An unpublished article by Winston Churchill surfaced in which he partly blamed Britain’s Jews for anti-Semitism. Cambridge University lecturer Richard Toye recently discovered the 1937 article, titled “How The Jews Can Combat Persecution,” in a campus archive dedicated to 20th century statesman. Churchill denounced the “wickedness” of anti-Semites but added his own criticism of what he called Jewish “aloofness.” “Yet there are times when one feels instinctively that all this is only another manifestation of the difference, the separateness of the Jew,” Churchill wrote in the article, which did not arouse publishers’ interest until Britain’s Sunday Dispatch newspaper offered to run it in 1940. By then, Britain was at war with Germany and Churchill was on the verge of becoming prime minister. His office declined to allow the article’s publication. Toye suggested that Churchill felt the timing was wrong given the flare-up of Jewish persecution in Europe.
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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.
