Jews in the 20th Century

The old-style pogroms which made the life of Polish Jews a nightmare under the Czars have died out, yet the terror of Antisemitism still haunts their three million men, women and children, one-tenth of the country’s population.

Now they are a race apart, isolated, according to Sholem Asch (1880- 1957), a Yiddish writer who recently visited the country, like lepers. Young women in the Warsaw Ghetto look like dried skeletons, he says. Rickety children save scraps of bread from their free school lunches to feed their parents at night.

This article appeared at a time when Eastern European immigration levels had been drastically curtailed, Klan membership was at it’s peak, antisemitism in college admissions had been exposed, and the memory Leo Frank’s murder was in it’s seventh year. The article is about the chasm between the two groups and building the necessary bridges; Dr. Stephen S. Wise (1874 – 1949), columnist Walter Lippmann (1889 – 1974) and a cadre of others address the topic with the needed perspective. Dr. Wise remarked:

Whatever Christians may have taught…their duty in the present is clear as are the heavens in the noon hour; the duty of affirming that incalculable and eternal is the debt of Christians to Israel, of whose gifts Jesus is treasured as the chiefest.

Jews are like everybody else, only more so.’
So clicked the typewriter of the epigrammatic Dorthy Thompson (1893 – 1961), syndicated columnist and wife of Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951)’.

‘Are they?’ queried Robert Gessner (1913 – 1978), twenty-nine-year-old instructor of English at New York University. ‘Then why are they so persecuted?’

‘To answer his own question, the young Michigan-born Jew traveled to Europe, saw Hitler-swayed Jews march from meetings shouting ‘Down with us! Down with Us! Less fantastic were his experiences in Poland, Palestine, the Soviet Union and England…’