After 2000 Jewish, anti-Zionist Communists held rally at New York City’s Irving Plaza on August 28, 1929 in support of the ‘Arab Revolt’ in Palestine, the next month saw Party meetings and offices were attacked by right-wing Zionists, and ‘socialist’ Zionists, the American Legion, and police . The Communist Party had a substantial Jewish membership and its influential and widely read Yiddish-language paper Morgen Freiheit was a particular target for assault. In response, on September 22, 4000 people packed the New Star Casino in a ‘trial’ organized by the Jewish Buro of the Communist Party, conducted largely in Yiddish, finding Zionism ‘guilty’ of collaborating with imperialism and ‘swindling’ Jewish workers.

‘Jewish Masses Repudiate Zionist Swindle’ from The Daily Worker. Vol. 6 Nos. 170 & 171. September 23 & 24, 1929.

ZIONIST TOOLS FOUND GUILTY.

Convicted of Aiding Imperialism

Four thousand Jewish workers crowded New Star Casino to capacity, with hundreds more clamoring to enter the hall, in a remarkable demonstration yesterday against the betrayal of the cause of the working class by the Jewish Daily Forward and other Jewish newspapers which support imperialism and its instrument, Zionism, in Palestine.

The affair, arranged by the Jewish Bureau of the Communist Party, took the form of a trial, by the workers, of the mercenary journalists who try to poison the working class with capitalist class propaganda in general and try to aid in the imperialist war to subjugate the Arabian people in Palestine.

The case was “prosecuted” on behalf of the working class by M.J. Olgin and M. Epstein, of the Jewish Communist Daily, the Morning Freiheit, the judge being Paul Yudich, also of the Freiheit. Stirring scenes were enacted when the jury of twelve workers was chosen from among the audience, and when witness after witness recited the evidence at betrayals and mercenary lying on the part of the writers and editors of the Forward, the Day and the Morning Journal. Some of the witnesses were workers who had at one time been inveigled into the Jewish Legion in the service of British imperialism in Palestine. The affair decisively demonstrated the genuine attitude of the class-conscious Jewish workers against the corruption of reactionary nationalism and social-fascism, showing that the correction of the earlier errors of the Freheit, which at first fell into the trap of reactionary nationalism, will get the support of the Jewish proletarians of New York.

JEWISH MASSES REPUDIATE ZIONIST SWINDLE AND FOLLOW PARTY LEAD ON PALESTINE

The thousands of Jewish workers who packed New Star Casino Sunday and the hundreds, perhaps thousands of others who could not get into the crowded auditorium, showed clearly that the class struggle cannot be obscured by the racial or religious appeals of the Zionists and the other elements of the Jewish bourgeoisie. These thousands of workers, with one voice, denounced the writers, editors and contributors to the Jewish Daily Forward, the Day and the Morning Journal, as agents of imperialism who were trying to aid in the capitalist suppression and exploitation of the Arabian masses and Jewish workers in Palestine. The demonstration took the form of a mass trial, with spokesmen for the Communist Party presenting a devastating indictment of the Zionists as pliant tools of British imperialism.

The masses realized the true significance of the Zionist swindle, as its utopian mask was ripped off and its imperialist features exposed in all their hideousness. Zionism, trying to deceive the Jewish masses with talk of a social and national paradise in Palestine, is in reality an instrument by which British imperialism carries on a campaign of expropriation against the Arabian masses, driving them from the land on which they and their ancestors have lived for centuries and enslaving them on plantations. It was shown conclusively that no Jewish state has been established in Palestine; that the Zionists aid British imperialism in stifling every movement for political independence of Palestine. The “left” Zionists, the Paoli Zionists, were exposed as the most vicious enemies of the toiling masses and the most virulent agents of imperialism who even sink so far as to prostitute Communist slogans and demand a “Jewish Soviet republic” for Palestine. This is nothing other than a demand for a dictatorship of a minority of Jewish elements over the vast majority of Arabians in Palestine. A Soviet republic must be based upon the whole toiling masses of a country and can only be brought about by the overthrow of the exploiting class and of every form of exploitation.

Against the demands of the Zionist agents of imperialism the clear Communist demands were put forward for support of the revolutionary movement against imperialism and its Zionist agents, for an independent Arab republic with full rights for all national minorities, including the toiling Jewish masses, for the return of the land stolen from the Arabs, for a federation of Soviet republics of Arabistan and for a united front of Jewish and Arab toiling masses against world imperialism.

The Communist program was unanimously endorsed by the class conscious Jewish workers of New York, who have been through bitter class conflicts in this city and elsewhere. These workers could not be deceived by the reactionary nationalist and religious appeals of the Zionists.

At the same hour the trial of the Zionist agents of imperialism was being held, there was staged in another hall a demonstration of Jewish capitalist journalists, editors, doctors, lawyers, manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, peddlers, musicians, who passed resolutions against the Communists and affirmed their “most sacred faith in Jewish culture, in the Jewish masses and the Jewish people.” No one I would expect these elements to speak of the working class.

The Jewish masses recognize in the apologists for Zionism who passed resolutions against the class struggle and against the liberation movement of the colonial victims of imperialism, the same identical Jewish needle trades bosses and their associates and labor faker tools and gangsters who fight with all their power against every attempt of the Jewish needle trades and other workers to improve their conditions.

The Jewish working masses understand that their emancipation is to be sought not by following the chimera of nationalism into the camp of imperialism, but by fighting the class struggle in the ranks of the working class.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924. National and City (New York and environs) editions exist.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1929/1929-ny/v06-n170-NY-sep-23-1929-DW-LOC.pdf

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1929/1929-ny/v06-n171-NY-sep-24-1929-DW-LOC.pdf