Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Holocaust

Showing posts with label Holocaust. Show all posts

Monday, December 26, 2022

Whoopi Goldberg's perverted mindset is a manifestation of the larger phenomenon of Black antisemitism

Over the weekend, the Times of London reported that actress, producer and TV commentator Whoopi Goldberg doubled down on her statements earlier this year that the Holocaust was not about race (and, incidentally, showing that her apology at the time was meaningless:)

Whoopi Goldberg doubled down on her comments that the Holocaust was "not about race," which she made before temporarily being suspended from cohosting the TV talk show "The View" in February.

In a new interview with The Times of London, Goldberg said the Holocaust was not "originally" about race.

"Remember who they were killing first. They were not killing racial; they were killing physical. They were killing people they considered to be mentally defective," she said.

She also questioned whether Jewish people were a "race" compared to herself as a Black person.

"It doesn't change the fact that you could not tell a Jew on a street," Goldberg said. "You could find me. You couldn't find them. That was the point I was making. But you would have thought that I'd taken a big old stinky dump on the table, butt naked."

When Goldberg was asked about the fact that the Nazis classified Jewish people as a race, she responded: "The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why are you believing them? They're Nazis. Why believe what they're saying?"

This is so ignorant that one does not know where to begin.

The two important facts that The View pundit gets completely wrong are:

1. For Nazis, everything was about race.

It is true that the Nazis started their extermination program with the disabled (not only mentally but physically.) But the reason for that was purely racial: to weed out what Nazis believed were undesirable genetic traits in order to breed a Master Race. It was a trial run for their genocide against Jews, targeted also because of their supposedly inferior genetic traits. (Indeed, the Jewish disabled were wiped out first.)

2. Race is a social construct that has no bearing on biological reality.

Whoopi Goldberg's question, "Why believe what they are saying?' also applies to her. She believes that race is critically important because it is often visible, but in reality there is no "Black" gene. There are no significant genetic differences between people whose ancestors come from Europe, Asia or Africa, and the genetic variation within each group is larger than between groups.

Goldberg says that Nazi misconceptions about race are meaningless, but anti-Black racist opinions are of the highest importance.

It gets worse. She seems to be saying that Jews in Europe could have blended into the larger population and not have been persecuted. For religious Jews, this would mean cutting off their beards and payos, changing their clothing, language and accents, and abandoning their religion.

That is as offensive as saying that Black people could simply bleach their skin to defeat racism. And in both cases, it wouldn't work.

In fact, Goldberg is being more offensive, because her theory appears to be that the Holocaust was partially the Jews' fault - it was white people fighting with white people, both sides responsible, and if only the Jews would have acted differently, they would still be alive today.

There is a deeper issue here, though. How does someone as intelligent and accomplished as Whoopi Goldberg believe such stupidity?

And the reason is because she is an antisemitic bigot herself.

When you ask Caryn Elaine Johnson why she chose the stage name "Goldberg," she says, "The true story is that my family is Jewish, Buddhist, Baptist and Catholic . . So I took the last name from a Jewish ancestor."

This is a lie. She has no Jewish ancestors that anyone could find. But according to one account, her mother thought that her last name Johnson was "not Jewish enough" to make her a star.

Taking a Jewish name was a career move because Jews control Hollywood.

But there is something deeper here, and it relates to the current flavor of Black antisemitism.

As we have seen in recent years, it has become fashionable in even mainstream Black circles to claim that Blacks are the real Jews, making Jews imposters. The logic is not based on facts, but on the idea that victimhood is the coin of the realm and since Jews have been history's most prominent victims, Blacks must be the real Jews.

When being a victim is considered desirable, and anti-Black racism is defined as the ultimate evil, then the Holocaust becomes an ideological roadblock. The Nazi genocide, which dwarfs the evils of slavery by orders of magnitude, is a problem that must be minimized and explained away to maintain the idea that (anti-Black) racism is the alpha and omega of inhumanity.

Goldberg needs the Holocaust to not be about racism, because that means that Jews have been much bigger, much more recent victims of racism than Blacks have been - and that waters down the effectiveness of claiming that everything is about anti-Black racism.

Saying that Jews aren't really Jews and are just other white people also becomes a way for some Blacks to rationalize why Jews went from being a despised minority to a successful group in only one or two generations while most Black people are still at a great disadvantage. It couldn't be that Jews worked hard to transcend anti-Jewish bigotry: that implies that anti-Black racism can be overcome just as anti-Jewish racism was. That is not an acceptable message in a society that values victimhood over accomplishments. Easier to push the lie that white people always accepted Jews as fellow whites.

The irony is that the main purveyors of the new Black antisemitism are some of the richest, most powerful and most famous Black celebrities - the very people who managed to become successful despite racism. The Whoopi Goldbergs, Professor Griffs and Ice Cubes prefer to cut Jews down than to bring their fellow Blacks up.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

80 years ago: The State Department says paying ransom for Jews is a crime

A small item on page 4 of the Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1942:

This came in response to a report out of the Netherlands that the Nazis were extorting huge sums for exit permits.

There is, unfortunately, a large body of literature on ransoming captives under Jewish law. A summary from Din Online:

The Rambam (Matmos Aniim 8:10, based on the Gemara in Bava Basra 8b) states in the context of charity donations: “There is no greater mitzvah (i.e. use of charity funds) than redeeming captives.” Based on its special importance, redemption of captives is the first priority for allocating charity funds. Echoing the Rambam, the Shulchan Aruch (Yoreh De’ah 252:1) likewise states: “No mitzvah is as great as redeeming captives.”

The Gemara (Bava Basra 8b) highlights the plight of the captive in the hands of his captors. The latter can torture him, pass him through great suffering, and even kill him. He is entirely at their mercy. The Shulchan Aruch (Yoreh De’ah 252:3) thus writes that one who can redeem a captive yet fails to do so is considered to be murdering at each moment.

Nevertheless, the Mishnah (Gittin 45a) teaches that captives should not be redeemed for any price: “Captives are not redeemed for more than their value.”

The reason for this is discussed by the Gemara, which mentions two possible reasons, without deciding which of them is the true reason. One reason is that it is too weighty a burden on the community. According to this reason, Rashi writes that a private individual is permitted to redeem his own family or loved ones, even for great sums of money.

Another suggested reason is that payment of large ransoms encourages captors to continue in their evil ways, taking further captives to make money. Based on this rationale, a private individual may not pay exorbitant sums for the release of his family, since this encourages kidnappings and places the community at risk.

It seems to me that both those reasons for not paying ransom would not apply in this case. The first reason, as stated, would not apply to the family of the relative being held hostage. The second reason, that it encourages the captors to take more prisoners, doesn't seem to apply because all the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were already effectively captive and already in great danger.

