The Sentinel, v.068 no. 03, 1927

              THE SENTINEL 11
RANDOM THOUGHTS .
By CHARLES E. JOSEPH
(Copyright, 1927, Seven Arts Feature Syndicate)
A LETTER
In answer to the quotation I made from a statement of
Louis J. Lewis, a former member of the Christian Science
Church, regarding racial discrimination, the following
letter was sent to the editor of the Cleveland "Jewish
Review and Observer," which, in justice to the Christian
Science Church, I am including in this column:
October 11, 1927.
To the Editor of the Cleveland
Jewish Review and Observer:
The reason why Louis J. Lewis did not get a
more prominent position among Christian Scientists
and why he withdrew from the Christian Science
denomination were personal to himself. This denom-ination
includes a considerable number of members
who were followers of Judaism, and Mr. Lewis is
mistaken in saying that there has been a change of
attitude toward them on the part of the Christian
Science Board of Directors. In fact, the by-laws of
the Christian Science Mother Church provide for
equality among all members in good standing, with-out
regard to their former affiliations, and there
never has been any variation from this policy on
the part of the officers of this Church.
Ralph B. Texter,
Christian Science Committee of
Publication for Ohio.
ON "RELIGIOUS LIBERTY"
The Rev. Dr. Albert C. Dieffenbach, editor of the
"Christian Register," certainly had fire in his eye when
he wrote that book of his, "Religious Liberty: An Ameri-can
Illusion." He announces right on the first page
that he is prepared to take the consequences of his state-ments.
He shows how Fundamentalist Protestantism is
bludgeoning the legislators of the states into putting
church-dogma on the statute books. He views with alarm
this Fundamentalist autocracy that is being created in
this country which he considers a serious menace to re-ligious
liberty, or what is left of it in the United States.
I feel that our own people don't realize what's going on.
I have tried for years to point out this very danger that
Dr. Dieffenbach so clearly presents in his book. The
forces of fanaticism are in the saddle. There are mil-lions
of dollars invested in this movement to throttle
religious liberty. Censorship of every kind is involved.
Blue laws, Bible reading in the schools, anti-evolution,
Klan, anti-tobacco leagues, putting Jesus in the Consti-tution,
all this is being promoted while Liberalism stands
without leadership.
HELP CIRCULATE IT
I would like to see this book of Dr. Dieffenbach obtain
a wide circulation and I wish the readers of this column
would help distribute it. Doctor Dieffenbach is one of
the militant liberals of the nation. ' He is a leading Uni-tarian
of Boston, and has lecturefiat the Williamstown
Institute of Politics. Last year he was the speaker at a
Goodwill dinner given in Pittsburgh under the auspices
of the Brotherhood of Rabbi Samuel H. Goldenson's con-gregation,
and made a profound impression upon leaders
of all denominations.
HA HA!
Bedtime stories. Do you believe in fairies? It's queer
what astonishing persons one meets with in pamphlets
issued by Hebrew-Christians. I wish I could find the
kinds of Jews they seem to discover. Here's an example
sent me by a reader of this column in Chicago. It is
issued by the Chicago Hebrew Mission. Anybody who
can believe this story can believe in witches.
It is the story of a Jewish girl whose Christian lover
had not been true blue, so she left him. Now read the
thrilling story in our next paragraph.
She walked up and down the seashore, heart-broken,
feeling that her loss was irreparable. One
afternoon as she looked out into the blue ocean,
she said in her heart:
"1 do not want to live, I am not going to live;
and tonight I shall end it all.">
She went back to the hotel, and as she was climb-ing
up the broad stairway, she sighed heavily. A
young woman going down the stair heard the sigh
and said:
"Excuse me! You sighed deeply. Are you in
trouble ?"
The Jewess replied, "Well, yes. I was thinking
that life is not worth living."
She did not say that she intended to end it, but
merely that it was not worth living."
"Indeed," said the young woman, "I think life is
worth living.", The Jewess turned with a little bow, a look of
unbelief on her face, and said, "Your secret, pray !"
