Jewish Community Relations Council, Boston, Massachusetts

              12 August 1957
 
Editor
Life Magazine
Now York, New York
Dear Sir:
Life Magazine seems irredeemably determined to misunderstand and misrepresent the
American Jew to his fellow-citizens. Errors which — to my own certain knowledge —
have been called directly to the attention of its editors more than once, keep reappearing with incredible persistence. The article by George Steiner in your issue
of 12 August is only the latest in a series which promises a new record of journalistic myopia. How unfortunate that your truly excellent presentation of the work
being done by the United Jewish Appeal had to be followed by such distortion.
Witness, for example, the weird selection of pictures to illustrate what the reader
presumably is to accept as an objective study of the attitudes of American Jews toward the State of Israel. It can scarcely be either oversight or accident that not
a single Zionist is included, though the portrait of Lessing Rosenwald is conspicuously present as a leading anti-Zionist. By what conceivable criteria, moreover,
MN the photographs of Phil Silvers and Hank Greenberg included among the seven
Jews chosen? Has either achieved prominence as a Jew or in the relationship of
American Jews to Israel? Is either an authentic spokesman on the subject of "how
U. S. Jews view (the) Jewish State?" Their inclusion makes just about a6 much sense
as to exhibit a picture of Herb Score (because he happens to be a Catholic) in an
article on the feelings of American Catholics toward the Vatican.
The distortion implied by your choice of photographsbecomes more explicit in the text
itself. Ten lines are given over to an exposition or the Zionist point of view, which
is undefcniably upheld by far more than the 750,000 American Jews you mention. Almost
twice that space is devoted to the  American Council for Judaism, a ridiculously insignificant handful of frightened Jews, considerably less than the "fewer than 20,000
members" with which" you credit them.
Mo indication is given that the American Council for Judaism has been officially
repudiated and condemned by just about every responsible organization of American Jews
in existence, including the American Jewish Committee which you cite with implied
approval as a non-extremist group. The Council is described as seeking "increased
civic, cultural and social integration into the life of the United States," as if
they possessed an exclusive monopoly on that opinion. The obvious and inescapable
implication is that Zionists do not favor such integration.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. And noting could be more inexcusable than
for the staff of Life to persist in perpetrating such strange and subtile nonsence.
Your readers have been mislead quite as much by what you fail to say as by what you
say. The support which Aaerica's Jews have so abundantly extended to Israel is attributed
Entirely to the tragedy which decimated a third of the Jewish people during World War II
and to the anti-Semitism which exists in lesser dimension even here in the United States.
Mo mention is made, nor even a hint given, that there is also a deeply religious motivation to that support.