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7slir lAggIVS:MPUMMIYi
, Brandeis on the Jewish Problem.
In a brief statement of fifteen words, Su-
preme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis
summed up the obligation of the Jew.
Rabbi Louis I. Newman of San Francisco
conversed with Justice Brandeis in Wash-
ington recently on the situation in Jewry
and in Zionism, and he quotes this superb
epigram of Brandeis':
Only those who are satisfied to die
childless can ray there is no Jewish prob-
lem."
It is unnecessary to comment to this
statement. We have time and again pointed
out that those in Jewry live happiest who
are Jewishly informed and Jewishly
trained, and who understand the ideals and
aspirations of their people. Without such
knowledge, one must live a dilemma as a
Jew because our people is so often called
upon to be responsible one for another;
because we are so often called upon to
make sacrifices in being Jews; because it
takes courage to be a Jew.
It is the Jew who has the courage to be
what he is proudly who is happiest. But
the Jew who does not recognize the exist-
ence of a Jewish problem, the Jew who
does not prepare his children for this prob-
lem, only prepares them for unhappiness as
Jews and in many instances as detriments
to Jewry. If every Jew were to study the
Brandeis principle and apply it, we would
be making our problem easier of solution.
Scanning the
Horizon
By DAVID SCHWARTZ
CALLED HIM NAPOLEON
• A hard man is gone—Abi sham
Lincoln Erlanger. The estsits he
left estimated at 75 million- this
is probably an exaggeration -but
it was plenty big and yet by his
will not a cent to charity.
Someone, it appears once called
him the Napoleon of the theater
and ever afterwards, he sought to
pose as the great little Corsican.
During the last years of his life,
he began the erection of the Er-
langer theaters in all parts of the
country, that they might serve as
his monuments—after he was
gone.
He would have done better to
have imitated the figures symbo-
lized by his given name. Better
had he imitated Father Abraham,
or Abraham Lincoln, than Napo-
leon.
Abraham Lincoln Erlanger then
would have been surer of the pres-
ervation of his memory.
AN INTERESTING FIGURE
=MUM yt. &AA
The best joke in the Soviet war on re-
ligion is contained in the attack upon Dr.
Stephen S. Wise by the Communist Yiddish
daily of Moscow, Emes. Dr. Wise is
attacked as "a speculator on Wall Street"
and as organizer of "a Jewish section at
the Vatican under the Pope."
Q.9. •
But it's funny. More Jewish
millionaires. If you want to see
how really funny that is, just re-
fresh your acquaintance with one,
Flavius Josephus. You will recall
he did his writing some two thous-
and years ago. He wrote a history
of the Jews, you remember also
many defenses of Judaism from
the attacks levelled at it those days
by the Greeks.
Well, read Josephus' answer to
Apion. Many of the charges to
which Josephus replies seems as
though they were only made to-
day—such charges as the Jewish
faith is inferior, that the Jews pro-
duced no great men and the like,
but there is one most peculiar
charge. The Jews, said Apion in
disdain were not a commercial peo-
ple and Apion cannot forgive them
for it.
And Josephus in his reply to
Apion is forced to admit the
charge.
DIFFERENT TODAY
So the wheel of history revolves.
Then the Jew was bad for not be-
ing commercial. Today, he is bad,
because he is commercial. What
about tomorrow. If you will talk
to Dr. Henry Moskowitz, of the
Ort, you may begin to believe,
that tomorrow the Jew will again
not be commercial. In Russia, for
instance. the millions of Jews by
the elimination of the middleman
are being forced out of business
into other occupations. In Po-
land, government monopolies are
branching out and forcing the Jew,
who was the leader of business
there, nut into handicrafts. A vir-
tual silent revolution is taking
place, with Jews becoming tech-
nicians, handicraftsmen, mechanics
instead of business men. A revo-
lution but like many of these
peaceful revolutions, they are first
realized by the historian a half
century later.
The knowledge that the Americans have en-
countered something which they cannot assimi-
late has long stirred up an anti-Semitic feeling
which accounts for the aloofness of the Jew in
his American environment. First, the Gentile
fears, and with reason, the competition of the
Jews in business, and despises him as a matter
of course, although regularly at the end of
every month, the balance-sheet shows that the
Jew outstripped him again . . .
