The persistence of the Jews as a nation throughout centuries of persecution and in countries remote one from the other is a riddle baffling to the ethnologist. To him it holds something of the miraculous and the incomprehensible; he declares it an important exception to an important rule. Edom and Ishmael, Ammon and Moab, the Canaanite and his six neighbours, all of these, contemporaries of the early Israelites as they were, have now passed into mythology, have vanished from off the face of the earth, have become bywords of ephemerality. We alone have preserved a distinct and continuous national character....

It is a belief cherished by those who know these things that what is more important to a University than even the novelty of its discoveries is the antiquity of its traditions; and by traditions they mean not only the set of principles and the series of precedents governing and inspiring its generations of students, but also those familiar little details of that Universityʹs architecture and environment which endear it to the subsequent students. Thus the turrets and the cloisters of Oxford or of Cambridge, of Heidelberg or of the Sorbonne, made venerable by age and lovely by association, create...

One of the three things which according to Haggadic tradition achieved for our people the release from Egyptian bondage, was the fact that they did not change their language. Even in the fleshpots of Mizraim they spoke in a sanctified tongue; the syllables of the Hebrew language were ever on their lips, a continual reminder that they were strangers in a foreign land. Their vocabulary pointed to a future of freedom; their diction in itself was prediction …

Even after the Destruction of the Temple, the Hebrew language continued to be spoken and taught. Though our country was taken from...

We are a people of peace. From our earliest youth, the ideal of friendship and of brotherhood has been implanted in us. Our laws enjoin it; our prophets urge it; our poets proclaim it. Those of our enemies who have titled us aggressive have never even in their moments of deepest hatred, termed us bellicose. Trite would it be indeed here to repeat the threadbare dictum that the power of Esau is manual, and the power of Jacob vocal; so common is this knowledge that it is lisped even by the sucklings of the kindergarten. We rattle no sabres; we...

The charlatans and fakirs who for centuries imposed themselves on a nation of such despairing pessimists that at any moment, so extreme was their feeling, they could be driven to an exalted but ephemeral optimism, form an essential part in the evolution of the national Idea. It is upon the phoenix-ashes of the Messiah-belief that Zionism is born; and it is thus that our national endeavours have in them, without any of its sensationalism and dupery, all the sublimeness of a messianic enterprise. Herzl is merely a saner and a sincerer Shabbathai-Zebi.

Yet it is not for us to scoff...

There are a number of Jewish writers for whom it is a continual source of pride and gratification to point out that such and such a great one was of their own race. They delve deeply into genealogies to seek some root in the family tree of the renowned which sprung from Palestine; they analyze the blood of the great, and gloat when they discover that a drop of it is Jewish; they take the most heathenish of names and juggle and twist it until they are ready to proclaim a scion of David discovered. Nothing pleases them more than...

On July fifth the whole Jewish world will commemorate the anniversary of Herzlʹs death. In no more than three decades, within the period of a single generation, Theodor Herzl has already become a legend and a symbol. He has won for himself so exalted a place in the Jewish heart that if canonization were a Hebrew practice the Jewish calendar would have already been graced with a Saint Theodor. Yet though Herzl is universally admired and his memory everywhere respected, few if any have been able to fathom his enigmatic personality, and he has remained a 19th century sphinx.

In...

When words have too many meanings, they have none. They then become ambiguous, equivocating, dangerous. They beget misunderstandings which beget conflicts. They mean one thing to Berach, another to Zerach, and still another to Terach. A babel ensues. Men find themselves in the position of the two knights, who meeting on the highway beneath an ensign, engaged in an argument as to whether the shield was red or blue, an argument which was settled only in trial by combat. As a matter of fact, the sign-post was red on one side and blue on the other. The quarrel, therefore, arose...

Several years ago, out of a clear blue sky, there fell upon the Jewish community of this province, a series of evil-smelling and malevolent thunderbolts. With that sufferance which is the badge of all our tribe, we at first dismissed these puerile explosions as one dismisses the firecrackers of irresponsible streetgamins. For we knew their origin. We knew that two professional mudslingers, two double-jointed acrobats leaping from one political party into the other, had appeared upon the journalistic scene and were auctioning off their bankrupt souls to the highest bidder. The sulphurous fumes of slander which filled the atmosphere and...

Despite the depreciating references with which the Left press has greeted the Nazi victory on July 31st, the fact remains that the Hitlerites have appreciably increased their strength in the German Reichstag. Previously represented with only 143 seats, they now have won for themselves 230; and the franchises which they received from a nation victimized by the Versailles treaty and burdened with debts which visit the sins of the fathers upon the third and fourth generations, have been quadrupled since 1928. If Hitler is not yet comfortably seated in the saddle, he has begun at least to mount the governmental...

It has happened! The blow which hovered over the head of Jewry, has at long last fallen. Seven months of adjournments, postponements, and procrastinations, have finally ceased. The judgment of the Royal Commission, although at time of writing, not yet officially issued, has been widely publicized. This procedure is not surprising; it is an old diplomatic custom whereby thesotto vocesecrets of the embassies are the black-type headlines of the international press. The summary of the wisdom of the Royal Commissioners – if such wisdom can indeed be summarized without loss of some invaluable pearls of sapience – indicates...

The entire world still stands aghast at the monstrous happenings in Germany which have in the past week disgraced the name of civilization. Because an irresponsible Jewish youth, aged seventeen, maddened by the reports of what was happening to his near kin in Germany, went forth and assassinated the secretary of the German Embassy in France, such vengeance was wreaked upon the entire Jewish population in Germany as has no parallel, either in the annals of barbarism or in the dossiers of gangsters. Spontaneously – the word is Goeringʹs – assault upon Jews and arson on synagogues were perpetrated throughout...

On Friday, November 24, theLe Devoirannounced to its breathless readers, that on the next day would appear a magnum opus on the Jews in Germany. The readers were insomniac with impatience. Then the next day came;Le Devoirdutifully arrived. And Pelletier oped his lips to speak.

He began by shedding a couple of paragraphs of crocodile tears on behalf of the German Jews, and by damning the Nazis as naughty, naughty. They really shouldnʹt have done such things. It simply wasnʹt nice. He then enumerated – just to show that he knew what was happening – the...

Mahatma Gandhi, hearing that by dictatorial ukase, the Jews of Germany have been added to that caste, has just realized that there are untouchables elsewhere than in India. An authority on that subject, he proceeds to give advice to the parties concerned. But his advice, we regret to say, is a peculiar admixture of Hindoo mysticism and Anglophobe realpolitik.

In the first place, he produces from the capacious folds of his loin-cloth, that great weapon of his invention – passive resistance; and he counsels German Jewry to swing this instrument against the Nazis, and not to leave the frontiers of...

The celebration of the feast of Chanukah this year is not that occasion for festivity which it might be. For we have ourselves become a sort of Chanukah symbol, – a nation of pancakes scraped on the grate of antisemitism, and fried upper and nether, a people ofdreidlach, spinned this way and that, and falling towards the four sides of the wind.

Nonetheless, in the very midst of our trial and tribulation – while our brethren in Germany see themselves compelled to give to the tyrant an enforced Chanukahgelt, and while the swine enters onto the altar of...

Mr. H.G. Wells has again sallied forth into the realm of imaginative literature. Having with the precision of an eye-witness described in his previous masterpieces the mores of Mars and the men in the moon, the Admirable Crichton of the twentieth century undertakes to tell what is wrong with the Jew, and the Jew that he describes is as mythical a character as the milkman of the Milky Way.

In the current issue ofLiberty– a magazine which is a sort of literary Grand Hotel in whose printed lobby one encounters Leon Trotsky rubbing shoulders with Vicki Baum, and...

The latest incidents in German realpolitik manifest very clearly that the sense of aesthetic refinement which the Bavarians lack in their culinary sauerkraut-and-frankfurter art, they do possess in their diplomatic pot-pourri. For the history of the past five years has shown that the German Reich has proceeded towards the gobbling up of Europe with the deliberate savoir-faire of a political gourmet. The repast of Hitler began naturally enough, with some juicy hors-dʹoeuvres snatched from off the plate of Versailles, the whole preceded by an introductory cocktail sipped in the re-occupied Rhine. This was later followed by the agglutination of a...

Mad warriors have frequently maintained with that perverseness which is the characteristic of the intelligence called military that methods of warfare have been the most important factors in the development of civilization. One has but to read the classic Omanʹs History of organized killing to come to the conclusion that the instruments of battle, and their application, have considerably altered – not civilization, forsooth, – but the chronicles of man.

The great terror which now agitates the human mind is not so much the terror of war, as of that terribly horrific, new instrument of destruction – the bombing plane....

Although we are not of the faith, our sorrow at the passing of His Holiness, after a valiant battle with the Angel of Death, is no less than that of our good Catholic friends. For Pope Pius xi was one of the finest spirits that ever reigned over the Holy See, a reign which coincided with a most difficult period for the world in general, and religion in particular. Scholar, statesman, scientist, His Holiness while adhering meticulously to the traditions of the Fathers of the Church, nonetheless kept intimately in touch with the many inventions of its sons. By speech,...

Camillien Houde rides again. He rides from meeting to meeting, and stops at each long enough to reveal to all who will listen, his new discovery of an ethnological America, – the true form and content of the French-Canadian soul. Wearied with the heavy realities of municipal finance, Camillien has decided to take a fling at folklore; his plump diminutive form stanced upon a y.m.c.a. platform, the mayor, a born raconteur, recently delivered himself of his latest masterpiece in nursery fiction; he spoke of the nature and essence of French-Canadian blood. And his fairy tale was Grimm.

For like the...

We doubt whether there will be any who will find it in their hearts, after a reading of the following lines, to either compliment or condemn us – depending upon the point of view – as being too religiously fanatic. We know at least that our Rabbi would not hold us up as an example of purity, and a paragon of fervour. We doubt whether we are fitted to enter into the company of the saintly. For us our religion has been a purely personal affair, modelled upon the dictum of Heine:Dieu me pardonnera, cʹest son métier– The...

For weeks prior to the Soviet Congress which is presently taking place in Moscow, the Communist press heralded and prognosticated messages that would prove of great interest and importance to the proletariat of the world. No doubt democrats in all the free countries of the globe waited in anticipation for the gospel about to be uttered from the Kremlin. Now, they must have said, we will hear, not the shilly-shallying temporizing of realpolitik, the smug clichés of diplomacy, but the true word and accent of democracy. The fearless Russians are about to speak; surely they will tell the totalitarian states...

The British House of Commons has, at this writing, reluctantly and halfheartedly approved the notorious White Paper as an expression of future policy in Palestine. The injustices expressly detailed and indirectly implied in that cynical document shall henceforward be the law of Government in the Holy Land; Mr. Chamberlain, without expense of plane-fare, has achieved another Munich. The shadow of the umbrella falls across Erez Israel.

That this new declaration has brought bitterness and disappointment in its wake is easily understandable. Jews have been shocked by this volte-face of a many-faced policy, emanating from that quarter in Downing Street which...

Let no one despair of the race of man. It is most surprising in what quarters one is liable to discover virtue, and in what breasts humanity throbs. Hearken to this tale. An offer by bull fight promoters to give a benefit performance in the Madrid Arena with the best bulls and fighters in the country has been rejected by Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Why? You would never guess, dear readers. Why? Because in the new Spain – actually more second-hand than new – in the new Spain, blood sacrifices even in the form of horses and bulls must not be...

That anti-Semitism which for centuries relegated Jews, by dint of economic laws, to the position of aʹLuftmensch,ʹa being neither rooted in the soil where he dwelt nor consigned to the heavens which he desired to enter, has now come upon a new development. The economic race-juggling is complete; the political one is well on the way. Refugee Jewry, battered from pillar to post, can find no place of sanctuary. Booted out of one country, it cannot find refuge in another; doomed it is to linger, like a personification of the evil conscience of the world, outside the pale....

Many readers no doubt will recall that the great satirist Dean Swift, in seeking to heap ridicule upon his contemporaries, suggested by way of ʹmodest proposalʹ areductio ad absurdumof the customs of his fellow-men then current. Having neither the wit nor the Irish of the Dean, it does seem to us, nonetheless, that there is a crying need for such a ʹmodest proposalʹ anent the destiny of the Jewish homeland and the fate of Jewish refugees.

It appears that great numbers of the wanderers have willy-nilly taken to the high seas. TheSt. Louisfloats upon the Atlantic...

We are fully aware of the possibility that as we pen these lines, European developments, which move at such an infernal pace, may completely contradict every single line, jot and tittle. In the light of what is transpiring, the safest formula for wisdom is silence; for those who once believed that two parallel lines would never meet except in infinity, must now either recognize the arrival of that infinity, or revise their Euclidean geometry.

For the two lines have met. Nazi Germany, whose favourite sport since 1933 has been the baiting of Russian Communists and the incarceration of native ones,...

The issue is clear! The war which the madman of Europe has forced upon the world permits of no misinterpretation. It is befogged by no imperialist analysis; it is beclouded by no complicatedrealpolitik. It is purely and simply the conflict between Mazda and Ahriman, between day and night, between light and darkness! Futile will be the attempt to analyze the pros and cons; and empty the desire to weigh and measure arguments and counter-arguments. No slogans can help us, no shibboleth of propaganda can aid us. A child can understand the cause of this, the second, and we hope...

The oration which Adolf Hitler delivered from Danzig, and which was permitted to be heard in all the democratic countries, – there is not here, like in Germany, a death penalty for listening to foreign propaganda – throws considerable light upon the mentality of the Fuehrer. In the first case, the manner of its delivery indicates that honours and power have brought no sanity to the madman who rules the Reich; beginning, with a prima donnaʹs histrionics, in a low voice, the Fuehrer in his peroration rose to such a crescendo of dementia that one could almost see the froth...

