Gerald L. K. Smith and Anti-Semitism

Isabel B. Price, University of New Mexico - Main Campus

Abstract

No abstract. First page of introduction:

The events of the past thirty years have made Jews and non-Jews increasingly aware of the fact that modern anti-Semitism constitutes one of the most formidable anti-democratic techniques of our day. If anti-Semitism strikes at the Jew, its real target is the democratic way of life. For the limitations of the rights of Jews logically implies the ultimate abolition of the democratic form of government and legal protection of the individual. Jews equally have come to realize that no simple generalizations suffice in the face of the threat of anti-Semitism. For it is clear from the German experience, that the intensity of anti-Semitism bears little relationship to the degree of cultural or social assimilation of Jewish communities or to the refutation of anti-Semitic propaganda. How, then, could it have happened, it has been asked, that in a society so steeped in law, order and reason as the German society, irrational racial and religious hatred, could have mastered minds to produce such violent destructiveness? Significant in the answer must be the effect of the threatening internal situation in Nazi Germany.