The young woman replied: "My secret is that I
have a friend who comforts me in all my sorrows,
and delivers me out of all my troubles. He is my
companion through life."
"Will you introduce me to your friend ?"
"With pleasure; I shall do so by means of a book.
Will you read it?"
"Yes, anything that will tell me of your friend
who can heal one's sorrows."'
"Then wait a minute, while I fetch it."
The young woman brought a New Testament, and
said:
'"This is the book."
"What is it? A New Testament! I have never
seen it before."
"Will you read it?"
"Most assuredly."
And like all good stories, this one ended happily by
the Jewess reading the New Testament and becoming a
good Christian. Well, that's more than the New Testa-ment
has been able to do for a few hundred million
Gentiles.
SWAPPED!
Running true to form, former Crown Prince William
offered his autographed photograph as a prize at an
athletic meet by a Students' Sport Club at his Ooels
estate. It was unfortunately won by a Jewish boy named
Pincus. This created an embarrassing situation for the
former Prince because he did not relish the thought of
his picture being in the hands of a Jew. So the officials
swapped the picture for a crystal bowl and kept the pic-ture
for their clubroom walls. Anyway I look at it, the
Jewish boy was the winner in both instances. Who in
the world wants a photograph of former Crown Prince
William!
THE TIME IS HERE
Begging letters are still coming from Jerusalem. They
are a little overdue, but I presume the senders figure
in these matters that a late "touch" is better than no
touch at all. I imagine that they obtain fairly complete
lists of the. "givers" in the United States and then bom-bard
them with appeals during the high holidays. I
must say for them that they have a system. They only
send out their S. O. S. letters one month in the year.
And if business is good they can retire until the following
year.
CALL UP MR. KAHN
So we have with us the conductor of the Palestine
Opera, who informs us that opera is as popular in Pales-tine
as the cinema is here in the United States. Morchay
Golinkin, the leader in question, says that the best seats
sell for $2.50, and critics says the performances are of
a high order. "Faust" and "Aida" are the favorites.
The operas are sung in Hebrew. Mr. Golinkin is seeking
to raise about $200,000 to build an opera house in Jeru-salem
or Tel-Aviv. There should be no trouble about
that. All he needs is Otto Kahn's telephone number.
WELL-I
wonder if "Time" isn't jazzing this news item a bit
too much. It reports a Yom Kippur incident in this
fashion:
"At Toledo, one Andrew Cohen went to Rabbi
Joseph S. Kornfeld early Yom Kippur morning, full
of anguish. The rabbi knew that he (Cohen) was
shortstop for the Buffalo baseball nine, champions of
the International League. The rabbi knew that the
Buffalos were playing that day with the American
Association's champion Toledo team for the minor
league championship of the world; that Toledo had
four wins to Buffalo's one; that Andrew Cohen's
mates would suffer mentally and possibly financially
if he could not play. Was there no dispensation in
Judaism?
"Rabbi Kornfeld, President Harding's friend and
onetime (1921) Minister to Persia, proved himself
a sympathetic latitudinarian on Yom Kippur, most
solemn of Jewish days. Continuing his own fast, he
fixed Shortstop Cohen a nourishing smack and sent
him forth to play shortstop for Buffalo."
If the foregoing is true, then it seems to me that some
rabbis are destroying some of the respect that is due
the holiest day in the year. Even to give a magazine
like "Time" an excuse to write of it in the way it does
is itself an injury to the American Rabbinate. Unless
"Time" has complete justification for its report, the
editors should take more time before they rush into
print.
A WELL-WRITTEN BOOK
A correction in the interest of historical accuracy. In
commenting on Lewis Browne's newest and most fascinat-inse
book, "That Man Heine." I said that Elsa Weihl, who
collaborated, had gone to.Europe to assemble the mate-rial.
On the contrary Mr. Browne was the one who did
the roaming in Germany. gathering unpublished manu-scripts,
and, of course, doing the writing. Miss Weihl
was the research expert, who remained in New York assemhling material. If you haven't read "That Man
Heine," get it. Lewis Browne knows how to write and
he proves it in this book.
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