June 10, 2020 Anno Domini
Excerpt from The Anti-Defamation League and its Use in the World Communist Offensive (1947), pgs. 18-25
I DO NOT WISH to condemn the Jewish community. The Anti-Defamation League is but a part of that community. I do not wish to condemn the Anti-Defamation League for activities for which it may not be responsible. I do know, however, that to get a true perspective of the results of the League’s activities it is necessary to look at the whole disturbed world. It is necessary to read the Jewish press to see what is being put into the minds of the Jewish people, for whom the B’nai B’rith, the League’s parent, claims wide representation in America. It is necessary to estimate how much of that press is frankly Marxist and Zionist and pro-Russian. It is necessary to see what foreign influences attract Jews in America, and what their more radical leaders are trying to do for and to them. Then you can form your own estimate of the activities of the ADL.
Such a survey reveals information of such extreme importance to America that it would be marked “Top Secret” in the files of the Army or the State Department if reported by one of its officials.
No thoughtful American can read the Jewish press today without becoming alarmed. Too many Jewish periodicals are pouring a stream of Pro-Communist, Marxist, pro-Russian sentiment into the Jewish people. I became aware of this shocking fact while on active duty at a counter-intelligence officer in the Army. In that capacity I also was astounded to see that so many of our younger Jews had gone pro-Communist—that so many of our Communists were Jews. These facts may shock conservative American Jews who will pay heed as much as they shock non-Jews. The remark that “all Jews are Communists” is an irresponsible statement. This is the mistake more and more Americans are making today. The rigidly Orthodox Jew is likely to be a loyal American citizen, opposed to Fascism, Communism and Political Zionism, adhering only to religious Zionism, a spiritual concept. Jews who belong to, or agree with, the American Council for Judaism likewise acknowledge only one flag, the Stars and Stripes. They, too, oppose being used by radicals in a revolutionary movement which they regard as certain to end in terror and bloodshed for Jew and Gentile alike.
In my own experience in Intelligence, I found Jewish officers and soldiers whose Americanism could not be questioned. But I am forced to admit, not without foreboding, that those Jewish officers and enlisted men who did not show a preference for Communism and who were not fanatically pro-Soviet were few in number. Among Intelligence officers and CIC investigators, it was a common saying—and I know Communist-fronts will denounce me as anti-Semitic and a Fascist for reporting this—that “seventy-five per cent of the Jews in the army are pro-Communist.”
This percentage may not hold true of the old people; but among those in their thirties and younger, I think it conservative.
An energetic young Jewish reporter on a leading American daily, with whom I have conversed many times, admits frankly his pro-Communist sentiments—for which I have tried to shame him. Asked if he knew any Jewish people who were anti-Communist, he said. “Sure. My old man jumps on me all the time, just as you do.” Asked if he knew any Jewish young people who were not pro-Communist, he said, “Very few.”
My own investigative staff and I in the army reviewed or processed thousands of pro-Communist cases. The percentage of Jews among them was disproportionately high. The “heat” is put on any person, Jew or Gentile, who mentions these facts. An official of the ADL said to a friend of mine, “Why talk about them? We want you not to mention them.” I am not talking with the intent to create prejudice. I am reporting facts of the greatest importance to our future security, internal and external.
Attacks Grow Vicious
The responsibility for this strong Communist trend among the young Jews is squarely on the left-wing leaders in the Jewish community. These people have managed virtually to control the Jewish press—which I urge you to read.
Here are just a few quotations:
Dr. Louis G. Reynolds, in the July 5, 1946, issue of California Jewish Voice: “I cannot conceive of any Jew in the role of an enemy of the Soviet Union. To me, such a Jew is an unnatural monstrosity, a travesty on everything that is decent and right.”
J. I. Fishbein in The Sentinel (sub-titled “Devoted to Unity in Jewish Life”), issue of June 20, 1946 (under caption, “The Editor Views the News”): “The fascist-minded scum and Naziphiles of this country are threatening Russia with everything from atom bombs to ‘democratic elections.’ . . . We recognize that in this country the ‘Hate-Russia’ element is also the ‘Hate-the-Jews’ element. . . . Did you ever hear of any anti-Semites anywhere in the world who were not also anti-Soviet? . . . We recognize our foes. Let us recognize our friends, the Soviet people.”
The Jewish Opinion Publishing Company, as long ago as 1937, awarded prizes to six essayists on ” How to Combat Anti-Semitism in America.” All prize winners expressed sentiments hardly compatible with the American tradition of freedom, some of them attacking the Christian religion as causing anti-Semitism. Judges were George Gordon Battle, John Haynes Holmes, Everett R. Clinchy, Ludwig Lewishon, and Stephen S. Wise. Dr. Clinchy is the present director (non-Jewish) of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise is too well known as a leader of the Marxist Zionist movement to need introduction.