Indeed, there have been halachic rulings that if the captive's life is in danger without being ransomed, there is no price too high to pay.

The State Department's reason - that paying ransom will add money to the enemies' coffers - is not at all a consideration in Jewish law.

Yet as far as I can tell, this was not even a subject of debate in 1942. The fate of the Jews was well known at this point in time, and there was plenty of pretend outrage in the West, but it didn't extend to actually trying to save their lives.

Jews who wanted to save their friends and family were to be considered criminals.

For context, here is the entire Los Angeles Times page 4 where these two articles were. The main two articles on the page were about the Nazis wiping out the Jews of Europe by the millions:

At the very same time the readers were being given the details of the horrors of the Holocaust, they were also informed that saving some of those Jewish lives is a crime.

Here is an editorial from a British newspaper, the Dumfries and Galloway Standard and Advertiser (December 12, 1942), that goes on at length and detail about how terrible the Nazi persecution of Jews is and how there is no longer doubt about the Final Solution:

Yet when it comes to whether something can be done to save these unfortunate Jews, suddenly the tone changes:

"The humanitarian feelings of humanity must not be traded on for the purpose of financing the Nazis."

Sure, Jewish lives matter - but not to the point of actually paying money to save them. Better to write op-eds about how terrible it is that we have no choice but to let them all die, as long as we know the Nazis will eventually be "brought to justice."

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Arabic media upset that UAE will teach students about the Holocaust: "normalization"

Times of Israel reports:

The United Arab Emirates is taking major steps to combat a regional culture of Holocaust denial in the wake of the 2020 Abraham Accords that normalized its relations with Israel.

Once entirely absent from the learning materials of children in the UAE — which also blacked out Israel from world maps and globes — the Holocaust is now set to be fully included in the curriculum, as the Gulf country moves to position itself as a regional peacemaker.

Emirates Leaks published this news with the headline "the new shame of normalization." It got picked up by Iraqi and Iranian Arabic media as well.

If teaching the Holocaust is considered a shameful act of normalization with Israel, then it follows that Holocaust denial is merely "anti-Zionism."

As always, there is no distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. And the Western anti-Zionists never, ever denounce the antisemitism in the Arab world.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Serban Flondor, a Holocaust "righteous gentile" you never heard of

I stumbled upon this JTA story from 1944:

I wanted to learn more about this, but couldn't find anything online about "Staroshentzi" or the people named here.

So I crowdsourced the research on Twitter.

I was pointed by Aviva Hadara to the town of Storozhynets, Ukraine, sometimes spelled Storozhynets' [Ukr], Storozhinets [Rus], Storojineţ [Rom], Storojinet [Ger], Shtrozshnitz [Yid], Stordjinet [Yid], Storojineti [Hun], Storozynetz, Strizinitz, Strozynetz, or Sorojinet.

Then SD Homnick pointed me to another person who saved Jews from Storozhynets, also an agronomist, so chances are he was the real hero.

From "Solidarity and Rescue in Romania" written by the Elie Wiesel Commission:

Attempts to save Transnistria deportees were severely punished by the regime; therefore, rescue efforts—and they were not few—deserve great respect. Unfortunately, no systematic research has been done on this topic. However, several individual cases are highly relevant. .... Serban Flondor, a doctor of agronomics and renowned specialist in heraldry and geneology and son of Iancu Flondor (who played an important role in uniting Bukovina with Romania), supplied the Jews in the Storojinet camp with food. Additionally, with the assistance of railway managers, he sent Jews to Bucharest by locking them in unoccupied sleeping car compartments. While serving as councilor for the Chamber of Agriculture, he used his train car to take Jews from Bukovina to Bucharest, where they could hide more easily.

This website calls him the "Schindler from Bucovina:"

Serban Flondor, center

Agronomist engineer, deputy in the interwar Romanian Parliament, a well-known genealogist and mayor of his hometown, Storojinet, Serban Flondor was truly a character-hero, of a refinement and intelligence that all the Bucharest aristocrats of the interwar period and who would measure his own humanity in terrible times.

A few years after this photograph, Serban Flondor would fight to save the lives of dear Jewish friends, simple acquaintances or people he had never seen: Rubi Klein (whom he hid in the house in the yard of which the photograph was taken, at Storojinet), students Zalman Leon, Elias Corneliu or Iancu Moscovici from "Cultura" and "Ciocanul" high schools (he got involved and obtained their pardon), whole families from a death train heading towards Transnistria and which he managed to stop en route.

The chief rabbi of Storojinet, Benzion Katz, knew the exceptional merits of Serban Flondor and, years later, gave him a distinction from the heart, a gold plaque on which a wish for long life was engraved in Hebrew. The count from Bucovina wore this gold plate until his death (1971), saying that this is the only treasure he would like to take with him.

Sam Gold found the original report from the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Russian, where JTA got the story from. Not sure about the accuracy but it adds details not in the original story:

Before the war, more than three hundred Jewish families lived in Starozhenets, Chernivtsi region: they were mostly craftsmen, workers and employees of local enterprises. Having captured the city, the German-Romanian fascists began to deport Jews to Transnistria, where special ghettos were created.
In the third week of their rule, the invaders issued an order ordering the entire Jewish population to appear at Vokzalnaya Square at a certain time, taking only the most necessary with them. Death was threatened for violating the order.
By this time, many refugees from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria and other places had accumulated in Bukovina. They knew what these "special ghettos" meant. The Bukovinian Jews also knew about this, but there was no way out. The Romanian “siguranza” (okhrana), under the leadership of Gestapo instructors, cordoned off the Jewish quarters and expelled all Jewish residents from their apartments. All the janitors were called to the Gestapo. They were warned that if a hiding Jew was found in any house, the janitor would be shot along with him.
Jews filled Vokzalnaya Square. For three weeks they were kept here in the open air, waiting for the train. One and a half thousand souls - women with babies, old people, children were lying on the damp earth. Many of the cold, dampness and hunger died right there on the square. Some managed to escape and went into the forest.
The forest watchman Stepan Burlecu and his two daughters-in-law, who lived near the railway station, with the assistance of the agronomist Paskaranu, rescued a large group of Jews. They hid them for some time in the forest and finally, dressing them in peasant clothes, they sent them to work - in the forest, in the field.
Burleca and Pascarana rescued music teacher Hecht with his wife and child; tailor Gaiser with his wife and two daughters; soap factory master Gottlieb with a young daughter (his wife died on Vokzalnaya Square); engineer Behler, whose wife was shot for trying to escape from Vokzalnaya Square; Finder's teacher and his two boys, tannery and soap factory workers Solomon Neumann, David Rubinger, Moses Rosner, Yakov Singer and Ariel Kurtzman.
In addition to all these, some Jewish families survived, who dared, despite the threat of the death penalty, not to appear on Vokzalnaya Square and hid with their Moldavian neighbors.
Janitors Geku Lupescu, Nicolai Peranu and Jan Bruzha rescued the lawyer Bislinger and his family, the director of the real school Dr. Welt, the pharmacist Ribaizen and the accountant of the city bank Kantarovich.