Readers, no doubt, will recall this pleasant line from a pleasant little nursery rhyme. This stanzaic doggerel is being to-day repeated in international relations. The latest report has it that A. Hitler has recently sent, by special courier, a love-letter to one J. Stalin. What the contents of it are, we do not know; but we can well imagine. We present herewith a draft thereof:

My dear Joie,

Since our last communication to you, time has dragged heavily in my hands. I have tried, with the technique which both of us discussed last time, to get the democracies to fall...

It is gratifying in newspapers lugubrious with war news and melancholy with peace offensives to read an item which at least serves to increase the gayety of nations. Of course in these times it could hardly be a completely light-hearted piece but it is the next thing to it – sorrow with undertones of laughter. We refer, ladies and gentlemen, to the report announcing that Miss Sally Rand, the famous bubble dancer, has gone bankrupt.

The record of her case, we feel, should create jurisprudence. Held, that a person who began her business with assets consisting only of the fact...

The imagination of the most macabre author could hardly conceive fictions more horrible than the facts which are daily issuing out of Poland, describing the fate of its unfortunate Jewry. For a while, during the progress of the war, many naive souls consoled themselves with the fond hope that perhaps the German army was made of finer stuff than the storm-troop rabble which perpetrated the notorious November tenth of 1938. It was hoped that the great military traditions of Germany would prevail over the contemporary bestiality introduced into German life; facts reveal that that hope was doomed to disappointment. Indeed,...

M. Jean-Charles Harvey, editor ofLe Jour, which by its weekly appearances proves that its name means, not The Day, but The Light, has delivered himself of a speech before the Toronto Empire Club which constitutes perhaps one of the sagest comments upon the essence of true Canadianism that has been heard for many a day. Repudiating all those slick formulas, those provincial clichés, the hackneyed parochialisms which are the usual stock-in-trade of dispensers of nationalism, M. Harvey not only defined the true nature of this phenomenon, but recommended a number of points which would serve to weld together a...

The facile phrasemakers are wont to speak of that hackneyed contrast – literature and life, as if the two concepts, instead of being complementary, were mutually exclusive. To-day, with reference to the sorry lot of all those who in Poland earned their meagre livelihood by the pen, they are amply justified. Literature and life are mutually exclusive.

The fate of Polish Jewry in general is a bitter and a tragic one; but the fate of those who built up Jewish culture in Poland until it fed the world, and all for a paltry pittance, is even bitterer and more tragic....

The jackals have started their chorus again. Since August of last year when Tsar Joseph the First allied himself with Adolf, the Soviet press, when it has not been silent on the Jewish question, has been enigmatically ambiguous. Indeed, upon frequent occasions before that ominous date, the henchmen of Stalin have maintained a guilty taciturnity about this problem. When refugees were scattering all over the face of Europe, seeking a place of refuge from the wrath of the madman, the so-called bourgeois states gave them whatever asylum they could: it is true that they were not absolutely saint-like in their...

Speculation is rife as to what actually transpired on Monday upon the high Brenner Pass when the two worthies of European politics, the pseudo-Demon and the quasi-Pythias of Fascism, had their rendez-vous of love. They had not seen each other since 1938, alas; but since that time much water has flowed under many bridges. That great friendship about which both of them prated at every opportunity, had somewhat cooled; the wintry blasts about the Brenner altitudes constituted a fit atmosphere for the reunion.

What did they speak about in that two-hour interview? Nobody knows, except the two conversationalists and their...

It would be laughable, were it not so tragic, this latest pre-occupation of the Polish Government in Exile. Faced with great national issues, a country under the heel of a foreign dictator, and their countrymen conquered and oppressed, the geniuses of Polonia seem to have no other fit subject for the exercise of their gigantic intelligences, than the paramount question: ʹWhat will they do with the ʺsurplus Jewsʺ in Poland after the war? How will they be evacuated?ʹ

We can think of no parallel to this example of combined gall and stupidity. At a time when the Nazi legions are...

The bombings which recently took place in southern France, particularly in Marseilles, are being interpreted, not as a military but as a diplomatic move. It is, of course, difficult to understand what there is of the diplomatic in the tone of an exploding bomb; but this, it appears, is a special occasion. As Mussolini sits upon his fence, plucking a daisy – he loves me, he loves me not – the Fuehrer wishes to hasten his decision. Accordingly, he sends his bombers to the Mediterranean with ʹa message for my loveʹ – ʹSee,ʹ he seems to say, ʹjump in, the...

There was something greatly pathetic and symbolic in the arrival in America of the latest refugee from Europe, Mr. Maurice Maeterlinck. The famous dramatist was accompanied by his wife and two bluebirds. The bluebirds, suspect of carrying infectious diseases, were not admitted, they were released from their cage to continue, like birds during an earlier deluge, their wanderings over the face of the waters.

The old dramatist, age 77, was himself a pitiable figure. The man who had so great a joie de vivre, the man of imagination and poetry, could not understand what had happened. For a person accustomed...

Dr. Chaim Zhitlovsky enjoys an extraordinary reputation in Jewish letters. At the risk of being dubbed a Philistine, and in spite of Zhitlovskyʹs ponderous volumes, we venture to say that that reputation is grossly overestimated. For the learned doctor, despite his sesquipedalian vocabulary, has ever dealt only in platitudes and half-truth. His erudition has been but of the shallowest kind, its shallowness disguised in a mongrel Yiddish which is a composite of German and Latin, designed to impress only those who have not had the benefit of that European culture which Zhitlovsky presumably conveys to the Hebrews.

Indeed, there is...

Haboker, in commenting upon the great loss which Jewry has just suffered in the passing of Vladimir Jabotinsky, says: ʹAn eagle has fallen from the skies.ʹ This is no mere oriental hyperbole, motivated by the injunction to speak only good of the dead. Keen-eyed, upward-soaring, the late Jabotinsky was a veritable eagle in Israel. It is true that he frequently swooped down upon those whom he considered of the lesser breed; it is true that frequently he kept himself aloof in the great eyrie of his idealism; but certainly he always flew high, certainly he ever saw far.

He was...

The latest decree emanating from the lawmakers of Vichy concerns prohibition. Still bewildered at the cause of French defeat – look in thy heart, and write? – the junta of Vichy now announces that the French republic collapsed because the republicans drank too much wine. Alcohol, therefore, has been the doom of ʹla belle France.ʹ Not Pétain undermined the state, but Pernod, the manufacturer, of absinthe. If only the French people had not drunk wine, their resistance might have been greater. Such at least, is the thesis which the solons of unoccupied France wish to advance, as they prohibit the...

The distinguished Dr. Einstein, it appears, has graduated himself from relativity to theory. Deprived of his laboratory by the Nazi regime, the minute scientist is attempting to smuggle himself into the Lordʹs test-tube and retort presence. Such, at least, is the impression which is gained by the learned doctorʹs most recent address delivered in a paper presented at the Conference of Science, Philosophy and Religion at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Here it was that, like a new Moses on an American Sinai, he urged the ministers of the Lord ʹto give up the doctrine of a personal God.ʹ...

We had occasion some time ago to comment upon an editorial which appeared in the TorontoGlobe and Mailin which its author, using the smooth style in which blessing reads like malediction, set himself up as a mentor to Jewry, and lectured Israel – of course, in the most refined language – upon its duty in time of war. The gratuitous sermon of the Toronto journal was evoked by an announcement from ʹThe New Zionist Organizationʹ that a plan was afoot to organize a Jewish army. While the MontrealDaily Starused this announcement as an occasion to pay...

From the shores of the Mediterranean there sprang the two great sources of our culture and civilization, the Hebraic and the Hellenic strains. While the one contributed our concepts of morality, ethics, right being, the other brought to light the concepts of art and beauty. Together, in an almost impeccable amalgam, they gave western civilization both its form and its substance.

Against this culture, the axe-bearers of the Axis are implacably set. They began their onslaught, naturally enough, against what they termed the Semitic in European life, i.e., against the Ten Commandments, against the teachings of the prophets, major and...

The Bible, written in anthropomorphic terminology –lʹshabair eth ha-ozen, as Maimonides explains it – has a remarkable expression for events of an inner symbolism. They are called ʹfingers of God.ʹ Such a one was lifted last week for all to see. And timely it was, indeed. Whether it will serve to point the lesson intended, or not, is quite another question; but as the novelists say, you have been warned.

For the earthquakes in Rumania, extending as they did not only throughout that country but far beyond its borders, should have written a message not only upon Europeʹs seismograph,...

There was a time when the gullible were easily impressed by one Benito Mussolini. All the Duce had to do was jut out his jaw, and the discontented and he undiscriminating immediately began to rave about ʹthe strong man.ʹ Indeed, it was a popular sport within the democracies themselves to hold up the picture of Benito as an example of the man ʹwho gets things done.ʹ All those who at one time or other flirted with Fascism, dressed in the seven veils of business efficiency, idealized the Duce, and spoke wistfully about the appearance of that prototype in their own...

We have no quarrel with those who insist that the eclipse of France is merely temporary. Indeed, no one who has the slightest vestige of faith in the vigor of militant democracy, can believe otherwise. This great people, which first gave to the world the example of democracy, which enriched civilization with the priceless gift of its culture, and which even in military matters ceded to no one – until it was taken by surprise – has merely had its history interrupted, certainly not ended. The reports which issue from unoccupied France, moreover, tend to further confirm this estimate of...

The last week-end beheld in Toronto an event unprecedented in the history of Canadian Jewry. It is difficult for us, being part of the said event, freely to comment thereon; the natural modesty of the undersigned handicaps accurate description. The precedent, however, is of such a nature, that it behooves us, in the larger communal interest, to fling humility to the winds, and to sing, in unembarrassed numbers, the eisteddfod of the Central Division of the Canadian Jewish Congress.

This, then, is what occurred. Let it be writ in large letters that all who run may read, and all who...

At last the Nazi press has pleaded guilty – not without arrogance – to the accusation par excellence which the democracies level against it. Many years ago, when Edgar Ansel Mowrer first analyzed the nature of the Nazi regime, he published a book calledGermany Puts Back the Clock. That was sometime in 1933. Since then it has been clearly demonstrated that it is not merely a clock which the Fascists have put back; they have torn up the whole calendar of contemporary progress.

Accordingly, it is no mere propaganda to say that the ambition of contemporary Germany is to...

Of the spirit which activates the Prime Minister of Britain, all know from the example of his sturdy leadership in the most troubled time of Englandʹs island story. Of his plans, his policies, his programs, are they not written in Hansard, reported in the press, and told in all places where speech is not stifled nor fettered the human mind? Like the true pedant which we are, we propose to write of the speech, the language, which gives form to his imperishable thought.

No leader of Britain, within the memory of living man, has been such a master of the...

Somewhere in his ʹDon Juan,ʹ Byron has occasion to describe a character as ʹthe mildest-mannered man that ever slit a throat.ʹ We recalled this masterly description as we read of the latest cooings of Japanese diplomacy. Major Kumo Akiyama, it appears, has decided ornithological opinions about contemporary politics in the Pacific. Addressing a press conference recently, he declared that the British and Americans ʹwere snakes placing snakesʹ eggs in a doveʹs nest.ʹ

For those who may be obtuse in catching the implications of this oriental imagery, it may be explained that the doveʹs nest is the Pacific – which the...

It is in the words of the above sonnet, forming part of the illuminated address presented to Samuel Bronfman on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, that a poet – a dear friend of ours – reviving the acrostic form which so flourished in the Golden Age of Spain, paid tribute on his own behalf and on behalf of his contemporaries – to the official spokesman of Canadian Jewry. It was not a mere poetizing sonnet, performing the routine courtesies of a festive occasion; it, indeed, reveals, in its cryptic phraseology, packed into the fourteen links in which this literary...

As we write these lines, our city is tied with ropes of wind and knotted with gordians of snow. Nonetheless, the calendar informs us that since the ides of March has passed in routine fashion, unlucky only for the latter-day pseudo-Caesar who watches Africa fade into darkness before him, the twenty-first day of the month will arrive, and astronomers will squeak: Spring.

It used to be a word to conjure with. Poets used to wait for that day, much in the same fashion as cloak-makers wait for the early fall; it is their ʹseason.ʹ Young men impatiently attended its arrival...

In another of a series of articles by Mr. Demaree Bess, appearing in theSaturday Evening Post, that author, having despatched Norway, writes about ʹPoland in Chains.ʹ We had occasion to remark concerning his last lucubration that it was a perfect example of how words can be used to conceal and not to reveal thought. It is, of course, always understood that writing from Germany, every comma of the peripatetic journalist is being censored; it was, indeed, precisely because Mr. Bess sought to give the impression in his last article that he was free to go where he pleased and...

One of the most ingenious and loveliest of the poems included in the Passover service is that which has as its continual refrain:And it was at midnight. Its author, with a versatility reminiscent of the Alexandrian school, and a faith typical of the mediaeval one, enumerates in verse culled from Holy Writ the various occasions when a divine Providence wrought at mid of night on behalf of an oppressed Israel. This flower of poetry which finds its proper place in literatureʹs greatest anthology of liberty – the Haggadah – still serves to-day to cast its fragrance upon a most...

