Stephen Samuel Wise (1874 - 1949) was a U.S. rabbi and Zionist leader. He founded the Jewish Institute of Religion, an educational center in New York City to train rabbis in Reform Judaism. It was merged into the Hebrew Union College a year after his death.

He embraced a Jewish equivalent of the Social Gospel encouraging social justice, and was a close friend of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who turned to Wise for advice on issues concerning the Jewish community in the United States.

Wise has sometimes been criticized for his initial failure to recognize the Holocaustprior to American entry into World War II, and his dismissal of early reports of the Final Solution as propaganda. Like much of the American Jewish community at the time, his mistakes in this area probably stemmed from a desire to not fan the flames of anti-Semitism by drawing undue attention to the sufferings of the Jewish people in Europe under Nazi rule, fearing an upsurge of anti-Semitism in the United States.

External Links

• Biography at PBS.org (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaust/peopleevents/pandeAMEX101.html)