As a member of the American Jewish Committee, Rosenman was actively involved in addressing issues of concern to the Jewish community. He was a member of its Survey Committee, which worked to reduce antisemitism in the United States by promoting national unity. The Committee considered some of the actions of Jewish activists as unproductive in promoting, rather than dispelling, notions of difference rather than of unity. The Survey Committee believed that the most effective answer to antisemitism was to attack it as Unamerican in its divisive purpose. The Survey Committee emphasized the importance of unity in standing up to the Nazi menace and was influential, in part through Rosenman, in having Roosevelt promote and emphasize national unity in many of his speeches before and after the US entry entered
World War II. On October 6, 1943, three days before
Yom Kippur,
Hillel Kook (also known as
Peter Bergson) organized a march to Washington, DC (the famous
Rabbis March), by a delegation of some 400 rabbis, most if not all Orthodox and some recent immigrants, to make a public appeal to the United States government to do more to try to rescue the abandoned Jews of Europe. It was the only such protest in Washington during the Holocaust. The rabbis were received at the steps of the Capitol by the Senate majority and minority leaders, and the Speaker of the House. After prayers for the war effort at the Lincoln Memorial, the rabbis went to the White House to plead with President Roosevelt and were told that the President was busy all day and Vice President
Henry Wallace met them instead. It was later learned that Roosevelt had several free hours that afternoon, but was advised by both
Stephen Wise (head of the
World Jewish Congress) and Rosenman (who, in addition to being the President's advisor and speech writer, also headed the
American Jewish Committee) that the protesting rabbis "were not representative" of American Jewry and not the kind of Jews he should meet. Wise also accused the rabbis of "offending the dignity of the Jewish people." Historian
Rafael Medoff, founder of The David Wyman Institute (named after Holocaust historian
David Wyman) characterizes Rosenman: "One of FDR’s top advisers and speechwriters was Samuel Rosenman, a leading member of the American Jewish Committee. Rosenman, a deeply assimilated Jew, was uncomfortable calling attention to Jewish concerns. During the 1930's, antisemitism was increasing in the United States, stoked by the virulent tirades of popular antisemitic personalities such as
Father Charles Coughlin, and later aided, perhaps unwittingly, by the arguments of ardent isolationists such as
Charles Lindbergh. Rosenman was sensitive to the destructive charges that Roosevelt was led by a "Jewish cabal" and, as with many leading Jews, fearful that antisemitism in the United States could increase further. After the 1938
Kristallnacht pogroms, he warned FDR that admitting German Jewish refugees to America would “create a Jewish problem in the U.S.” ==Later career==