Page:The International Jew - Volume 3.djvu/31

 ARE THE JEWS VICTIMS OR PERSECUTORS? 25

of Columbus Day and berated Governor Hughes for signing the law making it a holiday in New York. The act that established it deserved "the contempt of thinking men." Why? Is not the discovery of America a memorable event? Yes, but Columbus was a Catholic! However, in recent months the Jews are proving him to have been a Jew, so we may expect some day to see Columbus Day insisted upon with Jewish rites.

The Catholic Columbian made editorial reference to the increasing Jewish influence on the American press, in these words : "Jewry is getting its grip on the news of this country as it is on Renter's and the Havas agency in Europe." A perfectly polite and true observation.

But the Jewish editorial thunderer came back- "The Columbian, in its sneaking Jesuitical way, does not mention the fact that these (the Jewish) papers are the very cleanest in the country. The Columbian cannot point to a single daily owned by one of its co-religionists that begins to compare with the above papers."

The sweet spirit here evidenced is very significant today when an appeal is being made to create a strong pro-Jewish Catholic sentiment.

If there is in the world any extra-ecclesiastical undertaking by Catholics which has won the undivided approval of the Christian world as the Passion Play of Oberammergau has done, the present writer does not know what it is. Yet in a volume entitled "A Rabbi's Impressions of the Oberammergau Passion Play" Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf, D.D., of Philadelphia, has stigmatized that notable production as reeking with falsehoods and vicious anti-Semitism. In the rabbi's eyes, of course, it is, for to him the entire Christian tradition is a poisonous lie. The whole fabric of Christian truth, especially as it concerns the person of Christ, are "the hallucinations of emotional men and hysterical women."

"Thus," says the rabbi (p. 127) "was invented that cruel story, that has caused more misery, more innocent suffering, than any other work of fiction in