Document text
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Forms to be Filled out for Each Interview FOLKLORE
FORM A
Circumstances of Interview
STATE
NANE OF WORKER Joseph Vogel
ADDRESS
DATE March 27, 197)9
SUBJECT Miscellaneous
1. Date and tim:, of Interview
On this street
2. Place of interview
3. Name and address of informant
NE 'v; YORK
N. Bernstein (insurance saleaman)
4320 Winhattan Avenue
Bklyn, N. Y.
4. Name and address of person, if any, who put you in
touch with informant.
5. Name and address of person, if any, accompanying you
6. Description of room, house, surroundings, etc.
(Use as many additional sheets as necessary, for any of the forms, each
bearing the proper heading and the number to which the material refers.)
FORM C
Text of Interview (Unedited)
STATE
NAME OF WORKER Joseph Vogel
ADDRESS
DATE
SUBJECT
March 27, 1939
Miscellaneous (Hospital)
Talmudic Reasoning Gone Haywire
FOLKLORE
NEW YORK
Why go to hospitals to study people? You find plenty
of them in the street. I mean with a screw loose in the head.
I'm in the insurance business so I meet plenty of people. Half
of them are crazy.. Well, not half, a few of them. There's one
old man, he can't sleep on account of what's happening to the
Jews in Europe. He goes around holding his head and he says it's
like holding a lump of lead in his hands. He worries day and
night what's going to happen to the Jews, in this country too. He
feels it, fascism, like a wind on his back. So day and night he
thinks and thinks. Before he used to think about the Talmud, now
he thinks about fascism. So he comes to me yesterday morning
and tells me he's got it all figured out. He says maybe after all
fascism is a good thing. "What's the matter with you, "I say,
"you crazy?"
"I'm not so crazy as you think," he says.
So he's got it figured out like this. Fascism is killing
out the Jews. All riTht. But at the same time it's killing out
the Christians. He don't mean the people especially, he means the
the religion. It's not only killing the Jewish religion, it's
killing the Christian religion. Well, he says, one thing is sure.
The Jewish religion you can never kill. They tried it before a
few times and it didn't work. So what's going to happen? The fas-
cists are going to destroy the Christian religion. But can a man
exist without religion? Whoever heard such a thing? So after the
fascists kill the Christian religion, all the Christians will be
forced to adapt the only religion there is left: the Jewish religion.
So I say to myself, "You have to be a Talmudist to figure
that out."
It just goes to show you how fascism turns a man's reason-
ing upside-down.
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