. . . The Americans have a grudge against
him because he forces them to keep up with
his feverish pace. If the pace set by the Wan-
dering Jew is killing in business in intellectual
circles it is far worse. Left to himself the
the universities he goes in for sport and flirta-
tions and in the libraries all he wants is light
reading. Now the Jew, on the contrary, in the
same universities and the same libraries is deep
in some serious book on science, sociology or
thing for his ownparticular ends. That is just
philosophy—it ion t a fair thing, they protest!
. . . The Jew has a mind that can neither be
tamed nor disciplined, for he questions every
thing for his own particular ends. This is just
what the Americans do not want. They require
a type of mind that can be dealt with collec-
tively and fitted into an organization in which
the individual is asked to make his own person-
ality subservient to the common good. The
Jew, on the contrary, is an intellectual revo-
lutionary to the point of suspicion and there-
fore in spite of their apparent similarity when
they first come in contact, the Protestant and
the Jew soon diverge. In spite of the great
value of Jewish collaboration, the Protestant
American has adopted a hostile attitude which
has developed into an anti-Semitic movement.
I am sure despite the sincere efforts of good-will
missionaries one can scarcely deny the truth of the
assertion that there is in the United States a defi-
nite anti-Semitic movement.
FELT a personal loss in the death of William
I Howard
Taft. I spent considerable time with
him after his defeat for the presidency. Never
have I known a greater soul, one completely
free from prejudice, and who tempered all
his judgments on the individual or society as a
whole with charity and good-will. lie numbered
many Jews among his friends and associates, and
he had a high regard in particular for Henry Mor-
genthau. In discussing with him the effort made in
the Senate to prevent Louis Brandeis from being
appointed to the supreme bench he assured me that
the question of his being a Jew played very little
part in it. On the contrary, in his opinion, some
Senators who were opposed to Brandeis because
they truly felt he was not just the type of mind for
the supreme bench were inclined to favor him
rather than be under the suspicion of anti-Jewish
motives. Once he paid high tribute to a Washing-
ton correspondent of a Cincinnati newspaper, Gus
Karger, I believe, and he told me that there was no
man in Washington in whim he placed such im-
plicit faith and whom he could trust in any situa-
tion. Karger was one of the many Jewish news-
paper men who were recognized as leaders in their
profession in Washington.
William Howard Taft was a lovable character, a
gentleman and a scholar. In his death America
lost one who was the embodiment of the true spirit
of America. A far nobler American than the
noisy "100-per-centers" with their counterfeit
Americanism.
From his vantage post in Paris Pierre
Van Paassen, one of the outstanding
newspaper correspondents in the world
and daily contributor to the column
"Through My Window" In the new York
Evening World, comments in hi, own
Inimitable way on Jewish even. and
personalities of Europe in his Incisive
column - Passing My Window."
GREAT JEWISH DRAMATIST
The Manchester Guardian re-
marked casually the other day that
Herman Ileijermans is secure of
his place with Isben and with
Strindberg in the great succession
of European dramatists. This is
no light matter to say. Yet it is
eminently correct. Ileijermans is
not known yet in America, but his
day will come. But even then the
tragic pity remains that this Rot-
terdam Jew died a few years ago
in comparative poverty, unknown
almost, certainly unrecognized. He
was brought up among the poorer
workers of his city and he set out
primarily to stir the public con-
science to the sufferings he saw
around hint and his earlier play and
novels that deal with the hardships
of the fisherfolk, the diamond work-
ers and the miners, though lit by
a fine flame of compassion were
crude beside the later work in
which he has no problem and no
temptation to strain credulity to
point a moral. Little of his later
work has been acted in England,
though "The Rising Sun," which
belongs to this Aerial, has been
performed by sonic of the pioneer
societies in England, and among
more distinguished theaters, by
the Liverpool Playhouse. Its four
acts are laid in our time, and the
tragedy they depict arise out of
the crushing of a small, old estab-
lished family business by a large
new concern that surrounds it and
destroys it. But Matthew Strong,
in his vain fight to save his family,
his home and his shop from the at-
tack of his rival, is the protagon-
ist of more than mere self-satis-
faction. He is enkindled, as are
many of Isben's heroes with a pas-
sion for intellectual as well as
practical honesty—a passion that
at the end of the poignant last act
is put to as severe a test as it could
well face. For the fate of his 20-
year-old (laughter Sonia, who has
been the mainstay of his optimism
and courage throughout the strug-
gle and whose relationship with her
father is one of the most lovely
sketches of true kinship that the
stage can boast, is desperately in-
volved. When the crash is immi-
nent, and the bailiffs can no longer
be denied entrance, it is from Son-
ia's hands that there falls the par-
affin lamp which sets the shop
ablaze and offers salvation from
ruin by way of an insurance of $25,-
000. That there perishes in the
fire the crippled child of the tenant
of the upper story is not the great-
est horror of that culminating in-
cident. For as dreadful is the sus-
picion that rends Strong's spirit,
even after the law has been satis-
fied by an investigation on the
spot, that, in a half hysterical hope
of helping the parent she adores,
the girl's act was deliberate. It is
then, and then only, that the rath-
er unpractical optimism and ir-
rational cheerfulness of the man in
adversity are quenched, as he real-
izes that for her this is a crisis
that only confession can avert. The
final curtain that hands her over
to justice is as logical a develop-
ment of the nature of these two as
it is powerful in dramatic effect.
