THE JEWISH NEWS
Bookends
C\
Incorporating The Detroit Jewish Chronicle commencing with issue of July 20, 1951
Member American Association of English—Jewish Newspapers, Michigan Press Association, National Editorial
Association.
Published every Friday by The Jewish News Publishing Co., 17100 West Seven Mile Road, Detroit 48235 Mich.,
VE 8-9364. Subscription $6 a year. Foreign $7.
Second Class Postage Paid at Detroit, Michigan
PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
Editor and Publisher
CARMI M. SLOMOVITZ
Business Manager
SIDNEY SHMARAK
Advertising Manager
CHARLOTTE RYAMS
City Editor
Sabbath Scriptural Selections
This Sabbath, the twenty - third day of Av, 5724, the following Scriptural selections
will be read in our synagogues.
Pentateuchal portion: Deut. 7-12-11:35. Prophetical portion: Isaiah 49:14-51-3.
Licht benshen, Friday, July 31, 7:34 p.m.
VOL. XLV. No. 23
Page Four
July 31, 1964
USSR's Most Dangerous Form of Racialism
In this era of troubling situations
created by racist issues in this country, in
South Africa and in Russia, it is especially
disturbing to be told by the International
Commission of Jurists, who met earlier this
month in Geneva, that "anti-Semitism repre-
sents the most dangerous form of racialism
in the world."
Jewish issues generally are being ig-
nored at present, when the color problem
has become such a vital matter of concern—
one that disrupts the thinking of the citizens
of this land and creates such serious reper-
cussions in South Africa. The jurists, repre-
senting many lands, finding it necessary to
warn of the dangers that are menacing the
Jews in the Soviet Union, calls attention
anew to one of the most serious threats to
the largest portion of European Jewry.
In a lengthy report on "Religion in the
Soviet Union," George Bailey, the corre-
spondent of Reporter Magazine, had this to
say, describing his findings on the situation
affecting the Jews of Russia:
In some of the recent economic trials, the
role of the scapegoat has been refined to a
remarkable degree. On the evidence provided by
Soviet reporting of the trials, close to sixty per
cent of those sentenced to death in the Soviet
Union as a whole (ninety per cent in the
Ukraine) are Jews. The discrepancy between
these percentages and the 1.09 per cent of the
total population of the Soviet Union made up of
Jews (two per cent in the Ukraine) has caused
a considerable stir in the Soviet Union and some
concern abroad.
Most of the Jewish defendants have been
charged with the manufacture of goods without
proper authorization. Although in comparatively
lowly positions, the Jews were apparently able
to entice and enthrall large numbers of key
officials ("With the aid of large bribes, they drew
unstable and morally decadent people into their
criminal orbit"). In singling out the Jew as a
prime target, the Soviet press continually
stresses his "giving bribes to spiritual brethren,"
his "characteristic sins," "the well-known fact
that Jews will go to any length in order to help
their kind." Groups of Jews are identified as
"compatriots" or "co-religionists" of defendants
and the lot are branded "members of an alien
world.' The impression is given that the Soviets
have finally managed to isolate and identify the
virus of free enterprise in its purest and most
dangerous form.
The concerted anti-Semitic campaign in the
Soviet Union is always —directly or indirectly—
connected with the Jew's religion, and the drive
against the Jews is the spearhead of the general
drive to destroy the Judeo-Christian ethic. Soviet
Communists regard the Jew as the religious
archetype, Judaism as the primordial religion.
For Communists, the concept of race in any
discriminatory sense is doctrinally taboo—hence
the Soviet government's enraged protest that it
cannot be accused of anti-Semitism. But Judaism
is the only major religion exclusively identified
with a people. The relationship between Judaism,
Jewish culture, and even Jewish "consciousness"
is integral. The Torah and the Talmud are the
canonized ethnic history of the Jews. In short,
the Jew's religion is hN identity. For this reason
it would be impossible to foster a heresy within
Judaism or to control "Soviet Judaism" as a
front against the rest of world Jewry. Moscow
might conceivably become the New Byzantium
but it could never possibly become the New
Jerusalem. Consequently, not one Jewish re-
ligious official has ever been allowed to travel
outside the Soviet Union.