Milton somewhere has a phrase descriptive of the arrogantly wicked – he calls them ʹthe sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.ʹ Certainly the ranting rhetoric of the Fuehrer, delivered at the Kroll Opera House on Sunday, qualified him for that description. It may perhaps be a source of comfort to the illegitimate Schicklgruber to learn that he is somebodyʹs son, even if only Belialʹs. Be that as it may; every word of the dictator was full of the triumphant arrogance, the orgulous gloating of the typical wicked who prosper.

And yet, despite the obvious rubbing-of-palms which characterized Adolfʹs...

We do not know whether it is as a result of the Russian-Japanese pact or from some other inscrutable cause, but the customs of the land of the chrysanthemum, as described by Gilbert and Sullivan, are already being manifested in the domain of the bear. Of particular interest is the latest imitation of Japanese mores – the institution of the Pooh-Bah.

It will be recalled by those familiar withThe Mikadothat one of its most fascinating roles is that of the Pooh-Bah, the high executioner, advocate, judge, and general factotum. His vocation is changed according to the exigency of...

There is nothing more pitiable than the spectacle of a man, once famous, long outliving the years of his glory. The full vigor of his youth is gone, the fire of his genius is burned out, and all that remains is a memory and a faded laurel wreath. Indeed, the longevity, which otherwise might be considered a blessing, turns into a curse, and the last years of life into a slander upon that life itself.

These sombre reflections occur to us when we contemplate the life and work of George Bernard Shaw. Once ʹtwas a name to conjure with; all...

The Fuehrer of the Nazi Reich, his patience with Soviet Russia now at an end, has declared war upon that country, and as these lines are being written, bombs are dropping on both sides of their common frontier. To many, this new turn in the tide of events has something macabre and strange about it; to us, reluctant as we are to ejaculate: ʹI told you so,ʹ the entire event has been postulated by previous circumstances. The break between the two cronies had to come; it was merely a question of time. It was also a question as to who...

There is one group of political thinkers (?) whom we do not envy at all these days. We refer to the cis-Atlantic Communists. Consider the agonizing acrobatics to which they have been subjected during the last six years: first, the period when all who differed with them, even Socialists, were dubbed Social-Fascists; then, that blithe interregnum of the Popular Front, when the Communist party all but embraced religious orthodoxy; later, the flirtation with Hitler, and finally the consummation of the Berlin-Moscow pact. Certainly these periodic volte-faces evoked a great deal of mental agility on the part of the perennially faithful....

We do not know whether the Duce has appointed any one to act as the official chronicler of Italian war effort. It is a job we would not wish our worst enemy. For the military historian, it must be noted, can exercise his talents only in the narration of victories, or even of defeats, if they be glorious. Alas, that the annals of Italian military history are singularly deficient in such exploits.

How, indeed, is one to sing in inspired numbers, the ignominious defeat of Caporetto, the classic example of the last war which has so frequently repeated itself in...

Duce:

I address you by your self-imposed magniloquent title and by no other, not forsooth, because I wish to hail you as leader, but because by your actions, by your attitude, by your entire outlook on life, you have reduced yourself from being a man to being merely an occupation. And to-day I particularly wanted to address the father in you, hoping that something paternal might still be lingering in that ambition-distorted heart and power-corrupted brain of yours.

For certainly you have long since ceased to be a father. I do not refer to your fifty-eight heavy years which you...

There is no doubt but that in the concepts of western civilization as we know it there is no room for the principle of ʹtempering government by assassination.ʹ In the first place, it is a practice which is repugnant to the high ethical instincts of civilized men; in the second place, it seldom achieves that for which it is perpetrated. Moreover, it sets up against one form of arbitrary tyranny – that of the despot – another form, that of the assassin. Certainly it runs counter to the general principle enunciated by the Talmudists –dina dʹmalcutha dina– the...

New Year editorials run to a monotonous standard. Invariably one recognizes the formula which created them – a swift fleeting glance upon the past, an olympian survey of the present, and a jubilant greeting of the future – and the literary ceremonial is fulfilled.

But while this is true – platitudinously true of the level and extended days of peace and ennui, it is only superficially true of the days through which we are presently passing. There is no hour which sounds upon the clock which is not full of forebodings and omens. There is no incident which is not...

The ʹLone Eagleʹ is far from being the solitary creature the newspapers and hero-worshippers have made him out to be. The fact is that he flies with the rest of the vultures. His recent speech, in which for the first time, the idol of yesteryear shamelessly raised the race-cry to advance his isolationist propaganda, now demonstrates that he is of the same feather as those birds in Berlin. Comparatively lonely he is only in America where his denunciation of the Roosevelt regime and the Jews has aroused condemnation from all truly American citizens.

Indeed, the worthy flier is not even...

Latest reports from the place of incarceration of Rudolf Hess indicate that that worthy is presently on a hunger strike. It was the last method to which, we imagined, he would resort, inasmuch as hunger strikes are peculiarly proletarian weapons, and certainly to be scorned by the aristocratic supermen of the Reich. Besides, it is unlikely that Hessʹs gaolers will be much concerned about his voluntary limitation of diet, inasmuch as supermen, by definition, can get along without food.

Nonetheless Hess – during the ten days of penitence, and no doubt also on Yom Kippur, is fasting. His grievance is...

The isolationists and the fifth columnists still persist in their malevolent characterization of the great conflict upon which the outcome of civilization depends. Once upon a time, it was the delight of the great strategists to term the battle a ʹphoney warʹ; all for the purpose of undermining the morale of the belligerent countries. Time, of course, has shown that there is nothing phoney about it. The refugees of Europe, the widows and the orphans, the concentration-camp residents, the crippled and the maimed, all of these by way of example, fail to appreciate the adjective ʹphoney.ʹ There is nothing phoney...

The present world situation, it will be readily agreed, is full of riddles; but of all the enigmas which defy logical analysis, none is more tantalizingly sphinx-like than the attitude of the British Government in refusing to permit the organization of a Jewish army to fight the common foe of mankind. One would have imagined that such an offer would have been gladly accepted, accepted both because it would mean an increase in military strength and also because it would add another banner – and an ancient and honorable one – to those already raised in defiance against the modern...

No one who studies national traits and character can overlook the fact that the majority of the early protagonists of political Zionism were what may be called for want of a better term, literary men. Diplomats without a state, they manifested their statemanship mainly in the republic of letters. Herzl, the greatest of them all, the supreme leader, began his career remote from the Jewish tragedy – in the feuilleton columns of theNeue Freie Presse. His first impulse towards Jewish nationalism, indeed, was a purely inspirational one; it was only after being confronted by the brutal reality of the...

Those who are familiar with Jewish history will no doubt recall that upon an unhappy time there appeared in its Polish annals a certain Jacob Frank, a pseudo-messiah, who in dark and dismal days held out to his contemporaries the light of hope – the deceptive firefly of his personality. Like the careers of all such panacea-bringers, his, too, ended at the baptismal font.

ʹAye, but that happened,ʹ as Marlowe would have said, ʹin a different age, and in another land.ʹ True, but if Jewry for a moment thought that it was forever rid of the Frankist psychology, and all...

The dastardly attack launched by the Empire of the Rising Sun against a country with which it was at peace – with which, in fact, it was at the very moment of the hostile preparations and onslaught, negotiating for a pacific settlement – will go down in history as the classic example of perfidious double-dealing. The records of civilized mankind, even its records of conflict and bitterness, contain no incident comparable in treachery to the cunning Japanese scheme which preceded their brutal attack. The negotiations for peace, the bland smile, the sending of the two special envoys, the flowers from...

TheContemporary Jewish Recordis an excellent periodical, published under the auspices of the American Jewish Committee. Since its inception several years ago, its writers have contributed to American Jewish thought a series of treatises upon a number of subjects which have almost invariably been thorough, studied, and profound. The only faults which we have found with theRecordis that some of its authors have apparently written under the assumption that to be serious is to be dull, and to be factual is to be pedantic. To the reading of theRecordone must bring not only a broad...

The news which has issued out of the former Polish capital has for many days been of a most tragic nature. The number of deaths taking place in the Warsaw ghetto daily, the unsanitary conditions imposed by the German overlords, and the general sadism which has characterized the Nazi administration, have been matters which have justly caused grave concern for the future of Polish Jewry.

It is heartening therefore to obtain from that dark quarter whatever ray of light may emerge. One such ray is the fact that though all the Jews of Warsaw may be under the heel of...

If any single incident were required symbolically to illustrate the dire plight, the utter hopelessness of European Jewry to-day, that which occurred five miles out of the Bosphorus in the Black Sea has amply supplied it. For while it is true that in time of war, and particularly during a war of the present dimensions, there is a danger that one may become callous to tragedy, and unmoved by loss of life, the fate of the seven hundred who perished with theStrumahas not failed to stir to their inmost being all those to whom the news has been...

There is no doubt that the ravages of the contemporary Hamaniacs have left their mark, for generations to come, not only upon the physical appearance of the European continent, but also upon its cultural character. That the face of Europe has been changed, no one can deny; one only has to be referred to the scarred physiognomy of Rotterdam, or to the pock-marked countenance of Warsaw, to see that of the Hun it may be well said that he found a Europe of stone, and left a Europe of rubble. But the change has gone into the very essence of...

The shameful precedent – was it a precedent? – which was established some tim ago when rowdy gangs of juvenile hoodlums, emerging from a pseudo-political meeting, went rioting through the streets of Montreal, was repeated again on Tuesday night. As in the first case, the ruffians followed the same formula which characterized their first exploit. A meeting under the auspices of ʹThe League for the Defence of Canadaʹ was convened to discuss the forthcoming plebiscite. Demagogues harangued the audience; they spoke soft words and noble phrases; they knew, with all the instincts of the sophist, that sometimes one can inflame...

TheSaturday Evening Post, either because of its sabbatical name or for purposes of circulation, has set itself, during the last winter season, the task of solving the Jewish problem. We need hardly report that despite the glowing limelight which theS.E.P.focussed upon this question, the matter still remains penumbrated beneath the triple shadow thrown by its three illuminators – Messrs. Jerome and Waldo Frank, and finally Mr. Milton Mayer. Of Mr. Frankʹs contribution to the subject, we have already written at great and painful length. Our readers will remember that the learned judge disposed of the case by...

On April the twenty-seventh, the people of Canada will go to the polls to declare their democratic will concerning a problem which is of vital importance to the future of our war-effort. They will be asked, at this historic moment, whether they are for or against the release of the Government from the pledges which it had made prior to its entry into office.

It will be remembered that during the last election, both contending parties, conjuring up before them the picture of disunity which had resulted from the conscription issue during the last war, committed themselves to a recruiting...

We are told by those who know that the great musical masterpieces of the symphony are built about the technical variations of one or two or three major themes. While it may be stretching a point, we do believe that contemporary history may well be compared to such a symphony; not that there is anything in the news of the day which is particularly melodious, or elevating, or sweetly musical. As a piece of history-making music, current events may rather be compared to one of those ultra-modern masterpieces, characterized by strident chords and much din and clangour. Indeed, the valley...

There was a time when the formula of resistance, invented by Mahatma Gandhi out of the whole cloth of his mystical consciousness, and applied against the British Government in India, had in it a modicum of naive charm, and even of simple practicality. As applied against the mild-mannered English officials, this method of warfare by nuisance, was sometimes effective. This was so, not because Gandhiʹs passive resistance can seriously be considered a means of opposition, but because the British bureaucracy, consisting of gentlemen to the manner born, allowed theirnoblesse obligeto bow before the Mahatmaʹs fastings, and before the...

The appeal on behalf of the twoYeshivoth, recently established in Montreal, which is to be launched in all synagogues during the Shevuoth festival should evoke a wholehearted and sincere response from all those who are concerned about the future of Judaism in this country. No event, it has been wisely said, is wholly evil; the disturbances which have been visited upon Europe by the abominable tyrant are no exception to the rule, for they have resulted – albeit we would have wished that the result had been consummated in some other fashion – they have resulted in the establishment...

Gutenberg has been sufficiently cursed for having invented the printing press. Let him stay, therefore, unmolested by us in his printersʹ heaven, listening to the loved hosannah of the linotype, and inhaling the ambrosial odors of printerʹs ink. But upon him who invented the process of reproducing photographs in newspapers, and upon all those who have corrupted his good intentions, if any – may their destiny be an after-life when all is a blur, and existence itself a faded negative!

The bitterness of our soul wells up at the thought of the monstrosities which are daily perpetrated by means of...

It may be a difficult name to remember. The pronunciation of Czech consonants does not, after all, flow trippingly from our tongue. We may be remembering a sound which means nothing to Czech ears. But to the world at large the very letters of that word, its mere unuttered orthography speaks with a message it shall never forget!

Remember Lidice! There are so many places to remember in these unforgettable years. There is Dunkirk, for the callous might of the Nazi war machine; there is Rotterdam, for the ruthless savagery of its Luftwaffe; there is Pearl Harbor, for the treachery...

There has never been a crisis in human history but it brought forth in its wake of misery and suffering some great utterance, some inspired declaration which either articulated a new truth or reiterated an old one in danger of being forgotten. Always at the moment when the world seemed to lapse into the corruption of Sodom and Gomorrah, some voice was lifted which informed the world that the human conscience was still alive, that moral values still counted for something, and that injustice, if it had to be perpetrated, would be perpetrated not in shameful silence, but over and...

The Indian leader, Nehru, addressing an open letter to Americans in which he sought to win u.s. sympathy for the Gandhi sabotage of the military efforts of the United Nations – ventured to express the opinion that although the western countries were justly credited with great material progress, it was to the East – to India, to China, that the world ought to turn to learn the true art of living. We must admit that this contrast between occidental materialism and oriental spiritualism is not an original idea with Nehru; the point has been made before. It is a point,...

