Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Hays Sulzberger

Sulzberger’s line reads less like a neutral policy preference than a moral wager: that diaspora, with all its vulnerability, buys a kind of universal standing you shouldn’t trade for sovereignty. Coming from the publisher of The New York Times, it’s also a statement about power and optics. He’s not just saying “no” to a Jewish state; he’s implying that statehood would shrink Jews from a people with a global ethical mission into one more interest group, one more nation among nations. The phrasing turns renunciation into nobility: to want a homeland is to “give up” something “infinitely greater,” as if political self-determination were a petty consolation prize compared with being at home in the world.

The subtext is assimilationist and anxious. Sulzberger, a prominent American Jew in an era when Jewish belonging in the U.S. still felt conditional, is defending a vision of Jewish identity that is portable, civic, and compatible with American universalism. He’s also resisting the charge - common in that period - that Jews were a separate nationality, a suspicion that fed both social exclusion and outright antisemitism. Anti-Zionism here doubles as a loyalty argument: no “homeland” elsewhere means fewer accusations of divided allegiance at home.

Context sharpens the edge. Sulzberger held this view as Zionism surged in response to European catastrophe and statelessness became deadly. The quote’s elegance depends on an abstraction - “the world” - that history was actively stripping away. That tension is the tell: an ideal of cosmopolitan belonging speaking over the trauma that made cosmopolitanism feel, to many Jews, like a broken promise.