Between the Lines

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Ever since Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Theodore Dreiser has been sore at the world. Considering himself “the greatest American novelist”—though one wonders on what grounds—Mr. Dreiser feels that the world has done him an injustice by overshadowing him with Lewis.

Dissatisfied with everything and everybody, Mr. Dreiser is also dissatisfied with the Jews. He finds the Jews in America “multiplying in number.” He speaks of the Jews as being “money – minded, very pagan, very sharp in practice.” Their single objective, according to Dreiser, is “plenty of money.”

MISREPRESENTS FACTS

Apparently ignorant of the fact that there are thousands of Jews engaged in farming in the United States, Mr. Dreiser makes the allegation that the Jews “do not enter upon farming.” He deliberately closes his eyes to the well known fact that there are tens of thousands of Jewish workers in America and venture to say that “the Jews are not the day laborers of the world.” To him the Jews are “by preference lawyers, bankers, merchants, money-lenders, middlemen and brokers.”

Mr. Dreiser is not satisfied with just attacking the Jews. Like the Nazis, he speaks also of half-Jews and quarter-Jews. They too are not kosher to Mr. Dreiser, for “because of their Jewish blood they adherer acially and religiously with Jewry.”

“REMOVE” JEWS, HE URGES

Exposing himself as a protagonist of Hitler’s racial “blood theory,” Mr. Dreiser, who for years posed as a Liberal and even as a semi-Communist, is dissatisfied with the fact that Jews are using American names and “deliberately pass as Americans.” He recommends nothing more nor less than the “removal” of all the Jews to a separate territory. He urges that various nations “now quarreling with the Jew and his internationalism” should call an international conference with all Jewry and “therein thrash out all the problems now seemingly worrying so many of the nations as well as the Jews.”

This is recommended by a person who has always rated himself as an internationalist. This comes from a man who returned from Soviet Russia a pink pro-Stalinist. All this is suggested by a novelist ninety per cent of whose readers are in all probability Jews.

A “LIBERAL” EXPOSED

As far as American Jewry is concerned, little attention will probably be paid to Mr. Dreiser’s outburst. Hutchins Hapgood, who has brought out Mr. Dreiser’s views on the Jews by publishing in the Nation, deserves, however, the credit for exposing Mr. Dreiser. Knowing what Mr. Dreiser things of them, the Jews of America will now know what to think of Mr. Dreiser.

Is Dreiser an anti-Semite? the current issue of the Nation asks, making public his anti-Jewish views. Certainly, will be the answer of the Jews of America. And not only of the Jews, but of every liberal-minded person.

For years Jewish Daily Bulletin readers have turned to us for various types of information.