To the Editor:

This is to congratulate you on the publication of Milton Himmelfarb’s “Is American Jewry in Crisis?” [March]. It was a masterful statement, which I would not want to see changed by as much as a word. . . .

To the Jewish apologist, I would like to ask: what do you gain by “understanding” or even justifying anti-Semitic statements? . . . You may agree or disagree about the extent of anti-Semitism among blacks; you may agree or disagree with the positions, among others, of some individual Jews and Jewish organizations. But what do you gain by not speaking out against statements which are clearly anti-Semitic, or, if you would rather have it said in this manner, which clearly bring “Jew” into the merits of a controversy when “Jew” is not logically necessary? What gain do you find for yourself or for blacks when you apply standards toward statements by blacks which you would not apply toward statements by Jews? . . .

I think the point should be clear: no matter what the motivation or social purpose, there are certain things one does not do. One does not run down blacks as blacks. One does not run down Jews as Jews.

Leonard S. Sandweiss
New York City

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To the Editor:

Congratulations to Milton Himmelfarb for his trenchant article. . . . For too long Jews have been admiring the stroke of their oppressors . . . or have been willing to tolerate the vituperation of their adversaries. Why do we owe patience, understanding, and empathy to anyone who seeks to do us harm? . . .

Howard Altstein
Champaign, Illinois

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To the Editor:

. . . Why does Mr. Himmelfarb imply that it is all right to take up arms for our defense, yet deny us the right to use ammunition? Of course the “ethnics” are not going to fight for Jewish survival, but it is obvious that they themselves, together with the middle class and organized labor, see the threat and in many cases are more disturbed about it than we are. Roosevelt and Churchill sided with Stalin because it was expedient; Hitler allied Germany with Japan because it was expedient. Why must we Jews be like a tiny island in the middle of the ocean, forever bucking the waves yet never really stopping them? . . .

Beryl Mosor
Brookline, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

. . . Backlash is ugly enough, but when Mr. Himmelfarb suggests that Jewish voters align themselves with the most conservative elements of our society in their own “self-interest,” backlash becomes lunacy. As a Jew, I do not perceive that abandoning my liberal and humanistic traditions is in my own “best interests.” Joining repressive elements in their attack on black calls for justice can only result in unleashing forces that ultimately (and historically) turn against Jews.

The hysterical overreaction of the Jewish Establishment to a handful of anti-Semitic incidents, incidents that are all the more isolated for their being unrepresentative, leads one to suspect the motives. Are our “professional Jews” attempting to use the imagined threat of black anti-Semitism as a lever to perpetuate their own organizations and their own power? . . .

D. S. Davis
New York City

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To the Editor:

Milton Himmelfarb’s article would be more to the point were it entitled “In Defense of the Liberalism of American Jewry.” Indeed, he implies as much in his opening paragraph when he writes: “. . . I have found it necessary to praise the Jews to Jews. By praise I mean defend. The defense has been [is] against the accusation, undeterred by mere fact, that American Jews have become selfishly conservative, or downright reactionary.” One cannot help but agree that Jews are in need of praise by Jews. And defense attorney Milton Himmelfarb makes a good case for Jewish liberalism within the framework he selects. But the question, is American Jewry in crisis?, never really gets considered.

At the same time many of the facts which Mr. Himmelfarb cites to support the claim of Jewish liberalism have a bearing on the more basic question of the position of Jews in the U.S. The general problem arises from the fact that Jews, who in terms of wealth, economic activity, and education are more closely allied with conservatives, nevertheless continue to support what they believe to be the more liberal candidates, policies, and practices. As Mr. Himmelfarb notes, this has left Jews without allies, though he seems to think this is one more instance of anti-Jewish feeling rather than further evidence of the breakdown of American liberalism.

Jews vote like Negroes but have no political alliance with the growing black community (almost five times as large as the Jewish minority); on the contrary, instead of collaboration one can look for greater estrangement between the two groups. Similarly, Jews vote like labor but have few strictly labor interests and can count on labor support for specifically Jewish concerns only in very special circumstances. . . . And, of most importance, Jews strongly support the State of Israel even to the point of interventionism at a time when most Americans are indifferent to the fate of Israel, above all else want peace in the Middle East, and are tending toward nonintervention in general. In a word, what is most significant about the position of Jews in the U.S. today is that it tends toward political isolation.

