The following is an article written by an American Jew in 1928:
by Marcus Eli Ravage
reprinted from The Century Magazine January 1928
Of course, you do resent us. It is no good telling me you don't. So let us not waste any time on denials and alibis. You know you do, and I know it, and we understand each other. To be sure, some of your best friends are Jews, and all that. I have heard that before once or twice, I think. And I know too, that you do not include me personally - "me" being any particular individual Jew - when you fling out at us in your wholesale fashion, because I am, well, so different, don't you know, almost as good as one of yourselves. That little exemption does not, somehow, move me to gratitude; but never mind that now. It is the aggressive, climbing, pushing, materialistic sort you dislike - those, in a world, who remind you so much of your own up-and-coming brethren. We understand each other perfectly. I don't hold it against you.
Bless my soul, I do not blame anybody for disliking anybody. The thing that intrigues me about this anti-Jewish business, as you play at it, you make such fantastic and transparent excuses, you seem to be suffering from self-consciousness so horribly, that if the performance were not so grotesque it would be irritating.
It is not as if you were amateurs: you have been at it for over fifteen centuries. Yet watching you and hearing your childish pretexts, one might get the impression that you did not know yourselves what it is all about. You resent us, but you cannot clearly say why. You think up a new excuse - a "reason" is what you call it - every other day. You have been piling up justification for yourself these many hundreds of years and each new invention is more laughable than the last and each new excuse contradicts and annihilates the last.
Not so many years ago I used to hear that we were money-grubbers and commercial materialists; now the complaint is being whispered around that no art and no profession is safe against Jewish invasion.
We are, if you are to be believed, at once clannish and exclusive, and unassimilable because we won't intermarry with you, and we are also climbers and pushers and a menace to your racial integrity.
Our standard of living is so low that we create your slums and sweat industries, and so high that we crowd you out of your best residential sections. We shirk our patriotic duty in wartime because we are pacifists by nature and tradition, and we are the arch-plotters of universal wars and the chief beneficiaries of those wars (see "The protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion".)
We are at once the founders and leading adherents of capitalism and the chief perpetrators of the rebellion against capitalism.
Surely, history has nothing like us for versatility!
And oh! I almost forgot the reasons of reasons. We are the stiff-necked people who never accepted Christianity, and we are the criminal people who crucified its founder.
But I tell you, you are self-deceivers. You lack either the self-knowledge or the mettle to face the facts squarely and own up to the truth. You resent the Jew not because, as some of you seem to think, we crucified Jesus but because we gave him birth. Your real quarrel with us is not that we have rejected Christianity but that we have imposed it upon you!
Your loose, contradictory charges against us are not a patch on the blackness of our proved historic offence. You accuse us of stirring up revolution in Moscow. Suppose we admit the charge. What of it? Compared with what Paul the Jew of Tarsus accomplished in Rome, the Russian upheavals a mere street brawl.
You make much noise and fury about the undue Jewish influence in your theatres and movie palaces. Very good; granted your complaint is well-founded. But what is that compared to our staggering influence in your churches, your schools, your laws and your governments, and the very thoughts you think every day?