World War, 1914-1918 -- Atrocities; World War, 1914-1918 -- Hospitals; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
These races, in their weakness and poverty, have been unable to swing
back to their own deep center of consciousness. Unaided, it is doubtful
if they will ever raise their buried life from its sleep. The Jewish
nation is the only dispersion among us which has gathered its will
and recovered its self-consciousness enough to give us any promising
movement. They are slowly recognizing what is being done to their
young. They begin to see that their nation is losing its one priceless
jewel, the possession of spiritual insight. In the movement which is
spreading through the day schools for teaching young Jews the great
ethical tradition of their people, in their educational alliances, in
the Menorah Association, in the Zionist Movement, in the writings of
Brandeis, Kallen and Bourne, they are showing the first glimmerings of
statesmanship and making the first application of intelligence to our
commercialized cosmopolitan materialistic country which we have had
since we passed on from "Anglo-Saxon" Protestant civilization. May
their grip on their nationality never grow less. May the clear program
which they have constructed against the drift and rush of our careless
life seize the imagination of Italian and Serb and Bohemian. So and no
otherwise, we shall at last have a spiritual basis for our civilization.
Frank acceptance of the fact of dual nationality leads to such clear
statement as Randolph Bourne has given us in _The Menorah Journal_ for
December, 1916. He shows the fallacy of the "melting pot" idea, which
attempts to knead the whole population into an undefined colorless
mass, labeled American. In place of that undesirable and absurd
consummation, he offers a coöperation of cultures. "America has become
a vast reservoir of dispersions," and Coöperative Americanism will meet
"the demands of the foreign immigré who wishes freedom to preserve his
heritage at the same time that he coöperates loyally with all other
nationals in the building up of America."
What is Coöperative Americanism? Mr. Bourne answers that it is "an
ideal of a freely mingling society of peoples of very different racial
and cultural antecedents, with a common political allegiance and common
social ends, but with free and distinctive cultural allegiances which
may be placed anywhere in the world that they like. If the Jews have
been the first international race, I look to America to be the first
international nation."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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