On the Jewish Question
The following is a reprint of Peter Buch’s April 1970 introduction to Leon Trotsky’s pamphlet, On the Jewish Question, a collection of essays by Trotsky.1
Leon Trotsky’s views on the Jewish question will be of great interest to radical youth today, especially those of Jewish origin who often feel troubled over the present Arab-Israeli conflict.
The turn toward Marxism within the current international youth radicalization has led many young rebels and Third World liberation fighters to discover the relevance of Trotsky’s writings for the revolutionary period we live in now. Trotsky was the first to struggle against Stalin’s revision of Marxism and Leninism. He advocated permanent revolution as the road of underdeveloped countries to socialism, and he fought to assemble a new international leadership for the world socialist revolution. Young people who have rallied to the Vietnamese freedom struggle and who cheered Che Guevara’s cry for “two, three, many Vietnams” perceive that Trotsky fought, in his day, for “two, three, many” Russian Revolutions. The revolutionary optimism and fighting spirit which emerge from his writings speak directly to today’s new generation of fighters.
Trotsky devoted the years of his final exile from his forcible deportation from the USSR (United Soviet Socialist Republic) in 1929 till his assassination by an agent of Stalin in 1940, to the struggle to rescue the banner of Leninism from the Stalinist usurpers. The selections in this pamphlet were written during his last ten years, when he was at the height of his powers and engaged in what he regarded as the most significant work of his life, more important even than his role as the organizer of the October 1917 insurrection and the creator of the Red Army.
In his last decade, Trotsky was addressing a generation very different from today’s, one which had witnessed the greatest working-class upsurge in history only to see it cruelly smashed, as in Spain, or at least put back in harness, as in the United States. The European labor movement, captained by either the Stalinized Communist Parties or the reformist social democrats, seemed unable to resist the steady march of capitalist reaction and barbarism which overtook the continent. The entrenchment of the Soviet and Comintern bureaucracies under Stalin had led to the political disarming and physical defeat of the powerful German Communist Party, to the liquidation of Lenin’s old Bolshevik comrades in the Moscow show trials, and finally to the strangulation of promising workers’ revolutions in France and Spain which could have flung back the fascist scum.
As the revolutionary tide ebbed and world war approached, millions became deeply disoriented and demoralized. They lost faith in the possibilities of world socialism and the capacity of the working class to take power. In the name of “realism” and “practical politics,” old formulas and nostrums long discredited were revived, refurbished, and held up like so many brass icons as the surer promise of survival. In this fantasy world of partition plans, “collective security,” disarmament parleys, Munich agreements, “peace in our time,” League of Nations “sanctions,” and “eternal” peace pacts, Zionism contended for its place too as an alternative to socialist revolution.
And indeed, the regeneration of the most noxious varieties of anti-Semitism by the Nazis victorious in Germany posed the Jewish question anew in the sharpest possible way, as European Jewry faced extinction.
“What should the Jews do now?” many people wondered, overcome by events. “Can they afford to wait for the socialist revolution? What if it doesn’t come in time? What if it doesn’t come at all? And if it does come, what is to prevent the rise of another tyrant like Stalin, who ordered the repression of entire nationalities, including the Jews? Where can the Jewish refugees go but Palestine since the doors of all nations are locked to them? Doesn’t the threat of Nazi annihilation prove the necessity of a Jewish homeland where the Jews can be safe?”
For Trotsky, the Nazi peril, whose enormity he comprehended better and earlier than anyone else, proved more than ever that the Jews would not be safe as long as socialism did not replace capitalism on a world scale. He traced the impending catastrophe to its roots:
“Before exhausting or drowning mankind in blood,” he wrote in 1938, “capitalism befouls the world atmosphere with the poisonous vapors of national and race hatred. Anti-Semitism today is one of the more malignant convulsions of capitalism’s death agony.” The strategic task for genuine revolutionaries was clear: “An uncompromising disclosure of the roots of race prejudice and all forms and shades of national arrogance and chauvinism, particularly anti-Semitism, should become part of the daily work of all sections of the Fourth International, as the most important part of the struggle against imperialism and war. Our basic slogan remains: Workers of the World Unite!” (The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International [The Transitional Program], adopted by the Founding Conference of the Fourth International, 1938.)
