Spivak, John L. Plotting America’s Pogroms: A Documented Exposé of Organized Anti-Semitism in the United States. [New York] New Masses, 1934.
“A web of anti-Jewish hatred has been woven around the country within the last two years and the effects upon our national life have been profound and far-reaching. In the business, professional and cultural worlds anti-Semitism has been whipped up until the Jew now feels a sense of isolation which he had thought he had lost with the ghetto days of the eighteenth century. It is no unusual thing to find handbills littering New York subway cars, preaching hatred of the Jew.”
So begins John Spivak’s Plotting America’s Pogroms: A Documented Exposé of Organized Anti-Semitism in the United States, published in 1934. This work was first published as a series of articles in the New Masses from October 2 to December 4, 1934.
John L. Spivak (1897-1981) was an American investigative reporter. He wrote about the working class and the spread of fascism and anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States from the 1920s through the 1940s. Plotting America’s Pogroms documents Spivak’s investigation of Nazi groups in the United States, and he continued his reports with Europe Under the Terror (1936).
John Spivak’s papers can be found at Syracuse University and The Harry Ransom Centre. Some of the text above and below is adapted from the finding aids.
The New Masses was launched in New York City in 1926. Initially, the magazine took a loosely leftist position: “Among the fifty-six writers and artists connected in some way with the early issues of the New Masses, [Joseph] Freeman reports, only two were members of the Communist Party, and less than a dozen were fellow travelers.” The editorial policy soon moved from “generic left” to a position of Marxist conformity. By the end of 1928, when Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman gained full editorial control, the “Stalinist/Trotskyist” division began in earnest.
The Dog's Tooth 