impaired; the money which might have been collected for Shekolim and the National Fund must perforce nowadays be diverted into other channels. The insistent cry of hunger and distress in Central Europe and in Palestine is rising in volume day by day. And who knows what utter misery and desolation there must be in those Jewish war-areas? Can Zionism for the moment do anything for these poor sufferers? Zionists cannot even send the starving refugees to Palestine, which promises in the near future to flow with blood and tears again. In Russia, and especially Poland, the whole Zionist organization has necessarily collapsed in the general ruin of the Pole. Many Zionists have been cast into prison, the Yiddish and Zionist Press annihilated with one stroke of the pen, and Zionist meetings and collections forbidden under a strict penalty of imprisonment. So how Zionist can glibly talk of Jewish nationality or achieve any Jewish solidarity in the face of the wreck and destruction of Polish and Lithuanian Jewry baffles my understanding. But of course dogmas are independent of reason. :
“The other day I received a ‘Declaration of the Basle Programme’ from the English Zionist Federation, asking me to subscribe my name thereto. They are sending these ‘Declarations’ out broadcast throughout the iand to obtain signatures for a gigantic petition to the Powers on the conclusion of hostilities. Needless to say, I refused to sign my name to the bill, for the Basle Programme asks for a legally-assured home for the Jewish people, which, as I showed you before, does not exist. I wrote back to say that if the Federation were willing to amend the wording of ‘a legally-assured home for the Jewish people’ to ‘a legally-assured home for a Jewish people,’ that I would gladly add my name to the ‘Declaration.” This offer was not accepted.
"Now my point is that there is no such thing as the Jewish nation, nor could any considerable fraction of the so-called Jewish nation go into Palestine. And if only a section of Jewry went to Palestine, it could never legislate for the Jewish nation, but merely for a Jewish nation. This great war, the most terrible in
all history, has irrevocably split up Jews into dismembered units, into scattered Jewish communities, divided and separated from one another by reason of their divergent aims and interests, which must necessarily arise while Jews continue to be subjects of various rival states. And even after the war it will be for years extremely difficult to repair the breaches made in the walls of Jewish unity.
Is there no hope then for Jewish Nationalism after the war.
“Certainly none outside Palestine or a Jewish territory. Our people is not great or heroic enough to stand out against the environment. Is it not more than likely that after an oceanic shedding of Jewish blood, that Jews will feel more attached to their separate Fatherlands than before the war? The battlefield obliterates or weakens old prejudices. And where Jews and Christians have suffered a common suffering, have mingled their blood together in the face of a common enemy, is it likely that all these physicäl sacrifices will be easily forgotten in a day? Jews in England, Jews in France, Jews in Italy, Jews in Russia will unquestionably be strengthened only the more in their patriotism for the countries for which thev have surrendered their all.”
So what have Jews to work for?
"Jews in the various countries have to agitate to secure their full religious, national, civic and political rights, on the same terms as they are, or may be, granted to their fellow-citizens."
On my expressing "a philosophic doubt" of an optimistic interpretation of the Jewish future, he said:
"I have an unshaken belief in the conquest of good over evil; Ahriman will banish Oxmugd. The truly democratic in Europe is bound to prevail in the end. Even in Russia things look more promising than they did before. The Real Russia, I mean the Liberal Russia, the Russia with its great heart and lofty soul, will inevitably soar above the sordid doings of its bureaucracy and unfurl for Europe a new banner of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity."
At this the maid approached with the tea things, and the conversation passed into other channels.
The Program For To-Morrow
HOSE Zionists who were present at the Rochester Convention in June, 1914, and remember the doubt and timidity with which a budget of ten thousand dollars was voted to carry on the whole work of Zionist administration and propaganda in the United States must feel pleasure in the record of the organization for the last two years. The ten thousand dollars have gone up into the hundred thousands, and not only has the work of propaganda and education in this country increased a hundred fold, but the organization has maintained the Zionist institutions in Palestine, subsidized and international administration, and helped individuals to succor their friends abroad and to prevent their being submitted to the so-frequently avoidable humiliations of public relief.
That the European crisis has undoubtedly called forth a high degree of latent energy and has put Zionists on
their mettle, no one will deny. But the crisis alone would have been altogether inadequate to evoke the energies and the devotion with which the new situation has been met. One need only consider the activities of other units like the American Jewish Committee and the relief committees to realize this insufficiencey. The fact is that the other groups are without real leadership, while the Zionists have at last found a leader. Without the abounding patience, the keenness of insight, the capacity to grasp detail in terms of general principles, the power to organize and administer—all animated by a disinterestedness and loyalty without parallel—of Justice Brandeis, none of these achievements could have come about. The leader has given to the Zionists of America and to the Zionists of the world an example and a program. He has taken the implications of the Zionist ideal at their face value, and he has asked from each Zionist only what he has required of himself. Slowly but stead- ilv. an undiscinvlined and unoreanized bodv of talkers