hile the Jews in free
and civilized lands are only half Jews. Now against this, we of the
Hebrew Union College, we who represent progressive or reformed
Judaism, must protest. We must insist that the Jewish race, the Jewish
people or nation, if you want to call it so, can form only the body;
Judaism, the Jewish religion, is the soul. And we will always stand
not merely for the body, not merely for the material side, not merely
for race, which is the lowest kind of life, but for the spirit, the
soul of Judaism, and that is its religious truth.

PROF. JULIAN MORGENSTERN

I believe that it is one of the positive aims of the Menorah Society
to recognize the Jewish side of much that enters, or should enter,
into our daily life, to develop our full consciousness of all that is
essentially and fundamentally Jewish, and thus enable us to live
positive and constructive Jewish lives. It is a noble aim, to which I
unrestrictedly subscribe. Whenever I hear public speakers or writers
pat Jews and Judaism on the back, and patronizingly tell us, "Oh, you
Jews are all right," I am, as no doubt most of us are, deeply
chagrined, to use a mild expression. What we want is not that others
should appreciate us and tell us that we are all right. What we want,
and what we need, is that we should appreciate ourselves and that we
should take ourselves seriously and at our full value. Not that we
should over-appreciate ourselves and think ourselves alone the salt of
the earth. There is such a thing as over-appreciation that must in the
end lead to futility and vanity. But equally, there is such a thing as
self-depreciation, and to a certain extent I cannot but feel that we
Jews have been more or less guilty of that in the past, have more or
less, particularly in our college and university life, assumed a
deprecating attitude, apologizing as it were for our existence as
Jews, and, probably unconsciously, have kept the fact of our Judaism
in the background, and suffered our education and our culture to
influence almost everything but our Jewish knowledge and our Jewish
life.

For right appreciation, which shall be neither over-appreciation nor
under-appreciation, but true appreciation, based upon a correct
estimation of all essentials, the first requisite is knowledge,
thorough knowledge of all conditions, forces and influences. And the
second requisite is pride, pride in this knowledge and in the object
of this knowledge. And this, translate