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Letters They Wouldn't Publish
September 20, 2004
Letters to the Editor
New York Jewish Week
Dear editor:
In your September 3 “In Profile,” veteran political activist Evelyn Chasan recalled her participation in May Day rallies in the 1930s and involvement in “anti-fascist Socialist circles.” She mentioned a party “organized by fellow progressives in 1938 or 1939, when the world seemed at once a more desperate and more hopeful place. Hitler was not yet a widely known name...”
Hitler absorbed Austria in March 1938. The Munich agreement, and the beginning of the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, was signed in September 1938. The massive nationwide Kristallnacht pogrom devastated Germany’s Jews in November 1938 (and earlier pogroms, such as those in Berlin in 1935, had been prominently reported in the American media as well). It can hardly be said that Hitler’s name or his sponsorship of antisemitic violence were “not widely known.”
What may be said is that a certain segment of the American left was so focused on the alleged evils of capitalism in the late 1930s that it had trouble recognizing the unique evil of Hitler. Following the 1939 agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany, which paved the way for Germany’s invasion of Poland, some American radicals rationalized Moscow’s pact with Hitler and urged the U.S. to stay out of the war between Germany and England, which Mary McCarthy and other Partisan Review intellectuals called “a useless imperialist war.” Irving Howe, in World of Our Fathers, recalls how the New York Yiddish Communist newspaper Freiheit went so far as to justify Hitler’s invasion of Poland as “good for the Jews” on the grounds that while two million Polish Jews were now under Hitler’s rule,the remaining one million had been “saved” by the Soviet Union.
Sincerely,
Dr. Rafael Medoff
Director
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Melrose Park, PA
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