The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 | Page 7

of the Menorah Journal, to provide an opportunity for a more general spread of the high ideals of the Menorah Societies among our college youth. When I received some time ago a copy of the publication entitled "The Menorah Movement," I noted with particular pleasure the progress the Menorah Societies had already made. After an attentive perusal of the contents of this publication, I felt as if a copy ought to be placed in the hands of every Jewish college and university student, and I myself distributed a number of copies for propaganda purposes. The Menorah Societies are to be congratulated upon their new venture in issuing the Journal, upon which I wish them every success. It is to be hoped that the Menorah Journal will help the Jewish student to understand what Judaism means and what as Jews we should strive for to become useful and worthy citizens of this country. We shall have to face increasing problems because of the deplorable war in Europe, which so tragically affects our co-religionists there, and it will require much devotion and understanding on our part to properly deal with the conditions which will necessarily arise. The Menorah Journal should freely discuss these conditions, so as to inspire its readers with the desire to aid and the courage needed in the situation which is facing us. Thus, by "spreading light," the Journal can greatly assist the Menorah movement, and render efficient service in and outside of the university. Let me wish Godspeed to your new publication and its managers.
[Illustration: Signature: Jacob H. Schiff]
From Dr. Stephen S. Wise
Rabbi of the Free Synagogue, New York
[Illustration]
I REJOICE to learn of the establishment of an organ by the Menorah Association. The Menorah Journal will, I take it, serve the threefold purpose of keeping the various groups of the Menorah throughout the universities of the land in constant touch with one another, of interpreting the ideals of the Menorah to widening circles of the Jewish youth, and of confirming anew, from time to time, the loyalty of the Menorah men to the Menorah ideal.
A truly great Jew said about fifteen years ago that a high self-reverence had transformed arme Judenjungen into stolze junge Juden. I believe that the Menorah movement in this land is in part the cause and in other part the token of a transformation among young American Jews to-day parallel to that cited by Theodor Herzl. It marks a sea-change from the self pitying Jewish youth, immeasurably "sorry for himself" because of his exclusion from certain dominantly unfraternal groups, to the Jewish youth self-regarding, in the highest sense of the term, self-knowing, self-revering. That the self-respecting young Jew command the respect of the world without is of minor importance by the side of the outstanding fact that he has ceased to measure himself by the values which he imagined the unfriendly elements of the world without had set upon him.
The Menorah movement is welcome as a proof of a new order in the life of the young college Jew. He has come to see at last that it is comic, in large part, to be shut out from the Greek letter fraternities of the Hellenes and the Barbarians, but that it is tragic, in large part, to shut himself out from the life of his own people. For it is from his own people that he must draw his vision and spiritual sustenance if he is to live a life of self-mastery rather than the life of a contemptible parasite rooted nowhere and chameleonizing everywhere. Time was when their fellow-Jews half excused the college men, who drifted away from the life of Israel, as if the burden of the Jewish bond were too much for the untried and unrobust shoulders of our Jewish college men, as if their intellectual and moral squeamishness led to inevitable revolt against association with their much-despised and wholly misunderstood Jewish fellows. Now we see, and our younger brothers of the Menorah fellowship have caught the vision, that no Jew can be truly cultured who Jewishly uproots himself, that the man who rejects the birthright of inheritance of the traditions of the earliest and virilest of the cultured peoples of earth is impoverishing his very being. The Jew who is a "little Jew" is less of a man.
The Menorah lights the path for the fellowship of young Israel, finely self-reverencing. Long be that rekindled light undimmed!
[Illustration: Signature: Stephen S. Wise]

A Call to the Educated Jew
BY LOUIS D. BRANDEIS
[Illustration: Louis D. Brandeis (born in Louisville, Ky., in 1856), lawyer and publicist, is a distinguished leader in the voluntary profession of "public servant." His extraordinary record of unselfish, genuine achievement in behalf of the public interest--for shorter hours of labor, savings bank insurance, protection against monopoly, against increase in railroad rates, etc.,--gives