Persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany

Persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany becomes a political fault line in the novel: its reality is acknowledged, but that acknowledgment is used to argue against intervention and to cast Jewish political activity as suspect. The contrast between this official rhetoric and the domestic threats faced by Jewish communities makes persecution more than a distant fact. It exposes how anti-Semitic arguments can recognize Jewish suffering while still turning Jews into objects of accusation, and how those arguments coexist with intimidation and preparations for violence in the United States.

Persecution in the Argument for Neutrality

In a passage presenting an argument about the war, persecution in Germany is treated as sufficient reason for Jewish people to hate the Nazi regime. The concession is explicit: the suffering cannot be condoned. But the argument immediately pivots from that acknowledgment to the claim that Jewish advocacy for intervention endangers both the United States and Jews themselves. Jewish groups, it contends, should oppose war because they would be among the first to suffer its consequences. The sequence grants the persecution moral weight while using it to discredit the political response of those affected by it.

The argument then makes tolerance dependent on peace and strength, suggesting that war and devastation would destroy the conditions in which tolerance can survive. It distinguishes a minority of Jewish people who oppose intervention from a majority who do not, and presents Jewish influence in film, the press, radio, and government as a danger. By attributing a common political purpose to Jewish and British leaders and depicting that purpose as alien to American interests, the speech turns a discussion of persecution into an anti-Semitic account of Jewish influence and divided allegiance. The contradiction is central: Jewish suffering is acknowledged, yet Jewish efforts to resist the regime responsible for it are framed as a threat.

Winchell’s Counter-Campaign

Walter Winchell gives the opposing argument a public platform. On the Tuesday after Labor Day, he began a congressional campaign from a soapbox at Broadway and 42nd Street, the same platform from which he had announced his presidential candidacy. His recognizable radio-broadcaster appearance drew a rapidly growing crowd; within minutes, mounted New York City police officers were diverting traffic, and newspaper accounts put the gathering at nearly ten thousand. Winchell denounced the removal of his radio microphone and newspaper column and made the danger he identified the subject of the campaign: he would continue warning audiences about fascism and seek to drive Lindbergh’s pro-Hitler party from Congress.

The campaign carried that warning beyond New York. Winchell spoke in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, addressing audiences at factory and shipyard entrances as well as small street gatherings. In Boston, at Perkins Square, heckling escalated into a mob attack. Armed bodyguards got him out and took him to a hospital for treatment; local police had not arrived until an hour after gunshots were heard. The episode shows how the campaign’s effort to expose organized anti-Semitism brought its speaker into direct danger, while the delayed official response sharpened doubts about whether public authorities would protect those targeted.

Newark’s Preparations for Violence

After the violence in Detroit, Jewish residents of Newark feared that unrest might reach their own streets, whether with a visit from Winchell or through the spread of the riots. The concern was sharpened by Newark’s geography and social makeup: about fifty thousand Jews lived in a city of more than half a million, in a heavily Jewish neighborhood adjoining working-class communities where anti-Semitic agitation could find support. The fear was not simply of spontaneous disorder, but of a crowd being mobilized by organized pro-Nazi forces.

Rabbi Joachim Prinz and five other prominent local Jews established the Newark Committee of Concerned Jewish Citizens. The committee sought contingency plans through meetings with the mayor and city officials, followed by consultations at the New Jersey State House with the governor, state police leadership, and the National Guard. The state attorney general assured Prinz that assaults would be prosecuted. When the committee asked Rabbi Bengelsdorf for a meeting in Washington, he replied that the matter was local rather than federal and directed them back to city and state authorities. The response left community safety to local arrangements even as the committee was confronting a danger it understood as part of a wider political crisis.

Longy Zwillman prepared a separate line of defense in case police failed to respond effectively. He assigned Bullet Apfelbaum to recruit and train young Jewish men for the Provisional Jewish Police, a hastily assembled volunteer corps intended to protect the neighborhood. Their presence on street corners and their efforts to enlist able-bodied residents brought the threat into everyday community spaces. In this progression, public meetings and official assurances were accompanied by preparations for self-defense: the community had to plan not only how to persuade authorities to act, but what to do if they did not.

Public Warning and Its Cost

The novel sets Winchell’s warning against fascism beside the political use of Jewish persecution abroad. His campaign tried to make anti-Semitism visible to audiences across the country, while the arguments he opposed treated Jewish resistance to Nazi Germany as evidence of disloyal influence. These were not equivalent positions: one named a danger to Jews, while the other made Jewish political agency part of the supposed danger. The gap between them becomes concrete in the violence against Winchell and Newark’s preparations for possible attacks.

When a radio bulletin announced that Winchell had been killed at a political rally in Louisville, Herman Roth and his family listened together. The news connected a national political murder to the anxieties already shaping local life. Across the episodes, persecution in Nazi Germany is thus not confined to discussion of Germany: it is invoked to justify neutrality, contested through street-level political speech, and made newly urgent by anti-Semitic violence and the uncertain protection available to Jewish communities.