Muman, I find it hard to believe that Antisemitism was larger in the South than it was in the North. It was on both sides of the fence, and there are plenty examples of it everywhere.
Also, that bit about the protocols being the second best selling book in the US in the 20s and 30s is StørmFrønt nonsense. I think we covered this a long time ago.
Also, Chaim is very supportive of southern states keeping their southern heritage, and this is no accident.
brian,
I didn't say anything against the South keeping their heritage. What I am saying is that I don't think the south has a good history of treatment of the Jews.
What I quoted above is not from StørmFrønt, quite the opposite. That is from the Jewish website Aish.com and it is not the only source which claims that Ford and many great American industrialists gained a lot from propagating antisemitism in the 20s and 30s.
http://www.aish.com/jl/h/48956806.html
PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION
Around the turn of the century (It was first published in 1903), the Russian secret police began to circulate a forgery which became the most famous anti-Semitic "document" in history -- The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These protocols purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of world Jewish leaders, which supposedly took place once every hundred years for the purpose of plotting how to manipulate and control the world in the next century.
As ridiculous as this might sound to us today, the Protocols were seized upon as "proof" that the world was dominated by Jews who were responsible for all of the world's problems.
Fans and proponents of the Protocols have included such anti-Semites as: Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company; Adolf Hitler, as might be expected; Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser; and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, among others.
Despite the fact that the Protocols are a proven forgery whose allegations are completely ridiculous, an expression of the worst kind of anti-Semitism, the Protocols continue to sell briskly today and are carried by such huge bookstore chains as Barnes and Noble and amazon.com in the name of freedom of speech.
http://www.jewishmag.com/86mag/usa10/usa10.htm
The 1920's were a period of upward mobility for the Jew. Jewish attendance at institutions of higher learning was far greater than ever. Despite that American reactionism increasingly led to direct and indirect quotas restricting Jewish access to professional schools and corporate America, the Jewish immigrant's children increasingly realized the American dream.
The very definition that Jews were a religion and not a separate people would be used, ironically during the civil rights struggles of the 1960-1980's, to exclude Jews from admittance to higher education again. If Jews were a religion and not an identifiable people such as American Blacks, American Indians or American Hispanics, then by affirmative action quotas they could be excluded from admittance to universities. The very effort of trying to be part of America would eventually be used to exclude Jews.
The rising wave of American anti-Semitism, in the 1920's and 1930's, was led by respected leaders such as the American auto magnate Henry Ford through his newspaper the Dearborn Michigan Independent. Ford's serialization of the false anti-Semitic Russian secret police creation, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, granted an increasing level of legitimacy to American anti-Semitism. Ford believed that WWI was caused by German Jewish banking interests. American anti-Semitism reached its pre WWII zenith under the near fascist support of the nationally syndicated radio broadcaster Father James Coughlin, the famous aviator supporter of the America First Committee, the establishment of the German American Bund and fears generated by the Great Depression.
The Great Depression began in 1929 with the October collapse of Wall Street. Millions upon millions of people were disastrously affected economically. Many looked for someone to blame. Jews were scapegoated and directly impacted when the Bank of the United States failed in 1930. The Bank of the United States was a Jewish bank. Almost all of its 400,000 depositors were Jews. The Bank of the United States held the assets of 1/5 of New York's Jews and 1/10 of all American Jews. With the failure of the Bank, came the Great Depression and wiped out most of the assets of the Jewish immigrant generation; their retirement savings, their college funds for their children, their economic future.
The Great Depression and consequent economic implosion led to a very human reaction in America. Jobs, scarce as they were, went to ones own. Young Jewish Doctors were generally excluded from hospitals except for the 44 Jewish Hospitals in the country. Being a Jewish attorney was a guaranteed ticket to virtual starvation. Jews, like the American Black, were the last to be hired and the first to be fired. Radicalism grew rapidly in the 1930's, along with anti-Semitism.
Physically, Jews were rarely attacked but that the American environment could turn on them suddenly was a terrible shock. The Great Depression made anti-Semitism respectable and not just the domain of the lunatic Ku Klux Klan. As Howard Sachar noted "A 1930 research study undertaken by New York's Federation of Jewish Philanthropies concluded that 'normal absorption of Jews within the American economic structure is now practically impossible." Eight years later, an American Jewish Congress report noted that anti-Jewish restrictions in want ads had reached their highest level in history.
Hebert Hoover's inability to respond to the new realities of the Depression led to the 1932 election victory of Franklin Roosevelt. Jews saw in Roosevelt a liberal alternative to the backsliding reactionism of the Republicans. As early as 1928, Jewish voting power was beginning to exert itself in Presidential elections when Alfred E. Smith garnered 72% of the Jewish vote for the Democratic ticket. The fact that Alfred Smith – an Irish Catholic who spoke serviceable Yiddish as well as Italian and who had prominent Jews on his staff earned himself the nickname of the "Irisher mensch."
August 15th is auspicious as a day when two different Jews were lynched :
* S.A. Bierfield was lynched by the K.K.K. in Franklin Tenn., 1868, first such incident involving a Jew.
* Albert Bettelhein, journalist and author, convicted by a Georgia jury of murder, was lynched by an anti-Semitic mob, 1915.
I will say once again that times have changed and maybe I am just holding onto a prejudice from the 50s-60s... But there was much hostility toward what they called "New York" Jews, of which my family was considered.
Topic: If the South rises again...where will you be? (Read 3464 times)