The problem therefore is not to defend Jewish liberalism, which in the past was a part of the mainstream of the American political revolution ushered in by the New Deal, but to comprehend the growing Jewish political isolation today and deal with the dangers which accompany it in a period when the American majority is moving to the right of center. Given this situation, it would seem that the obvious answer is that Jews should also move to the right. Mr. Himmelfarb hints at that answer when he asks: “Why did I contribute to that 81 per cent [Jewish vote for Humphrey] the last time out? Would 70 or 75 per cent not have been liberal enough?”

Two things are wrong with this simple antidote. First, Jewish liberalism, as Mr. Himmelfarb’s data suggest, has deep roots and will not be easily renounced to meet some prescription for security. Second, the trend toward conservatism, whose limits are by no means visible, is itself a danger to Jews to which they would only be adding were they to give it support.

This brief letter is hardly the place to analyze the forces destroying American liberalism, but at least it should be recognized that, taking into account the nature of the Jewish predicament, Jews have a special need to make liberalism viable. Though it is the right and obligation of Jews to pursue Jewish interests, those can never be wholly separated from a democratic and open society. Jewish liberalism cannot stand alone, crushed between the complacent majority on the Right and the frenetic minority on the Left. If Jewry is not in crisis now, the chance that it will face a crisis in the future is—if American liberalism should continue to deteriorate—indeed very great.

David Danzig
Columbia University School of Social Work
New York City

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To the Editor:

I will not attempt to comment on the general thesis advanced by Milton Himmelfarb. But there ought to be a response to his sneering reference to “the Jewish-label civil-liberties outfit [which] is busy protecting us against—against a Christmas stamp with the archangel Gabriel from Jan van Eyck’s ‘Annunication,’ and a lottery ticket with a menorah and Shield of David.” The implication is that the “outfit” in question, presumably the American Jewish Congress, is doing nothing else and particularly nothing about the crisis which Mr. Himmelfarb is discussing. That is utter nonsense, unless you assume that all the Jewish organizations should drop everything they are doing, including defense of religious liberty, to deal with this one problem.

Readers of COMMENTARY, including Mr. Himmelfarb, should know that the religious design of the Christmas stamp was protested not only by the American Jewish Congress but by all the organizations in the National Community Relations Advisory Council and the Synagogue Council of America, including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and the rabbinical and congregational bodies of all three branches of Judaism.

Mr. Himmelfarb has been expressing for years his disagreement with the prevailing view in the Jewish community on the importance of maintaining separation of church and state. But the fact that we are all out of step with him does not mean that we are not protecting Jewish interests.

Joseph B. Robison
Commission on Law & Social Justice
American Jewish Congress
New York City

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To the Editor:

. . . In New York City, and in the Middle East, Jews today enjoy what (knowing Mr. Himmelfarb’s predilection for Latinisms) I would call an unquestionable plenitas potestatis. The Jews are, in these two regions, powerful, and almost unchallengeably so. Their power has not been acquired by accident. . . . It has, rather, been acquired as a result of a deliberate and determined resolve to do so; the reconstitution of Jewish life on the basis of power (both within the Jewish world itself and in terms of the Jewish-Gentile confrontation) is the revolutionary transformation of modern Jewish history; it is this that was meant by the objective of “normalizing” the Jewish people.

We Jews (if I may be allowed to indulge in the old I. F. Stone trick) have normalized ourselves. The great mass of Jews seems to be exhilarated by this turn of events: now we can persecute and exploit rather than be the objects of persecution and exploitation, and even as we do this we can cover our flanks by hiding behind the sufferings we endured in the past. . . . A few Jews, on the other hand, and I often get the feeling that they are pitifully few, reject “normalcy” and, like Moses when he came down from Mt. Sinai and saw the people dancing round the Golden Calf, stubbornly insist that it is indeed possible for the whole army to be out of step.