The town was still the site of horrific massacres. Even though some Jews were saved, compared to the entire population, it was still a tiny percentage.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

11/21 Links Pt2: Why is the religious left taking sides against Israel?; 1,000 Israeli Students Call on Harvard Crimson to Move Office from "Stolen Lands"

From Ian:

Why is the religious left taking sides against Israel?

For the old religious and evangelical left, Israel often represents Western Civilization, colonialism, and imperialism. For aging denizens of Liberation Theology, the Palestinian cause offers the narrative of a Third World people oppressed by First World wealth, technology, and cultural superiority. Israel is an ally of the United States, and from the religious left’s perspective, is an unwelcome extension of American (and British) power into the Mideast. The Palestinians, from that view, are victims of the American imperium, meriting special advocacy by concerned justice-minded American Christians.

The religious left’s animus towards Israel leads to often absurd contradictions and double standards.

Evangelical leftists relate to this narrative, often informed by their own neo-Anabaptist perspective, which is pacifist and anti-empire. Israel of course has by necessity a significant military force, much of it made possible through American aid. This rankles neo-Anabaptists who think anti-violence is the gospel’s chief theme. There is another sometimes-underlying concern for neo-Anabaptists. They are discomfited by ancient biblical Israel, with its divinely ordained kings, warrior heroes, armies, and military victories, all of which defy the neo-Anabaptist stress on God as supremely peaceful. If only unconsciously, they are inclined towards a form of Marcionism, the early church heresy that minimized the canonical authority of the Old Testament. This discomfort with the Hebrew scriptures facilitates unease with modern Israel.

The religious left’s animus towards Israel leads to often absurd contradictions and double standards, especially for a denomination like the PCUSA. It and the other mainline Protestant bodies have countless statements condemning Israel for ostensibly oppressing the Palestinians among other depredations. But they are largely silent about human rights abuses so prevalent among Israel’s Arab neighbors, including the Palestinian Authority, not to mention countless repressive regimes around the world. They ignored Hamas’s July rocket attacks on Israel. A 2011 PCUSA report affirmed calls for democracy during the Arab Spring, but such calls are rare, and it naturally focused on criticizing U.S. Mideast policy.

The PCUSA General Assembly in July did condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it devoted more verbiage to the United States and NATO having “flooded Ukraine with lethal weapons,” enriching “war profiteers—at the expense of the taxpayers, the poor and the planet,” guided by “powerful geopolitical and financial interests.” It also derided sanctions against Russia and lamented the cost to “planetary survival and social justice.”

The Religious Left descends from the Social Gospel, later radicalized by Liberation Theology. It disdains capitalism, bourgeois democracy, America, Western Civilization, and human rights regarding speech, religion, and property. But its hostility to Israel is especially pernicious, not just for its double standards, but also for its underlying disregard for a people who have been among the world’s most tormented.

Modern Israel arose from the ashes of the Holocaust. From the beginning, Israel has had to fight for its very existence. Christians should understand that opposition to Israel as a Jewish state is opposition to Israel as a nation.

John-Paul Pagano: First Principles

Antisemitism is different from most other forms of racism. In order to combat it, we need to understand what is a conspiracy theory.

It's customary to hear well-meaning people intone something along these lines: "Antisemitism and anti-black racism are part of the same fight.” In a basic sense, this is true: they are both odious forms of hatred that endanger people and corrode society. Diminishing them as much as possible is part of the same overarching defense of our civic health.

But it’s a platitude that papers over essential differences between two opposite forms of racism. Few human phenomena can be described with an algorithm. There are always ambiguities and exceptions. Nevertheless, it’s heuristically valid to arrange racism into two categories: a caste-oriented, “down-punching” form and a conspiracist, “up-punching” form.

By and large, anti-black racism constructs an underclass that the racist regards as inferior, to be segregated, plundered, and exploited. In the main, Antisemitism views the Jews as a preternaturally powerful, evil elite that plunders and exploits the Antisemite—and the broader society he seeks to awaken to the struggle. In the ugliest of ironies, however much he rails about Jewish degeneracy, the Antisemite invests the Jews with traits and abilities that make them seem diabolically superior.

Jonathan Tobin: The ADL is waging war on free speech, not on Trump or Twitter

Yet the ADL has shown a dangerous propensity for Internet censorship—an authoritarian impulse that it usually veils behind a desire to quell the rising tide of antisemitism. Its consultations with the PayPal online payment system, for instance, were geared toward demonetizing anyone, not just far-right extremists, whose opinions were out of favor with the left.

The attempt to sink Twitter by persuading advertisers and users to exit it goes beyond those efforts to harness Big Tech clout to enforce woke orthodoxy on the Web.

What the ADL is now demanding is to set a standard by which no social-media platform or Internet service can survive if it enables conservatives to participate on an equal footing with liberals.

Censored or uncensored, Twitter—or any similar company—will always be something of a sewer, as it prizes angry discourse and discourages thoughtful exchanges. But if the ADL and others succeed, a precedent will be set to ensure that no platform encouraging debate from both ends of the spectrum can survive.

The consequence of the above—such as the Biden administration’s use of social- media companies to squelch COVID-19 debate—will be an even more divided country and greater civil strife.

Just as important, it will create an atmosphere in which free speech is not merely under assault, as it is on college campuses and other places that have been completely captured by the left. It will mean we are moving closer to a society where the norm will be to silence dissent on all important topics.

It is already a disgrace that the ADL treats partisan advocacy as more important than its core mission of fighting antisemitism. But its effort to sink Twitter makes clear that its real goal is to shut up those who don’t toe its political line.

Think what you like about Trump or Musk. But this latest stand shows that there is no greater foe of democracy than the ADL under Greenblatt.

The French reaction to Kristallnacht: Let's pretend to care about Jews while watching them suffer

Reading the contemporaneous newspaper coverage of Kristallnacht is overwhelming. While the story did not start out on the front pages, the coverage snowballed over the next few days as Nazi restrictions on Jews increased and editorials in newspapers expressed outrage.

The outrage did not extend to doing a damn thing to help Jews in Germany, though.

A French newspaper published this editorial cartoon:

And the New York Times reported of angry reactions to the pogroms and anti-Jewish edicts in France:

But there were two other stories out of France that week.