No doubt the Unitarian, as hereinafter defined, exists also among what the old scribes called ʹthe nations of the world.ʹ We are impelled to write, however, about the Jewish Unitarian because when the general characteristics appear in the Hebrew they are, by some unknown pathological law, exaggerated into classic characteristic. And when so exaggerated, gentle reader, this Unitarian is indeed a weariness to the flesh and a bore.

Let us define the term. By Jewish Unitarian we do not in any manner or wise refer to theological credos. In the final analysis, all Jews are Unitarians, since by virtue of...

The art of advertising, we have been told, consists in making everybody buy what nobody wants. The malice prepense behind this dictum appears to assume that it is the function of advertising not so much to direct the reader to the destination where his wants may be best satisfied, as much as to create in him a want for something he might not desire without the copy-writerʹs verbiage. Although there is much truth in this statement, it is much less than a half-truth. The fact is that there is no barometer which so clearly reflects the mentality of the public...

Thirty-five years ago – on August 30, 1907, to be precise and historical – there, was founded in the city of Montreal, the first Yiddish newspaper in the Dominion, our distinguished contemporary,The Jewish Daily Eagle. Of its original founders, all, with the exception of one, saw their journalistic ardor quenched by the vicissitudes of newspaper pioneering. One lasted a fortnight as a tycoon of the Fourth Estate; after that his five hundred dollars gave out. Another discovered that he was not by temperament suited to the struggle involved in bringing a journal to birth. Still another discovered, in those...

A peculiar nemesis seems to pursue certain of the practitioners of the literary art. Launching upon the world their figments of imagination, they walk arrogantly in their creativeness, until a retributive irony turns them themselves into the prototypes of their writing. Thus, Mr. P.G. Wodehouse, who brought to life that supreme example of a gentlemanʹs gentleman is to-day himself a butler, a valet, a Mr. Jeeves to his German captors. And thus Mr. Theodore Dreiser, who several years ago wrote a powerful novel about ʹAn American Tragedy,ʹ decided that he himself should perform a tragic role.

Toronto was the scene...

Mr. Arthur Hays Sulzberger is, in one more than one sense, the Jew behind theTimes. He is, in the first instance, the publisher of that powerful organ which releases only the news thatʹs fit to print; and he is, in the second instance, a Hebraic Canute seeking with a gesture and a speech to halt the march of Jewish national resurgence. Despite careful perusal of his own journal he has not, apparently, yet realized that the aspirations of the Jewish people for a homeland of their own are so deep-rooted in his co-religionistsʹ psychology, and so essential because of...

The defeats to which German arms have been of late subjected, both in Russia and in Africa, have not served to bring to the Reich that feeling of contrition which comes from the sense of imminent doom. Perhaps it is too early to expect that these sentiments will have any currency among the hardened criminals and arrogant slaves who constitute theherrenvolk. Instead there is everywhere apparent, desperation and fear. But it is a desperation as yet unaccompanied by remorse.

On the contrary; the bandits of the Reich, in fear lest the measure of their wickedness may not be completed...

We were surprised, as we turned on our radio last Sunday evening, to hear the voice of Jean Drapeau, ʹthe candidate of the conscripts,ʹ holding forth in a post-mortem dissertation upon the results of the election in Outremont. At first our surprise was confined to a single motivation; we found it strange that a defeated candidate, who barely saved his deposit, should carry his humiliation beyond the frontiers of his constituency, and subject himself to a process of verbal self-flagellation by analyzing the statistics of his defeat. We felt, however, that if an aspirant to political office, repudiated by his...

It is almost an act of foolishness to comment upon German barbarism. Certainly one does not find the fact that the jackal feeds on carrion, or that the vulture swoops down on the dead, a fit subject of editorial expatiation. That the Nazis are beasts, and that their entire policy towards Jews and other victims is bestial, is already one of the truisms of European life. To remedy the situation, one does not lecture the beasts; one merely takes oneʹs hunting rifle.

Yet, are there degrees in bestiality, and stages in savagery. A new depth of depravity reached by the...

How often, indeed, is a concept more lucidly interpreted by a gesture rather than by a word! You have only to put this assertion to the test to discover how frequently individuals prefer the almost intuitive facility of a gesture to the labor and care required for definition. Ask your neighbor to define the word ʹaccordionʹ – a common enough instrument of dubious music. Your neighbor will not halt to pick and choose the exact phraseology which will convey to you the form, shape, and function of an accordion: he will simply move his hands back and forth, now slowly,...

We are most happy to move a sincere vote of thanks to Mr. Wendell Willkie for thoughts recently uttered, and laudable for both lucidity and timeliness. We have long felt that the statement should have been made, and no one could have made it with greater verve and less objectionableness than Wendell Willkie whose motive in this instance could not be suspect.

The courageous and incontrovertible dictum of Willkie is worth quoting verbatim. Deploring what he called ʹ a trend toward what is called leadership – but what is really nothing more than the idolization of individual men,ʹ Mr. Willkie...

The week-end which passed marked one of the gloomiest milestones in world history – a decade since Adolf Hitlerʹs accession to power. To mankind at large it has been a period in which the world witnessed one of the most powerful attempts to push civilization back ʹinto the dark backward and abysm of timeʹ; a period during which there rose to influence and to might a philosophy which was a complete denial of all that men had ever worshipped or cherished; a period in which a talented but demented people repudiated international morality, scorned both public and private right, oppressed...

Once again there came to articulate expression, at Madison Square Garden, the great challenge which history has flung at our civilization. Will the world stand by — even a world at war — while an entire people, helpless and unarmed, is systematically and ruthlessly exterminated? Will those nations who form part of the compact of anti-Nazi warfare, look on as the enemy dooms to wholesale destruction an ancient and innocent race, and content themselves with saying:Our hands have not shed this blood? Will they postpone the rescue of those who can now be saved until such time as all...

The news which has just been released that Henrik Erlich and Victor Alter, world-renowned Socialist leaders of the Polish working-class, had been executed last December by – of all people! – the Soviet authorities evokes mingled feelings of sadness and embarrassment; sadness, that so terrible a fate by so incongruous an execution should have been visited upon these men – and embarrassment that it was the government of a valiant people which perpetrated this deed. It will be remembered that Alter and Erlich had been arrested by the Communist authorities immediately after they took over their part of Poland. Subsequently,...

Childhood is not childhood unless it possess its imaginary town of fools. They were shrewd men, indeed, the mythologists of every people who invented for the sake of their babes and sucklings these legendary habitations of stupidity, the exploits of which served,a contrario, to teach the infants wisdom and the way wherein they should go. The little children of Greece had their Boeotia, renowned for the simplicity of its denizens; Englishmen had the city of Gotham; and Jewry has its town of Chelm. All of these municipalities grew famous in the imagination of youth by the tales of the...

The Bermuda Conference, called under Anglo-American auspices, to discuss ways and means of solving the acute and tragic problem of the refugee, has already sat for a number of days. Under ordinary circumstances one would have been justified in seeing a symbolic forecast of liberation in the fact that the sessions of this loftily inspired meeting take place on the days of Passover, season of emancipation. But the provisos which have thus far hedged this conference, and the cautious and nullifying reports which have thus far issued of its deliberations, give even to the most sanguine no grounds for optimism....

As the much-vaunted forces of the ʹinvincibleʹ Rommel were surrendering in their tens of thousands in North Africa, the German military machine was not entirely helpless and forlorn. There were still fronts where its blitzkrieg methods availed for something; there were still battlefields where additional glory and honors for the Reich could be won. One of these immortal battlefields was the ghetto of Warsaw, where, after ten days of warfare, in which the fire and metal of the German army was directed against the blood and flesh of unarmed civilians, a great victory was registered in Hitlerʹs name; the ghetto...

We do not know whether the Municipal Council of the good City of Quebec has yet seen fit to pass a resolution of gratitude to its Jewish community for being instrumental, if only indirectly, in contributing towards the scenic embellishment of that fair metropolis; but certainly such a resolution has long been overdue. No other group of citizens, to our mind, has recently done more towards the increasing of parks and playgrounds than the Jewish community in its futile quest for a site for its synagogue. Our readers will no doubt remember that for the last several years, Quebec Jewry...

As we read in a recent issue ofLifethe infuriating and sycophantic contribution made by Lessing Rosenwald to the discussion which that magazine has been publishing about the aims and objectives of Zionism, we could not help but reflect how prejudice so frequently distorts the meaning and implication of the simplest of words. Take the word ʹlandlessnessʹ as a pertinent example. To most people, the word implies a condition which is far removed from felicity. Our readers no doubt will recall the John Lackland of English history, the tragic figure of a disinherited prince. Everything else about him is...

The celebration of the Feast of Succoth, with its picturesque ritual and ancient memories, comes again to grace the Jewish calendar, a living parable for the very days of our years. A composite religious and national festival – the occasion for the ingathering of the harvest and the seasonal ceremonial evocative of Israelʹs wanderings – its symbolism is but half-pertinent to our contemporary history. For no one who gives thought to what is everywhere transpiring about us can see, we know, any sign or vestige of anything even faintly resembling a cornucopia harvest for Jewry, – unless it be the...

The release of Oswald Mosley, Britainʹs arch-fascist, from the internment for the duration to which he was condemned at the beginning of the war, has raised a storm of protest throughout the length and breadth of England which promises to spread to other parts of the Empire. These protests, to say the least, are understandable. Why special clemency should be exercised in the case of a man who for years was the pledged enemy of democracy, the loudest British admirer of Hitler, and the most dangerous potential fifth-columnist on the island, passeth the understanding of all minds save the acrobatic...

It is refreshing to read, in a world full of frailties and decrepitudes, of a valiant professor, located, of all places, in Chicago, undertaking to describe the aspect of the brave new world in general, and in particular, so that all may hear and be heartened, the shape and form of ʹthe perfect manʹ of the future. The search for this flawless specimen of mankind is not a phenomenon new to either professors or philosophers; from time immemorial the human mind has dwelt wishfully upon an era when the flesh would be rid of its corruptions and life itself would...

As the tanks come rolling to the rescue of the city which you have made famous in our memory, I think of you, O wonderful Rabbi, again and again. Almost have I expected to hear your name mentioned in the war-communiqués, to hear it sounded from the radio, to see it headlined in the newspapers:Rabbi Levi Yitschok of Berditchev wins his debate with God.

But never a word was repeated of your doings. Berditchev is mentioned, but not the one by whose ineffable merit Berditchev lived. Secrecy surrounds you, as if you, arrayed in yourtallisandtfillin, were...

Things most strange, most passing strange, according to song and story, do happen in the state of Texas. Not the least of these astounding occurrences, to our mind, took place a fortnight ago when after the subject had been mooted for the necessary forty days and forty nights, the Houston Beth Israel Congregation finally agreed upon what, with a gallant disregard of the meaning of words, it was pleased to call ʹThe BasicPrinciplesof ReformedJudaism.ʹThe reportage touching this latter-day apocalypse does not, unfortunately, reveal what scruples of conscience, whatagenbite of inwit, prompted this brand-new testament. That...

The temptation to divide the continuum of history into stages clearly defined and easily identifiable, has been, it would appear from the writings of both scientists and poets, ever irresistible. Thus, the bard, surveying the vast backward and abysm of time, has, in many notable instances, bethought him of metals, base and noble, and has accordingly designated the ages of history as being either golden or of iron; and thus, too, the scientist, borrowing his imagery, not from the mineral but the animal kingdom, has distinguished one period of time from the other by attributing to each the name of...

A laconic note in the Polish Socialist newspaperRabotnikreports that but recently the dread Gestapo finally liquidated the last Jew of Danzig. It will be remembered – it certainly has not been forgotten – that early in the spring of 1940, the goose-stepping sons of Belial, blown up with insolence and blood, celebrated their then current victories with a veritable massacre of the Jews of Danzig, an orgy which was at once a thanksgiving to their pagan blood-swilling gods and a first instalment upon their plan to make EuropeJudenrein. In this massacre, conducted with German savagery and German...

It was none other than Adolf Hitler who, to a Jewry celebrating the discomfiture of Haman and the triumph of Israel, furnished the perfect thought for the occasion. With a knowledge of Jewish lore which is not surprising in one who for years has specialized in discovering and slandering all things Semitic, and with a natural intuition which for once seemed to have a solid background,der Fuehrerexpressed the conviction that world Jewry stood by eagerly awaiting the opportunity to commemorate his downfall with a new Purim. We believe that for once, Hitler diagnosed our sentiments correctly. He spoke...

Again the annual feast of Passover comes, not as a commemoration of events belonging to the remote and romantic past, but as the symbol of the very incidents of the current all-too-realistic day. Indeed, as one reads both the first twenty chapters of Exodus and the embellishing narrative of the Haggadah, one is struck again and again by the fact that the story told is far more contemporaneous than historical. It is as if the headlines of today and tomorrow had been foretold in the chapters and verses of Holy Writ. We would not be surprised, in fact, if one...

That the Jews of Poland, even in the halycon days of peace, did not in that country lie at ease in a bed of roses, is a historic fact which requires no elaborate proof. The newspaper headlines of the Thirties supply sufficient illustration. Nonetheless, in the common misery which befell all the citizens of the Polish Republic, Jewry was ready to forget – at least for the duration, it hoped, forever – the unhappy things of yesterday, the economic discrimination, the ghetto-benches, the uniforms of the Endeks, the bloodless pogrom and the occasional bloody one, too, – forget, indeed, the...

