THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Throughout history Jews have found
it necessary to forget the spectacles on
their noses and the autumn in their
hearts. But only for a while. One such a
while came. to New York - in the middle
thirties when the German-American
Bund tossed verbal thunderbolts (and
worse) at Jews from their brown-shirted
enclave in Yorkville, the "Reich Valley."
Rabbi Stephen Wise, the exalted leader
of Reform Jewry, became upset by these
happenings, and in 1935 he sent word to
Meyer Lansky that "something must be
done" about the Nazi outrages.. Lansky
agreed to supply the necessary means
and asked for only one consideration:
that the Jewish press lay off him and the
methods he might have to employ.
For the next couple of years the Nazi
strut was increasingly tripped up by
Jews tossing sticks and stones and
bombs. Heads were smashed, bones
broken, and the thud of fat German
necks hitting sidewalks sounded a new
kind of Jewish rumba. The bomb
throwers and fist swingers were drawn
from every level of Jewish life. Few were
aware that Lansky was behind the
operations.
"And who do you think came out
against us?" Lansky says. "The Jewish
press, of course. They called us Jewish
gangsters, these fair souls who sat
peacefully in their beautiful homes while
we were on the lines defending Jewish
honor. They kept up the pressure, they
wanted us destroyed, we were 'shaming'
Jewry by attacking Nazis. The heat got
too much for Rabbi-Wise, and he ordered
us to put an end to our actions."
I told Lansky that Rabbi Wise had
been less successful in his efforts to
silence Ben Hecht some years later. As
head of the Committee to Save the Jews
of Europe, Hecht in 1943 wrote a pageant
called "We Will Never Die." Rabbi Wise
got hold of the script. He phoned Hecht
and "ordered" him to stop work on the
show and to be sure to consult him if in
the future he wished to work for the
Jewish cause. Hecht hung up on him.
Governor Thomas E. Dewey then
agreed to proclaim a day of mourning for
the murdered Jews of Europe in conjunc-
tion with the production of Hecht's
pageant at Madison Square Garden. Rab-
bi Wise and a delegation of important
Jews journeyed to Albany, asked Dewey
not to issue the proclamation, and warn-
ed him that he would lose the Jewish vote
if he didn't break with Hecht and his.
"dangerous and irresponsible racketeers
who are hinging terrible disgrace to our
already harassed people."
When Ben Hecht got word of this, he
called Wise and let loose with a barrage
of barracks-room language. As Ben's
popular New York talk radio show that
night and named Ellsberg as the source of
the famous leak. The story made the front
pages across the country but the world of
journalism called him "immoral" for nam-
ing Ellsberg, a hero to all those who were
against the Vietnam War.
Zion was blacklisted by the New York
Times — he was told not to set foot in the
building — as well as a number of maga-
zines and newspapers for which he had
written. One newspaper at the time de-
scribed him as "the most despised man in
the American press."
To Zion, the press was acting like a
bunch of jealous hypocrites. After all, he
was only doing his job, going after a hot
story. He reasons that his colleagues
turned on him because he wasn't working
for any particular paper at the time and
they were upset that he "scooped" them.
In any event, about a year later, while
holding court at his usual spot at Sardi's
bar one night, Zion was approached by
Abe Rosenthal, his former boss at the
Times, who had been avoiding him ever
since the Ellsberg story. This night Rosen-
thal muttered genug in Yiddish to Zion
(-` `enough") and invited him to have a
drink.
After that the writing market eased a bit
but Zion still found the going tough
enough to go back to practicing law. When
Pete Hamill wrote a full column apology
to Zion in the Post, where he had attack-
ed him, Zion sent him a wire: "I assume
this is the start of a series." Hamill's col-
umn ended with a plea for the blacklist to
stop but it didn't until the Sunday New
York Times Magazine gave Zion an as-
signment in 1977 to profile New York
sports businessman Mike Burke. It be-
came a cover story, marking Zion's reen-
try to the Times Magazine after almost a
decade.
Soon after, Rupert Murdoch, took over
New York magazine and the Post and
hired Zion to write a column for the Post.
He was later canned — he still doesn't
know why — and immediately hired as a
The Other
Meyer Lansky
Following is an excerpt from Sidney Zion's
piece on his meeting in Israel with Meyer Lan-
sky. Reprinted from Read All About It! (Berkley
Books):
,
.
Friday, April 26, 1985
widow, Rose, recalled recently, "He
started by telling this 'Chief Rabbi of the
World' that he'd rip his off.
After that it got unprintable."
Governor Dewey went ahead and pro-
claimed the day of mourning, and forty
thousand people jammed the Garden for
the two performances of "We Will Never
Die."
Lansky nodded wisely at the recoun-
ting of this tale, but his eyes betrayed a
touch of shock that anyone would dare
talk that way to a rabbi. Lansky, the
terrible mobster, obediently accepts "the
word" from a rabbi; Ben Hecht, then the
highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood,
tells him to gazump himself.
Ben Hecht, like Babel, was one of those
rare birds with enough serenity — and
gaiety — to celebrate Jewish criminals.
He wrote of them naturally, as though it
never occurred to him that Jews were not
allowed to have their outlaws. Imagine
the futures book of the Anti-Defamation
League if such thinking became con-
tagious. Dore Schary on the panel shows
— every night! — clucking his tongue,
shaking his head, recounting for a dead-
ly bored world the glorious passivity of
Jewish culture.
To deny Lansky, it occurred to me
while talking to him, is to betray a full-
blown ghetto mentality. One need make
no brief for his character to say this —
quite the contrary. For what more abject
kow-towing to the goyish world can be
conjured up than to say that we will
vomit out our gangsters to impress you
with our goodness.
And that is what the argument is all
about in State of Israel v. Meyer Lansky.
columnist for New York magazine.
In the fall of 1978, Zion teamed -up with
his friend Uri Dan, a leading Israeli jour-
nalist, to do a behind-the-scenes story on
the Camp David peace accords. The New
York Times Sunday Magazine decided to
run their story, 20,000 words, as a two-
parter, though Zion' was furious to learn
that rather than being a cover story it
would only get a slash across the top. The
cover was John McEnroe.
Then, as the issue was hitting the press,
Zion checked the calendar and called back
to remind the editors that Sunday was the
Super Bowl and they would look foolish
putting a tennis star on the cover. The
editors agreed, killing the tennis cover and
putting the Israeli piece there instead.
Thanks to the attention of the cover,
says Zion, the article, "The Untold Story
of the Middle East Talks," made interna-
tional headlines and ultimately won Zion
and Dan the Overseas Press Club Award
for best magazine interpretation of foreign
news.
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