In this one, we see that France turned away the Jews who were fleeing Germany - Jews the Nazis were allowing to leave.

And days later, after French newspapers said how unacceptable it would be for France to make an agreement with a Nazi Germany that so cruelly and proudly persecuted Jews, France worked hard to make exactly that agreement.

That agreement was signed on December 6, 1938, and the articles about it didn't mention a thing about Jews.

Then, as now, the world pretended to care about Jews - but was not willing to lift a finger to actually save their lives. It was all lip service.

So whenever the world demands that Israel compromise on its security today, remember that it is also no lip service. No one will guarantee Jewish security and survival besides Jews themselves.

The only difference is that now we have a state and an army.

There's another relevant lesson for today. Don't make agreements with genocidal madmen.

They tend not to be too trustworthy.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

11/04 Links Pt2: Kanye West, Louis Farrakhan and Anti-Semitism; The Hijacking of Middle East Studies; Why is conservative media defending anti-Semitism?

From Ian:

Abe Greenwald: Kanye West, Louis Farrakhan and Anti-Semitism

What lessons can we learn from the rubbish-cluttered mind of Kanye West? We can start by drawing some important distinctions.

Mr. West’s is a particular kind of anti-Semitism. The left-wing activist Shaun King writes in Newsweek that “you don’t have to be white to be a white supremacist,” and that “Kanye West is now a full-blown white supremacist.” This is a category error.

The “white extinction” conspiracy theory promoted by white supremacists holds that Jews promote integration, miscegenation and civil rights as part of a plot to replace the white race. Mr. West appears to believe the opposite. “Jewish people have owned the black voice,” he said on a recent podcast, later speaking of black Americans “being signed to a [Jewish-owned] record label, or having a Jewish manager, or being signed to a Jewish basketball team, or doing a movie on a Jewish platform like Disney.”

That sort of talk sounds very much like the ravings of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, the world’s foremost black anti-Semite. “You can’t do nothing in Hollywood unless you go by them”—the Jews—Mr. Farrakhan said in a 2010 speech. “You a hip-hop artist? You can’t do nothing, you gotta go by them. You want to be a great sports figure? They own that plantation. Children of Israel, they got you jumping through hoops.”

Similarly, Mr. West’s claim that Planned Parenthood was founded by Jews to control the black population is the inverse of the white-supremacist notion that Jews have promoted abortion to eradicate whites. Again, Mr. West was merely echoing the Nation of Islam, which has long implicated Planned Parenthood in a supposed black “depopulation agenda.”

IMDB: Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America

Trivia
Film was included on a recommended viewing list by the Congressional Black Caucus at the request of long time Democrat Party supporter Louis Farrakhan

Why is conservative media defending anti-Semitism?

Kanye West’s descent into anti-Semitic hysteria has been a clarifying moment for American Jews. We have found out who our friends are from their reaction or non-reaction to Kanye’s appalling statements. Unfortunately, not enough conservative and Republican leaders have spoken out. The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens’s incoherent defense of Kanye, who is a friend of hers, was disappointing. Hopefully she will reconsider and put some distance between herself and Kanye.

Much worse, however, is the case of Jason Whitlock. A black Christian conservative with 600,000 followers on Twitter, Whitlock works at Glenn Beck’s The Blaze and frequently appears on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. He is not only defending Kanye’s anti-Semitic outbursts, but also engaging in anti-Semitism himself, attacking Jewish people with rhetoric one would expect to find only on a fringe neo-Nazi website.

In an article at The Blaze defending Kanye’s comments about Jews having too much power and controlling black lives, Whitlock wrote, “I’m not going to entertain the lie that progressive secular elites—black, Jewish, LGBTQ or feminists—wield no power in the United States. Miss me with that ‘trope.’ Denial of the mass power they’ve collected is just one of the many lies they use to avoid accountability.”

“On the surface, progressive secular black people, Jewish people, LGBTQ and feminists seem united in their hatred of white people,” he continued. “It’s not white people. It’s a hatred of Christianity that unites them. That hatred compels them to try to destroy anything that Christianity created, including the patriarchy, Western civilization and the United States of America.”

Blaming Jews for trying to destroy Christianity is one of anti-Semitism’s oldest libels, and it has led to centuries of Christian violence against Jews. Moreover, why single out Jews for promulgating left-wing policies that Whitlock believes are harming America? Are there no progressive Christians or Muslims in the U.S. who wield political power? Has Whitlock ever heard of former President Barack Obama? Current President Joe Biden? Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi? They all routinely cite Christian doctrine to promote left-wing values.

How Theodore Roosevelt Embarrassed an Anti-Semite While Protecting His Freedom of Speech

In 1892, Hermann Ahlwardt was elected to the German parliament on an explicitly anti-Semitic platform. Three years later he broke off from his party to found the “Anti-Semitic People’s Party.” Dovi Safier and Yehuda Geberer tell the story of his brief tour of United States in the same year, in which he was feted by the newly formed Anti-Semitic Society of America. At the time, Theodore Roosevelt was New York City’s police commissioner. Safier and Geberer cite the future president’s description of what followed:
“While I was Police Commissioner of New York City, an anti-Semitic preacher from Berlin, Rector Ahlwardt, came to New York to preach a crusade against the Jews. Many Jews were much excited and asked me to prevent him from speaking and not to give him police protection. This, I told them, was impossible; and, if possible, would have been undesirable, because it would make him a martyr. The proper thing to do was to make him ridiculous. Accordingly, I sent a detail of police under a Jewish sergeant, and the Jew-baiter made his harangue under the active protection of some 40 police, every one of them a Jew.”

Safier and Geberer add:
As a result, his U.S. tour wasn’t overly successful, and the American press was full of derision for his stated mission. When he arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey to deliver an address at the local anti-Semitic society, he was berated and beaten by the young Jewish crowd, causing him to draw his (illegally obtained) pistol and wave it at the crowd. This act landed him in prison for disorderly conduct and carrying a concealed weapon. Borrowing a page from Commissioner Roosevelt’s playbook, the authorities in Hoboken placed him in a cell together with his assailants—who surely didn’t file a complaint about overcrowding.

11/02 Links Pt2: The Holocaust Is Not Your Metaphor; The Balfour bogeyman; AOC’s ‘obsession’ with Israel is ‘shameful’; LA Council Passes IHRA Definition of Antisemitism

From Ian:

The Stories She Never Told

My mother loved to talk politics, real estate, and cooking. She’d happily offer intelligent insights on nearly any subject except one: her own life. With stops in prewar Hungary, Auschwitz, the Sorbonne, Mexico, and finally Manhattan, my mother’s life was extraordinary, but she kept it to herself. I hated that, but I knew why. So tender-hearted that news of terrorist attacks or natural disasters brought her to tears, she needed to distance herself from the pain of her own past. Still, as her child, I needed to understand her and the world that created her.

