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.]

“It was at a dinner in Washington one night last year,” we read in the second of a series of articles appearing in “Liberty” on “The Jew in America” by Franklin Fargo, “that George Harvey, former United States Ambassador to England, made the following story the preamble to his speech.

“‘I recently returned from Europe,’ he said, ‘on the Levi Nathan, the largest of liners. We docked at Hoboken and I crossed the North River at once to Jew York. At Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street I saw a tremendous crowd obviously striving for a view of something curious in its center.

“‘I pushed through the crowd and beheld a lonely individual obviously embarrassed. He was a Gentile.'”

There were a number of Jews present at the dinner and they did not join heartily in the laughter, Mr. Fargo adds.

Commenting on this story Dr. S. Margoshes, in the “Day” of March 30, observes: “A joke? Of course. And not a bad one at that. But what does it show? It shows what all jokes show–that the one who tells it, in addition to a sense of humor, has also a purpose, an intention, which he may not wish to express openly, brutally, but he thinks of it. The psychoanalysts have a grateful task in studying the subconscious, which pops out every now and then through a ‘harmless’ joke.”

The “Jewish Morning Journal” (April 1) resents “Liberty’s” series on the Jews.

“Mr. Fargo,” the paper asserts, “comes out neither as an open enemy nor as a defender of the Jews; his unfriendly motives are to be found rather between the lines than in the text proper. He admits, for instance, that the Jews believe it would be better not to discuss this subject. If we accept this as true, then the very discussion of the subject is a sign of unfriendliness. And he follows the path of Mr. Kendrick, that is, he has a good opinion of the Sephardic Jews and even of the German Jews, but the Russian and Polish Jews are more than he can ‘stand’.”

HAS THE MELTING POT FAILED?

Has the Melting Pot failed? Henry H. Curran, who retired Wednesday as Immigration Commissioner at Ellis Island, believes it has. His opinion on this subject is given in the New York “American” in reply to a question put by that paper on March 29 in an editorial which stated in part:

“This New York of ours is the melting pot of the nation. Here is where most of the foreigners land and where a great proportion of them stay. Have we the facilities to make them worthy citizens who will benefit the country and contribute to the progress of the nation and of the world?”

Mr. Curran, speaking of the stream of immigrants who came here for a generation before the war, observes:

“If we had given them a friendly welcome and helped them in the right way after their arrival, this great stream of immigration still would have been almost unmanageable by reason of its very size and difference in habits and customs of life.

“But we went to the other extreme. We took all the labor they would give at the cheapest price. We allowed them to live in slums that would spoil any human being on the face of the earth. We jeered at them as foreigners and newcomers.

“We provided no melting pot at all.”

Mr. Nathan Straus, answering the “American’s” editorial, declares:

“I consider religious tolerance and education of prime importance for constructive Americanization.”