Wise Scores Jewish Employers for Discrimination Against Jewish Workers

Jewish anti-Semitism is an incorsement of non-Jewish anti-Semitism, and “just another phase of the passion for imitation which lies in the hearts of many Jews,” declared Dr. Stephen S. Wise in his sermon at the Free Synagogue, in which he denounced the discrimination which he said is exercised by some Jewish employers against others of their race.

Rabbi Wise told of communications he had received from Jewish girls in which they had been told at some employment agencies that Jewish employers wanted Christian help only.

“Jewish employers don’t want to employ Jews because they don’t want a competitor in six years,” Dr. Wise said. “They want employees who are safe, who will be satisfied and who are not ambitious; they damn the very thing that made them. Jews are too independent; they will never be satisfied or stay put as a cog in a wheel, content to go along for thirty or forty years at a cead level with no hope of rising.

“We are a restless, ambitious people. The restless Jew, always on the move and striving for higher and better things, is the one who contributes most to America.”

Dr. Wise declared “imitation of Christians,” which motivates Jewish employers to discriminate against members of their own race, “is the commonest and meanest thing in the world.” If Christian employers commenced refusng positions to Christians some Jews might, for the first time, begin employing Jews, he added. Other Jewish parents, he pointed out, boast that their children are the only Jewish children in certain schools.