Page:The International Jew - Volume 2.djvu/40

 from the lower East Side of New York. The New York Ghetto has long since overflowed the lower East Side. Brownsville, Brooklyn, is a Jewish town, with its own language, theaters and press. The upper East Side of New York is practically in large sections a Jewish Ghetto. The prosperous West Side and the middle class section of the city north of Central Park are practically Jewish.

With the exception of one great department store and a few lesser ones, all the large department stores in New York are Jewish. Men and women’s ready-to-wear apparel, laundries, furriers, the general run of shopkeeping is practically monopolized by Jews. The legal profession is predominantly Jewish. It is estimated that of the 27,000 news stands that control the distribution of New York’s reading matter, 25,000 are in the hands of Jews. There are 360 synagogues on the East Side of New York alone.

The New York Kehillah is a very powerful organization, whose membership strength is not accurately known. It may be described as the Jewish government of that city. It was organized in 1908 as the result of a statement by General Bingham, then police commissioner of New York, that the Jewish population, which then amounted to 600,000, contributed 50 per cent of the criminals of the city. The Kehillah is the bar before which the authorities must answer for statements or acts touching the Jewish community. Its power is very great and its methods far reaching.

Politically, while the rest of the country is entertained with the fiction that Tammany Hall rules the politics of New York, the fact is rarely published that the Jews rule Tammany.

But it is not the possession of power that constitutes an indictment of any people, it is their use or misuse of it. And if the fact of power is established, no misuse of it being found, the fact has a commendatory side. If the Jews who flock to New York become American, and if they do not work ceaselessly to twist Americanism into something else; if they strengthen the principles and traditions of America, and do not cease to vitiate the one and abolish the other, the judgement upon them must be one of friendship.

However, to establish the fact of Jewish power, one