U.s.- Relations Seen at Breaking Point; Coughlin Issue. Anti-semitism Here Aired

New tension in relations between the United States and Germany, the Coughlin issue and anti-Semitism in this country were given considerable prominence in the press today. The State department’s latest note to Germany, the third within the past few weeks and the fourth since April 6, was interpreted by most Washington correspondents and in editorials as a strong hint of retaliatory measures if American property rights were put in jeopardy by the Anti-Semitic decrees.

Discussion of relations between the American and German governments, particularly the question of refugees, was expected to be held in Washington between president Roosevelt and Joseph P. Kennedy, United States Ambassador to London, who returned last night on the Queen Mary for a vacation. Mr. Kennedy told reporters: “If you want to hear all I would say about that, I would suggest that you meet me on the day that I resign. what do I think of the latest nazi outbreak? I think it’s terrible, the most terrible thing I ever heard of. And I’ll probably lose my job for saying that. But it stands. You might also say that I am only sharing the sentiments of our president. oh, how I would like to say a lot more.”

The question of anti-Semitism in the United States was discussed in a column-long editorial today in the New York Daily News which, declaring that “plenty of people just now are exercising their right to dislike the Jews,” expresses doubt that the current wave “will rise very high.”

Referring to an anti-Semitic pamphlet being distributed among Congressmen in Washington, which lists the names of Jews connected with the new deal and to a digest of which the news devoted the best part of three pages yesterday, the editorial declared “the list looked to us more like a tribute than an insult to the Jews, though, of course, it was intended as an insult and an incitement to political if not mob action against them.” The editorial, after voicing high praise of some of the Jewish and allegedly part-Jewish official listed in the pamphlet, continued: “We doubt that this wave of anti-Semitism will rise very high. We’ve had them before — notably in the early 20’s, when the Ku Klux Klan set out to put down both the Catholics and the Jews, and presently folded up. Its ghost goes mumbling on, but few take it seriously. we don’t want to be understood as saluting all Jews as practically perfect people. there are worthwhile Jews and worthless Jews, just as is the case with Gentiles, Negroes, Chinese or Indians. But we do maintain that what racial faults the Old World Jews have displayed are disappearing in the American meeting pot. . . . The best thing this country can do, we believe, is just to go on being the melting pot.”

Last night an audience of more than 6,000 persons at the Manhattan opera house, gathered under the auspices of the committee for the defense of American constitutional Rights, cheered every mention of father Coughlin and lustily booed radio station YMCA, one of three which had barred him because he had refused to abide by their demand to submit advance scripts of his talks. The meeting adopted a resolution calling upon the federal communications Commission to revoke the station’s license or censure its owners and pledging the audience to picket the station and boycott any business or place of recreation advertising over it. YMCA officials said today they would adhere to their stand on Coughlin.

An attack on Father Coughlin, written by the Rev. William C. Kernan, rector of the Trinity Episcopal Church of Bayonne, N.J., was published in the current issue of the Nation, liberal weekly. in a lengthy article entitled “Coughlin, the Jews and communism,” the writer presents a detailed refutation of the “radio priest’s charges of Jewish influence on communism and urges Christians to shun Coughlin’s anti-Jewish drive.

In a lecture that appeared to be aimed at least partly at father Coughlin, Prof. Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher and writer, Wednesday night also replied to accusations linking Jews with communism, criticized orators and publicists who used the discredited “protocols of the elders of Zion” and termed anti-Semitism “a pathological phenomenon” abhorrent to Catholicism. declaring that the Jewish spirit did not adapt itself to Communist conformism, Prof. Maritain asserted that “in some countries a section of Jewish youth may find itself driven to revolutionary extremism by the force of persecution” and those primarily responsible were “those who make their life Unbearable.”