August, 1956
By now, there is no household in all the forty-eight states which is not abundantly aware of the fact that the new Lord Mayor of Dublin, Ireland, is a Jew. The Jewish-controlled public press of America has out-done itself in presenting every detail of the unlikely story of Robert Briscoe — fighter for Ireland’s freedom, intimate friend of de Valera, long-time representative of the Irish people in their parliament.
And for the “little” Jews of America, lest they be tempted to take too seriously this fiction of a patriotic Jew, there has been equal coverage in the strictly Jewish publications. A typical account may be found in the National Jewish Monthly, current issue. Robert Briscoe is therein revealed to be one of the founders of the Dublin Lodge of B’nai B’rith and an “active supporter” of the infamous Irgun.
This is all the tip-off an American Jew needs. Robert Briscoe has in no sense abandoned the objectives of his own kind by becoming the Mayor of Dublin. Membership in the B’nai B’rith means a total and conscious dedication to the highest goal of Judaeo-Masonry: the complete destruction of the Christian world and the establishment of the kingdom of Anti-Christ himself. Briscoe’s support of the Irgun is equally telling. It was this band of Jewish marauders which took chief credit for desecrating the Catholic churches and shrines of Palestine, destroying Catholic hospitals, shooting at Catholic schools and convents, and generally wrecking and defiling Catholic property in the Holy Land at the rate of two million dollars worth a year.
It matters little whether Mayor Briscoe has been able to keep these facts about himself suppressed in 95-per cent Catholic Dublin. For what is troubling Dublin’s Catholic conscience right now is the bare, incontestable information that the city’s chief magistrate is a Jew, who will not make the Sign of the Cross, who will not say the Our Father or the Hail Mary, who denies that the Ever-Blessed Virgin is the Mother of God, and who thinks that the adorable Jesus present in all the Catholic tabernacles of Dublin is not the Messias promised by God, but is rather a brazen impostor.
As every man knows, the one part of a newspaper where shots of Jewish profiles seldom appear is the sports section. Somehow, when it comes to walloping a baseball, or plunging through tackle, or even paddling a tennis ball over a net, Jews exhibit a remarkable lack of ability. Consequently, that supreme adulation which Americans bestow on good athletes — the unqualified American Heroes — has thus far been reserved for Gentiles.
The only game crowded with Jewish players is basketball. But this is a special case. In his book Farewell to Sport, former sportswriter Paul Gallico accounts for it as follows: “The reason, I suspect, that it (basketball) appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging, and general smart-aleckness.”
Inasmuch as the American public has never found such traits particularly endearing, the fact that lots of Jews play basketball does not affect the rule: Jews do not become Heroes.
Once, however, there was a Jew who almost broke the rule. He was a boxer, and he almost became a Hero.
His name was Barney Ross, and at one time (1935-1938) he held the welterweight boxing championship of the world. Now, boxing is a sport whose top men are, or were, freely idolized. Yet, for some reason, the public restrained itself with Barney. Perhaps they were bothered by the still-vivid memories of another star Jewish boxer, Max Baer — Maxie the Clown — who, having sampled the right hand of a young aspirant named Joe Louis, abruptly terminated his clowning and his career by squatting ingloriously on the canvas while the referee counted ten.
And so, Barney Ross won his championship title, held it for three years, and finally lost it, without once having the public really warm up to him. But then, just when it seemed he had lost all hope of becoming a Hero, Barney got a second chance.
When the hostilities known as World War II commenced, Barney Ross discovered with dismay that he was at the awkward age which made a call from his local draft hoard imminent. It would be unseemly for him to seek a “4-F” status; nor would the public be likely to countenance his trotting off with the rest of the Jewish soldiers to language, or radar, or cooks-and-bakers school. Unable to find a neutral corner, Barney, in wild desperation, signed up with the Marines.
It was a fortunate move. For, though he had to spend some miserable days and nights crouched in a foxhole while his Marine Division fought for Guadalcanal, still, after the battle was over, Barney was sent back home. He arrived to a fanfare of publicity, and in short order found himself presented with a Silver Star for “heroism under fire,” invited to the White House for a personal citation from the President, awarded a plaque as boxing’s Man of the Year, honored at banquets and celebrations all over the country — and, to top it all, promised a medical discharge as soon as things would quiet down a little.