But for Trotsky there was no question of “waiting” for socialism. Immediate, practical measures were required to save the Jews from the Nazi butchers. With the defeat of the socialist revolution in Europe, nothing could have helped except a powerful international campaign to spotlight Hitler’s actual plans and to force open the doors of the Western countries most able to give asylum, especially the United States and England. Trotsky called for mass action around the demand of asylum now for the threatened Jews. Such a demand was capable of uniting all genuine opponents of fascism, socialist or not, in a mass movement which might have saved millions from the gas chambers.
There is no more honorable chapter in the record of world Trotskyism than the energetic campaign to build such a mass movement that it initiated, in united action with many independents, before the war broke out. The campaign was especially active in the U.S., where the racist 1924 immigration laws effectively barred the entry of most Jews.
“Open the gates!” was the slogan carried by the activists of the American Fund for Political Prisoners and Refugees into the union halls, the unemployed councils, the campuses, community groups, and other mass organizations, many of which sent urgent demands to Washington and organized militant demonstrations.
The leaders of the labor, Stalinist, reformist, and Zionist movements for the most part remained aloof from this campaign and thereby condemned it to failure. Their pursuit of “realistic” aims with the methods of “practical politics,” i.e., without challenging capitalism, held them strangely immobilized when it came to realizing a concrete “nonsocialist” task around the single issue of rescuing the Jews.
The liberal-labor bloc with Roosevelt was loath to annoy his administration, whose secret war plans might have been hampered by an independent mass movement set in motion by the asylum demand. The Zionists and Jewish community leaders who also lined up with Roosevelt wished neither to embarrass their prospective patron by protesting the racist immigration laws nor to detract from the Jewish colonizing of Palestine by mass Jewish settlement elsewhere. As for the Communist Party, it kept understandably mum about the danger to the Jews from Stalin’s new ally after the signing of the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939. After Hitler’s abrogation of that pact in June 1941, the CP leaped onto the Roosevelt bandwagon as his most fervent and loyal booster. Stalin, for his part, tended to soft-pedal the issue as his way of counter acting Hitler’s propaganda to the Russians that they were being mobilized to fight only in the interest of the Jews.
Trotsky did not read the Jewish press or follow closely the course of Jewish political affairs. But he was himself of Jewish origin and grew up in the land where the word “pogrom” was coined, and anti-Semitism was official. From the beginning, he was involved in the main disputes over the correct road to Jewish emancipation, not least because of the success of the revolutionary cause in winning Jewish adherents in numbers beyond their proportion in the population.
Czarist Russia was known as the “prison house of nations” for its brutal system of national oppression, which singled out the Jews for special persecution as convenient scapegoats for the miseries of the people. Along with many other Jewish youth who joined the revolutionary movement, Trotsky viewed the overthrow of Czarism as the obvious first step to the liberation of the captive peoples, paving the way for the struggle to establish socialism on the entire European continent. Zionism was rejected out of hand because it offered to cooperate with the Czar, instead of overthrowing him, if he would sponsor the Jewish colonization of Palestine.
The most important political organization among the East European Jewish communities at the time was the General Jewish Workers Union of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, known as the Bund. It demanded full rights for the Jews where they lived and worked and fiercely opposed Zionism as a utopian, reactionary scheme, a form of self-expulsion, preached by Jewish bourgeois nationalists who played into the hands of the anti-Semites and further divided the working class.
Until the rise of Hitler and the coming of the Second World War, Zionism remained a definite minority trend among the Jewish people, especially the Jewish workers, who were violently opposed to it. During the war, the Bund disappeared in the fires that consumed East European Jewry, but in prerevolutionary Russia it played a key role among the Jewish workers. To clarify some of Trotsky’s remarks, and much of Lenin’s writings, on the Jewish question, it is worthwhile to dwell briefly on their dispute with the Bund.
In the historic Second Congress of the Russian Social Democrats in 1903, where the division into Bolsheviks (Majority) and Mensheviks (Minority) occurred, the Bund opposed Lenin’s concept of a multinational, democratically centralized, professional revolutionary party. The Bundists favored a federated party structure and insisted on taking exclusive charge of party relations with the Jewish working class. It advocated “national-cultural autonomy” to unite the Jews scattered throughout the whole country, not in a territory of their own, but around schools and other institutions, a concept borrowed from the Austrian social democratic theoretician, Otto Bauer. Ironically, the reformist Bauer opposed the right of national self-determination, the essence of which was the right of secession, and proposed his scheme instead as a substitute more acceptable to the liberal bourgeoisie who were anxious to keep the Austro-Hungarian Empire intact.
