The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is remembered by many for the stirring final address by Martin Luther King Jr., the “I Have a Dream” speech.
However, few people recall the speaker who immediately preceded King on Aug. 28, 1963, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a refugee from Nazi Germany.
Rabbi Prinz addressed the throng estimated at 200,000-300,000: “I speak to you as an American Jew. As Americans we share the profound concern of millions of people about the shame and disgrace of inequality and injustice which makes [sic] a mockery of the great American idea.”
Prinz continued with a thumbnail sketch of the Jewish “two-fold experience — one of the spirit and one of our history.
“In the realm of the spirit, our fathers taught us thousands of years ago that when God created man, he created him as everybody’s neighbor. Neighbor is not a geographic term. It is a moral concept. It means our collective responsibility for the preservation of man’s dignity and integrity.
“From our Jewish historic experience of three and a half thousand years we say:
“Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom. During the Middle Ages my people lived for a thousand years in the ghettos of Europe. Our modern history begins with a proclamation of emancipation.
“It is for these reasons that it is not merely sympathy and compassion for the Black people of America that motivates us. It is above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience.”
Rabbi Prinz then told of his personal experience of repression:
When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned in my life and under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.
A great people which had created a great civilization had become a nation of silent onlookers. They remained silent in the face of hate, in the face of brutality and in the face of mass murder. America must not become a nation of onlookers.
America must not remain silent. Not merely Black America, but all of America. It must speak up and act, from the President down to the humblest of us, and not for the sake of the Negro, not for the sake of the Black community but for the sake of the image, the dream, the idea and the aspiration of America itself.
Prinz noted that our children, “yours and mine in every school across the land,” pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag and to a nation dedicated to “liberty and justice for all.”
And he concluded: “The time, I believe, has come to work together — for it is not enough to hope together, and it is not enough to pray together — to work together that this children’s oath, pronounced every morning from Maine to California, from North to South, that this oath may become a glorious, unshakeable reality in a morally renewed and united America.”
Again, the legacy of Rabbi Joachim Prinz has faded into the mists of history; but his warning that we must not “become a nation of silent onlookers” is as relevant as ever.
We live in a time of growing political repression, encroaching authoritarianism in this country and around the globe. In Minnesota, we are still in a state of shock in the aftermath of the ICE invasion, in which Pres. Donald Trump exacted his “retribution” on our communities by sending in 4,000 masked, paramilitary immigration enforcement agents to terrorize the citizenry.
The occupation dubbed Operation Metro Surge devolved to assaulting and sequestering our immigrant neighbors and shooting down U.S. citizens on the streets of Minneapolis.
Fortunately, tens of thousands of Minnesotans were not passive onlookers, but went into the streets to demonstrate en masse in subzero weather and to confront the lawless thugs from the Department of Homeland Security.
We still are waiting for justice to be served on the federal agents and their bosses responsible for the dirty and criminal repression that they perpetrated earlier this year.
Since the ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency, again, this newspaper has warned about a turn to fascism in the United States. The authoritarian impulse has ebbed and flowed over the past century — and authors in the U.S. have addressed this theme in our politics.
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis, a native of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, published a dystopian political novel titled It Can’t Happen Here, which traced the rise of an American politician, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, to victory in the 1936 presidential election and the eventual imposition of dictatorial rule.
The cautionary tale by Lewis — whose journalist wife Dorothy Thompson was expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934 — was informed by events in Europe at the time: Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy and Hitler’s Third Reich.
In the same vein, the late Philip Roth considered the possibility of a fascist regime seizing power in the U.S., in his 2004 novel The Plot Against America. In Roth’s counter-historical imagining, American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, who was raised in Little Falls, Minnesota, is nominated for president by the Republican Party and defeats Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 election. As president, Lindbergh’s first act is to sign an agreement not to interfere with Germany’s aggression in Europe.
In a tender portrait of his family in Newark, New Jersey, Roth explores how the turn to fascism makes Jews feel like outsiders in this country.
We don’t know how events will play out in the remaining two years of Trump 2.0 misrule. Will there be some catastrophic event that befalls the nation, or will we continue to experience the gradual degradation of the U.S. at the hands of a corrupt and incompetent regime? Apparently, there is no one in the room with Trump to curb his increasingly lunatic behavior.
And amid the grim news unspooling daily, we can still find moments of joy and beauty around us.
The editors and staff of the American Jewish World wish all of our readers a happy and peaceful new year. Farewell to the curses of the old year and welcome to the blessings of the new year.
Mordecai Specktor / editor [at] ajwnews [dot] com
(American Jewish World, September 2026)