Other Jews, however, fall between these two extremes: Himmelfarb evidently is one of them. Such Jews acclaim our new normalcy, but somehow cannot be entirely reconciled to it. They want to be “normal” but at the same time recognize that this desire leads them to betray their Jewish inheritance. They are not prevented by this recognition from continuing in their betrayal, but they feel guilty. Indulging in the exercise of power, some lurking, lingering suspicion that this is not altogether a nice Jewish thing to do nevertheless continues to haunt them. And so they dream up fantastic conspiracies to prove that they are still being persecuted and, by becoming so terribly exercised with this figment of their own imagination, retain a tenuous hold on the Jewishness which they have rejected, but not altogether without a qualm. . . .

Michael Selzer
The City University of New York
New York City

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To the Editor:

. . . Two of Mr. Himmelfarb’s points call for further comment.

On quotas vs. merit: it is possible and technically simple to provide preferential weightings to Negro candidates, within a merit system, without either unduly undermining it, or introducing pernicious quotas. Presumably in the public interest, veterans are now given point handicaps on many civil-service tests. For parallel reasons, Negroes might also be given preferences on some merit examinations. . . . Such a policy, while clearly discriminatory in favor of one racial group, would not seriously disadvantage other groups, Jews included, as long as no quotas were set, and the point handicaps were held to reasonable levels.

On the implication of anti-Semitism by Brandeis blacks organizing themselves as Malcolm X University: Jews are, and should be, sensitive to anti-Semitism wherever they find it, and to Jewish eyes it fairly leaps from the pages of Malcolm’s autobiography, along with assorted racial nonsense. I have no private pipeline to the black subconscious, but Malcolm’s anti-Semitism is not, I wager, the message that “sends” young blacks. It is, rather, his strident and defiant racial pride . . . which arouses young Negroes. . . .

Morton Clurman
Croton-on-Hudson, New York

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To the Editor:

At the risk of having Milton Himmelfarb dismiss me as one of those “Jewish universalists” who blindly “understand” and explain away the perils confronting them, may I suggest that his article on black anti-Semitism is disturbing in more ways than he perhaps intended? Of course Jews have every reason, as he indicates, to be anxious about anti-Semitism! Of course it must not be overlooked, no matter where it makes its appearance. Anti-Semitism, as anyone who can remember the 30’s and 40’s must know, is a frightfully serious matter. But that is precisely why its extent and location must be defined with the utmost care. Given the fears waiting to be born, anything less can be dangerously provocative. Black activism must not be made to seem synonymous with anti-Semitism. In Mr. Himmelfarb’s article, however, I’m afraid it frequently is.

One instance: after observing that Malcolm X “was an anti-Semite,” he notes that the “one thing no one remarked on when the black students occupied that building at Brandeis—not even the parochial Jews, so accepted has it all become—is the new name under which those students organized themselves: Malcolm X University.” Since this is his only mention of the Brandeis event, it conveys the impression that the seizure of Ford Hall was an anti-Semitic demonstration. That’s bad enough—but what really jars is the implication created by the surrounding context. The comment is embedded in a paragraph on Herman B. Ferguson, who has advocated organizing black education around the gun and has been indicted for conspiracy to commit murder. One need not be a “Jewish universalist” to realize that this method of discussion is downright inflammatory. . . .

As one who was on campus almost constantly during the Ford Hall occupation, let me make it clear that everything said and done in those ten days urges the conclusion that the name chosen by the black students was intended to symbolize black aspiration, even black militancy, but not what Mr. Himmelfarb suspects, anti-Semitism. . . .

Arthur Edelstein
Brandeis University
Waltham, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

. . . Mr. Himmelfarb fails to distinguish between black militants who adhere to the non-violent approach (shall we say “responsible” militants) and those who do not (“extremists”); between black (self-appointed) spokesmen and black Americans in general; between radicals who retain their Jewish identity and those who do not; and so on. . . .

