Recently returned from a coast-to-coast tour, David Bernstein here reports on a deep uneasiness he noted among many American Jews as to their position and future in America, in the wake of the terror of Hitler’s Germany and of anti-Semitic manifestations during the war period here. He here analyzes this mood of spiritual withdrawal, and attempts to unravel the tangle of emotions and confused thinking that feed this—to his mind—quite unwarrantedly negative attitude toward the promise of America for Jews.
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Sooner or later everyone, I suppose, succumbs to the urge to rediscover his own land. After having been away from the United States entirely for many months, my wife and I recently traveled slowly across the country to California, and then back to the East.
More striking than anything else, we felt, was the pervading restlessness of people at this decade’s whirling events. In the midst of dollars, there is fear of economic collapse; in the midst of safety, a foreboding of disaster.
In the hotel lobbies, bulletin boards were crowded with listings of patriotic rallies, meetings of veterans’ organizations, civic gatherings. Local papers announced church suppers, religious revivals, women’s club meetings. And in the larger cities, especially, the Jewish gatherings were markedly numerous.
These struck us particularly, because they dealt so largely with “emergencies” and “problems” (generally on a note far removed from the locality and its familiar concerns)—the world Jewish problem, the Palestine problem, the DP problem, the problem of anti-Semitism. Indeed, when I myself went to Portland to give a talk, the local newspaper printed an interview with me which erroneously quoted me as having said that all European Jews wanted to leave Europe at once, and that anti-Semitism in Europe was worse than it had ever been under Hitler—a misquotation arising, I was sure, not from malice or intention but from the sheer habit of hearing Jewish speakers say such things.
As we talked to individual Jews we found a similar and striking undercurrent of emergency. And we were impelled to conclude that, of all the insecure people in America (except for Negroes), Jews are the most unhappily insecure.
They did not appear so at the meetings we attended, for these were characterized by a “group” spirit which effectively shut out the rest of the world. But, once the meetings ended, we noticed the return of self-consciousness, of suspicion, of discomfort.
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Hitler’s anti-Semitism succeeded in killing six million Jews, and to the rest, whether in Europe or in America, he bequeathed the assumption that their “Jewishness” is their outstanding and most vulnerable characteristic. In America this is breeding a new kind of separatism, almost entirely without positive content, which most often expresses itself in some form of emotional Jewish nationalism.
It may be oversimplification to describe this as mental flight from America. Yet there is in the phrase something strongly suggestive of the truth. Psychologically, many American Jews are uncomfortable here, though they cannot define the causes or the implications of their discomfort, and though they show themselves to be good and patriotic citizens. Their problem is not one of loyalty or subversion. It is one of adjustment; of discovering who they are, and working out their lives in terms of the realities of the world they live in—not the imaginary “realities,” but the actual realities.
Their difficulty stems from the events in Europe and the tendency to assume that America and Europe are alike. It stems from the evidences of anti-Semitism in the United States and their exaggeration in the hands of too many professional speakers and writers. It stems, too, from the bewilderment of the individual Jew, who often finds himself in social and intellectual limbo because he really does not know what being a Jew means to himself and, therefore, to his world.
Hitler and all too many Jewish professionals have given him definitions which, fundamentally, are not greatly at odds. Their crux is that he is “separate,” homeless, apart. In his American community he cannot reconcile the easy identification of everyone around him with the uncertainty of his own identity. He cannot even be sure that the next Jew will accept either his definition or his confusion. He wants very badly to have a “taken-for-granted” past, present, and future—like everyone else. Often, in search for peace of mind, he seizes some quick formula, so that he can stop thinking, stop arguing with himself.
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In geneva, a few months ago, I talked to a Polish Jew who, if I recall his career accurately, left Poland about fifteen years ago to escape anti-Semitism, went into business in Belgium, left for France when Hitler’s Germany moved too close for comfort, skipped out of Paris a few months ahead of the Nazis, established himself in Tel Aviv during the war but discovered that he was not happy in Palestine, and wound up with a temporary job in Switzerland while waiting to enter the United States as an immigrant. This gentleman, a Zionist no longer, now felt that Christian-Jewish relations hinged on semantics.
