strange
that the rest of the world should regard the Jew as alien when he
cannot but hold himself as such?

It would seem that this argument leads along a straight path towards
Zionism as its conclusion. But practical Zionism, like all other
programs of reconstruction, must await a time which will admit of
reconstruction, and that is not the present. It may be that when this
war is concluded, world conditions will have so completely changed
that Zionism and its geographic program will no longer be the answer
to the problem of Jewry. All that is certain of it now is its
uncertainty. But the spirit of which Zionism is the expression, and
which has made of it more than a mere experiment in colonization,
still remains, emphasized by the self-realization to which the Jews
have been brought in the present conflict.

_The Persistence of the Jewish Faith_

IN every crisis, even in those which have swept whole nations from
existence, the Jew has always found himself with one inalienable
possession--his faith. There is something mystifying about the
persistence through so many vicissitudes of a religion which commands
respect from neighbors who see in it a powerful inspiration, while the
Jew himself, especially the Jew more fortunately placed in the general
community, endeavors so often to cast it off as outworn and
impracticable. It is the Jew himself who has misled the rest of the
world into a delusion. He has seemed to consider himself, and the
faith with which he is bound up, inferior. In his endeavor to take on
the color of his environment, he has sought to lay aside all that was
old, and of this the religion of his fathers was a part. But a faith
as strong and as far-reaching as Judaism cannot be dropped out of the
life into which it has been ingrained, and hence the Jew has been hard
put to cover it up, to hide it, or to attempt its modification to fit
the fashion in religions. The inevitable reaction on the non-Jewish
part of the community has been a feeling of mystification, and,
following on that, suspicion and distrust.

It is this which has undermined confidence in the Jews as a
people--their negation of that which is their valuable heritage. For
Judaism is not merely tradition, a thing to be reverenced as a relic;
it is a thing to be put to everyday use. This practical and vitalized
Judaism is the real salvation for which the Jews have been groping,
all the while under the delusion that it was anywhere but nea