Trotsky, then still in his twenties, sided with Lenin in this dispute and, in fact, was the majority spokesman at the Congress against the Bund, which later walked out and lined up with the Mensheviks.
In a subsequent article directed against the Bund, “The De-composition of Zionism and Its Possible Successors,” in Iskra2, January 1904, Trotsky quoted a current Bund pamphlet on the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basle. The Bund authors declared that the “liquidation” of Zionism had begun, but that the “real interests hidden under the name of Zionism” would remain and find successors. Trotsky agreed that “Zionism has exhausted its impoverished content and the Basle Congress...was a demonstration of its decomposition and its impotence.” But he went on to point out that the Bund’s demand to act as the sole representative of the Jewish workers to the party instead of the party’s organizational representative to the Jewish workers, as had been its original function, was a concession to the bourgeois nationalist spirit of Zionism, despite the Bund’s fierce anti-Zionism. Its policies would prove unable to win over and educate the disappointed left Zionist currents then coming over to the revolutionary ranks. The Bund itself, he warned, could well become that feared successor to Zionism which would act to “divert the Jewish proletariat from the path of revolutionary Social Democracy.”
Trotsky was wrong, of course, along with the Bund and the Bolsheviks, in regarding Zionism as a dead cause. The unforeseen delay in the advent of world socialism was to give it a new lease on life—at a staggering cost to the Jewish people. But Trotsky was right about the Bund. In 1917 it formed a bloc with the Mensheviks against the socialist October Revolution, placing unwarranted confidence in the ability of the national democratic regime set up in February to grant the equal rights and liberation of nationalities it had promised.
“For the oppressed nations of Russia,” Trotsky wrote in 1932, “the overthrow of the monarchy inevitably meant also their own national revolution. In this matter, however, we observe the same thing as in all other departments of the February regime: the official democracy, held in leash by its political dependence upon an imperialist bourgeoisie, was totally incapable of breaking the old fetters. Holding inviolable its right to settle the fate of all other nations, it continued jealously to guard those sources of wealth, power and influence which had given the Great Russian bourgeoisie its dominant position.”
This regime, headed by Kerensky, did seek to annul the repressive laws, and establish formal juridical equality among the peoples before the state. “This formal equality gave most of all to the Jews,” Trotsky said, “for the laws limiting their rights had reached the number of 650. Moreover, being city dwellers and the most scattered of all the nationalities, the Jews could make no claim either to state independence or even territorial autonomy. As to the project of a so-called ‘national-cultural autonomy,’ this reactionary utopia...melted in those first days of freedom like wax under the sun’s rays.
“But a revolution is a revolution for the very reason that it is not satisfied either with doles or deferred payments. The abolition of the more shameful national limitations established a formal equality of citizens regardless of their nationality, but this revealed only the more sharply the unequal position of the nationalities as such, leaving the major part of them in the position of stepchildren or foster-children of the Great Russian state.” (The History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 3, 1932.)
To establish the social basis for the genuine equality of nations as well as to defend the gains already achieved, the national democratic revolution had to break with capitalism and “grow over,” as Trotsky put it in explaining this process of permanent revolution, into a socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks were the only party prepared to take the leadership of such a revolution and to defend it in the civil war that followed when the old ruling classes launched a violent campaign to overthrow the new workers’ government.
The most advanced sections of the oppressed nationalities, including the Jews, came forward to support and defend this next phase of the struggle, often in the form of their own military battalions. Trotsky explained his approach to these formations in a telegram he sent as head of the Red Army on May 10, 1919, to the Military Headquarters in Kiev:
“Since the Jewish S.R. [Socialist Revolutionary] party, ‘Poale Zion,’ and other Jewish workers’ organizations announced their readiness to organize sections of the Jewish workers to defend the revolution, I propose to organize such formations under the authority of the (military) Headquarters. Along with this proposal, I suggest that the Jewish battalions enter those regiments where there are also battalions of other nationalities. In this way we can avoid the chauvinism which results from the estrangement of the different nationalities, and which unfortunately arises when entirely independent national military units are formed.” (Quoted in The Pogroms in the Ukraine in the Year 1919, by Elias Tcherikower, YIVO Press, 1965.)