“What is the Christian to think?” he inquired. “One Jew tells him we are a nation, and another says we are a religious group, and another says there is only a Jewish culture. Each Jew is certain that his definition is the only correct one, and that anyone who disagrees is probably anti-Semitic.
“The Christian is bewildered; so he becomes resentful and suspicious. The result is anti-Semitism. How much better it would be if we were simply to say that we don’t know what we are. This would make sense to the Christian. He would look at the Jew and think, ‘Eh bien, voilà un bonhomme who doesn’t know what he is; I can understand that!’”
My peripatetic friend’s reasoning should, in all logic, make delightful sense in a lunatic world. As it happens, it does not. People who don’t know what they are rarely make sense to people who are certain they do know what they are; and it is probable, anyway, that the whole question seems less important to non-Jews than to Jews.
No, peace of mind for Jews does not lie in influencing what the Gentiles think; it lies, first of all, in deciding what to think for themselves. Which means that we must satisfy ourselves as to who and what we are, in a context that gives us both identity and personal freedom.
Is the American Jew to be identified solely on the basis of his religion?
Such an identification must be qualified by so many explanations and rationalizations as to be utterly unrealistic, at least in the United States. There are, of course, many devout Jews who try to observe the rituals and ethics of Judaism; there are some who observe the rituals but forget the ethics; and there are others who observe the ethics but ignore the rituals. All of them, perhaps, do belong to a Jewish religious group, whether by intent or inertia.
But what of the Jews to whom the rituals are meaningless or even embarrassing, and the ethics recognizable only as they correspond to popular American concepts of good works, honesty, and charity?
It can be argued that such people are “bad Jews,” to the same extent that Methodists who do not profess Methodism are simply “bad Methodists.” The argument is not altogether convincing. No one bears a Methodist name, or speaks with a Methodist inflection, or lives in a Methodist neighborhood complete with Methodist delicatessen. Few colleges maintain Methodist quotas. The “bad Methodist” can get himself born, brought up, educated, married, employed, divorced, retired, and buried without being very much aware that he is a Methodist, good or bad. If he marries a Baptist, he has few ensuing problems; if he sends his children to a Congregational Sunday school because it is more conveniently located or more fashionable, scarcely an eyebrow will rise. Can all this be said of “bad Jews”?
It can also be argued that nearly all American Jews, even the “bad” ones, turn to the rituals of Judaism in such supreme moments as marriage and death. This, too, needs further examination. The “bad” Jews, generally, are second generation or later. Their reversion to the rituals of Judaism is often no more than a concession to the sensibilities of their elders; and as the generations succeed one another the demand for such concessions decreases acceleratively.
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Is the religious definition valid at all? Of course it is—for those who are personally aware of their Judaism as the faith by which they live. For the others—including the “bad Jews”—it has little meaning.
Are American Jews, then, identifiable as members of a Jewish nation or, in the mystical jargon of politics, a “people”?
What is a nation? A group of human beings recognizing a common history and a common culture, yearning for a common destiny, assuming common habits, and generally attached to a specific piece of the earth’s surface; and, perhaps most important of all, feeling at home with one another. This definition, I think, can be applied to Americans, Filipinos, Swedes, and most other “nations.”
Would it apply to Jews, including the five million American Jews? The convinced Zionist would say yes, without hesitation. He would insist that it is easy to find the thread of common Jewish history and culture through thousands of years; he would say, “The common destiny is ours to make, the common habits are ours to develop, the piece of land is Eretz Yisrael, and as for feeling at home as a Jew—have you ever lived in Tel Aviv?”
