One of the ringleaders has defied the courts with impunity and still walks the streets. Jewish theatrical managers in New York have headlined his actress wife, a Jewess, presumably because of the added prestige it gave her to be the wife of the world-defying bond thief.
That is the element which strikes something like consternation to the heart of the ordinary lover of law and order—the insolence with which these wealthy Jewish criminals regard all the agencies of the law. They are defended by clever lawyers, and the attitude of the Jewish press and Jewish population toward them is compact of sympathy and admiration. Why not?—since most of the individual victims of * the thievery are Gentiles, and the general victim is Gentile capitalism itself!
There is complete silence on the Jewish side regard¬ ing this reign of crime. And yet inevitably the Jews themselves must suffer most from it. The New York Kehillah has completely ignored this outbreak and its exposure. The spokesmen of Jewry, so voluble against non-Jews, have no word to say to those whom they would probably call their “co-religionists.” Yet it is well enough understood that so closely combined are all the influences in New York Jewry that a deter¬ mined effort on the part of the leaders could clean up many untoward conditions now existing. But there seems to be a distinct aversion to anything that will indicate a division of one class of Jews against another. It is a racial instinct, evidently, to protect the threat¬ ened one no matter how richly he may deserve punish¬ ment.
It is this fact which puts the finishing Jewish touch on the whole matter. It may, of course, be an accident that all the criminals and their tools, with an occa¬ sional exception, are Jews. That of itself might not be a reason, in the extreme sense, for labeling the con¬ dition with a racial name. But the silence, the appro¬ bation in some quarters, the very active sympathy in others, all combining as a racial protectorate around the wrongdoers, is the more regrettable manifestation of the two.