The Denver Jewish news., 1924-09-11

/ ~ hfATNi W A''H - w Ailf fANlN EOIlIfNl
recently coducted by the Department
Of Synagogue and School Extension
Of the Union Of American Hebrew
Congregations. Annually prizes are
awarded TO Jewish students for essays
on Jewish topics. This year seven
prizes were awarded. The contest
was conducted by districts, the roun-
try being divided into sections with
| supervisor, representative Of the
Department of Synagogue and School
Extension. The author Of this essay,
Mr., Brenner, is a student at the Uni.
verSity Of Missouri, and Is resident
Of Kansas City. Mo.
Today, as never before, there is be-
ing spread over the world great deal
Of propaganda against the Jew. He
is ridiculed and derided; his name is
made the laughing stock Of the world,
He is accused of bringing on the late
war and of being the cause Of these
unsettled postwar conditions. HE,
name is linked with causing poverty
and riches. He is ostraeized from So
ciety and blacklisted by many frater-
nal organizations. If firm goes to
the wall, the Jewish bankers have
caused it; if n firm builds up great
business, it is the unscrupuouSness of
the Jew that has caused it. He is
called a separatist, and an individu-
alist.
From Poland and Ukraine, where
the jew is the victim of the cruelest
physical violence at the hands of the
war-crazed, despair-ridden people of
Europe, to the more subtle attacks of
higher anti-Semitism in England and
America, voiced by Ford and Belloc,
all the three threabare charges
against the Jew and Judaism are re-
vived and re-asserted.
The well-informed jew knows how
base and groundless these fictions are
for their aims are clear, clumsilyy
covered by a pretended analysis of
present day life. Once again for the
thousandth time the jew is made the
scapegoat of all the sorrow and desc
lation which follows in the wake of
war.
To the uniformed Jew, ignorant of
our long history of suffering, the pres
ent wave of hatred and suspicion
strikes him with alarm and even paic.
Unable to explain this phenomenon,
he feels that Israel is on the eve of
annihilation. The survival of the
jew in the world becomes real per-
sonal danger.
Everywhere, anti-Semitism is mex
plicably allied with political recation
on the one hand and defiance of law
and decency on the other. Just as in
England the diehards and in France
the camelots have manifest anti-Sem-
itic leanings, so monarchists every
where, in Germany, Hungary, Aus
tria, and Russia are concentrating
their fury on the Jews at whose door
they lay every conceivable charge,
from the loss of the war and the inva-
sion of the Ruhr to the fall of the
mark, and the breakdown of religion.
While, here and there, self-respecting
and humane people raise their voices
against the unreasonableness and in
decency of anti-Semitism, such as
Adam Roeder, warming the academic
/ pnntb n in 70 nt ,,,1;
tions there are others who play upon
every lawless instinct and every
brutal fashion to incite the rabble
against the Jew. A Knueppel- Kunze,
openly advising te mob to cudgel the
Jews with rubberhead canes, and the
murderous attack by rowdies upon
Commercial Councillor Fraenkel, a
communal leader of the Munich News,
and, soon afterward, the attack of
rioters upon Jewish shops in Breslau,
prove that the appeal had not fallen
upon deaf ears. That the enemies of
the Jews are the enemies of the coun-
try, not only as disturbers of the pub
lie order, but directly as conspires
against the public welfare, was
proved, in part at least, at the Fuchs
treason trial, which showed at least
some of the monarchists in open con-
spiracy with the French for disrup-
tion of German unity. Walter Rath-
enau, with his sane plans of recon,
struction, might have rescued Ger
many from bankruptcy, but he was
assassinated when his work was only
half completed. Czecho- -Slovakia was
more fortunate; its Doctor Raskin,
who plucked it out of the swamps of
initiation and set it upon the rock of
financial security, was murdered after
he had completed his task.
In many lines of activity, the Jews
are being excluded. The Jewish stu
dents in Europe are Justify fighting
for what to them is chiefly the privi-
lege to study. In the winter of 1923,
the German nationalist students went
1