Trotsky never swerved from his conviction that the struggle for Jewish emancipation was inseparably linked with the fate of the struggle for socialism. The attitude of Lenin and the Bolsheviks toward the national question flowed from the same kind of perspective, which Trotsky contrasted, in one of his last works, to the liberal position of the Austrian reformists:
“One of the aims of the Austrian program of ‘cultural autonomy’ was ‘the preservation and development of ·the national idiosyncrasies of peoples.’ Why and for what purpose? asked Bolshevism in amazement. Segregating the various nationalistic portions of mankind was never our concern. True, Bolshevism insisted that each nation should have the right to secede—the right, but not the duty—as the ultimate, most effective guarantee against oppression. But the thought of artificially preserving national idiosyncrasies was profoundly alien to Bolshevism. The removal of any, even disguised, even the most refined and practically ‘imponderable’ national oppression or indignity, must be used for the revolutionary unification rather than the segregation of the workers of various nationalities. Wherever national privileges and injuries exist, nations must have the possibility to separate from each other, that thus they may facilitate the free unification of the workers, in the name of a close rapprochement of nations, with the distant perspective of the eventual complete fusion of all. Such was the basic tendency of Bolshevism, which revealed the full measure of its force in the October revolution.” (Stalin, 1940.)
The right of nations to self-determination was not proclaimed by Lenin’s party, however, in the manner of a benign guarantee to be accepted gratefully and at face value by dependent peoples. Trotsky emphasized that in these words:
“What characterizes Bolshevism on the national question is that in its attitude towards the oppressed nations, even the most backward, it considers them not only the object but also the subject of politics. Bolshevism does not confine itself to recognizing their ‘right’ to self-determination and to parliamentary protests against the trampling upon of this right. Bolshevism penetrates into the midst of the oppressed nations; it raises them up against their oppressors; it ties up their struggle with the struggle of the proletariat in capitalist countries; it instructs the oppressed Chinese, Hindus, or Arabs in the art of insurrection and it assumes full responsibility for this work in the face of civilized executioners. Here only does Bolshevism begin, that is, revolutionary Marxism in action.” (What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat, 1932.)
Unfortunately, the Russian Revolution was not followed by victorious socialist revolutions in other countries which could have helped the first workers’ state to overcome its inherited backwardness, its postwar devastation, and the capitalist embargo that isolated it from the world market. Nurtured by these conditions, a privileged nationalist-minded bureaucracy headed by Stalin usurped party leadership and took over governmental power. Although they spouted Leninist rhetoric, the new Stalinist leaders no longer instructed the oppressed in the art of insurrection, but rather commanded their sacrifices to win short-lived diplomatic concessions from the imperialist powers, all in pursuit of the preposterous notion that “socialism in one country” could be built peacefully in an imperialist world environment. The Communist Third International, or Comintern, founded by Lenin in 1919 as a world party for socialist revolution, was gradually reduced to a Moscow-controlled pressure agency to serve the immediate diplomatic needs of the Stalin regime.
In the Soviet Union, the Communist Left Opposition, headed by Trotsky, was crushed after a long inner-party struggle. Trotsky was then forcibly exiled to Turkey, where he immediately directed his appeal to Communists abroad. Among those to respond were groups of Yiddish-speaking Communist workers in France and the United States.
The first selections in this pamphlet are letters to the Yiddish-language newspapers put out by these groups, Klorkeit (Clarity) in Paris and Unser Kamf (Our Struggle) in New York. Trotsky wrote these at a time when he still hoped to rally forces within the Comintern to reverse the Stalinist trend and take advantage of the new revolutionary opportunities opening up with the world capitalist crisis of the 1930s. The Trotskyists still functioned as a left opposition within the Communist Parties, directing their appeals to the Communist ranks against their unjust expulsion and for a return to the genuine principles of Bolshevism. In the United States at that time, they were organized into the Communist League of America, whose English-language organ was The Militant, which directed its message to the Jewish workers through Unser Kamf.
