Few men speak with more authority than Bruno Bettelheim on the anatomy and conquest of fear. He was born and educated in Vienna, and fate gave him the opportunity to do his fieldwork on the effects of terror on the human mind and spirit in a German concentration camp, after Hitler’s annexation of Austria. His study “Behavior in Extreme Situations,” which appeared originally in the journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, is now a classic. In his article “The Victim’s Image of the Anti-Semite,” in the February 1948 issue of COMMENTARY, he argued it was possible to rise superior to fear, and act rationally and effectively even under concentration camp conditions. Here, in the present article, he considers the somewhat less drastic situation of living as a Jew in the United States, with special reference to the upbringing of children so as to adapt them to the impact of anti-Semitism.

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Behind much of the effort to build up a Jewish cultural life in this country—the establishment of schools, synagogues, and community centers, as well as the production of Jewish books, music, and art—we often find one supreme motivation: a desire to armor the Jewish child against anti-Semitism, to prevent, if possible, the ill effects on his psyche of anti-Semitic experience.

This is doubtless something of a simplification, but it requires only plain and scrupulous observation to see how close it lies to the heart of the matter. Why does a new community of Jews suddenly decide it needs a Sunday school, or a congregation, or a community center? Usually because, as almost any of its members will tell us, its children must be given the knowledge that will prepare them to face the attacks of the anti-Semite. Knowledge of the Jewish past will supply the child with inner security in the face of hostility; participation in community ceremonies and observances will effectively cancel out any future experiences of exclusion from the non-Jewish world—so it is asserted. Jewish institutional life in this country is fair on its way to becoming a vast system of psychological fortifications behind which it is hoped that Jews will live out their lives without incurring psychological scars. For a first-hand report in detail of this process in operation, one may read Herbert Gans’s article, “Park Forest: Birth of a Jewish Community,” in the April 1951 COMMENTARY.

And yet, as by now most parents recognize, institutions cannot provide the answer, at least not the full answer. It is still the parents who must help their children face up to the experience of race prejudice, and particularly so in the early years. Long before any institutional system of psychological fortification can begin to operate, it is they who must know how they are to “handle the problem,” how they are to prepare their child—if at all. It is they who will meet their child running from school or from a group of playmates with the Inevitable Question—an experience, moreover, that is likely to be even more painful to them than to the child. The very parent who meets prejudice against his own person with an educated detachment, even with a shrewd counter-move, easily falls into a blundering passion if it is his helpless child who is attacked.

But it is plain that nothing could be of less help to the very young child who has just suffered rejection than an overwrought and for the moment mindless parent. Anxiety is a natural condition of the child. It wells up in him at the slightest stress and he turns instantly to his adult protector to allay it for him. From the face, the tones, the gestures of his father or mother, the small child in his narrow world gets his clues as to how to evaluate some mishap. Any anxiety he detects in his parent immeasurably increases his own. Everyone has seen how in so simple a matter as a fall and a bruise, the child wants a clue; if the mother remains calm and minimizes things, the child is soon serene again—provided, of course, the injury was not serious. In yet more frightening circumstances, during the war in England, it was observed that very young children were not so much perturbed, for example, by the actual bombings—it was the frenzy of the parents that upset the children. In the vaguer, more complicated situation of prejudice, the child will be especially sensitive to his parents’ attitude.

I recall an extreme instance—the case, as it happens, not of a Jewish child, but of a little Nisei boy of four. He was playing on a woodpile in his back yard when some older boys came up and began to tease him. They called him, among other names, a “dirty Jap.” He had no idea what they meant, but responded by calling names back at them. The older gang threw pieces of wood at him, and one struck him hard enough to break his toe. His mother came running out, snatched him up, and rushed him to a hospital. Now the child began to undergo a bewildering experience. The mother loudly bewailed to him, and to anyone who would listen, the unhappy fate of her small son, so innocent and already the victim of race persecution. Up to then everything had been familiar enough to the little boy: the big boys had bullied him and called him names, but some day he would get even. Besides, if only his daddy were there, he would chase those boys. But now his mother’s hysteria brought before him a threat of mysterious shape, a thing, he understood dimly, that even his daddy could not chase away. Something unpleasant and painful, but easy to understand, had been changed into something baffling and terrifying. This child received a shock whose effect remained with him for years in the form of a crippling sense of insecurity.

