Editor WILLIAM ZUKERMAN, in the biweekly review, JEWISH NEWSLETTER:
THERE cannot be the slightest doubt that a state of mind very much like that of Israel now prevails among American Jews. There is a fanatical certainty abroad that there is only one truth and that Israel is the sole custodian of it. No distinction is made between the Jews of the world and Israel, and not even between the Israeli government and Israel. Israeli statesmen and their policies are assumed to be inviolate and above criticism. There is a frightening intolerance of opinions differing from those of the majority, a complete disregard of reason, and a yielding to the emotions of a stampeding herd.
There is only one important difference between the Israeli and the American Jews. In Israel, the outburst of emotionalism, as far as one can judge from outside, has a basis in reality. It wells from the hidden springs of a disillusioned people who were promised security and peace and find themselves in a war trap. The American-Jewish brand of hysteria is entirely without roots in the realities of American-Jewish life. It is completely artificial, manufactured by the Zionist leaders, and almost mechanically foisted on a people who have no cause for hysteria by an army of paid propagandists as a means of advancing a policy of avowed political pressure and of stimulating fund raising. Never before has a propaganda campaign in behalf of a foreign government been planned and carried out more blatantly and cynically, in the blaze of limelight and to the fanfare of publicity, than the present wave of hysteria now being worked up among American Jews.
AMERICANS SHOULD STOP BAITING INTELLECTUALS
Bishop JOHN J. WRIGHT of Worcester, Mass., in a Founders' Day sermon at St. Louis University:
IT makes little difference why so many Catholics have conformed with the prevailing patterns of anti-intellectualism in our day. Such conformity may be part of the pattern by which our people have in all things sought to demonstrate how thoroughly American they are. In any case, it is unfortunate both for us and for America. Such a suspicious contempt for the intellectual life is far from being a Catholic phenomenon. It is a kink in the American character generally. It is the more unbecoming in Catholics, however, because it is so utterly out of harmony with any authentic
Catholic tradition, and it is therefore the more painful that it should reveal itself on public questions and in community life as so entrenched among us.
Perhaps it is necessary for us to develop a special patience with the bright and sometimes irritatingly brilliant, a patience comparable to that which we have virtuously tried to have toward the dull. Perhaps it is needed that we be slow to label [as] "revolutionaires," or liberals in any unfavorable sense, those who have many ideas, including occasional disturbing ideas, instead of a mere comfortable few. Perhaps it were well if we preached as often on intellectual sloth as we tend to preach on intellectual pride.