individuals.

This refreshed realization is by no means of negative value. It is
rather a positive benefit, and should be fixed in the minds of all men
who are striving collectively for various ends. For political parties,
socialists, suffragists, all and sundry reformers, this realization
should be the starting point from which to readjust programs when the
cataclysm is over.

For the Jewish people this realization is peculiarly significant.
Though the outlines of the general situation the world over are as yet
indistinct, some problems of the Jews have already been brought out
into sharp relief. Like the rest of mankind, the Jew has had his eyes
cruelly opened, and the clear boundary between truth and delusion
which this war has made should be stamped upon his memory, to remain
vivid after negative feelings of wrongs and disappointments have been
forgotten.

_The Delusion of Assimilation_

IN the past hundred years, the Jew has had more reason than at any
time since the dispersal to consider himself assimilated in all save
the Slav countries. Not that anti-Semitism had disappeared; but it had
seemed to be, and indeed is, so much less important when viewed
against the background of the Jew's positive advance to light and
freedom. Explained more recently as a survival of many prejudices
which do not die overnight, including the old religious differences,
physical and mental antipathies, economic jealousies--the force of
anti-Semitism was not only weakened by the increasing breadth of
vision, the cosmopolitanism on which the world has plumed itself, but
dwarfed by the achievement of the Jew himself. He has come out of his
Ghetto; softened by a more liberal attitude on the part of his
individual neighbor, he has largely laid aside his resentment and his
hostility. There was a feeling that adaptation and assimilation had
advanced so far that the Jew, by his own progress and with the consent
of his neighbor, had become a citizen of his community, differentiated
from the rest, if at all, only by what he chose to keep of his
religious belief. Those who have most zealously argued for
assimilation as the sole solution of the Jewish problem have had
little need of late to push their gospel further; the process seemed
to be taking excellent care of itself. But after all, it was not real.
A drastic crisis like the present one was required to brand it as
delusion. The attitude of the occasional individual was construed as