Unobserved, a date of great historical importance has been inscribed in the history of American Jewry. On the first of July the new quota law, based on the 1890 census, reducing the possibility for Jewish immigration to the United States to almost nothing, went into effect. After the stormy protest meetings, pleading committees, individual appeals and aroused public sentiment, there came a lull. With one stroke of the pen, history was made.
A period of thirty years of Jewish immigration to the New World, averaging about 100,000 yearly, has come to a close. It can safely be said that this period will be recorded as the most remarkable and outstanding in the age-old and complex process of Jewish transformation. Upon the thin layer of the original Spanish and German Jewish settlers in the United States have come layers of Jews from all corners of the world, merging slowly into one American Jewish community, creating new forms of Jewish life, opening new avenues of Jewish thought and even making new Jewish customs and traditions.
What course will American Jewry take now that its reservoir of vitality has been cut off? This question has been correctly answered by one who has seriously thought on the matter. While the new change is to be regretted, there is no reason for despairing. American Jewry has already developed a sufficiently strong element of spiritual leadership and communal responsibility to assure its further inner growth.
Jewish history has seen the development of a distinct Arabian-Jewish type, succeeded by a Spanish-Jewish type, which has in turn been transformed into English-Jewish, French-Jewish, German-Jewish, Polish-Jewish and Russian-Jewish types. Jewish history is now preparing for the emergence of the distinct American-Jewish type.
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That there is no need for worrying over the future of American Jewry is also the belief of the champion of the doctrines of our Bible, the always-original democrat, William Jennings Bryan.
While the Democratic Convention, in the City of New York, was floundering between the deep sea of innumerable ballots and the evil spirit of the Ku Klux Klan, inspiration came to it from that ancient source of salvation, the Bible. Are the progressive and democratic elements of America to come out in an open fight against the hooded knights of religious prejudice and racial discrimination, endangering perhaps the outcome of the presidential campaign, or are they to compromise? The forces of American democracy were split into two distinct halves. These halves must be welded together again. How can it be done? Who can do it? It was William Jennings Bryan who then pleaded:
“The Jews do not need this resolution. They have Moses. They have Elijah. They have Elisha, who was able to draw back the curtain and show upon the mountain tops an invisible host greater than a thousand Ku Klux Klans.”
And so it happened that the spirit of Moses, Elisha and Elijah rested upon a woman, who decided the outcome; it was recorded that the resolution against the Ku Klux Klan, condemning it by name, was lost by a majority of less than one vote, cast by a woman delegate.
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That the spirit of Moses, Elijah and Elisha will be perpetuated – and again through the efforts of the women – can be safely predicted when we forget for a while the noise and fanfare of the political conventions and stop to listen to another kind of convention.
I have in mind the convention of the Jewish women’s organization of America, Hadassah, which has just opened in Pittsburgh. 17,000 Jewish women are quietly organized for the carrying on of a splendid humanitarian and Jewish work. The organization, under the able leadership of Miss Henrietta Szold has, in the last year, gained over 5,000 new members, an increase of almost 50% over its previous membership. For its special work, aside from the contributions that its members make to various Jewish communal undertakings, the organization has been able to collect $250,000 during the last year.
The organization has to its credit the remarkable progress in sanitary conditions in Palestine, and the curative and preventive work among the inhabitants of that country. It intends, according to the plans outlined by its president, to assume even greater responsibility. Its immediate intention is to help maintain the newly proposed hospital in Tiberias. Another and more distant plan is to take over the entire medical work in Palestine.
Surely the spirit of Moses, Elijah and Elisha rests with the work and efforts of this unique Jewish women’s organization.
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