All of which is perfectly valid for those who accept it. For nationhood is a pattern of belief and feeling rather than of fact. Its key words are: recognizing, yearning, assuming, attached, feeling. They depend upon emotional and intellectual willingness to recognize, yearn, assume, and so forth. If a Jew outside of Palestine chooses not to be a participant in the Jewish nation, then no rule-book on earth can force him to be one.
This fact need not conflict with one’s approval (or disapproval) of a Jewish state in Palestine or anywhere else. Those who choose to be members of the Jewish nation can settle there or otherwise affiliate themselves with it. Those who choose not to do so can stay away, even though they may favor the Zionist cause, and aid it. If one approves of any form of nationalism, then one must agree that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with Zionism, except the widespread propaganda of those Zionist spokesmen who insist that Jewish nationhood automatically includes all people who happen to be Jews.
There are some five million Jews in the United States. Most of them have no intention of moving to Palestine. They are Americans emotionally and intellectually and often more so than they fully realize. Many are Zionists, which is as consonant with American patriotism as, say, favoring the aspirations of the Irish or the Indonesian nationalists. Sympathy or even assistance for the Irish or Indonesians does not make one less an American; and by favoring Zionism one does not necessarily become a Jewish national.
The American Zionist must therefore, it would seem, delimit his Zionism. He can support the Zionist cause for all he is worth; but unless he is willing to give up his moral responsibility as an American, there is a line beyond which he dare not go, especially after the Jewish state is formally established in Palestine. The line itself is easy to mark off: it does not preclude support for the Jewish state; but it does preclude a national loyalty—whether to Ireland or Indonesia or to Jewish Palestine—above one’s loyalty to America.
This would seem a rather obvious conclusion. But it is not obvious at all, unfortunately, to many American Jews who have taken the mental flight from America without realizing that they have done so, and whose inner contradictions remain to be settled.
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Let us consider the position, for example, of a Jewish leader like Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver. Here is a distinguished rabbi, a free American since childhood, a respected citizen of Cleveland, a leader in Ohio Republican circles, who is also the foremost Zionist in America and not long ago was spokesman before the United Nations for the Jewish Agency. As an American citizen, he represented a body which has had the unique status of being a government and yet not a government. In his highly effective presentation of the Zionist case, there were strange and irreconcilable passages.
“We mean,” said Rabbi Silver, “to be good neighbors, not only to the Arab state of Palestine, but to the Arab states throughout the Middle East. And certainly we mean scrupulously to respect the equal rights of the Arab population in the free and democratic Jewish state.”
Who is “we” in this declaration? Obviously, the citizens of the proposed Jewish state. But a speaker who uses the first person plural is including himself. Yet Rabbi Silver has not given up his American citizenship, nor has he moved his family from Shaker Boulevard to the shores of the Mediterranean.
A little later in his speech, Rabbi Silver came to the problem of force in Palestine. Here his words were impersonal, the words of a trial lawyer representing a client. He began to talk about “them,” not “us.” He said: “The Jewish people of Palestine stands ready to assume immediately all responsibilities which the establishment of the Jewish state will involve . . . . The Jewish state, when it is established, will respect the sovereignty of its neighbor states as fully as it will defend its own. The Jewish people in Palestine is prepared to defend itself. It is not impressed by idle threats,” and so forth. The shift from “we” to “them” is smooth but hardly consistent.
When Professor Oscar Lange of the University of Chicago decided, at the war’s end, to throw in his lot with the new Polish government, he relinquished his American citizenship and resumed his status as a Pole; after which he was appointed Polish Ambassador to the United States and Polish representative on the United Nations Security Council. I do not suggest that Dr. Silver should do likewise, once there is a Jewish state. I do suggest that the contradiction which Dr. Lange resolved satisfactorily, Dr. Silver has not resolved at all. To the extent that this is merely a problem for a thoughtful man to settle with his own conscience, it is none of our business. To the extent that the same kind of unresolved conflict now involves the thinking and feeling of thousands of American Jews, it certainly is our business—for it raises the question of our quality as Americans.
