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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Part:         Session:         Page of 542

It all began to be very painful when all kinds of people would write to me and ask if I were a Jew, all sorts of people would ask me about it. You could deny it. I always did deny it if I was asked, but you couldn't make a public denunciation of the charge because that would appear that there was something very wrong about being a Jew. It was insulting to your Jewish constituents and to the Jewish community generally.

This was all part of the sam rumors as the ones that mentioned Harry Bridges. This “Star of David” circulated all over the West Coast enormously. There were large numbers of people who believed that to be true. Also, they began circulating a special attack on me. There circulated a copy of a marriage certificate in which one Paul Wilson married one Mathilda Watsky in Newton, Massachusetts. They were married by a rabbi so the marriage certificate showed and they were both workers in a shoe factory, I think, not far from Newton, in that same area just outside of Boston. The only thought process which could have made anybody, ignorant as he might be, have a thought that this might be my marriage certificate was the fact that my own vita curricula and life history as printed in Who's Who states that I was born in Boston, which is true. Newton is a suburb of Boston.





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