Bearing Gifts

NOW comes another vicarious friend of the Jews to give them friendly advice and admonition. This time it is an American Fascist, editor of the American Review; formerly The Bookman, Mr. Seward Collins. This gentleman is convinced that America is going Fascist and he advises the Jews to prepare themselves for its speedy advent. He graciously volunteers to indicate the required method of preparation. The Jews should “curb their ambitions in public life and in certain professions and businesses.” They should voluntarily achieve solidarity and a certain amount of separation by “relinquishing some of the forms of participation in national affairs, temporarily won for them by liberalism, and turning more for their happiness to themselves and to the immense stores of Jewish traditions.” The alternative is to have “this outcome forced on them in strife, agony and bloodshed.”

Mr. Collins draws a dark picture of what American Fascism is going to be. “Unless the Jews themselves take step to prevent the Fascist wave which is sweeping in the wake of an impractical democracy from taking a cruelly racialistic turn, they are almost certain to suffer here as they have in Germany and so many times before. And their fate is likely to be worse here than in Germany! Americans are notoriously more given to extremes and less amenable to orderly measures than the German people.”

Thus forewarned and properly alarmed, American Jews should, according to Mr. Collins, proceed to accept voluntarily and submissively the full ghetto program which the Fascist theory has prescribed for the Jews of the world. They should surrender at once the “illusion of liberalism,” that “unreasoned liberalism” to which they are so strangely addicted. They should give up at once the doctrines of assimilation and full equality. By assimilation, Mr. Collins understands that reprehensible desire of American Jews to enjoy the same rights and privileges as all other Americans. Upon surrendering all their outmoded notions of liberalism, equality and full rights of citizenship, American Jews will then be spared–what? Racial bigotry and its suffering and bitterness, replies Mr. Collins. But what greater bigotry and suffering and bitterness can there be than that which is already involved in this ghetto program which this Fascist friend of the Jews advises them to accept so gratefully and so gracefully?

Even the most unbalanced of the Nazi madmen never proposed such a preposterous program to the Jews of Germany and never insulted their intelligence by expecting them to entertain it for a moment. It remained for one of those rose-water American Fascists who, in spite of all that has happened in the lands of the colored shirts, can still indulge themselves in dreams of “personal liberty (sic!) under Fascism,” who fondly believe that an American Fascism will wage war upon capitalism and socialism with equal fervor (as the young and befuddled idealists among the German Nazis believed) and who, tired of the tension and the arduous adventure of modern life and thought, yearn after the simple “ancient ways” of life, when there were no socialism and feminism and pscho-analysis (sic!) to confound and harass the placid classicist and the weary humanist–it remained for one of this band to scale the heights of such imbecility or naivete. Truly, “the higher the ape goes, the more he shows his tail.”

It is clear that the American Fascists for whom Mr. Collins speaks want exactly the same things that the Nazis wanted and achieved in Germany: to disqualify, disfranchise and socially, politically and economically to quarantine the Jew.

They are just a wee bit squeamish about the harsh methods which their Teutonic brothers employed. They would like to achieve their objectives quietly, without noise or violence, by a sort of gentleman’s agreement… These literary “Feinschmeckers” cannot stand the smell of blood… They shudder at the thought of whips and lashes and mangled bodies and concentration camps. The obliging Jew should quietly, without fuss or protest, return to his ghetto and to the promised security of servitude and self-abasement, and leave the field clear for the Collinses and their chosen clan to run the country by the divine right of their having been born–Irishmen or Scotsmen or Englishmen.

No, dear little would-be despots of the quill, the affair is not likely to be as simple or as peaceful as all that. The Jew will not be tricked into turning Fascist in order to escape the disabilities which Fascism would force upon him. The Jew knows his history. He knows that Fascism, whether of the Hitler or of the Collins brand, means a throwback to the Middle Ages, and, for the Jews, the Middle Ages are not a mystically-romantic theme for literary nympholepsy, but blood and suffering and degradation. He will not throw in his lot with those who seek to revive “monarchistic and aristocratic principles” in government. He has lived under the beneficient aegis before and he knows exactly what they mean when they are translated into laws, acts and institutions.

He will fight for that “unreasoned liberalism” which razed his ghetto walls, restored his human rights and gave him, as well as all other denied and exploited peoples, a chance to live in freedom and in dignity. He will fight for those “liberal doctrines” which have been the cornerstone of American democracy since its inception. When these are destroyed and the Jew is then confronted with a choice between Fascism and Marxism, between blck reaction which demands of him as the price of toleration the surrender of his equality and his human dignity, and a collectivist society which wipes out all distinctions, the hard common sense of the Jew can be trusted unhesitatingly to choose the latter.

The Jew will never reconcile himself to the disabilities to a Fascist State any more than he reconciled himself in the past to the disabilities which Tzarist Russia forced upon him. Persistently, determinedly and relentlessly he will work underground for its ultimate overthrow. We are a stiff-necked people. This “obstinate Judaeorum” was well known to our persecutors throughout the ages. The yoke to enslave us permanently has not yet been devised.

No, gift-bearing friends of the New Reaction! We do not need your minatory counsel and are not impressed by your dark forebodings. We are not as naive or as easily intimidated or as weak as you imagine…