Word: goldstein
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Joseph Goldstein and others who consider The Merchant of Venice anti-Semitic [TIME, April 4], I would suggest they . . . reread the play with the open-mindedness they ask of others. Viewed from the 20th Century, the Christians make a pretty poor showing, on the whole. It is they who suffer from delusions of grandeur and indulge freely in insults and jibes; it is they who . . . mouth words like mercy and justice, only to evade an honest bargain by means of a cheap legal trick...
...petition to the board, Goldstein charged that the books plant "in the student in our public schools the seeds of anti-Semitism . . . [which] will pay dividends in hate, prejudice, intolerance and bigotry for generations to come." The character of Dickens' Fagin, Goldstein maintained, "holds the Jew up to ... contempt, ridicule and depicts the Jew as as fiend ... a murderer . . ." Shylock was hardly better; "the synonym for usurer, cheat . . . hater of all Christians...
...approving such reading matter, Goldstein charged, the board is defeating its own purpose of instilling in the children tolerance and "a love of neighbor and mankind." Since the schools are supported by Christians and Jews alike, he argued, the board's approval of such books is "an illegal, arbitrary and defenseless exercise of power...
...Lawyer Goldstein said that "at least a dozen organizations" were backing him, but he was not ready to name them last week. Apparently he did not speak for B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League, whose national director, Benjamin R. Epstein, declared: "We believe Mr. Goldstein's threatened resort to litigation . . . is unwise. A decent respect for academic freedom means that the police power of the state is resorted to only in those cases where the material is intended to undermine the democratic fabric and even then, only in extreme cases...
...week's end city educational authorities, with a defiant glint in the eye, dared Goldstein to do his worst. Said Dr. Paul A. Kennedy, assistant superintendent of schools: "I see he's going to pick our books for us! He is not ... We're just going to continue in our regular, slow, somewhat dumb schoolteacher fashion to do the best we can for the children...