Here is a question from one of the prize winners, Joshua Trachtenberg, a Rabbi of Easton, Pennsylvania: “Were this essay entitled ‘How to Eradicate Anti-Semitism in America‘ it should have to open with the grim admission: It can’t be done! Not short of demolishing the America we live in and building a new one, at any rate. Even outside Marxist circles it is a commonplace that anti-Semitism . . . is a disease indigenous to our economic system, which goads the underprivileged . . . to exact payment of the eternal scapegoat, the Jew, for the iniquities of the system itself . . . Anti-Semitism is a potent buckler in the defensive armor of Capitalism. In the degree that the various secondary factors that make for the victimization of the Jew lose their force, the inchoate rebellion of the masses can be less readily diverted from the real oppressors and the doom of the Capitalist system draws near.” This frank anti-Capitalist does add: “Nor is it politic to press an argument which might alienate a great many of those non-Jews who would come to our aid on less controversial ground.”
It is the frequency of such sentiments which today makes Americans suspicious of all secretive organized movements. What, they ask, is the Anti-Defamation League up to, and why does it need to spend $5,000,000 trying to persuade our children and young people to some end it has conceived to be to the best interests of the Jewish community? Why are so many of our own neighbors here in America highly organized and financed and saying the same things that the agents of the Communist Revolution are saying all over the world, while western civilization, the so-called Christian world, is crumbling nation by nation under the onslaught?
More and more intemperate language is used, as one writer stimulates another. Here is a statement, the sentiments of which are prominent in the Jewish press:
‘Rabbi Leon Spitz, a sermon quoted in the American Hebrew of March 1, 1946: “Perhaps the time has come when roles should be changed. Let Esau whine and wail and protest to the civilized world, and let Jacob raise his hand to fight the good fight. The anti-Semite . . . understands but one language, and he must be dealt with on his own level. The Purim Jews stood up for their lives. (Note: Reference is to the Book of Esther in the Old Testament. “Esau” is used by modern Jews as a code name for the stupid gentile; “Jacob” for the crafty, deceptive Jew.) American Jews, too, must come to grips with our contemporary anti-Semites. We must fill our jails with anti-Semitic gangsters. We must fill our insane asylums with anti-Semitic lunatics.We must combat every alien Jew-hater. We must harass and prosecute our Jew-baiters to the extreme limits of the laws. We must humble and shame our anti-Semitic hoodlums to such an extent that none will wish or dare to become (their) ‘fellow-travelers’.”
This from a Rabbi to his flock! This in a land which has shown greater tolerance for all races, Jews included, than any in history!
To understand the full import of the above sermon by Rabbi Spitz, it is necessary to remember that any man or woman who actively opposes Communism is immediately branded by Communist-fronts as anti-Semitic. If a law can be passed making “anti-Semitism” a crime, the Communists can hail their enemies into court—as in the infamous “Sedition Trial.”
Who decides what citizens are “anti-Semitic” gangsters, lunatics and Jew-baiters? Courts recently have assessed libel judgments against self-appointed prosecutors of innocent victims of this fury. Derounian, for instance (alias Carlson), author of Undercover and The Plotters, has been found guilty on numerous counts of libeling American citizens with this false smear. A federal judge, presiding at one of the suits against Derounian, said he found no evidence of anti-Semitism in the speech, the writings and the activities of the libeled smear victim. Yet 700,000 copies of Undercover had been sold, with the assistance of Walter Winchell, spreading false defamation from coast to coast.
The above statement of the rabbi need not necessarily imply that he is himself pro-Communist. He may have been taken in by the fear hysteria spread by Communist leaders, including both Jews and Gentiles. But he is stirring his Jewish flock almost to the point of violent eruption.
I am sure there is no organized Fascist movement in America worth all the scare. Such a movement is not what the Reds are talking about. It is the anti-Communist movement they are fighting and they brand it Fascist—and anti-Semitic. It is the pro-Americanism “reaction” they are fighting. Of all times and places in history when a Jew could settle down to a normal relationship with his Gentile neighbors, the time is now, the place is America. I see signs that the activity of the Communist crusade to brand the opposition as anti-Semitic, coupled with the activity of many secret Gestapos, including the ADL , is setting in motion a wave of anti- Semitism. The burning of a fiery cross where never a Klansman is found, simply to frighten negroes and Jews, the writing of anti-Semitic phrases on a synagogue—these tricks, exposed in several places as done by young Communists to fan race friction, are beginning to take effect.