The left Zionists advocated emigration to Palestine because, in their view, the Jewish workers and radicals in Western society could not be effective in the class struggles in their own countries, where they were regarded as aliens. These letters show that Trotsky, on the contrary, saw in the “pariah status” of the Jewish and other minority workers a special revolutionary force where proper leadership could play a decisive role in the battle for socialism.
All the remaining selections in this collection date from after 1933, when the ignominious capitulation of the German Communist Party to Hitler without a fight led Trotsky to conclude that there was no hope left for salvaging the Comintern and to call instead for the founding of a new, Fourth International.
“On the ‘Jewish Problem’” is an interview done in France in 1934 and one of Trotsky’s earliest statements dealing with the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine as well as with the new argument that the rise of German fascism compelled a revision of the traditional Marxist opposition to Zionism.
Later in 1934 (“Reply to a Question About Birobidjan,”) Trotsky answered an inquiry about the correct attitude to take toward the project of a separate territory in Birobidjan for settling Jews who wished to live together and develop their culture as an ethnic community.
Upon Trotsky’s arrival in Mexico in January 1937, a group of Jewish journalists submitted a series of questions to Trotsky about his attitude to Jewish assimilation and nationhood, anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, and Birobidjan. In the “Interview with Jewish Correspondents in Mexico,” Trotsky admitted that he had changed his original expectation of a “quasi-automatic” disappearance of the Jewish question by the process of assimilation. He granted that through the development of Yiddish-speaking culture a Jewish nation had in fact been formed, though it lacked a territorial base. Some people have misinterpreted this as a change in Trotsky’s opposition to Zionism, but the interview speaks for itself on that score.
In “Thermidor and Anti-Semitism,” written in 1937, Trotsky combatted the thinly veiled anti-Semitism of the Stalin faction, to which its liberal admirers abroad were blind and to which opponents of Marxism eagerly pointed as evidence that socialism was no answer for the Jewish problem.
“Thermidor” was the month, according to the new calendar proclaimed by the French bourgeois revolution, in which the radical Jacobins led by Robespierre were overthrown by a reactionary wing within the revolution that did not go so far, however, as to restore the feudal regime. Trotsky used the term as a historical analogy, to designate the seizure of power by the conservative Stalinist bureaucracy within the framework of nationalized property relations. Since capitalist property relations were not restored, Trotsky advocated unconditional defense of the workers’ states against the imperialist governments, while he called at the same time for a political revolution to throw out the Stalin bureaucracy, whose ruinous policies strengthened the danger of capitalist restoration. In December,1938, a few months after the founding of the Fourth International, Trotsky directed an urgent “Appeal to American Jews Menaced by Fascism and Anti-Semitism.” He warned that the Jews faced physical extermination not only in Europe but also in the United States. Anti-Semitic demagogues in America like Father Coughlin3 already had a mass following and stood ready to summon their fascist gangs into action against the Jews as well as labor at the next major downturn in the extended economic crisis gripping the country.
Trotsky asked for support, especially financial support, for the new international, which had not stopped at asserting the need for socialism as the salvation of the Jews but had proceeded to formulate a transitional program which could be implemented immediately.
The fate of the Jews is linked to the fate of the working class, Trotsky declared. Help the revolutionary vanguard to promote the self-confidence, activity, and audacity of the oppressed, to mobilize the workers’ physical resistance to the fascists, to turn back the wave of reaction that menaced world Jewry! The broad campaign, discussed above, for granting immediate asylum to the Jewish refugees, especially the German Jews who stood in imminent peril, had already been launched by sections of the Fourth International.
The Second World War descended with all its horror on Europe as the decade of the thirties closed. In May 1940, the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International convened despite great hardships to assess the new turn of events and orient the revolutionary vanguard. The conference prepared a manifesto to the world working class, drafted by Trotsky, on the nature of the imperialist war and the factors that could lead to its transformation into a struggle for the world socialist revolution. At the same time, the manifesto called for action along the lines of strategic and tactical directives worked out at the conference. Key sections of the manifesto analyzed the source and role of anti-Semitism; these are excerpted here in “Imperialism and Anti-Semitism.”
