Joachim Prinz, chairman of the Governing Council of the World Jewish Congress, declared here last night that American Jewry “is drifting into complete isolation from world problems and from Jewish problems of the world” and that American Jews are completely “uninformed as to what is going on in the danger zones of Jewish life.”
Addressing the eighth blennial conference of Americans for Progressive Israel-Hashomer Hatzair, Dr. Prinz observed that this isolation is aggravated by the fact that “large numbers of American Jews have now come to believe that their political hope lies in the reactionary conservative wing of American politics.” He noted that such thinking has led to the approach that Jews should “stick to their own posts” and leave the solution of central problems to others.
Dr. Prinz warned that this approach is “not merely dangerous” for the Jewish position in America but has caused Jews to forfeit their rights and duties as American citizens by “abdicating from their participation in the solution of the problems of America itself.” He contended that American Jewry “is ruled by a small number of executive directors and a leadership group which has been selected for its monetary contribution rather than for its intellectual capacity. The level of the discussion of Jewish subjects has reached a record low, and every opinion deviating from the official line is being denounced and rejected.”
The World Jewish Congress leader told the more than 200 delegates and guests attending the API-HH conference that the philosophy of isolationism has found “its high point of insanity in the psychopathic movement of the Jewish Defense League,” which, he asserted, “appeals to the basest instincts of violence, thoughtlessness and irresponsibility among a relatively small group of American Jews.” He stated that the JDL has done a great deal of harm to Soviet Jewry and to the name of Jewry itself.
SOCIALIST-ZIONIST SLATE ANNOUNCED
Moshe Kagan, API-HH national chairman, called for a massive support of the United Socialist-Zionist slate for the forthcoming 28th World Zionist Congress. The slate comprises the API-HH which is affiliated with the World Union of Mapam; Hashomer Hatzair Socialist Youth Movement, and the Radical Zionist Alliance. The United Socialist-Zionist platform declares that in Israel “we stand for a humanist, socialist society”; “elimination of the social and economic gap among various sectors of society”; complete separation of religion and state”; and an end to harassment of political dissidents.
In the Middle East, the platform supports a Socialist Middle East “where all nations live in peace in mutually agreed-upon borders, the right of all people, including the Palestinians, to self-determination, and positive initiatives for Middle East peace by the Israeli government.” In the United States, the platform calls for the “democratization of the Jewish community to assure complete grass-roots participation in the decision-making, especially by youth and women,” opposes racism at home and imperialism abroad, calls for the immediate withdrawal of all US troops from Southeast Asia. In addition, the platform supports the right of Jews in the Soviet Union and Arab countries to live as Jews or to emigrate to Israel.
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.