As a teenager and young adult, I plied her with questions, but I was only partly successful. I uncovered the scaffolding of her past but not its interiority. My mother is gone now, but my curiosity remains. I still search for her by immersing myself in stories of prewar Hungarian Jewry. Surprisingly, a new book about a Sephardic Holocaust survivor has opened a window into my mother’s inner life.

One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World, a Natan Award winner, is a Tuesdays with Morrie-style recollection of journalist Michael Frank’s conversations with nonagenarian Stella Levi, who grew up on the island of Rhodes. My mother was born thousands of miles and a universe away in the Romanian city of Satu Mare, the small Romanian city better known by its Yiddish name Satmar—the birthplace of the Satmar Hasidic sect—yet their lives seem to mirror each other.

They were born within two years of each other in the mid-1920s; both grew up in religiously observant but non-Hasidic families (prewar Satmar was home to many non-Hasidic Jews), and both belonged to the last generation of Jews to feel deeply rooted in their European birthplaces. My mother’s forebears had lived in or around Satmar for more than two centuries. Levi’s family had been part of the Juderia, Rhodes’ Jewish district, since the Spanish Inquisition. Both grew up in the embrace of aunts, uncles, and cousins in a world that moved to the eternal rhythms of the Jewish calendar.

Living within a 5-mile radius in Manhattan, both Levi and my mother viewed themselves as consummately modern women, yet both were intensely nostalgic for their childhood homes. Levi spoke of “a place where old women sat outside and told stories … took dishes to be baked in the communal oven … and where a granddaughter learned to prepare her grandmother’s sweet and savory dishes.” Unable to access the right words, my mother expressed her longing to recreate the flavors of her childhood and by carrying a crumpled photograph of her doomed aunts and cousins inside of her wallet.

Daniel Greenfield: The Holocaust Is Not Your Metaphor

"A production of Romeo and Juliet for non-binary performers"

This is what happens when the Holocaust becomes universalized, a free-floating metaphor and finally woke kitsch.

Yes, that’s the problem there.

This production, which has now been canceled, comes on the heels of things like the various Anne Frank revisions, including the Latino/ICE one. The underlying problem though is the use of the Holocaust and Hitler as a metaphor for everything bad.

The Holocaust is not a lens. It’s certainly not a lens for whatever woke nonsense is trying to appropriate Jewish history to make claims about the “rise of fascism” today.

There, is to a much lesser degree, similar objections to Netfix’s Dahmer movie which distorted and rewrote the history of the murders to score political points.

Treating real events, especially the murder of people, as a metaphor reduces the dead to the means of a political end while robbing them of their voice, their history and their identity.

The Holocaust is not slavery, slavery is not the Holocaust, whatever some sexual minority is upset by is not either one, and real events are not interchangeable. Neither are real people.

The Balfour bogeyman

In the eyes of the Palestinian Authority, one historical act is attributed with all future Palestinian suffering. That act is the Balfour Declaration, issued today, Nov. 2, in 1917. The declaration was the first contemporary, internationally recognized expression of the right of the Jewish people to establish a national homeland in the geographical area known as “Palestine”.

“His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

As exposed by Palestinian Media Watch, the PA Ministry of Information called the Balfour declaration: “The greatest crime in the history of mankind,” and the official PA daily called it “The crime of the century.”

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, who also serves as the PA’s Supreme Shari’ah Judge recently claimed that the Balfour declaration violated international law:
“Israel’s very existence contradicts international law. On what right do you bring people who have no connection to this land and plant them here and tell them: This is your national home? Who gave Britain a right to give a national home? Was Palestine the land of [former British Foreign Secretary Arthur] Balfour’s father?”

[Facebook page of the Fatah Commission of Information and Culture, Oct. 10, 2022]

So how then, can one answer the PA’s claim?

While the Balfour Declaration was an important statement of policy on the part of the UK government, it certainly did not have the ability to bring about the creation of the Jewish state without wide international consensus.

Historically, the declaration was issued as part of a new regional order that was born out of World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire, which, inter alia, had controlled most of the Middle East for centuries. As part of the new order, new borders were drawn and countries were, for the first time, carved out.

In the Ottoman Empire, “Palestine” as the separate national country and identity, as the PA claims, never existed. Rather, the region was merely just another region of the empire with no specific definition.

Abbas’ advisor: Israel’s existence contradicts international law

A film-maker comments on Ken Burns' Holocaust documentary (Martin Ostrow)

By Martin Ostrow

Ken Burns’s advance interviews for his new Holocaust film provided much material for public discussion. Now that PBS has broadcast the six-hour series, how does the film measure up?

The answer, unfortunately, is that it’s a disappointment. “The U.S. and the Holocaust” misrepresents some key historical issues and entirely omits crucial information. Ultimately, Ken and his producer partners, Sarah Botstein and Lynn Novick, have failed to deliver the kind of film that we would have expected, given their track record.

I write not as a historian, but as the producer and director of a previous PBS film on America’s response to the Holocaust, “America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference,” which first aired in 1994.

Inevitably, both my film and Ken’s cover some of the same ground. We both describe the context in which America’s response to the Holocaust evolved, such as the racism, isolationism, and antisemitism in the United States in the 1930s. Ken handles those themes and the unfolding of the Nazi genocide quite well, worthy moments of Holocaust education.

It is one thing, however, to acknowledge the disturbing trends in public and congressional opinion in those days; it is another to make it seem as if President Franklin D. Roosevelt was captive to them, as Ken does. FDR, after all, was a masterful leader. When he cared about an issue, he knew how to fight for it. But he made no real effort concerning the plight of Jewish refugees, not even to let them stay temporarily in a U.S. territory such as the Virgin Islands.

One might argue that Ken’s series is so broad and complex that it’s easy to lose Roosevelt in its massive story. Perhaps that was his intention. Ken certainly has the skill to render his subjects with vivid three-dimensional effect. Yet in this vast work, FDR is at times ghost-like—a hapless, impotent figure. The film offers excuses for the president’s inaction and shifts almost all the blame to Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long. Viewers could easily forget who actually hired Long, and who could have fired him if he had wanted to. Long served at the pleasure of the president, not the other way around.

It's a shame the series brings nothing new to understanding Roosevelt’s troubling decisions and motivations. Ken had a major advantage in making this new film. He could have drawn on significant information scholars have uncovered in the past two decades about FDR and America’s response to the Holocaust. I’m puzzled and disappointed he did not. For example:

— FDR’s Private Feelings About Jews. Historians have uncovered more than a dozen private statements made by Roosevelt in which he disparaged “Jewish blood,” advocated quotas on Jews in various professions (and college admissions), and even accused the publishers of the New York Times of using a “dirty Jewish trick” to gain a tax advantage. While President Roosevelt’s private feelings about Jews may or may not offer a clue to his policies concerning Jewish refugees, they at least need to be part of the conversation. Yet they are not mentioned in the film.

