The Jewish establishment has condemned the NYC Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for asking candidates if they would forgo plans to take trips to Israel as an act of solidarity with Palestinians. The Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), which arranges these trips for City Council members, expressed outrage and that group and a number of politicians raised a cry of “anti-Semitism”. Of course it’s a croc. It’s also hypocrisy.
There were times when leaders of the Jewish community (very properly) embraced boycotts as necessary measures of self-defense. At the start of the 1900’s New York City banker Jacob Schiff led a bankers boycott of the intensely anti-Semitic Imperial Russia. In the 1920’s there was a successful boycott of the company owned by the then world’s most famous anti-Semite, Henry Ford. In 1927 he gave in, wrote a public letter of apology to Jews and sold his anti-Jewish paper, the Dearborn Independent.
The most serious boycott, though, started in 1933 when Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor. In his book Mein Kampf he had outlined his murderous plans for Jews and his goons had beaten and harassed German Jews for years. Within weeks of Hitler’s appointment (January 30, 1933) calls sounded for a boycott of Germany.
Its earliest proponent was the JWV (Jewish War Veterans), made up of men who had fought in the Great War. After hearing accounts of Nazi thugs in German cities rioting and calling for anti-Jewish boycotts, the JWV announced a boycott campaign on March 12. On the 23rd the JWV led thousands down New York City streets to City Hall where they presented Mayor John O’Brien with a resolution calling for a boycott of Germany.
Four days later, on March 27, 1933, major Jewish organizations held a huge rally in Madison Square Garden. It was jammed full and tens of thousands were outside on the streets around it and in Columbus Circle. The New York Times account the next day was headlined, “55,000 Here Stage Protest on Hitler Attack on Jews”.
A photo of Madison Square Garden of the rally shows the huge size of the crowd that evening. Up on the stage there’s one giant poster. It’s a picture of a man with some kind of tool ripping apart a swastika and above it the words “Boycott Nazi Germany”. Speakers denounced Hitler and Nazi attacks on Jews. Besides Jewish leaders, important non-Jews spoke, like the head of the American Federation of Labor and Senator Robert Wagner.
The idea behind the anti-German boycott was to harm German manufacturing and get the owners of the big companies to pressure Hitler and his gang to stop its violence and discrimination against Jews. In many ways it had a very similar motive to the BDS campaign against the Israeli Apartheid of today.
The Jewish War Veterans was the first group to go into the streets with boycott activities. They gave out flyers and picketed stores that sold German products.
By the end of ’33 the main leader of the boycott was millionaire and NYC Tammany Hall politician Samuel Untermeyer. He raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for boycott offices, flyers, telephones, etc. Offices were set up all over the country.
Another leader of the boycott was Rabbi Stephen Wise, a famous U.S. Zionist leader and head of a very important Manhattan synagogue. He was put in charge of boycott activities by the World Jewish Conference, an international group formed to fight Hitlerism.
In May 1933 there was an immense march in New York City lead by Untermeyer, Wise and the American Jewish Congress. Former Congressman (and future mayor) Fiorello LaGuardia was one of the speakers before the march. Untermeyer spoke too and urged all Americans to ban all German products and services. Edwin Black describes the march dramatically in his book “The Transfer Agreement”. He writes, “Roars of applause and volcanic cheers greeted a hat-waving Stephen Wise at every corner. For hours, Wise, 100,000 behind him, marched south toward Battery Park.” Marchers were showered with ticker tape. On their way from Madison Square to Battery Park thousands of labor unionists joined the march. Mayor O’Brien sat on the reviewing stand and watched the march pass by for four hours.
The boycott started in 1933 and went on until World War II. It obviously did not succeed in moderating Hitler, but few today would argue it was a wrong thing to do. Nor would anyone (but Nazis) argue that it was racist to be so “anti-German”.
