Jews Will Not Be Intimidated, Says Dr. Silver

Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver in a statement issued here said that Jews in America will not be intimidated by the anti-Jewish insinuations of Lindbergh and other isolationists.

“We Jews,” Dr. Silver said, ” have been threatened by some isolationists. We have been called warmongers. We have been told that unless we oppose the foreign policy of our Government, which is today approved by the majority of our citizens, we shall be saddled with the responsibility for the war, if war comes, and for all its dire consequences. Even Senators of the United States have stooped to these infamous tactics in their wild and headlong attack upon the foreign policy of our Government. It is an old Nazi trick to discredit a program or a policy by labeling it Jewish and by denouncing it as a Jewish conspiracy.

“But we shall not be intimidated! We shall not surrender our rights as American citizens to speak our minds, because of any open or covert threats from the Nyes, Wheelers, Clarks or Lindberghs… The Jews of America will not regulate their life and thought and actions to please the anti-Semite. Those who seek to make of the Jews the scapegoat for all national misfortunes will do so regardless of what we do or say. They require no proofs. They invent them! Whatever we say or do will not affect the anti-Semite or his propaganda, for ‘he is a liar and the father of the lie.

“The Jews of America are not urging their country to go to war. No patriotic American wants war. But we all know we are living in a world at war – war forced upon it by a brutal would be world conqueror gone berserk. By his own avowals he intends to destroy all democracies and to set up what he calls his New Order in which America, if he succeeds in defeating England, will certainly not be able to survive as a free nation.

“Americans of all creeds and races would be traitors to their country if they did not respond to the summons of their chosen and responsible political leaders to resist this deadly for, to build up our national defenses and to strengthen the hands of those nations which are now fighting and weakening this common foe.”