THE MACCABAEAN
THE AMERICAN JEWISH STUDENT.
When Theodor Herzl uttered his first message to the Jewish people, he found the community where he lived antagonistic to his endeavor to call a Zionist Congress. The official community was opposed to him. The leaders were distressed by his persistence. But he found a sturdy backing in the Jewish student organization in Vienna, the Kadimah. These young men, conscious of the national struggle they had to wage in university circles, appreciated their kinship with the Zionist ideal. They became militant advocates of the cause.
The same conditions were to be found in the Russian universities. The young men of our people, flung into the vortex of life where Anti-Semitic prejudices struck them with full force, became enthusiastic advocates of the movement that appealed to their manhood.
The Bilu was composed of students. They made a heroic fight against intolerable conditions, and in Palestine struggled like heroes to make life possible under the then unpropitious circumstances. Many of them died in Palestine as a result of exposure. Many of them emigrated determined to return when conditions improved.
In this country, Zionism is a movement as yet directed by professional men supported by the middle-class and the upper proletariat. We look in vain for the influence of the university men in our organisation. In England, a group of young students has come to the front during the past five years, who promise much for the advancement of our ideas. In the United States, the army of university trained men who will devote themselves to Jewish national interests has yet to climb up the hill and to be seen.
But they are coming. We already see the tips of their banners waving.
It may be that they have not come before because in this country, the student has been regarded as a frivolous, athletic, fun-loving individual anxious to avoid the contamination of serious intellectual ideas. The American student has had his standard fixed not by American thinkers, not by strong enthusiasms, but by the ideas of the athletic field. Of course, there have been students who pursued their own intellectual and spiritual ideas, but the tone of the American university did not favor such pursuits; the at-