U.S. JEWS HYSTERICAL OVER THE MIDDLE EAST

Editor WILLIAM ZUKERMAN, in the biweekly review, JEWISH NEWSLETTER:

THERE cannot be the slightest doubt that a state of mind very much like that of Israel now prevails among American Jews. There is a fanatical certainty abroad that there is only one truth and that Israel is the sole custodian of it. No distinction is made between the Jews of the world and Israel, and not even between the Israeli government and Israel. Israeli statesmen and their policies are assumed to be inviolate and above criticism. There is a frightening intolerance of opinions differing from those of the majority, a complete disregard of reason, and a yielding to the emotions of a stampeding herd.

There is only one important difference between the Israeli and the American Jews. In Israel, the outburst of emotionalism, as far as one can judge from outside, has a basis in reality. It wells from the hidden springs of a disillusioned people who were promised security and peace and find themselves in a war trap. The American-Jewish brand of hysteria is entirely without roots in the realities of American-Jewish life. It is completely artificial, manufactured by the Zionist leaders, and almost mechanically foisted on a people who have no cause for hysteria by an army of paid propagandists as a means of advancing a policy of avowed political pressure and of stimulating fund raising. Never before has a propaganda campaign in behalf of a foreign government been planned and carried out more blatantly and cynically, in the blaze of limelight and to the fanfare of publicity, than the present wave of hysteria now being worked up among American Jews.

AMERICANS SHOULD STOP BAITING INTELLECTUALS

Bishop JOHN J. WRIGHT of Worcester, Mass., in a Founders’ Day sermon at St. Louis University:

IT makes little difference why so many Catholics have conformed with the prevailing patterns of anti-intellectualism in our day. Such conformity may be part of the pattern by which our people have in all things sought to demonstrate how thoroughly American they are. In any case, it is unfortunate both for us and for America. Such a suspicious contempt for the intellectual life is far from being a Catholic phenomenon. It is a kink in the American character generally. It is the more unbecoming in Catholics, however, because it is so utterly out of harmony with any authentic

Catholic tradition, and it is therefore the more painful that it should reveal itself on public questions and in community life as so entrenched among us.

Perhaps it is necessary for us to develop a special patience with the bright and sometimes irritatingly brilliant, a patience comparable to that which we have virtuously tried to have toward the dull. Perhaps it is needed that we be slow to label [as] “revolutionaires,” or liberals in any unfavorable sense, those who have many ideas, including occasional disturbing ideas, instead of a mere comfortable few. Perhaps it were well if we preached as often on intellectual sloth as we tend to preach on intellectual pride.

The dangers of intellectual pride are many and grave, and we do well to discipline ourselves and our students in the moral and ascetical controls of this as of all other vices. But the dangers of intellectual stagnation are not less grievous both for individual personality and for the common good. The wrath of the stupid has laid waste the world quite as often as has the craft of the bright.

ROBERT E. SHERWOOD: A COLLEAGUE’S EULOGY

Playwright MAXWELL ANDERSON, in a funeral oration spoken in St. George’s Episcopal Church, Manhattan, by Actor ALFRED LUNT:

WE all have to come to terms with death, all of us who live long enough to know that it happens, long enough to welcome it or fear it. In this scientific age most of us accept the biological doctrine that birth and death are the essential machinery of evolution, reciprocal phases that make it possible for a species to change, perhaps to improve, over long periods of years. But that takes none of the heartbreak out of it, none of the sense of needless loss. And there are some few in every generation whom we would like to see exempt from the general law.

Some few among us seem to be successful experiments, much too valuable to be discarded lightly in the vast game of trial and error in which we are all discarded, in which we may indeed lead to something but may never, any one of us, be anything permanent. If we are to choose out of the men we thought worthy to survive beyond their times, our lists would be brief and they would not be the same, but Robert Sherwood would stand high in the balloting.

When we say that we have lost incalculably in intelligence, humor, and human kindness, we can see Bob’s face, brooding for a moment before he can find and utter his implacable, unanswerable comment on these trite phrases.

He has escaped us now, as all escape into death, both from friends and enemies. But the memory of his face, his voice, his wit that seemed to gather slowly like a storm and flash with its lightning, these are still strongly with us, and there is none among us that doesn’t have a sentence or phrase or episode etched on his cortex to remind him of what manner of man Sherwood was. No stranger could ever encounter Bob without becoming aware that he was in the presence of a formidable brain and personality. No friend of Bob’s ever found him lacking in warmth, sympathy or time when there were troubles to be met. Though he was no opportunist, though he said what he thought whenever it was useful, he made few enemies. Many stood in awe of him because of his deft and pungent tongue, but apt as he was in attack or retort, Sherwood was readier still to give mercy, happier to be tolerant than to be angry.

In the American theater the death of Sherwood has an effect comparable to the removal of a major planet from a solar system. Nothing will be the same for any of us, near or far, from now on. There is no disguising that the death of Robert Sherwood is a heavy misfortune for us and for our times. We wish the dice could have fallen the other way. It was a better world when we had him with us.

STEVENSON’S CANDIDACY: TWO VIEWS

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS:

IT’S high time, says Mr. Also Ran of ’52, for the Democrats “to resume the executive direction of our national affairs” -meaning for the nation to go back to the grand old days of war, inflation, government by crony and crook, White House seizure of private property, and all the rest of it.

THE WASHINGTON POST AND TIMES HERALD :

THERE should be a sense of reassurance in the country that Adlai E. Stevenson has announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination next year. He has demonstrated a wisdom and a degree of responsibility too seldom found in politicians, and he is a man of principle and intelligence. If the Democrats choose him again, and if the Republicans also are as wise and as fortunate as they were in 1952, the country may face the forthcoming campaign with equanimity. Mr. Stevenson appears today to be almost the ideal leader from the Democratic viewpoint, for he combines liberalism with moderation and conservatism with understanding. He fits the mood of the times as well as any Democrat on the scene today.