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Still, parents would say, since we know that every child of an underprivileged minority is bound, sooner or later, to face prejudice, is it unreasonable to ask: cannot our children be prepared against the destructiveness of the experience—even the young child, and even against his very earliest experience in nursery school or kindergarten? In my opinion, the answer is no. There is little that parents can do to prepare children of four or five to meet the realities of prejudice.

To tell the small child, for example, that he is likely to meet some people who will not like him has its dangers. If such a warning can conceivably be given at all, it may be given only to the child who feels perfect security within his important inner circle of family and relations. Children who feel such unconditional security are very few, and even with them, advance warning of a possible rejection, if it has any positive meaning, may work simply to frighten them into withdrawing from strangers who intend to be entirely friendly, with the result that the child’s premature awareness and suspicion may bring on the dislike it was meant to protect him against.

As for burdening the child of nursery-school age with any explanation about “racial” groups and their irrational hostilities, this is on the face of it absurd. Some such explanation may be given to the child of seven or eight who already has gained through his own experience a notion of “ingroups” and “outgroups,” who has seen, for instance, how the third-graders bully the second-graders for the sole reason that they are the “stronger.” But the younger child can know nothing about “groups”—he knows only the private happiness he feels in belonging to his family and his small group of playmates.

There are, indeed, educators who pin their whole faith on “group belongingness” as the force which will withstand most powerfully, and even in the early age groups, the onslaughts of intolerance. They would like to see each Jewish child brought up in such a way as to feel dynamically and subjectively his membership in the Jewish group, and to regard the Jewish community at large, with all of its particularity, as the primary ingroup of his life (along with the family group). Toward that end, many of these educators favor the Jewish parochial school.

A distinguished proponent of these ideas was the late Professor Kurt Lewin. He opposed the soft-pedaling of the problem of prejudice for children. “Such a procedure,” he wrote, “does not help the child, but, on the contrary, is most likely to have the opposite effect.” And, summing up the importance of “belongingness,” he said: “The group to which an individual belongs is the ground on which he stands, which gives or denies him social status, gives or denies him security and help . . . .”

Certainly, the sense of security an individual gains from “belonging” may be extremely important to him in meeting life’s various situations. And it is not impossible that even the relatively young Jewish child may know and accept the fact that he is “Jewish” if he belongs to a family of strong Jewish traditions and to a community where a large number of Jews lead a distinctive life of their own. In such a closed cultural atmosphere—if it exists—it may well seem to the child that to be “Jewish” is almost equivalent to being human, and if he is attacked for being “different” he may stand his ground, secure in the feeling that it is not he but his attacker who is “different.”

Yet for more and more American Jews the reality, the unalterable reality, is something very different. Large numbers of them live dispersed among non-Jews, and even those who live in “Jewish areas”—in the large cities, for instance—show no strong cultural divergence from the American community at large; if anything, they seek continually to reduce what divergencies remain. Their religious life, no matter how intense, no longer involves a full and inviolable series of distinctive communal ceremonies; and for the majority, the communal religious life is itself extinct (the most generous estimates attribute synagogue affiliation to no more than one-third of the Jewish population). In the lives of the children of these Jews, there remains neither the bulk of traditional ritual nor any separateness of language to mark off their group. Adult Jews themselves are troubled by the problem of what remains to define them as Jews; the problem can hardly be easier for their children. It would seem, then, that for these children of unsegregated and culturally integrated Jews, it is impossible to contrive the kind of “belongingness” that Lewin advocates. Certainly it is hard to see how the celebration of a few Jewish holidays will do it, or even much more intensively “Jewish” nursery-school or kindergarten programs. And there are many good reasons for believing that even if this were possible, it would still be undesirable; after all, there are other values in life besides being subjectively immune to the stings of prejudice, nor is such immunity the only criterion of mental health. One can pay too high a price for “adjustment.”

