Jewish Post, Indianapolis, Marion County, 8 May 1936 — Page 2

The Jewish Post A Journal for Indiana Jewry Published every Friday by The Spokesman Company, 423 Citizens Bldg., Louisville, Ky. Subscription rate, $1.00 a year. For advertising rates apply at office. Entered as second class matter October 17, 1935, at the post office at Louisville, Ky, under the act of March 3, 1879. Editorial office, 2101 East Washington Street, Indianapolis, Ind. Telephone CH 4385. Changes of address should be sent direct to the Circulation Department, The Jewish Post, Bo* 503, Louisville, Ky. Unless received two weeks in advance, The Jewish Post cannot assume responsibility for issues missed. Please include old address. Friday, May 8, 1936

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What A World! It’* Often Pleasant Too

HEBREW CALENDAR 5696-1936 Rosh Chodesh Slvan May 22 1st Day Shabueth May 27 •Rosh Chodesh Tammuz... June 21 Rosh Hashonah September 17 Yom Kippur September 26 •Rosh Chodesh also observed previous day. The Editor’s Chair We receive many voluntary suo. scriptions through the mail, but every once in a while they are accompanied by letters which are so unusual in one respect or another, that we print them under our “Freedom of the Press” column. Such a letter is that of Charles Caplan, of 1924 E. 105th Street, Cleveland, O. Having been shown a copy of our publication by one of our subscribers, Mr. Caplan makes the generous suggestion that he would be glad to sell subscriptions to his friends gratis. Like any task, whether it be ditohdigging or the dirtier job of publishing an Anglo-Jewish newspaper, our particular one oould hardly be called pleasant. Most readers only write to register complaints, forgetting the hundred times that they were pleased or entertained by a particular article or editorial. Yet. like marriage, being an editor is not all drudgery and disappointment. It has moments of bliss and contentment. Charles Caplan’s letter is one of these moments. * * • So many have been the orders From our readers for copies of “Jews in America,” the Fortune magazine article, which has been published in book form by Random House, that our immediate supply has been exhausted. The indulgence of readers is asked until the new shipment arrives. It is our personal recommendation that every Jewish family should purchase one of these enlightening books which in detail explodes the myth of Jewish domination in all branches of art, industry and professions. In fact so scorching is the survey that criticisms denounce it for its inevitable conclusions that Jews are not the overpowering force in American life that they have led themselves to be. For a refreshing revelation for your n o n-J e w is h friends, this book is indispensable. In fact, many readers, in ordering the book, declare that they have praticular non-Jewish friends whom they are eager to have read the book. We are offering our readers another service in securing the book for them by writing to us. The book is $1.00 per copy. ,

Beleaguered on many sides by distressing news of anti-Jewish riots, attacks, discrimination, and bias, Jews of many lands, including the United States, Canada, England, France and other benevolent nations might well pause from time to time to consider the peace, quiet and contentment in which they are living, side by side with non-Jews, working at enjoyable occupations, being entertained by divertisements which formerly were only a king’s, and generally at home in cities and villages where the highest concepts of happiness and the fullest development are theirs for the cultivation. Like an audience at a tense tragedy, the refreshing night air outside after the curtain has rung down relieves the taut nerves and relaxes strained emotions. So the thought of life in lands like the United States, clean and wholesome, without the dread fear of economic or social discrimination is a welcome Interlude. Pause for a moment. You have your Jewish clubs, your Jewish lodges, your Jewish syna> gogues and Temples, your Jewish friends, your warm Jewish home life, and hi addition your non. Jewish acquaintances and associations. Granted that behind these all may be a seeUiing fire whose eruption is just a matter of Time, and whose consuming flames may some day destroy just as is being destroyed in Germany today. Yet if these bitternesses touch upon your daily life at all, it is only at divided intervals, when you

read your Anglo-Jewish newspaper, or you receive your B’nai B’rith Magazine, or when you attend Jewish gatherings. All in all, like death, these fears are put off in your mind for specific occasions when you bring them out or they are brought out by your connections with pure Jewish life. Nor is it abnormal when you dismiss these devils of peace. Rather it would be perversion if you were occupied hour after hour and thought after thought with fears and worries for the safety of yourself here and the safety of your brethren in Europe. Naturally when you are sick, your thoughts turn more to death. So at times like these our fears increase and our worrise trouble us more. However, even the centenarian or those with lingering Illnesses, buoy themselves by hopes, false perhaps, but beneficial nevertheless. It would be a sickly world indeed, if Pandora had been a woman of integrity. Just as complete indifference to the serious situation of World Jewry is undesirable, so is complete absorption in the miserable lot of the Jew in Europe unhealthy. Stop, we say, pause, and consider your good fortune. The traffic cop does not always go out of his way to tag your automobile, and your wife is often pleasant and affable.

