Samuel, Maurice

(1895–1972)

   US writer and lecturer. After a boyhood in Manchester, Romanian-born Samuel emigrated to the United States at the age of nineteen. For the next half-century, his penetrating, witty and at times provocative books and platform lectures projected to the English-speaking world the problems of Jewish-gentile relations and the tenets and achievements of Zionism. His prolific output also included a number of novels on historical and biblical subjects.

   In such challenging works as You Gentiles (1924), I, The Jew (1927), Jews on Approval (1931), and The Great Hatred (1941), he bluntly asserted that anti- Semitism sprang from gentile shortcomings, not Jewish ones. He translated Sholem ASCH, I.L.PERETZ and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and poems of BIALIK into first-rate English; and he wrote a moving account of the life in the Eastern European shtetl, The World of Shalom Aleichem (1943). He lived for a decade in Palestine and described the progress of the yishuv in Harvest in the Desert (1944). Level Sunlight (1953) reaffirmed his faith in the Jewish renaissance in the State of Israel.