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A special issue of The New Leader (vol. XLII, No. 33) published on September 14, 1959 dedicated to the topic of The Jews in the Soviet Union. Produced by Moshe Decter, and Myron Kolatch, it consisted—except for an opening contextual essay and a short concluding one—of published Soviet and non-Soviet Communist documents. Together they presented an undeniable picture of the Jewish community’s deteriorating political, social and religious status in the USSR since the Bolshevik Revolution. “Jews in the Soviet Union” was widely distributed in the U.S. and abroad by organizations like the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. It was the precursor of the American Conference on Soviet Jewry and corresponding groups elsewhere. It also contributed to nudging the subject toward the front burner in Western capitals, ultimately leading to the Kremlin’s painfully arbitrary program permitting the emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel.
The New Leader was published by The American Labor Conference on International Affairs, Inc. THE NEW LEADER made its first appearance on January 19, 1924, as a six-column standard-size weekly newspaper “devoted to the interests of the Socialist and Labor movements,” according to its masthead. Prominent contributors listed there included Eugene V. Debs, Morris Hillquit, Algernon Lee, Abraham Cahan, and Norman Thomas. The editor was James Oneal—not, as is widely thought, Sol Levitas, a former Menshevik vice mayor of Vladivostok.
The New Leader [was] a highly regarded source of information about the underlying meaning of ongoing events in the Soviet bloc, prompting even the Kremlin to subscribe. And bylines of well-known political figures, reflecting a growing global reach, started to appear: Hugh Gaitskell and Herbert Morrison from Britain; Jules Moch and André Philip from France; Konrad Adenauer, Erich Ollenhauer and Willy Brandt from Germany; Giuseppe Saragat from Italy; Haakon Lie from Norway; Jayaprakash Narayan from India.
It switched to a magazine format in May 1950. |