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Some psychologists, aware of the inevitability and desirability of intergroup contacts in America, have advised parents to try to give the minority-group child some notion that “others” are different, but that “we” and “they” are equally “good.” To the small child, this is an impenetrable equation. The adult who thinks thus to enlighten him will only implant in him a feeling either of inferiority: I am different and not as good; or of superiority: I am different and better. If the child should appear to agree with the “different but equally good” idea, it will be only because he classes it with the many other nonsensical statements adults make about the world, and which he would rather pretend to accept than have to argue about. Any parent who has observed his child of nurseryschool or kindergarten age knows how anxious the child is to be “the same” as his playmates, how fearful lest he appear in any respect different—unless he can be different and superior: then he is willing, and can deride the children who are different but inferior.

Or, suggest some other psychologists, give the child a familiar and vivid example to help him understand group differences and the irrationality of discrimination. Tell him that a cocker spaniel and a great Dane are both dogs and equally good, but some people just happen to like spaniels and others would rather have a Dane. The child will be unconvinced. The child who loves his cocker spaniel and sees it being petted by the most important people in the world, his mother and father, may very well hate a great Dane, or be afraid of it, and for (to him) good reasons which are not altered by the fact that both are called dogs.

The process of growing up is largely a process of assimilating parental values. My own experience with emotionally disturbed children at the Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago has demonstrated that the development of a well-balanced personality depends on its having begun to be molded in early childhood on the ground of consistent parental characteristics, values, and folkways. The child who is forming his personality in the image of his parents’ folkways tends to become confused if it is suddenly revealed to him that there are other ways of doing things—different but “just as good.” Actually, upon being told this, the normal child will think to himself: Daddy’s and Mommy’s ways are still best, the way they do it is the only right way. And the neurotic child may think: That goes to show that my Daddy and Mommy know (as I have always feared) that other people are better. Any formal idea that the world comprises varieties of people of equivalent virtues, and that this variety is in itself a good, is beyond the grasp of the small child’s psychology—perhaps worse than meaningless to him.

We must conclude then: in the free and increasingly unsegregated society of America, it is useless or worse than useless to try to prepare the very young child for the experience of discrimination, either by telling him that not everyone can like him or by trying to explain “other” groups to him. By the time the child is self-assured enough to assimilate the fact that he cannot be accepted by everyone alike, and intellectually mature enough to understand the meaning of groups and intergroup tensions, he is likely to be well into the grade-school years. The lucky few who have known nothing of prejudice before having reached their later grade-school years can and should be prepared for it by adequate explanations. Unfortunately, most children have their first such experience long before that age of comparative reason and self-assurance.

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What, then, should parents do?

The first principle that must never be lost sight of in our dealings with children is that every experience has to them the sharp definition of the tangible, the concrete, and the personal; and an injury having been experienced concretely, whatever is done to heal it must be just as concrete. The parent equipped with some knowledge of the world in which small children have their special anxieties, conflicts, and satisfactions will be far more likely to know what measures to take to reassure the child who has just been hurt by the sting of prejudice: measures which, to be truly effective, must have the soothing immediacy of a band-aid applied to a scraped knee.

Why does one small child in the nursery school or kindergarten “discriminate” against another? The infant—unless the family life is seriously disrupted—feels safe in his relations to those who move around him at home and never fail to serve him. But once the child’s sphere enlarges to include children (and adults) who are strangers to him, he faces competition, and possible displacement. Children then may react in a number of ways to the threat to their position. Subgroups within the group may form, and perhaps one such becomes the most powerful and attractive; the ruling group may even be a select few—those who have more toys or whose daddies have the “biggest cars.”

Some child who is excluded from the favored group then turns around, and to bolster what he feels as his own shaky position, bullies another child—often one belonging to a “racial minority,” because the practices of adult society make that easy. The aggrieved little bully may call names (“kike” or “wop” or “nigger”) or use his fists; if the teacher stops such open aggression, he may form a clique of his own and exclude his victim, as he himself was excluded: “Let’s have a club, and don’t let David in—he’s a Jew.” Or, simply: “Don’t play with him, he’s a Jew.” And thus he involves the most unknowing innocents in his own aggressions.