— The James McDonald Diaries. The discovery of the diaries of the late refugee advocate and diplomat James G. McDonald shed new light on his efforts to help the Jews—and the refusal of the Roosevelt administration to assist him. Remarkably, McDonald is not even mentioned in the film.

— The George McGovern Interview. In a revealing 2004 interview with filmmakers Chaim Hecht and Stuart Erdheim, George McGovern, the former senator and presidential nominee, recounted his experiences as a World War II pilot who bombed the oil factories in the slave labor section of Auschwitz. McGovern’s eyewitness recollections about the feasibility of bombing the railways leading to the camp tell us much more than Ken’s commentators, who offer confusing speculations about why neither the railways nor the gas chambers were ever bombed.

Admittedly, a disadvantage Ken suffered was that in the decades since my film, some of the remaining principal figures in the story passed away. For example, unlike Ken, I had the opportunity to personally interview John Pehle, the first director of the War Refugee Board.

Recalling the British-American conference on refugees held in remote Bermuda in 1943, Pehle told me it was “a conference set up to not accomplish anything, and the people who represented the United States there were given those instructions.” Yet the Bermuda meeting, a crucial event in the history of the U.S. response to the Holocaust, was not even mentioned by Ken.

Regarding the failure to bomb Auschwitz, Pehle says in my film, “After we recommended to the War Department that the extermination facilities at Auschwitz be bombed, we were told [that] this would involve bombers being sent from England…and therefore, it was not possible to do this. Later, perhaps after the war, we discovered at the very time we were recommending this, bombing all around Auschwitz was going on from Italy, and we had been misled.” Pehle’s powerful words should have been in Ken’s film. They are not.

As with every Ken Burns film, "The U.S. and the Holocaust” includes affecting cinematography, touching moments, and memorable music--although the decision to appropriate the precise Bach violin concerto passage from the most poignant moment of my film, is certainly questionable.

But the film's strengths do not make up for the fact that this Burns production stumbles when it comes to the most important parts of the historical record. Ken promised "The U.S. and the Holocaust" would answer many of the lingering questions about our nation’s response to the Nazi genocide. But after watching all six-plus hours of the film, I can only imagine that many people are still asking the same questions. They certainly should be.

[Martin Ostrow has been an award-winning documentary producer, writer and director for public, commercial and cable television for more than 30 years.]

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The US Jews who opposed Orthodox rabbis pleading to save European Jews

On October 6, 1943, a group of hundreds of Orthodox rabbis came to Washington DC to plead for the lives of their brethren in Europe.

They presented a letter to Vice President Wallace asking for a government agency to help save the remaining Jews from the Holocaust. The letter demanded that the US open its doors to Jewish refugees, that the UN create a passport that could be used for Jews to travel, and for Britain to "open the doors of Palestine."

Some of the details about this trip are outrageous.

Historian Alex Grobman writes:

Dressed in long, dark rabbinic attire, the rabbis walked from Union Station to the Capitol Building. There, Rabbis Eliezer Silver, Israel Rosenberg and Bernhard Louis Levinthal led a recitation of Psalms. Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), who was head of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, introduced them to Vice President Henry Wallace and a number of Congressmen.

Bergson enlisted the rabbis and the American Jewish Legion of Veterans for the march. He expected American clergy would join, but none did. Only the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the U.S. and Canada, the Union of Hassidic Rabbis and a commander of the Jewish Legion participated. The modern Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America sent Rabbi David Silver, Rabbi Eliezer Silver’s son.

White House adviser Judge Samuel Rosenman told the president that those “behind this petition” were “not representative of the most thoughtful elements in Jewry.” The “leading Jews” Rosenman knew opposed the march, but he admitted failing to “keep the horde from storming Washington.”

A number of Jewish congressmen had attempted to dissuade the rabbis from marching. This backfired when Congressman Sol Bloom, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, argued that “It would be undignified for these un-American looking rabbis to appear in the nation’s capital.”

At the Lincoln Memorial, the rabbis—who had declared a fast day—prayed for the welfare of the armed forces and the Jews of Europe and a quick Allied victory. Then they walked to the White House and prayed outside the gates. Though they expected to meet with the President, they were told he was unavailable. Later they learned he went to Bolling Field Air Force Base for a minor ceremony to avoid meeting them.

Rafael Medoff adds:

The era’s most prominent American Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen Wise, criticized the march in somewhat similar terms. Wise, who headed the American Jewish Congress, the World Jewish Congress, and the American Zionist movement, wrote that “the orthodox rabbinical parade [ sic]” was a “painful and even lamentable exhibition.” He derided the organizers as “stuntists” and accused them of offending “the dignity of [the Jewish] people.”

The oh-so-dignified Jews were aghast that Orthodox rabbis would make a scene while pleading for the lives of Jews in Europe.

And these self-appointed leaders were dead wrong. They thought that since they had their own access to corridors of power, they had influence in those corridors. In fact, Roosevelt didn't want to meet the rabbis specifically because he didn't want to be pressured to help save the Jewish refugees from Europe. FDR knew the power of public pressure. (His schedule that afternoon was remarkably open.)

The vice president issued a vague, meaningless statement of support meant to get rid of these strange Jews.

And there was a more than a little self-hating from the American secular Jews in this event, as these supposed defenders of Jews in America did not want to be associated with people who looked like their grandfathers did. The Orthodox embarrassed them. Public tears to help save millions of lives is not the image they want Americans to see.

They thought of themselves as superior, at having left their visible Judaism behind. And their conceit that they are better, and know better, than other Jews, indirectly resulted in more European Jews being murdered.

It is the same conceit that kept the daily attacks on Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn out of the news cycle for so long.

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False claims of Nazi spies masquerading as Jews provided excuse to limit Jewish immigration to America during the Holocaust

The Ken Burns documentary that started being broadcast last night, The US and the Holocaust, has prompted me to dig up little known stories about how the US severely limited Jewish immigration.

One reason that the US gave for limiting immigration was the fear that some of the immigrants were in fact Nazi spies.

The New York Daily News reported on November 26, 1940 - a year before the US entered the war - about a secret Gestapo school in Prague to train spies to act as Jews for espionage purposes.

The article makes it clear that this fear would end up dooming thousands of Jews.

I cannot find any independent report during or after the Holocaust about this supposed "Jewish institute."

