Continuum of hate
‘Nazis in Newark,’ anti-Semites in New Brunswick, and a poet laureate in Trenton

by Max L. Kleinman

While Warren Grover’s Nazis In Newark (New Brunswick, Transaction Press, 2003) is a historical study, the issues he studies are contemporaneous with today’s headlines.

Grover chronicles the efforts, primarily among Jews, to combat the presence of Nazis in Newark, Irvington, and Sussex County’s Camp Nordland during the 1930s and early ’40s. The primary protagonist in this effort was Nat Arno, who headed the Minutemen, a group of Jewish ex-boxers and “enforcers,” members of gangster Abner “Longie” Zwillman’s gang. Grover writes that they would be ready at a “minute’s notice” to confront and even attack the Nazis who organized rallies where they spewed their hatred of Jews and exhorted others to join their cause.

The Nazi presence in New Jersey was most significant at Camp Nordland, which at its height trained 4,000 young Americans to become this country’s version of Hitler Youth. Arno’s unlikely compatriot in combating the Nazis was Dr. S. William Kalb, a physician who for many years led the nonsectarian Anti-Nazi League; it was his mission to boycott German goods to prevent their entering this country. The two were passionate in their entreaties to the civil authorities, haranguing them into banning Nazi meetings as a violation of American values.

Other groups, both Jewish and non-Jewish, responded less consistently and effectively to the Nazi threat in New Jersey, including the liberal trio of Amelia Moorfield, Luke Garner, and Frank Kingdon, who made attempts but failed to significantly rally Newark’s Christians into combating Nazism. And within the Jewish establishment in Newark, efforts concentrated on providing for the social welfare of Jews in Europe and promoting a homeland in Palestine. Many leaders were either embarrassed by the Minutemen’s tactics or were indifferent, hoping naively that the Nazi problem would just go away.

In Grover’s eyes, Kalb, Arno, and their followers were heroes. The collaboration of “a boycott group and a street army” made Newark’s anti-Nazi struggle unique in America. (The 1940s would bring Peter Bergson and his style of mass activism so well documented by David Wyman and other historians.)

The material presented in Nazis in Newark is so layered with colorful personalities and nefarious double-crosses that it would make a stimulating TV miniseries. The story line can be melodramatic, but it is based on prodigious research. Grover canvassed many primary and secondary sources and interviewed dozens of people who lived through the era.

He has shown an excellent mastery of this period, placing Newark against the backdrop of national and international events. He concludes that the Minutemen’s physical assaults and the activism represented by the boycott met the visceral needs of Jews who needed to show and feel that they were doing something to combat Nazism with whatever means they had at their disposal. In the words of a contemporary speaking about the members of the local Jewish community, the assaults launched by the Jewish thugs “made us proud to be Jews.”

Grover reminds us that there were eight long years between Hitler’s taking the reins of power as German chancellor in 1933 and America’s entry into the war after Pearl Harbor. Jewish rights in Germany were abrogated as early as 1933, and there were successive, and successively more onerous assaults on Jews before the Final Solution was crafted at the 1942 Wannsee Conference.

Unabated hatred

These events occurred six and seven decades ago, but hatred against Jews continues unabated. The following quote, made famous by American flier Charles Lindbergh, resonates with the messages of today’s headlines: “The administration, the British, and the Jews are three groups pushing the country to war…. The greatest danger lies in [the Jews’] large ownership and influence in our motion picture industry, our press and radio, and our government.” The remark is strikingly similar to those made by Malaysia’s former prime minister at a recent conclave of Muslim state leaders.

New Jersey itself achieved some infamy in this regard when Amiri Baraka was chosen to become the state’s poet laureate. Fair-minded citizens were embarrassed when Baraka accused Israel of foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, a specious repetition of the type of conspiracy theory promulgated by Lindbergh.

There was no uniformity of response to this issue. Many felt Baraka’s calumny should have been ignored, that he should have been left alone to finish his term. Others, primarily within the African-American community, felt that trying to remove Baraka was an infringement of his right of free expression. Fortunately, due to hard lobbying primarily by the Jewish community in concert with other religious and ethnic groups, the NJ legislature removed Baraka by eliminating the poet laureate position, arguing that the state should not support the fomenting of hatred. Enough private citizens are doing that quite well on their own in the “private sector,” particularly on college campuses.

This is manifested most clearly by a new radical group whose members advocate the establishment of a Palestinian state by any means possible, including the elimination of Israel entirely. Placards displayed at Rutgers University in New Brunswick urging the establishment of “Palestine from sea to sea” refer to a state that would incorporate all the land from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, effectively eliminating the Jewish State of Israel.

Also under discussion in intellectual circles in Europe and in the pages of The New York Review of Books is the notion of a binational state of Jews and Palestinians, in which the two peoples would live in peace and harmony forever. According to this argument, resurrected from the 1960s, the eventual elimination of the Jewish state would be assured by the overwhelming sweep of Palestinian demography. The last century has shown that Arab tribal or religious minorities are more often than not persecuted, if not slaughtered, by their Arab brothers. Is anyone naive enough to believe that the Jews would fare any better in such a binational state?

One of our greatest historians, Arthur Schlesinger, reminds us that there are cycles in American history. Nazis in Newark tells of the fascist cycle that confronted Americans during the 1930s and 1940s. Our contemporary cycle of evil is embodied by terrorism. In order to win the war against terrorism, we must show the same vigilance and sense of sacrifice that the greatest generation, the generation of Arno and Kalb, demonstrated six decades ago.

Max Kleinman is executive vice president of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey.