Letters to the Editor

New York City,

October 31, 1933.

To the Editor of the Jewish Daily Bulletin:

The truth of Max Nordau’s aphorism, “The Jews learn from catastrophe and not from experience”, is strikingly demonstrated in the very issue of your publication in which it is quoted.

I refer to the advice of Mr. Slomovitz, your Detroit correspondent, in his news-letter of October 27th, that we, the Jews of New York, ignore and ridicule Heinz Spanknoebel, strangely missing minion of Hitler.

Heinz may be “simple without logical powers of persuasion” (whatever the latter may mean) and we know that he is a poltroon, a bully, “yellow”, and a contemptible liar to boot. But we also know that if we had permitted him to carry on he would have kindled an anti-Semitic conflagration here of grave magnitude.

Ridicule and ignore him? Jews of America ignored the Ku Klux Klan or ridiculed it. Ask the Jews of any of a hundred small Southern towns how funny it was only a short five years ago. Even today, on the Tamiami Trail leading into Miami, you see hotel posters with the legend “Gentile patronage exclusively.” And you see the same legend on the front of a number of hotels on Miami Beach.

How funny were the mass-reactions to the trash published in the Dearborn Independent? Do you remember what nearly happened at Massena, New York, in the Spring of 1928?

Jews in Germany (some of them the “first Jewish newspaper men to have met and interviewed him”) either ignored Hitler with “echt Deutsch” dignity, or, going to the other extreme of folly, ridiculed “the Austrian paperhanger” with his so-comic mustache, his vain struggles with the dative case; they scoffed at his abortive “putsch”, his supra-Hohenzollern ambition, his phonographic repetitions of the ravings of Stoecker and Ahlwardt, his threat that heads would roll—

Jews in Germany ignored or ridiculed Goering—”the morphine addict, the homo-sexual, the epicene tub-shumper”—

Jews in Germany ignored or ridiculed Goebbels with his “Iago” complex, and beater of nonogenarians—

Jews in Germany ignored all the rest of Hitler’s henchmen and hired S.A.’s with their silly “Heils” and farcical salutes, wise-cracking about the “Brown Shirt Racket”, as some Jews in America are even now wise-cracking about Pelley and his “Silver Shirt” racket—

And now! who will ever tell the whole story of what has been done to the Jews of Germany by those “Fools” who only a year ago they either ignored or ridiculed?

We Jews cannot afford the luxury of either ignoring or ridiculing our enemies.

It has ever been thus. In every emergency all through our history, we have had wiseacres advising us to ignore or ridicule our enemies.

It is high time we learn that we dare ignore no enemy of ours—that eternal vigilance, vociferous protest, organized, concerted action to arouse public opinion and equally organized concerted action in our own defense are the price of peace for the Jews.

A. H. Fromenson.

FOR A JEWISH COLLECTION

Nov. 6, 1933.

To the Editor of the Jewish Daily Bulletin,

May I call the attention of your readers to the needs of the Library of the University of Louisville. It has an excellent collection on Modern Palestine from the nucleus provided by Justice Louis D. Brandeis who some years ago presented to the University of his native city his own library, including the Palestine literature.

Such a collection in the South, where no important Jewish library exists, may eventually prove of great value to those desirous of understanding Palestinian and Jewish problems.

There must be thousands of books, pamphlets and journals, bearing on Palestinian and Jewish themes which may thus be accorded a permanent and useful home. Gifts in any language may be sent direct to the Librarian, Miss Evelyn J. Schneider, University of Louisville, Louisville, Ky., or to the under signed.

(signed) Mrs. Jacob de Haas.