CHAPTER VIII.THE RETORT TO ANTI-SEMITISM

There are two kinds of answers possible to a movement like anti-Semitism, the explicit refutation of its doctrines and teachings, whether by Jews or non-Jews; and the response by adjustment and by psychological traits. It is a commonplace that Jewish loyalty is always strengthened by anti-Semitism; it is equally true that the Jewish inferiority complex is conditioned, if not caused, by anti-Semitism. In fact, we may well conclude that Jewish characteristics are greatly influenced and molded by the adverse forces of the environment. Both these types of response, the explicit and the implied, exist in this particular case, whether as counterpart or as results of anti-Semitism itself, and both can be traced in the United States in connection with the present movement.

Defense of Jews by non-Jews is a notable phenomenon of modern times, associated with the general growth of tolerance. Beginning with the Renaissance there have been a few hardy spirits in every generation who were willing to espouse the cause of these pariahs of Christendom, chiefly the liberals who were challenging group standards in many directions. Such advocates as Mirabeau, Lessing, Jefferson and Macaulay endeavored to remove Jewish disabilities and to defend the Jews against the attacks of the intolerant groups. Here in America we have seen the same result; the use of the individual intelligence has drawn many non-Jews out of the unified group mind of the persecutors; many entire groups, in fact, of Catholics, liberals, and others had never entered into it. Even before the World War the Reverend Madison Peters of Brooklyn was widely known for his book, “Justice to the Jew,” and several similar volumes. More recently, as a definite reply to the anti-Semitic writers there have appeared “The Jew and American Ideals,” by John Spargo; “The Jew and Civilization” by Ada Sterling;“The Truth about the Jews, by a Gentile,” by Walter Hurt; and “Patriotism of the American Jew” by Samuel W. McCall. These works and others like them, of varying merit, were definitely apologetic in nature. A number of periodicals published articles either avowedly in defense of the Jew, or purporting to examine the Jewish problem fairly and without intolerance. Such were the brilliant series by able thinkers, which I have quoted so frequently, in the Nation; by Norman Hapgood in Hearst’s International; by William Hard in the Metropolitan Magazine; by Arthur Brisbane in his syndicated newspaper column, and many others. Former President William Howard Taft, now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, during the interval between these high offices, wrote a speech on “Anti-Semitism in the United States,” which he delivered in many parts of the country and which was printed by the Anti-Defamation League.

Several actions of larger bodies of non-Jews lent even more dignity to this counter-movement. On December 5, 1920, the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, the great Protestant federation, passed the following resolution in its national convention in Boston:

Whereas, for some time past there have been in circulation in this country publications tending to create race prejudice and arouse animosity against our Jewish fellow-citizens and containing charges so preposterous as to be unworthy of credence, be it resolved that the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, impressed by the need at this period of our national existence for unity and brotherhood, deplores all such cruel and unwarranted attacks upon our Jewish brethren and in a spirit of good-will extends to them an expression of confidence in their patriotism and their good citizenship and earnestly admonishes our people to express disapproval of all actions which are conducive to intolerance or tend to the destruction of our national unity through arousing racial division in our body politic.

It is a peculiar commentary upon the nature of groups and group leadership that the very churches thus addressed by their great national leaders should have furnished so much material for the recruiting officers of the Ku Klux Klan.

On January 16, 1921, a protest against anti-Semitism was issued under the initiative of John Spargo, signed by one hundrednineteen distinguished American Christians from every walk of life, headed by the names of President Woodrow Wilson, former President William Howard Taft, and William Cardinal O’Connell. I quote a few sentences from this interesting document:

The loyalty and patriotism of our fellow citizens of the Jewish faith is equal to that of any part of our people, and requires no defense at our hands.... Anti-Semitism is almost invariably associated with lawlessness and with brutality and injustice. It is also invariably found closely intertwined with other sinister forces, particularly those which are corrupt, reactionary and oppressive. We believe that it should not be left to men and women of Jewish faith to fight this evil, but that it is in a very special sense the duty of citizens who are not Jews by ancestry or faith.