It follows that while these earliest events in nursery school or kindergarten take on the external forms of anti-minority discrimination as we know it, they are little more than attempts of children to gain certain private satisfactions for themselves. The parents of a three-or four-year-old who comes home with his first taste of such “discrimination” would err greatly if they dealt with it as discrimination. Yet the child is upset, and in danger of having some injurious pattern set for the future. What can be done?

Any one example can have only a limited application, but I should like to relate the first experience of my own little girl with “discrimination.” One day—she was three years old then—she came home and asked, “Why do they call me a shoe?” (Here, by the way, is demonstrated the small child’s tendency to interpret things familiarly and concretely.) Now, this little girl of ours had been called names before—children at play are notorious name-callers. But never before had she come home so astonished and hurt. Somehow this particular name, “shoe,” affected her differently from other “swearwords” and “bad" names she was used to hearing in the play yard. She knew it was offensive to be called “dirty,” or a “stinker”—dirt and smell were “not nice.” But why should “shoe” be a curse word? With her threeyear-old’s understanding, even the simplest explanation of religious differences, or of why some people are for no good reason against other people, would only have confounded her. We decided it was best to explain to her that this incident was simply another expression of the free and easy name-calling among children which she was used to and which she herself did not hesitate to resort to. This solved no problem; but the little girl was able to dismiss the incident wholly.

I believe that any attempt to explain matters to the satisfaction of the young child may actually have mischievous consequences. Every child between the ages of two and four wages a battle to suppress his asocial tendencies. Gradually, under parental pressure, the small child has given up the habits of soiling himself, exposing himself, grabbing, throwing, hitting, and the various other forms of behavior which the child never really sees as “bad,” but which he is willing to abandon for the sake of pleasing the only important people that exist for him, his parents. Yet this desire to please his parents, however urgent, is constantly if vaguely crossed by another urge: to do the forbidden things. If some stranger comes along and accuses the child of being something which he does not understand (“I won’t play with you, you’re a Jew”) but which he senses is “bad,” he may be invaded by the conviction that he has been seen through, that his accuser has somehow recognized his impulse to do all the “bad” things. At such a pass, the child’s extreme anxiety at having been discovered would in itself prevent his understanding any explanation of what it means actually to be a “Jew.” It is therefore of the first importance that such incidents should be minimized and that the child should not retain the least notion that the remark might refer in any way to his “bad” desires.

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We see, then, how “discrimination” among the youngest children is in reality pure and simple rejection, and felt as rejection, with little consciousness of race prejudice. If Johnny refuses to play with David because he is a Jew, David feels only that Johnny doesn’t like him—the rest is mystery. If it is explained that Johnny is jealous, maybe, or wants to “get back” at David, or wants to show he’s better in some way, David can understand, and will not tend to feel that something fearful and overpowering is operating against him. As a matter of fact, this is the true explanation of what happened.

The problem is likely to be quite different for the somewhat older child. Now the child no longer feels threatened by the “bad” in him, for he has a firmer control over that “bad.” Group life has acquired increased meaning for him, and daily he experiences the world in terms of “we” and “they.” The attitude toward him of “they” cannot so easily be put aside by a simple assertion of his intimate family security. The larger world matters because he must and wants to relate himself to it.

Radios, movies, the casual conversations of adults, expose most of our children to some kind of hearsay about group differences and animosities. The child often forms from these a hazy opinion of his own which is more than likely to lead to difficulties later on. Seeing a movie intended to promote better intergroup relations, he may fail to get the “message” while he does apprehend “danger”: groups exist in his town, or his neighborhood, which are hostile to each other, for reasons not altogether clear. He is filled with uneasiness—or downright fear—that he may himself be somehow involved in this strange clash, perhaps even some day be physically attacked. He feels threatened—worse, by mysterious forces.

Whatever little he does or does not understand of general group differences, it is precisely the “racial difference” that makes the deepest impression on the older child of grade-school age. Nor will it avail to tell the child who is called “nigger” or “kike” or “wop” or “spic” that social scientists say there is no such thing as “race.” When he is beaten up because he belongs to a group which is “alien,” this appears to the child—without benefit of anthropological research—as race hate. He, in turn, to protect himself, must learn to spot his persecutors, and recognize the group to which they belong.