An Important Difference
There is a big difference between the boycott of the 1930s and BDS today. BDS is led by a movement of Palestinian civil society organizations. (It was never advocated by the Palestinian Authority.) BDS is targeted against entities cooperating with or enriching themselves from oppression. The boycott of the 1930s was against all German goods.
The BDS movement site explains, “the BDS movement is impactful when it focuses its consumer boycotts and campaigns on a number of companies that are most deeply involved in Israel’s occupation and apartheid.” As far as boycotts of Israeli colleges the site states, “The academic boycott is a boycott of complicit Israeli academic institutions not individuals.” In answer to the question about boycotts of artists, the site explains, “BDS does not target artists. It targets institutions based on their complicity in Israel’s violations of international law.”
The boycott of the 1930s was not selective. It targeted all German goods from gloves to cheese products to medicines. For instance in Newark, NJ in 1935 squads of women went into Bamburger’s department store to make sure there were no German products.
Neither boycott was racist. Both were attempts to use peaceful economic pressure to fight for human rights. Clearly though the Palestinians are going the extra mile to show their boycott is principled and not based on ethnic hatred.
New York Jewish leaders had a proud role in the anti-Nazi boycott of the 1930s. The Rightists who control the big Jewish organizations today don’t measure up to them in the slightest. It’s sheer hypocrisy for them to criticize the Palestinian-led BDS movement struggling against modern-day apartheid and oppression.
Footnote: Zionist Sabotaging of the Anti-Nazi Boycott
In 1984 Lenni Brenner wrote about something that had been buried for decades, a deal bargained by Zionist leader of British Palestine and Nazi officials, the “Transfer Agreement”. Under the agreement German Jewish wealth was taken out of the Germany in the form of products and sold in Palestine. The refugees got a lot of the proceeds and Zionist organizations got a slice, too. Realize though that when Jews of the world were boycotting German goods, Palestinian Jews were selling German goods. Whatever it did for Zionism and refugees the Transfer Agreement, in the words of Zionist historian Edwin Black, “pierce[d] a stake through the heart of the Jewish-led anti-Nazi boycott “. I write about this in one section of my book, “Zionist Betrayal of Jews” (2019).
There are many approaches to defend the BDS movement. I congratulate the author for presenting an unusually revealing one. Israel is today’s Nazi Germany—only worse– and the Jews here and around the world who support Israel, no matter how critical their attitude toward its government, the occupation, or its social and political structures, are nevertheless by extension, I suppose, the equivalent of the German American Bund or the German American Friendship Committee of the 1930s. Critical Nazis, after all, are still Nazis.
But, all is not lost. Pass the BDS non-normalization litmus test, confess that Zionism is a program of hatred, racism and contempt for other people and you “good Jews” can now return to the fold and participate with Left campaigns.
Otherwise, a line must be drawn: “no cops, no scabs, no Zionists.” For, unlike Nazi Germany, in which it was the fascism that was considered objectionable, here it is the nation itself which is considered an illegitimate stain. Those Jews—an overwhelming majority—who support this stain are hereby put on notice that you risk exiling yourselves from the progressive community, the community of the just, by your stiff-necked behavior. But by genuflecting before BDS and rupturing your ties with 95% of world Jewry you publically demonstrate to the entire world, and most importantly to the critical section of advanced humanity, your worthiness.
All very medieval. But I guess ancient Church attitudes retain certain enduring charms. Where there was once an Inquisition to save the Jews from their inherent wickedness, there is now BDS to save them from their latent racism. Jews: you once protested against Nazi Germany, now its time to cleanse yourselves of your inner Nazism.
I’ll leave it at that. For those who wish a deeper dive into the agonizing moral complexities of the Transfer Agreements, I suggest a careful reading of this, which is available from YVS on request.
Weiss, Yfaat, “The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement; a Jewish Dilemma on the Eve of the Holocaust”
Published in: Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998) 129-171.
But for those who prefer baloney to steak, Brenner will certainly do.
