Nazis in Newark 1933-41; a Parallel Universe with Today

by Norman Berdichevsky (December 2009)

Nazis in Newark
by Warren Glover
Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ. 2003
ISBN 978-0-7658-0516-4

           
The crisis we face today that has resulted in an ever more aggressive and truculent, militant Islam threatening the foundations of Western civilization from without and within, bears an uncanny parallel, almost a parallel universe, with the dreadful anxiety-filled 1930s, when a virulent Nazism intimidated and cowed much of public opinion throughout the United States.

The most recent incident at Ft. Hood, in which an American born Muslim carrying out the tenets of Jihad resulting in numerous deaths that has “dumbfounded” the Pentagon, puts into the sharpest relief the blindness of our highest authorities, both civilian and military, and their total ignorance of Islam and its many followers who are committed to jihad yet thrive and scheme while protected by our laws. Dozens of “isolated incidents” involving Muslims committing heinous acts of murder and honor killings have been swept under the carpet by our government and mass media treating the guilty as “lone individuals” suffering from “derangement” while ignoring the ideology that lies at the bottom of their mental instability.

This is all the more reason to read “Nazis in Newark,” a book that reveals a parallel history two generations ago with the apathy to danger in our midst today. Under the impact of a world depression, a large majority of isolationist public opinion in the United States including many self styled Liberals sought to adopt a default policy of America first, excusing anti-Semitism, making amends for saddling Germany with war guilt and avoiding any rearmament. Their first object of assigning blame was then, like today, to avoid placing it on the Germans, or the Muslims and their allegiance to Nazi and Jihadist doctrines, but instead on those “war-mongers” who “inflamed emotions” by a “reckless foreign policy,” one that dared to confront the evil ambitions or ruthless dictators and fanatics who had constructed a scenario blaming the Jews for all the world’s ills.    

This book is an accurate and insightful account of the struggles of decent Americans who sought to call public attention to the growing menace of Nazism within the United States and the confrontations on the streets of Newark, New Jersey which witnessed the most direct physical battle of the era between Nazi sympathizers and American Jews. It recalls a parallel universe to today’s battles with one notable exception, the absence then of much of the current insane political correctness and “multiculturalism” that excuses Islamist crimes and designs to wreck the foundations of American democracy and self-defense.

Glover’s book casts a sharp clinical light from the standpoint of history on the sanctimonious attitude of Jewish Obama supporters who have created the ultra-Liberal “J-Street” refusing to acknowledge the open anti-Semitic stance or radical Far Left character of many of the President’s most influential supporters, associates and appointees who demean and defame Israel and Zionism.

For them, any sign of Jewish pride must be demeaned in order to secure their certificate of “kashrut” as loyal Democrats for whom all other ethnic, racial or religious groups must be encouraged to seek special favor from the government and be recognized as an important and proud element of a rainbow coalition.
 


When Jews actually organized successful real resistance in DEEDS and not just WORDS on a major scale (something unheard of today in the United States) in the Newark riots against the pro-Nazi organizations “Friends of the New Germany” and the “German-American Bund,” the initiative was largely on the part of conservative leaning Jewish war veterans with battle experience, professional and amateur boxers, gangsters, machinists, plumbers, glaziers, athletes, butchers and upholsterers with muscle power rather than the pious statements of “activists” on the Left and liberal leaning “progressive rabbis.”

The same was true in Britain after World War II when the “1943 Group” of Jewish war veterans took to the streets of London to forcefully evict the remnants of Moseley’s British Union of Fascists in defiance of the requests of the establishment British Board of Deputies who pleaded for British Jews not to act as vigilantes and leave their protection to the police (see The 1943 Group by Morris Beckman, A Centerprise Publication, London. 1992.)   

The long dormant and docile majority among many Jews still suffering from a time warp in which FDR was regarded as a savior is wholly ignorant of the perfidious roles played by the New York Times and the BBC in their decades’ long campaign to slander and malign “The Jewish State” (the very term offends their international and cosmopolitan sensibilities).