More primitively still, the “racial” meaning the child sees in an attack on him strikes at the center of his security. It is plain to him that if he is persecuted, it is for something which involves his parents as well as himself, and their parents before them, and back and back. But, above all, his parents, his towers of strength: any attack on them weakens his security in them. The act of hostility thus becomes “racial” in the deepest sense of the countless emotional ties that bind the child to the parent. Again, an incident involving our little girl may be illuminating.

This was her second experience with “discrimination,” and she was now five years old. One day a neighbor, not Jewish, came to us to report a conversation he had just had with our daughter. It seemed that she had suddenly left her playmates and run over to see him. She asked him if he liked her. When he said he did, very much, she asked, “Even if I’m not an American?” He assured her she was an American, a little American girl, and a nice one. She insisted: “No, I’m not. Suzy says I’m not an American because my Mommy and Daddy are Jewish.”

This was altogether different from the time she was called a “shoe.” She now had more understanding, and she was anxious about being a “good American.” She understood, too, that her parents, the source of her security, were being attacked. She had even been so sophisticated as to shield them by keeping the accusation against her a secret from them, but this was the limit of her restraint, and she had then gone to a friend whom no one had mentioned as being “Jewish,” and therefore not American, to find out whether he could still accept her—he was someone outside her family. It was evident that her major fear was that she and her parents were no longer acceptable. It was on this level that the accusation had to be met.

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Assurances on our part that Jews were as good as, or (more dangerous still) better than, those who were not Jews would scarcely have solaced her, and might even have been interpreted as a suspiciously weak denial. Equally little comfort would have come to her from being told that lots of other “Americans,” children and grown-ups, “felt differently from Suzy”; she had no desire to play with these other children, she did not know them. No, what she had to be shown (not told) was that she was still likeable and liked—by all her other playmates even if not by Suzy. It chanced that several children with whom she had been playing, including Suzy, were still about. One of the mothers was told about the incident and quickly arranged for the children to gather at her home for a small party. (Obviously, it would not have done for us to give the party.) The party was a success; our daughter saw herself accepted by her comrades—evidently her fears had been groundless. Essentially, she was able to regard the incident as another one of name-calling, and to dismiss it from her mind and feelings. (This is not to say that she might not recall it later, under the influence of another such attack.)

We were not yet done with the incident, however. The next step was to deal with Suzy and if necessary with her parents, whom we already knew to have made some slurring remarks about another minority, the Greeks. It is true that in our first annoyance we were tempted to discourage our little girl from playing with Suzy altogether. We were angry, and we rationalized our anger by saying that after all there were many other children for our little girl to play with. Then we realized that forbidding our child to play with Suzy might be regarded as an admission on our part that Suzy did indeed have some secret knowledge of “bad” things about us—Suzy might even become all the more attractive. We considered dropping the matter as it stood, except that this too might be interpreted by a child as meaning that whatever had happened was, after all, shameful and unmentionable. Besides, Suzy would doubtless make similar remarks again. We felt it necessary to act in some further way, to straighten the matter out with all the persons involved.

First, we tackled Suzy. Casually, and in a wholly friendly manner, we spoke to her the next day when she came as usual to visit our little girl—who, of course, was present. We suggested to Suzy that if she did not think our little girl as good as some other children, she ought not to come to our house and play with her toys. We then asked her: what are Jews? Not unexpectedly, she didn’t know; she knew they were different, but pressed to tell in what way, she was baffled. We had achieved one result we very much desired: our little girl now saw for herself that Suzy had no secret knowledge, no knowledge of any kind, against her or her parents, and that her own parents could defend her under all circumstances. As for Suzy, she was taken aback by our directness and for a few days kept away from the group. But because all the other children were there as usual, our little girl saw that she was in no danger of isolation from any power Suzy had. Suzy shortly came back, and apparently did not repeat her remarks about Jews. If she did, our little girl was apparently not affected. We ourselves avoided any further probing: an exaggerated awareness on the part of parents, and an exaggerated interference, can do the child no good.