SUGGEST that whenever any of my readers find
I the
time that they register their protest with the
publishers of the Standard Dictionary to have them
remove the offensive definition of the word "Jew"
width still obtains in that publication. That's the
only way it's going to be taken out. The other
day I received this letter from a reader:
I myself have taken this matter up direct
with Funk F7 Wagnalls in March, 1924. They
then made the reply that this objectionable
definition was taken from an old English pub-
lication. Not having given the author's name
I am inclined to believe it may have been
during the period of the so-called good Chris-
tian King John, who imprisoned all the English
Jews in order to get money from them.
Although in the recent issue of the Standard
Dictionary the objectionable definition has been
somewhat modified it is not entirely free from
race hatred.
If we write often Enough perhaps an impression
may yet be made on the editor-in-chief.
A
• "VI V,
By PIERRE VAN PAASSEN
.
IN RE-READING Siegfried's book on "America
Conies of Age" which, by the way, every Jew
should read if he wants to gain an intelligent under-
standing of the power and force of the Protestant
movement in this country. I am reminded of the
criticism that so often has been uttered against
statements made in this column of a definite anti-
Semitic movement in the United States. •There are
two or three paragraphs that I would submit to the
reader: they might serve for subjects for discussion
among the members of some of our clubs:
—0--
IN THE DAY S OF JOSEPHUS
`If " b"
PASSING MY WINDOW
a
s .1011 0
IN POINT of generosity that gift of $20,000 by
Judge and Mrs. Josiah Cohen of Pittsburgh to
the Allied Jewish Campaign is the largest ever given
to a Jewish drive in this country. The Cohens are
like Nathan Straus, they give the limit of them-
selves and of their means. Judge Cohen, 89 years
old, and his good wife only a few years his junior,
are ceaselessly active in Jewish welfare work, put-
ting to shame those of younger years. I believe
that this donation will be of more inspirational
vaue to the cause of the campaign than any other,
regardless of how large the amount. Above all, they
have pledged this amount to the cause of UNITY
in Israel, and they thank God that they have been
spared long enough to give this tangible expression
of appreciation to those who are working for a har-
monious program in approaching problems of Jewish
welfare the world over.
JEWISH MILLIONAIRES
Fenner Brockway, M. P., who came here
recently to plagiarize on Dr. J. L. Magnes'
proposals for the establishment of a parlia-
ment in Palestine, is hit by the London
Truth as "doing his best to cause trouble
for his country abroad." Anyone who is
informed on the Palestine situation and
heard Mr. Brock way's address in Detroit
could have guessed at once that there was
something suspicious about this M. P.
4
ti
Charles II Joseph
irtS.S.
A survey of millionaires has
just been made by Arthur M. Kap-.
Ian. Ile finds that there are a to-
tal of 1,876 Jews in America who
are millionaires, and that there are
proportionately three times as
many Jewish millionaires as non-
Jewish.
I woad rather the same propor-
tion could be shown in the fields of
science and the arts, but at the
same time, there is no use sniffing
at those making money. After all,
pretty nearly everybody—Jewish
and non-Jewish, appears to be out
for the shekels, and with those who
frown and glower, it is generally
nothing but a case of sour grapes.
Of course, when a Jew has
money, it becomes just a tiny bit
worse. Somehow, everything a
Jew has appears to create a vaster
impression. Was it not the love-
able Mark Twain who remarked,
when he was told there were only
15 million Jews in the world:
"Why, I know that many my-
self."
