Editors' Note.—In articles to follow, Professor Kaplan will give his conception of "What Judaism Is."
The Jewish Student in Our Universities
A Menorah Prize Essay
By Morris J. Escoll
MORRIS J. ESCOLL (born in Russia, 1893, came to America in 1896), graduate of Stuyvesant High School, New York (1910), student at Columbia (1910-'12) where he won the Peithologian Medal for a Freshman Essay; worked as farm hand; and since 1914 a student in the Cornell College of Agriculture. The present paper is a somewhat revised version of the Essay with which he won the Cornell Menorah Prize last June.
THE remarkable adaptability of the Jew to his environment has been at once his strength and his weakness. His strength, in that it provided a variable cloak to shelter him in storm on the one hand,—on the other, to deck him seasonably, as it were, for the onward journey, when days were fair; his weakness, in that it has often led him to forget that the cloak was but raiment;—"and is not the body more than raiment?" Of strength in storm we have had example enough for twenty centuries—such example as is unique in history; of what is more rare, strength in days of fair weather, we are to expect a supreme example today, and in America, in the American Universities let us say, where the cloak of adaptability is most free and seasonable—a supreme example of strength, or of weakness.
The Cloak of Adaptability