Dr. Stephen S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, issued a statement tonight urging that the Jews answer the Italian Cabinet’s decree for expulsion of foreign Jews by not setting “Foot in Italy again until this law be revoked and the accursed rule of IL Duce be ended.”
“We will loathe Italy’s shame until Italy reestablishes itself within the circle of civilized peoples,” Dr. Wise said. “We will have no relation to it. We will avoid it as we would any other physical and moral pestilence.”
He called the decree “the great surrender” of Italy to Nazism, and added: “Democracy must learn its lesson anew. anti-Semitism is either, as in Germany, the beginning of a Fascist regime, or, as in Italy, its consummation. But it is a part of it. It is one with it. The democratic world will know how to evaluate and how to respond to this crime against one tenth of one per cent of the population of Italy.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
