Click on the text of the poem above to see an enlarged version for easier reading.

“Homeward” by P. M. Raskin was published in The Maccabaean in May 1917. 

As Naomi W. Cohen explains in her article “The Maccabaean’s Message: A Study in American Zionism Until World War I” (Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3, July 1956, p. 163):

“Four years after the first Zionist Congress at Basel, the Federation of American Zionists launched its official monthly journal, The Maccabaean. The magazine (in its inaugural issue) declared its devotion to the ‘living literature and life of the Jewish people,’ and avowed rather ambitious aims:

”’To reconstruct the Jewish people, to lead them to an organized national existence, to make Jewish religious life possible, to foster the study of Jewish literature and history, to provide a stable home for the oppressed and downtrodden of our race.’

“These ideas were elaborated to a greater or lesser extent in subsequent issues of The Maccabaean, with Jacob de Haas and Louis Lipsky emerging as the key editorial figures. In the light of this program, The Maccabaean magazine evaluated various facets of American Jewish life.”

Click here to access the rest of Naomi W. Cohen’s article on JSTOR.

Submitted by Susan Woodland, American Jewish Historical Society.