WHAT WILL SAVE THE JEWS?
Mayer, Milton
What Will Save The Jews? 'A Hard And Brave Doctrine THE JEW IN OUR DAY, by Waldo Frank. With an Introduction by Reinhold Neibuhr and a reply to the introduction by Mr. Frank. Duell, Sloan, and...
...Reviewed by Milton Mayer ASMALL, excessively repetitious, and not too readable a book in any case, The Jew in Our Day contains one of the few great debates that have found their way into recent print...
...Neibuhr and Frank are good men and true, concerned with truth and goodness...
...They abandoned their mission for conformity to the dominant materialism that is burning out civilization, and they find themselves thoroughtly unpopular parasites on the monster they refused to fight...
...Frank is a Jew, denouncing the Jews for having abandoned their historical mission of infusing the body of democracy with the spirit of God...
...Their argument, at any time, but especially in a time of sophistical and desperate expediency, is epic...
...and, as the Gentiles writhe to escape destruction they will shake off their parasites if they can...
...Frank's collected essays on the Jews all add up to the argument that the Jew will be saved when he saves his own soul—and will save all human freedom in doing so...
...They have got to lead the Gentiles back to Christianity, or the Gentiles will destroy themselves...
...It takes a passing brave man to attack an oppressed people for being no better than their oppressors...
...Frank, though he lacks the verbal fire of the prophets, breathes it in every pedestrian phrase...
...It goes without saying that he is not popular with the modern Jew— what he calls the inertial Jew—the capitalist, materialist, conformist Jew who speaks for bourgeois Jewry...
...They will die certainly— are dying certainly—if they don't...
...The fact that he no less lightly castigates the American Gentile, who has in his life and aspirations renounced Roger Williams and Abraham Lincoln, does not reduce his unpopularity with his fellow-Jews...
...Frank is brave...
...Frank calls upon the Jews to seize once more the prophetic vision and to live...
...Duell, Sloan, and Pearce...
...This is, as I say, a hard and a brave doctrine, and Mr...
...They have let the Gentiles crucify Jesus—and Isaiah with him...
...2.50...
...But Mr...
...The Messrs...
Vol. 9 • June 1945 • No. 25
