With publication of Children of the Ghetto, Israel Zangwill became the most prominent English-language Jewish novelist on both sides of the Atlantic. In it he had implemented fully Amy Levy's program of portraying the Western Jewish milieu in literature. In this effort he was following consciously in the tradition of the Western "ghetto" authors.

But enlarging upon this agenda, Zangwill sought not merely to describe but through his realistic depiction of the "private" world of the immigrants also to attack the negative literary stereotype of the Jew and to evoke a more human and sympathetic image of the Jews in Western society. In 1892 this was still a most daring venture requiring great courage, for it entailed the risks of offending "polite" British opinion and image-conscious Jewish spokesmen. That he succeeded is evident from the work's immediate reception.

Children of the Ghetto won critical acclaim among both non-Jewish and Jewish reviewers. They recognized that Israel Zangwill, with this book, had entered upon a new stage in his literary career, one to be taken much more seriously than his New Humour phase.

In "Children of the Ghetto" he strikes out a new line... the present book is a serious novel of considerable merit.... The chief interest of the book lies in the wonderful description of the Whitechapel Jews.... The picture is most sympathetically drawn.... But his sympathy does not blind him to their faults.... Moreover the vividness and force with which Mr. Zangwill brings before us the strange and uncouth characters with which he had peopled his book are truly admirable.

Admirable for wit and originality as Mr. Zangwill's earlier books have been, in the "Children of the Ghetto" he strikes a firmer and more ambitious note. Here he must be judged as a novelist, as a writer who seeks to portray human life, while before he was the narrator of confessedly bizarre impossibilities. And the result of a close study of Mr. Zangwill's new book is to convince the reader ... that in Mr. Zangwill a literary star of the first magnitude has at last risen above the Jewish horizon in England....

That the "Children of the Ghetto" is very largely true is clear to the superficial reader, and clearer still to the careful reader. Mr. Zangwill has a mastery over Jewish custom, over Jewish life in all its crannies and ramifications, he has insight into the ideal and an eye for the mean and tawdry, a sigh for its pathos and a smile for its joy like Franzos.

It is impossible to rate too highly the sacrifices that they (Henry Nevinson and Laurence Housman) and H. N. Brailsford, F. W. Pethick Lawrence, Harold Laski, Israel Zangwill, Gerald Gould, George Landsbury, and many others made to keep our movement free from the suggestion of a sex war.

Masterman in the chair. Zangwill talked a great deal too much. The sense was talked by Wells and Chesterton. Rather disappointed in Gilbert Murray, but I like the look of little R. H. Benson. Masterman directed pretty well, and Claude Schuster and the Foreign Office representative were not bad. Thomas Hardy was all right.

I was determined to join the Pankhursts' organisation, the Women's Social and Political Union, but was held up in this resolve for three months by the fact that my father, who had considerable foresight and realised pretty well what joining that body was likely to mean, was inclined to be opposed to the idea. However, I finally decided that he could be no judge of a matter which concerned one primarily as a woman. Prid meanwhile had, travelling by a slightly different road, arrived at the same conclusion. She and I met one autumn day in London, and, full of excitement, went off together to Clement's Inn and joined.

One of the first effects that joining the militant movement had on me, as perhaps on the majority of those of my generation who went into it, was that it forced me to educate myself. I read to begin with, of course, the whole literature of feminism: leaflets, pamphlets, books in favour and books against. Of books that mattered dealing directly with feminism there were curiously few. Only three now stay in my mind: John Stuart Mill's " Subjection of Women," Olive Schreiner's " Woman and Labour," Cicely Hamilton's "Marriage as a Trade"; and perhaps one should add a fourth, Shaw's " Quintessence of Ibsenism." Of course, there were stray passages in others; one or two of Israel Zangwill's Essays, for example, I find unforgettable to this day.

Of the quantities of books on politics, economics, finance, the working of the Exchanges, sociology, anthropology and psychology which I read during the first few happy years of that new revelation, some few still remain fresh in my mind. I can still, for example, vividly remember reading Havelock Ellis's " Psychology of Sex." It was the first thing of its kind I had found. Though I was far from accepting it all, it opened up a whole new world of thought to me. I discussed it at some length with my father, and he, much interested, went off to buy the set of volumes for himself; but in those days one could not walk into a shop and buy "The Psychology of Sex "; one had to produce some kind of signed certificate from a doctor or lawyer to the effect that one was a suitable person to read it. To his surprise he could not at first obtain it. I still remember his amused indignation that he was refused a book which his own daughter had already read. But the fact was that the Cavendish Bentinck Library, to which I, in common with many others, owe a deep debt of gratitude, was at that time supplying all the young women in the suffrage movement with the books they could not procure in the ordinary way.

Zangwill's physical and mental health deteriorated seriously during the following two months as the incessant insomnia and anxiety acted upon his always fragile physical constitution. No longer capable of doing any work, he was confined to his home. And at the beginning of July, Edith Zangwill admitted to a friend who was intending to come down to Far End for a visit, "My husband has had a serious nervous breakdown, and is in a nursing home."

On 1 August 1926 Israel Zangwill unexpectedly died at the nursing home in Midhurst, Sussex; he was sixty-two years old. The funeral, at which the rabbi of London's Liberal Jewish Synagogue, St. John's Wood, officiated, was held on 5 August at the Golders Green Crematorium; Stephen S. Wise, visiting from the United States, delivered the eulogy.