Digest of Public Opinion on Jewish Matters

[The purpose of the Digest is informative: Preference is given to papers not generally accessible to our readers. Quotation does not indicate approval.–Editor.]

A new anti-Semitic attack in the “Dearborn Independent,” charging that the Jews are violating the Prohibition law, shows that Ford’s mouthpiece has broken what amounted to a promise in a recent editorial not to engage in further propaganda against the Jews.

While the latest, attack of the “Dearborn Independent” does not employ the word “Jew,” it gives a number of names, all of them obviously Jewish, of a list recently indicted for violation of the Volstead Act, introducing these names with the following remarks:

“The aliens have proved themselves able to outwit the men who temporarily comprise our Government. The bootleggers are better organized and have more brains–or use more–than our enforcement agents.

“We append a few of the names of the recent list of the indicted as published in the current newspapers. These are the men whom our law-officers say they cannot control. Any committee of private citizens could easily accomplish the task of law-enforcement on these people.”

The announcement in the New York “American” that Henry Ford will contribute articles to that paper is commented on by Jacob Fishman in the “Jewish Morning Journal” (April 12).

“We surmised that such a thing would eventually happen long ago when Arthur Brisbane in his daily column frequently went into ecstasies over Ford and Ford’s enterprises. Now that Henry Ford has demonstrated in his Dearborn Independent’ what a wonderful journalist he is, he has become eligible to a prominent place in the Hearst papers,” Mr. Fishman observes.

FEARS “NUMERUS CLAUSUS” AT HARVARD

If Harvard should enforce the new regulations recently announced, pertaining to admission of candidates, it would constitute in effect a numerus clausus against the Jews, similar to that practiced in such reactionary countries as Hungary and Roumania, declares the “American Israelite” of Cincinnati.

Writing under date of April S, the “Israelite” says:

“‘The Harvard Crimson,’ a college journal, points out that ‘consideration of personality and promise enfolds the possibility of limiting ‘non-assimilable’ elements such as commuting students and racial groups.’

“The general belief has been that Harvard is an educational institution and that it is not in any sense of the term a social club and that it is not at all necessary that the students should be ‘assimilable’ elements or that they are not members of certain racial groups. There is little or no reason to doubt that the students almost without exception would assimilate and no racial groups would be formed if this course were not forced upon a certain number of the students by snobbishness, especially that offensive kind displayed by the members of various frats.

The charge that Jews are excluded from college faculties appears in the April 8 issue of the “Daily News,” organ of the students at New York University, in a column headed “The Opinionator.” The writer of the article, Norman W. Cohen, makes the following statements in the course of his discussion on Freedom in the College:

“I am given to understand that Jews are excluded as rigorously as possible from college faculties. It seems that they are banned not because of their vices but because of their virtues. The Jews have inherent within them the spirit of progressiveness, a spirit, which in any of its manifestations becomes offensive to those whom it confronts.”