the capitalist press boiling everything in the timely caldrons of hysteria - Morris Schappes

The finance-capitalists who dominate American life are not Jews (Morgan, Rockefeller, DuPonts, Ford, etc.), and the number of Jewish proletarians has vastly increased. Yet, despite these facts, anti-Semitism has taken root in this country, and is now being organized on a greater scale than ever before. This organized anti-Semitism, furthermore, is more and more openly being used as a siphon to divert what are essentially anti-capitalist feelings among the people into channels that will serve only to fasten the hold of capitalism upon them, and capitalism, at that, in its most rabid, its fascist, form. The way to wipe out anti-Semitism coincides in large part, therefore, with the way to eliminate economic exploitation. And the way to wipe out the organized anti-Semitism that the American fascist forces are now fostering coincides with the way to check and crush fascism. Only socialism, through the dictatorship of the proletariat, can eliminate the roots of anti-Semitism. And only the people's front, based on the trade unions and uniting the oppressed middle classes of city and country, can crush the fascists' attempt to organize anti-Semitism along lines of violence and vigilanteism. It is, therefore, very encouraging to note that practically all of the contributors to this symposium agree on these propositions: that anti-Semitism has economic roots, and can be uprooted only by some form of socialism; and that anti-Semitism now is a phase of fascism and must be fought as such, through unity with all progressive forces. It is noteworthy that all agree that the time has come to fight anti-Semitism, and considerable scorn is directed against those who preach passivity as a way of mollifying the anti-Semites.

I studied the students' problems; I did not try to suggest solutions; I tried only to have them develop courage and confidence in the fact that our people, who have solved so many problems, can solve this one, too.

It helps one keep one's balance to remember that there are other important problems clamoring for action...just the other week one of my Negro neighbors had her brother come home, discharged from the Army for medical reasons. He told his sister something which helps me maintain a proper perspective and relative sense of values. Her brother had been stationed in Alabama. In this Army camp there was a group of war prisoners, Germans. On Saturday nights these German war prisoners, properly protected, of course, by guards, would be escorted to the Alabama town for an American Saturday night "in town." But the Negro troops stationed there were not allowed, either escorted or under their own power, to go to town in Alabama on a Saturday night. Since hearing this story I have been thinking that surely there is nothing that can be done to one man at Sing Sing, either in two years or a year and a half or in any time that you may commute the sentence to, that can be quite as vicious, quite as brutalizing, quite as demoralizing as that which almost a half million Negro soldiers face in the armed forces or that which so many millions face in civilian life that is not yet entirely civilized.