The American Jewish Committee is itself a misnomer. The committee is not exclusively American, and its work is not to Americanize the Jews nor even to encourage real Americanization among them. It is a committee composed of Jews representing that class which profits most by keeping the mass of the Jews segregated from Americans and in bondage to the “higher-ups” among the Jews. They are the “big Jews,” as Norman Hapgood used to call them, who say to the “little Jews,” “You hang closely together; we will be your representatives to these foreign peoples, the Americans and others.” If the American Jewish Committee would change its name to this: “The Jewish Commission for America,” it might be nearer the truth. It has dealt with America in the recent past very much as the Allied Commissions deal with Germany. There are certain things we may do, and certain things we may not do, and the Jewish Commission for America tells us what we may and may not do. One of the things we may not do is to declare that this is a Christian country.
There is one absolutely safe rule in dealing with anything emanating from the American Jewish Committee. Don’t rely on the label, open the matter up. You will, find that the Kehillah is not what it pretends to be; that the Jewish labor union is not what it pretends to be; that Zionism is a camouflage for something entirely different; that the name and the nature are nearly always different, which is the reason for a particular name being chosen. It runs all the way through Jewish practice, and presents another little job for the Jewish reformer.
——
Issue of November 12, 1921.
*“What the American Jew needs to develop is the habit of self-criticism. If the spokesmen of the Jewish people would devote one-half the energy they now expend in answering attacks to attacking the evils that stare everyone