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Our "Irresponsible" Youth
The Young American Jew Under the Microscope
Drawn in Striking Composite Picture
N OTHING is quite so symptomatic of in
ertia in our communal life as the desperate
consistency with which its revered elders
ignored Jewish youth. I heirs is a consistency
blind to its tenacity and a desperateness betraying
a fear as compelling as only the fear of an untried
foe can be.
Uncertain of their strength and only too certain
of their weakness, they have launched an offensive
defensive. They have brought the battle into the
enemy’s camp lest it overwhelm them with its in
tangible power. And to avoid wasting themselves
needlessly in locating the vulnerable heel of this
mercurial power of youth, they have set up their
own target, their own dummy of the youth they
fear, and stuffing it with all the ills youth has
been supposedly heir to in recent decades, they have
proceeded to knock the stuffings out of it.
But for all their triumph, they might as well
be hacking away at a windmill with a sword of
cheese; for what they claim to have exposed died
a natural death long before, while the youth whom
they thought they had laid low, marches on as
impregnable in his inarticulated musings as the
Sphinx.
When a post-mortem is performed on the re
mains of the sawdust dummy so thoroughly dis
membered bv the good men of the community,
we find that the youth thus lambasted was a cari
cature, a myth, a moving picture or short story
type. T he rah-rah, skull-capped young man whose
chest is Hat from supporting a tie with an elephan
tine knot may be characteristic of a small dodo
headed minority; yet he, by his crying example of
shallowness, has served to thin his own company
to extinction.
This specimen which the elders hold up as the
justification of their indignation is ravaged, it must
be conceded, by a multitude of sins. He is the
archtype of the jazz age, a remnant of the fast
life era, exponent of the superficial material, here
and now existence—in short he is exactly what the
reformer ordered. And what the elders proclaim
triumphantly to be the typical youth. But this
tinsel-seeking youth is by a long-shot not the rule.
At best he is the exception which makes a diamet-
trically opposed character the rule. He has been
exhibited as the modern youth because h:s foibles
lend themselves excellently to exhibition, for he
wears his philosophy of life (if it may be so digni
fied) on his sleeve.
The youth who is truly representative of modern
Jewish youth as a whole, would paradoxically
enough not make an “interesting” exhibit. His
clothes are almost deliberately modest. There is
no individuality in their cut. They are almost
a uniform. And in their grayness they suggest the
introvert spirit of Hamlet. His expression is
immobile, pensive, and even when he smiles, a
shadow lurks about his lips.
In his hyper-sensitiveness he has felt the cutting
barbs of this mortal coil. He has unwound the
seventh veil and instead of a beautiful maiden,
he has found a toothless witch. So he has un
wound many an illusion, and so he wishes he
hadn’t. For a time science, which dissects the
rose, and enshrines the test-tube, make a step-child
of him. Human life on the universe was an acci
dent—just a matter of temperature, he was told.
His religion toppled. Suspended in mid-air, he
grasped pantheism to his heart, and contemplated
[6]
By Meyer F. Steinglass
Is the young American Jew frivolous? How
does he look? Is he sensitive? Is he material
istic? Has he been conquered by commun
ism? Does he leant to be active in Jewish
affairs? Aleyer I. Steinglass, a brilliant
representative of the younger group of writers
delves into this complex enigma. The boxed
note of the young Jewish student who con
tributed so valiantly to science and humanity,
caps Mr. Stein glass' sentiments on the Ameri
can Jewish youth.
Alfred Hein hart of Dorchester,
Mass., met his death from a damaged
heart and at the same time made an im
portant contribution to medical science, it
was revealed through Dr. Soma Weiss,
assistant professor of medicine at the Har
vard Medical School. Reinhart, who died
recently at the age of 24, graduated from
Harvard with magna cum laude honors
and spent three years in the medical school.
