John Strachey, theoretical Communist descended from aristocratic English heights to lecture in the U.S.A., had managed to speak before some sixty meetings all over the country before the Hearst minions (wearing official badges) nabbed him for deportation. Of all the university, public and private halls in which he had held forth, the meeting place selected for the farcical and unjustified arrest was the North Shore Israel Temple in Glencoe, Ill.
Neither Strachey nor his sponsors are to blame for this strange selection of locale, of course. Possibly it was pure accident. But the linking of such “dangerous” Communist preachings with a Jewish temple will surely dig a little deeper that well-worn groove in the moron mind which considers Communism and Judaism one and inseparable.
A few days earlier the priestly demagogue, Father Coughlin, took a lusty and possibly well-deserved whack at “international bankers.” Of the half-dozen horrible examples which he cited all but one were Jewish. In relation to one of these, Bernard Mannes Baruch, Father Coughlin went to the length of outright misrepresentation and called him “Manasseh.” Meticulously he refrained from mentioning the Mellons, Rockefellers, Fords and other money-kings, except Morgan.
No doubt the priest will hold up his cossack in horror at the suggestion that he intended to help the good cause of Jew-baiting. Perhaps his horror will not be entirely simulated. It is conceivable that in the mind of Father Coughlin international banking and Jews are so identical that the Jewish names roll off his tongue automatically. In any case, he has deepened another well-worn groove in the moron mind—the one which regards international banking and Jews as one and inseparable.
Thus at both ends of the economic scale—banking and Bolshevism—the Jew is blamed for the ills of the world.
General Hugh S. Johnson is not altogether displeased with the anti-Semitic break on the Michigan Father’s part. It will do more than anything that has come over the priest’s well-financed radio hook-up to date to turn American Jewry against the unctuous prelate’s prattle.
In the first of a series of syndicated articles Johnson underlines that break, in case anyone should have overlooked it. “Father Coughlin,” he writes, ” . . . says that I am the servant of a master—a prince of Israel — named Manasseh, who, he said, sawed the Prophet Isaiah in two. He is talking about Bernie Baruch, whose name he gives as Manasseh Baruch. The latter’s name is no more Manasseh than Coughlin is Doodlesack. The name is Mannes—that of a well-known South Carolina family—friends of the Baruchs.”
For us the episode, trivial in itself, holds a serious lesson. Ranting demagogy, whether in person of a priest or a Louisiana Senator, deserves no encouragement from Jews as Jews. Whatever its economic panacea or political trickery, it is at bottom an appeal to the unthinking mob, and by its own logic must rest on the greatest common denominators of popular prejudice. Anti-Semitism is among these common denominators, one of the tricks in the bags of such magicians, and certain to be drawn out for the popular delectation when the moment is ripe.
One need not be blind to the social injustice which provides a fertile ground for the Longs and Coughlins. But the reality of the ills they attack must not deceive us as to the poison in their medicine.
It is unseemly in the extreme for a race which counts Spinoza and Marx and Einstein among its sons to take undue pride in its pugilists. Nevertheless I confess publicly herewith that in the impending fight between Max Baer and Max Schmeling my sympathies are entirely on the Baer side. In all other fights of course, my sympathies are with the public, which is ballyhooed into paying out hard-earned cash to see a couple of brutes butcher each other.
The mix-up between the “Aryan” Max and the Jewish Max will decide nothing. All the same we trust that it will decide that nothing in favor of the Jewish Max.
At the time the United States entered the World War, I was just old enough to enlist in the Jewish Legion organized by Vladimir Jabotinsky. The enlistment card is still in my files, but the American government, insisting unreasonably that I was eligible to military service, frustrated that journey. I recall as though it were yesterday the disappointment of that frustration.
In table conversation I have always attributed the enlistment to a sudden eruption of nationalistic emotion. But under the surface of my mind, then as now, lurked the suspicion that the adventure of fighting in Palestine was not the least ingredient in the Legion’s lure for me.
Jabotinsky is now in America. The general press has paid scant attention to him, being ignorant of his colorful personality. The Jewish press for the most part “plays down” his activities and personality because of political opposition to his Revisionist program.
Yet there are few Jews in the world today of whom we can be more justly proud. I am not competent to judge the Revisionist program, except on its emotional side. But I do admire its sharpedged, determined, uncompromising spirit. It has the clean lines of a definite objective and a clearcut program. It is not a metaphysical concept floating towards higher heavens but a regimen of action in the here and now.
DR. SILVER’S ARTICLE
The Jewish Daily Bulletin regrets that Dr. Abba Hillel Silver’s editorial article does not appear in this issue because of a delay in transit. It will be published next week-end.
Lieutenant Solomon Braun of the French Army was one of the members of the 1897 expedition to Lake Tchad that was wiped out by the Tuaregs.
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.