Now we tackled Suzy’s parents—not in an aggressive mood, but in a neighborly one. We told them what had happened, quite matter-of-factly, and suggested that whatever their opinions might be, it would be too bad to have to break up the companionship of the two little girls, and inconvenient for the mothers as well. However, we added, if our daughter continued to be exposed to such incidents, we would sever the friendship. Suzy’s parents agreed with alacrity that the friendship ought to continue, and assured us they were free of anti-Semitic prejudice, adding that Suzy may have got some erroneous ideas from the movie Crossfire. If the parents were originally the guilty ones, they were apparently more careful thereafter.

It is axiomatic that aggression breeds counter-aggression: any emotions of anger and resentment, however justified, must be allowed to settle before one undertakes a reasonable solution of such a case. Nor, it is true, would it always be successful to take up the racial issue in this direct and friendly way. The parents of Suzy, one might object, were only moderately “biased.” Yet studies in race bias in the population as a whole show that the majority of those who are prejudiced are not unwaveringly so, but rather have been caught up into the prevalent community pattern: to think differently from others is harder than to concur in prejudice. Indeed, certain of these studies would tend to show that if the community as a whole (and especially its leading members) for some reason changes the degree or form of its bias, most individuals will follow suit. Suzy’s parents were made aware that members of the community they were part of were strongly opposed to discrimination of any kind. Faced with the choice of restraining their prejudice and its expression or making enemies in the neighborhood, they decided to continue a friendship from which they had only to gain. In incidents of this kind, it is wise to remember that most people prefer, if only on a practical basis, to be friends with their neighbors.

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Intolerance cuts both ways. The Jewish parent trying to help his child understand and “take” intolerance is often faced with the twin task of educating the same child in the lessons of tolerance. And it is precisely the parent who belongs to a minority group, and is therefore acutely sensitive to questions of tolerance, who is in danger of being unrealistic when it comes to teaching his child these lessons.

To the small child there is a real difference between someone with a white skin and someone with a yellow or black skin—notwithstanding the innumerable stories about children who “just don’t notice” such differences, and notwithstanding also, in my opinion, evidence from a few studies which tend to support these stories. To insist, out of a mechanical obeisance to tolerance, that your small child play with a Negro child when he is opposed to the idea is to “redouble your zeal and forget your aim.” It is a fact that concrete anxieties in the small child may be connected with just such differences as color of skin. Parents have come to realize, for example, how the sight of a crippled person will arouse a child’s fear lest he may get that way. Such anxieties, it is true, are the more acute the more insecure the child feels generally; but normal children are also the victims of them. Growing up entails so many mysterious, “secret” changes, that a change in the color of his skin can seem a real possibility to the pre-school child. Some children seek to protect themselves against an anxiety of this kind by exaggerating the differences between black and white, and anxious children are stubbornly prejudiced against those who are so different. Yet if a small child is brought up with a sense of security, these minor phobias, left alone, will pass with the months, leaving little trace behind them; the too active intervention of the parents is likely to do more harm than good.

With somewhat older children, some parents will not only argue that they “ought” to play with Negroes (an argument which seems irrelevant to the child who selects his companions for his own reasons), but will even physically punish the child who calls a Negro a “nigger.” The punishment may silence the child but fix his resentment the deeper. And there are other contradictions here: the parent, insisting the child must not lose his temper and call people vile names, gives a demonstration of temper-losing himself, and while preaching a universal democracy, suggests the lack of it as between himself, the physically stronger, and his child, the physically weaker.

Wiser parents will inquire as to what has aroused the child’s anger, and if some Negro boy seems to have been the true aggressor, will freely admit that their own child’s anger is justified before they remind him casually that his quarrel has nothing to do with the color of his “enemy’s” skin, and that all Negroes are not therefore bullies. Similarly, the small child who in some state of resentment has called the Negro maid a name should not be forced to apologize on the instant simply to soothe the parents’ vanity in their child’s good breeding or their anxiety about relations with the maid. Why the child has been rude is important; if it turns out to be because he is really angry with his playmate, or with his parents, perhaps, then it can be explained to him how useless was his name-calling: he hurt the maid, and did not affect the real object of his anger.