I can’t imagine what has caused the fury of the comment above. I guess it’s because I raised the matter that Lenni Brenner (who is a national treasure in my book) rediscovered in the ‘80’s, the decision by the Zionists of the Yishuv (Jews in British Palestine) to deal with Nazi Germany (the Transfer Agreement) and sabotage the international boycott.
The Yad Vashem document by Weiss that Finger recommends needs no special permission to read. It’s here: https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203231.pdf It indeed is filled with excellent facts and observations. Right at the start of the article there are assertions exactly in line of what Brenner and I have been saying if only in less emotional language: “In retrospect, and in view of what we know about the annihilation of European Jewry, these relations between the Zionist movement and Nazi Germany seem especially problematic….One of the German authorities’ principal goals in negotiating with the Zionist movement was to fragment the Jewish boycott of German goods.”
In talking about the Transfer Agreement Weiss writes, “the Yishuv leadership was increasingly preoccupied with the economic advantages that would accrue to this community if the basis of Jewish life in Germany were eliminated..”
Echoing Edmund Black on how the Transfer Agreement undermined the boycott, Weiss states, “the rumors and reports of an impending economic agreement between Nazi Germany and the Yishuv, under the auspices of the Jewish Agency, dealt the initiators of and participants in the boycott an extremely heavy moral blow.” Later in the article talking about the Histadrut’s attempt to verbally be in favor of the boycott Weiss writes, “the true import of the Transfer Agreement, the effective shattering of the boycott, could not be mitigated by semantics.”
Weiss writes, “the Labor faction passed a majority resolution concerning the Transfer and, after imposing party discipline on its members, led the Zionist Congress to a majority resolution in support of the Transfer Agreement, thus withdrawing from the cycle of active opposition to Nazism for good.” In other words the Zionist majority (at the time led by Labour) knew full well it was withdrawing from the fight against Nazism.
Weiss quotes Aharonwitz on the Executive of the Jewish Agency who in 1934 said, “I have the feeling that we are breaching the boycott and have no way to justify this. We’re doing it not to save Jews but to build houses for this or that organization. […] We shall accomplish little and pay for it dearly. We shall befoul ourselves irreparably, and we will pay dearly for the money, too.
Oh yes, the Zionists knew what they were doing. Weiss quotes, Moshe Shertok, head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, as saying, “it is Zionism’s fate to be cruel toward the Diaspora at times […] when this is necessary in order to build the country.”
At a time when Jews were realizing that the Nazis were a threat to every Jew in the world, Jews should have led an uncompromising opposition to the Nazis. Yet the Zionists in the words of Aharonwitz did “befoul” themselves by undercutting the fight against Hitler.
Yes, indeed, Lenni Brenner rediscovered in the 80’s, the decision by the Zionists of the Yishuv to deal with Nazi Germany and sabotage the international boycott. And he gave it a particular twist, one that could have been lifted from the pages of the Stalinist propaganda houses of the 1970s. Yuri Ivanov, in his screed, Caution: Zionism! (p. 80) wrote, “Zionists, as we know, have always favoured anti-Semitism in which they openly placed all their hopes for the future. Therefore the conclusion of a secret alliance between Zionism and fascism was not at all unnatural.”
Brenner, that national treasure with an advanced degree from the Stalinist school of falsification, blames Zionists for the collapse of the Weimar Republic, Japanese imperial expansion in Asia and for partnering with the Nazis in the Holocaust, which—according to him– was welcomed as a necessary step in the creation of their reactionary, racist Jewish dream state in Palestine. (Zionism in the Age of Dictators, Lawrence Hill Books, pp. 27-37). Yes, this national treasure gleefully concluded, “Zionism had come full turn: instead of Zionism being the hope of the Jews, their blood was to be the political salvation of Zionism,” (p 238). The myth of the Zionist-Nazi conspiracy to annihilate the Jews of Europe, was invented by the Stalinists post-1967 to advance their power politics, refashioned by Brenner, endorsed by Heller, and retailed by assorted neoNazis, Arab nationalists, Holocaust deniers and leftist muddle heads.
