How did American Jews in the 1930s/40s respond to the US government's refusal to accept Jewish refugees like those on board the MS St Louis? Was there a significant move to put pressure on the government?

The short answer to this is yes. There was a concerted effort by the Jewish community to pressure the U.S. government to admit Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution.

The longer answer was that almost all Jews wanted to do something to help save Jews being persecuted by the Nazis, but there were real divisions about if these should be private political lobbying or more public efforts. Older and more established Jewish organizations, such as the The American Jewish Committee and B'nai B'rith, feared focusing attention on Jewish suffering could worsen American antisemitism. In 1933, B'nai B'rith and the American Jewish Committee put out a joint statement calling for the U.S. government to intervene diplomatically to stop Nazi persecution of Jews, but also asking Americans not to engage in boycotts or demonstrations against Germany.

Another faction, headed by Rabbi Stephen Wise and associated with the American Jewish Congress, wanted to be vocal and outspoken in their protests against the Nazis. In 1933, they gathered 65,000 people in New York to protest the Nazi regime. The Nazis used the protest to their own ends, claiming that American Jews rallying against them proved that the Jews were hostile and they boycotted and tried to destroy German Jewish businesses. In the U.S., American Jews briefly attempted to boycott Germany, but were not very successful. Part of the failure was because vocal antisemitism was being directed at anyone seen as being too sympathetic to the Jews. On the radio, Father Charles Coughlin stirred up a populist mob by denouncing “Jewish bankers” and blaming Jews for the economic conditions in the United States. In 1934, 20,000 Nazi sympathizers packed into Madison Square Garden to extol Hitler and denounce Jewish efforts to boycott the Nazi regime.

The U.S. was heavily reluctant to take in large numbers of Jewish immigrants. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act restricted immigration based on percentage quotas of the population based around the 1890 census. The goal of the act was to heavily restrict Jewish, Polish, Greek and Italian immigration, which it succeeded in doing. American Jews and their allies, particularly in mainline and liberal Protestantism, focused heavily on trying to increase the number of immigrants the U.S. would take, and struggled to find other nations willing to take Jews. Stephen Wise repeatedly met with President Franklin Roosevelt on the issue.

Roosevelt was sympathetic to the goal of admitting Jews into the United States, but immigration was a sensitive political issue. By 1939, 83 percent of the American public opposed admitting European refugees into the United States. FDR could also not easily bypass congress. You have to keep in mind that this is also taking place in an America recovering from the Depression. The American Federation of Labor, the largest labor organization in the country, made clear to FDR that they feared that new immigrants would take jobs.

Jewish groups did have minor successes in lobbying the government. Often Jews could not immigrate because of a provision in immigration law that barred entry of anyone who might become a “public charge” and need assistance from the government. Because Nazis restricted Jews from taking money or property out of Germany, this meant it was extremely difficult for Jews to enter the United States. Each year quota limits for Germany rarely went fully fulfilled. Starting in 1937 the Department of State developed a more lax interpretation of the public charge provision, allowing people to immigrate who were possible public charges, and providing for distant relatives to file affidavits saying they would support these new immigrants. In 1938, FDR made it so that any German refugee who managed to get to the United States on a visitor’s visa would not be forced to leave. This was dubiously legal, but probably saves thousands of lives.

In 1942, a new Jewish voice appeared in the United States, Hillel Kook, who took on the name Peter Bergson when in the U.S. Bergson came to the U.S. from Jewish Palestine, and was a member of the Irgun, a militant Zionist group that sought to fight the British to create a Jewish homeland. In the U.S., Bergson publicly denounced American Jewish leaders for not being vocal enough about the Holocaust. Bergson held rallies in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and in Washington called “We Will Never Die” to generate support for helping Jews in Nazi occupied territories.

Bergson ultimately tried to play his hand at diplomacy, negotiating with the Nazi-allied Romanian government to pay a ransom for the release of 70,000 Jews. The Romanians wanted $350 dollars for each person they spared, and talks broke down. The mainstream Jewish community accused Bergson of working with the enemy, but he said he was doing what was needed to be done in an extreme circumstance. In 1943 Bergson lead a march on Washington containing both U.S. senators and rabbis. He called for a presidential commission to rescue Jews. Mainstream Jewish leaders like Rabbi Wise were upset, and felt that Bergson was making too much of spectacle of himself. The best way to help Jews, they felt, was to win the war.

Under pressure from American Jews and their allies, the U.S. government did take new two new actions. The U.S. began to support Zionism openly. In 1944, FDR spoke out in favor of the creation of a Jewish state after the end of the war. Behind the scenes, FDR repeatedly pressured the British to allow Jewish immigration into Palestine, which he saw as the easiest solution to the question of what to do with refugees. That same year, in the election of 1944, the Republican Party made support for a Jewish state part of their platform. This meant that for the first time both U.S. political parties supported the creation of a Jewish state.

The other big action was that in 1944 FDR created the War Refugees Board, essentially an organization dedicated to saving Jews and other victims of the Nazis. It established refugee camps worldwide, in places like Switzerland, the U.S. and Palestine. It also brought 1000 refugees from Italy to upstate New York. They had no legal status, and were kept in an army camp, but they survived the war. The War Refugee Board pressured the president to condemn Nazi actions against Jews, and make clear that perpetrators would be punished after the war, which he did in late 1944. It’s hard to know how many people the War Refugee Board saved, but one historian estimates it may have been as many as 200,000 people.