“Palestine’s prosperity since 1931 has been gall and wornwood to Chaim Weizmann and his journalistic advocates,” who, “for reasons best known to themselves, are beating the tom-toms for their hero’s return to the presidency of the World Zionist Organization,” declares Rabbi Louis I. Newman in a sharp attack made public today on statements by Maurice Samuel in an article on “the new Ugandism,” in the Anglo-Jewish press last week.
Rabbi Newman takes vigorous exception to Mr. Samuel’s characterization of the policy of the Szold-Brodie group as a “new Ugandism” and defends the efforts of this group “to rebuild Palestine in terms of private investment under social control” as responsible for the present success of Palestine.
Mr. Samuel is criticized for “endeavoring to substitute a leadership of Luftmenschen, and to turn the clock back to the halcyon days when the Zionist Organization indulged itself in the luxury of a staff of propagandists. Rabbi Newman also reproves him for his references to Herzl and Nordau and for his criticism of the new settlers in Palestine as “hungry investors.”
SZOLD-BRODIE GROUP WILL CONTINUE
In concluding his rebuttal, Rabbi Newman states: “The Zionist Congress at Prague may make a crucial error and destroy the present coalition by placing Weizmann at a post where he may do harm. If so, the Szold-Brodie group will continue its activities as heretofore, after Cleveland, 1921: namely, seeking out enterprises such as the Dead Sea project and its allied undertakings, and enlisting Jewish capital for the strengthening of Eretz Yisrael and the Yishub. We invite Zionists to ‘look at the record’: not to be confused and bedevilled by the pseudo-historical fantasies of Samuel, Brainin, Zukerman and their cronies. To them, a prosperous Palestine with a fine middle-class immigration may be ‘Uganda’, but to increasing thousands, it is the Jewish homeland, where refugees may find not only the spirit of the new Zion, but also the means of honest toil and honest self-support which spell, except to propagandists like Samuel and Brainin, self-respect, security, and hope for the days to come.”
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