At last, Barney was a Hero. And not just a Sports Hero, but that most exalted of all American specimens, a War Hero. He was one Jew who had finally made good — that is, in the newspapers.
But for some reason Americans weren’t believing all they read in the papers that year, and the high-powered campaign to present the nation with a glorified Jew slowly ground to a stop. The cause of this failure we don’t know. Maybe too many of the Marines who had fought on Guadalcanal had been writing letters home, telling on Barney. We do know that when he came to Boston in the early summer of 1943, shortly after his return to the States, he was hooted and hissed out of town by a large and eloquent delegation of servicemen, including several hundred Marines from the barracks in Chelsea.
After a few hapless months touring the country, Barney Ross disappeared from public view. He was not heard from again until 1946, when he was admitted to the government hospital at Lexington, Kentucky. For Barney had become a drug addict, and was in need of extended medical treatment.
The last chapter in the saga of the Jew who almost became a Hero appeared in the New York Times of March 31, 1948. Released from the hospital, Ross had applied for a passport that he might go to Palestine and fight in the Jewish army which was then terrorizing the countryside in its efforts to establish a Jewish state. When our State Department refused his request, Barney announced that although he didn’t want to lose his U. S. citizenship, still, he was going so Palestine anyway, because, he said, he was determined “to be a private in that army.”
For the career of such an unlikely Jew, it made a likely finale.
Back in the 1880’s, when Boston, Massachusetts still cherished its dream of being the “Athens of America,” and when many Bostonians remained convinced that their home-town was indeed the “Hub of the Universe,” it came to pass that Boston acquired for itself a permanent symphony orchestra. The job of conducting this precious cultural acquisition could, of course, be entrusted only to someone of integral Boston lineage and impeccable Harvard training — or so the Brahmins thought. When the Symphony’s first concert season opened, however, Bostonians were confronted with a most unseemly gentleman who had but lately stepped off the boat. He bore the suspicious name of Henschel, and, once he appeared on the stage, even the farthest reaches of the second balcony could only conclude that the Boston Symphony’s first conductor was an unashamed, full-blooded Jew.
Boston was thus the more prepared, several seasons later, for the news that its first permanent opera company was likewise in the hands of a Jew, one Henry Russell.
With the passing years, local Puritan concert-goers have watched the Jewish grip on their music tighten. And the process has been facilitated by the fact that Boston’s musical taste is of the sort which the Jews are most able to satisfy. For the city likes virtuosos — the kind of high-strung, high-paid soloist that every Jewish parent is planning on when he first straps his three-year-old offspring to a piano stool.
Example: Boston is much taken with keyboard performers like Artur Rubenstein, Myra Hess, Rudolph Serkin, Wanda Landowska, Artur Schnabel, William Kapell, Alexander Brailowsky, Leopold Godowsky, Vladimir Horowitz — all Jews. And with concert-violinists like Fritz Kreisler, Isaac Stern, Nathan Milstein, Mischa Mischakoff, Joseph Szigeti, Efrem Zimbalist, Joseph Fuchs, Mischa Elman, Michel Piastro, Erica Morini, Yehudi Menuhin, Jascha Heifitz — Jews who lend support to the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia ’s boast that “The entire history of violin-playing is virtually a Jewish art.”
Beyond this, Boston is a “symphony” rather than an “opera” town. Russell’s Boston Opera Company quickly faded, but Henschel’s Boston Symphony became world-famous. Among the Yankees, in fact, going to the Symphony took on all the aspects of a new form of worship. As one astute, out-of-town observer remarked: when a Boston lady walks down the center aisle of Symphony Hall, you fully expect a profound genuflection before she enters her seat.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra a few years ago sustained the loss of its most long-lived Jewish conductor, Serge Koussevitzky, the despot of local music for twenty-five years. And when devoted Bostonians were not actually in the presence of Koussevitzky (or his Jewish colleague, Arthur Fiedler) at Symphony Hall, they were home listening to recorded performances of the rest of the country’s symphony orchestras, directed by the rest of the country’s Jewish conductors. For, with about three notable exceptions, the men who gesticulate before the chief orchestras of the nation are all Jews.