In the 1920s and 1930s Jewish institutions
were allowed to flourish to a certain degree
because Russian Jewry included an intellectual
and professional elite essential to the Soviet
consolidation effort. But in 1948 the considerable
array of Yiddish schools, newspapers, publishing
houses, repertory theaters, dramatic schools and
research institutes was liquidated at one blow.
The only Yiddish publication in the Soviet
Union in addition to the magazine Sovietish
Heimland is a newspaper called Birobidzhan
Shtern which appears thrice weekly and has a
circulation of exactly one thousand. These two
publications "serve" a community numbering
almost half a million native Yiddish speakers
and two and a quarter million who voluntarily
registered their nationality as Jewish in. the
Soviet census of 1959. The Sidi Tal theater
group has no theater of its own and is made up
of aging Jewish artists who occasionally give
"guest performances." There is nothing else.
There are now only five officiating rabbis left
in the Soviet Union. All are over seventy, one is
over eighty. The student body of the only Jewish
seminary, the Moscow Yeshiva, which was
opened as a sop to foreign public opinion in 1957
and once boasted fourteen students, has been
reduced to what was described to me as "one and
one half students," the "half student" being so
described "because he is only half there." A few
years ago eight students were denied resident
permits for Moscow. Four other students were
simply "dissuaded" from attending the seminary.
"This campaign has been carefully calculated
by the Soviet authorities." a Jew told me as we
walked in a Moscow park.
Summarizing his findings, the Reporter
correspondent branded the "class enemy"
anti-religious campaign in the USSR "a con-
cept that fulfills the same function in a Com-
munist system as 'race enemy' did for the
Nazis."
It would be sheer folly to ignore these
facts, regardless of the repeated denials
made by Soviet spokesmen that there is an
organized anti-Semitic movement in the
USSR. The fact remains that Jews are dis-
criminated against in the Soviet Union, that
they are deprived of their cultural rights,
that, unlike other groups of Russians, the
Jews have been prevented from publishing
daily newspapers on a scale comparable to
pre-Stalinist days, a n d Hebrew has been
branded with Zionism as a foreign ideology.
The fact remains also that Khrushchev's
policies have encouraged anti-Jewish propa-
gandists in Arab countries. When N. S.
Khrushchev spoke in Cairo, addressing:
"Dear Friend, President Gamal Abdel Nas-
ser: Esteemed President of the National
Assembly Anwar Sadat: Esteemed Depu-
ties, Friends" (this is taken from official
Soviet Documents, abridged by Novosti
Press Agency, issued to all Soviet papers,
May 12, 1964), his only reference to Israel
was in this paragraph:
"The Soviet Union supports the just demands
M the Arab countries and the entire Arab people
on the need for Israel to fulfill the United Nations
resolution regarding Arab Palestinian refugees.
We support the just demands of the Arab states
in connection with the imperialist plans of Israel
to use the waters of the River Jordan to the
detriment of the rights of the Arabs using these
waters."
The facts regarding these accusations
have been definitely established, both at the
UN and in Washington. Yet this brief in-
citement against Israel was the most widely
circulated portion of Khrushchev's Cairo
speech. It is an indication of the readiness
of Khrushchev to be used as a tool against
Jewry and the eagerness of Nasser and his
cohorts to utilize every manifestation of
anti-Semitism for their purposes.
The official Soviet document containing
the joint Khrushchev-Nasser statement on
their conferences in Cairo contains a para-
graph somewhat longer than the one just
quoted, but including the similar assertions
regarding Israel. While there now are re-
ports of a "disenchantment between the
USSR-UAR leaders, their attitudes remain
menacing and they especially tend to under-
mine efforts for peace in the Middle East.
That's how the Russian scheme works—
within Russia, among the Arabs, wherever
propaganda can be utilized. And the em-
phasis, often out of context, is placed as an
onus upon Jewry.
