Carlebach wrote for
Israelitisches Familienblatt. When
Haynt, stricken by a strike, asked for help, Carlebach sent articles from Germany without payment.
Haynt later financed Carlebach's expeditions to Jewish communities all over Europe and the Mediterranean, covering communities like the
Lithuanian
Karaites,
Sephardi Jews of
Thessaloniki (to be later almost completely extinguished by the Nazi occupants),
Maghrebian
Mizrahi Jews, Yemenite
Teimanim, and the crypto-Jewish
Dönmeh (Sabbateans) in Turkey as well as
Mallorquin Conversos, some of whom he detected while travelling. Carlebach sent regular reports to
Haynt, which later became the basis for a book. He also wrote a series of articles describing his travels through Germany, including an encounter with an
anti-Semitic gang which left him severely beaten. In June 1931 a publishing house in Leipzig,
Deutsche Buchwerkstätten, awarded him its
novelist prize of the year, which he shared with Alexander von Keller. Carlebach's novel is set in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem's old city. He also worked as a freelance journalist for newspapers such as the Hebrew
Haaretz, and starting in 1931 – under a permanent appointment – with the
Hamburg-based
Israelitisches Familienblatt. This paper presented in its cultural insert music, performing and visual art by examples of creative works by Jewish artists. Four to five evenings of the week Carlebach went to the theatre and afterwards composed his reviews, dictating them – freely phrasing – to his assistant Ruth Heinsohn, who right away typed them. In summer 1932 – again financed by
Haynt – he travelled to the USSR, among others to
Crimea and
Birobidzhan, in order to give an account of Jewish life under communist reign. In his report ('Sowjetjudäa', In:
Israelitisches Familienblatt and in
Haynt) he came to the conclusion that there were neither the possibilities nor an adequate milieu for a genuine Jewish life.
Albert Einstein occasionally brought the
Sowjetjudäa series up for discussions, so that they had a much broader response than usual. Especially adversaries of
Hitler, who relied on the USSR and who naïvely or willfully downplayed the crimes there, were incited to question their stance or to be angry with Carlebach. He assessed the broad controversy on the subject being a journalistic success. "The articles brought forth a flurry of anonymous threatening letters and a vile pamphlet attack upon him from Hamburg's 'Jewish Workers' Study Group.'" The camouflage name of this group (in German:
Arbeitsgemeinschaft jüdischer Werktätiger, Hamburg) aimed at rather disguising the harassing of Carlebach, the avowed Jew, by the
Communist Youth Federation, section Hamburg. On the night of January 3, 1933, the harassment culminated in an assassination attempt. A gunshot cut through his hat just luckily missing him. Carlebach fell over, got concussed and lost consciousness. The police found him later senseless.
Israelitisches Familienblatt offered a reward of 2,000 reichsmarks for the capture of the person who did it. By February he had recovered so far that he could resume his work for
Israelitisches Familienblatt. Soon after he moved to Berlin. Such experience notwithstanding he continued to attack Nazism. Earlier Carlebach had discovered that
Joseph Goebbels, who so vehemently defamed Jews and their alleged detrimental influence, had studied with Jewish professors. Right after the
seizure of power by the
Nazis, Carlebach was arrested. He attributed the arrest to Goebbels, who resented Carlebach for revealing his Jewish connections. In this way, he monitored from within how Nazism tightened its power in Germany and wrote daily articles for
Haynt in Warsaw under the pseudonym
Levi Gotthelf (לוי גאָטהעלף). On May 10, 1933, he incognito attended as an observer the central
book-burning on
Opernplatz in Berlin, where also his books were thrown into the fires. Meanwhile,
Haynt strove to get Carlebach out of the country. Finally – bearing the counterfeited papers of an Upper Silesian coal miner – he was smuggled over the border close to city of
Katowice in the then Polish part of
Upper Silesia. Carlebach's series of articles, being the first
inside story on the Nazis' takeover, appeared in
Haynt and was republished in
Forwerts (פֿאָרווערטס) in New York. In concert with the Zionist
Jehoszua Gottlieb, the folkist journalist
Saul Stupnicki (Chief editor of
Lubliner Tugblat לובלינער טאָגבלאט) and others Carlebach organised in Poland a countrywide series of lectures named
Literary Judgments on Germany. The German ambassador to Poland,
Hans-Adolf von Moltke, attended the start lecture in Warsaw, sitting in the first line. Carlebach was then permanently appointed at modest salary with
Haynt, whose articles – like that one on 'The anti-Semitic International' (of
Nuremberg) reappeared in other newspapers such as
Nowy Dziennik in
Kraków,
Chwila in
Lwów,
Di Yidishe Shtime (די יידישע שטימע) in Kaunas,
Frimorgn (פֿרימאָרגן) in
Riga and
Forverts in New York. Living in Polish exile he got onto the second list (March 29, 1934) of Germans, which were
arbitrarily officially denaturalised according to a new law, which also ensued the seizure of all his property in Germany. In 1933 and 1934 Carlebach traveled for
Haynt to report on the
Zionist Congress, the
International Congress of National Minorities and Goebbels' speech as German main delegate at the
League of Nations in
Geneva on September 29, 1933. His speech
An Appeal to the Nations was an éclat and the subsequent press conference accordingly well attended. Nevertheless, on the sidelines Carlebach and Goebbels had a sharp argument on co-operatives exemplified by the newspaper company
Haynt. Carlebach reported how the Upper Silesian
Franz Bernheim succeeded to prompt the League of Nations (
Bernheim petition ) to coerce Germany to abide by the
German-Polish Accord on East Silesia. According to that treaty each contractual party guaranteed in its respective part of
Upper Silesia equal civil rights for all the inhabitants. So in September 1933 the Reich's Nazi government suspended in Upper Silesia all anti-Semitic discriminations already imposed and excepted the province from all new such invidiousnesses to be decreed, until the Accord expired in May 1937. In 1935 Carlebach was appointed chief editor of daily
Yidishe Post (יידישע פאָסט) in London. But he continued to cover travelling the rest of Europe, except of Germany. In
Selbstwehr (Prague) Carlebach published a regular column
Tagebuch der Woche (diary of the week). In April 1935 Carlebach called attention to
Kurt Schuschnigg's anti-Semitic policy in Austria in an interview with the
Federal Chancellor. He adopted an increasingly sharper tone in relation to non-Zionists, whose intentions to stay in Europe, he regarded negligent in view of the development. From 1936 on British policy on Palestine (
Peel Commission) stood at the centre of Carlebach's editing. In 1937 Carlebach immigrated to
Palestine under an appointment as foreign correspondent of
Yidishe Post. In the same year he became a journalist at the newspaper , afterwards becoming its editor. In early 1939 Carlebach travelled again to Warsaw, meeting with friends there – not knowingly to see many of them for the last time. In 1948, while chief editor of , a disagreement broke out between Carlebach and Yehuda Mozes, owner of the paper. Carlebach and several senior journalists left Yedioth Ahronoth and founded a new newspaper, ''Yedioth Ma'ariv'', which first appeared on February 15, 1948, with Carlebach as its chief editor. After several months, the paper's name was changed to ''Ma'ariv'', to avoid confusion between it and . Ezriel Carlebach edited the ''Ma'ariv
newspaper from its founding until his death in 1956. While he was editor, Ma'ariv'' became the most widely read newspaper in the country. He is regarded as one of the great journalists of his period. ==Views and opinions==