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Can American Jews be identified as a group by their common culture? By Jewish culture, generally, one means not only the ancient literature and customs, but also all of the writings and output of Jewish thinkers and artists. There has been a specifically Jewish culture, and there still is, but it is largely unknown to the mass of Jews in America. They may occasionally read a translated poem or two, or a story by Sholom Aleichem; they may recognize a Chagall in the museum; but these are skimpy foundations on which to build a case.
To a very great extent, Jewish literature and art in recent centuries have been Eastern European in origin, with values, standards, and assumptions which each day become more exotic and strange to American Jews. By now, one would assert, except for the Yiddishists and a few others, Jewish culture means little to most American Jews.
And what of those who accept no positive definitions as American Jews, yet insist on an identification nevertheless? “We are Jews,” they say, “not by religion, or nationality, or culture, but simply because other people stick the label on us, because there is anti-Semitism. Though admittedly we have no positive feeling as Jews, it would be beneath our dignity to deny our Jewishness while such labels and prejudices exist.”
Or, in the interpretation of the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, who is not a Jew himself: “Le Juif est un homme que les autres hommes tiennent pour Juif: voilà la verité simple d’où il faut partir.” (“The Jew is a man whom other men consider Jewish: that is the simple truth from which we must start.”) Sartre, at least, follows through on his premise. American Jews who try to live by this same premise stop with this simple truth; and they wonder why the doctrine still leaves room for bewilderment and indecision.
The reason, of course, is that man cannot live by a negative philosophy. Jews who are Jews only because others call them Jews are ringed by a dilemma. They do not want to be Jews; they will not, on the other hand, stop being Jews. Since they assume no positive values, they condemn themselves to a Jewishness without content or satisfaction.
Finally, there is the racial definition. The Nazis claimed that Jews were a racial group, and a low-grade one at that. They rationalized their bloody program of extermination with theories of biological heredity ridiculed by every reputable scientist in the world. Revulsion against the Nazi race theory and its consequences has perhaps caused us to overlook the fact that there has been a Jewish race theory, too. This is the “chosen people” concept, which in its modem form differs from Nazi theory in that it stresses the religious and ethical rather than the biological, and claims superiority in spirit rather than in power.
These, then, are the five most common prevailing concepts: religion, nationality, culture, race, and a negative one for which a single word is hard to find. Not one of these can possibly apply to all Jews in America: the religious, unreligious, antireligious; the nationalists and anti-nationalists; the rational Jews, the emotional Jews, the unthinking Jews; the lovers of Jewish culture and those who are oblivious to it; the Jews who think Gentiles make them Jews and those who like to be Jews.
Is there any need for a definition at all? I think there is, not for purposes of defense against anti-Semitism but for achievement of peace of mind as Jews. No individual feels secure unless he has some understanding of and pride in his roots as a person—his family, his home town, his childhood associations, his background. The search for roots can, like anything else, be carried to ridiculous and even dangerous extremes; but, in moderation, it is human and even necessary.
What we seek, therefore, is a definition that can be applied to most, if not all, Jews in America—that will correspond with the facts—that will permit the individual Jew to make as much or little of his background as he wishes, so that he may be proud of his Jcwish heritage or simply take it for granted. Such a definition can hardly be found in current concepts. It can, I believe, be found in an understanding of the position of American Jews as one among the many ethnic groups which add up to the total population of the United States.
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No country in Europe, west of the Soviet Union, can compare with the United States for the heterogeneity of its population. Wave after wave of immigrants came here expecting freedom, opportunity, safety, or, in the case of Negroes, slavery. This is how America grew. This is the very basis of our population pattern.
By and large, the degree of integration (and of acceptance) into the overall American pattern has been in direct proportion to the length of time each group has been here. We have a dominant Anglo-Saxonism probably because the English and Scotch-Irish were among the earliest arrivals. The Dutch have long since been absorbed. The Germans who came in the early g9th century are by now almost completely integrated. Descendants of the early Irish, who had many difficulties at first, have passed beyond the immigrants’ time of troubles. The later immigrants—Italians, Poles, Slovaks, for example—had to suffer the exaggerated tensions of an industrializing America; but they are gradually achieving greater acceptance and greater integration.
