to
continent. Who will decide which raises the more serious problem, the
involuntary migration of the hapless many or the voluntary imitation
of the world by an unhappy few? There has really been more than a
migration, for innumerable hosts have suddenly been compelled not only
to wander from one continent to another but to leave one world behind
them and to enter into a wholly new world.

The move is not merely from Russia or Roumania, Galicia or the Levant
to America; it is a plunge into a new world-life with all that such
sudden sea-change involves. This transplantation to strange climes and
an alien life results in many cases in the tragedy of utter
misunderstanding and alienation between parent and children, a tragedy
remaining for some Zangwill to portray. But it is not only the homes
of the poor and the oppressed Jews the texture of which has greatly
altered within a generation. For within the homes of the well-to-do in
Israel a graver and a sadder peril has come to threaten as a result of
the repudiation, though it be implicit, of parental responsibility at
its highest and of filial duty at its finest, which repudiation in
truth is sequent upon the abandonment of the ancient and long
unwearied idealism of the Jew.

If the homes of the poor are endangered from without, the home of the
rich is in peril from within. Prosperity and its abandonment of the
highest have undermined the home to a degree beyond the possibility of
the effect of adversity. If it behoove children not to be over-insistent
upon their parents accepting their ways and becoming exactly like them,
it is trebly necessary for children to understand that foreignism in
parents does not justify them in compelling parents to assimilate the
externals of the new world and its new life. Under these circumstances,
parents have a peculiar right to be themselves, to insist upon the
essentials of their own _modus vivendi_, to cherish and maintain the
things by which they lived in a past arbitrarily cut off.

It ought to be said that the Jewish home has been more menaced by the
life of the world into which Israel has in some part entered than by
any other circumstance. The truth is that the Jew's home is become a
part of the world and in its new orientation (or occidentalization)
has lost its other-wordly touch or nimbus. Thus Israel never really
found it necessary to stress filial obedience. The latter has always
been one of the things taken for granted. S