THr7EVITH NEWS
Where Jews Are Banned
Incorporating the Detroit Jewish Chronicle commencing with issue of July 20, 1951
Member American Association
Editorial Association.
Published every Friday by The
Mich., VE 8-9364. Subscription $5 a
Entered as second class matter
8, 1879.
PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
Editor and Publisher
of English—Jewish Newspapers, Michigan Press Association, National
Jewish News Publishing Co. 17100 West Seven Mile Road, Detroit 35,
year. Foreign $6.
Aug. 6, 1942 at Post Office, Detroit, Mich. under act of Congress of March
SIDNEY SHMARAK
Advertising Manager
CARMI M. SLOMOVITZ
Circulation Manager
FRANK SIMONS
City Editor
Sabbath Scriptural Selections
This Sabbath, the fourteenth day of Iyar, 5 720, the following Scriptural selections will be
read in our synagogues:
Pentateuchal portion, Emor, Lev. 21:1-24:23. Prophetical portion., Ezek. 44:15-31.
Licht Benshen, Friday, May 13, 7:25 p.m.
VOL. XXXVII. No. 11
Page Four
May 13, 1960
Basic American Idea Must Be Honored
A deplorable situation has developed in
Washington. There was a time when even
the slightest abuse of the rights of Ameri-
cans to share in the freedom of commer-
cial exchanges, whether on land or on sea,
would have brought the unanimous pro-
test of our legislators. There was a long
era during which the privilege of Ameri-
cans to speak their minds and to resort
to petitions for causes they believed just
were viewed as elementary rights.
All of these basic American codes stood
in danger of being destroyed, due to the
fright that has entered into our diplo-
matic ranks lest the dictators in Arab
countries should take a dislike to the leg-
islative powers of free Americans.
Fortunately, the United States Senate
refused to yield to panic. But there
were enough well-meaning Americans
who, on the spur of the moment, fell vic-
tims to the spread of fear, and they came
very near to destroying one of the basic
American principles: that of our right to
petition and to speak our minds freely.
It is heartening to know that both Mich-
igan Senators—Pat McNamara and Philip
A. Hart—supported the Douglas-Keating
Amendment, and that Senator Hart was
one of its co-sponsors.
*
*
A grave injustice was perpetrated in
Washington when Senator J. W. Fuibright
and a group of misled Senators who fol-
lowed his thinking resorted to the term
"pressure group" and applied it to the
Jewish people. These men rendered a
disservice to true Americanism when they
injected a so-called "Jewish vote" issue.
By appeasing Nasser, while attacking
Israel, Senator Fulbright became the
sponsor of a bigoted idea.
Now Senator Fuibright is about to meet
the dictator he was appeasing, in the Tat-
ter's headquarters in Cairo, and we are
beginning to wonder what else will de-
velop out of the biased -partnership that
is emerging out of the failure of responsi-
ble Americans to recognize the dangers
that stem from conciliating the United
Arab Republic at the expense of Israel.
* * *
The situation is, in a sense, most amaz-
ing. Israel is the butt of enemy nations
who surround her and threaten her ex-
tinction. Yet, when two unions, motivated
by a sense of justice, have undertaken to
picket an Egyptian ship, in retaliation for
harm that has been done to American sea-
men who traveled through Arab ports en
route to Israel, the representatives of the
Arab nations have turned the affair into
a diplomatic issue. Several times, the
diplomats in Washington made repre-
sentations to the United States Govern-
ment against the picketing of an Egyptian
ship, and State Department officials
finally succeeded in calling a halt to the
unions' picketing.
State Department officials had gone so
far as to maintain that very few Ameri-
can ships suffered indignities in Arab
ports while en route to Israel. This has
been disproved.
Speaking before the United Nations
Correspondents Association, in New
York, last week, Israel's Ambassador
to the UN, Michael S. Comay, stated
that 387 ships from 28 countries were
blacklisted for trading with Israel or
touching at Israeli ports. Is there a bet-
ter reason for maritime unions to re-
sent such abuses of the rights to free-
dom of the seas? "Others, besides Is-
rael, are suffering penalties as a result
of the Arab attempt to put the eco-
nomic squeeze," Ambassador Comay
said. It is no wonder that the labor
unions should have acted as they did.
* * *
Our State Department is loaded with a
sufficient amount of international prob-
lems to cause those who are battling for
freedom of the seas and for justice to a
very small nation to deplore the necessity
of opposing certain elements in Washing-
ton whose actions must be interpreted as
unfriendly to Israel.
Yet, the AFL-CIO president, George
Meany, and his associates, went along
with the unions who boycotted the Egyp-
tian ship, and the heads of the maritime
unions have warned that unless the State
Department is able to force a halt to harm
being done to American shipping as a
result of the Arab boycott of Israel, the
picketing will be resumed.
Of interest in the present instance also
is the JTA report from Washington that
plans to create a billion-dollar Interna-
tional Development Association ran into a
demand from a strong bloc of members
of the House Banking Committee that
the charter include a clause which would
in effect bar loans to the United Arab
Republic due to the Suez Canal issue.
This is another indication that there is a
strong element in Washington that will
not go along with the destructive policies
of Nasser and will not yield to his threats.
