In order to understand some of the problems which I, as a Jew, face or feel in America today, I find it helpful to think of the stretch of time from 1890 to 1945 as one moment in the history of Jews. But one moment. I find it helps to think that because this is one period of time the decision to migrate to America made by Jews during the very early 20th century had an immediate effect on decisions made by Jews and their enemies during the Third Reich. Viewed in this way, the great Jewish migration from Europe at the turn of the century had terrible consequences that reached forward into Nazi Germany and profoundly affected the lives of European Jews. No one individual can be blamed for the terrible consequences. Blame is misplaced, since it is the objective fact of the total migration to America that has meaning, and no single individual can be held morally culpable even if he took part in the wandering westward. Blame cannot be put, but it can be taken. That cannot be avoided. Maybe it is the most blameless who are the guiltiest.

The Jewish and personal meaning of the migration to America now seems clear to me. It is because part of America’s understanding of itself, and my understanding of the Jewish meaning of the 20th century, come together in my mind when I anguish over the course of European affairs that, sometime or other, I should face my moral question. I face it publicly in order to find out if I am alone. To understand at least a part of this moral question helps me to under-stand both more of America and more of myself as a Jew.

Compared to world Jewry, I, as an American Jew, am safe and rich. That is what my own family came for. They believe that they came so long ago, about fifty or sixty years ago. They have worked for what they have, and they have wrapped their children in a thick layer of America so that they and their children may forget their participation in recent Jewish history as well as their membership in the wider, non-American community of Jews. They may try to forget.

Thank God, I said when I heard those strange yet familiar names, like Treblinka and Auschwitz—thank God I am lucky and safe and American. I closed my ears and pretended that I did not hear the silence with which I and the world responded to those strange familiar names. I closed my mind and pretended that I did not suffer guilt for being alive during a long, long moment when to be a Jew meant to die. We came to America, I said to myself, before the trouble began, and are therefore free. Free from what? Free to do what?

Did not we almost safe American Jews finally beat the Selection System of the extermination camps? Did not our earlier escape reduce the chances of any particular European Jew? Did we not beat the Nazi extermination system by selecting ourselves for life before Selection began in earnest? If the concept of the community which is quite central in Jewish secular and theological thought means anything, it means to me that I, as an American member of the Jewish community, left the European members of the same community as my representatives in the Old Country. It means that I am safe because the Europeans died in my place. That is the business of a representative: to act for another.

When, however, did the representative, the still European Jew, agree to represent me? When did he agree to personify absent members of his community? He became a representative through another’s exercise of will. He was elected when we had fled westward in search of—what? Peace? Plenty? But not identity as Jews. That we already had, and it may have been a rejection of that identity that drove us westward. For how many was the trip not a retreat from, but a search for? Typically, the historical wandering Jew retreated because he had to; he did not leave his last place of exile in order to improve his social or economic position. For those Jews who stayed or were left behind in 20th-century Europe, their identity as Jews was left unimpaired. How quickly the entire Jewish community learned that such identity was not a matter of individual will, but was raised by the Nazis into a branch of their version of an objective science. Jewishness, the Nazis said, was a quantity as well as a quality, and thus could be accurately measured. Nazis made Jewishness palpable, and made the will of the victim irrelevant. The European Jew was left with his identity, and he had no choice. And my vision shows me that, in my case at least, participation in that immemorial urge to wander westward left those who stayed home to speak—die—for me. Who asked the Jews who remained whether they agreed? They had no choice.

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America has been involved in such guilt-by-wandering for a very long time. When the Puritans came away from England they were accused of hurting their cause in England. A Civil War could have been and was predicted, and some of the best of the Puritan community made their contribution to the Puritan cause in England by sailing westward, by leaving the country. The charge that the American Puritans actually helped the wrong side of the English struggle when they went off in search of their Wilderness Zion got under their American skin. The charge made them nervous, and they finally answered it by going farther instead of by reaching back. In their Americanism they destroyed their Puritanism.

To the wilderness saints, and many of their descendants, America came to mean virtue and the future as Europe grew to mean vice and the past. Finding their most instructive parallel in the heroes of Jewish history, the Puritans Hebraicized their thinking to the point where they thought of themselves as a “Christian Israel” having come from a new “land of Egypt” with James I as “Pharaoh” and the Atlantic as “the Red Sea.” They thought of themselves as a Chosen People who were involved in a community of saints. But they knew or felt that the community was larger than Massachusetts Bay, that the decision to launch the Great Migration seriously affected the saints who stayed at home. The guilt contributed to the final and perhaps inevitable result: saints became Yankees.

America has always been involved in this guilt-by-wandering. Archibald MacLeish put the hope this way:

East were the
Dead kings and remembered sepulchres:
West was the grass.

