First Published: Morning Freiheit, July 27, 1975.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Dear Editor,
A letter published in the Daily World of March 14, 1975 has just been brought to my attention. Written by one Zoltan Deak, it attacks the Morning Freiheit for daring to call for “A Leninist Struggle Against Anti-Semitism.” It seems to follow a destructive pattern which I see growing among those who will grant none the right to differ with them in any way. They use the tactics of lifting quotations out of context, of twisting facts, and unjustified name calling against honest radicals who will not swallow without qualification developments within the Soviet Union during the past decade or so even though there might be differences of position among other Communist Parties and their organs throughout the world.
Protests by Jewish progressives (myself among them), upon the appearance of the first anti-Semitic writings of the ill-famed Yevseyev, the “Fatherland of Socialism” and sorrow that such filth could be printed there, brought forth on that occasion a slap on the wrist for that writer. Yevseyev’s writings have since been succeeded by a spate of denigrations and slanders of Jews by this same writer and others, culminating in the recent Ogonyok opus, which reads like a restatement of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in the Nazi “Volkisher Beobachter” of evil memory.
It is my belief that if Lenin were alive today there would be a “Leninist struggle against anti-Semitism,” for which the Morning Freiheit calls. The “general crisis of capitalism” is – if history is a guide – bound to result in a search for racial and religious scapegoats, and does not need the help of any of the Soviet writers mentioned above, even if Mr. Deak chooses to overlook their onerous existence.
I am desperately grieved that an organ of the presently, greatly endangered workingclass, finds it necessary to publish matter more insulting to the intelligence of its readers than to the integrity of the Morning Freiheit.
DANIEL N. STONE