The Jewish Daily News · 11 September 1918

CP-1918-006

The Modern Protest Rabbis

Transcribed from the clipping

“The Dispatch sent by Rabbi Ephraim Frisch of the New Synagogue, this city, to President Wilson, protesting against his endorsement of Zionism, is similar to the protest of the rabbis twenty-two years ago, when Herzl called together the first Zionist Congress. The few reform rabbis who have gained their knowledge of Judaism from German-Jewish reformers, or better said, assimilators, are very ill advised when they—as Rabbi Frisch, their spokesman, did—assailed the loyalty of American Zionists… With the exception of one or two, the others are blatant ignoramuses; and, which is worse, they absolutely decline to learn. They are theorists, and like all theorists, refuse to face facts squarely and honestly. We grant them the right to their opinion, but when they tell the President that the loyalty of Zionists is to be questioned, then they stand before the world branded as miserable slanderers… President Wilson does not need to be told who is loyal. He knows Louis D. Brandeis; he knows Julian W. Mack; he knows Stephen S. Wise; he knows Felix Frankfurter… No one will doubt the Americanism and loyalty of Theodore Roosevelt. He, too, has endorsed a Jewish State in Palestine. What unutterable impertinence on the part of these rabbis! Chutzpah is their long suit, their stock and trade. Representing a dying minority, they want to make the world believe that their voice is the voice of American Israel. They are fooling no one but themselves. There will be a Jewish State in Palestine, protest rabbis or no protest rabbis… For twenty-five years and more the Zionist Movement has gone on, growing from strength to strength. Where are the protest-rabbis of those days? Where the modern protest-rabbis will be. They are forgotten; they were execrated. History repeats itself.”

Context added by this archive

1918, in a New York Yiddish daily with English pages: the Zionist answer to the rabbis who wrote to Wilson against Zionism, printed as a front-page editorial. The archive carries the anti-Zionist letters; this is what was said back, in the same decade, at the same volume.

Cite this item

"The Modern Protest Rabbis," The Jewish Daily News, 11 September 1918. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1918-006. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1918-006

Elsewhere in the archive

• British Forces Make Advance In PalestineBellingham Herald · 15 February 1918 · the same year
• British Forces Capture NablusFreeport Journal-Standard · 4 March 1918 · the same year
• SEES ROOM FOR FEW IN PALESTINE COLONYThe New York Times · 29 May 1918 · the same year