The case for the European relief item in
the $6,000,000 Allied Jewish Campaign is
excellently stated in this editorial, and the
needs that cry to American Jewry for recon-
struction in Europe are in themselves suffi-
cient to demand wholehearted response
from the Jews of this country. With the
strength and glory that is added to this cam-
paign by the inclusion of the Palestine
item, it is difficult to see how the drive can
be anything but a great success. It is not
necessary again to review the importance
of the share played in the campaign by the
Jewish Homeland as a beneficiary. The
mere mention of the name Palestine arouses
sentiments of love for Israel's cradle-land
and joy in the great works accomplished
there.
Surely a united Jewry will respond nobly
in the forthcoming campaign which, locally,
becomes the most important effort in the
community's history because it includes not
only the Palestinian and European recon-
struction items, but also the budgets for the
United Hebrew Schools, the Hebrew Free
Loan Association, the initial item for a Jew-
ish Center and other local and national
needs.
14.90•
.
lie was of course a most inter-
esting figure and unquestionably
the most dominant personality of
the theater of his day. Ile revolu-
tionized the theatrical business and
gave it efficiency and dignity. Be-
fore his advent, such things were
almost unheard of. An actor, un-
der the best of circumstances,
hardly knew then whether there
would be eating for him next week
or not. The profession owes much
to him. It realizes it, and the im-
portance of it inflated his ego.
The alleged wife, who is now
seeking part of the estate, Miss
Fiscal, is the niece of the late
Judge Leventritt, at one time Er-
langer's lawyer and a man who, it
may be remembered, played a fair-
ly conspicuous role of Jewish life.
Erlanger once remarked that
while he was very succesful in the
show business, he did not seem to
be as fortunate in his dealings with
women. They, as a whole, did
not seem to take to him.
has taken the form of vocational training for
the young and the restoration or creation of
means of subsistence for the older generation.
In Soviet Russia the bulk of expenditure has
gone into colonization and supplying artisans
with tools. In Poland and other border states
relief has chiefly taken the shape of loan funds
for the purpose of financing artisans and small
tradesmen. Everywhere in Eastern Europe the
problem of Jewish reconstruction has been
naturally conditioned by the general situation,
political, economical, social. In Soviet Russia
aid for the Jewish town population has had to
be carried on with due regard for a Communist
regime suspicious of "capitalist" ways. Simi-
larly the Jewish agricultural colonies must now
reckon with the Soviet government's collectivi-
zation program. Mr. Felix Warburg at Wash-
ington recently aptly described the role of
Jewish relief in Russia as that of a trained
nurse who must do the best she can for her
patient while deferring to the vagaries of the
physician in charge. The Jews of Poland are
not subjected to a process of complete uproot-
ing like that involved in the Communist intro-
but they have to contend with the ntro-
duction
duction of government monopolies in various
branches of commerce, resulting in the im-
poverishment of many small tradesmen. But,
as stated at the Washington conference, the
very difficulties with which the administration
of relief in Eastern Europe must contend
should be a challenge to American persistence
and generosity.
The Registration Bill.
The fiasco which attended the hearing
on the proposed registration bill before the
Senate Immigration Committee last week
has not helped the cause of justice to the
alien now in this country. The fact that
opponents to the registration measures were
unable to present their views suggests that
these bills may be railroaded through Con-
gress.
But by far the worst danger is the at-
tempt to make the proposed bills appear
as humane and just measures. One of the
sponsors of the measures, to quote one in-
stance, even suggested that honest men
have nothing to fear from registration, and
added that all citizens are "registered in
one way or another from the cradle to the
grave." The trouble with such a view is
that those adhering to it fail to see the
analogy between registering aliens and
finger-printing criminals. There may be
nothing against fingerprinting all honest
men, but as it happens only criminals are
being so registered. There may be nothing
against registering all honest men, but reg-
istration of aliens suggests an espionage
system which will be attended by all the
dangers of deportation and humiliation.
Once we have a system for registering
aliens, it may lead us to the adoption of
a passport system similar to that which
helped relegate Czarist Russia to countries
belonging to the Darkest Ages. Ameri-
cans who prize the idealism of American
institutions should exert every effort to op-
pose this measure.
.
tistsier.,,,x1wr, v
The dissolution of the Yevsectzia, the
Published Weekly by The Jewish Chronicle PubEMI. Co., lac.
