Daniel Frisch, president of the Zionist Organization of America, today charged anti-Zionists with advocating “regimentation rather than Americanism” in their attempt to undermine the efforts for the economic reconstruction of Israel and for Jewish cultural renaissance in the United States.
In an open letter addressed to Miss Dorothy Thompson, the president of the Z.O.A. characterized as “a bogey” and as “pure invention” what he termed the “canard” of dual political allegiance leveled against American Zionists by her in an address delivered under the auspices of the American Council for Judaism in Philadelphia.
Flaying Miss Thompson’s charge that Zionism is incompatible with Americanism, Mr. Frisch declared that “if this is so, then all the presidents of the United States, from Woodrow Wilson to Harry S. Truman, in addition to the late Justice Louis Brandeis, were un-American.” All of them, he said, “not only failed to see any incompatibility between Americanism and Zionism, but actually endorsed the aims of the Zionist movement. These endorsements are a matter of American historical record.”
The Z.O.A. president quoted from an address by Israel’s Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett before the General Assembly of the United Nations on May 11, 1949, at Lake Success, in which Mr. Sharett said that “the state of Israel claims no allegiance from Jews in other lands. As a sovereign entity it rests on the loyalty of its own citizens; it alone is responsible for its actions and policies.”
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.
