In the presence of nearly a thousand persons, delegates from Yiddish cultural organizations in various parts of the United States and Canada and their guests, the first annual convention of the Yiddishe Kultur Gesellshaft, the society for promoting the Yiddish language and literature in this country, was opened Friday night at the Irving Plaza Hall, Manhattan. The convention continued all day yesterday and closes tonight.
Dr. Chaim Zhitlowsky, intellectual leader of the Yiddishists, and Zalman Raisin, editor of the “Tog” of Vilna, Poland, and author of the “Lexicon of Yiddish Literature,” were the two main speakers at the opening session. Messages were received from Prof. John Dewey of Columbia, eminent American philosopher; Thomas L. Cotton, director of the Foreign Language Information Service; Prof. Simeon Dubnow, famous Jewish historian; Prof. A. A. Roback of Cambridge, Mass.; from Yiddish writers’ organizations in New York, Argentina and Palestine, and from the Federation of Yiddish Schools in Poland.
“No one can deny now that there is such a thing as a culture in Yiddish,” said Dr. Zhitlowsky in his address. “Jewish culture in the Yiddish language is now a fact. It is not only a culture for the great Jewish masses, but it has also drawn to itself a great part of the Jewish intelligentsia.
“Yiddish culture is now world-wide. We in America are only a link in the great chain of Yiddish cultural creativeness. The Yiddish language is the national-psychic connecting force which links us all together. All Jewish movements throughout the world must make use of Yiddish if they wish to appeal to the Jewish masses.
“But it is not only a mass-culture which is being created. We have now higher cultural achievements. The Yiddish Scientific Institute of Vilna, of which Einstein, Freud and even great non-Jewish scientists are honorary members, is one of these achievements.”
In the course of his speech Dr. Zhitlowsky also attacked the American “melting pot” idea, declaring that “we are all good Americans, but we want to be not only good citizens of the United States, but in the United Peoples of the United States. At the same time we want the Anglo-Saxons here to be our ‘big brothers’. We want the English language to be the expression of our material home, and Yiddish that of our spiritual home.”
Zalman Raisin greeted the convention on behalf of the Vilna Scientific Institute. He declared that only in the Yiddish language are Jewish cultural values being created today. Even in America, he said, where Yiddish is in a worse condition than in Eastern Europe, it has managed to create great cultural movements, such as an important daily press, literature, theatres and “What have our opponents accomplished? Where are they?” he asked. In this connection he also stated that in Galicia, as long as the Yiddish language was strong, great Jewish cultural values were being created, but that with the abandonment of Yiddish came spiirtual poverty among Galician Jews.
In Vilna, Raisin said, the Yiddishists have managed to create an entire school system, from kindergarten through gymnasium and technical school. They also have a teachers’ seminary there which provides Yiddish teachers for all of Poland. Both Zhitlowsky and Raisin declared that Yiddishism is a revolutionary movement, since it aims “to emancipate the Jewish masses spiritually from the fetters imposed upon them by religion.”
John Dewey, in his message to the convention, said:
“I have always felt that the metaphor, ‘the melting pot’, is unfortunate in so far as it implies a reduction of all elements of our population to a monotonous uniformity. It might be interpreted to mean that through contact and mutual intercourse, these different elements are to produce something new and distinctive, in which each one of the constituent parts should contribute out of its own traditions and culture something enduring in value. This result cannot be attained, however, unless there is an effort to conserve and nurture the characteristic values which each of the component elements has within. The chief problem, it seems to me, is to accomplish this work by means that do not also produce isolation and exclusiveness. I can only regret the existence of whatever forces tend to keep the varied elements of our population separate from one another.”
The convention was opened by H. Novack, secretary of the Kultur Gesellshaft.
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