In general, discussions about tolerance are apt to go unheeded by the child in an intolerant mood. Timing is important. Wait till the child is at peace with himself and his small world. The basis of the tolerance of many adults is anxiety or guilt; the child’s basis is his own sense of security. Moreover, it is when he is not directly involved, when no anxiety of his own obtrudes, that the lesson can best be taught.

Such a moment is particularly felicitous, also, for preparing him for the possibility that he too may be made the target of prejudiced behavior. The child who has just shown affection for the Negro woman who takes care of him may be told that nevertheless there are people who are against this capable and fine person simply because her skin is black; he will be in a fair way to understand the injustice of discrimination. From there, he may be told about other people; Jews like himself, for instance, who are sometimes harmed by the same kind of prejudice. The important idea that the intrinsic worth of an individual is not being judged in this act of discrimination may well be conveyed to him then. However, let the child be guided to these conclusions on his own steam, so to speak; a genuine tolerance comes to each person by his own decision.

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The full acceptance by the child of ever larger groups as being not alien to him is part of the slow process of education. For the youngest child there is the family, the primary ingroup: all else belongs to an undifferentiated and always potentially hostile mass of non-family Then comes the small aggregate of playmates around the sandbox; later, his kindergarten friends, the children in the same grade, the children on the block, those at summer camp, the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts. The normal child moves with an ever greater assurance from smaller to larger groups. The “racial” group—regardless of the attitude of those who would desire to abolish all such distinctions—may be an important intermediate step on the child’s way to feeling himself a member of society as a whole. It is here, perhaps, that the Jewish child may gain most, in terms of his personal development, from that specifically Jewish atmosphere in ritual and culture which some see as an answer to the psychological problems of prejudice.

Direct transition from the family and age-groups to society as a whole, to being a “citizen of the world,” may be very difficult. The point could be made—though I am not ready to support it in full—that a child would feel lost without first belonging to one of the important ingroups, racial, religious, or perhaps political: always, however, with this danger, that the warm, safe feeling of “belonging” to such a group may be acquired at the price of thinking it very different and—much better. It might even be argued that someone who has not “belonged” to this kind of group earlier in life may, as a grown-up, self-consciously seek one out, thus reverting to just the kind of provincialism from which his parents sought to keep him. But this much is certain: only the small child who knew a maximum security within his family circle is ready to weather the insecurities of all the succeeding groups with which he may later identify himself. Security within the family group: that is the key to this problem, as to so many others.

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When all is said, to be born a Jew—or born into any other minority—means, in our present society, to experience discrimination sooner or later, more or less. The older Jewish child; at the proper time, must be educated, openly and realistically, to know that this will be his situation, which, as an adult, he must come to terms with if he would free his energies for constructive action—including, it might well be, the fight against intolerance. Very early he must be taught that the problem is a social one, not individual for him. Nor should existing real differences between groups be glossed over; nor, on the other hand, should they be made to appear larger or more mysterious than they are.

At the same time, only by building up in the child his individual self-respect can he be got ready for whatever lies in wait. Here the example of the parent is what counts. True self-respect in the child can be achieved only when the parents show that they do not depend for their own self-respect on arbitrary externals, least of all on whether they are accepted by everyone alike. The Jewish parent who is denied access to certain clubs or hotels, and receives this as a blow to his self-esteem rather than as the act of prejudice it is—or, worse, the parent who expresses pride at being tolerated where other Jews are barred—is surely not one whose example can teach the child to rely on his self-respect to take the blows of intolerance. And, on the group level, communal emphasis on the cultivation of Judaism, not for its own sake, but only as an armor against prejudice, only further undermines the self-respect of the Jewish group as a whole and its individual members and serves to keep alive and feed anew insecurity, generation after generation.