PAYING THE PRICE

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Boldly, Searchingly, The Pettines Of Am-

erican Jewry I* Discussed successful business week? Strange. England, with less than 350,000 Jew's has always had two commercially successful Jewish weeklies. During about forty years of contact with the London “Jewish •Chronicle,” it has always been an expanding, positively influential and commercially successful enterprise. I think it was the only pa per that ever sustained a suit in which an advertiser claimed damages because the publisher refused to insert his ad. The publisher defended his refusal to publish the advertisement, but willingly paid the damages awarded the plaintiff: There could be no higher testimonial to the value of the “J. C." as Londoners call it affec-

tionately.

Unconsciously the editor and the publisher struggled, with all the talent at their command, against a demoralization which has had American Jewry in its talons for nearly half a century. I became a Zionist because accident threw me into Jewish journalism, and I took the problem seriously. A hundred times since I have reflected that Zionism saved Jewish journalism, good, bad and indiffen' ent, from extinction, for it created some storm, sufficient to: stir some Jews out of somnolence. Anti-nationalism not only requires no exposition, but normally it produces nothing of journalistic or public interest. Basically it represents the Jew who wants to be left alone. If he could be articulate he would explain that Jewish life does not interest him, that he wants to know nothing about it, and that his Judaism is a private and wholly personal affair. He rather resents the intrusion of Jewish news in the daily press, and he is a shade more angry at the publicity Hitler has achieved than at what he actually did. Within the last few days I spent an evening with three Jews of German birth and education. They belong to no Jewish organization. They resent the thwarting of their individual policy of escape. They were angry at the idea that there is a possible accumulative record which exhibits the tendency of German attitudes towards the Jews, they blamed England for letting Hitler rule in Germany, and

By JACOB DE HAAS

“We had quite a meeting at the Hotel Astor last night, but the Emergency Appeal for the U. P. A. was a flop. We did not get above a thousand dollars. Haim Greenberg was splendid, he told the audience that an Arab striking three days was giving more than any rich Jew here in New York. It is just terrible. The commun ity seems dull, bewildered and unresponsive.” I repeat this telephone report to my wife, and my son breaks in: “Dad, this community is sick of causes. It is given no rest between Red Cross, Relief and a thousand Jewish appeals. We are tired out, disap-

pointed and disgusted.”

When I slipped this sheet into the typewriter I was not thinking about that meeting at which I was not present. It is just ten o’clock. I have read through a batch of Jewish weeklies from all parts of the country, and scanned those from Europe, and noted a blazoning page ad in the New York “Times” for the Palestine Appeal. My mind was toying with a paragraph in the “Chicago Jewish Chronicle” discussing the suspension of the “American Hebrew” and the indifference of subscribers to Jewish publications. That hit te pigeonhole of memory. I began reading American Jewish weeklies in 1890, and I began to be London correspon dent of the “American Hebrew” about 1893, and threw up the job after six months or so, because no checks were forthcoming. In fact, I believe that among my papers there may still exist a letter promising me payment by “following mail,” which I preserved because an American Jew who came to me with an introduction from the “Hebrew’’ office, explained to me that “following mail” meant any mall

following, at any time.

To my unsophisticated mind this was so ingenious a phrase that 1 noted the interpretation, and preserved the letter. For about six months in 1905-06 I worked with the “Hebrew” and it was then no better off than the previous decade, and as I sit here I wonder— I have no access to the facts— whether in the fifty-odd years of its existence it ever had a really

Freedom of The Pres* A Good Samaritan To the Editor: Enclosed find check for special 16-months’ subscription to your

weekly.

