Now summer is definitely upon us, and for many of us vacation time has already begun. The seashore, the mountains and the countries across the ocean are calling us, and we hurry forth to find recreation as well as stimulation, rest as well as new impressions during the months to come.
I am the lat to be a spoil-sport and to burden your thoughts during gay vacation time with an undue earnestness. Yet I think it is necessary for the readers of this column to remember that wherever they go this summer and whatever they do, they go there and they do it not only in the private capacity of their own personalities but also as representatives of the Jewish race. And that involves a great, an important responsibility.
Have you ever thought about how this word “responsibility” consists, just like “man,” of two distinct halves-a spiritual and a material one? It is really formed out of “response”, and “ability.” Response is the spiritual half-it refers to the quick and intuitive answers our soul and mind make to the various challenges of life. “Ability” is the material half and speaks to the power to translate the spiritual impulses into effective action.
WORLD MORE CRITICAL OF JEWISH WOMEN
Every Jewish woman should, then, possess this responsibility, this twofold precious gift. She should do it, for whenever she fails she fails not only for herself but also for her people. She is judged by the outside world not only as a woman but also as a Jewess. Her graciousness of manner, her taste in dress, the kindness and forbearance she shows to neighbors or co-travelers-all these things are of more importance in her and to her than in women of other races, for she is looked upon with a more critical eye, measured according to a more exacting standard.
It is even a sad, but only too true fact, that her very charm and loveliness, her kindness and her virtues will help her people less than her eventual faults may harm them. Before Einstein was the great man, acclaimed by all the world he once said with a certain gentle bitterness: “If my theory proves true I shall be for the outside world a Swiss savant. If it is false I shall be a German Jew.”
JEWISH FAILURES BEAR RACIAL BRAND
Not always are Jewish successes and Jewish virtues credited to the race as a whole, but Jewish failures are invariably branded, not as human failures, but as Jewish ones, and turned to the discredit of the entire people.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
