Friday Mar 7

Enjoyed this evening
a lecture by Mr. Grant
a christian, but a fine
type of a Zionist at the
2nd Zionist district.

He ought to be an
example to certain Jews
as how to be a good Jew.

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Matt's Notes

I'm hardly qualified to comment on Chrisitan Zionism, though I've always understood it to be motivated more by biblical dictates than concern for the Jewish people. It's certainly made for some strange bedfellows in the modern era; I wonder how a proto-lefty like Papa would have felt about the conservative ideals of today's higher profile, evangelical Christian Zionists.

Sticky politics aside, I do find Papa's language in this entry to be unusually strident. But, as we've seen before, Zionism and Judaism were simply one and the same for him and were essential to his spiritual identity. Jews who did not support a Jewish homeland baffled and disappointed him, and nothing made him happier than to see previously non-Zionist Jews throw their support behind the movement (we saw this in an earlier entry, when he attended a ceremony at which the United Hebrew Trades, after years of a strictly domestic agenda, officially announced its support for Jewish workers in Palestine).