There are cases of Nazis who masqueraded as Jewish refugees in Europe. One such ring was reported in Holland and the Dutch authorities easily discovered them, as JTA reported:

The disclosure that Nazi agents masquerading as refugees had helped the Nazi parachutists landing in the Netherlands recalled today that the Dutch authorities had several months ago discovered a group of such agents through the medium of botched circumcisions.

Last February the Paris newspaper L’Ouevre reported that 16 Nazi spies who entered the Netherlands in the guise of Jewish refugees — even taking the precaution of being circumcised — were unmasked when it was determined through a rabbi that they were not circumcised according to the Jewish ritual.

According to the report, the Gestapo had selected 16 men who looked as Jewish as possible, had them attend synagogue services for several weeks to acquaint ports stamped with “J” (Jew) and sent them into Holland.

The Netherlands anti-espionage service, suspecting that they were spies, arrested the men. After examining them, the authorities called a rabbi and, without informing him about the details of the case, asked him to ascertain whether they had been circumcised in the Jewish manner. He reported that they were not.

But (so far) I cannot find any such case in the US. The closest was the case of Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr, a German-born American citizen who arrived in the US on the Swedish-American liner SS Drottningholm in 1942. The media originally said that he pretended to be a Jewish refugee but that wasn't true, as JTA reported at the time:

The Nazi spy, Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr, who was arrested aboard the diplomatic exchange ship Drottningholm, will face a speedy trial, it was announced today. Full information of the arrest released here indicated that the 29-year-old spy was posing as a “friend of Jews in Germany,” and not as a Jewish refugee as was generally reported yesterday when the news of his arrest was made public by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Inquiry at the FBI office here elicited the information that Bahr was provided by the Nazi military espionage office with full information concerning a Jewish family in Germany in order to be able to explain to U.S. authorities how he happened to be in possession of $7,000 in American currency. He was instructed by the Nazi espionage headquarters to say that a Jewish friend of his in Germany, a member of the old Social-Democratic party, had been beheaded by the Nazis, that the man’s wife had sold a valuable stamp collection for $7,000 and given him the proceeds to take out of the country for her.

In 2015, the Smithsonian Magazine wrote an investigative report on Bahr and noted that in fact the rumors of Nazis posing as Jews to spy on the US were essentially baseless:

Government officials from the State Department to the FBI to President Franklin Roosevelt himself argued that refugees posed a serious threat to national security. Yet today, historians believe that Bahr's case was practically unique—and the concern about refugee spies was blown far out of proportion.

In the court of public opinion, the story of a spy disguised as a refugee was too scandalous to resist.

Immigration restrictions actually tightened as the refugee crisis worsened. Wartime measures demanded special scrutiny of anyone with relatives in Nazi territories—even relatives in concentration camps. At a press conference, President Roosevelt repeated the unproven claims from his advisers that some Jewish refugees had been coerced to spy for the Nazis. “Not all of them are voluntary spies,” Roosevelt said. “It is rather a horrible story, but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they found a number of definitely proven spies.”

Here and there, skeptics objected. As the historian Deborah Lipstadt points out in her book Beyond Belief, The New Republic portrayed the government’s attitude as “persecuting the refugee.” The Nation didn’t believe that the State Department could “cite a single instance of forced espionage.” But these voices were drowned out in the name of national security.

Government agencies like the State Department used spy trials as fuel for the argument against accepting refugees. But late in the war, government whistleblowers began to question this approach. In 1944, the Treasury Department released a damning report initialed by lawyer Randolph Paul. It read:

“I am convinced on the basis of the information which is available to me that certain officials in our State Department, which is charged with carrying out this policy, have been guilty not only of gross procrastination and wilful failure to act, but even of wilful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler.”

The FBI, State Department and media couldn't resist pushing the narrative of Jewish spies, the result being that tens of thousands of Jews who could have been saved in the US were murdered instead.

One other point: It would have been easy for the FBI to hire religious Jews to vet the immigrants to ensure that at least the religious ones were who they said they were. But it seems that the antisemitism of the day precluded considering American religious Jews as truly American and trustworthy for such a task.

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Poland demands compensation from Germany for the Jews burned alive - by Poles

Last week, Poland demanded compensation from Germany for its estimates for World War II losses it estimated at $1.32 trillion.

Jan Grabowski, an expert on the Holocaust in Poland, discovered that some of these demands were to pay Poland for killing its own Jews.

On the 83rd anniversary of the outbreak of World War II last week, a three-volume report was published entitled “Report on Losses Suffered by Poland as a Result of German Aggression and Occupation during World War II 1939–1945.” The report was written by a parliamentary investigative committee established in 2017 to assess damages from Germany for Polish losses during the war....

However, the report ascribes to Germans the murder of Jews carried out by their Polish neighbors without the involvement of Germans. Canadian-Jewish historian of Polish origin, Prof. Jan Grabowski, discovered this when reading the third volume of the report, which includes a list of 9,292 places where Germans committed atrocities against Poles in occupied Poland between 1939 and 1945. According to the report, the list is intended to “commemorate the Polish citizens who were killed by Nazi Germany in World War II.”

Grabowski, who called the report “shameful," and a “rewriting of the history of the Holocaust,” discovered that one of the sites listed in the report is the town of Jedwabne, where it states that 1,650 Jews were murdered. The pogrom there, carried out in July of 1941, is well documented through historical research based on archival material and eyewitness accounts.

According to the research, the pogrom was carried out by Poles exclusively, without German involvement. The precise number of Jews murdered in this event is not known but is believed to be a few hundred. Beaten and threatened, they were led by Poles to a local barn, where they were burned alive.

Prof. Grabowski was surprised to find the victims of Jedwabne in a report meant to deal with German crimes against the Poles in World War II. Writing on Facebook, Grabowski said he was "dismayed" that the "Polish authorities would actually ask the Germans for compensation" for the Jews murdered by Poles in 1941. "To say that the whole situation is grotesque is to say nothing at all," he wrote.

Along with requesting reparations for Poles' murder of the Jews of Jebwabne, the new report includes other sites where Jews were also killed by Poles exclusively. The list includes the murder of Jews in the towns of Radzilow, Bzura and Szczuczyn, all in the summer of 1941.

Grabowski calls the inclusion of these towns in the report “grotesque,” but his claims against the writers of the report are more significant. He bases his arguments on the fact that in the calculation of Poles murdered and killed during World War II, the Poles also include 3 million Polish Jews, among whom he says about 200,000 were murdered with the help of or directly by Poles. What kind of restitution does Poland want from the Germans for 200,000 Jews murdered by the Poles or with Polish participation?" he asked in Polish on Twitter.

The tweet drew angry responses, with comments calling him “Jewish bastard” and “Jewish swine,” among other things.

