You with fresh energies, you with the clear eye of healthy youth, you with unoppressed hearts, you at the beginning of life, you should go at your work splendidly, directly, forcefully. The real idealist is a man of action, of untiring activity. Do things and you verify what you plan. You have the privilege of youth. Have also the pride of youth. Keep it sweet, but keep it also strong.
Dr. Samuel Iglauer
THE Menorah Society appeals to me as a college graduate not only for many of its positive virtues but also for some of its negative merits. It is not in any sense a social organization, and above all it is not a secret society. Now I have my own peculiar views about secret societies in universities, and I do not believe that they tend to promote college spirit and college unity. It has been well said that in these societies those who are in any particular societies are brothers, while every one else who belongs to another society, or to no society whatever, is just a step-brother. To my mind that is not a good spirit in an American institution.
It seems to me that, having in this city a Hebrew Union College with a gifted faculty, we should establish at our University a Department of Semitics. Since the University is a public school, an institution supported by public taxation, it certainly could not affiliate directly with a sectarian institution, but I see no reason why the professors in the Hebrew College, if they are not already overworked like the students, should not be able to conduct courses at the University itself, and I believe such courses would promote the Menorah movement more than anything else you could do. I think you would attract students from far and wide to the University of Cincinnati, and you would thereby achieve one of the ends for which you are working.
Mr. Walter M. Shohl
IT is gratifying to me to attend this meeting of the Menorah, because, as the Chairman has said, I heard the flapping of the wings of the stork at its birth. I recall very well the preliminary meetings that we had when the organization of the Menorah Society at Cambridge was first spoken of. At that time I was one of the doubters; I held back. There were in Cambridge a number of societies, social primarily, that did not desire members of our faith among their number. I felt that a movement which was composed entirely of Jewish men would be mistaken for an effort at a Jewish fraternity that was to take the place of the fraternities in which we were not welcome. The other men, however, felt that we could have a society the purposes of which had nothing to do with social matters, and that we could bring out all that was good in Jewish matters of culture and develop a society to promote those interests. So at first somewhat reluctantly, I joined in with the movement, and the result has justified their farsightedness, and I am sorry now that I was only a "trailer" in the beginning.
The position of the Menorah movement and what it stands for calls to mind a story that was told in Montreal a couple of years ago by Lord Haldane, who came to America to attend a meeting of the American Bar Association. A part of the story was recited in verse (which I do not recall exactly) and had to do with an Englishman who was taken prisoner in one of the countries of the Far East, and was offered his choice between conversion to the religion of his captors or death. He was a man who had no particular religious feelings; he was not religious when at home. However, he felt that first and foremost he was an Englishman and that if he were to do anything base it would reflect upon all those ideals which were so dear to him, and therefore he cast in his lot and chose against the change of religion. So, too, with some of us who perhaps are not religious in a formal way; the realization of the great things that have been accomplished in the past by Jews, the Jewish historical background, is in itself a shield to us, and the realization of what Judaism is and stands for must act to prevent us from doing something that would be unworthy of ourselves and of the religion of which we are a part.
Dr. Kaufman Kohler
THIS comes rather unawares, but I wish to be very brief in stating that, while I listened to the very interesting and suggestive remarks that were made all along this table, and also on recalling what we heard last night, I feel glad, after all, from the point of view of the Hebrew Union College, that the Intercollegiate Menorah Association has come here to make propaganda for its work, at the same time receiving perhaps new direction and new ideas about the work they have so nobly begun. The fact that the work—started, as we heard, at Harvard in 1906—has made such progress shows that at least there was something in the young Jewish student at the colleges that called for the creation of such an association and such kind of work. Perhaps I may say that those who had their misgivings as to the tendencies of the Menorah Association are now at least informed that some of these misgivings or suspicions were not well founded. I personally will say that I had the impression that there was too much of nationalism or Zionism behind the movement, and that the movement was not, from the point of view of the Hebrew Union College or my humble self, one deserving encouragement and support. I have learned to change some of my views and some of my impressions as to the purpose and intention of this movement. There is a well-known quotation, for those who know a little German:
| "Das sind die Weisen, |
| Die vom Irrtum zur Wahrheit reisen; |
| Das sind die Narren, |
| Die beim Irrtum beharren." |