The State Department sharply denounced as a “viciously anti-Semitic work” a recently published book in the Soviet Union which attempts to eliminate any distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
“Such anti-Semitic propaganda under the guise of anti-Zionism or any other cover is absolutely unacceptable,” Department deputy spokesman Alan Romberg said. He added that the United States “condemns its hate filled message.”
The book, “The Class Essence of Zionism, ” was published in Kiev by the hardline Soviet propagandist Lev Korneyev and warmly reviewed in the official Communist press. It alleges, among other things, that Jews collaborated with the Nazis in exterminating hundreds of thousands of people during World War II.
Romberg called the book “one manifestation of officially sanctioned Soviet anti-Semitism .” He said these continuing propaganda efforts include anti-Semitic broadcasts and articles and also the formation several months ago of the “Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public.”
U.S. TO SPEAK OUT
“The U.S. government has spoken out against this campaign aimed at both the state of Israel and Jewish activists within the Soviet Union and will continue to denounce the Soviet government approved anti-Semitism whenever it shall appear,” the department spokesman said.
According to a report in the JTA earlier this month, the book claims that Zionists and Jews are partly responsible for violent anti-Semitism in Europe from the Czarist pogroms to the Nazi Holocaust; the idea that all Jews are citizens of a Jewish nation “automatically puts Jews in the role of a fifth column in any state;” and that Zionist agents provoked the Russian and Ukranian pogroms before World War I “in order to increase emigration from the country.”
Korneyev, who holds a doctorate in history and is regarded as an expert on Zionism in the Soviet Union, has employed some of the most virulent anti-Semitic techniques used in Russia, such as asserting that Jews in ancient times were involved in commerce and that “profit was their ideology.”
FOCUS OF CLASH
Komeyev’s book also became the focus of a clash of two members of the Anti-Zionist Committee where at a June 6 press conference in Moscow, it was claimed that all Jews desirous of leaving the Soviet Union have already left. The clash, as reported by the Institute of Jewish Affairs, the research am of the World Jewish Congress, was between Samuel Zivs and Yuri Kolesnikov on alleged Zionist collaboration with the Nazis during World War II.
When reporters questioned Zivson the Korneyev book, he responded that the Committee “will struggle against improper exposition in such booklets that unfortunately do appear.” But Kolesnikov, himself the author of novels on “Zionist collaboration ” defended Komeyev’s work. Kolesnikov claimed that during the war, Zionists “not only failed to protect their coreligionists but betrayed them, wholly with the gestapo and SS.” He claimed that Adolph Eichmann was executed by the Israelis to prevent the “sacred secrets” of their collaboration from becoming public.
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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.
