John L. Spivak, in an article called “Plotting the American Pogroms,” which appears in the current issue of the New Masses, out Friday, charges that Americans, some of them acting as Nazi agents, and many high in government positions, are among the secret directors of what he describes as a growing wave of anti-Semitic propaganda.
The article, the first of a series announced to deal with “a web of anti-Jewish hatred woven around the country within the past two years,” alleges that Ralph M. Easley, head of the National Civic Federation, distributed propaganda against the Jews imported into the United States by George Sylvester Viereck, paid Nazi agent.
Another charge which Spivak makes is that “the effect of this propaganda has already reached into big business and at least one insurance company has started to refuse insurance to Jews.”
REVIVING GHETTO DAYS
“In the business, professional and cultural worlds,” he writes, “anti-Semitism has been whipped up until the Jew now feels a sense of isolation which he thought he had lost with the ghetto days of the eighteenth century.
It is no unusual thing to find handbills littering New York subway cars, preaching hatred of the Jew.
“In the Yorkville section of New York . . . Jews are made to feel that they are pariahs.”
The United States is swept with anti-Semitic and fascist propaganda, the article continues, saying:
“Behind this deluge stalk almost fiction-like mysterious characters, secret foreign and American agents, spies, diplomatic officers, terrorists, gun-women—an almost incredible array of men and women plotting, smuggling, spying to weave the web of hate against the Jew and prepare the country for fascism.”
Spivak writes that, in the course of the series, he will prove:
“That American ‘patriotic’ organizations to which rich Jews contribute are secretly using this money for anti-Semitic propaganda.
“That Nazi uniforms are smuggled into this country; how this is done and by whom.
“That Nazis in full uniform drill in preparation for ‘the day’ when there will be pogroms against the Jews.”
In another place, he says:
“The German government itself through its propaganda bureau is mailing propaganda material direct to the Congress of the United States, some of it coming from Budapest purporting to be material issued by Americans abroad.
“Other propaganda material is openly imported in the form of books, leaflets and pamphlets for distribution. These publications ostensibly deal with subjects other than the Jew, such as the Communist, but within the text are some of the most vicious attacks against the Jew ever published. Still other material is smuggled into this country on German ships.”
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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.
