View from the Ten-Yard Line

It was enough to make old Peter Stuyvesant stomp around on his stump. From Brazil, 23 Jews had arrived in Governor Stuyvesant's New Amsterdam in 1654. Peter sent off a letter to his superiors in the Dutch West India Company seeking permission (unsuccessfully) to evict the members of the "very repugnant, deceitful race, hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ, lest they infect and trouble this new colony with their customary usury and deceitful trading."

Stuyvesant was neither the first nor the last New World citizen to vent a hatred almost as old as civilization itself. It is therefore all the more impressive that the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith,* which last week celebrated its 50th anniversary with President Kennedy as its honored guest, has in the short span of its lifetime (and with a considerable assist from Adolf Hitler) made a detectable dent in anti-Semitic expression.

Rising Tide. The league began in 1913 when some 15 members of B'nai B'rith, the Jewish service organization, gathered at the call of Chicago Lawyer Sigmund Livingston. They had concluded, as the league's charter states, that "for many years the Jewish and non-Jewish citizens have failed to meet this tendency [of antiSemitism] by any means save quiet criticism. But the tide has been rising until it calls for organized effort to stem it." Their immediate goal: "To stop, by appeals to reason and conscience, and if necessary by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people." Ultimately, they hoped "to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike."

The league first tackled newspapers that made a practice of identifying Jews in crime stories. New York Times Publisher Adolph S. Ochs, a league official, sent a memo to editors of all U.S. dailies.

"The word 'Jew' is a noun," he advised, "and should never be used as an adjective or verb. To speak of 'Jew girls' or 'Jew stories' is both objectionable and vulgar. The use of the word Jew as a verb--'to Jew down'--is a slang survival of the medieval term of opprobrium, and should be avoided altogether."

The league also went to work on vaudeville producers who featured unshaven Jewish comics and movie producers who portrayed Jews as usurious misers. In its zeal, the league at first sought local censorship ordinances, even tried to have such works as Oliver Twist and The Merchant of Venice removed from school reading programs. Later the league reversed itself and declared: "The Merchant is an accepted classic of world literature. As a work of great artistic quality, it cannot, in a free society, be subject to censorship."

"Apt to Malinger." In World War I, Jews had to fight off a crude stereotype of themselves as shirkers. Said one U.S. Army manual: "The foreign-born, and especially Jews, are more apt to malinger than the native-born." The league protested to the White House, and President Wilson ordered the manual destroyed.

After the war, the league pursued more activist tactics. It smuggled a hooded journalist into the Ku Klux Klan to keep the public informed of the anti-Semitic and anti-Negro activity that went on behind the sheets. It infiltrated the German-American Bund with a league informant who became Fuehrer Fritz Kuhn's personal chauffeur.

The A.D.L. won a public apology from Industrialist Henry Ford, whose newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, had for years spouted off about an "international Jewish conspiracy." The Ford family views changed so completely that by 1951 the A.D.L. could give Henry Ford II its highest award for "distinguished contributions to the enrichment of our democratic heritage." In 1954 the Ford Foundation won a league award too.

Cremation's Example. A turning point in the league's campaign came with the ordeal of World War II, when the stark example of the Nazi cremation camps showed where the roads of group hatred might lead. After the war, the league increasingly made not only antiSemitism, but all of civil rights its concern. It filed a brief in the historic 1954 Supreme Court school integration case, has worked in cooperation with the N.A.A.C.P. in the South. League posters appeal for nondiscriminatory treatment of all minorities. Today the A.D.L. has an annual budget of $3,000,000, a fulltime staff of some 150 specialists in law. publicity and social science, 26 regional offices.

Much remains to be done. The league is working to erase informal Jewish "quota systems" in college admissions, estimates that nearly 1,000 colleges recently have dropped questions about religion and race in admission forms. It found that 67% of 1,152 social clubs it surveyed across the nation practice religious discrimination, mostly against Jews (although another 90 clubs, mostly Jewish dominated, bar Christians or impose quotas on Christians). As league members arrived at the organization's 50th anniversary dinner in Washington's Sheraton-Park Hotel last week, a band of Lincoln Rockwell's kooky American Nazis paraded near by with such signs as "Communism Is Jewish."

At the dinner, President Kennedy received the league's Democratic Legacy Award for his efforts to "assure the application of constitutional principles of freedom to all Americans." He also laughed when folk singers burst into a song called We Want No Irish Here. Summing up the league's progress, its outgoing national chairman. New York Lawyer Henry Edward Schultz, declared: "Blatant, outright, overt anti-Semitism is less manifest today in this country. We've made real progress in the 50 years. But now we're getting into the more difficult areas of discrimination. We're on, you might say, the ten-yard line. The goal lies just ahead. But the going is getting much tougher."

* B'nai B'rith translates as "Sons of the Covenant" and refers to the covenant between God and Abraham upon which the Jews base the claim that they are God's chosen people.

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