Jews Are Too Clannish, Head of Scripps-howard Papers Says

The average Jew is too clannish, too prone to segregate himself from his Gentile neighbor, says Roy W. Howard, head of the Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers, in an article which appears in the Rosh Hashanah issue of the Jewish Tribune. Mr. Howard believes that the Jew should “come out of his shell” and should “give his Gentile neighbor a peep into his home life.”

“The average Jew is a clansman, by force of circumstances in times past—too often by choice in the present day,” declares Mr. Howard. “Generally speaking he mingles socially only with members of his own tribe. That is his right, of course. I am not criticizing it. But—

“Since, or at least when, he chooses that path, he must be equally ready to accept the consequences which are natural and almost inevitable. We can not, in social life, wall up the approach to our homes without finding before long that others have similarly walled up the approach to their homes.”

After mentioning Jewish successful achievements in various branches of American life, Mr. Howard says:

“Personally I would be happier about it if his achievements were recorded merely as those of a citizen rather than those of a religionist. It is enough that a man is a great scientist or a great artist. It adds to or detracts nothing from the appraisal to say that he is a great Catholic artist or a great Methodist scientist. No more does it interest me to know that he is a great Jewish something or other. That he is so often so tagged is not the fault of the Gentile public so much as the result of Jewish racial pride—a pride easily understandable but the existence of which is the greatest hindrance to the free functioning of the melting pot and to the complete development of national homegeneity, untainted and unweakened by differences of creed or religion.”

With regard to Zionism, Mr. Howard says:

“Zionism must always be one thing to the oppressed Jew of a background nation which it can never be to the man who thinks of himself as an American Jew rather than as a Jewish American. The foremost liberal minds seem agreed that the world is today cursed with too much petty patrioteering nationalism. To one who accepts this belief, the development of a nationalistic Jewish state can scarcely be regarded as a progressive step in the direction of greater world harmony.”