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There are two schools of Zionist economics. The school led by Chaim Weizmann, 55, and Louis Lipsky, 53 would send Jews to Palestine and there create work for them. The genesis of this school is in sentiment—to help Jews escape from poverty as well as political discrimination. Louis Dembitz Brandeis, 73, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, heads the other school. He would create jobs in Palestine. Then let Jews migrate and find the jobs. This is rationalistic, the sort of plan one might expect from a Jew who is almost a Boston Brahmin.
Justice Brandeis was little interested in Jewry or Judaism until 1910. He was born in Louisville of influential Bohemian Jewish immigrants. At 20 he was graduated from Harvard Law School. He practiced in Boston from 1879 until his Supreme Court appointment. In Boston he had few Jewish clients or friends; his intimates were Back Bay Bostonians—Harvard's late President Charles William Eliot foremost among them.
In 1910 when he conciliated a strike of Jewish garment workers, the misery of many Jews first struck him strongly He read up—slowly as is his habit—on their problems, joined the Zionists in 1912. Two years later the World War threatened to disrupt the work of International Zionism. He took command and put his economic principles to work in Palestine. The War situation of Zionism was a crisis. Justice Brandeis considered it an Ivry and was proud to boast, as he (erroneously) remembered King Henry IV (Henry of Navarre) had boasted to his Captain Crillon: ''I was at Ivry, you were not there." After Justice Brandeis was ousted in 1912, the ré'gime of Louis Lipsky prospered greatly. But lately it has been criticized for the Jewish-Arab troubles, the estoppage of Palestine immigration, for inefficient management. Such things it can ride down at a convention. But it cannot efface its financial troubles. Zionism needs money.† Every country, including the U. S., is in a financial depression. It now hurts Jews to give. Only way out is to have all Jews interested in Zionism cooperate. There must be no do-nothing dissidents.
So last March Louis Lipsky sent four able adherents to Justice Brandeis. In his two-room Washington office they asked him to say upon what terms he and his followers would return to Zionist activity. Justice Brandeis always writes out his important business—official or personal—in longhand. After two months pondering and writing he sent his ultimatum to the Lipsky group. He and his financial stalwarts would resume work only if and when every Lipsky man resigned from office in the Zionist Organization of America. The organization must also suspend its Democratic constitution, consent for a period to an administration oligarchy of nine men whom Justice Brandeis and friends would nominate.
That is the economic Ivry which the Zionists faced at Cleveland this week— suspend Lipsky-ism, to get back Brandeis. Before the convention opened, Leader Lipsky buckled on a forensic armor and fortified himself with a livelihood. He resigned as the paid president of the Z. O. A., became the $10,000-a-year president of Judea Life Insurance Co. He expected, of course, to be elected the unpaid Z. O. A. president.