

JL;DR SUMMARY Oren Kessler's essay examines Britain's missed opportunity to save European Jews during the Holocaust by offering settlement in parts of its empire, such as British Guiana. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

HolocaustJewish ImmigrationChaim WeizmannNeville ChamberlainWhite Paper 1939British Mandate PalestineFranklin Delano RooseveltBritish GuianaMalcolm Macdonald

Places mentioned

London, United Kingdom
"As revealed in Cabinet transcripts at the National Archives in London, Home Secretary Samuel Hoare warned."
Évian, Haute-Savoie, France
"A year earlier, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had convened a 31-nation conference in the French resort of vian to discuss the plight of persecuted minorities in Hitlers Reich."
Georgetown, Demerara-Mahaica, Guyana
"The British seized the areas western portion, todays independent republic of Guyana, in the early 19th century.A tiny white minority ruled from the capital Georgetown."
Birobidzhan, Jewish, Russian Federation
"Just a few years before the Guiana proposal, authorities in Moscow turned the village of Birobidzhan in Russias Far East, bordering China into the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast."
Kenya
"Chamberlains ministers initially considered Kenya, then Northern Rhodesia (Zambia of today), but white settlers in both colonies adamantly objected."
Israel
"Chaim Weizmann (who eventually served as the first president of Israel)."
Guyana
"The most obvious, he said, was British Guiana."

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Cairo Item ID 51319
Cairo Source ID 36
Retrieved 2025-05-11 05:30:50 UTC
Curated 2025-05-11 08:30:31 UTC