The following excerpt is from Chapter 5 of The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class. The book describes the continuity of the movement in the fight against Jew-hatred going back more than 100 years. It helps make clear the decisive importance of building a communist leadership capable of leading hundreds of millions to fight to take political power for the working class and oppressed nations worldwide. Copyright © 2024 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
A few months after the US communist movement took on its current form as the Socialist Workers Party at the opening of 1938, the party’s Political Committee adopted a resolution on the Jewish Question. In November, the SWP National Committee issued a declaration in response to the Nazis’ Kristallnacht pogroms across Germany earlier that month. That call to action launched the campaign the party organized and led — before, during, and after World War II — demanding that Washington open the doors to Jews seeking refuge from Nazi persecution. Excerpts from these two SWP documents appear below.
Theses on the Jewish Question
SWP Political Committee, 1938
Our approach to the Jewish question can be none other than that of the international class struggle. In its death agony the capitalist class maintains itself in power by resorting to unmitigated brutality and violence aimed at the working class, particularly at its vanguard. It utilizes every element of hatred and prejudice which it can fan into flame to bring about division among the masses and to establish a social basis for its fascist, gangster rule.
The Jews, by virtue of the fact that everywhere they form only a small minority of the population, and because anti-Semitism has always been fostered, sometimes openly, sometimes in masked form, constitute an easy scapegoat upon whom the big bourgeoisie can divert the pent-up, dangerous wrath of the backward elements among the masses, and particularly of the desperate middle classes. The fascist hirelings of the big bourgeoisie use the most vicious, lying propaganda to inflame to pogrom temperature the dormant antagonism to the Jews.
Precisely because the fomenting of anti-Semitism has become an inseparable part of the technique of fascist reaction, the revolutionary party has a double duty to perform in combating it. It has the duty of exposing the real aims of the capitalists, hidden behind the smokescreen of anti-Semitism and thereby inoculating the masses against the poison; it has also the special task of mobilizing the real defense of the persecuted Jews, a defense of necessity based on the might of the organized working class. If these tasks are properly carried out, then we can at the same time hope to attract to our firm support the Jewish masses. …
The Transitional Program includes the necessity for building workers’ defense groups. This idea can find especially fertile soil for implanting and for growth into reality among the Jewish masses.
It goes without saying that such defense groups constituted under our influence must not consist of Jews alone. Nevertheless, we must take full advantage of the great concentration of the Jews in New York City to enlist as many as possible in such defense organizations. In this respect the situation in Jersey City [with its incipient fascist, union-busting, Jew-hating gangs organized by Democratic Party mayor Frank Hague] and its implications for the Jews need hardly be emphasized.
Jewish organizations must be encouraged to set up defense groups, which should be offered aid by workers’ organizations. Similarly we must exert our influence wherever possible to have workers’ defense groups come to the aid of the Jews when necessary.
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Open the doors to refugees from Hitler’s Nazi terror!
From Socialist Workers Party ‘Call to Action’
SWP National Committee,
November 1938
The entire world has been shocked to the depths by the outburst of a new campaign of brutal violence against the Jews in Germany [the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 9–10, 1938].
The hideous terror of Hitlerism has never struck with such cruel and merciless force.
Throughout Germany, bands of Nazi gangsters organized and commanded by their leaders, have wrecked and looted stores owned by Jews. Jewish synagogues have been burned and destroyed by the instructed fascist mobs. The workers of Germany, who hate and despise Hitlerism with all their strength, were unable to come to the aid of the brutalized Jews because they are themselves still in the straitjacket of the Nazi terror.
The brown-shirted monsters do not even bother to conceal their aim: the physical extermination of every Jew in Great Germany.
Already a “fine” has been levied against the Jews, which means in effect the complete confiscation of all their property and its distribution among the Nazi sadists.
The regime of the ghetto is to be restored in Germany by the complete segregation of all Jews into marked-off slums. With this measure, Hitlerism shows again that it means barbarism, the destruction of all civilized progress, the return to the shame and depravity of the Middle Ages.
Why are the Hitlerites increasing their murderous attack upon the Jews?
For two reasons:
They hope to take the minds of the German workers and peasants off the misery from which they suffer, to make them think that the Jews — traditional scapegoats for reaction — are responsible for all their ills.
They hope to blackmail the international protest movement against fascism into cowardly silence.
If they accomplish these dastardly aims, they can continue without the slightest opposition their rule of blood and iron.
If they accomplish their aims, they will encourage the fascist reaction in every other country of the world to advance more boldly, more insolently, more successfully.
They must not be allowed to succeed! …
WE THEREFORE DEMAND:
Throw open the doors of the United States to the victims of the Hitlerite pogrom regime!
We urge all workers and other labor organizations: Demand that the American government use its emergency powers to open the doors to the horribly persecuted Jews of Germany! …
Show the victims of the fascist terror that you mean it seriously, by stretching out to them the hand of fraternal solidarity, by demanding of the American government the free and unrestricted right of asylum for the Jewish scapegoats of fascist barbarism!