The Jewish worship for learning continues to venerate what so many Liberals regard as “our finest academic Ivy League Institutions” such as Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Vassar and Barnard, aware that these names conjure up the picture of perfect liberal respectability with complete ignorance that precisely these universities were among the most anti-Semitic in their enrollment restrictions against Jewish students in the interwar years and that some of their most prominent faculty members including presidents and deans defended warmer foreign relations with Nazi Germany and opposed any anti-German economic boycott (see Rebecca Bynum’s excellent book review “Fashionable Fascism” in the November, 2009 issue of NER of Stephen H. Norwood’s “The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower; Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses</i>; Cambridge University Press, 2009).     

Many among today’s Jewish Liberals have convinced themselves that the Religious Right in Israel is their principal enemy and that to win credibility as progressives they must support a position that calls on Israel to make unlimited concessions no matter what the consequences. They follow the classic definition of insanity– “repeating the same course of failed action and still believing that the outcome will be different.” In the meantime, since the “Oslo Accords,” most Israelis have been cured of that form of insanity and realize the futility of continuing to act as if the Palestinian side with Iranian encouragement intends to abide by any of the promises made. 

Flashback to the 1930s: Newark, New Jersey became the prime stage of confrontation due to its ethnic make-up and proximity to both New York and Washington, D.C. From 1933 until Pearl Harbor, it was the most prominent American city where the struggle against Nazi sympathizers took on the dimensions of pitched street battles. It is worthwhile recalling how the political battle for “hearts and minds” of Americans was fought and how the anti-Nazi struggle successfully engaged both Jews and Gentiles including German-Americans.

This is particularly important in the light of today’s squeamishness among the “politically correct” Left wing of the Democratic Party to demand that Muslim-Americans express their condemnation of Jihadist activity around the globe and the sympathy, aid and comfort rendered to those fighting our troops and murdering civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and on a dozen other fronts.

The American Jewish boycott against the Nazi regime was initiated on March 19, 1933 by the national Jewish War Veterans at its annual convention in Atlantic City. Nowhere else in America was the call to battle so enthusiastically answered as in the Third Ward of Newark. The response came as a direct reaction to the parades and activities of the Friends of the New Germany, a Nazi front and propaganda organization.

The wealthier more integrated veteran Jewish community leaders of German origin were cautious at first and reluctant to utilize any measures beyond those of trust in the government and police as a strategy to oppose anti-Semitism. The established German-American community in Newark and elsewhere also initially viewed the Nazi government with suspicion and disfavor and hoped for an avoidance of any tensions with their Jewish neighbors but with each political victory engineered by Hitler over the remilitarization of the Rhineland and Saar, the absorption of Austria and the Sudentenland, the take-over of Memel and demands on Poland to return the “Corridor” and Danzig, more and more German-Americans (although still a small minority) expressed support and pride in the new regime. In doing so, they accepted without reservation the accompanying racist anti-Semitic doctrines of the Nazis.

A growing number of the Liberal Christian clergy following the example of Pastor Reinhold Niebhur, although anxious to avoid any extra-legal measures, gravitated more and more to support of Jewish rights while many in the ultra conservative Catholic clergy, the African-American community and certainly among many hard core isolationists and “country-club” bluebloods among the WASP majority in America felt that this was a foreign matter of little concern to them.
 

The central figure in the Jewish resistance movement that arose in Newark was Abner “Longy” Zwillman, a notorious gangster and his henchman, ex-prizefighter, Nat Arno. Their gang was the leading criminal organization involved in bootlegging, racketeering, gambling, protection and labor union extortion all along the Northeast Coast. Zwillman’s financial and tactical support of the Jewish militant activists named “The Minutemen,” dedicated to disrupting Nazi meetings, had nothing to do with his criminal activities. He acted as a proud Jew, profoundly sympathetic to his friends and neighbors, many of them first generation immigrant Americans in Newark’s inner city Third Ward. He and Arno had used their fists and wits to combat anti-Semitism like many of his generation. From the 1920s to 1950s, and sporadically thereafter, American, British, Russian, Argentine, Hungarian and French Jews held many national and world champion boxing titles. Many of them wore the Star of David on their trunks, and were elected to the Boxing hall of Fame (for full list see