The ideas in which Judaism was wont to spell itself out in the past are no longer at home in the Weltanschauung of the modern man. What prevented the Reform movement from becoming a real reformation and a vitalization of Judaism was that it sought to adjust Judaism to a Weltanschauung which had already begun to grow obsolete. We have to reckon with all that has been learned in the meantime concerning human society and the place of religion in it. When one comes to a strange land, and has with him only the coin of his native country, he must calculate in terms of the currency of the land he is in, if he wants to know whether or not he has enough to live on. Can we Jews afford to live spiritually upon our heritage? That can only be answered if we learn what that heritage is equivalent to in the current mental coin of the modern man. If we do not wish to be cut off from the stream of living thought, if we do not want to be spiritually starved, we Jews must know not so much what Judaism meant twenty centuries ago, nor even a century ago, but what it is to mean to us of today. [Illustration: Signature: MMKaplan] 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 [Illustration: _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_