Between the Lines

The Jews in the United States are usually looked upon as a business element. Few, however, are aware of the fact that Jews in America are also fairly well represented in farming.

The Jewish farmer in America has had little in the way of publicity. Though there are more Jews on the soil in the United States than in other countries, including Palestine— Soviet Russia being the exception—little has been known of them and their activities.

Once a year the Jewish Agricultural Society publishes a report on Jewish farm settlement in America, and people then “discover” that there are actually large masses of Jewish farmers in this country. They make this discovery only to forget it the next day.

COLONIZATION IN JERSEY

It is therefore no wonder that the announcement made this week, that the State Department will begin to execute, at the end of this month, its plan of settling the families of 160 Jewish needle workers on farms in New Jersey has caused wide comment. The fact that 160 Jewish families are going to be settled on land is looked upon as an extraordinary event, just as if there were not thousands of other Jewish families tilling the soil in America, in not less than twenty states.

The novelty about the government plan may, perhaps, lie in the fact that the United States government has advanced $850,000 for this project. But this sum is intended for industrial purposes only. It is on this sum that a garment factory and 200 homes will have to be established in order that some members of the families, who are not physically fit to work on the land, may be employed in the factory.

This is the first Federal Homestead experiment the government is making for Jews in the neighborhood of New York. It is an experiment to combine farming with factory work on a cooperative basis.

ATTENTION NEEDED

This experiment brings us back to the question of why no attention is being paid by our leading organizations in general to the entire problem of Jewish farming in America.

At no other time could a census to establish the exact number of Jewish farmers in the United States be of such importance as at present, when the wave of anti-Jewish propaganda is assuming serious proportions in our country. The anti-Semitic elements in the United States are always referring in their propaganda to Jews as “financiers” or “Communists.” They never mention the fact that there are thousands of hardworking Jewish farmhands who are determined to retain their anchorage on the land despite the present distressing conditions in farming.

The duty of our central Jewish organizations is to make the facts about Jewish farming in America better known. Jewish farmers are one of the constructive sides of Jewish life in the United States. They must not be neglected. Our friends as well as our enemies should be better informed about the number of Jews in America who stick to the soil and who are far from being “financiers.”

Adolph Proskauer was a major in the Confederate Army and served one term in the Alabama Legislature.