To the Editor:
The Hollywood Ten, and lots of other writers, actors and other Hollywood big shots, were communists or communist sympathizers, supporters of a system
that cruelly persecuted their Jewish brethren. The communists in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe persecuted, jailed and executed Jewish leaders, including Stalin’s murder of leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which helped lead the propaganda war against Hitler.
Throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, Jewish newspapers, cultural and community institutions, and synagogues were closed down by the communist rulers with nary a protest from these supposedly courageous and freedom-loving Hollywood leftists.
Why Kirk Douglas, one of these leftists, is being honored now — when the history of communist anti-Semitism has been exposed and is so well known — is beyond me.
Lewis Regenstein
Atlanta, Ga.
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