Many a Gentile is completely stumped by this question. He is confused because, knowing the extreme brutality of the Bolsheviks and their successors, sympathizing deeply with the enslaved Russian people, (for whom Victor Kravchenko appeals eloquently to us in his remarkable historic document, I Chose Freedom) he cannot understand why so many of his Jewish acquaintances are pro-Soviet. He has a right to ask the question, and he is entitled to an honest answer. We are in a precarious position today, our leaders and publishers afraid to tell the people the real answer, afraid of the smear or loss of business, because we have blacked it out of the news for thirty years. Our sin is catching up with us. Many an editor himself now does not know the real secret behind the Iron Curtain.
Let Louis Levine, national chairman of the Jewish Council of Russian Relief, tell you. Levine paid an extended visit to Russia last summer and came back hysterical in his enthusiasm for the Soviet regime. He reported before an audience provided by, and I believe sponsored by, leading Jewish organizations and publicists of Chicago. The heart of these group gatherings appears to be the ADL. In an article in the November, 1946, issue of Soviet Russia Today, Levine (billed as “Outstanding leader of American Jewry”) wrote: “Special concern for the Jewish people has characterized the Soviet Union since its birth in the 1917 Revolution. A week after tsarism was overthrown, the infant Socialist government, headed by Lenin, legally abolished national oppression, making it the first country in the world to declare anti-Semitism a crime. . . . Every manifestation of anti-Semitism was fought openly and sternly.”
He makes the amazing statement, “Many American Jews did not quite believe that the anti-Semitic scourge of several thousand years could be wiped out within one generation and certainly not in a country in which it had been an official part of the state apparatus for many hundred years.”
I don’t know where in all literature I have read such an appalling statement. Considering that there must have been millions of Russians adjudged anti-Semitic, especially by Communist standards, it does not seem possible that “anti-Semitism” could have been wiped out in one generation short of killing and exiling countless hordes of Gentile Russians. Was it, then, the suspicion of anti-Semitism as much as property considerations which caused the Communist regime to destroy 20,000,000 Russians? Levine continues: “And there were some (American Jews) who believed the ‘miracle’ had taken place, but frankly wondered whether it was accomplished at the cost of a loss of a distinct Jewish life, of a decline in religious observances and of a deterioration of Jewish culture.”
Levine then describes expansively his 6,000-mile trip inside the Soviet Union, going wherever and whenever he pleased without surveillance— a rare concession, made not even to our ambassadors. And everywhere, he says, he encountered a Jewish culture. He tells that “more than in any other country in the world, Jewish literature, theater, poetry is considered basic to a full cultural life. I met many non-Jews who had read Sholem Aleichem in the original Yiddish. Many non-Jews, including the Ukrainian leader, Dmitri Manuilsky, were brought up in Jewish surroundings, and retain great interest and pride in their background.” (Manuilsky is often mentioned as a possible successor to Stalin.) He says that the “center of Jewish life in the Soviet Union is the extremely active and influential Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. . . . When I spoke to government officials about the Jewish Council or the Soviet Jews, I was generally asked, ‘What does Mikhoels (head of the Committee) think about it’ or I was told that ‘If it is OK with the Committee, it is OK with us’.”
In my Intelligence research, I had learned from documents and authentic excerpts from documents gathered from numerous sources, that the Russian Communist government was still under powerful Jewish influence; also Jewish soldiers from Russia and Poland in the U.S. Army told me something of this power. (I don’t think they themselves realized its magnitude.) But here it is again, from one who ought to know.
Levine wrote of meeting world-famous Jewish surgeons, a Jewish general, and many other high government officials of Jewish origin. “It was apparent—and even the sketchiest of observations would have disclosed it—that the Soviet Jews participate fully and freely on every level of government activity.”
He went much stronger than that in Chicago, (on the 12th floor at 32 West Randolph Street) on the night of October 30, 1946, saying that many of the high ranking government officials were Jewish, and explaining one of the devices which, I believe, has kept the Russian people themselves much in the dark as to the extent of Jewish control over them: Many of the Jewish officials “did not look Jewish, but they spoke to me privately in Hebrew or Yiddish.”
He implied what we find confirmed from other sources, that the “miracle” by which all anti-Semitism had been “wiped out” in Russia in one generation was the weapon of Liquidation or exile to Siberia. “One does not dare be anti-Semitic in Russia,” he wrote.
This undoubtedly is the real secret behind the iron curtain—the power of the highly organized, utterly ruthless Marxist wing of Russian Jewry. It terrorized anti-Communist Jews, the same as anti-Communist Gentiles, for a time: but Levine, in the article previously quoted, relates how they have opened their synagogues again and the Jewish people again enjoy complete religious freedom. Now that the Christian church has been virtually exterminated, it may be the intent of the Russian government to permit religious freedom. How can we know for sure?
