News Brief

fore, for immigration into Palestine.”

“It is natural and proper that Palestine should be the national homeland of the Jewish people, and every facitlity possible should be provided to enable them to go there.”

Ambassador Bingham talked convincingly and informatively on the relation between the Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land. Especially was he impressed with the general economic condition in Palestine today and the evident improvement wrought by Jewish settlers there.

DENOUNCES ANTI-SEMITISM

When the subject turned to the Silver Shirts, the Ambassador talked to the Silver Shirts, the Ambassador talked more unrestrainedly. Here was a subject, religious bigotry, which he had met and courgageously fought, all through his career as the publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times.

Denouncing the Silver Shirts and like groups, he said, “I do not believe that anti-Semitism will ever gain a foothold in America. The flurry in the United States today, I believe, is small and of relative insignificance. The general attitude of religious tolerance and respect for the Jewish people here is too great for anti-Semitism to assume any real proportions.”

Recounting how his two newspaers, under his generalship, had attacked and exposed the Ku Klux Klan, Ambassador Bingham said he resented anti-Semitism as a personal affront because although in the first instance he decried anti-Semitism as un-American, in the first instance he decried anti-Semitism as un-American, in the second place he himself firmly hated any form of religious bigotry.

Back of Ambassador Bingham’s solicitous regard for the Jewish people is al orientation to the Jewish problem which threads back almost fifty years to his childhood home, when his father gave him a monograph to read from the pen of General Zebulon Vance, revered North Carolinian Civil War leader, on “The Scattered Nation”. Although so young as to preclude any real understanding of the question, he was admonished by the elder Bingham to “read it thoroughly” and to take to heart this sympathetic account of the wandering through the ages of the Jewish people.

With such a broadminded home environment, it is not difficult to comprehend how, when Judge Bingham retired from the bench in 1911 and was looking about for law associates with whom to form a firm, he selected two astute and high-minded Jewish men, the late Aaron Kohn and the late Stanley Sloss. The firm name was Kohn, Bingham and Sloss.

CLOSE ASSOCIATION WITH JEWS

The Ambassador said that when he was informed of his apporintment to the post in London he asked Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis to swear him in.

“For Justice Brandeis I have a profound respect as a great man, as a great citizen and as a great jurist,” Ambassador Bingham explained.

“I have been associated with Jews all my life,” the Ambassador told the Jewish Telegraph Agency. “My law parners were Jewish, and when it became necesary to leave my publishing business in assuming the post I now hold, I did so with perfect confildence be cause the man I left in charge in the business, Emanuel Levy, is a man in whos courgage, integrity and intelligence I have the most complete faith.”

And Ambassador Bingham says that the High Commissioner for Refugees James G. McDonald, is able and energetic, and will do all that is possible for the Jewish people, but what can be accomplished at this time is extremely doubtful, it is certain that he would like to override the limitations of his position and alleviate as far as possible the suffering and the bewilderment of the refugees from Germany.

While Ambassador Bingham decilines to be quoted on the restricetion of Jewish immigration into Transiordania, it is probable that he belives that the additional territory should be thrown open to Jewish settlement.