Digest of World Press Opinion

Severe criticism is heaped upon the Executive of the Jewish Agency in Palestine in an editorial in Boust’nai, official organ of the Jewish Farmers Association in Palestine, edited by the Zionist leader M. Smiliansky. The paper is dissatisfied with the fact that the Executive has started a partisan news service from Palestine. Asking why this news service is necessary when the JTA is in existence, the editorial reads:

The Executive of the Jewish Agency lately is not much satisfied with the JTA, which is not always relaying news abroad in the form wished by the Executive. Especially opposed to the JTA is the Labor wing, for this reason only — because the JTA refuses to color its news to suit the Laborite.

Henceforth order will be restored. Henceforth only censored news will be sent abroad from Palestine. The three editors of the new Palcor service are all Laborites. They are “good boys.” They are kosher.

It is possible that such action is in accordance with democratic theories. The smell is not at all, however, a pleasant one. Such censorship, when practiced by Stalin or Mussolini, is condemned by us in the strongest words possible.

It is useless to tell us stories like the one that the new news service is allegedly “a share-holding corporation.” Such fairy tales are no good in our times, not even for putting babies to sleep.

MONTEFIORE ANALYZES SITUATION IN REICH

Leonard G. Montefiore, well known leader of British Jewry, speaking in the Synagogue Review, a London publication, on the Jewish situation in Germany, says:

In a few weeks, Hitler will celebrate the second anniversary of his accession to power. Considering the fact that racial discrimination and anti-Semitism provide the main impulse of the National Socialist movement, it is remarkable that the German-Jewish communities have managed during the last two years to maintain their existence. Vilified, calumniated and traduced, denounced in print and speech and broadcast as enemies and traitors, the German Jews still maintain a vigorous communal life. How long they will be able to do so, remains uncertain.

It is the calculated attack on Judaism and the Jewish race that makes me believe it is the duty of every Jew and Jewess to spend a little time and thought on what is going on in Germany. The Nazi movement began by attacking certain classes of Jews, East European Jews and so on. It went on by attacking Jews in certain professions and occupations, politics, the law, medicine and the civil service. Now it is concentrating upon an attack upon everything that is Jewish or of Jewish origin.

DISCUSSES ART OF MAX LIEBERMANN

The Listener, a London art magazine, comments on the Nazi attitude toward the famous Jewish painter, Max Liebermann, as follows:

Since the Nazis affirm the existence of racial qualities in art and point to the deterimental effect of Jewish elements on a national culture, it is worth while considering what characteristics in Liebermann’s art might be due to his Jewish origin. I confess I find none at all. The Jewish genius is not naturally expressed in the plastic arts; there is no Hebrew architecture or painting or sculpture to correspond to Hebrew literature. Nevertheless, in the case of one or two modern artists (Marc Chagall, for example) one might isolate a certain quality which is Jewish—a certain rhetoric, a certain psychological phantasy. But these qualities are not present in Liebermann. “The more naturalistic a painter is, the more imaginative he must be; for the imagination of a painter is shown, not in the representation of ideas, but in the representation of reality.” That is a saying of Liebermann’s, and it certainly expresses a sentiment inconsistent with the general character of German art, in which there has always been a mystical, transcendental tendency. But the sentiment expressed by Liebermann is not typically Jewish; it is merely anti-transcendental, anti-romantic. It exactly describes the art of such un-Jewish artists as Constable and Cézanne.

LAUDS YIDDISH THEATRE IN MOSCOW

The Birmingham Post writes on the Yiddish State Theatre in Moscow:

Among the theatres of the national minorities is the Jewish Kamerny Theatre of Moscow, eulogized as being expressive of the soul of the liberated Jewish proletariat. The flamboyant rhythm of its productions is born of the rhythm and tempo of the Jewish crowd. Its producers asserted that they have discovered and strengthened the musical basis of the Yiddish tongue, “which does not lie in Talmudic chants or synagogue songs, but the harmonious speech of the street, the bazaar, the town.” About its actors, strong, buoyant and vital, there is no trace of the “ancient Hebrew sorrow”; the will-to-live is the leitmotiv of the Kamery Theatre.

HOW BOOM AFFECTS PALESTINE RAILWAYS

The Near East and India reports the effect of Palestine’s prosperity on the railways system there as follows:

When economic development follows the establishment of communications it is inevitable that difficulties should arise; for the reasons that lead to the creation of a settlement in one place, of a group of industries in another, and the extension of a particular form of cultivation in a third, are likely to be different from those which guided the original alignment of a railway in practically undeveloped country.

So it happens that the progress which is going on so briskly in Palestine, resulting in the development of important townships and flourishing agricultural areas, has made it clear that the present route of the main line of the Palestine Railways does not follow the line best calculated to facilitate the country’s commerce. It has, therefore, been decided to ask Sir Felix Pole, who has on more than one occasion been invited to advise on railway questions in the Near East, to examine the position and make recommendations, and it is understood that he will leave for Palestine at the end of next week.

The main problem that will be placed before him is the advisability of bringing the main line near to Jaffa and Tel Aviv, a new junction being established for these centres, and the best course for the necessary deviation.