* * *
A major source of regret is the failure
of some Washington correspondents to
recognize in the current issue a cause in-
volving a grave injustice to a small nation
and a threat to an American code of free-
dom of expression in defiance of the views
of foreign dictators. But, contrary to the
blindness of at least one Detroit corres-
pondent, a nationally prominent column-
ist called Senator Fulbright and the Ad-
ministration to task for yielding to Nas-
ser-inspired panic. David L a w r e n c e
maintained in his analysis of the issue
that Fulbright took sides with Nasser
against Israel, and he added:
"It is the Nasser government which is
trying to sabotage American foreign policy.
Within the last few days the vice-foreign
minister of the United Arab Republic, on
his visit to Chile, told a news conference
there that the Cairo government 'will reso-
lutely help Cuba defend herself against
aggression if Cuba requests it, and if it is
possibilities.' There was a time
within
when such
such a pronouncement would have been
regarded as a public insult to the United
States because of the Monroe Doctrine .. .
"The Cairo regime has been boldly taking
the Communist side in many a dispute, and
yet the chairman of the Senate Foreign
Affairs Committee imputes improper motives
to other members of Congress who resent
the pro-Communist tactics of Egypt's dic-
tator."
Thus, the facts are emerging, some of
them in all their ugliness. The bitterest
portion of the entire dispute is that Is-
rael's position should have been vilified by
responsible men in the Senate. But there
were more Senators who saw the justice
of Israel's position, and that is most heart-
ening. It means that the American idea
of fair play is indestructible, no matter
how many intrusions are made into our
political sphere by dictatorial pressure
from without.
There remains the problem created
by the abandonment of the picket-
ing of the Egyptian ship. It remains to be
seen whether the State Department will
do as much to help put an end to the Arab
boycott of Israel as it did to interfere with
the protests against that damaging boy-
cott.
Intermarriage, Freud's Ancestry
Among Essays in YIVO Annual
Daniel J. Levinson and Maria H. Levinson, director and staff
member, respectively, of the Center for Sociopsychological Re-
search of Harvard Medical School, in an essay, "Jews Who inter-
marry: Sociopsychological Bases of Ethical Identity and Change,"
appearing in the new volume of YIVO Annual of Jewish Social
Science, make this important declaration:
"Intermarriage is not a unitary phenomenon. Intermarriage
occurs under a variety of psychological and social conditions and
has varying consequences. Psychologically it is not purely a
neurotic manifestation, although neurotic motives may enter
to varying degrees. Nor is it to be seen solely as an 'escape' from
the Jewish group or as a means of securing social or financial
gain—although motives of this kind play a part ih some cases.
Some intermarriers have had very little Jewish education, while
others have had what to them was an excess which they found
intolerable; but the amount of Jewish education as such does
not seem to be a crucial factor."
The authors of this thorough study also state: "Whether the
rate of intermarriage by Jews rises or falls in the future, will
depend not on pronouncements for or against intermarriage as
such but on more fundamental social and psychological changes:
in the secularization and urbanization of American society; in
the new bases that can be found for building a distinctive but
not insular Jewish identity; in the emotional qualities of the
Jewish family, and the like."
"Discussion Regarding Sigmund Freud's Ancestry," one of
the major articles in this YIVO Annual, was authored by
Mayer Halevy, Mordecai W. Bernstein, L. Melamed and Willy
Aron, in a series of brief statements.
Other authors and their themes, in this volume, are: "The
Bearing of Emancipation on Jewish Survival," by Dr. Horace M.
Kallen; "Problems of the Jewish Ethnic Character," by Leibush
Lehrer; "American Jewry as a Field of Social Science Research,"
by Joshua A. Fishman; "The Role of English Jews in the Devel-
opment of American Jewish Life, 1775-1850," by Jacob Neusner;
"The Musical Heritage of the Bible," by Joseph Yasser; "Wilhelm
Roscher's Theory of the Economic and Social Position of the
Jews in the Middle Ages," by Toni Oelsner; "One Hundred Years
in the History of the Jewish Community of Wurzburg, 1250-1350,"
by Moses A. Shulvass; "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations During the
Nazi Occupation," by Philip Friedman; "Jewish Religious Ob-
servance During the French Revolution of 1789," by Z. Szajkow-
ski; "Martin Buber and the Social Problem of Our Time," by
Maurice Friedman; "The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Community
in Bohemia," by Max Steiner.
Friedman's article on Ukrainian-Jewish relations shows
that three million Jews lived among the forty million Ukrainians
during the Nazi invasion; that there were Ukrainian collabora-
tors with the Nazis in persecuting the Jews; that to a lesser
extent Jews were given comfort by some Ukrainian elements.
Friedman states that scant documentation is available on the
relations between Jews and Ukrainians and that the material
available "has not been subjected to a thorough scholarly exam-
ination nor supplemented by other findings." He adds:
"There is a wide gulf separating the Jewish and Ukrainian
interpretations of the issues involved, and the lack of reliable and
thorough documentation is certainly no help in narrowing the
gap, in bringing closer the divergent views of Jewish and
Ukrainian scholars."
""
The Secrets of Long Life
//
Dr. George Gallup, director of the American Institute of
Public Opinion, and Evan Hill explored the field of longevity.
The result is their book, "The Secrets of Long Life," which
has been published by Bernard Geis Associates (527 Lexington,
N.Y. 17), and is being distributed by Random House.
Every aspect of the subject is reviewed and evaluated—
health, heredity, the teeth, sleep, a person's personality. The
guidance offered is enlightening, and also entertaining. The
book makes splendid reading.
There is an interesting chart worth mentioning. Listing
spans of life, it gives for Israel's Jewish population 71 for girls
and 68 for boys. By comparison, the figures are 41 and 36 re-
spectively for Egypt.