The following is a partial list: Artur Rodzinski, Alfred Wallenstein, Leonard Bernstein, George Szell, Erich Leinsdorf, Otto Klemperer, Efrem Kurtz, Bruno Walter, Vladimir Golschmann, Walter Damrosch, Eugene Ormandy, Alexander Smallens, Fritz Reiner, Pierre Monteux, Josef Pasternak, Erich Kleiber, Max Reiter, Fabien Sevitzky, Andre Kostelanetz.
And what, in the face of all this, does The Point propose for a remedy? The situation is obviously critical. What do we recommend as a course of effective action for Bostonians? Shall we start a crusade to rescue the holy precincts of Symphony Hall from the sacrilegious hands of the Jews? Shall we picket the box-office? Shall we assault the place? Storm it in mid-season? Shall we sweat and bleed and die for the right to hear Beethoven conducted by a Mayflower descendant?
After proper consideration, we think not. We think that perhaps this time we will restrain our wrath, run the risk of being labeled “above it all,” and just contemplate with medieval, Romish satisfaction, the prospect of a stuffy hall-full of heretics being serenaded by a pit-full of infidels — for all eternity.
Dante himself might envy us such a vision.
While it is surprising to find a Jew who has made himself acceptable to Dublin’s politics, New York’s prizefights, or Boston’s polite society, it is closer to sensational to discover a Jew who has been attacked by the B’nai B’rith, who thinks the big Jewish money-drives are a fraud, and who says that the State of Israel is an aggregation of aggressive “kikes” looking for trouble!
There does exist such a Jew. And, what is more, he is a full-fledged rabbi. His name is Elmer Berger.
Rabbi Berger is such an unusual Jew that a few months ago, when his latest anti-Zionist book appeared, the publishers mailed a complimentary review copy to the editors of The Point. They apparently felt that here, at last, was one Jew that we could find no quarrel with. Here was a Jew who agrees with us that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to America; that the leaders of Zionism in our country have been forcing the hand, and thus forging the policy, of the U. S. State Department; that American Jews are promoting by every means possible the nationalist program of a foreign state (Israel) and that, therefore, they will not “melt” into the stream of American life.
We do understand Rabbi Berger. He stems from a tradition in Jewry which has been all but blotted out by the incredible triumph of Zionism during the past fifty years. Rabbi Berger is the more cautious Jew; the Jew who likes the good life which comes with being only a moderate parasite among the Goyim; the Jew who willingly takes on the protective coloring of cultural assimilation; who feels that a Christmas tree in his living-room is very little compromise for all the security it will bring to his children.
Berger long ago scoured the country for other Jews who might be ill-disposed toward Zionism. Such dregs as he found were subsequently organized as the American Council for Judaism, chief member: Mr. Lessing Rosenwald, retired head of Sears, Roebuck and Co.
With this straggling band of cautious Jews behind him, Berger has become official publicist for the wishful theory that Jews can really be normal citizens. And it is in the course of this publicizing, in the heat of his anti-Zionist fervor, that the rabbi truly reveals himself. For in his effort to be against Zionism but for Judaism, Rabbi Berger seasons his argument with all the standard Jewish sneers at the Catholic Church. He brands the Church’s influence in Western society as “the iron ring of medievalism”; he describes the flowering of Catholic life in the Middle Ages as “a generally decadent society”; he charges that “Paul of Tarsus” started the Catholic Church which Jesus Christ (a mere “human personality”) had no notion of founding. And much more.
Rabbi Berger’s message to the Zionists of America is that they are headed for pogroms, because Americans will not tolerate their allegiance to a foreign Jewish state. The Zionists might well remind the rabbi that, long before Zionism ever existed, Catholic men were placing the likes of Elmer Berger in well-defined ghettos, with conspicuous badges, compulsory sermons, and not one glimmer of “citizenship.”