in the election of class
officers the Jews have been slighted; at the class dinner a Jew was
insulted; one fellow was refused accommodations at a student
rooming-house because he was a Jew; and the sensitive young man begins
to feel as though there were but two divisions of people at the
University after all: Jews and everybody else.

_The Perennial Burden of the Jew_

BUT it is unfair and ungrateful to speak thus of the American
University. All superstition and prejudice may not have disappeared
here; enough it is that they tend to disappear so rapidly. But what of
the large country outside the university? What of the growing Jewries
in our cities? What of the Jew in the little hamlet carrying his pack
of tinware from door to door; he is so eager to earn an honest dollar
for a wife, a daughter, perhaps for a son at college; so eager to find
him a home like that of the earlier non-Jewish immigrants who buy his
wares; yet why must he overstrain his virtues before them, break
through the ice, as the saying goes, and clear himself--why? for being
a Jew. Evidently, others are taken as good until they prove themselves
bad; the Jew is bad until he proves himself good. Should some other
Jewish trader come to the same locality and commit some wrong,
overcharge a shilling on the price of a kettle, for example, the first
Jew must be made to feel ashamed of it, for it was not the other man
who did the wrong, but the "Jew in him." Evidently, again, the Jewish
problem is not of the individual, but of the race. Must the Wandering
Jew bear a perennial burden?

But even if this problem were solved (it is possible for all the Jews
in America to be in time regarded on equal terms with their neighbors
or even to be assimilated altogether with them), what of the Jews in
Russia, in Roumania, in Galicia? How long must we wait for them to
assimilate or to become free and equal sons of a fatherland? Surely we
shall not suggest that it is well for them to continue forever an
alien people in those lands. And even if this problem too were solved,
if the Jews of Russia, Roumania, and Galicia were to become free and
equal sons of a fatherland, if the Jews all over the world were to be
taken in as brothers by their neighbors, is it enough? Are we to be
satisfied with this alone? "Hills, cottages, home and country"--is not
all this but raiment? What of the body, what of the Jewish soul?

_The Three Types of Jewish Students: (1) The "No-Jew"_