A month before his death in August 1940, Trotsky assessed once more the chances of Jewish salvation in Palestine. In a fragment found among his papers afterwards, he wrote:
“The attempt to solve the Jewish question through the migration of Jews to Palestine can now be seen for what it is, a tragic mockery of the Jewish people. Interested in winning the sympathy of the Arabs who are more numerous than the Jews, the British government has sharply altered its policy toward the Jews and has actually renounced its promise to help them found their ‘own home’ in a foreign land. The future development of military events may well transform Palestine into a bloody trap for several-hundred-thousand Jews. Never was it so clear as it is today that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the over throw of the capitalist system.” (July 1940.)
As it turned out, only the fortuitous shift of forces in the war ultimately halted the German army’s advance toward the conquest of the Middle East and exempted Palestine itself from becoming a devastated battleground. The Zionist program, however, proved to be of little aid in saving six million Jews from the “bloody trap” in Europe and did much to obscure the genuine solution to the Jewish problem. The Zionists helped to shift attention away from the real cause of Jewish persecution, namely, the malignant contradictions of capitalism, and asserted that it was instead the national homelessness of the Jews, i.e., a mere national “defect” of the Jews themselves, which generated the feverish passions directed against them.
The relationship of forces in the Middle East has changed since Trotsky wrote. Israel is a strong, apparently invincible power. Her people, once among the chief victims of the imperialist doctrine of “lebensraum,” [the territory that a state or nation believes is needed for its natural development, especially associated with Nazi Germany] have now ironically been maneuvered once again into the position of middlemen—the old stereotype from which Zionism promised to deliver them—in transmitting this hateful racist doctrine to the Arab Palestinians. These are the homeless people now, expelled to make way for the Jewish settlers. Israel functions as the most stable and dependable ally—for the present—of American interests in the Middle East. At bottom, however, it is a small, dependent nation that has lent itself as an instrument against the Arab revolution. Hated by the millions of Arab workers, peasants, and students both inside and outside its borders, Israel can be flung aside at the next juncture when and if U.S. imperialism deems it expendable. Israel remains...a ‘‘bloody trap.”
The original Zionist vision of creating a unique new Jewish identity freely determined by Jews reunited with the land and engaged in productive labor cannot be fulfilled in a garrison state, dependent upon American imperialism, driven by Zionist exclusionism and chauvinism, and internally regimented for the needs of an aggressive capitalist nation-state.
On the other hand, the establishment of Israel has not made the Jews abroad any safer. In the capitalist countries, a severe social crisis could produce the same conditions of widespread unemployment, middle-class ruin, and national desperation which spurred the Hitlerite reaction and anti-Semitic frenzy in Germany. A profit-motivated society which concentrates the national wealth and means of production in the hands of a few rival capitalist oligarchies cannot avoid such crises and will continue to breed war, depression, racism, and finally anti-Semitism.
As for the Soviet bloc, the ruling bureaucracy there is not above the use of thinly disguised anti-Semitism to reinforce its domination and stifle dissent.
“The salvation of the Jewish people cannot come from reliance upon Zionist chauvinism, American imperialism, or Stalinist bureaucratism. Every expedient short of the struggle for socialism, any substitute for that, will end in calamity for the Jews.” So writes the noted American Marxist George Novack in a recent essay, How Can the Jews Survive? A Socialist Answer to Zionism4 (Merit Publishers, 1969).
“The Jews have to link themselves,” Novack concludes, “with those forces in their own country and on a world scale that are fighting to overthrow imperialism and striving to build the new society. The solution of the Jewish question is indissolubly bound up with the complete emancipation of humanity that can be brought about only along the road of international socialism.”
The present generation of revolutionary youth, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have already given much evidence that they are determined to follow that road.
—April 1970
1 We are able to provide this to our readers thanks to the Holt Labor Library (see ad elsewhere in this issue of Socialist Viewpoint.)
2 Iskra (the Spark) was a fortnightly political newspaper of Russian socialist emigrants established as the official organ of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra
3 Charles Edward Coughlin, commonly known as Father Coughlin, was a Canadian-American Catholic priest based in the United States near Detroit. After making attacks on Jewish bankers, Coughlin began to use his radio program to broadcast antisemitic commentary. In the late 1930s, he supported some of the policies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The broadcasts have been described as “a variation of the Fascist agenda applied to American culture.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin
4 Currently out of print but published in the May, June 2024 issue of Socialist Viewpoint, Vol. 24, No. 3 online at socialistviewpoint.org.