It was the late Chaim Nachman Bialik, poet laureate of the Hebrew Renaissance, who once made so bold as to declare that to him, despite his literary loyalties, a book on Palestinian fertilizer was a much more welcome phenomenon, at this period of the Homelandʹs development, than the finest masterpiece of belles lettres. This dictum – which reveals that even poets are sometimes visited with a sense of reality – came to our mind as we read the highly factual and extremely fascinating book of Mr. Lowdermilk. It is a book which for its treatment of the agricultural and industrial...

It is with a deep sense of sadness and with a shocking realization of the truth as it is glaringly revealed in the flames playing about the newly-erected Quebec synagogue that we must here record that that dubious honour – the burning of synagogues – which hitherto characterized only Nazi cities is now shared by the capital of our province. There is, moreover, hardly an enlightened Canadian, of no matter what religious persuasion, who does not at this moment join with us in our wrath and bitterness at the thought that in a democratic country, engaged in a life-and-death struggle...

We have no doubt but that General Montgomery, now leading the attack upon the beaches of Normandy, has frequently had occasion during the last seven days, to recall many of those passages of Holy Writ, so appealing to his temperament, so pertinent to his destiny. For ʹMontyʹ is, almost as much as he is a general, a Bible-man. With equal skill does he wield both the avenging sword and the consoling text. Son of an Archbishop, he bears with him, even into the smoke and fury of battle, the lore which he gathered at his fatherʹs table. So was it...

Of the sweetsinger in Israel it is written that he did once cause his lips to speak evil of the spider, Godʹs creature. Out of the disgust of his soul, he, the psalmist who had so richly praised the world and all that is therein, did abhor this ugly creeping thing, of the six legs all ambulant, as if filth would embrace the compass, and of the little bloated belly weaving the gray filaments of corruption, – belly and legs, a retching for the eye.

The writing, however, goes on to say that later when King David was pursued by...

No doubt our readers are familiar with that famous Canadian advertising cartoon which; announcing the charms of a certain beverage, daily startled the engrossed public with the challenging query: Whereʹs Joe? Invariably the self-satisfied answer was forthwith provided by the advertiser: Gone for a beer.

The same sort of act has been taking place, it would appear, in the world press, curious about the whereabouts of Adolf Hitler; it sets up hypotheses, it reports rumours, it piques curiosity, all on the question of what has happened to Adolf. These questionings, moreover, are not entirely unjustified: upon certain unpleasant occasions throughout...

While one can understand the great personal feeling, the strong pressure of a shocked public opinion, and the natural reaction to an abominable deed, all of which impelled Prime Minister Churchill to make his recent statement upon the assassination of Lord Moyne, one cannot but help a feeling of regret that Mr. Churchillʹs remarks were not, to say the least, couched with the usual felicity of his expression. Indeed, one cannot but entertain a suspicion that Mr. Churchillʹs penchant for antithetic and dramatic rhetoric led him to give an impression that was totally unwarranted by the facts, and to adopt...

The numerous tributes which during the past fortnight have been paid to Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, felicitations which came to him from all free countries and from the representatives of almost every political point of view, should be not only a source of satisfaction to himself, but also a source of pride to all Jews everywhere. Certainly his leadership, despite criticism levelled at it by the intransigent and the impatient, has been such as to win him the support of the vast majority of the Jewish masses. There is, indeed, no doubt but that the...

From time to time, various publications, published in the other eight provinces of this Dominion, and in the United States, have ʹgone to townʹ on the province of Quebec. With a self-righteousness which was apparently blind to things transpiring under their very noses, and with a crusading fervour which was not always pure and undefiled, they have set themselves up as critics and castigators of what they termed the peculiar mores of the province of Quebec. By way of adding a coronative feather to their Galahad-plumes, they have, – with justice, – railed against the anti-semitism which prevails in our...

It is not our intention here to enter into a theological discussion of the salutary effects wrought upon the spirit by the discipline of periodic fasting, or of the inward rewards offered by penitence, or of the beneficent moral consequences of contrition. The day of fasting which was Wednesday proclaimed and observed throughout the Jewish world was not, essentially, a day of penitence and contrition; it is not Jewry which in this instance has reason for repentance, but Jewryʹs oppressors; the fast-day was primarily a day of mourning and remembrance.

Certainly it was meet and proper, while many arduous duties...

There is, in our unceremonial time, nothing sacrosanct about birthdays. The clock ticks off its number of hours, the days pass, the calendar pages are torn and flung away, and there it is: another anniversary. But even in this latter day, birthdays still possess the charm that they do provide the formal occasion for the utterance of tribute which somehow, in more pedestrian days, remains unsaid. It would be, we venture to platitudinize, a happier world if these things were said all the days of the year; failing that, however, it is at least a consummation that they are uttered...

One of the more unpleasant tasks of the editorial scribe is the duty, sanctioned by immemorial custom, of noting in his periodic pronouncements, the regretted passing of the distinguished. The reader somehow seems to expect his editor to be in continual contact with the morgue thence to issue both notification of, and lament for, the importantly deceased. It is for this reason that the discussion of the most world-shaping events is in this column sometimes interrupted to permit its writer to publicly mourn the passing of sage, or seer, or statesman, suddenly snatched from the scene. It is a task...

Not with surprising suddenness did it come; it did not come – as in the dark days we had hoped it would – as a miraculous flash on a radio, a startling announcement lifting us from the depths of despair. By instalments, with forewarnings, parcelled in rumours, it finally arrived, and even then was only quasi-official:the Nazis had surrendered, unconditionally. Indeed, but a week earlier, President Truman himself had had to take to the microphone to squelch a premature report of peace, to issue a negative proclamation; moreover when the final tidings were brought, they came not from the...

Ordinary honest folk who in recent weeks have had the dubious privilege of beholding with their own eyes – on film and in newspaper – the pictorial representation of both the techniques and the effects of Nazi barbarism, have, we have noted, reacted very simply to these grim spectacles. They have said: Surely these things which have been shown to us, and which hitherto we deemed unbelievable, constitute crimes, unqualified and heinous. Their authors ought to be punished. Here were no subtle distinctions, no sophistical qualifications. Crimes had been committed, thecorpores delictilay there in their thousands, obviously the...

The protest which has just been broadcast by the Chief Rabbi of England, complaining about the forced conversion of Jewish child refugees all over the European continent, is one which will receive the full-hearted endorsation of all those who are sincerely concerned about the survival of our people. The bald statement of the Rabbiʹs cause for protest constitutes in itself a shocking revelation of what has been transpiring with the remnants of Israel. According to this indictment – and there is no reason to doubt its foundation in fact – thousands of Jewish children who, during the Nazi occupations, were...

The description of the attitude and morale of the Nazi supermen, now awaiting trial, does indeed make disgusting reading. From all accounts it would appear that the ʹblond beastsʹ presently caged in their wired Valhallas do possess none of the noble and heroic qualities which they so arrogantly boasted in the happier days when they were the authors of their self-descriptions. Fat Goering, it is reported, is now nothing more than so much avoirdupois of cowardice; he sweats; he mumbles; his jelly shivers with fear and excess weight. Even his adjutants regard him with contempt: was this the face that...

For the past six years, while the press was full of a detailed description of the methods adopted by the Nazi extermination squads to encompass the destruction of European Jewry, while the Nazis themselves openly flaunted the murder-blueprints they had prepared, and while reporters standing upon the abandoned scenes of Gestapo atrocity sent accounts of the number of containers of human ashes they had discovered in the macabre buildings, the quantity of gold torn from the teeth of Jews about to be cremated, while all this was being attested, both as to place and as to time, as to method...

At last the great ordeal which the world has endured for the past six years has come to an end. Though the fighting citizens of the United Nations, convinced, as they had to be, in the eventual triumph of right over might, ever foresaw precisely such a culmination to the epic of the forties, the fact does remain that many a time and often even the hardiest of spirits stood troubled and concerned over the outcome. Now the issue has been resolved. The organized iniquity which the Fascist powers had meant to impose upon the world has been frustrated; the...

Several days ago, there were returned to the shores of Palestine the thirteen hundred survivors of thePatriawho, after languishing for five years in the concentration camps of the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, were at long last ʹrepatriatedʹ to the land from whose haven they were so ruthlessly snatched. And thus ended a bitter odyssey; a tale of wandering, pursuit, and tribulation such as has not been matched even in the cruel annals of this war. Hunted by the hounds of the Reich eager for Jewish blood, several thousand Jewish refugees, from various parts of the...

For centuries the British judicial process, with its untold number of protections designed to safeguard the rights of the individual, has justly enjoyed a reputation of pre-eminent excellence. This reputation was recently further enhanced by incidents of contemporary history, and in particular by the contrast afforded by the respective trials of Pierre Laval and ʹLord Haw-Haw.ʹ That both of these men were reprehensible knaves is not a subject for debate; we would wish to place no one in the dilemma of having to choose between them. The treacheries of both, indeed, were matters of public knowledge, and insofar as democratic...

We were, we must admit, both astonished and shocked to read in the Tuesday issue ofLe Canada, distinguished organ of Quebec liberalism, an article which for its malice and hysteria, could easily have found a place in the columns of Julius Streicherʹs unlamentedStuermer. The incongruity of the thing, moreover, was further enhanced by the fact that this piece of clumsy and venomous race-baiting appeared – of all places – on the womenʹs page of that journal, a page usually reserved for questions of cooking and coiffure. This time however, Mlle. Odette Oligny decided to use her boudoir-cuisine space...

The Palestine Administration, it would appear from recent events in the Holy Land, is having a difficult time not only with the numerous White Papers which clutter up its files, but also with the volumes of the Bible which, after all, remain the final authority on the destiny of Eretz Israel. Moreover, the reconciling of the texts of Holy Writ appears much more difficult than the reconciling of the various White Papers; these latter, as is well known, are couched in language so delightfully ambiguous that it is possible from their total number to extract either yea or nay, as...

Throughout the six years of this war, people who remembered the experience of the last warned us that all the animosity which was then being directed against the barbarian enemy would not last, that inevitably, after hostilities ceased, the sentimentalists – sentimental about the aggressor but not about his victim – would again find their voices, and that there would rise in the land the cry of a perverted magnanimity: Let bygones be bygones. We did not believe these prognostications. The misdeeds of the Nazis, we felt, weresui generis;the world had not seen their like before; and the...

Until the day before yesterday, most Canadians thought that espionage and international intrigue were occupations which were practised only in Oppenheim novels, and then confined only to European capitals, and such places as Monte Carlo. Certainly one never imagined that Canada, with its wide open spaces, and its candid population, were a fit or repaying milieu for this questionable activity. The last time, to our recollection, that spies were spoken about in our Dominion was when they were mentioned, and fascinatingly described, by one of our Governors-General, the late Lord Tweedsmuir. But he, too, created them for fiction, for fiction...

The United Palestine Appeal which, opening in Montreal this week-end, is being launched at a time of grave decision in Jewish life, will evoke from the local community, we are certain, a response commensurate with the importance and the urgency of the needs it is called to meet. Certainly at no time in our post-exilic history has the necessity of a Jewish homeland been so tragically apparent, at no time before have so many individual lives, and indeed the entire destiny of a people, hung upon the fate of Palestine, as to-day. Six million Jews ruthlessly murdered – one third...

One of the most charming (sic) quiddities of the Nazi ideology – in the day when it still masqueraded as an ideology – was the self-flattering doctrine that the German people constituted a national élite, that what came out of Berlin was the salt of the earth and the cream of society, that, in a word, all the Fritzes and the Gretels, by mere birth and existence, showed to the world the example of an herrenvolk. The theory, moreover, had a corollary; if every ordinary German was by his sole nativity,ipso facto, a man of honor, the leaders of...

This week the democratic world, we gathered from newspaper spacefillers, did casually note – it would be wrong to saycelebrated– the first anniversary of the conclusion of the Second World War. The newspaper issues of last year were duly photostated and republished; the reader was made to recall the fact that a year ago today Germany surrendered. Such an evocation of a still fresh triumph might have been followed, one thought, by songs of praise and paragraphs of general optimism. Alas, no journalists could bring themselves to the expected literary ecstasies. There was chronology and no comment; the...

The Labor Party of Britain, which is presently holding its convention at Bournemouth, this year as in years past again took up the Palestine question. But how different things were now from what they were of yore! In days gone by, when the Labor Party stood out in the wilderness of opposition, it was the time-honored custom of these conventions to pass annually, with great éclat and with practically unanimous approbation, a resolution calling for the immediate revocation of the White Paper and for increased immigration into Eretz Israel. At one convention, indeed, a gallant minority, led by Mr. Hugh...

At another time, and under other circumstances, the tale of the disappearing Mufti – now he is here, now he is not – could no doubt have been treated as but another one of those comic opera adventures with which Levantine potentates so often regale the Parisianmonde, or, if you prefer the truly oriental, as a sort of diminuendo addition to theArabian Nightsʹ Entertainment. Certainly one would be inclined – on happier occasion – to smile at the spectacle of two mighty empires, the British and the French, both solemnly agreeing – with M. Bidaultʹspersonalundertaking, if...

We are quite well aware of the fact that the atom, with its chain reactions, its pleading protons and nimble neutrons, hardly requires benefit of counsel; it can, as the Yiddish proverb has it, ʹmaintain its own little city.ʹ The truth is that the last thing we would like to meet up with on a dark night in a secluded lane is an atom on the rampage. Nonetheless, amidst all the slander and vituperation which is being flung upon the poor heaven-crested atom, which, after all, through all the millenia and up to this date has kept its peace, a...