The problem can be settled only on the basis of each person’s growing up with a firm, true security within himself, so that he will neither suffer unduly from the intolerance of others nor be forced to seek a false security in an arbitrary over-valuation of his own group. Naturally, as the child grows older he depends less on his parents, more on his own personality. As early as preadolescence, the intellectual mastery of the problems that face him and his society becomes important to the child. Gradually, an understanding of the motives of tolerance and intolerance will help him to stand his ground when and if intolerance hits him. But, to repeat and re-emphasize: his basic security must be acquired mainly in early childhood. No educational or cultural institution, no “program” can do the parents’ job. The child’s protection from the consequences of intolerance, to the extent that he can be protected at all, lies in his early and consistent feeling of belonging to the most important group he ever depends on—his family—and for that, to reiterate once more, he must look to his parents. On their own sense of security and how they convey it to him, the child’s security will basically and primarily depend.

But that brings us to the final point, indeed the very core of “what the parent must do.” Failing in this, he is likely to fail in all else. How is the parent to pass on a sense of security he does not himself feel? How can he avoid passing on anxiety if he is torn by a sense of anxiety concerning not only his child’s future but his own?

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That many Jewish parents feel themselves threatened by anti-Semitism, are even haunted by a permanent anxiety about present discrimination and future hostility, attack, and rejection in the larger society can hardly be questioned. The prevalence of this state of mind among American Jews may well be the central fact affecting Jewish thought and action today.

Such anxiety is quite understandable: after Hitler, no Jew can ignore the ultimate explosiveness of anti-Semitism. But we are not concerned here with possible justification, but with trying to evolve rational, practical, and self-respecting modes of behavior. As a first step toward this, perhaps it is time that individual Jews began asking themselves—as they prepare not merely to be good parents but to think and act decently and intelligently as members of the Jewish and general communities—how much real correspondence there is between their own anxiety about anti-Semitism and the day-today facts of their experience, the realistic possibilities within American society. Granting that it is ever right to be ruled by fear though even in concentration camps it is not, in my belief—how fearful should an American Jew be today? Precautions, yes; wise action, yes; but deep, gnawing anxiety—one would say, no.

It is worth noting that Jewish preoccupation with anti-Semitism far antedates the days of Hitler, and as a phenomenon it is surprising how constant its basic quality remains, and how largely independent of the external circumstances, be they the worsening state of Jewish life in the early days of Hitler or the incomparably improved lot of Jews in this country. It is easy for most of us to perceive that the anti-Semite makes use of the Jew as a target to project his own inner anxiety. That the Jews make a somewhat similar use of anti-Semitism, and that their irrational fear of the goy plays an analogous role to the Gentiles’ fear of the Jew, is more difficult to recognize. More difficult, because while “the Jew” of the anti-Semite’s nightmare does not exist, the anti-Semite certainly does, and discrimination is a brutal reality. Thus the irrationality of the Jew consists in the high disproportionateness of his fear as compared to the facts, rather than in a total hallucination.

But, once allowing for this by no means unimportant distinction, there still is a startling similarity of role in individual psychology. Around the fact of anti-Semitism we cluster many anxieties: social insecurity; fear of competition; fear of exposure of personal inadequacy; and many other fears common to all men in our modern industrialized society. With all other fears thus centered in it, the one admitted fear of anti-Semitism is stretched far out of its real proportion. Such fear of anti-Semitism may become for the individual Jew a kind of psychological necessity, as fear of the Jew is for the inadequate Gentile. And so it is that often the over-anxious Jew may be as reluctant to give up his fear of anti-Semitism as the anti-Semite is reluctant to overcome his fear of the Jew.

To recognize how much of the vicissitudes of his individual life may be ascribed to anti-Semitism, and how much should not, to separate the “real” from the merely “feared,” this is the task, it seems clear, that each Jewish parent must face for himself before he can help protect his child. Before he can prescribe for his child’s anxiety, he must grapple with his own; if the child is to “understand” his world, the parent, it would seem to be life’s logic, must “understand” his. So, inescapably, the question of how best prepare our child to face anti-Semitism rests on our answer to a prior question: how do we prepare ourselves to face up to and struggle against the actual anti-Semitism that still remains in our American society, with inner security and without undue fear. One wonders how long it will be before American Jews are ready for this larger question, not merely “for the children,” but for themselves, and including the children.

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