An Old Battle's Fresh Wounds

Rosen added, however, that he did not intend to impugn anyone's personal patriotism, only their historical biases.

"The academic world is full of people who really think America is the bad guy -- you know, we were built on slavery, we killed the Indians, we're an imperialist power. There are many left-wing academics who are anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic and don't like America much. I wish I could take credit for that observation, but I'm hardly the first to say it," he said.

Rosen, who is Jewish, blames the "Wyman school" of Holocaust historians for what he believes is a giant intellectual fraud.

"Most people in America today think we should have bombed Auschwitz and American Jews were begging the government to do it, but the Roosevelt administration didn't do it because John J. McCloy, the undersecretary of war, was an anti-Semite. That's the conventional story in a nutshell," he said. "I think it is totally erroneous."

Rosen, 58, is a lawyer with a busy practice in Charleston, S.C., who writes on the side. His last book, "The Jewish Confederates," was a sympathetic look at Jews who fought for the Southern states in the Civil War. He was piqued into writing "Saving the Jews" when he visited Boston's Holocaust Memorial in 2001 and saw an exhibit that said, "By late 1942, the United States and its allies were aware of the death camps but did nothing to destroy them."

As evidence that such statements are not only wrong but deliberately deceptive, Rosen cites a similar exhibit at Washington's U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It shows an Aug. 9, 1944, letter from the World Jewish Congress passing on a Czechoslovakian official's request that the Roosevelt administration bomb Auschwitz.

"They highlighted that letter, but they ignored one subsequent and two previous letters from the World Jewish Congress saying not to bomb Auschwitz because it would kill the Jews there," Rosen said. "The truth is that American Jewish leaders were divided on what to do, and very few were asking Roosevelt to bomb the camps."

Steve Luckert, curator of the Holocaust Museum's permanent exhibition, said he stands by the accuracy of its exhibit. He noted that the main panel on "Why Auschwitz Was Not Bombed" includes this summary: "A few Jewish leaders called for the bombing of the Auschwitz gas chambers; others opposed it. Like some allied officials, both sides feared the death toll or the German propaganda that might exploit any bombing of the camp's prisoners. No one was certain of the results."

"We try to show this issue in a nuanced way," Luckert said. "One thing I have learned in my years as an historian is that things are rarely black and white. New documents are always coming out. What you don't want to do is say, 'All the answers are there; we don't need to do any more digging.' "

The furious response to Rosen's assertions could backfire, bringing him more attention than he would otherwise have received. The book is "selling steadily," said Michele Martin, interim head of Thunder's Mouth Press. Rosen said it has sold about 6,000 copies.

His book has a complimentary afterword by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and blurbs on the back cover from James MacGregor Burns ("an authoritative analysis") and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ("an essential book"). But it received some withering reviews when it came out in May.

Publishers Weekly called it a "bloated, repetitious volume" that "reads like one long apology" for FDR. The Jerusalem Post called it "a partisan riposte to the decades of serious work on the subject."