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bearing.” Roosevelt seemed to think the plan had worked extremely well.
    Roosevelt now brought the conversation around to what he expected of Dodd. First he raised the matter of Germany’s debt, and here he expressed ambivalence. He acknowledged that American bankers had made what he called “exorbitant profits” lending money to German businesses and cities and selling associated bonds to U.S.citizens. “But our people are entitled to repayment, and while it is altogether beyond governmental responsibility, I want you to do all you can to prevent a moratorium”—a German suspension of payment. “It would tend to retard recovery.”
    The president turned next to what everyone seemed to be calling the Jewish “problem” or “question.”
    FOR ROOSEVELT, THIS WAS treacherous ground. Though appalled by Nazi treatment of Jews and aware of the violence that had convulsed Germany earlier in the year, he refrained from issuing any direct statement of condemnation. Some Jewish leaders, like Rabbi Wise, Judge Irving Lehman, and Lewis L. Strauss, a partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Company, wanted Roosevelt to speak out; others, like Felix Warburg and Judge Joseph Proskauer, favored the quieter approach of urging the president to ease the entry of Jews into America. Roosevelt’s reluctance on both fronts was maddening. By November 1933, Wise would describe Roosevelt as “immovable, incurable and even inaccessible excepting to those of his Jewish friends whom he can safely trust not to trouble him with any Jewish problems.” Wrote Felix Warburg, “So far all the vague promises have not materialized into any action.” Even Roosevelt’s good friend Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard law professor whom he later named to the Supreme Court, found himself unable to move the president to action, much to his frustration. But Roosevelt understood that the political costs of any public condemnation of Nazi persecution or any obvious effort to ease the entry of Jews into America were likely to be immense, because American political discourse had framed the Jewish problem as an immigration problem. Germany’s persecution of Jews raised the specter of a vast influx of Jewish refugees at a time when America was reeling from the Depression. The isolationists added another dimension to the debate by insisting, as did Hitler’s government, that Nazi oppression of Germany’s Jews was a domestic German affair and thus none of America’s business.
    Even America’s Jews were deeply divided on how to approach the problem. On one side stood the American Jewish Congress, whichcalled for all manner of protest, including marches and a boycott of German goods. One of its most visible leaders was Rabbi Wise, its honorary president, who in 1933 was growing increasingly frustrated with Roosevelt’s failure to speak out. During a trip to Washington when he sought in vain to meet with the president, Rabbi Wise wrote to his wife, “If he refuse [sic] to see me, I shall return and let loose an avalanche of demands for action by Jewry. I have other things up my sleeve. Perhaps it will be better, for I shall be free to speak as I have never spoken before. And, God helping me, I will fight.”
    On the other side stood Jewish groups aligned with the American Jewish Committee, headed by Judge Proskauer, which counseled a quieter path, fearing that noisy protests and boycotts would only make things worse for Jews still in Germany. One who shared this point of view was Leo Wormser, a Jewish attorney in Chicago. In a letter to Dodd, Wormser wrote that “we in Chicago … have been steadfastly opposing the program of Mr. Samuel Untermeyer and Dr. Stephen Wise to further an organized Jewish boycott against German goods.” Such a boycott, he explained, could stimulate more intense persecution of Germany’s Jews, “and we know that, as to many of them, it could be still worse than it now is.” He stated also that a boycott would “hamper efforts of friends in