The most practical work of this kind was undertaken in December, 1924, when a joint committee of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America and of the Central Conference of American Rabbis met in Washington, D. C., to consider the problem of good will between Christians and Jews. Their statement follows in full:

We, of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, and the Central Conference of American Rabbis, as represented in a joint session of their respective committees on good will between Jews and Christians, realizing the necessity for a truer interpretation of Americanism and religion, and in order to advance both on the highest plane of good will and fellowship, herewith declare:1. The purpose of our committees is to promote mutual understanding and good will in the place of suspicion and ill will in the entire range of our inter-religious and social relations.2. Because of our mutual respect for the integrity of each other’s religion and our desire that each faith shall enjoy the fullest opportunity for its development and enrichment, these committees have no proselytizing purpose.3. We endorse the statement of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, made by its Administrative Committee in the resolution of September 22, 1922, declaring that the “rise of organizations whose members are masked, oath-bound and unknown, and whose activities have the effect of arousing religious prejudices and racial antipathies, is fraught with grave consequences to the church and to society at large.” To this statement we add our conviction that such organizations violate the fundamental principles and ideals of our country and of religion, and merit our condemnation.4. We realize, further, that we best reveal our fellowship by practical co-operation in common tasks, and it is our endeavor to formulate a program by which to realize the high purposes and noble endeavors of mutual good will and helpfulness.

1. The purpose of our committees is to promote mutual understanding and good will in the place of suspicion and ill will in the entire range of our inter-religious and social relations.

2. Because of our mutual respect for the integrity of each other’s religion and our desire that each faith shall enjoy the fullest opportunity for its development and enrichment, these committees have no proselytizing purpose.

3. We endorse the statement of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, made by its Administrative Committee in the resolution of September 22, 1922, declaring that the “rise of organizations whose members are masked, oath-bound and unknown, and whose activities have the effect of arousing religious prejudices and racial antipathies, is fraught with grave consequences to the church and to society at large.” To this statement we add our conviction that such organizations violate the fundamental principles and ideals of our country and of religion, and merit our condemnation.

4. We realize, further, that we best reveal our fellowship by practical co-operation in common tasks, and it is our endeavor to formulate a program by which to realize the high purposes and noble endeavors of mutual good will and helpfulness.

While some non-Jews were trying to break up the group ideas which were expressed in anti-Semitism, whether through drawing away individuals by argument, or through diverting groups by the prestige of great names, the Jews themselves were far from idle. There was a flood of books, articles, speeches, designed to show that the Jews have had a proud share in American history in the past, are now patriotic citizens, are being wronged by calumny, and so on. Most of these were quite worthless for their purpose, for anti-Semitism was not caused by the arguments against the Jews at all; moreover, they were plainly apologetic and would not have impressed a prejudiced person in the least. But the work of several great Jewish organizations was of a different order.

Among a number of these organizations I select three which have, from their inception, made this one of their prime purposes of existence. The oldest of these is the American Jewish Committee, of which Mr. Louis Marshall of New York City is president. This organization was founded in 1906 with the purpose of defending Jewish rights at home and abroad; its immediate occasion was the Kishineff massacre in Russia, with the consequent strengthening of Jewish group loyalty in the United States as well. The annual reports of this body, published in the various volumes of the American Jewish Yearbook, reveal, besides other activities, a variety of defense methods—a personal protest to the head of a publishing firm which was producing the “Protocols”; efforts on behalf of newly arrived immigrants; the completion and publication in summary form of the record of American Jews in the army, navy and marine corps during the World War; attempts to befriend persecuted Jews in foreign lands. On December 1, 1920, this committee published an “Address to their Fellow Citizens on the Protocols, Bolshevism and the Jews,” which was signed also by representativesof nine other Jewish organizations—rabbinical conferences, unions of congregations and the like. This statement rehearsed the proofs against the current charges of anti-Semitism and appealed to the American public, with the evident hope of breaking up the group mind that was then filled with the image of anti-Semitism. It ends in this fashion:

We have an abiding confidence in the spirit of justice and fairness that permeates the true American, and we are satisfied that our fellow-citizens will not permit the campaign of slander and libel that has been launched against us to go unreproved.... Let not hatred and misunderstanding arise where peace and harmony, unity and brotherliness, are required to perpetuate all that America represents, and to enable all men to know that within her wide boundaries there is no room for injustice and intolerance.

