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Balfour Niece Sees Dark Days for U.S. Jewry

February 20, 1935
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Pessimism as to the future of American Jewry was expressed here by Mrs. Dugdale, niece of the late Lord Balfour, author of the Balfour Declaration, in a lecture which she delivered at the League of Nations Union on “The Future of the Jews.”

“I would not venture to predict what the future of the Jews in the United States will be, cut off as they are from revitalizing Jewishness by the stoppage of European immigration to America,” Mrs. Dugdale stated.

“In wealth and in numbers American Jewry is still the most important nucleus of Jewish life. In the last twenty years it has contributed much to the upbuilding of Palestine. But the Jews of America have their own problems and their own anxieties, even apart from economics. Anti-Semitism is a latent danger even in that great country of boasted freedom.”

Mrs. Dugdale expressed the opinion that only in the British Empire can the individual Jew face the future without anxiety.

Touching upon the Jewish problem in Soviet Russia, Mrs. Dugdale stated that the Jews of Russia suffered appalling economic distress by the sudden break from the capitalist system, but for such of them as have survived it may well be that a healthier, happier life opens in Soviet Russia than in the empire of the czars.

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