A Jewish faculty member at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale has rebutted the anti-Semitic allegations of a Negro student published in the university newspaper and has urged an end to the “racist madness” on the campus. Prof. Mordecai Gorelik, research professor of theater, wrote to the paper, The Daily Egyptian, which published the interview with a Negro student, John Williams. The latter charged that “Whitey, the Jew, has his foot on our neck and the only way to get it off is to burn it off, tear it off or cut it off.” Prof. Gorelik wrote, “You cannot enter into rational discourse with a racist, whether white, black or yellow; you can only speak to people who are capable of listening. I…address myself to those people, especially to our Negro students.”
“Mr. Williams,” he said, “singled out the Jew as his chief enemy, as if it is the Jews who run the American Establishment or who sold his people into slavery or thrust them into ghettos. One of the more significant reasons, unstated by Mr. Williams, is that the Jews, as a very small minority in this country, and as a traditional scapegoat, are a section of the white race that is especially vulnerable to attack.”
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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.
