Jews in the West
To the Editor:
As a recent subscriber, I have been greatly impressed by your magazine . . . and was particularly interested in Louis Berg's “Peddlers in Eldorado” [July]. Much of the story of the Jewish contribution to the development of the early West . . . is, I am sure, in the category of “secret history.” Jews are still resented in some parts of the West as somehow “alien” and “foreign”; it is, after all, in this part of the country that the “super-patriotic” organizations, whose members include many virulent anti-Semites, have perhaps their largest following. . . . Here in Utah, whatever anti-Semitic sentiment there is, is particularly . . . irrational, because of the emotional and intellectual identification of the secular Mormon “Israel” with the Israel of the Old Testament. . . .
Mark Stookey
Salt Lake City, Utah