How may one play in that western grass when the eastern kings are killed only by one’s flight from them? When the more deeply rooted and stable members of the community still face a living past? The American must forget the old kings, his own eastern background, or else the Puritan and American Dream of building a new Zion will be impossible. The American must forget; everything depends on it. If he thinks hard enough maybe he really can forget those hostile and angry kings. Perhaps the American can will the extermination of the past. But if somewhere in his self he broods over the fact that the death of an evil past is only a victory of his own consciousness, a victory of his ability to hide from a still existing reality, he must then ask about the consequences of his newly found safety. With this self-awareness he must face the guilt and ask the next questions: does America have a right to exist, and do I have a right to it? Who pays the price of America? Are they willing? Throughout America’s history immigrants arrived in flight from experienced or imaginary evil, and whispered that their flight contributed to the hurt of those who stayed, and those who would yet be born to stay.

Dispersion was the Jew’s affliction and America’s nourishment. America was made from those in Galut, those in physical and spiritual exile—some Jews and many others. The decision to hazard the Atlantic and face the trials either of a raw wilderness or of an unknown society was almost always based on an anterior rejection of the familiar, the European. From the beginning of America to the Third Reich, Americans told themselves that their new nation could function as a land of displaced persons. Having come, those millions of migrants had to begin that curious and perhaps unique American habit of asking who they were. They had to begin because they were trying to wipe out the past, break their own continuity. What is an American? Loud and powerful national voices have told us that he is a “new man,” a healthy and active participant in a new republic of virtue. He is new because his Galut is over; he has found home. Now he too may dream the American Dream. Now he too may hope that his children will “have it better.” Because of America’s rejection of the past, of the fierce commitment to the notion that this land will start anew, the American Jew is pulled apart. To be a Jew is to remember. An American must forget.

The American can dream his Dream only if he forgets. He must not remember his status in an older and eastern community. If he thinks of himself as new, he persuades himself that he will be. Even now he continues to tell himself that the newest is the best, that youth is better than age. And how could he be new if his memory came westward with him? The single act of memory would destroy all that he came for, all that he had built. It would create those restraining ligaments that would tie him to his former self and former community. His natural body is old and he must join a new, a perpetually young, body politic. I regard the hoary body of Jewry as the fatal memory that would make my own entrance into the new body absolutely impossible. I must forget. Daniel Bell¹ economically described the Jewish need to remember: “to be a Jew is to be part of a community woven by memory—the memory whose knots are tied by the yizkor, by the continuity that is summed up in the holy words: Yizkor Elohim nishmas aboh mori:—‘May God remember the name of. . . .’ The yizkor is the tie to the dead, the link to the past, the continuity with those who have suffered and, through suffering, have made us witness to cruelty and given us the strength of courage over pride.”

My family did not come to America to remember. They came voluntarily. Before the massive exodus to America the Jews had been compelled to wander, evidently not by the suffering they had experienced in almost ubiquitous pogroms, but by the actual legislated or legally decreed expulsion from one country after another: from England in 1290 and France in 1306, from the area of Germany in the 14th century, and from Spain in 1492, that year of years. The Jew could live in Galut because in his wanderings he had not been lured by the new land, but had been compelled to leave the old. He had fled not from suffering, not from Galut, but because he had been ordered to leave his home, had been ordered to wander. America was different. It lured. It promised the end of Galut, the beginning of tomorrow, the start of a new life.

Once we arrived, we were exposed to those aspects of the New World which militated against the traditional insulation or aloofness of the Jew in exile, against the act of memory which almost always had been the Jew’s essential weapon in his movements over the face of Europe. Almost always he had managed to resist the particular physical locale of his Galut by remembering his participation both in history and in the Jewish community. But because when we moved to America we responded to a psychological reversal promised by the American Dream—a promise of the end of Galut—we became more susceptible to the incursions of American utopianism, of America’s rejection of the past, of age, and of continuity with Europe.

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After the emancipation and assimilation of the 19th century in Europe, some Jews could no longer face the conditions of exile. They had traveled so far that the final long step to heaven on earth seemed possible. To heaven; away from exile; away from self. When the Holy Land and the new God’s Country became confused in our minds, our exodus to the New Zion betrayed an almost unique voluntarism which for millennia Jews had been saving for the final march home. America demanded a finality too, one that touched us where we were weak: our fears and anxieties were over; we had found a new home, and could tell ourselves that it was just as good as or even better than the old home for which Jews had suffered and waited so long.

Thinking of myself as a rightful member of the community of Jews, I must come close to rejecting the motives which led my family westward in the first place. Doing this, I must know that my metaphysical self was left behind even though my physical self is safe in the New World. Even if I can live with that schizophrenia, I know that the safety of my physical self is rejected by my other self. I know that Nazis destroyed natural bodies, not metabodies.

I have several impossible alternatives. Because I am an American, I must take the Puritan model and forget my Jewishness. I cannot. If I remember my Jewishness, I must ask the questions no man can ask. May one ask oneself: who died in my place? How many died in my place? It can’t have been a child. May one ask the questions even once, and be the same ever again? And just what does the building fund or the United Jewish Appeal have to do with the fact that, for me, to be an American Jew is a physical and psychological reality, and a moral impossibility?

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¹ “Reflections on Jewish Identity,” in COMMENTARY, June 1961.