It is from the Kremlin's rulers that the
troubles emanate today, and it is a source
of great concern that "anti-Semitism repre-
sents the most dangerous form of racialism
in the world."
01A
Friedman's Critical
Critical Anthology:
i
'The Worlds of Existent alism'
Seldom has existentialism been as clearly defined and as well
illustrated as in the new critical reader, "The Worlds of Existentialism,"
edited by the eminent authority on Martin Buber's works, Dr. Maurice
Friedman, professor of philosophy at Sarah
Lawrence College.
This monumental work, published by
Random House, contains an anthology rep-
resenting many fields in which existential-
ism is reflected. Religion and psychoan-
alysis, philosophy and the social sciences
are drawn upon, and the authors upon
whom the editor has drawn are from all
ages, all nations.
At the outset, in his scholarly intro-
duction, Prof. Friedman explains that exist-
entialism "is not a philosophy but a mood
embracing a number of disparate philoso-
phies" and that "the differences among
them are more basic than the temper
which unites them." He describes the tem-
Prof. Friedman
per as "a reaction against the static, the
abstract, the purely rational, the merely irrational, in favor of the
dynamic and the concrete, personal involvement and 'engagement,'
action, choice and commitment, the distinction between 'authentic'
and 'inauthentic' existence, and the actual situation of the existential
subject as the starting point of thought."
Prof. Friedman views as only a half truth the contention
of Walter Kaufman that "religion has always been existentialist,"
and he maintains: "Religion has never been simply a detached
observation of reality for its own sake. Rather it has always been
a way of life, a way of man. It has always stood in need, therefore,
of existential verification in the lived life of man." He explains:
"The root of 'existentialism' is, of course, 'existence.' That might
seem to include just about everything, and by the same token
to say nothing, were it not for the traditions in the history of
religion and the history of philosophy which have tended to look
away from the 'passing flux' of existence to a - realmof true 'Being,'
unchanging and eternal, a world of ideal essences or a formless
absolute beyond these essences, in comparison with which the
particulars of our earthly life are seen as merely phenomena
The forerunners in Prof. Friedman's sources are the Old Ti" .
ment, the Psalms, the Prophets, as well as the New Testament.
Dr. Friedman makes much use of Hasidism, of Hasidic sayings
and fables, and quoting from the Masters he resorts to the wisdom
of Rabbi Hanokh, Rabbi Uri, Rabbi Yitzhak Eisik, Rabbi Zusya and
others.
For example, on the subject of "Give and Take," we read: "Rabbi
Yitzhak Eisik said, 'The motto of life is "Give and take." Everyone
must be both a giver and a receiver. He who is not both is as a barren
tree.' "
The scholars and philosophers in this anthology include Paul
Tillich, Franz Kafka, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Karl Marx,
Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and many others.
In his conclusions Dr. Friedman evaluates some of the quoted
works, probes into the relation of an ex-Nazi like Martin Heidegger
to the philosophy he expounded and his later thought about Being.
"What concerns us here," Dr. Friedman states, "is not the ques-
tion of whether Heidegger was an active Nazi—a fact established and
well-known, if not always understood in its full range—but whether
Heidegger's political activities have no bearing on the meaning and
value of his philosophy . . We are not concerned with Heidegger's
Nazi activities in themselves but whether there is any integral relation
between them and his philosophy which casts further light on the
meaning and implications of that philosophy."
The works of the other quoted philosphers are analyzed in the
study of the issues, and the noted editor and compiler of this work
states:
Despite all confusions and impreciseness ... existentialism has an,
important continuing place in the philosophy and culture of our time.
It offers modern man methods and subjects of 'existential illumination'
which are notably absent in those schools of modern philsophy that
have from the outset excluded existential knowledge and the whole-
ness of man from their concern."
The evaluations of a former Nazi, the works of Buber, the views
of philosophers of all ages are vital factors of this valuable collection
which has been edited and commented upon so knowledgeably by the
distinguished editor.
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