Reform Jews alike. It is not merely a religious but a civic problem.”
That is separatism and exclusivism as an educational program, and its results cannot help being a cloud of difference such as this article has in part disclosed. The New York Kehillah, through its Bureau of Education, is giving “a purely religious training to 200,000 Jewish children,” the religious training being, of course, not what is generally understood by that term, but a training in ideas of racial superiority and separateness.
This difference is strikingly illustrated in Jewish fiction recently. To love a Christian maiden is sinful; this is the theme of all sorts of stories, sketches and editorials appearing these days. But James Gibbons Huneker, in a sketch extravagantly praised by Jewish critics, shows how deep this idea of separateness is when he makes Yaankely Ostrowicz say: “As a child I trembled at the sound of music and was taught to put my finger in my ears when profane music, Goy music, was played.” This is the root idea: All Gentile life and institutions are “profane.” It is the Jews’ unceasing consciousness of the Goy that constitutes the disease of Judaism, this century-long tradition of separateness.
There is no such thing as anti-Semitism. There is, however, much anti-Goyism. In England, Germany, France, America, Russia, there is no anti-Arab sentiment of which anyone knows. None of the Semite peoples have been distinguished by the special dislike of any other people. There is no reason why anyone should dislike the Semites.
It is very strange, however, that the Semitic people should be a unit in disliking the Jews. Palestine, which still has only a handful of Jews, is peopled by Semites who so thoroughly dislike the Jews that serious complications are threatening the Zionistic advances being made there. This surely is not anti-Semitism. Semites are not against Semites. But they are at odds with Jews.
When Aryan and Semite are kept conscious through many centuries that the Jew is another race, and when it is known that neither Aryan nor Semite are touchy