And why not? The all-powerful Jew, able to subvert nations and launch wars, the perfidious Jew willing to sell out even his own kind to advance his wealth and power, all resonate with culturally familiar, age-old anti-Jewish tropes. One probably could cherry pick from Henry Ford’s The International Jew, rename those selected portions The International Zionist, publish it under the imprimatur of the Anti-Imperialist Peoples’ Front, and profitably market it to a gleeful audience among portions of today’s left.
The Transfer Agreement, though not Exhibit A, is nevertheless trotted out triumphantly as proof positive of the nefarious mindset of Zionism. The Agreement, hardly the “private” and “confidential” affair that Brenner alleges, instigated intense public controversy within the Jewish community and the Zionist movement. But by then the Boycott movement had run its course. Its purpose was never to “overthrow” Nazism, something that no sane person, i.e., not besotted by the myth of Jewish power, expected it to do. It was to arouse world sympathy to the plight of European Jews. But Hitler had called the democracies’ bluff. He offered any country that shed a tear for German Jews the whole lot of them. Nobody took the bait. Boatloads of Jews were famously turned back to German harbors.
Brenner and by extension Heller, more importantly, also treat the Boycott as an impediment to Nazi rearmament, a Jewish war of resistance against Nazi Germany, undermined by the Transfer pivot. That even the Zionist historian Edwin Black endulges in such far-flung nonsense does not give others license. It was a foolish conceit then. With what we know now, it’s delusional. Did it stop IBM, Ford, Chase or even Coca Cola from cooperating with the Nazis? Did it discourage Stalin from training up the Luftwaffe and from serving as Hitler’s quartermaster?
The pivot from boycott to transfer was imposed on the Zionist movement by its very failure to translate humanity’s perfunctory outrage into leverage for Jewish emigration, by the failure of socialist revolution, and by the consolidation of bureaucratic power. In Chaim Weizmann’s words, “There are in this part of the world 6,000,000 people…for whom the world is divided into places where they cannot live and places where they cannot enter.”
Of course, Zionists felt that they had “befouled” themselves. But not because they undermined a Jewish “war” that never existed against Nazism. They felt themselves soiled by having to negotiate terms of flight from a position of powerlessness with their mortal enemies. And for what? To eat shit by calling off a relatively toothless, but highly symbolic boycott—an assertion of Jewish pride and dignity– in order to save a handful here, a handful there, as similar transfer agreements were extended to Central and Eastern Europe? To do what little was in its power? And to be reminded at how very little power they had?
And then there’s this. Brenner knows better. “Once Hitler had triumphed inside Germany, the position of the Jews was hopeless; all that was left for them was to go into exile and continue the fight from there.” (p.55). And yet still he feels entitled to castigate Zionists for “boycott scabbing and outright collaboration” with Hitler, for negotiating their only means out.
But the real crime of the Zionists is their refusal to accept Brenner’s diktat. “Every genuine opponent of Nazism understood that once Hitler had taken power and had German Jewry in its claws, the struggle against him could not possibly be curbed by an over concern for their fate; they were essentially prisoners of war. The battle still had to go on. Naturally, no one wished those unfortunates any more grief than necessary, but to have brought the campaign against Nazism to a standstill out of the concern for the German Jews would only have accelerated Hitler’s further march into Europe.”(p 76.). Forgive me for thinking that this passage could have been penned at a later date by members of FDR’s administration and the ally’s general staff.
So there we have it. Jews had it within their power (!) to stop Hitler’s advance in its tracks. But Zionists nevertheless vainly placed their narrow national and egotistical interests—that is saving a remnant of Jews–above the common good of humanity.