Jewish section of the Communist party in
Entered a Second-class matter Much 3, 1916. M the Posts
Russia, will be hailed by Jews everywhere
Detroit. Mich.. under the Act of March 3, 1879.
as one of the happiest occurrences since the
General Offices and Publication Building
rise to power of the Soviet.
525 Woodward Avenue
Telephone: Cadillac 1040 Cable Address: Chronicle
London Office.
It acted like a cancer upon the heart of
14 Stratford Place, London, W. 1, England
Russian Jewry. To Yevsectzia could be
$3.00 Per Year ascribed all of the Jew's sufferings under
Subscription, in Advance
To In.re publication. allcorrespondent. and news matter
the Soviets. It was this group of Jewish
reach this office by Tuesda y evening of each week.
When mailing notices, kindly use one side of the paper only.
When
Communists that was anxious to destroy
The Detroit Jewish Chronicle Invitescorrespondence on sub-
jects of Interest to the Jewish people, but disclaims reeponsis
everything that was built to satisfy the
Willy for an Indorsement of the views cap ..... d by the writers
spiritual needs of the Jew.
Sabbath Readings of the Torah.
Pentateuchal portion—Ex. 30:11-34:35; Num. 19.
The removal of this cancer from the
Prophetical portion—Ezek. 36:1G-38.
body of Russian Jewry is good news. Very
Adar 21, 5690
March 21, 1930
often we have suffered most from Jewish
anti-Semites, and the removal of power
Lord Balfour—the Second Cyrus.
from such enemies within Jewish ranks in
Arthur James Balfour is dead, but his
name will fur all time live in the history of Russia strengthens the hope for the coming
of better days for Jewry under Communist
the Jewish people.
As the author of the historic declaration rule.
which bears his name, the Earl of Balfour
has won the title of the Second Cyrus. lie
Jewish Reconstruction Abroad.
appeared on the Jewish scene in an hour of
Commenting
on the launching of the
gloom for our people, and held out a hope
to the discouraged and downtrodden which drive for $6,000,000 for the Joint Distribu-
gave new life to the oppressed Jewish tion committee and the Jewish Agency, at
the conference in Washington on March 8
masses.
The Balfour Declaration was the strong- and 9, the New York Times, writing editori-
est ray of hope that was held to our people ally under the above heading, analyzes the
since the destruction of the Second Temple, problem of European reconstruction as fol-
and like Cyrus of Persia who made pos- lows:
sible Jewish national reconstruction after
The Allied Jewish Campaign for reconstruc-
the Babylonian exile, Lord Balfour's act
tion in Eastern Europe and development in
Palestine
has been formally set in motion by a
has won the gratitude of all Jews, and his
conference at Washington. Prevented by Mr.
name is engraved honorably in the heart
Taft's death from addressing the delegates in
person, President Hoover wrote to express his
and story of Israel.
sympathy with the purposes of the conference
Lord Balfour has been consistent in his
as a contribution to international good-will.
devotion to the cause of Palestine's recon-
The goal fixed for the present drive is $6,000,-
000. It will be the latest item in a continuous
struction as the Jewish National Home. On
expenditure since 1914 amounting to $80,000-,
every occasion he has defended the justice
000. Impressive as the latter sum may be, it
reduces itself to an annual average of $5,000,.
of his famous Declaration. He was among
000, which is not beyond the resources of the
the first to condemn the recent outrages,
Jewish population of the United States and
and with David Lloyd George and General
Canada, as it certainly is not beyond the needs
of the beneficiaries in Russia, Poland, Rumania
Smuts he penned the courageous protest
and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and in Pales-
against the British government's betrayal
tine. Even if the amount of private aid flow-
ing from this country in the form of direct gifts
of trust in the failure to honor the pledges
to relatives and friends be assumed to equal
made to the Jewish people.
the aunt distributed by public agencies, the per
capita relief works nut to a pitifully small sum
Jewry sits in mourning over the loss of
for an affected population of several millions.
one whose name will live among the Has-
Jewish reconstructtion work in Eastern Eu-
sidei Umos Ho-olam, the pious among the
rope, after the initial phase of rebuilding
Gentiles.
ruined homes and reuniting dispersed families,
.
5#
Removing a Cancer
FrIEVEFROIVEWISRefRONICLE
.
