Letters to the Editor

Nov. 3, 1933.

To the Editor of the Jewish Daily Bulletin:

The German-American Board of Trade is certainly within its rights when it protests the boycott of German goods in this country. Organized for the promotion of trade relations between the two countries, it could pursue no other course.

In its appeal to the President, it predicates its argument on the ground that Germany being the purchaser of more goods than it sells, perhaps twice as much, Uncle Sam thereby is the loser as the result of the boycott which should be abandoned on that account, besides its effect on the payment of public and private debts owed by Germany to this country.

All of which is strictly commercial. Not a word, however, about the principle of the boycott nor the cause underlying it, not a hint that it is a defensive boycott designed to give the Germans a dose of their own medicine for their own, unjust boycott of Jews.

This prompts me to ask the German-American Board of Trade if it ever, by word or deed, protested against the German boycott of Jews in business in the fatherland.

Surely the German Jews, owners of department stores, chain stores, and other commercial enterprises were selling merchandise “made in America” and perhaps pioneered in the distribution of goods from this country. Surely that boycott was sufficient cause to prompt the intervention of the German-American Board of Trade!

When the world applauds the first real fight of the Jews who would not take their licking lying down as the Hitlerites calculated, but are fighting with their backs to the wall, for a principle, for humanity, for all that is dear to lovers of liberty, the German-American Board of Trade wants all this scrapped for the sake of the dollars involved, yet the Board of Trade declares its members are Americans!

It should be noted in this connection that there seems to be a synchronization of German propaganda.

When the boycott was first proposed, the Germans warned us that such a measure would affect the status of Jews in the fatherland and make their lot harder. That was echoed by Hitlerites here. In Germany it was said that the debts to this country would be imperilled by such a boycott and that also was swallowed and proclaimed by the Germans in this country as a reason to stop the boycott.

Then they whooped up the plea that peace was endangered by a boycott and finally Germans and German-Americans decided to aid the fatherland by reprisals and discriminations against Jews in the United States, as if, forsooth, it had not been planned beforehand in the campaign of anti-Semitism, outlined before Americans were aware of the existence of such a conspiracy.

Characteristically the German American Board of Trade appeals to the President of the United States without the semblance of a spark of humanity and sordidly expects action based upon dollars and cents only.

How ignoble, how un-American! Now here is another opportunity to President Roosevelt to administer a rebuke that would again reveal him as the great humanitarian he is known to be and the great President who is not afraid to assert American traditions.

H. Jandorf.