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.