Rabbi Prinz Issues Formal Letter of Complaint to Look Magazine

Dr. Joachim Prinz, past president of the American Jewish Congress, sent a formal letter of complaint to Look magazine today for its “distortion” of some of his statements to one of its editors for the article “The Agonized American Jews.” The article appears in the April 20 issue, out today. Dr. Prinz’s formal displeasure with the article was previewed in an interview in yesterday’s JTA Daily News Bulletin. In his letter today, addressed to “The Editors,” the 68-year-old Jewish leader wrote that he was “deeply troubled by some of the statements” attributed to him by senior editor Gerald Astor, who did not tape-record their recent three-hour Interview. Rabbi Prinz made five points in his letter to Look. He disputed Astor’s claim that he was “a 1937 graduate of solitary confinement in a Nazi concentration camp,” advising the editors that he was “expelled by the Gestapo” that year. Dr. Prinz complained that the article stressed his plea for the political independence of American Jews without noting his belief in “cultural and national interdependence” between American and Israeli Jews and his position that “the continued existence of Israel (is) central to Jewish survival in the world.”

Further, the fact that, as the article points out, he disagrees with some Israeli leaders over American Jewish participation in the peace movement “has nothing to do” with parallels between Communist efforts in Indochina and in the Middle East, Dr. Prinz stated. He explained: “I do not accept the analogy between American intervention in Indochina and the struggle of Israel for survival within secure borders. I hold that for an American citizen, Jewish or non-Jewish, the only acceptable motivation for taking a stand on Vietnam is his conscience and not any political consideration.” The fourth point made by Dr. Prinz was that he did not say that American Jewish aliya to Israel “has more to do with dissatisfaction with the U.S. than closeness to Israel,” as reported in Look; on the contrary, “many of them settle in Israel because of their love for Israel.” Rabbi Prinz concluded by charging that the paragraph, quoted from one of his speeches, in which he states that “American Jewry is a (cultural) disaster area” actually “makes little sense if the report does not add that I (say) so because of our failure in Jewish education, general Jewish apathy and an alarmingly growing rate of intermarriage.”