Status Updates From Melting Point: Family, Memo...

Scotsman: The problem is heavily complicated by the official Jewish decision that they will not permit Arab refugees to return to their homes.

Shlomo Zalman Shragai: Today the Jewish people becomes an equal member among the family of nations. From now onwards, whoever so desires may return home.

Abba Hillel Silver: The Jewish people have kept their appointment with history. The Jewish State, the dream of twenty centuries of homelessness wandering, is today a reality. (May 14, 1948)

Sunday Mirror: The Mandate, dating from
The First World War, favoured ‘the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people.’ The Mandate also said that the rights of non-Jews must be protected.

John Hall: British rule came to a Palestine of primitive conditions. Its 750K inhabitants were disease-ridden and poor in a land that was poverty-stricken, undeveloped, and prey to raiding nomads from the desert borders. We taught them husbandry, made loans, and nurtured the Palestine of today, with its good roads, fruitful farms, and show-places like Tel-Aviv.

Harold Reinhart: The Christian nations of the world should vie with each other in offering asylum to the relatively few Jewish survivors of the Hitler terror.

The Times: There is little doubt that Zionism receives strong support from those who do. It give a fig where the homeless Jews go so long as they go somewhere else.

The Times: The Jews have formed a valued and enriching element in the populations of Europe and America too long for world opinion to regard their segregation in Palestine as the sole hope of rebuilding their shattered lives.

The Times: There can scarcely be a limit to the reparation owed by the civilized world to a people so grievously wronged. Yet it is clear that the claims of conscience cannot be discharged by a process which creates new wrongs in remedying the old.

Thomas Horder: Is it fair to expect them to rebuild their shattered lives among the tombstones of their fellows? Uprooted and homeless, where in liberated or conquered Europe are they to feel secure?

“…haunted him: it can’t happen here. He felt that as a failure of his life, that he hadn’t managed to persuade them to leave. He took matters to heart.”

“Jabotinksy sent him (Yehuda Benari) on a lecture tour to Poland in 1938. He went from village to village, and from town to town, saying, ‘Get out while you can, don’t you see what’s coming?’ And they didn’t listen. Most people said, ‘It won’t happen here. I’m the only surgeon in this town,’ or ‘I’m the favorite opera singer. Don’t worry, it won’t happen to me.’ That phrase always …

Variety:
The plot: a man running for Governor of New York gets drunk and over the radio tells the American public to go to hell. The citizens think he is an honest man, so he’s elected.

March 1927, Harbor Allen
‘Loud Speaker’ (John Howard Lawson) is a satirical epic on American fakery. Every American fake is here. Fake religion, fake romance, fake politics, fake news, fake women, fake booze.

Mike Gold: I was born in a tenement. That tall, somber mass, holding its freight of obscure human destinies, is the batten in which my being has been cast. All that I know of Life I learned in the tenement. The tenement is in my blood. When I think it is the tenement thinking.”

Zangwill: “America is the land of refuge, but it is also the ‘melting pot.’ No people in history has ever been able to live unmelted in the bosom of a bigger people, except when safeguarded by a separate religion. And the religion of American Jewry is not strong and separate enough to save the American Jews from absorption. Even the East Side of New York speaks Yiddish with a twang.”

“I infer from Quixano’s rhapsodies that the Jew will no longer be a Jew. I protest against his pronouncement of our doom.”

Bernard Richards, American Hebrew
“We shall be melted whether we like it or not. All our ancient traits and characteristics, our ‘hankering for the past’ and even our religious beliefs shall vanish in the great process of the crucible. There is no use arguing about it. What spiritual identity will the Jew have when he emerges out of the ‘melting pot’?”

Bill Nye, 10 May 1891
If you feel yourself getting conventional and pokey, and stiff and morbid, and the moss is beginning to grow on the north side of your soul, light out for Texas.

“It has transpired that the heat of Mesopotamia is terrific and the population hostile.”

“Australia is Zangwill’s new ITOland.”

“But imagine an Itoland established and Mesopotamia acting as a refuge against the evil days that may come.”

“But imagine an airplane established and Mesopotamia acting as a refuge against the evil days they may come.”

Zangwill, 1909 “We are coming into a period of history when gigantic problems occupy the world’s attention. What time has the world to trouble itself with the Jewish question? And what right have we to expect that the Jewish people will emerge from all these coming frictions any less battered than before? Who shall say what the whirligig of time has yet in store for us?”

Israel Zangwell: A race of some 12 million people has no square inch of land that it can call its own. Just as plants cannot thrive unless they have water, so people cannot thrive unless they have land.