Warning

We Should not be unduly alarmed by the stupid and scurrilous anti-Semitic leaflets which are being anonymously circulated in all parts of the country. Note that they are anonymous, the anti-Semite being an anti-Semite because he is both coward and bully—trying to mitigate his self contempt by rendering others contemptible, brutal when in power to prove his superiority to himself by the only means at his command, namely, naked force. The leaflets repeat the false and foolish accusations which have no relation to any facts about us, good or bad, but are the unvarying symptoms of the particular mass-neurosis in question.

The accusations are generally four in number. (1) We control world finance and economy nationally and internationally. Our participation in banking is, of course, not at all disproportionate and is rapidly dwindling; our participation in basic industries is nil. (2) We are trying to rule the world by an international Jewish conspiracy. The truth is, equally of course, that every Jewish leader breaks his heart over the stubborn disunitedness of the Jewish people for any purposes, even strictly self-defensive ones. (3) We control press, stage and screen. And that is more indecently wrong-headed than even many Jews know. Absolutely our share in these things is (strictly according to statistics) very far from the mildest preponderance; our relatively large representation in these conspicuous callings, however, is forced upon us by our exclusion from the normal inconspicuous callings of teaching, the consular service, the expert or secretarial service of the great national corporations and basic industrial systems.

I Come to the fourth accusation, namely, that we are “reds,” that is to say, that we are desirous of overthrowing the historic civilization of the West in America and of substituting for it a system and a regime modelled on that of the U. S. S. R. Now broadly speaking this accusation is as baseless as the others. The overwhelming majority of American Jews are as desperately frightened (quite justly!) at the thought of a Communist revolution as they are at that of a Fascist one. They have precisely the same interest as all other Americans in the continuance of the normal processes of Western civilization. Nay, they have a deeper and keener interest. For only within those normal processes can they hope to sustain and to keep that moderate modicum of economic opportunity and moral and religious freedom which they still possess in the Western democracies.

Why then do I single out this fourth accusation? Because it is true that too many young Jews, who seem more numerous than they are because by a strange paradox they are often the well-born and well-bred and therefore both conspicuous and vocal, embrace the Communist ideology (while continuing to live comfortable bourgeois lives) and have made a Utopia and an escape mechanism of the Soviets.

In their tortured subjectivity they have utterly lost touch with the intellectual life of both the American people and the Jewish people. They have utterly forgotten how mightily and proudly and justly this civilization (whatever its defects and its cruelties and its insufficiencies) will resist the slightest attempt to re-model it according to a type of both economic and moral tyranny that only the dark masses of a half-mediaeval and half-Asiatic people could conceivably endure.

Let them read in Joseph Wood Krutch’s “Was Europe a Success?” the reaction of the highest type of American thinker, scholar, stylist and sincere friend of the Jewish people, to that dark threat of plunging us all into the undifferentiated mass of a Marxian chaos. Let them not nurse the disastrous delusion that they are motivated by compassion for the disinherited and underprivileged of the present order, for the clear high thinkers of the world are perfectly aware of the fact that such compassion has nothing, nothing whatever, to do with that savage devaluation of all values, that breaking of all the classical forms of human life, that more than fundamentalist fury of persecution and the extinction of all moral and religious and philosophical liberties which characterizes Soviet barbarism even as, upon another delusion and according to a different pattern it characterizes the neo-barbarism of the Fascist.

Let These young men and women awaken from the dangerous delusions of their escape mechanism. They are Jews; they are Americans. They can work nobly and fruitfully for the redemption and auto-emancipation of the Jewish people; as Americans they can work for the amelioration of economic wrong and the broadening of our margin of civil liberties; they can be effective as Zionists and liberals and pacifists. As Russified communists they are not only ineffective; they are (as were their fellows in Germany) instigators of pogroms. The builders of this civilization will not permit them to try to tear it down. It is the builders and upholders who will prevail; it is they and theirs who will be stamped out.

A moment may come (I pray it may not nor do I believe it), but a moment and an hour of history may come when these young Jewish bourgeois “reds” will be responsible for the enslavement and the very blood of our people, for their people. They have the right of all Americans to work and strive for a better and a freer America within the framework of America’s historic life and historic traditions. They have no right to seek to shatter these. And the moment for them to desist from their insane folly and irresponsibility is now — now, before it is too late and hopelessly, as in Germany, they stand in line for certificates at the Palaestina-Aemter, ashamed to have been converted to sound sense by the brutality of fire and death.