The privileged class
This reminds me of Kravchenko’s pitiful story of the complete and utter degradation of the Russian family, the closing of their Christian churches, the killing and deporting of the kulaks—the farmers. No where in all the articles and reports I have read of the Russian scene have I found any indication that the non-Jewish people enjoyed or now enjoy any such privileges as Levine reports for the Jewish people there. Kravchenko writes a pitiful chapter in I Chose Freedom on seeing the privileged persons evacuated in Packard automobiles with their families or mistresses as the Hitler armies approached, and of how other people were forced at bayonet point to remain behind, to let the Nazi armies pass and then harass them with underground activities at great personal risk. He describes the bitterness as intense.
Levine wrote, “And at the outset of the war, as we all know, Jews were among the first evacuated from the western regions threatened by the Hitlerite invaders, and shipped to safety east of the Urals.” Thus Levine tells us the privileged persons saved from the Nazis were Jewish. He said 2,000,000 of them were thus saved. (Were the privileged class of whom Kravchenko wrote among these?)
Another observer writes of seeing Jews vacationing in luxury at resorts on the Black Sea, while Gentiles starved in Russian mills. This was just before the War.
Is it any wonder that Jews the world over are interested in the Soviet Union? Even if we had no other documentary evidence to substantiate Levine’s report—even if he were manufacturing considerable of it to swing American Jewry into the Marxist movement—their inclination in that direction would be understandable—except those who were sickened at the mass killings.
W. L. White, in his new book, Report on the Poles, (condensed in the December, 1946, issue of Reader’s Digest) estimates that only about 50 per cent of the Polish Communist government are Jewish. An official representative of that government has told me that he believes White’s estimate “conservative.”
Sokolsky reports that anti-Semitism is raging in Poland worse than anywhere else at any time in history. The Poles understand Communism.
Reports on Roumania and Hungary indicate great bitterness among the Christians, the same as in Poland, because of their fathomless fear of the radical Jewish element in their government.
White states that many Jews in Poland, before Russia took over, opposed the march of Communism. He says that the Polish Communist Party was dominated by Jews, who comprised about 70 per cent of the total Party membership; but the Party itself was small. I have reputable Jewish magazines and other publications issued during the war stating that many a Catholic and Protestant in Poland, including some Catholic priests, risked their lives to hide Jews from the Nazis. It may be there was much firm friendship and not very widespread Communism among the Polish peoples, Jews and Gentiles, before Russia look over. In the army I found very little pro-Communist sentiment among our Gentile Poles; I did find considerable among the Jewish Poles.
I have statements from trusted sources that many of the richest Jews in the Baltic states turned Communist overnight when the Red army came in. But this is not proof that they would have been Communist had the Baltics remained “free.” They had little choice; embracing Communism for them was easy. Resistance meant punishment, while as converts they would expect favored treatment at the hands of the Russian government.
Eye witnesses say they immediately began helping the Reds liquidate Christians.
Our own government and all governments understood that it was the Bolshevik element among the Jewish people who took over Russia in the October Revolution of 1917. A report by our own American Intelligence Service in 1919, never released in America but published in Paris (Documentation Catholique, issue of March 6, 1920), listed the names of the 25 leading Bolshevik officials, 24 of whom were shown as Jewish. The 25th, Lenin, married to a Jewess. (Some authorities insist that Lenin was half Jewish.) Heading the list of the 24 was, of course, L. Trotsky (Bronstein of New York).
Broadly, this report was confirmed in a British White Paper “Presented to Parliament by Command of His Majesty, April, 1919,” now a rare document, a photographed copy of which I have in safe keeping. This document was suppressed almost immediately after it was presented to Parliament, and when it reappeared the entire reference to the Jewish influence had been deleted. I will presently have a copy of the censored edition also. Originals are in safekeeping in several English and Irish university libraries.
The Jewish Transcript of Seattle, Washington, of May 29, 1936, said: “The Communists are Jewish controlled.”
Winston Churchill, in a speech on the floor of Parliament in 1919, reviewing the Revolution, also brought out the fact of Jewish Bolshevik domination. “The Last Days of the Romanoffs,” by Robert Wilton, an Englishman who served as an officer in the Russian army and was in an excellent position to observe; official reports made to President Woodrow Wilson and to the British government, and many reports by individuals, substantiate the fact that the power was seized by Jewish elements of the Bolshevik Party in the October Revolution of 1917. The money which went from New York City to finance the Revolution was raised and sent by American Jewish bankers, some of them not likely Bolsheviks themselves but rather anxious for revenge against a Czarist government which had committed pogroms against the Jews of Russia. This money, nevertheless, was placed in the hands of the Jewish element of the Bolshevik Communist Party in Russia—not in the hands of Gentile Bolsheviks—and it made possible the buying of arms and ammunition, the printing and distribution of seditious revolutionary literature among soldiers of the Russian armies, the feeding and financing of Communist agents, the setting up of governmental machinery. It was supplemented, to be sure, by funds stolen and seized in Russia.