A number of Jewish organizations, we are informed, are giving thought to the necessity of erecting some fitting memorial to the memory of the millions of Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis, either as helpless victims or in the various armies of resistance. We doubt whether there breathes a Jew who fails to understand the motivation behind this desire. Certainly, there springs in the heart of everyone a natural compulsion to do something which would eternalize, as much as mortal man can eternalize, the heroism and martyrdom of our millions, on the one hand, and on the...

It could hardly be believed. That Jewry which for the past generation had so trustingly placed its faith in the pledged word of England could hardly believe its eyes, as it read, with mounting indignation, of the uncalled for and arrogant measures which the Palestine Administration – itself recognized by the same document which recognized the Jewish Agency – had taken, out of both impotence and a sense of guilt, against that Agency, and, indeed, against the entire Yishuv. Without a scintilla of proof, without even a charge known to any code of law, to have laid hands upon the...

For the outrageous perpetration of the group of irresponsible terrorists who, at a critical moment in the history of the Yishuv, took it into their heads, with a tragically misplaced bravado, to bomb, causing great loss of life, the King David Hotel, headquarters of the British Administration in Palestine, there can be nothing but unqualified condemnation. Such acts run counter to the entire tradition of our people; they are as wicked as they are stupid; and taking place at a time when negotiations were going on as to the fate of the one hundred thousand, they demonstrate an unspeakable callousness...

It is not surprising, in the light of the completely unprincipled motives which to-day dictate international affairs, that the Agency prisoners who now find themselves in a concentration camp at Latrun should have betaken themselves, no doubt as a legal means of escape, to the writing of pure literature. It is reported, for example, that Moishe Shertok, in an attempt to while away the hours which the Government has expropriated from him, is writing a book – on Hebrew grammar! David Remez, on the other hand, has betaken himself to a field equally innocuous, and has just sent on to...

Every consideration of the potentialities of the New Year, every attempt to pierce by logic and analysis, beyond the veil of the future – and at the Holiday Season such an undertaking is a sore temptation – must, we think, necessarily involve, as a first condition, a consideration of what the French are pleased to call ʹthe actualities of the contemporary scene.ʹ It is a dismal prerequisite. For upon the contemporary scene there is very little, indeed, which could tend to buoy up the spirit, or arouse the optimism, of the beholder.

For after six years of arduous warfare, warfare...

At last, after a leisurely year of probing the obvious and investigating the notorious, the learned jurists who sat in judgment over the Nazi war criminals have arrived, inevitably, at the foregone conclusion. The henchmen of Hitler, the court found, were guilty. We doubt very much whether this procrastinated verdict came to the world this fateful Monday as anything but a judicial confirmation of the already universally known; certainly there was nothing apocalyptic about the revelation that Goering is a bandit and Streicher a murderer. Insofar as those condemned to death are concerned, therefore, the entire trial was an act...

A week ago Monday, but two days after his Day of Atonement, Dr. I.M. Rabinowitch delivered before the Canadian Club, whose chairman took pains not to associate the club with the opinions of its speaker, an oration sensationally titled:The Menace of Political Zionism. When the announcement of this address was first made, there were many, it must be stated, who were at a loss to understand the relation of this speaker to this subject; for while Dr. Rabinowitch was regarded as an expert on diabetes, a scholar in metabolism, and a master of chemical warfare, no one had hitherto...

Every year, as wisdom is translated from the Scandinavian, the world awaits with bated breath the announcement of the Nobel awards. Accorded to those who ʹin the preceding year have most contributed to the benefit of mankindʹ – whether through distinguished effort in literature, in science, or in the works of peace – the Nobel prizes have ever been deemed, and for the most part justly deemed, thene plus ultraof international approval, the supreme accolade of world appreciation.

This year, as the season of the Nobel harvest came round, and as one reflected upon the present case and...

The Japanese deportations which were ordered some time ago and which were stayed to allow for an appeal upon the constitutionality of the orders to the highest court in the Empire, the Privy Council, are about to be set in motion again. The learned lords, basing their judgment solely upon legalconsiderants, have ruled the ordersintra vires. Dura lex, sed lex.

The Privy Council, of course, is not accustomed, nor is it permitted, to go outside the scope of law to seek among the dicta of morality, lights whereby to illuminate its judgment. This, however, should not prevent the...

Mr. Duplessisʹ recent demonstration of power arbitrarily exercised is such as will leave all citizens, and particularly those belonging to minority groups in the province, with a justifiable feeling of insecurity touching their civil rights. Certainly we have no axe to grind on behalf of the Witnesses of Jehovah; we deem, in fact, their alleged association with Jehovah a usurpation of our own ancestral prerogatives; we consider their method of proselytizing as objectionable as their doctrines, and their doctrines as questionable as their all too violent denigrations of other peopleʹs creeds; but, believing all these things about the over-testifying witnesses,...

Others before us have noted the rather disappointing fact that culture and humanity are not necessarily kindred concepts, and that, indeed, it may often happen that they bear a relation to each other which only the mathematics of inverse proportions can adequately express. The atomic bomb is not without justice adduced as a case in point. Here, in atomic physics, was a field of knowledge whose secrets were hitherto deemed unreachable; nonetheless, in the fullness of time, the mind of man, broadening out from explosive to explosive – the arduous and ardorous ingenuity of the human mind nonetheless did reach...

It is particularly after a war that the sculptors, a tribe that in the flat days of peace is usually found lugubrious over its unpatronized lot, do really come into their own. Then it is, as the laurel wreaths are fixed upon the heads of the returning victors, that the sculptor, lifting up his eyes from his sorry contemplations, suddenly discovers that through the dust and smoke of battle everything has taken on proportions heroic. What but a short untrumpeted while ago was dully civic and pedestrian is now transformed, metamorphosed, made triumphantly equestrian; who yesterday left for the wars,...

No one will gainsay but that the period through which we are presently passing is fraught with the greatest significance for the future of our people. We are here not speaking of the tragic fact that our world population has been so cruelly cut down through the murder of six million of our kith and kin; not even the best established of educational institutions can do aught to bring them back to life. Nor are we adverting to the fact that the years to come must be those which will, which must serve to establish the status of the Jewish...

Our readers have no doubt observed how orators, when they wish to make a particularly pathetic point, almost invariably appeal for sympathy, corroboration, and support, to some ineffable arbiter known as the worldʹs conscience. The implication of course, is that while all other systems of justice may be fallible or corrupt, here is a judicial instance, an ethical barometer which is sensitive to the slightest shadings of right and wrong, here, from the worldʹs conscience, there must ineluctably issue the response for which the persecuted and the downtrodden so agonizedly languish.

It is with regret that we are beginning to...

There is no doubt but that that sympathy which British statesmen have until recently extended to Jewish national aspirations in Palestine owed much of its driving force to the fact that ever since the Authorized Version the English people have been a people brought up on the Bible. Until almost the end of the nineteenth century there was not a piece of literature published on the British Isles which did not manifest, in a hundred places, the impress of that great book. Whether we consider the soldiers of the Cromwellian armies who went forth into battle chanting the Psalms of...

Throughout the past decade, as we stood engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the most implacable foe ever to rise up against our people, conviction in his inevitable defeat and doom never forsook us. It could not be otherwise; we already had in the history books, quite a crew of barbarian megalomaniacs who had set themselves the same dastardly objective, only to end up as derisive foot notes at the conclusion of the chapter; and there was no reason why Hitler should not suffer the fate of Pharaoh or of Haman. (As it turned out, he did suffer the same...

No one who has followed the proceedings of the United Nations, now assembled in deliberation over the Palestine question, could have failed to be struck by the unreal, almost nightmarish character of the goings-on at Flushing Meadows. The whole thing in fact has thus far given the impression of some fantastic play, staged by a mad director, the actors coming upon the stage each to steal the lines of the other; and, to heap unreality upon unreality, there is the unmistakable implication that even this absurd performance is, by the consent of the participants, of a significance even less than...

Perhaps this is too venerable a designation to apply to the sprightly youngster who attained his mere fourscore years this first of July; in the history of a nation, after all, a thousand years are but as yesterday, as a watch of the night when it is past, – and eighty years, the mere twinkling of an eye; the calendar fact, however, is indubitable: Canada as a Dominion is now eighty years old.

The stripling, it must be admitted, has not done badly for himself. He has come up in the world. While he has not yet taken over the...

That justice is not always impartially blind, that occasionally she does play bo-peep from behind her bandage so as to catch a glimpse of the identity of the accused and temper her judgment accordingly, is an observation which has not waited for this column to be stated. Both philosophers and jurisconsults have noted that justice often changes with the degrees of geographic latitude. What is considered a high crime and misdemeanour in northern countries is often a virtue to be practised in southern ones; andvice versa. Of course these distinctions have always had reference todifferentsystems of justice...

There is not a man in Jewry, we believe, who will gainsay the pre-eminence as a spiritual figure which Dr. Judah L. Magnes enjoys in contemporary Jewish life. Chancellor of the Hebrew University from the days of its inception, world Jewry has consistently regarded him as the intellectual mentor of Palestine youth and the right trusty keeper of Jewish cultural treasure. The outstanding facts of his biography – the forlorn hopes he has entertained, the lost causes he has espoused, the unpopular convictions he has held, – these have further endeared him to the lovers of the quixotic; and there...

Those who fondly believe that the ubiquitous urge of Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine is a stimulated and artificial trend received yet another shock to their wiseacre smugness when they read this week of the arrival near the coasts of the Holy Land of another shipload of displaced persons, this time to the number of forty-five hundred. The ʹartificial stimulationʹ must indeed be irresistible if it can persuade almost five thousand people to leave the European paradise, to brave the dangers of the sea and to risk the hospitality of Cyprus. But of course no one seriously believes that...

There is no doubt but that the latest exploit of the pseudo-patriots of the Irgun – the cold-blooded murder of the two innocent British sergeants, captured, so ran their cynical ʹargot,ʹ as ʹhostagesʹ – has left world Jewry fevered with horror and revulsion. It could not be otherwise; these abominations malign the character of our people; throughout our long and minutely-recorded history one will look in vain to find its like. Sergeants Paice and Martin were not only not guilty of any crime; they were declared by Irgun definition and broadcast personally to be free from any imputed crime. They...

It is not in the staid and restrained vocabulary of the editorial column that one can adequately describe the great wave of joy which swept over world Jewry as there was brought to it the news that the United Nations had at last sanctioned the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The theme is rather a subject for poetic treatment – an epic of two thousand years of wandering and homelessness brought to an end, if not as yetde facto, at leastde jure;a drama in which the great wrong which the world had perpetrated, – either...

As if to illustrate the strange inexplicable powers that in the East can be evoked like somedjinnout of his imprisonment, there is brought before the attention of the world the latest of Mahatma Gandhiʹs gestures. As in the past, it is again the threat of a fast unto death which the Mahatma directs against those whom he would persuade; but unlike his abnegations heretofore, the present fast is aimed not at the British Raj but against the people he presumably liberated from the British subjection.

In a drab world, a world in which international gestures are made on...

That in the death of Gandhi, not only India, but the whole world, has suffered an irreparable loss is a truism so obvious that it seems almost an insult to his memory to utter it. For the spirituality of his thinking, for the prophetic character of his personality, and for the almost other-worldly saintliness of his career, he knew no equal. Nor does there appear anywhere upon the horizon an individual who might be mistaken for his successor. His death has truly left a gap; from the world there has been removed a great and goodly treasure.

Such a removal,...

There is not a single casualty arising out of the war in Palestine which does not come home to Jews everywhere bringing with it a sense of both personal loss and great dramatic tragedy – personal loss, because with every hero fallen in the fight the entire people is by that much diminished, and great dramatic tragedy because the victims of Arab sniping are for the most part Jews who but recently in Palestine, after terrible ordeals and wanderings, began to live. These, certainly, are not mere newspaper deaths; they are family bereavements.

To the loss of no recent casualty...

Lawyers with hopeless cases, entangled diplomats, spouses flagrant with delict, confidence men, and in general all those who have need of a verbal technique whereby guilt may be made to shine like piety beneath a halo, could do worse in their desperation than to study the article called ʹEaster in Palestineʹ which appears in this weekʹs issue ofLife. For there they will find exemplified, in large type and all on one page, enough gestures of innocence, sufficient pantomime of sanctity, to annul even in the direst of straits. Written by that composite editorial genius recently described in the pages...

For two thousand years all headlines, and even lesser news reports, relating to Jews, have been singularly unepical. We say unepical, and not unheroic; for of heroism – that kind of heroism in which the heroes go forth to battle but always fall – there have been far too many instances. Even as late as 1943, world Jewry was solemnly thrilled by the report of the valiant defense of the ghetto of Warsaw, a defense in which a mass of starved and poorly-armed Jews for weeks stood against the might and terror of the ruthless organized forces of the Third...

Conceived two thousand years ago on that same day the long agony of exile and dispersion began, – throughout the centuries nurtured in the very body and beneath the heart of the people, – borne, through suffering, with patience, – in its own blood sustained, – the Jewish State is at long last about to enter into life. The ticking of all the clocks of Jewry herald its approach, proclaim its imminence. Unless another Joshua again make the sun to stand still in Ashkalon, the unaltered circuits of the heavens, the mere passage of time, renders its birth inevitable. The...

Among the subtler techniques of denigration none is as difficult to combat as that which takes the form of pseudo-friendly advice, the brotherly tip-off counselling its victim to refrain from doing impolitically just that which the victim has no intention of doing at all. With this device, the slanderer is able both to eat his cake and treasure it still; in attributing to his victim motives that victim does not entertain, he satisfies his malice; in defending the victim from the implications of his very own suggestion, he preserves intact his role as friend and mentor. The victim, moreover, finds...