The process of acceptance is slow. But it does move. Seventy-five years ago it would have been inconceivable for an Irish Catholic to think seriously of running for the presidency. In 1928, Alfred E. Smith did try it, and he was nominated by one of our major parties. True, one reason for his defeat was the very fact that he was Irish and Catholic; but an Irish Catholic could probably become president of the United States in our generation. When Wendell Willkie ran in 1940, his German ancestry had nothing whatever to do with the election returns. And among the present Republican possibilities are listed Harold Stassen, of mixed Austrian and Scandinavian parentage, and, until his recent withdrawal, Dwight Eisenhower, of Swiss-German descent.
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Just as acceptance increases with the passage of time, so does integration within the group. The third-generation Irish American is likely to be less anti-British than his grandfather or his father. The American-born Italian is not likely to read an Italian-language newspaper at all, or to take much more than an average interest in the political affairs of the old country.
This is Americanization in the normal, healthy sense. It is not a sharp, self-conscious amputation of the natural interests of people arriving in a new home and still thinking nostalgically of the old one; it is a gradual shifting of interest to the here and the now, almost imperceptible from day to day, but clearly evident from generation to generation.
The overwhelming majority of American Jews are descended from forebears who, in recent centuries at least, lived in a rather clearly defined area of Eastern and Central Europe—Poland, Russia, Hungary, Rumania, Lithuania, Austria, Eastern Germany, etc.
In most of these lands emancipation came late, and, in some, only superficially. Thus the European forebears of most American Jews had led ghetto lives, dwelling in an environment exclusively Jewish, following separate communal customs, observing Jewish religious practices, enjoying the Jewish variations on Central and East European cooking, engaging in what became popularly known as Jewish occupations, and looking on non-Jews as outsiders who were probably unfriendly. It is not necessary here to stress the fact that all this was forced on them. They led such lives, separate and Jewish.
These forebears of most American Jews were indeed an ethnic group, whether they came from Galicia or Lithuania or Bukovina; as an ethnic group, they came to America; and today their children and grandchildren are most easily comparable, as a group, to descendants of other ethnic groups.
The great wave of Jewish immigration lasted from the 1880’s to the First World War. This means that the Jewish group, on the whole, is second generation now verging into third generation. By now most American Jews are decidedly different from what they were fifty years ago. They have been educated in the American schools and have lost many of the habits and values which meant so much to their parents. They do certain things, react in certain ways, less because of what conditions were like in Eastern Europe in 1890 and more because of what conditions are like in the United States in 1948. This is the process that social scientists call acculturation. I would call it a process of assimilation, if the word did not seem to give so many Jews the shudders.
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Assimilation, in the minds of most American Jews, implies hypocritical flight from Jewishness, generally including conversion to Christianity, changing one’s name, denying or at least hiding the fact that one is Jewish. And the Jews of Germany are recalled as the most shameful example of this kind of “assimilation,” with the ironic recollection of what happened to them when Hitler achieved power.
I hold no brief for the pre-Hitler behavior of German Jews. Perhaps they did seek to escape affiliation with their Jewish past. But if the Hitler accession to power is to be the only test of the soundness of their adjustment, then all Germans and all non-assimilationist Jews who believed in democracy, personal freedom, peace, and justice also were wrong. For all were unable to stop Hitler or escape his violence. The catastrophe that befell German Jews was not the result of their assimilationism. It was the result of Hitlerism. This means that the lesson that Jews have to learn from the German experience is not so simple as the current Jewish nationalist cliché would have us believe.
