Confessions Of A Judaica Document Collector

Moreover, I particularly enjoy the challenging search for documents written by non-Jewish personalities on matters of Jewish interest. Such items in my collection include:

• a letter from President Kennedy to the Union of Orthodox Rabbis regarding a pending anti-shechitah bill;

• a signed copy of Picasso’s The Old Jew;

• a synagogue program for an address by Martin Luther King and signed by him;

• a letter in which Darwin threatens to give a plum translation assignment to (shudder!) a Jew;

• a letter by Enrico Fermi explaining that he departed Italy for the United States to save his Jewish wife and children from the Holocaust;

• a Santayana letter in which he calls Spinoza “my Jewish master” and claims that “my best pupils were Jews;”

• an incredibly ironic letter from Nazi Kurt Waldheim to Simon Wiesenthal lauding the famous Nazi-hunter;

• a correspondence by Montgomery of Alamein in which he recalls the key role played by his “great friend” Moshe Dayan during the 1956 Sinai crisis;

• a signed program by the African American contralto Marian Anderson, a dedicated Zionist who performed Brahms's Alto Rhapsody with the Israeli Philharmonic – and sang the entire oratorio in perfect Hebrew;

● an original poem by Woody Guthrie, who wrote songs about Jewish history and the Holocaust, married a Jew and raised his children as Jews, and arranged for his son, Arlo, to receive bar mitzvah lessons from a young rabbi named Meir Kahane.

God willing, I will present some of these in upcoming Collecting Jewish History columns in The Jewish Press.