Please be good enough to mail me all April issues with the exception of the 24th, which a friend gave me. Send me a few subscrip' tion blanks. I think I can sell some of them for you gratis. CHARLES CAPLAN. 1924 E. 105th St. Cleveland, O. are quite sure that when he disappears things will be as they were. All three denied anU-Senjitic phenomena in Germany. * They had cultivated disremembering. Being cultured and informed men I forced their memories to work. I men tioned the high spots of anti-Semit-ism since 1879. It was interesting to watch the struggle between intellectual honesty and the old and encrusted habit of deciding that public incidents “which do not affect me personally are no concern of mine.” Of course they do not apply this narrow code to American affairs. On such matters they can be eager and concerned though their actual relationship to current American problems is far more remote than to the growth of anti-Semitiism in. America. This is, perhaps, the extreme of the attitude of detachment. I know plenty of Russian Jews in New York who approach Jewish life no closer than these three Germans. Need 1 add that none of these ever subscribed for a Jewish weekly, not even the kind' that mildly advocat ed just that type of attitude? Nothingism does not require an Nothingism does not require an organ, and it won’t pay for one. By this i am not implying that Zionism is the salvation for any paper in the red. That, too, is palpably untrue. Zionist organs die aborning, and few of them have survived without the aid of considerable subsidies. When I say Zionism was the salvation of the Jewish press I mean that it provided something to write about, that it gave birth to hundreds of ideas and movements that provide some newspaper color, and that stirred interest in things that happened to Jews here, there and everywhere. Some other Idea that created a clash might have served the same purpose. That in an immense community (Continued on Page 3)

Between You and Me By PAUL A. PETERS

Doctor

Our Teronto keyholerand eavesdroper (and he didn’t have to keyhole or eavesdrop to get this, either) Informs us the Dr. D. E. Robertson who was rescued from that Moose River mine is pretty well known among his native city’s Jewry for his anti-Semitic proclivities. . . . Those anti-Sem-itic proclivities, according to our informant, have been aired on numerous occasions and have made themselves apparent in other more concrete forms. . . . Once he is reported to have told a Jewish woman he “wouldn’t operate on a Jewish child for a million dollars.” . . . And he is said to have ousted from his Medical Arts Building in Toronto half of the Jewish doctors who had offices there. . . . Perhaps, when Dr. Robertson gets over the tragic experience he went through, somebody ought to ask him about these things....

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Mish-Mash Take it from Harry Zinder (who is leave-of absencing it from a Palestine newspaper job). Professor Felix Frankfurter of Harvard is amazingly well informed on Palestine... .Zinder, who has worked in the Holy Land three years, made this discovery during a fif-teen-minute interview with the famous Roosevelt brain-truster. . . . Prof. Morris R. Cohen, philosopher, who is said to be one of the few men in the world thoroughly conversant with the Einstein theory of relativity, is well satisfied with his two sons. . . . One of them. Felix, is doing important le^ gal work for the Department of the Interior at Washington, while the other, Willie, is a physicist at a middle Western university. . . . Felix, incidentally, used to play tennis with this commentator.... He had one of the most puzzling cork screw types of service P.A.P. ever faced ... He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard before he reached his .najority. . . . (Rabbi emeritus) Samuel Schulman of Temple Emanu-El of New York at this writing is seriously ill at Mount Sinai Hospital. ... He semt a note to friends asking them not to bring him flowers, and instead to use the money as donations to a well-known cause. . . . The leader of an equally well-known cause got wind of this request and urged the rabbi to change it by asking that the flower-money be equally divided among both.... Wouldn’t be surprised if Rabbi Sohulman finally decided it would be less trouble to accept the flowers. . . . What well-known manufacturer of a famous Pesacn food had pork as the piece-de-resistance of his seder menu?... Samuel Nirenstein, first secretary to Justice McCook of the Supreme Court of New York, is probably the most orthodox secretary any Supreme Court Justice ever

had.... * « *

In Heine’s Day Al, the office boy, was reading^ “Poems of Heinrich Heine” as selected and translated by Louis Untermeyer and he came across the following passage in the introduction: “The traditions and tyrannies that weighed down, on all the German people of his day (Heine’s,) were slight compared to the oppressions imposed upon the Jews. The demands upon them, the petty persecutions, the rigorous orders and taboos would form an incredible list. Let these few facts suffice: (Continued on Page 3)