The history, the culture, the mythology, the ideals of America and Germany are so different as to be almost beyond comparison. Gunnar Myrdal, studying the Negro problem in America, concluded that there was an American faith in democratic, libertarian, equalitarian principles, which was not always carried into American practice; and the conflict between faith and practice he called the “American dilemma.” In Germany, for a few years under the Weimar Republic, an attempt was made to superimpose democratic, libertarian, equalitarian practices on the generations-old German faith in force and authoritarianism. This was the German dilemma; it was resolved by Hitler in 1933, to the satisfaction of too many Germans. The American dilemma has not been resolved, by any means, and it may never be resolved. But so far, in the struggle, the faith has shown itself strong, and the practice moves forward. So long as there is this real difference between Germany and America, it would be silly to measure the Jewish perspective in America by the Jewish failure in Germany.
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There is, of course, anti-Semitism in America, and it complicates any Jewish effort to achieve personal peace. The very word is enough to awake echoes of the Eastern European pogroms that our grandfathers knew, or of gas chambers in Germany not so many months ago; and in this memory lies real danger. For it is easy to assume that things must follow the same course everywhere. On the evidence, they need not.
Overt, militant, virulent, organized anti-Semitism (Christian Front), inspired by and following European patterns, is the least widespread form of anti-Semitism in this country. And it is the least dangerous, precisely because it stems from European political patterns unacceptable to most Americans. On the other hand, the really prevalent and dangerous kind of anti-Semitism in America is hardly even understood at all, chiefly, I believe, because we try to evaluate it by European standards.
In all the recent discussion about the motion picture Crossfire, most people overlooked the fact that the picture portrayed not one but two types of anti-Semitism. One type motivated the villain to murder a man on the sole ground that his victim was Jewish. Such a motive might ring true in a German, or Polish, or Slovak atmosphere, where there exists a tradition of active Jewbaiting. The villain’s anti-Semitism in Crossfire was essentially European, not American; and American audiences would not dream of identifying their own attitude toward Jews with his.
Further in the film, a Tennessee boy becomes a key figure in the plot. He is asked to take part in a scheme to trap the villain into giving himself away. The youthful, shy, rather inarticulate boy hesitates. After all, he asks, how is he to know that the persuasive police officer isn’t himself a “Jewish person”?
I submit that, in a raw and uncut state, this is a closer approximation to the prevalent native anti-Semitism. I make no claim to scientific analysis; but I saw the film in cross-sectional Washington, where the audience was not predominantly Jewish. The gasp (and the giggles) that followed the boy’s naively sincere remark revealed, I think, the fact that he had put into words what some of these people were unconsciously feeling.
They were people who might suspect Jewish influence behind special pleading against anti-Semitism; who might listen appreciatively to an anti-Jewish joke, and retell it if they could remember the punch line; who might pass remarks about a funny Jewish name, or an accent; who might resent the too rapid advancement of a Jewish fellow-worker; who might flatter their own egos by choosing a “restricted” summer resort.
But they would not normally condone violence or murder, whether the motive was anti-Semitism or robbery. They would not go out of their way to be deliberately rude to Jews. They would not, in other words, fall within the European anti-Semitic tradition. This does not make them any less anti-Semitic. It makes them anti-Semitic in a different way—socially, not politically—and according to a pattern highly reminiscent of the temper which produced the “No Irish Need Apply” signs of the last century. There is more of a connection between anti-Semitism in America and the historic forms of other anti-immigrant prejudices and actions, than between American anti-Semitism and what the Nazis thought and did.
Anti-Semitism, as we know it in America, will in my opinion be reduced not only by the passage of time but also by the reduction of all prejudices and discriminations; we will not wipe it out so long as other groups in the population also suffer non-acceptance. On the other hand, it is too easy to assume that simply by combating prejudice and discrimination we are going to achieve Jewish peace of mind.
Anti-Semitism is one of the factors, and a heart-rendingly vital one, in Jewish discomfort. But it is not the only one. And the others cannot be dismissed by blaming the anti-Semites. These other factors have to do with the thoughts and emotions of Jews themselves. Our problem is not only acceptance by others, but also deeper understanding of our position in America and fuller integration with others.
