This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Barely a week after assuming office, President Donald Trump set off a worldwide firestorm

when he decided to temporarily ban migrants from seven Muslim-majority countries and refugees

from all over the world from entering the United States.

I'm establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the

United States of America. We don't want them here. We only want to admit those into

our country who will support our country and love deeply our people.

Trump's executive order was greeted with support in some quarters.

President Trump came in here not just as a commander in chief of the military. He's a CEO

and he's trying to protect everybody in the country and he's trying to keep everybody

all America's regardless of religion safe from the potential terrorist to come. And I mean

some people from some of these parts of the world believe it or not want to kill us.

And with dismay and outrage in others. Spontaneous protests erupted at airports and public

squares across the nation. One technique we often use to understand current events is to

look to the past to see what history can teach us. But this is a process that is fraught

with psychological peril. We're often inclined to draw lessons from history that suit our

preconceived notions of how to think about the present. Historians say there are important

lessons that we can draw from the past but there are also dangers to overly neat analogies.

One analogy that many people have reached for in recent days is the story of the SS St.

Lewis. It's a notable story drawn from the Holocaust that is revealing in how we respond

to the pleas of people fleeing distant shores for the United States. Many people might be

familiar with the story of the St. Lewis. On today's Hidden Brain we're going to revisit

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