World Press Digest

Under the headline “Germany’s Cultural Ghetto,” the Herald Trbune carries the following article:

The organization in Germany of a Jewish “kulturbund,” for the advancement of what the news reports call a “Ghetto culture,” is a movement to which the Nazis have given free rein on the condition that all its activities remain exclusively Jewish. Hitler’s leading anti-Semitic lieutenants probably argue among themselves that this development of a Jewish cultural world apart is evidence of the Jew’s resignation to his exclusion from what they call their “Aryan” social and cultural circles; that it will serve to advertise and emphasize the Jew’s alien status in the Third Reich, and that it will make it easier for the guardians of Teutonism undefiled to quarantine the “Aryan” against Jewish cultural influences—the root of all evil, according to much official Nazi propaganda.

Just as it is often alleged that the Jews of Venice moved into the first Ghetto voluntarily because of the protection that the walls and gates of that quarter afforded them, so the Hitlerites will probably be pleased henceforth to let it be known that although Germany’s denationalized Jews were not welcome in “Aryan” gatherings, their cultural segregation has been voluntary.

EINSTEIN SEES JEWRY BOUND BY DESTINY

The Buffalo Jewish Review publishes the following advice of Professor Einstein to the Jews:

If we as Jews can learn anything from these politically sad times, it is the fact that destiny has bound us together, a fact which in times of quiet and security we often so easily and gladly forget. We are accustomed to lay too much emphasis on the differences that divide the Jews of different lands and different religious views. And we forget often that it is the concern of every Jew, when anywhere the Jew is halted and treated unjustly, when politicians with flexible consciences set into motion against us the old prejudices, originally religious, in order to concoct political schemes at our expense.

The most important lesson which we can learn from these tragic occurrences is, according to my view, the following we must not conceive of the Jewish community as one purely of religious tradition; but we must so build it up that it still shall give to each individual composing it a spiritual purpose, protection against isolation, opportunities for educating the youth, and, in times of individual need or external pressure, also the needed material protection.

URGES ACTION TO CURB LAND SPECULATION

Writing on land speculation in Palestine, the Canadian Jewish Chronicle comments editorially:

Inasmuch as Palestine looks forward to a steady stream of immigration for some time to come, the Jewish Agency would do well to set about correcting some of the evils which every “boom” brings in its wake. Because immigration into Palestine is in a large measure supervised by the Agency, there is no reason why some system of regulation should not be introduced which should divert some of the overflow into other potential “Tel Avivs.”

PANACEA AND DISILLUSIONMENT

Jewish Education, a publication of the Council for Jewish Education, expresses the following views in an editorial in its latest issue:

To assume that there is only one human struggle, namely, the economic, takes too simple a view of human society and its needs. The experience of Russia, recent though it be, already suffices to indicate the unreality of such oversimplification. Psychic, cultural, racial, aesthetic and intellectual problems exist even in communist society. To this our communist friends reply that all these problems “can wait” until the fundamental economic problem be solved. But the complexity of human life does not permit of solution in simple chronological sequences, problem after problem.

We Jews have had too much experience in disillusionment with past panaceas for us to believe that the solution of any one problem can solve all of our problems. Neither political emancipation nor economic emancipation can be the whole of the story for us. And just as we have had to continue the struggle for political rights, without abandoning Judaism, so must the economic struggle proceed pari passu with our efforts at Jewish communal integration and advancement. For us blithely to give up our corporate existence and our Jewish faith on the strength of anticipated economic messianism, “quickly in our day,” is a useless and impotent form of harikari.

COMMON DENOMINATOR SOUGHT FOR U. S. JEWS

Speaking on the program adopted at the Washington conference on Palestine, the Reform Advocate of Chicago says editorially:

There are places in this program where the non-Zionist can cooperate without making him swallow the whole nationalistic philosophy. And there was a way and we are perplexed as to the reasons which led for the calling of this conference under the narrowed auspices of the Zionistic Organization of America. Everywhere in American Jewish life the effort is being made to find the common denominator on which all Jews can stand and work and help. Definitely a calling of anything under the auspices of any one organization in American Jewry must limit the appeal.

When the American Jewish Committee meets, and it has just had its meeting, the partisans of the committee listen and applaud. The American Jewish Congress does exactly the same thing. A candidate for public office goes out on the stump for election and his speeches are applauded wherever he goes. He comes to think that surely he will be elected. It is only after the election that he understands why he was not elected despite the applause. Republicans went to republican meetings and applauded, and democrats are equally selective and vociferous. And neither rises above partisanship.