Knowing his own ailment, he asked to be
allowed to study it. He was assigned to
a room at the Thorndike Memorial Labo
ratory at the Boston City Hospital, where
he studied all the symptoms of his diseased
blood system and made notes on the mani
festation of the germ which attacked the
red corpuscles. I)r. Weiss will publish the
record, which is said to he an unusually
valuable study of endocarditis.
Harold Leon Newman
iiaioiu i^eon Newman, ot Atlanta, cooperai
student at Georgia Tech, and senior in electr
engineering, was elected to Phi Kappa Phi, rec
nized as the highest honorarv fraternity * at
Georgia School of Technology. Election to
fraternity is based on scholarship, leadership
native and general all-round abilitv, and Mr. N
man easily came within the scope of all these
tainments. Mr. Newman was also selected
1 organ Blake, widely known sports writer,
™ . the * hl T e outstanding students at T<
Uh.lein his junior year, Mr. Newman i
awarded a gold T given by Dr. Brittain, presid
ot the college. He has made the honor roll
fiveromecuuve years, and is first lieutenant of
hopefully the mystery of the test-tub.-—the m
terious transformations and revolutions that r k,
place in its tiny area—a tiny microcn m .
Now he has cause for cheer. Physics and mathe
matics are not the final formulators of the mw< -
of the universe. Having probably been swurv
around in their searchings by the void which ulti
mately formulate such as the Einstein theory must
have left in their wake, scientists now grant the
existence of a supreme force which baffles the
test-tube or the mathematician’s pencil.
But nevertheless, religion, the ritual which
willy-nilly evokes in our youth a sincere emo
tional response, and its theology which fascinates
him, religion as such does not contain for him the
final revelation. Yet he is devoutly religious. But
he prefers the vague overtones of emotion and
meditation—communing with intangibles in
tangibly.
Nor has the materialistic world around him in
spired him with any greater self-confidence or sup
plied him with a more positive life-urge. He ha'
seen and felt the economic crash, but what is more
significant, he had anticipated it. He has seen the
wasteful evils of competition. He has read of the
off-color ethics which have enabled Rockefeller to
distribute shiny new dimes in his old age. He has
watched, not without pain, an economic system
which allows bushels of wheat to rot while
thousands go hungry. He has forsworn the go-
getting idea. The era of rising from office boy
to railroad president is dead. He has resolved not
to make business a career. Never must it be an
end in itself. It must be a means to a life of
intellectual leisure—the good life.
In this frame of mind he considers Soviet Ru'-
sia. Communism as a body of politics does no'
interest him, nor is he in sympathy with the arbi
trary and dictatorial principles which govern that
vast country. Russia to him contains the seed n?
Utopia. In its perfervid industrialism, in its out
Americanizing American manufacturing scheme'
it seems to him to be preparing itself for a de
materialized culture—a culture free from the t
pervading struggle for economic security "hie
must absorb a people governed by a competum
system. Russia is manufacturing financial M ^ l!
for the future Russia—and in that lies his ai m
tion and envy of the Communists.
His life generally is governed by an enlightene
humanism. He takes his Byron with M " i '""2
as a chaser. Freud has revealed the world to n
Psychoanalysis is the indispensable tootm
psychology. He is not subject to ex ' " ' ,
attitude to women is a romanticism dilutu ' ^
awareness of biological facts, and marriage in \
pect appears to him a revolutionizing tX P erie ^
Whatever may be his disappointin' itt> in
bourgeois community which surroumL
nevertheless sincerely interested in it> P r . •
He may be at variance with the out mo *e ‘ faC .
adequate system the elders uphold ir j c s ys-
teristic intransigeance as the only P r -*- n .
tern, and he may, as he has been 1 j n its
absent himself from active partw.r , 0 .
program. But he bides his time 111 * t0
pitious moment, w r hen he will dti 1 - • ^ t hat
these same guardians of the commun - ^ van ity
change does not mean ruination, am
is not the measure of all things.
Copyrighted 1932 for The Southern
* THE SOUTHERN D