hood of Israel a greater reality, if you have self-respect and are anxious to rise in the esteem of foreign peoples, if you are proud of the Jewish past, of your parents and your heritage and are anxious to establish for Israel an even greater future; if you are anxious to make possible the epoch-making experiment of a Jewish People in Palestine, talking Hebrew and educated along Hebrew lines, endeavoring to unite the sense of righteousness and the Passion for Justice of the Prophets with the Arts and Literature of the Ancients and the Science of the Moderns; in short, if you are a Jew with a faith, then you must join our society.
If like every young Jew with any spark of conscience or comprehension, you are keenly uneasy or deeply concerned or openly rebellious about the Jewish Problem, that is, about the pitfalls of assimilation or the horrors of hydra-headed Antisemitism about the Massen Taufe, (Baptisms en masse) Dreyfus scandals, Beiliss tortures, Kishineff massacres, social ostracism, Ghetto confinement, Educational starvation about the cringing of our poor and their physical degeneration, and the Chameleon garb of our wealthy and their spiritual quiescence, there is a place for you in our society.
There you will find a concentration of
that passion for Jewish service for Jewish betterment, for a Jewish reconstruction that you share; you will be among kindred spirits eager with you to get on with the tidying up of the present mess of things. You will hear lectures not only from leading Zionists, but in addition, from sociologists, economists, social thinkers, men of experience and eminence in this or that aspect of the Jewish Problem. You will meet with all the latest and best and most advanced ideas bearing on Jewish History and Scholarship on our Political and Economic problems, which you will combat and criticise to your heart's content; you will find an atmosphere of democracy in which a professor might hobnob with his own student and even an undergraduate with his own professor.
By joining our society you make common cause with your fellow students in Paris and Cambridge, Berlin and Geneva, Jaffa and Harvard.
The Chibas Zion Movement was composed largely of students. Herzl's call was first answered by students and much of the energy and inspiration of the Movement has since come from them. But we ask University students to join the Organization not as intellectual prigs or snobs, but as Jews faithful to their past, anxious to serve their people.
"WE" AND THE WAR
To THE EDITOR :
The latest great international tragedy, the present war, brings home to us Jews more convincingly than most of the arguments in favor of Zionism the necessity of a country of our own, where we shall enjoy protection and shelter and where we shall enjiov “our own”.
A letter which I received from a dear friend who is serving as a private in the ranks of the German army causes me to write these lines. Describing some of the scenes of the gruesome battling and fighting through which he went, he writes.
*...Yes my friend, it is a great tragedy to have to kill, but this tragedy which made me shudder at first, but to which I have since grown accustomed, made me cry yesterday. I killed a Jew! He was a French soldier. He aimed at me, in the fight at L..., which I have described to you, and
where all our officers were killed. I sprang forward to take command of the remaining seventy of our company, shouting back to the boys to follow me, when suddenly a French soldier leaped forward who shouted "Voila un officer!" (There goes an officer! at the same instant pointing his gun at me. But before he could shoot, a shot from my revolver had struck him in the head, and he died instantly. Later in the evening after we had driven back the French, we gathered together the dead and wounded, and I took personal command of the search of the battlegrounds. There I recognized the French soldier I had killed. You know we gather the identification marks of both friend and foe, for future reference before we bury them. I looked for the label of this soldier; it read: "Jacques Levine", Reg. d' Inf. XV., 5me Comp." The name sounded suspiciously Jewish; I compared