The cry of ‘hush-hush’ will never win Jewry’s battles. No people fighting for its rights can ever hope to succeed by soft pedaling. The Jew must fight with his mind, and with his heart. We must fight Hitlerism standing up—not take it laying down!”
This militant message was voiced by one of the Pacific Coast’s outstanding Jewish leaders—Judge Isadore M. Golden, just appointed to the Superior Court bench of California, and who, as first vice-president of the Constitution B’nai B’rith Grand Lodge, is second in command of the world’s largest fraternal Jewish organization. He was a Seattle visitor.
“Jews should boycott German made goods to the hilt!”, declared Judge Golden, a tall lean, energetic man, whose hair greying and who admits, when asked his age, “I am in my fifties—that’s close enough.”
“The boycott is one weapon in our fight against the cruelty and barbarism of the Hitler regime. But it is not a Jewish weapon by any means. It is only natural that when the Nazis say, ‘We will have none of the Jews; we will ghettoize them,’ that any Jew with an ounce of backbone should answer, ‘If the Nazis will have none of us, we will have none of them.’ And that’s all the boycott is—a defensive measure.”
NOT A JEWISH BOYCOTT
“This is not a Jewish boycott. It is a spontaneous protest movement that Christians the world over have joined, who are fighting a battle against medieval autocracy in Germany, where death is dealt out at the mere whim and caprice of the tyrant in authority.
“The boycott is not aimed at the German people. It is aimed at the Nazi regime.
“The fight against Hitlerism is not a Jewish fight. It is, more than that, the battle of the world’s defenders of liberalism and against the proponents of iron-fisted autocracy.”
The duty of B’nai B’rith, Judge Golden declared, is “to speak the Jewish will, to mobilize the Jew.” Jewry needs the B’nai B’rith, declared the former grand president of District No. 4, and for thirty years a leader in the movement, “because the world has yet to learn what every Jew should insist upon: That the Jew is no different from any other person.”
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.
