Writer Amity Shlaes had an interesting review of Ken Burns's The U.S. and the Holocaust in City Journal; I have no informed opinion on the review generally, but I was puzzled by one item:
It is in the second episode that the filmmakers turn to Franklin Roosevelt, the only president forced to contend with the Third Reich while in office. Roosevelt himself was capable of bigotry. During his first election campaign, Roosevelt allowed himself a kind of casual but nasty xenophobia, as in a San Francisco speech in which he assailed the Chicago electricity magnate Samuel Insull, who was taking his employees down with him as his firm failed. Roosevelt spoke against "the Ishmael or Insull, whose hand is against every man's," a line so creepy one can only ask, "What does that mean?" In his March 1933 inaugural address, just weeks before Hitler opened his first concentration camp, Roosevelt channeled Henry Ford on international capital, claiming that "the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed" and that "practices of the unscrupulous money changers"—code for Jewish Wall Street—"stand indicted." Burns covers none of this.
Roosevelt apparently did hold some anti-Semitic sentiments (which were of course quite common at the time). And the line about "the Ishmael or Insull" might indeed yield a "What does that mean?" reaction. But a bit of quick Googling led even Bible-ignorant me to Genesis 16:11-12:
