William Morrow & Company, book publishers, are sponsoring a plan for a series of intellectual protest meetings to be devoted to a review of what Jews have done in the arts and sciences of Germany and which are to be held throughout the city on May 10, on which date the Hitlerites of Germany plan to burn books by authors of Jewish origin.
The book publisher has written to the Rabbis and heads of other religious groups in the city to organize these protest meetings, and is urging prominent American authors to address these meetings.
A recent publication of William Morrow & Company is among those under the ban at present in Germany. This book is called “Germany Puts the Clock Back” by Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Berlin correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, who has just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his foreign correspondence. The publication of this book, which gives the entire background of the present situation in Germany, prompted the Nazis to ask for Mr. Mowrer’s removal as head of the Foreign Correspondents’ Association.
A copy of the letter which the publisher addressed to the Rabbis of Greater New York follows:
“On May 10th the Hitler regime in Germany is planning to throw into a huge bonfire all books written by Jews or about Jews. The books consigned to flames include all the works of authors like Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Heine, Hermann Cohn, Jacob Wasserman, and many others.
“As book publishers and producers of one of the books which called down the wrath of the Nazis, ‘Germany Puts the Clock Back’, by Edgar Ansel Mowrer, we feel strongly the absurdity and the indignity of the book burning tragicomedy. It has occurred to us that on the evening when this takes place in Germany, lay and religious groups throughout Greater New York might hold what, for want of a better name, we would call Intellectual Protest Meetings. It is our suggestion that you may desire to call a special meeting of your congregants and their friends on the night of May 10th, and that you, in addition to one or two other speakers discuss the intellectual contributions of Jews to Germany. In other words, one address may be devoted to the Jew in Art, another to the Jew in Literature, another to the Jew in Medicine, or Philosophy or Science. We believe that if a dignified protest of this sort is made, the stupidity of the act of the Hitlerites will be brought home in an impressive manner to the citizens of this country and other nations.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
