Chaim Weizman on the Old-New Diasporism

I caught this in Rick Richman's new book, Racing Against History, on the visits of three Zionist leaders to America in 1940.

Chaim Weizmann wrote the following in 1937 as an observation of American Jews

and is as relevant now as it was then.

As the Shappell Foundation site highlights,

Weizmann also assails the temerity and faithlessness of the “assimilated Jew.” With American Jewry clearly in his sights, he blasts these Jews as thinking of themselves as Americans and not Jews. Their religion, he sniffs, is “a poor imitation of Protestantism. It has nothing in it of the austerity, severity and the real tradition of Jewry sanctified by so much martyrdom.” These people will send money, but Palestine is a challenge to them: “It stirs some memories… that they have tried to bury under their American civilization.

and as seen above, he emphasizes something quite familiar nowadays

"They fasten on the Arab problem which offers them a sort of escape from their Jewish consciousness; they are mostly useless to us, if not harmful.” 

Nothing new under the sun for those who promote Diasporism.

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