Written for some inscrutable reason and sent to us for reasons even more inscrutable, there has of late come to our desk quite a number of books and pamphlets, all written by rabbis, and all concerned either with the historicity of Christ or with the authenticity of the New Testament version of the famous Trial of Jesus. We must confess ourselves at a loss to understand why these things should still be the subject of polemic and discussion at this late date. Can it be that the rabbinate is no longer attracted by thepilpulof the Tosfoth thus to...

Throughout the ages, amidst varying cultures and civilizations, the Jewish people, by dint of its dedication to things literary, and particularly, to writ holy, has justly earned itself the title of the People of the Book. No doubt the most persuasive example of the ubiquity of its literature, and of its identification with works of the mind and the spirit, is the Bible, the great inspiring classic – if so technical a designation may be given to it – which has been translated into all the known languages of the world. To think within the ambit of his own culture,...

Such, in part, was the tribute which Henry Wadsworth Longfellow paid to the sainted Florence Nightingale. Her self-dedication during the Crimean War to the health and welfare of the fighting man, the nursing service she organized, the weary days and sleepless nights she spent in bringing solace and healing to men wounded in battle – these, and the general nobility of her character, were things of beauty which no poet, and least of all a poet of a country where the best in womanhood is worshipped as it is worshipped and adored in the United States, could possibly pass by,...

Intercession by the anti-Zionists with every other Great Power having failed, they now seek to intercede with God. Hence the spate of pharisaic scripture recently released onto the printing presses all purporting to prove that in the Holy Land the heathen rage. Vicariously through the eyes of his employees, Mr. Luce sheds weekly tears for that the six hundred and thirteenmitzvothof Holy Writ in the Holy Land allegedly go unobserved; the tycoons of the oil companies, it is rumoured, have taken to a study of theShulchan Aruchto discover what thingumjig of the iota gets broken by...

It is a long time now that a number of governments have looked upon the State of Israel and, induced into a wilful blindness, have failed to recognize it. The proclamation of May the fifteenth they seemed to consider as but a false echo, and the governmental apparatus actually functioning in the Holy Land as but an eastern mirage. The movement of Jewish troops both to the north and the south, vivid and real to the forces which opposed them, appeared to these myopic governments as but optical illusions.

When one suffers from an eye disease, a remedy may be...

The text of the u.n. Declaration of Human Rights, recently published in full in the public prints, is, though couched in simple language, difficult to understand. The worthy objectives it enunciates, though hitherto beyond human practise, are of course not beyond human comprehension. In democratic countries most of these objectives are quite properly deemed truisms. The statement that all men should be given equal opportunities and that everybody should be nice to everybody else is clear, clear as glass, like glass may be seen through, and like glass cannot be got through without injury.

What we do not understand is,...

One of the most entertaining of techniques used in the moving picture industry is that one in which the movie operator suddenly decides to reverse the progress of the film. Thus is the diver, half-way down from his board to the water, made to soar gracefully backwards until he is again poised in his original springing stance; thus, too, in a scene of battle, is the pursuing host suddenly made to flee with back-running haste, a sort of goose-step turned inside out.

We find these erratic transformations extremely fascinating. They satisfy in us, first, the desire for surprise; and then,...

I will be forgiven, I hope, for venturing to write now, at the very height and intoxication of Zionist success, what it would never have occurred to me to say during the long years of hope, and the frustration of hope, which constituted the sad sober prelude to our great consummation. Recently, however, there have been advanced certain philosophic views which make the issuance of a caveat imperative.

I refer particularly to the notions fostered by that crew of chauvinists who, under the justifiable afflatus of the Israel renascence, have dared to propound the doctrine they so scientifically and so...

In anticipation of the Passover Seder we have been examining, these past several days, a variety of Haggadahs which have come within our ken, issued, as their frontispieces announce, either by proud publisher or insistent organization to meet the needs of the sacred annual ritual. Some, we found, were ornate, resplendent with a multiplicity of colours, curlicued and illuminated; others were of a sad and sober mien, as if printed to be read to the poverty ofmatzoth, their letters somewhat indistinct, their woodcuts faded and blurred. Some were fortified with hard resounding decorated covers; others, coverless and limp and...

There is nothing in contemporary events which is as symbolic of the direction which Jewish history is taking as the custom, now prevalent in Israel, of changing oneʹs name. One day it is the jargoning nomenclature of theGaluthwhich in its thousand versions is recorded at the ports of entry; the next day from these ports into the very heart of the country there issue entire hosts bearing names such as these two millenia have not been heard in Jewry, names racy of the soil, of Holy Writ odorous, and in the true Hebrew accent couched.

It is as...

The establishment of the Israeli State, it can be seen by even the most superficial of observers, presents not only a challenge but a great opportunity to culture. It was Bialik who pointed out in a classic lecture on the subject that exilic Jewish culture, although it had the most extaordinary achievements to its credit, suffered nonetheless from certain very apparent deficiencies. The principal deficit that Bialik found in Diaspora culture was that too often it founded itself on foreign traditions; it made its contribution to an entity already established by others; it added, improved, ornamented, but it did not...

Date of Departure – July 31st. Destination – Israel.

In how many ways, in how many varied and lingering ways, is the full implication and force of this so-unexcited time-table brevity to be made clear? For certainly as it stands now, cold, staid, typographical on a printed page, not a millionth of the emotion it evokes, can issue therefrom. Shouldnʹt one pause over these equations, turn them – like ben Bag Bag was wont to do to the texts of Holy Writ – about and about – to note them, to spy them, to see them, and in all their...

It has been noted before that very frequently the resounding cause of patriotism is invoked for purposes which cannot be stated above a whisper; it is equally true that almost as often holiness itself is the cause behind which lurk considerations far removed from sanctity. This reflection is prompted by the great to-do which is presently being made in the councils of the United Nations, the whole presumably motivated by a desire to preserve the halidom of Jerusalem.

That same concern was not always a dominating factor in the thinking of the saints of Lake Success. We recall that when...

The city of Dresden, which is in the Province of Ontario, is distinguished in history – we doubt whether otherwise it would be noted – as the last resting place of the negro who stood for Harriet Beecher Stoweʹs portrait of Uncle Tom. In the early days of the American slave trade Dresden was, in fact, a Canadian terminus for the underground of negro escapees. Even to-day this city has a considerable negro population, descended from those refugees who, pursued by bloodhounds biped and quadruped, made their way, after many perils, to the land of their liberty.

Throughout the following...

No one of our generation, certainly, can complain of the dullness of contemporary life. Not a day passes but we are regaled with tales lurid, harrowing, and intriguing to such a degree that they pass invention; only the fertility of history, it is clear, can encompass them; and nowhere is this more true than in the field of international affairs.

Had some romancer of tales of international espionage devised a plot which had as its central mystery the existence of a spy at the very hearth of the White House, such a one would have been summarily dismissed as an...

The manner in which the Russians manage to extort confessions from their victims still remains the riddle of the Kremlin sphinx. Many theories have been advanced to explain this strange self-incriminating passion which the Russians have somehow learned to induce in the bosoms of their accused ones; almost all of them have had something to say about either the nature of the Russian soul which presumably is infatuated with self-mortification, or the consequences of the Marxian dialectic which apparently leads to a confusion between concepts and their antonyms, that is to say, between innocence and guilt.

As long as ʹthe...

There is at present on the premises of the headquarters of The Canadian Jewish Congress a variegated collection of Jewish and Hebrew books, awaiting distribution to libraries, synagogues, and community centres, the mere examination of which would move the hardest of hearts. For it is part of the printed residuum of a destroyed European Jewry. As thick as the leaves in Vallombrosaʹs vale were the books which the barbarian hordes of Germany had garnered from the cultural institutions of the communities they slaughtered, garnered to preserve them for the future as the hideous relictae of this tribe they had caused...

Some time ago, Mr. Bernard Wolf, of London, Ontario, bought from a Mrs. Noble a property located at a summer resort poetically called Beach oʹ Pines. The deeds to that property, however, contained a clause restrictive of its sale; the original sons of Beach oʹ Pines had covenanted between themselves that for a period of at least a generation no part of the summer resort was to be sold to Jews and such-like. Mr. Wolf is a Jew. Mr. Wolf sought, therefore, a judicial decision to determine whether in this free Canadian democracy segregating and ghettoizing clauses of the type...

What is the strongest weapon in the arsenal of a fighting people? The belief that it is in the right. The conviction that its cause is the cause of justice. It is upon this premise that one says that right is might. It is this fact which endows a people both with the defensive and aggressive spirit. Morality it is which builds morale.

Indeed, it would be fatal to a combatant state to announce publicly that its war objectives were in no way related to right and wrong, but were merely a part of the game of power politics. Such...

We do not wish to enter at this point into a discussion of the relative merits of the contending arguments which have recently brought about another governmental crisis in Israel. The details of the conflict have not been made public. All that is known is that the presumable issue on which the coalition broke was that of education. We know also that these frequent crises are not in the best interests of the Jewish State. They not only create confusion abroad, hinder and complicate the efforts for support of the various agencies and funds, but they also leave Israel itself...

It is an error to imagine that the perpetration of the crime of genocide is a new thing in ʹhumanʹ history. Typical always of barbaric ages, it has often manifested itself also in ages deemed civilized. Thus it was that the Phoenicians disappeared; thus the Assyrians perished. What in our time was startling was that this type of mass-murder should have persisted into the twentieth century; here, given the advantages of science and the efficiencies of organization, the thing became more ruthless than ever: an extermination which in ancient times would have taken generations, and even then never have been...

We have noted concerning ourselves that during the past number of years the reading of the Book of Esther which recounts the plot and the downfall of Haman, has recaptured for us again some of that fine literary grace, that easy consolatory pleasure, that fairy-tale conviction that all will eventually end well, which this adventurous tale brought to us in the days of our childhood. We say, the past number of years, – it wasnʹt so in the early forties. Then, as the war raged, and as the decimation of our people continued apace, the Book of Esther seemed to...

Our readers are no doubt familiar with that macabre tale of horror and impending death in which that master of the horrific, Edgar Allan Poe, described, as only he could describe, the ordeal of the pendulum and the pit. We had occasion recently to re-read this masterpiece of terror and were again made victim of Poeʹs dantesque verbal hypnotism. Only this time – for the first time – we descried in the passages and paragraphs of the inquisitional narrative a parable for our times.

For those who have gratefully forgotten the agonizing details of this story of protracted torture, it...

The usual versions of the Exodus from Egypt focus attention upon the careers of Moses and Aaron, the one as the great prototype, the other as the eloquent spokesman, of Jewish emancipation. Such is the tale as told in Holy Writ, and such as recounted in the Haggadah.

There is, however, another character in thedramatis personaeof the epic of Mizraim who, to our mind, affords also the pattern of recurrent history. It is Joseph whose adventuresome career it was that first brought the children of Israel into what was destined to become for them a land of bondage...

We must confess that, with the establishment of the State of Israel, we had expected never again to hear from the unspeakable junta of clerics and pseudo-Jews which, with typical bad taste, had organized its Judaism into a commercial compact and had dedicated itself to the ʹsaleʹ of thetaryagbehests and prohibitions as if they were so many items in Lessing Rosenwaldʹs Sears-Roebuck catalogue. When during the past number of months we had ceased to be assailed by their hissings and gnashings of teeth, we had thought that the incorporators of Judaism had disappeared forever, had skulked back into...

We must confess ourselves unable to conceal our impatience with those people who seek to explain the diminishing graph of Zionist responsiveness by alleging that the situation in Israel to-day is not as ʹdramaticʹ as it was in 1948. We doubt whether these apologists are fully aware of the implications of their thesis, whether they realize how base a slander they thus level against a folk from of yore dubbed the ʹcompassionate.ʹ

For if the fact is indeed so, if it indeed is true that American Jewry will not respond to the appeal of the harrowed and persecuted unless that...

With the celebration of the Feast of Weeks there flashes again before Jewry, as before the world, the recollection of that great event, lost in the remoteness of time, glorious and fearsome with the lightnings of Sinai, which gave to western civilization its ten basic imperatives. Neither historians, nor archaeologists, nor theologians, have been able to fix with precision the exact year in which that grand epiphany – the granting of Torah – took place; what there is of record is the anniversary date and month of that transfiguring occurrence, a date calculated as seven times seven days from the...

To-day, the world itself is in process of fission. Although the seismic break has not yet taken place, everywhere one senses, one is already able to identify, the tensions and strains which prelude some vast cataclysmic upheaval. In some quarters, it is believed that this global earthquake is inevitable, is part of the natural (sic) course of history; in others it is hoped that somehow, some way – by alleviating a stress here, by establishing a counter-balance there – the calamity may be avoided; everywhere, however – whether among those who approach this horrific anxiety head-on, or among those who...

We suppose that eventually it had to come. The state of quasi-hostility between the United Nations and the former Reich could not, in the very nature of things, continue for an eternity. No doubt the present relationship of tension between East and West hastened the formal forgiving and forgetting. We must confess, nevertheless, that we could not read the reports of peace and reconciliation without a good measure of distaste and disgust. When, moreover, these declarations were accompanied, as in some instances they were, by promise of new-born love and affection, embraces, kisses on both cheeks, and long-held warmly-grasped handclasps,...

Timed to coincide with the Arab-Israel discussions now taking place under the auspices of the un in Paris, discussions which are being conducted as through a screen – the Arabs refuse to sit at one table with those from whom they are now imploring concessions – certain elements of the American and British press have begun a campaign designed to elicit public sympathy for the Arab refugees. With such philanthropic motivation, taken in and by itself, we have no quarrel. None better than our people can understand what it means to be homeless and uprooted. We, too, would like to...

