U.S. Jewry’s Activities in Widely-scattered Cities

More interesting even than such items as (1) the appointment of Julian R. Hiller as foreman of the Grand Jury to investigate alleged frauds in last fall’s election, (2) the threat against the historic mansion of Judah P. Benjamin from the engineering necessities of flood-control work that may cut into its path, and (3) the departure of Isaac Heller, member of the Board of Education, for Great Britain to study the educational system there, is (4) the movement set afoot by the New Orleans Masada for the inauguration of a boycott of German goods by the local Jewish community. Under the initial sponsorship of this young people’s cultural organization a Central Council has been formed composed of individual members from seventeen Jewish organizations in this city. The 500 signatories, so far, to this collective pact include many of the most prominent Jewish citizens and it is reasonable to expect that in due time the movement will take definite shape.

Efforts to organize the cause have also been stimulated in Atlanta, whither the delegates from the local Young Judaea to the Southern District convention there journeyed a few days ago with specific instructions to propose the movement to the Young Judaean body, and also in Mobile, where Leon Schwartz, former Mobile Mayor, is active in it. Cooperating with the New Orleans Masada in its goal is Rabbi Henry Cohen of Galveston, farther to the Southwest. All in all, it appears that the reverberations set up by the overflow public anti-Hitler protest mass meeting earlier in the season in New Orleans have not vanished into inarticulate silence.

This growing boycott movement is but the latest manifestation of the challenge that the local Jewish community has flung into the face of the Nazis. An outstanding lay leader in this challenge has been the widely known local Jewish attorney, Alfred D. Danziger, who, when the local German Consul, Herr Rolf Jatger, published a “refutation” on the eve of the mass meeting of the charges of Hitlerite brutality, enlivened the local press with a stinging counter-argument and who, on a later occasion, appeared before the Young Men’s Business Club to answer the bland speech made before them the previous week by a Hitlerite visitor, Count Herman von Einsiedel. It is logical to suppose that a portion of the Masada’s zeal was inspired by the political exposition of Hitlerism given them when Mr. Danziger was their guest speaker several weeks ago, a lecture that was published in full in the local press.

A humorous sidelight on anti-Hitlerism in the Deep South is contained in the naive suggestion made by a Southern congressman to the Rabbi of a large metropolitan congregation in his constituency. The congressman, replying to the Rabbi’s letter asking his advocacy of an anti-Hitler resolution in Congress, said (with no intention of offending) that the Jewish people might better refer this problem to “Great Britain, under whose government they are.” Evidently, for the Congressman the Diaspora is but a glimmering illusion. Nor did he seem to realize that according to such amazing political logic the Rabbi himself would never be able to cast a vote for him.