##
READER of the Boston Jewish Advocate can-
celled her subscription because of my attitude
toward Jewish children hanging up their stockings
on Christmas Eve. I took the position that some
of us attach too much importance to non-essentials
in religion and miss completely the essential thing
—the spirit. Fortunately I am not a Jew who
thinks it a greater crime to omit a ceremony than
A RABBI WITHDRAWS
to DO RIGHT. The fault with the fundamentalist
The New York press has been
of ALL religious, Jewish or Christion, is that he
full of the story of the resignation
worships CEREMONY and RITUAL. When I was a
of Rabbi Feinberg and his with- child I hung my stocking up on Christmas; every
drawal from ministry. Only 28, other child in the neighborhood did the same thing.
this very able young rabbi leaves When we walked along the street and saw Santa
a position paying the not to be
Claus, our parents did not hurry us down a side
sneezed at sum of $12,000 a year.
street to escape being this PAGAN representative
Relatively, it appears the rabbin- of the Christianity. In fact, it never entered our
ical profession is still well paying. minds to think anything about him other than he
At least one rabbi that I know re- was a jolly, red-faced chap who gave goon children
ceives $40,000 a year, and there holiday presents. In all my reading and experi-
are others far better known than ence, in all my acquaintances with converted Jews,
he, who receive salaries in excess
among all the atheist Jews and agnostic Jews I
of that.
have met, I never found one who ever did so un-
Of course, the salary of the aver- Jewish a thing as to hang their stockings over the
age is much below either of the fireplace on Christmas! From what I can gather
figures mentioned.
EVERY CONVERTED HEBREW-CHRISTIAN
Rabbi Feinberg, I understand, is
MISSIONARY HAS COME FROM HOMES
soon to wed the (laughter of one WHERE THEY PROBABLY PULL DOWN THE.
of New York's greatest bankers.
SHADES IF SANTA CLAUS WALKED IN
However, it appears, he intends to
FRONT OF THEIR HOUSES. In God's name,
make his own way.
when will we ever, ever learn to slop quibbling over
trifles? Adolph Ochs gives a pair of :Menorahs to a
STUDENTS LEAVE
MANY STUDENTS
church in New York and what • hue and cry is
I do not know how large the
raised over it! As if this fine spiritually-minded
number is of rabbis who leave Jew has in some way compromised himself and his
their calling after once in it, but
faith by doing a fine thing. I have no more pa-
the number of students for the tience with the fanatics among the Jews than I have
with those of any other faith.
(Turn to Next Page)
CHALUTZIM DEVOTION
A plague threatens Palestine.
Hordes and swarms of locusts are
on the march from the Arabian des-
ert. If the flame-throwers and
chemicals don't bar the way, Pal-
estinian agriculture will he ruined
for the next three years. "An
earthquake, a massacre, a plague,
exclaims on English editor. "Sues
ly, the Jews have no luck in Pales-
tine. They may as well quit. Th
country isn't worth all that trout
le." The man doesn't know the Pa
estinians. They came into the Inn
when it was sick unto death, whe
the desert had crept over it like a
wasting disease. With the sweat
of their own bodies they waterer(
the arid stretches, with their bar
bands they started to dig up the
stones that centuries of neglect
had scattered over the surface
Unamuno the great Spanish philos
opher called Spain his mother am
his daughter. The Chalutzim ap
preached Palestine with such a lov(
and a devotion that increased in
the measure that the full realize
lion of the desolation of Eretz Is
reel dawned upon them. Nothins
can shake them now. They haw
seen the rebirth of the land. The
anguish and pain of birth, the
blood even, do not diminish a moth
er's devotion, but increase it.
--S-
A MASTER-SHOLOM ASCH
It looks as if the big publishing
houses in Germany and America,
overcoming their hesitancy vis-a-
vis of Yiddish language writers
have stumbled upon a gold mine
that lay untouched within their
grasp for many years. Literary
Germany, at any yate, is at present
singing the praise of Sholom Asch
and this certainly not undeserved-
ly for Asch is an author of the cal-
iber of the Pole Reymont and the
Norwegian master Hamann. T here
were some sceptics who asserted
that Asch had reached the apex of
his creative force in "The God of
Vengeance" that appeared just be-
fore the war, but instead of stag-
nating, Asch has gone from
strength to strength, no that in his
new work "Warsaw" we see him
developed into a painter of life and
its problems of international sig-
nificance. "Warsaw" treats of a
young Jew of wealthy family who
comes to Warsaw, and who dis-
turbed by the inhuman. existence
of the Jewish petite bourgeoisie
there, throws himself heart and
soul into the struggle to better
their lot. But he is not one of
these crushed human beings and he
can never enter wholly into their
struggles. The way is shown by
another young Jew, David Ilurwitz,
an idealist who shoota an officer
and is executed for his act of WS-
rorism. The picture that Sholom
Asch gives of the execution is one
of gripping reality and truth, a
pure masterpiece, both psychologi-
cally and in style. The soldiers
take the condemned man on a hill
to shoot hint. There standing
against a tree he sees the world
suddenly in a new aspect. The
fields, the trees, the Weichsel river,
everything breathes joy and happi-
ness and new life. And the thought
that all will go on after his death,
gives him strength. lie is perfect-
ly well aware what he is on that
hill for. Ile is not in any stupor
or dream. To the contrary, it is
as if in the last moments of his life
a new clarity illumines his spirit.
