This new department will represent, we hope, house-room for short pieces on a wide variety of subjects—reflections on and reactions to ideas and events; reports on occasions and happenings; comment on plays, films, music, and art; or just notions, sudden insights, and fancies. The accent will be on the brief and the informal; and perhaps on culture, in its broadest sense, rather than on politics—but we have no intention of being too rigorous in this respect either. On this horizon, we confess only to a bias in the direction of latitude rather than longitude. For its first two pieces, “On the Horizon” offers a review of Meyer Levin’s film The Illegals and a personal reflection by one of our younger writers on prejudice as a sin. Robert Warshow is managing editor of COMMENTARY. Myron Kaufmann is a newspaper man in Baltimore.
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We now have the confession of a “liberal” Gentile that even he may like to relax now and then with one of his unreconstructed kinfolk who takes white-Protestant superiority for granted (“A Liberal Gentile Looks at Himself,” by George Weltner, July 1948 COMMENTARY). I thought so; I rather suspected that the boisterous Jewish boys from the poorer parts of town had something to do with it when a college friend of mine—a clean-cut Unitarian who always stood on the “liberal” side of social questions—seemed increasingly uncomfortable at the University Commuters’ Center and finally let his membership lapse.
If this is anti-Semitism, I suppose some of my best friends would turn out to be anti-Semites, if I scratched their surfaces. Alan, who reads the Nation, has confided to me that although “clannishness” is a bad word, he “still can’t help noticing” that the Jews in his home town persist in marrying among themselves and inviting a preponderance of Jewish wedding guests. Tom, who once headed a national liberal organization, sometimes talks as if the jostling and pushing in New York’s subway crowds were an exclusive import from Eastern Europe.
Considerable recent propaganda has been aimed at a potential danger supposed to lurk in such men as these. Mr. Weltner, who owns up to “enjoying” his Gentile background, feels himself convicted as a small-scale Goering.
But are these prejudices the seeds of anti-Semitism—or do they represent, at least in the “liberal Gentile,” anti-Semitism’s last stand? My friends may lend a qualified credence to their fathers’ tales of Jewish businessmen, but they refuse to assume their fathers’ habits of social discrimination. Moreover, they confide their prejudices to me in the hope that I can explain them away.
Should we then acquit the “liberal Gentile,” in the absence of any overt anti-Semitic act? Should we rule that, after all, the proof of the pudding is in the eating?
I would say yes, if only because I suspect that the vast majority of liberals, and possibly the base of any liberal movement, must be made up of people like Mr. Weltner. The small number of “pure liberals” would be left with few allies if they denounced every person who has managed to achieve good conduct but yet finds that no amount of reason seems to prevail against the “residual prejudices” learned from his parents in childhood.
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And when I say “vast majority,” I am not confining myself to those liberals who happen to be Gentiles. I include Jews, and very probably Negroes and members of other minority-groupings as well. To be plain about it, if I condemn Mr. Weltner I must also condemn myself—and any number of “liberal Jews.”
In the first place, I must confess to what I will refer to as “Jewish prejudices.” By this I do not mean merely a pride in the success of Israeli arms, a possessive admiration of Professor Einstein, or a taste for cheese blintzes. I mean that, in congenial Jewish company, I am capable of relaxing into a chauvinistic theory that rolls all non-Jews into a single—and inferior—species: the Gentile. I can even nod in lazy agreement when the shortcomings of almost any non-Jew are shrugged off with a half-humorous, “Well, after all, what can you expect?” And I can listen receptively when Jewish failures, on the other hand, are ascribed to the evil influence or the stupid mismanagement of the Gentile majority.
More than this, I find that I have absorbed the prejudices of that very Gentile majority among which I was raised. I was early acquainted with the New England hierarchy that rates “The Irish” a notch below “The Yankees,” and the French-Canadians a notch lower still. At the age of four I already knew that my Jewishness involved a stigma, and that my community ranked Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in that order. (I cannot say to whom I am more indebted for this knowledge: my Gentile playmates, or my Jewish elders—most of whom had already suffered a life-long exposure to the raw New England climate.)
Even today, try as I may to suppress such unbecoming sentiments, I am capable of enjoying a secret sense of superiority in the presence of persons whose mannerisms, racial markings, or place of residence seem more characteristically Jewish than my own. Of course, I was aware even as a very young child that the community’s “caste” beliefs ran counter to the Jewish loyalties that were being inculcated in me at the same time. But my corruption came at an impressionable age, and on a level that undercuts reason.
It would be too facile and in fact erroneous to classify me with the self-hating Jewish woman in Gentleman’s Agreement. I wear my Judaism openly and—I hope—with outward dignity and inward pride. I have managed to keep up a personal reputation as a reasonably balanced adult and a political progressive. Yet—to be frank—there remain within me traces of New England snobbery, and a divided sense of Jewishness that makes me prefer brunettes in private and blondes in public.
But I don’t see much point in beating my breast, or in a liberal Gentile beating his. It seems to me that my rational levels must be in control, or I would not have passed for a liberal for so long. The same seems true of Mr. Weltner. At any rate, I am sure I could be safely entrusted to his mercy.
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I may be told that “evil” thoughts must sooner or later lead to evil actions: if a man is secretly “glad” he is a Gentile, then his opposition to residential covenants and educational quotas must inevitably flag. But everyday evidence contradicts this. Many a solid citizen entertains lurid thoughts when a flimsily-dressed young woman stands beside him at a car-stop. But if he refrains from translating the thoughts into action he is not arrested for them. So long as he has a sense of propriety and the will to behave accordingly, he remains an acceptable member of society.
Indeed, does not our whole moral code rest on the recognition that “instincts” or desires sometimes run counter to human decency or social necessity? We do not expect that men will never feel an urge to embezzle, or to punch a neighbor in the nose, or to take advantage of an unfair situation. We ask only that those who feel such urges put their temptations behind them.
Mr. Weltner envies his accusers’ apparent immunity to evil thoughts. He aspires to purity, and complains that his disease seems incurable. But what is important to society is that he has his disease well under control.
The hope for people like Mr. Weltner and myself is that a man who knows himself to be “wicked” inside may still try to behave as if he were not. I used to know a young Southern newspaperman who, although popular and influential among his associates, had attracted no particular attention as a militant liberal and presumably had no desire to pose as one. When asked on a statistical poll whether he had “any degree of prejudice against Negroes,” his confidential answer was: “A little, I’m afraid.” But when the question arose publicly as to whether Negroes should be admitted to a semi-professional, semi-social organization of which he was a member, and in which membership was highly prized, he was among those who argued for the Negroes, and it was his quiet insistence, rather than the half-hearted platitudes of his Northern colleagues, that finally turned out to be decisive. He may still lay claim to “a little” prejudice, but his practical liberalism—if practiced often enough—will in time become habitual.
Perhaps the Hollanders and Italians and others of Europe’s good people who helped hunted Jews escape from the Nazis did so to enjoy a thrill of power, or to relish their own moral superiority to the Nazis, or to point up their relative immunity as Nordics. But let us not trouble to ask them: let each of them work out the problem for himself. Suffice it for us to look at the deed.
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