The Anti-Defamation League, with its headquarters at Chicago, was founded in 1913 under the auspices of the Independent Order B’nai B’rith to carry on a somewhat different work. Its executive secretary for almost this entire period was Mr. Leon L. Lewis, now Grand Secretary of the Order. Its first activity, which it has continued throughout, was to issue individual protests to such magazines, newspapers, motion picture producers, vaudeville managers, etc., as allowed anti-Semitic tendencies to creep into their productions. In many cases a friendly protest was enough to stop the propaganda; in some extreme instances, no result whatever could be achieved, as the work in question was a direct expression of intolerance. Since the actual anti-Semitic movement began in the United States, the Anti-Defamation League has broadened its activities, has published some material refuting charges against the Jew, has circulated this through the country, has investigated various anti-Jewish organizations and so on. It has rendered great service in diverting from the anti-Semitic sub-group such individuals as drifted into it more or less by accident but who were not definitely aligned with it.

Finally, the American Jewish Congress, organized in Philadelphia on December 15, 1919, has passed certain resolutions of interest to the general public. Its chief work, however, was the appointment of delegates to represent the AmericanJewsat Paris during the Peace Conference. Largely through theefforts of this delegation and similar ones from the Jews of other countries, the rights of Jewish and other minorities in the newly constituted countries of eastern Europe were protected by treaty, and Palestine was made a British mandatory, with special rights of settlement for the Jews. This work, which has proved so important with regard to anti-Semitism abroad, has comparatively little direct influence on its American phase.

This direct propaganda may have some influence, but only as propaganda, not as argument to refute arguments from the other side. The fact of difference is the primary fact on which anti-Semitism, like all other intolerance, is based. This can be transcended only by an inclusive loyalty and an inclusive purpose in which both sub-groups lose their own purposes and consequently their opposition. The most direct reaction to anti-Semitism appears in the intensification of Jewish loyalty. Conflict makes the group mind vigorous and self-conscious, especially in the defeated group. The power of the “lost cause” over the minds of men has been beautifully developed by Royce in his “Philosophy of Loyalty”; and the cause of Jewry has been for two thousand years such a “lost cause” among the oppressors of the world.

Thus oppression of anti-Semitism in any part of the world cements Jews everywhere into one body, forces the group mind of the Jew into unity and direction. As Dr. Drachsler points out:

105Two sets of factors are of significance here: those making for identification with the general American community and those making for segregation and isolation. The attractive features of the American environment have their roots in and are nourished by the equality of social and economic opportunity that is America’s most precious heritage.It is anti-Semitic propaganda that constitutes one of the segregative forces of the American environment.... To these inner strains and stresses, making for an increase in group self-consciousness, are added those outer crises arising out of the trials and tribulations of Jewries in other lands. The problem of civil disabilities of Jews in many Europeancountries and the romantic ups and downs of Zionism have kept alive a steady interest among great masses of Jews in the United States.

It is anti-Semitic propaganda that constitutes one of the segregative forces of the American environment.... To these inner strains and stresses, making for an increase in group self-consciousness, are added those outer crises arising out of the trials and tribulations of Jewries in other lands. The problem of civil disabilities of Jews in many Europeancountries and the romantic ups and downs of Zionism have kept alive a steady interest among great masses of Jews in the United States.

The group loyalty of world Jewry has shown itself in the United States in the form of certain agencies that have been particularly active during and since the World War. The poverty, persecution and devastation of the great Jewish communities of eastern Europe occasioned the formation of the Joint Distribution Committee in America, in which—for the first time—reform, orthodox, and radical Jews sat together and labored in a common cause; the sixty-five million dollars they collected in America and disbursed abroad are less important to us than the group mind they developed in this common purpose. The Zionist movement, both as an attempt to provide a home in Palestine for the oppressed Jews of eastern Europe, and as a hope for the revival of Jewish nationality and culture in the Holy Land, has furnished a mode of resistance and a source of Jewish pride to many who felt themselves persecuted, either in their own persons or by proxy, in America. Such a distinguished American Jew as Justice Louis D. Brandeis of the United States Supreme Court felt his first call to Jewish allegiance or action in middle age, when he became an active Zionist and the president of the Zionist Organization of America. This influence operated on great numbers of Jews in the United States during the time of anti-Semitism abroad, and on still more during the period of anti-Semitism here. Anti-Semitism is a great incentive to Jewish loyalty, even as it disrupts the mind of the American people into conflicting groups.