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Since the years of Hitlerism and war, it has not been uncommon to hear American Jews speak of their sense of not belonging; it is indeed so common that many other Americans have begun to accept the phrase for the fact.
Recently, the American Federation of Labor passed a resolution favoring partition of Palestine. Its argument was founded on the “2,000-year-long historic homelessness of the Jewish people.” If it refers to American Jews, this is stupid and dangerous talk. Nothing will do more to make them homeless in fact than constant repetition of such a false and irresponsible slogan.
The fact is that, in spite of their uneasiness, American Jews are American in the full and best sense of the word. They like to live in America, and would not dream of giving up all that living here means in the way of prosperity, opportunity, freedom, and happiness—in spite of injustices, prejudices, inequalities, and discriminations. They may not have thought through the meaning of their emotional Zionism; they may not have learned how to cope with anti-Semitism; but, despite the temptation of many to flee mentally from America, what they really seek is contentment in America.
Any amateur psychologist knows that you cannot build peace of mind on fear. He also knows that the best way to begin the conquest of fear is to examine its source. In our case, the source is anti-Semitism, an anti-Semitism exacerbated by the worldwide Jewconsciousness stimulated by Hitler but nonetheless, in its most common manifestations, a blood relation to prejudices practiced against other ethnic groups at roughly similar stages of their life in America. When we recognize that fact, we begin to conquer our own fear.
What does this mean in practice? It means that we must recognize that we have developed an inferiority complex from the fact that we are Jewish. Every normal human being has an inferiority complex about something in this neurotic day: he is cross-eyed, color-blind, poor, wealthy, uneducated, a long-haired intellectual, a Polish-American with an unpronounceable name, a hick, a bad athlete, sexually insecure, or bald—and if you touch the sore spot you will get a reaction of pain and embarrassment. In the case of Jews, the sore spot is often the very fact that they are Jews but don’t know why. To recognize this is the first step toward therapy.
It means that those of us who are religious Jews should not be apologetic about their religion or its practices. I have even heard it proposed that Judaism be transformed into a proselytizing religion, in order to proclaim to the world its fine ethical message and also to reinforce the self-esteem of Jews themselves; and perhaps the idea is not so odd.
It means that we should avoid any tendency to assume that every non-Jew is automatically or even potentially the enemy of the Jew, to believe that Jews stand alone in an unfriendly world. Our allies in America are numerous and powerful. They include all people with normally decent ideas; people who are liberal in the American tradition, whether their politics be left-wing or right-wing; people who believe in fair play, condemn lynchings, and dislike being stampeded—the good people who are the majority of America. They are not all heroes, but they are people who permit matters to go so far and no further.
It means that we must seek the middle ground between aggressiveness and regressiveness—that, on the one hand, we must not want to see a Jew on the Supreme Court only because he is a Jew; and that, on the other hand, we must not try to prevent a Jew from holding high office for fear that people will point to “Jewish domination.” By the same token, it means we must remember that when Herschel Johnson participated in the UN deliberations on Palestine he was representing 140 million American citizens and not merely five million American Jews.
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It means, in sum, that as individuals we must accept the inevitable process of assimilation (or acculturation or integration or adjustment—whichever word offends our sensibilities less) not in its cowardly sense but in the healthy sense which sees no conflict between Jewishness and American-ness. This is a positive position, not a negative one. It accords us the right—and perhaps the duty—to recall our history, culture, faith, and trations as Jews, and to add them to the American amalgam.
To do all this requires a good deal more self-examination than is now going on among American Jews. Few of us can afford the luxury of the psychoanalyst—granting that this problem comes within his province. We must do the job on our own. The world as a whole is full of emotional conflict and intellectual confusion; and it is hardly likely that American Jews are going to achieve complete peace of mind ahead of anyone else. But, if they will only face American realities, recognizing that these realities are in no basic way incompatible with their hopes and aspirations, they can take the first steps toward eliminating some of the causes of an insecurity which seems many times more acute than that of their fellow humans in the atomic age.
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