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Culture

Jewish Civil Rights Activists Killed in Mississippi

1914 • 100 years ago

Bagel Monopoly of Norfolk Street

Anyone who hangs around the corner of New York City’s Hester and Norfolk Streets at about 5 a.m. knows of the boisterous baked-good market there, where Jews and Jewesses sell all manner of challahs, cakes, rolls and all kinds of other good things. This writer has been going there every morning for a while, and typically buys two well-done, twisted bagels for a penny from a particular Jewess. Recently another woman showed up and began selling the same kind of bagel at three for a penny, so I started to buy from her. After all, it was a better deal. About a week later, I discovered that the two women banded together and created a kind of bagel trust, selling them at the old price — two for a penny. A few days later, along comes a Jew selling onion rolls, yelling, “Buy some rolls, huge rolls, two for three cents; don’t buy bagels from the trust — their monopoly must be smashed!” That’s competition on the Jewish Street.

1939 • 75 years ago

Anti-semitism is Law of the Land

The president of the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, Emil Hacha, lodged an official protest with the Nazi administrator of Czech lands, Baron Konstantin von Neurath, against the German policy of expropriating the property of the Czech Jewish population, which has been ongoing since last week. Unfortunately, Hacha is a powerless figure, a plaything into the hands of the Nazi overlords. It is known, however, that the Bohemian administration has been in discussions with the Nazis regarding the new anti-Semitic orders. Since the Germans took over the Sudetenland, there have been constant demands that the remainder of Czech lands also institute anti-Jewish laws. Now that the Nazis have taken over all of Czechoslovakia, they want anti-Semitism to become the law of the land.

1964 • 50 years ago

Kaddish in Mississippi

A spokesman from the Mississippi Highway Patrol announced that the charred shell of the station wagon driven by the three young fighters for civil rights for African Americans has no traces of bullet holes or blood. The car also shows no signs of having been broken into. The station wagon, which was driven by two Jewish students from New York, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, along with James Chaney, an African American from Mississippi, was found in a wooded area near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The parents of the two Jewish students were received at the White House by President Johnson, who assured them that everything was being done to find the missing freedom fighters.

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