The Goethe Prize – it is reported – which is awarded annually for the furthering of a ʹsupra-national outlookʹ will go this year to Dr. Martin Buber, professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Now, here is a problem. There is no doubt but that no one better merits such a prize than Dr. Buber. Metaphysician of a philosophy of religion which, though grounded in Torah, assuredly transcends outlooks more national – Buberʹs main concern is with the I-Thou relationship, the relationship between God and man – Buber assuredly deserves this accolade. Being a philosopher, one therefore...

Is it right for the State of Israel to accept on behalf of the surviving victims of Nazism, most of whom are now citizens, and in many instances, also charges within its borders, the offer of reparations recently made by Chancellor Adenauer? That is the question which is now agitating Jewish public opinion; and it is not a question easy to resolve. That Jew would indeed be bereft of all sensitivity who did not find it distasteful to think of negotiating, or having any truck or traffic, with the heirs and assigns of the butchers of but seven years ago....

It has been reported – and subsequently modified, if not denied outright – for the which concession we are extremely grateful – that somewhere in the ranks of Mapam there is being circulated for the edification of its youngsters a book of readings from the Bible. This is a sensation in itself: Mapam, an extremely leftist but gratifyingly small party, is hardly the party that one would associate with Holy Writ. Here, however, comes the rub: these readings (from the Bible!) sedulously, meticulously, most cautiously, avoid all mention of God …

The worldʹs wonders never cease.

We have not been...

There can be nothing but admiration for the attitude adopted by the Government of the State of Israel with regard to the contract of peace recently effected between Germany and the civilized world. Ordinary people all over the world, indeed, watched with astonishment as the German Reich, but seven years ago proclaimed arch-criminal, and during the past seven years making but the feeblest gestures of contrition, was once again embraced by its former enemies, embraced and welcomed back to the fold like some dear, though erring, brother. The spectacle was certainly not one which was calculated to evoke in the...

The warfare among the beasts of the forest, unceasing and bloody, was taking its toll. One day it was a hare that fell prey to superior guile, the next day a fox that fell victim to superior force. The wolf was beaten by the bear, the bear was mauled by the tiger, the tiger devoured by the lion.

Nobody felt safe. And everywhere the complaint was the same – the inequalities of combat. The denizens of the forest were not evenly matched. In most conflicts, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. It was not only not sporting, it was fatal....

We must confess that the item adduced above evoked in us a set of mingled feelings. Our first reaction was one of excited approval; some new colour, we felt, would thus be introduced into the drabness of life; how rich and fascinating would shine the shields of Yemenite, Moroccan, Bokharan Jew! Other peoples, moreover, indulged in such self-flattery, why not the Israelis?

We recalled indeed, our experiences and our reactions, when we had first encountered the gorgeous shields of chivalry.

We resented, as if they were oblique allusions to a personal degradation, Europeʹs proud crests and scutcheons. As we moved...

Nothing so succinctly, and yet so eloquently, expresses the spirit which should move the faithful on the day of Yom Kippur as that pithy, and seemingly dogmatic, assertion which in bold black type dominates, and through cantorial rendition, informs with pathos the High Holiday Services. ʹFasting, prayers, and alms,ʹ says the rubric, ʹannul the severity of the judgment.ʹ

It seems like but another pious dictum invented by theologians to bend the spirit towards contrition and reform. Yet how psychologically shrewd, how true, how deep, this triple counsel is! For these three attitudes designed to soften the judgment of the Recording...

We gather fromAmerican Judaism, the official organ of Reform Judaism on this continent, that theological circles are now bending all their scholastic talents towards the solving of the weighty canonical problem presented by the case of Regina OʹHara. Regina OʹHara, a convert to Judaism, is intent, it appears, upon applying for admission to the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion to study for the rabbinate. Arise, then, two large questions.Quaere: May a female officiate as rabbi? Andquaere: Is it possible for an OʹHara to have the true Mosaic vocation?

This is, indeed, a knotty problem. If...

The wonderful legend, floated abroad from ʹthe seacoast of Bohemia,ʹ which tells how Rabbi Jacob Loew, in the hour of his peopleʹs need, fashioned upon the banks and out of the mud of the Moldau river, agolem, an automaton, which would do his inspired bidding, is one of the brightest fables to issue out of the darkness of Jewish diaspora history. One pauses, as one recalls the details of this great adventure in Cabbala, to wonder about the precise articulation of the tetragrammaton, the four-lettered name of God, which the audacious rabbin used to effect his miracle; one follows...

All of the holidays of the Hebrew calendar commemorate the occasions of some divine intervention. Whether it be the saga of Passover or the tale of Purim, in both one discerns the unseen hand of God. Our festivals, for the most part, are mementos of martyrdom and miracle, bondage and redemption, ordeal and wonder. Even the Book of Esther, which makes no mention of Godʹs name, remains, nevertheless, preeminently a religious tract, the record of an adventure in which mysteriously-inspired dreams work the harassment and final discomfiture of the enemy. The same is true of the accounts which provide authority...

It may be that an attempt to peer through the interstices of the Iron Curtain, even with the telescopic help of the Associated Press, is of necessity an exercise in frustration; it may be that what one distantly diagnoses as symptoms are no more than shadows evanescent, describable for an instant and then destined to disappear; it may indeed be that the sinister deductions recently drawn from what appeared to be manoeuvres distinctly anti-Jewish did do grave injustice to honest Stalinʹs right good innocent intentions. For the sake of the more than two million Jews whom he holds as hostage,...

There can be no doubt but that Stalin, forging a codicil to Marxʹs will, intends to make Antisemitism an integral part of Soviet policy. This intention of his, indeed, has been long elaborating; for the past number of years its signs and portents have been many. It is true that there was at one time a halcyon period in which the Soviet Union held it up as its proudest boast that its legislation was unique among the legislations of the world in that its statutes, and of all jurisprudence only its statutes, declared Antisemitism a criminal offence; but that was...

It was in astonishment and with a sense of the waning of the great administrative virtues which in times past served so admirably to build across the continents of the globe both theimperium Britannicumand thepax Britannica, that we read of Mr. Oliver Lyttletonʹs recent démarche with the baboons of Gambia. Colonial Secretary Lyttleton, as his record up to date has amply demonstrated, is a proconsul in the great tradition; it is all the more surprising that in his dealings with the apes of that West African colony he showed himself diminished of his usual perspicacity and judgment....

ʹ…Touching her magnanimity, her majesty, her estate royal, there was neither Alexander, nor Galba the Emperor, nor any that might be compared with her … This is she that useth the marigold for her flower, which at the rising of the sun openeth her leaves, and at the setting shutteth them, referring all her actions and endeavours to Him that ruleth the sun. This is that Caesar that first bound the crocodile to the palm tree, bridling those that sought to rein her. This is that good pelican that, to feed her people, spareth not to rend her person. Behold,...

Joined in their lives by a shared interest – their common dedication to the ideal of a renascent Israel – Herzl and Bialik, each an incomparable leader in his chosen vocation, are posthumously joined also, in the national memory, through the anniversaries of their passing. It was the month of Tammuz, – ʹTammuz yearly woundedʹ – which marked the ending of both careers, of Herzl in 1904, of Bialik in 1934.

There is no record of any intimate collaboration between these two leaders of the Zionist movement. Each appeared to cultivate only his own garden; their paths crossed, if at...

Angels, Principalities, Powers and Dominations, rejoice – for you are indeed believed in! According to a study which has been pursued in the United States for the last eight months, the preliminary conclusions of which have just been issued by Father Paul Bussard of theCatholic Digest, fully ninety-nine per cent of the American people believe in the existence of God and almost seventy per cent go so far as to postulate the hereafter of a heaven. What were the techniques and devices adopted in the canvassing of this galumphant poll, we do not know; no doubt it was through...

Canadian Jewry is most happy to join in the tributes of ceremony which this week, on the occasion of the unveiling of a statue of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, were lavished, and justly lavished, upon the memory of that immortal statesman. It will indeed rejoice all to know that now, at last, there may be encountered, in our pantheon of metropolitan monuments, the cherished figure of that beloved man; that the stranger, eager to make acquaintance with the shapers of our history, and the native son, desirous to stand in the auspicious company of our departed great, both may now, in...

Ask any Occidental, Englishman or American, what it is, apart from the occasional motive of self-interest, that has so often won his unreasoning sympathy for the Arab cause, and he will be, we think, at a loss for an answer. True, he will at first venture some reply, but so venturing he will soon discover that all these big, glib words which one summons up to bolster another peopleʹs national struggle, such as liberty, progress, self-determination, here have no pertinence at all, here issue forth only as unintended ironies. For to talk of freedom as being enjoyed by the oppressed...

The Honourable George Drew, leader of Her Majestyʹs Loyal Opposition, who but a short while ago was bent on decreasing the cost of government by millions of dollars and who was prevented from fulfilling this laudable intention by the ungrateful vote of the Canadian electorate, has seized, nonetheless, his first opportunity to add to the wealth and mintage of our land: he has coined a phrase. Inveighing in the House of Commons against the nationalizing policy of the St. Laurent administration, particularly as it affects traffic by air, Mr. Drew delivered himself of an epigram. He pronounced Liberalism to be...

Many of our readers will no doubt recall the days when the late Benito Mussolini,Duceon a balcony, was wont to inflame the Roman populace with demands, imperially enunciated, imperiously insisted upon, for ʹCorsica! Tunisia! Africa!ʹ Though the sawdust Caesar was eventually overturned under a meat-hook, his example, it would appear, still inspires emulation in the minds of certain temeritous and amnesiac statesmen. One of these is Francisco Franco, who, having displayed during the years of the last war a most remarkable caution, a most un-Castilian sense of discretion, now finds further self-restraint intolerable and has launched forth on...

It will be, no doubt, an occasion for surprise to those who have always affected to find some ineluctable association between thelex talionis(ʹan eye for an eyeʹ) and the Hebraic spirit to learn that that spirit, exercising itself for the first time in two thousand years of history through the channel of its own sovereignty, has impelled the abolition of the grossest instance of retaliatory law, the law of capital punishment. By a vote of 61 to 33, polled in the Knesseth which is the Israeli Parliament, death penalty for murder has been deleted from the statutes. The...

Seen Kelly? Here? In theJewish Chronicle? … Well, whatʹs so incredible about that? But look at the calendar and see there a contiguity that parallels, but exactly, like ahaman-taschgarnished with shamrock, the query that somehow has burst upon this page – see there the festival of Purim following within twenty-four hours upon the celebration of the Irishmenʹs St. Patrickʹs day! Exegetes, perhaps, may try to establish some esoteric connection between these two vernal days; they may point out that in the Book of Esther the curtains in the palace of Ahasueros (OʹHasueros?) were, among other colours, also...

It would appear that it is not only Homer who occasionally grows drowsy and nods. Even the genial mathematical Merlin of our generation, the incomparable Einstein, it would seem, is prone to fly off at an unorthodox tangent and deviate into a much too facile common sense. Thus, in his latest expostulation, the great scientist, wearied beyond patience by the ignorant interferences which some American politicos are wont to visit upon the otherwise tranquil investigations of science, expressed himself as regretting that he had ever chosen the vocation of scientist and as wishing, earnestly and retroactively, that he had become...

ʹWhich of the states of the earth,ʹ it might well be asked now upon any one of the current quiz progams, ʹis the most aggressive, war-mongering, and bellicose of those which to-day threaten the worldʹs peace? … Some clues: it breathes brimstone on its borders; it experiments atomically in the interior. It is hated on all its frontiers; it is advisedly barred from all contact with its neighbours. It repeatedly keeps calling for peace; it consistently keeps preparing for war. Now, which is it?ʹ

Had this question been put forward a fortnight ago, there would have been no doubt whatsoever...

Several have been the occasions when the career of Sir Winston Churchill has been considered as having reached either nadir or zenith, and the man himself deemed ready for the pages of history, headline or footnote. So was it in 1905 when the scion of Marlborough, defecting from the Tories, championed ʹthe people against the peersʹ; so was it when, during the first World War, the daring of Gallipoli miscarried; so was it again, during the regimes of Baldwin and Chamberlain, when Churchillʹs was but a voice crying in the wilderness; so was it even at the hour of greatest...

To few men is it given to enter history while they are still preoccupied with biography, and rare, indeed, is that genius who while engaged in his daily mundane tasks, sees his name made synonymous with cosmic fact. Such a one was the late Albert Einstein. They were not many who understood his esoteric theories; his basic assumptions concerning the structure of the world came to most as but an inscrutable kind of music of the spheres; few stood equal to his equations; yet all sensed by instinct, and many realized from the pragmatic uses to which his mystical hypotheses...

Until but recently the relationship which prevailed at any given time between any given number of nations could be described as belonging to one of three categories: they were either at peace, or at war, or in a state of truce. In the first, they exchanged commodities and, sometimes, ideas; in the second, they exchanged bullets; in the third, they exchanged protests.

Within the last decade, however, a fourth category has been added to the parlance of international behaviour. This is the state which is universally and aptly referred to as that of ʹthe cold war.ʹ The cold war, of...

When, at the drawing up of the Treaty of Versailles, the late President Wilson insisted, over the opposition of statesmen more conventional in habit and more cynical in thought, upon the recognition of the principle of ʹopen covenants openly arrived at,ʹ he did no more than at last bring to the attention of his colleagues the fact of the presence behind the diplomatic table of that new but unaccredited censor of negotiations, the invisible spectator, the eavesdropper with the power of veto, the Common Man. It was at this point that the twentieth century constructively passed into the heritage of...