- “Perhaps the most noticeable feature of the year in America has been the demand in certain quarters for the complete secularization of the public institutions of the country, what may be deemed the demand of the Jews for their full constitutional rights.”
Let the reader notice that the only time he finds the religious note struck in this series of studies of International Jewish activity, it is struck by the Jews. Honest non-Jews have been nonplussed by the Jewish charge that any scrutiny of Jewish action is “religious persecution,” even when religion has never been thought of or mentioned. The explanation is not far to seek. In the above quotation the religious note is struck at once: the “full constitutional rights” of Jews demands that we effect “the complete secularization of the public institutions of the country.”
That is worth thinking of. But to continue the quotation:
- “Justice Brewer’s article asserting that this is a Christian country has been challenged more than once, and the idea was formally combated in papers by Dr. Herbert Friedenwald, of New York, Isaac Hassler, of Philadelphia, and Rabbi Ephraim Frisch, of Little Rock, Arkansas.
- “The legal and theoretical argument was supplemented in a practical way by widespread opposition to Bible readings and Christmas carols in public schools, an opposition specifically decided upon by the Central Conference of American Rabbis.
- “In New York the agitation against the carols produced a counter-demonstration in their favor, and the matter seems to have been left to the discretion of the individual teacher.
- “In Philadelphia, Cincinnati, St. Paul and maybe elsewhere, there were similar movements and counter-movements, and the question may yet return to plague us.”
There you have, in officially authorized Jewish statement, what the Jews conceive to be a part of their Jewish rights.
A careful examination of the intensive propaganda conducted by the Kehillah and the American Jewish
