te of Stuyvesant High School, New York (1910),
student at Columbia (1910-'12) where he won the Peithologian Medal for
a Freshman Essay; worked as farm hand; and since 1914 a student in the
Cornell College of Agriculture. The present paper is a somewhat
revised version of the Essay with which he won the Cornell Menorah
Prize last June._]

THE remarkable adaptability of the Jew to his environment has been at
once his strength and his weakness. His strength, in that it provided
a variable cloak to shelter him in storm on the one hand,--on the
other, to deck him seasonably, as it were, for the onward journey,
when days were fair; his weakness, in that it has often led him to
forget that the cloak was but raiment;--"and is not the body more than
raiment?" Of strength in storm we have had example enough for twenty
centuries--such example as is unique in history; of what is more rare,
strength in days of fair weather, we are to expect a supreme example
today, and in America, in the American Universities let us say, where
the cloak of adaptability is most free and seasonable--a supreme
example of strength, or of weakness.

_The Cloak of Adaptability_

ONE is at first reluctant to single out the Jew from his fellows at
college. He seems in no manner different from them. He studies with
them, eats with them, plays ball with them. He writes editorials for
the college paper; he competes in the oratorical contests. One, for
example, is a member of the school orchestra; another, perhaps the son
or the grandson of an immigrant from Germany, leads the cheers at the
track meet; another, himself an immigrant from Russia, plays on the
chess team and is one of the brilliant scholars in his class. This
last does, at present, have something of the stranger about him, but
before long, no doubt, his speech will have become more smooth, his
trousers will have begun to show a crease; he will have become quite
an interesting and regular figure at the various reform and ethical
club meetings at the university, and he will begin to be seen quite
frequently in the company of his gentile classmates--even in the
company of his German-Jewish cousin. Wonderful, indeed, the country
that can so readily attire its adopted children, and, as the saying
goes, make them feel at home; wonderful, perhaps, the race that,
through centuries of degradation, has kept alive, though often latent
indeed, the potentialities of equal partnership with the most
enligh