Poland has been engaged in historical revisionism about the Holocaust in recent years, denying Polish complicity with the Holocaust and allowing historians who documented it to be sued.

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1938: Columnist is sympathetic towards Jews in Germany - but not THAT sympathetic

Later this month, Ken Burns is releasing a documentary, The US and the Holocaust, on how the United States did not help Jews escape their doom.

Here is one example of how some Americans thought on the eve of the Holocaust.

William Bruckart was a moderately successful and influential columnist in the 1930s, who published a regular syndicated column called Washington Digest.

In December 1938, only ten months before World War II would break out and when there were no longer any illusions about Hitler's attacks on Jews, he wrote about how terrible Hitler was - but sympathy for German Jews was not enough reason for the US to allow Jews to immigrate.

Danger of 'Jewish Problem' for United States in German 'Purge'

Opening of Gates to Refugees Might Introduce Disturbing Influence.
By WILLIAM BRUCKART WNU Service, National Press Bldg., Washington, D. C.

WASHINGTON. — Press service wires and cables and radio from abroad have been clogged for several weeks with hundreds of thousands of words about the plight of the Jews in Germany; about the abuses visited upon the Jewish race by the European madman, Hitler, and his camp followers; about the humanitarian pleas of our own President, Mr. Roosevelt, for appeasement of the conditions. There has been what I believe to be one of the greatest waves of emotion, waves of resentful national sentiment, that this country ever has known. I recall none like it, none as overwhelming, none as deep-seated as that through which we have been passing, and in my opinion our nation should have resented such outrages.

While no one with a heart can fail to grieve to a greater or less extent about the indescribable harshness, the unforgivable meanness of Hitler, it occurs to me that we should begin to temper these waves of emotion somewhat. There are other factors to be considered, factors and consequences of the thing that is now called "the Jewish problem," that require calm reasoning. In other words, let us say that America is and must remain for Americans, and charity, while it is sweet, cannot be exploited, or carried to extremes simply because we feel a sadness for a group upon whom an injustice has been sent. Like millions of other Americans, I am hopeful that some way will be found to aid the Jews who are being driven out of Germany, but I am unwilling that we, as a nation, shall create additional and unwarranted difficulties for ourselves by extending a helping hand. Therefore, the United States must not be the goat.

It is one thing to render aid. It is quite another thing to inject into our own bloodstream of national life additional elements without knowing what those elements are. After all, the damage is something that we did not cause; the injured are a people who have no knowledge of our way of doing things and may never cooperate with us, and we must prevent being dragged into the other fellow's fist fight.

I suppose there are very few persons in the United States who do not believe that Hitler's "purge" of German Jews constitutes a blot upon modern civilization. I know that leading Germans in the United States wish there were ways and means to stop the action. There can be no defense of the outright seizure of $400,000,000 of money from the Jews of Germany under the guise of a "fine" although there is a lesson of warning in it. ...
....
The unwanted race is simply the victim and a knowledge of how its members have had the sufferings brought upon them adds little or nothing to the search for a method to protect their lives. Where are they to go? That is the real question. Hitler doesn't care where they go or what happens to them. Some one else has to lead the way. Our nation has joined in that leadership, and rightly so. But we have policies and principles and traditions which must be respected. If, in our eagerness to help the German Jews, we should transgress those established principles, then we, as well as the Jews, will have to pay a penalty.....

We ought not kid ourselves. There are many persons swearing allegiance to the United States who do not like Jews. Those persons may be otherwise good citizens, but they distrust a Jew because he is a Jew, making no distinction between individuals. It is stating nothing new to say that there has been almost a steady undercurrent of criticism of Mr. Roosevelt from certain quarters because Jews have been given prominent places in the New Deal. I think it is not stretching the imagination at all, therefore, to point to the Jewish problem as one that may become involved in politics at some future time, although I hope it never does.

Mr. Roosevelt has proposed removal of some of the immigration restrictions as a means of bringing into this country more German Jews than our immigration laws now permit. In so doing, he verged on politics himself. Any one familiar with the debates on immigration policies in the early 1920s must recall the severity of that battle. The issue was whether we, as a nation, were going to be haven for all corners and just hope that they would do things the American way, or whether we should restrict the number coming here to live to a number which could be absorbed into our national life. Labor unions and most employers favored the restrictions, and when we think of the number of unemployed in the last five or six years—people fed and clothed by the federal government—it appears that we allowed too many to come in. It seems we could have excluded all of them to advantage.

Behind the scenes of the immigration restriction also was a determination on the part of Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania, then a senate power, to prevent introduction into the United States of all kinds of "isms." The senator foresaw the spread of radicalism by means of entry of the European backwash and rubbish. There was not much discussion of this phase because our government did not want to offend any foreign nation. It was a basic reason, however, and it is too bad that it was not given more public consideration.

Fortunately, there can be no change in the number of foreigners admitted from any nation without action by congress. The United States can take only so many—something like 30,000 a year—of those purged Jews, unless congress amends the law. And when I say it is fortunate that there must be action by congress before there can be a change in policy, I mean no inferences.

In consideration of whether we ought to let a deluge of refugees enter, I cannot help thinking of a possible spread of trouble. For example, if our definite national position of protest against Hitler's policies should bring retaliation, every Jewish refugee allowed in this country would be clamoring for the United States to take revenge on Germany and Hitler. Their influence would be great because they could tell what happened to them and give an idea of what is happening.

As far as relations between Germany and the United States are concerned at the moment, all that can be said is that the United States has let the world know of its disapproval. When Ambassador Wilson was recalled, it was just the same as saying to the world of nations that Uncle Sam hasn't any respect for Hitler.

Bruckart isn't an antisemite - no, he really cares about the Jews in Europe. He feels very bad about them. He hopes nothing bad will happen to them, even though it is already happening.

But doing anything to save them? That's un-American.

His mention of Senator David Reed refers to one of the architects of the 1924 Immigration Act which was designed to limit immigration to the US, especially of Jews and Asians. There was an element of Nazi-style eugenics in that law: northern Europeans were considered more wanted and healthier than those from central and southern Europe, where most Jews were attempting to immigrate from. It reduced Jewish immigration by about 90%.

This article assumes that there were desirable immigrants and undesirable ones - and Jews were definitely on the undesirable side of the equation. Moreover, it implies that the many Jewish immigrants who had come to the US in the early part of the century were still not real Americans, and that they were radicals.

That next to last paragraph is something. Bruckart is saying that Jews who arrive in America would tell the truth about how the Nazis act, and it would be bad for "real" Americans to hear the truth because it might prompt them to do something to stop it.

I was curious whether Bruckart would have continued his isolationist position after Pearl Harbor, but we'll never know - he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1940 at age 48.

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Read all about it here!