The most important reaction to anti-Semitism is the unconscious mode of response which we call the inferiority complex. Certainly the Jew has such a complex. He alternates boldness and timidity, because he is self-conscious in the presence of the non-Jew and therefore uncertain of himself. Jews change their names from land to land, assuming the Russian “witz” or the Polish “sky” for the previous German “sohn” as a patronymic—for all Jewish names were originally in the Hebrew form ofIsaac ben (son of) Abraham; but when they come to the United States the “witz” and “sky” are foreign and many of them are dropped in turn. The Hebrew Moses becomes the German Morris, and then the English Montague. This is partly due to the adoption of the standard of taste of the new environment, partly to the desire not to be too aggressively Jewish in externals. As Friedman shows:

106The Jew is the underdog of society ... he has acquired a social sympathy and has become spiritually attuned to the harmonies of a juster social order.107Anti-Semitism is a challenge to Jewry to revivify its ideals.108Danger strengthens family ties. Perhaps the pure and devoted family life for which the Jews have been noted may be due to the fact that they preserved this defensive reaction of a group under persecution.109Persecution has left the mark of fear on the psychology of the Jew.... The Jew retired into himself, or to the society of his kind.

In the present state of ignorance, I cannot state how much of the Jewish character is hereditary and how much environmental, or how much of the latter is due to the inferiority complex and hence to anti-Semitism. Certainly there must be many traits of this origin. Thomas Babington Macaulay made this discovery in 1833, when he argued in the House of Commons in favor of removing civil disabilities from the Jews of England.

... If all the red-haired people in Europe had, during centuries, been outraged and oppressed, banished from this place, driven from that ... if, when manners became milder, they had still been subject to debasing restrictions and exposed to vulgar insults ... what would be the patriotism of gentlemen with red hair?

Ludwig Lewisohn finds exactly such an artificial case in the German-Americans during the World War:

110I (the German) know exactly now why you (the Jew) and your people are accused of bad manners. How can one’s manners be good when all agreement and social certainties are lacking? Whatever one does will be considered an excess.... So I am beginning to understand the voluntary and yet involuntary segregation of Jewry.

To which the Jew retorts:

The worst of it is that we are all super-sensitive because we are neurasthenic.... There is scarcely a Jewish family in which there isn’t either madness or genius. Commonly both.

Professor Miller generalizes this into a theory of “oppression psychosis,” mentioned above:

111A technique is developed by the group and the individuals in it to meet the situation and retain the self-esteem necessary to life ... the Jewish capacity to trade was developed under a necessity for survival in which trade offered the only possibility.112The patriotism of an oppressed people is full of pathological elements. The symptoms vary slightly, but there is always hypersensitiveness and self-consciousness. The classic example is the Jew, and the Jewish problem wherever it exists can never be solved until most of the Jewish characteristics are diagnosed as the pathological result of the experience to which they have been subjected.... A very large portion of the peoples of the world are suffering from present or past experiences of oppression and therefore cannot be expected to act as normal groups.113The conspicuousness of the Jew is in large part due to his psychopathic adjustment to his environment. It is further due to the necessary technique for survival.114The peculiarity of the Jew is that because he has been made self-conscious by his experience, he has acquired a solidarity which has been kept vivid through adherence to the Law.

Besides the pathology of the case, Miller here indicates two modes of adjustment, the success motive and the religious motive. The former can be seen clearly in the Jewish students, who are largely excluded from social and athletic leadership in the colleges, and whose response is to excel wherever possible in scholarship. It appears in the medieval Jew who was placed outside the feudal system and consequently had no feudal loyalties, but established the first international financial connections; or in the Jew of some of the modern hyper-nationalistic countries of Europe, who is excluded from public life and finds his outlet in Zionism. Finally, and most important of all historically, the Jew has found his compensation in his religion. He was the Chosen People, he had the sacred Torah, he kept the festivals, obeyed the commandments of God; in the home and the synagog he was priest and king, whatever might be hisbeatings or his cringings without. Conversely, the growing indifference to Judaism today is both an adaptation to the new modes of thought the world over, and a relaxing of intensity of Jewish loyalty in the countries where the penalties for that loyalty are themselves relaxed.

The religious interpretation of this status is very ancient. The Bible speaks of the Jews as a “peculiar people”; “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” And the Talmud says:

God selected as His sacrifices not the pursuer but the pursued; not the lion but the bullock, not the wolf but the lamb, not the eagle but the dove. In the same way Israel, the pursued of all the heathen, the weakest of the nations of the world, is the Chosen People, the fitting sacrifice of the Lord.

