anti-Semitic violence in Boston and New York during World War II
During World War II, marauding bands composed largely of Irish-American youth terrorized Jewish communities in Boston and New York, repeatedly assaulting Jews in the streets and parks, desecrating synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, and damaging Jewish stores. Yiddish journalist and Zionist leader Dr. Samuel Margoshes referred to the violence in Boston as a "series of small pogroms." The attacks peaked in 1943 and 1944, as marauders left Irish-American districts contiguous to Jewish neighborhoods to go "Jew hunting." They challenged individuals they encountered by demanding to know whether they were Jewish. If the answer was affirmative, they beat, stabbed, or even mutilated the victim. They sometimes tore the clothes off Jewish girls. In late 1943, state senator Maurice Goldman, who represented the Dorchester-Mattapan-Roxbury district, where most of Boston's Jews resided, informed Massachusetts governor Leverett Saltonstall that his constituents lived in "mortal fear" of anti-Semitic assault. Jewish spokespersons in both cities, joined by concerned non-Jews, declared that the violence was part of an organized anti-Semitic campaign inspired by the Coughlinite Christian Front. The savage wartime beatings of Jews in Boston and New York constituted the most sustained wave of overt anti-Semitic violence in American history.
Both Boston and New York were Coughlinite strongholds. Michigan-based priest Charles Coughlin was one of the nation's most influential anti-Semites, who spoke every week to millions of Americans across the nation over the radio. In 1938 he reprinted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a long-discredited forgery purporting to demonstrate a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, in his newspaper Social Justice, sold in front of churches and at street corners throughout both cities. Coughlin organized the Christian Front in 1938 to propagate his anti-Semitic views. It recruited many members from the Boston and New York police forces. The Christian Front urged shoppers not to patronize Jewish-owned stores. Both the Christian Front and an offshoot called the Christian Mobilizers, whose rhetoric was explicitly violent, regularly staged street-corner meetings denouncing Jews.
From the late 1930s through World War II, the Christian Front advanced an anti-Semitic isolationism. Prior to U.S. entry into the war, Boston Christian Front leader Francis Moran charged that Jews schemed to draw the country into the European conflict in order to advance their economic interests. Labeling Jewish interventionists "bloodsuckers," Moran deliberately invoked the medieval charge that Jews murdered Christian children to obtain blood to mix with Passover matzoh. Although the federal government banned Social Justice as seditious in 1942, and Coughlin's archbishop, under U.S. Justice Department pressure, ordered him to withdraw from political activity, the Christian Front continued its anti-Semitic, isolationist campaign behind newly created front groups. It circulated massive quantities of anti-Semitic literature, including some that falsely accused Jews of avoiding military service. The anti-Semitic priest Edward Lodge Curran, the "Father Coughlin of the East," visited Irish-American South Boston during the war to denounce America's ally Britain at heavily attended, city-financed celebrations of Evacuation Day (which commemorated British withdrawal from Boston during the American Revolution). John Roy Carlson, one of America's leading authorities on hate movements, described wartime Boston as "seething with anti-Semitism and defeatism."
"anti-Semitic violence in Boston and New York during World War II." American History. ABC-CLIO, 2010. Web. 14 Dec. 2010.
Chicago
American History, s.v. "anti-Semitic violence in Boston and New York during World War II," accessed December 14, 2010.
APA
anti-Semitic violence in Boston and New York during World War II. (2010). In American History. Retrieved December 14, 2010, from