The speech delivered by Dr. Charles W. Eliot, President-Emeritus of Harvard University before the Harvard Zionist Society, concerning the desirability of the Jews in America preserving their racial characteristics, was the subject of discussion last Sunday in the Temple Beth-El and the Free Synagogue. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Rabbi Samuel Schulman hold contrary opinions on the subject.
Dr. Wise said Dr. Eliot’s advice was the best that could be given to the Jews. Dr. Wise attacked a tendency among some Jews of being thought too loyal to things Jewish. He regarded Dr. Eliot’s advice, “Be not assimilated”, as sound. He admitted that in the course of his remarks Dr. Eliot apparently unintentionally used the term of American when he should have used the term Anglo-Saxon.
Rabbi Schulman took the point of view that the Jew’s loyalty to his religion enabled him to survive.
Dr. Schulman said he could not fully understand the goal set by Dr. Eliot for the Jews. The spirit of his remarks seemed to aim at the segregation of the Jews, he said.
“The question naturally arises”, he continued, “who are the Americans and who are the foreign people? How long does it take before a so-called foreigner becomes an American? I deny that Jews, as Jews, are a foreign people in this country.
“If there be any clear idea underlying Dr. Eliot’s statement, it is this: that on the one hand he conceives a group of persons to exist in this country who are Americans, and they are of English blood, of Anglo-Saxon descent. And with respect to them everybody else belongs to a foreign people.
“After all, does there not peep through the cultured language of Dr. Eliot the peculiar teaching of the Ku Klux Klan? If I understand the platform of the Klan at all, it is this, that only men and women of Anglo-Saxon descent, that Nordics at best, can be considered as the only pure Americans: that all other people, though tolerated, though protected in their civil and political rights, cannot be considered Americans. Such a doctrine would eventually lead to the undermining and destruction of even their civil and political rights. We deny Dr. Eliot’s main thesis. We deny the right for his separation of the elements in American life. We hold that America has long outgrown the stature of an English colony.”
The forty-sixth annual meeting of the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum was held Sunday morning in the auditorium at Ralph Avenue and Dean Street. President M. B. Schmidt was elected to head the organization for another year. Algernon I. Nova was elected Vice President and A. N. Bernstein was re-elected Treasurer.
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