The famous fifty-second chapter of Isaiah with its marvelous conception of the Suffering Servant of the Lord, is again a picture of the Jewish people, persecuted and oppressed, but finding its purpose and its compensation in its religious message, which in the Messianic age was to convince and to overawe the world.

Perhaps I can best summarize this view in the words of Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, whose “Israel among the Nations” some thirty years ago marked a new treatment of the Jewish question by a Christian writer. This book contains a chapter on the Psychology of the Jew, in which he develops the idea of the influence of the milieu on the Jewish character:

115The Jew has kept his energy, but he has kept it within him, out of sight. His tenacity is now concealed by artfulness and masked beneath humility.... Deprived of the weapons of the strong, he resorted to the devices of the weak, to cunning, trickery and deceit.... Unable to command respect for his frail personality, the Jew took refuge in a collective pride; he was proud of his people, his religion, and his God. Never has he lost faith in the superiority of Israel.... This explains why for centuries they were able to bear such a burden of contempt without breaking down beneath its weight. The mainspring of Israel’s inner life was not broken; it remained intact, ready to be set in motion again on the day of deliverance. Bowed as he was, the Jew was always ready for the time of upraising.

The various theories and groupings of Jewry today may be regarded from the viewpoint of responses to the total environment, of which anti-Semitism is one of the important factors. On this basis neither Zionism nor reform Judaism can be regarded directly as a reply to anti-Semitism, but both are this among other things, for both are modes of response to the environment, with its Jewish and its non-Jewish factors. Two such responses are religious—the orthodox and the reform; two are racial and national—the assimilationist and the Zionist. From another standpoint, two are modes of adjustment to the environment—assimilation and reform; two are modes of resistance to the environment—Zionism and orthodoxy. Or, more precisely, assimilation is a racial adjustment to the non-Jewish environment; reform Judaism a religious adjustment; Zionism is a racial and national resistance to the environment; and orthodoxy a religious resistance. Obviously, the four are not unrelated, but many individuals adopt more than one of them as guides in various fields of thought and behavior.

Assimilation of the Jew to his environment, which involves abandonment of the group life, is an individual, not a group response. It attracts individuals in considerable numbers from the extreme right and left wings of American Jewry, from the very wealthy who may adopt Christianity for social distinction, and from the proletarians who adopt an international economic and political theory. It cannot be a group response because if great masses of Jews were to join any other church, or any other national or social grouping, they would do it as Jews still—we would then have churches of Hebrew Christians, or a Jewish wing for the Socialist party (as in Russia), but not the absorption in the environment which the assimilationist considers the solution of the Jewish problem. One point is true in the assimilationist theory—if there were no Jewish group, there would be no anti-Semitism. It is equally true that if there were no groups of human beings, there would be no intolerance. But such a condition is impossible. Man is a social being, and the tradition,the ideals, and the life of his own group hold him too firmly to be escaped except by the smallest minority.

116Assimilation may be social or biological in character, and the radical adoption of it would involve both phases. Intermarriage, the biological side of assimilation, is actually going on now, but to a much smaller extent among the Jews than among any other immigrant group in America. Drachsler worked out the proportion of intermarriages among 100,000 marriages in New York City of all races, and found that approximately 14 per cent. of these were intermarriages. Among all white groups, however, the Jews presented the smallest proportion of intermarriages, 1.17 per cent., ranging from less than half of 1 per cent. among Rumanian Jews, to 5 per cent. among German Jews, and 6.5 per cent. among French Jews. The age-old tradition against marriage outside of the group, together with the anti-Semitic spirit without, have conspired to prevent this type of assimilation even now. And while the second generation of Jews in America shows far more intermarriages than the first, the proportion is still extremely low—.64 per cent. for the first generation, and 4.5 per cent. for the second. And for a more assimilated section of Jewry, such as the German Jews, the difference between first and second generations is much less marked.

The directly opposite theory to assimilation is Zionism, the attempt to revive Jewish group life in the ancient homeland of the Jew, to restore the Hebrew tongue, erect a Jewish educational system, Jewish culture, and Jewish agriculture and industry as well. The connection of this movement with anti-Semitism is evident from its origin in the mind of Theodore Herzl, a Viennese correspondent in Paris, directly after he had observed the Dreyfus case, and his wholeWeltanshauungwas thereby transformed. Zionism is the same answer to the problems of internationalism and civilization that we see in all the new nationalities of Europe, in Ireland, Czecho-Slovakia and Poland. It has achieved a measure of success that is really astonishing in view of the slight resources and organization behindit. At the same time, it makes no pretension toward furnishing an eventual home for all the Jewish people, especially not for those of the United States and other lands of freedom. Zionism aims to save the persecuted Jews by finding for many of them a shelter; it aims, moreover, to solve the double problem of anti-Semitism and the inferiority complex by giving the Jewry of the world a source of pride in the form of a national home. To many thinkers this seems the only answer under present conditions.

