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American Jewry, Its Reaction
To the Nazi Menace
By Dorothy Thompson and Benjamin Stolberg
A NTI-SEMITISM, like all ignorance, is easy.
To the anti-Semite, no matter how high-
falutin his theories, a Jew is a Jew and
that settles it. But to the rest of the world, and
especially to the Jews themselves, the Jewish prob
lem is difficult, ever paradoxical and
enigmatic. Unlike the Irish and
Poles, the Jews cannot achieve na
tional self-determination. They are
not a nation. Nationalism must have
a homeland, not a nostalgia, such as
Zionism, for an alien theocracy now
dead for twenty centuries. Palestine
is not the fatherland of Messrs. Jus
tices Brandeis and Cardozo in the
sense in which Poland was always the
home of Paderewski or Bohemia the
home of Professor Mazaryk. On the
whole, the Jewish masses are anti-
Zionist, especially in America, partly
because Palestine obviously belongs to
its native Arabs, partly because they
distrust British imperialism, but
mainly because they love their own
countries.
The fact is that the Jew defies
definition. To modern anthropology
the Jews are no more a race than they
are a nation. No “race" is less pure
today than are the Jews, who have
interbred all over the world for two
thousand years. 1'hcy have completely
lost their original Arabic identity, un
less they he Arab Jews. '1'here are
colored and Chinese Jews, who are
not converts to Judaism. Nor are the
Jews a religious sect. It is obviously
unnecessary to believe in any of the
several Jewish faiths to be a Jew.
'The most satisfactory explanation of
the Jewish problem is still Karl Kaut-
sky’s famous theory, now borne out
by modern psychoanalysis, that the
Jews are a state of mind, the result
of a long and agonized history of social malad
justments in the non-Jewish world, and that the
only cure for Jews is a socialized society which
will permit them to assimilate into the national
racial groups to which they actually belong.
It is essential to understand this will-o’-the-wisp
nature of the Jewish question if one wishes to
gauge significantly the reaction of the American
Jew to Hitlerism. This reaction is deeply hurt,
movingly pathetic, clear in indignation, hut con
fused in strategy by the different class interests
and group attitudes within American Jewry.
There are, of course, any number of Jewish or
ganizations— fraternal, philanthropic, business,
labor, religious, Zionist—which deal with specific
Like Moses at Mt. Nrbo, the scene which the artist
Mitchell Loeb has depicted on the front cover, was given
to the late Louis Marshall after a lifetime devoted to
Israel to glimpse the Promised Land only from afar. Hut
in that glimpse, which Marshall ivas privileged to ob
tain at Zurich, where the Jewish Agency came into
being through his efforts, he was enabled to know that
at last, through his instrumentality, the entire force of
toorld Jewry had been mobilized for Israel’s great
dream of the ages.
[H]
This analysis of how the leaders and masses of Jews
in the United States have reacted during the crisis
brought on by the Nazi anti-Semitic terror in Germany,
is presented through the courtesy of Scribner’s Maga
zine.
RABBI STEPHEN S. WISE
“W hat is bad for the American Jewish Committee is
good for the American Jewish Congress, which is en
tirely the sounding board of Rabbi Stephen S. ITise."
LOUIS
stfABSJJALL
‘While he lived he did his best to sabotage the
dramatic qualities of Dr. Wise.”
purposes. But the Jewish people as a whole are
not agreed on the nature of the Jewish problem or
on its solution. 'I'herefore no organization rxists.'
or can exist, which represents them on the Jewish
question as such. It is precisely toward anti-
Semitism, which raises this question in
all its aspects, that the Jews can leas*
achieve a united front. The Jewish
banker reacts to anti-Semitism very
differently from the Jewish store
keeper. And the rabbis, who necev
sarily have a vested interest in the
Jewish problem, react very differently
from the Jewish wage-earners, whose
interest is to liquidate it.
The American upper Jewish classes
reacted to the Nazi pogroms cau
tiously, conservatively, diplomatically.
'The professional Jews, those who]
make a career of Jewishness, reacted
with intense race-consciousness. Mr.
Ludwig Lewisohn, who has a consid
erable following among the younger
Jewish chauvinists, accepts completeh
Hitler’s own impassioned apotheosT
of “race." To the Lewisohns the
Jews are still the Chosen People. I be
Jewish masses, on the other hand, re
acted to Hitler on socialist or on
democratic grounds, at any rate on
broad humanitarian grounds, careful
not to indict the German people for
the misdeeds of the fascist dictator
ship.
* The American Jewish Committee,
which has done extremely valuable
work in the postwar rehabilitation of
Jewish communities the world over,
is controlled by a small group ot
wealthy German-American Jews, here
for generations. One of its founder^
was the late Louis Marshall, a man
of enormous character, simplicity, and
honesty, who ran the committee du-
For all his extreme conservatism " c
had a real feeling for the Jewish masses. I h u >
he was extremely sympathetic with the Soviet ex
periment of settling Jews on the land. 1 n
his leadership the Jewish masses came to look upon
the committee as a sort of Red Cross to mee-
ravages of anti-Semitism.
When the Hitler anti-Semitic outbreak f-'
began, the American Jews expected the comnu
to meet these outbreaks more effectively than an\
other group. The committee is supported by t f
Schififs, the Warburgs, the Lehmans; in short ^
the leaders of Jewish influence and wealth. But 1
is precisely the international bankers and hi- 1 -'
ness leaders who proved to be temperamentally t
least able to cope with the Hitler fanaticism,
very wealthy Jews are race-sensitive from 1
ing of social inferiority with Gentiles of t! r
economic station. But they lack the pugnacity
the race-conscious chauvinist. Besides, their *>c^
conservatism keeps them from fully realizing
true horror of a fascist terror. Their attitu c
pretty much that of Jewish wealth in G<
They have large investments in Germany. ^
hope to come to terms (Please turn to p<>
» THE SOUTHERN ISRA UTE
tatorially.