Editorials

Modern educators have quite recently made the discovery that education and schooling are not synonymous. For those who are familiar with Jewish traditions and Jewish educational ideals, that is no discovery. Study and learning for the Jew was a never-ending process. It was, of course, more than merely an intellectual exercise that had for its aim the acquisition of knowledge or the improvement of the mind. It was also a sacrament and a religious duty of the first order.

Ivriah, the Women’s Division of the Jewish Education Association, is animated by this age-old Jewish ideal, and that is why it combines in its program the Jewish education of the mother and the child. Ivriah feels that if the parents are educated Jewishly, their children’s religious training will follow. “Judaism must not only be taught, but must be caught, in the home.”

The primary interest of the organization in its incipiency was the child. But as the organization grew, and gained experience and insight into its problems, the need for Jewish education and Jewish inspiration for the mother become more apparent and occupied an increasingly prominent place in its program of work.

In other words, in all the eighteen Ivriah Districts, one of the watchwords is cultural work for the members. In the case of many of its members, this cultural work represents a re-invoking and reinterpretation of things learned in early childhood and in the case of others, it represents something entirely new. But in all cases, it comes to them with the force of something intimate and cherished, something of their very own that they come into possession of.

So far as the children are concerned, the most important project which Ivriah is undertaking is the establishment of a Hebrew Kindergarten Fund with which to establish kindergartens in the various already existing Jewish religious schools. The project was adopted, of course, only after careful consideration and upon the advice of competent Jewish educators.

There are also classes in Hebrew and Bible History for adults. Ivriah maintains a Speakers’ Bureau which sends out women to address parents’ meetings and other gatherings where the message of Jewish education might fall on fruitful ground.

Ivriah exercises no obligation as to the form of observance the parents should adopt.

On Sunday evening, December 17, the parent organization, the Jewish education Association, will hold its annual Chanukah Dinner at the Hotel Waldorf Astoria.

IN HONOR OF LOUIS D. BRANDEIS

Louis D. Brandeis, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, will be seventy-seven years of age tomorrow. Next January 28th he will have served eighteen years on the highest bench of this country, as not the least notable of that group of nine justices whose opinions mould the law of the land and whose collective presence inspires a more profound sense of awe than does that of any legislative, executive or judicial body in this country, if not in the world.

If it is possible to summarize his contribution in forming the law of the land, or to state the trend of his opinions as a justice and his career as an attorney in one phrase that phrase would be: The law is made for man, not man for the law. In other words, he visualizes the body of the law as a flexible body of decision, governed and conditioned by changing social and economic facts; he sees in the law an instrumentality for enforcing the claims of social justice upon those gentry, malefactors of great wealth, as President Theodore Roosevelt called them, who are accustomed to employing the law to sanction and enforce their private claims as against those of the people. In his crusades against the utilities of Massachusetts, for example, he derived no demagogic gain for himself, but forged ahead, in serious, logical vein until he had enforced the people’s victory upon private interests. He has never been the creature of any corporate interest, no matter how much he might have gained by such defection from his sense of social justice and he expressed himself once as preferring to have clients than be somebody’s lawyer. Had he never been appointed to any bench, he would have achieved enough good to last most other men’s lifetimes.

When the late President Woodrow Wilson appointed Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court bench, amid the frantic howlings of the kept press and the paid and voluntary servants of capitalistic and utility interests, he made the following comment upon his nominee:

“I cannot speak too highly of his impartial, impersonal, orderly and constructive mind, his rare analytical powers, his deep human sympathy, his profound acquaintance with the historical roots of our institutions and insight into their spirit, or of the many instances he has given of being imbued to the very heart with our American ideals of justice and equality of opportunity.”

Many objections were raised against Mr. Brandeis as lacking in the so-called judicial temperament, by which is generally meant that the man is not cold-blooded enough to suit certain purposes. Behind much of the objection against him was the unspoken one that he was a Jew. But when among the nine Americans on the bench there are two such as Brandeis and Cardozo, that word Jew which is intended as a reproach becomes nothing less than a badge of honor.

INTER-RACE DIFFERENTIATION

The implication that a solution of the Jewish question in Germany may be found in a differentiation between the native-born Jews and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, is advanced in the current issue of the C. V. Zeitung, official organ of the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith.

The publication, discussing Chancellor Hitler’s speech of October 24, quotes that part of the speech in which Hitler referred to the Jewish question. Contrasting the position of England and Germany, Hitler had asserted, “If we too had declared that one could enter Germany only on condition that he brought along one thousand pounds or, indeed, paid them, there would not be any Jewish question with us at all….”

“Even now. we are still so magnanimous as to give the Jewish nation a much higher percentage as its share in the possibilities of earning a living than there is at our own disposal….”

Commenting on this statement, the C. V. Zeitung declares.

“The Chancellor’s utterances are to be examined with the attention which should be dedicated to every utterance by the highest authority of the ruling movement, and in this connection especially, because the Chancellor for a long time has not taken any ex cathedra stand on the German Jewish question. Then we find a very noteworthy differentiation in his judgment of the immigrant and the native-born, permanently settled Jews. And we might also, perhaps, find in the words of the Chancellor of the Reich the declaration that the indigenous Jews must find room for living in their German Fatherland.”