"You can kill me, but the land and
the world you will never kill," he
calls out at the firing squad. Asch's
picture of the execution is sombre,
yet brightly luminous, and of in-
tense feeling. And then the anti-
climax to this chapter. in the
night that the young Jew is exe-
cuted his mother Rachel-Leje, far
away, has a dream. She wants to
fix a hole in her boy's shirt, but
she can't find the black thread. And
in her sleep she murmurs: "White
thread, Ina uns Juden, is used only
for death garments!" Here is Asch,
the folklorist of his people, a mas-
ter with a great heart.
(Copyright, 1030, J. T. A.)
C
JEWS IN THE NEWS
By BERNARD POSTAL
Frederick Brown gets into the
headlines more often than he con-
siders necessary for his real estate
transactions are so darin so vast
and so venturesome that
at they
emerge from the comparative ob-
scurity of the real estate page and
become front page news. This
week he was in the limelight not
for the realty manipulations or for
his generous philanthropic activi-
ties. For the promotion of indus-
trial peace he was presented a
medal by the American Arbitra-
tion Association. A number of
speakers prominent in the busi-
ness, philanthropic and financial
world praised Frederick Brown's
character and leadership. his gen-
erosity to New York University is
well known. Laboratories, build-
ings and gifts of other kinds have
made him the outstanding patron
of N. Y. U. In Jewish philanthro-
pies he may be less known than
others but he is the donor of the
site on which stands the Federa-
tion Building and no philanthropic
undertaking is complete without
Frederick Brown.
As a leader of American Jewry
Mortimer Schiff himself will admit
that he doesn't rival his father, the
late beloved Jacob Schiff, but in
other roles Schiff is unquestion-
ably the public man that his vener-
ated father was. The celebration
of the twentieth anniversary of
the founding of the Boy Scouts of
America, of which Schiff is the
vice-president, lifted him into the
headlines. Although he is vice-
(Turn to Next Page)
VIEWS OF LEADING JEWS 11
DR. WILLIAM I. SIROVICII, Member of Congress: "The moment
has now arrived when we Jews, in appreciation of what this country has
done for us, should found in America, as a great contribution of the
Jews on the altar of education, a non-sectarian university, open to all,
bringing to it such eminent Jewish scholars as Professor Albert Ein-
stein and Dr. Henri Bergson."
•
•
•
DR. SAMUEL SCHULMAN, Rabbi of Congregation Emanuel, New
York: "In this country we have been indulging in an experiment for
the last 10 years which has extended the power of the state tremen-
dously and which is the greatest menace to personal liberty and to the
spirit of American institutions. We have attempted, by the prohibition
amendment and the prohibition law, to enforce a particular law which
is repugnant to millions of men and women."
•
•
•
DR. LOUIS I. NEWMAN: "Prophetism is required in the faith of us
moderns in order that our doctrines may socialize our conscience and
impel us to humanitarian service. Upon the prophetic ideals of justice,
peace, brotherhood and mercy, we must reconstruct our shattered
social order."
•
•
•
RABBI ALEXANDER LYONS: "If I were a Christian I should
take it as the greatest obligation of my religious life to make amends
to my Jewish brother, spiritual relative of Jesus that he is, whom Chris-
tian history in the past and some of its unregenerate descendants have
cruelly mistreated in one form or another of persecution and thus in
name of the Crucified One have persistently crucified those whom he
loved and to whom he professedly came."
•
•
•
RABBI STEPHEN S. WISE: "It isn't fair to ask the press to hold
up standards higher than its generation."
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