Sigh…
Barry Finger’s comments above are indeed toothy, and it is Heller’s “arguments” which are toothless. As for Lenni Brenner being a “national treasure,” we of the left might as well call–Gus Hall or William Z. Foster–“national treasures” too! Israel is a failing bourgeois state in a sea of authoritarian Islamist entities, but a failing bourgeois state in which the Israelis themselves are actively resisting Netanyahu’s encroachments! But, and this is important, Israel is decidedly not–repeat, not–Nazi Germany, or the grotesquely-misnamed Peoples Democratic Republic of Korea (North Korea), or “revolutionary Islamist” Iran, where women refusing to wear hijabs, and those who defend them, are brutally thrown into prison for years, even decades. Would those calling for refusal to even visit Israel also extend such refusals to North Korea or Iran? The hypocrisy here is glaring.
When the governments of Iran and North Korea actively solicit the cooperation of NYC Council members in their campaign of influence I will happily “extend [my] refusal” to those countries as well. There’s no hypocrisy here, only a dose of “whatabout-ism.”
Barry Finger, your misrepresentations of Brenner’s position amounts to slander and red baiting. Brenner is a Trotskyite and hence an opponent of Stalin and Communist parties. https://www.counterpunch.org/2002/12/23/51-documents/ He’s not responsible for any of their idiocies.
You write, the “pivot from boycott to transfer was imposed on the Zionist movement by its very failure to translate humanity’s perfunctory outrage into leverage for Jewish emigration”. First the Zionists were never interested in the boycott and supported it only verbally for a few years because it was overwhelmingly popular among Jews. Second, the Zionists didn’t attempt to work for any Jewish emigration to any country other than British Palestine. They started their dealings with Nazi Germany within a couple months of Hitler’s takeover.
Jews could leave Germany in the 1930’s and in fact 282,000 Jews left that country between Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and September 1939. Another 117,000 left from annexed Austria. 95,000 went to the United States. 75,000 made it to Latin America. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-jewish-refugees-1933-1939
As Weiss make clear in footnotes #36 and #37 in the text you recommend https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203231.pdf the Transfer Agreement “solved the problems of an affluent class of German Jews, which managed to save some of its property and emigrate to Palestine.” He was talking about 20,000 people. Did that make the Zionist decision to avoid any fight against Hitler worth it?
Neither Brenner nor I claim the boycott by itself could have brought down Hitler. The point is that Jews should have been unrelenting in the fight against Nazism. The appeasement represented by the Transfer Agreement undermined that fight.
Barry, what exactly is your position? It seems you’re saying that the Zionists were always right about Europe, that it was always hopeless to fight anti-Semitism and that logically Jews had a perfect right to save themselves by taking Palestine. My position, and the reason for writing the article, is that boycotts are honorable and are in the best of the Jewish tradition and that the Palestinian-led BDS boycott should be supported.
I can’t address the intricacies of Jewish thought in the 1930s. As a student of colonialism, I see Israel/Palestine as injustice from beginning to end, with the US and Britain as principal sources and most powerful actors. I see the US use the new-formed UN to impose a postwar settlement on Palestine, distributing land that belonged neither to US nor UN, with no regard for its native population either in partition or follow-up. Who can pretend that either the desperate Jewish refugees or the Palestinians struggling vainly against colonization were in control? It was and is the US. Palestinians had every right to resist takeover by foreign invaders down the centuries: Turks, British, Zionist colonists from Europe. The US as postwar power broker unjustly carved up the land and then did nothing to halt Israel’s military expansion over all Palestine. 13 million Palestinians have no homeland. What would I as an American do if this happened to us? An occupying army throwing Americans out, bullying and starving the remnants? I’d say: “All people who love justice, stand with us in nonviolent direct action against tyranny. Go back to the beginning, give us back half our country, let the refugees who fled here keep half. Americans (American Jews!) love justice. Show it now. End US control. Stop giving political, financial, military cover to conquest and occupation. Free my people!” That’s what BDS is about. — Yann van Heurck, Madison CT