Friedman’s whole thesis is that Zionism is the logical and final solution.

117The conflict between the Jew and his environment must be eliminated. By what means may this aim be reached? Either the incongruous elements must be removed or else they must be made compatible.118Only in their historic land where the Jews will be in the majority, where they can without fear of peculiarity assert their culture, is a Jewish mode of life possible.119Zionism at bottom is an attempt to preserve the remnant of Israel, that will make of Palestine its home. It alone promises to save the Jewish people, when the processes of assimilation, now at work in Western Europe and in the United States, shall extend to a liberalized Eastern Europe.120The Jew today is a bundle of conflicts. Not only does he in the present dispersed state suffer from the external, objective and social anti-Semitism, but also from an internal, subjective and psychological slavery. The Zionist insists on the maintenance of Jewish distinctiveness, of Jewishpersonality.

Orthodoxy in Judaism is the attempt to maintain the Jewish group by means of the religious and customary behavior which has operated successfully for that end since the destruction of the Jewish commonwealth in 70 A. D. It is conservative; it finds its chief values, not in the national, but in the religious life; and it endeavors to hold its group intact by a traditional ritual which possesses a profound emotional appeal and establishes certain habits of life. It is the appeal to loyalty and to group stability, and parallels similar conservative movements in many Christian denominations, though with the stronger urge of a longer and more bitter history of persecution.

Finally, there is a theory of group adaptation, best developed institutionally by the reform and conservative synagogs, but also in many non-religious organizations—social clubs, Young Men’s Hebrew Associations (the very name an imitation), labor unions, and the like. Not that these various parties are identical; as a matter of fact, they have practically nothing in common except the incorporation in their philosophies of the two elements—Jewish tradition and modern adaptation; but the conservative and reform statements—of adaptation, of tradition, and of the relation between the two—present profound differences both in theory and in practical details of application. This adjustment is not as yet entirely successful, but has developed a number of useful responses, by which Jews are managing to preserve their group identity and at the same time to enter as constituent members into the American group mind. It is still in a transition period, but the synthesis is being worked out clearly enough for our purposes. In the synagog it involves the reading of part of the prayers in English, as well as Hebrew, the beautification of the service by modern music, both vocal and instrumental, the incorporation of a sermon in English, a modern system of religious education, and a development of the social life of the young people by clubs, classes and recreational means. Without the synagog, it involves a type of “Modernism,” intellectual and moral. Even in the group which endeavors to be most orthodox, it is finding its way in the form of social surveys, modern methods in Hebrew education, and some sort of working compromise with the community custom of Sunday observance, the English language and the eating of non-kosher food. The nature of this adjustment is clear from the fact that every separate item has a different solution. The great majority of Jews work on the traditional Sabbath, due to the combined social and economic pressure; they universally are adopting English as their daily speech, but the majority of them have not yet admitted English into the ritual of the synagog; all those who really care to do so maintain the Jewish dietary laws in their own homes, though very few (comparatively) go so far as to refuse to enter a restaurant where the dishes are washed with soap, or to refuse to drink wine made by gentilesof which a libation might have been made to idols. At the same time, the Hebrew education, so long an integral part of Jewish life, has been completely revolutionized from the unsystematic private or charity instruction of Russia to the large, well organized schools for daily Hebrew instruction at the close of the public school day, whose method is largely copied from that of the American public school.121

We are witnessing before our eyes a group adjustment on a large scale to modern thought, to American customs, to the non-Jewish group. Some of this adjustment is systematic, based on a theory of Jewish life as a distinct religion among Americans of other religions. Some of it is economic and social, either without theory or directly against the orthodox theory of the adjusters themselves. At the same time, we are witnessing orthodoxy fighting for group solidarity; Zionism establishing a Jewish group in a distant land; the assimilationists who escape as individuals from the burden and the odium of being Jews. Each theory is today being tried out in practice, and the results of each will in time be demonstrated. At the same time, each theory of Jewish life implies a corresponding conception of America and of human groups as a whole.

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