Mr. Himmelfarb concentrates on the problem of black anti-Semitism, and demonstrates that he is cognizant of those studies which find that anti-Semites are a minority among black Americans. But he rejects these findings. Why?—because the author of one of these studies allegedly concluded that “Jews are incredibly paranoid.” I don’t know who that social scientist is and I don’t care. I do know, however, that every study that I have seen has concluded that black Americans are less anti-Semitic than white Americans. . . .

Chaim I. Waxman
Department of Sociology
Central Connecticut State College
New Britain, Connecticut

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To the Editor:

. . . Mr. Himmelfarb seems to be proposing that Jews should “vote their self-interest,” i.e., vote with the right wing, abandoning their traditional liberalism and concern for the (black) underdog. Indeed, in reading his article I sometimes had the impression that he advocated that we “get the blacks.” . . . I certainly do not believe Jews ought to indulge in the masochistic game of “Yes, yes, we’re bad, hit us again!” We ought not, as some Jews have done, endorse the position of black anti-Semites that Jewish exploitation is the root of black misery. But neither can we deny that ghetto blacks are exploited by ghetto merchants, and that large numbers of ghetto merchants are Jewish. . . . One reason ghetto merchants are Jewish is that the ghettos were Jewish before they were black, and the Jewish merchants simply “hung on” after their clientele changed. One reason ghetto merchants “exploit” is that their businesses are marginal: profits are low, costs are high, and so they are forced to charge higher prices than larger retailers. Finally, though, it must be said that there is a kind of “exploitation,” however unintended, in the fact that white merchants collect their profits in the black ghettos but spend them in white communities.

. . . There is probably an additional reason why blacks have chosen to direct an increasingly larger part of their rage specifically against Jews. It is that Jews are too often, and quite unfairly, held up to blacks as an example of how a discriminated-against ethnic minority, initially poor and ignorant of the ways of America, nevertheless “made it” in American society. . . . It is bitter indeed to observe another persecuted minority that did succeed in America, to observe the fruits of its success, to be compared constantly with it and found wanting, and to know that the route to success is closed to oneself.

What, then, is to be done about black anti-Semitism? I suggest that it is no solution to join the fascists in putting down the blacks. I suggest that Jews should speak out and tear to shreds the flimsy arguments of black anti-Semites on every possible occasion. I suggest that, fundamentally, the problem of black anti-Semitism will not be solved until the causes of black rage are removed. The best counter, therefore, to black anti-Semitism is to go on with the work we’ve been doing—go on working with blacks or parallel to blacks to eradicate white racism, to open up opportunities for economic advancement and residential dispersal, to reform or revolutionize the abysmal public education system.

In the meantime, it seems to me that the time for Jewish merchants in the black ghettos is past. Whether or not black ownership of marginal ghetto businesses is going to improve the economic position of the black community is not the issue. Probably it will not; but even if such ownership . . . does not change the economic situation of blacks substantially, they should have the right to try. . . .

The time for Jewish merchants in the black ghettos is past also because as long as they remain, they will retain their special visibility and thus continue to be the scapegoats for black rage and black frustration. I do not see my advocacy of a withdrawal from the ghetto as “placating” or even “rewarding” black anti-Semitism. Black anti-Semitism is detestable, and should not be rewarded. Jewish ghetto merchants are not the cause of black misery, and Jewish withdrawal from ghetto businesses should not be seen as a tacit acknowledgment that “Jewish exploitation” is a root cause of the blacks’ troubles. But nothing good is accomplished by Jewish merchants remaining in the ghetto. If they leave, one stimulus to black anti-Semitism would be removed. . . .

Efforts on the part of the American Jewish community to accomplish the peaceful transition from white to black ownership of ghetto enterprises should go a long way toward constructively removing, not mollifying, the causes of black anti-Semitism. . . .

Evalyn F. Segal
Center for Urban Studies
University of Illinois
Chicago, Illinois

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To the Editor:

Mr. Himmelfarb is right on target in his attack on apologists for anti-Semitism, Jewish and otherwise. But I think we must not take the present noise among the militants for an anti-Semitic movement among blacks. The ethnic targets vary with the locality. Across the river in Newark black students last year were writing “Kill the Wops” on school walls. And to me, “honkie” sounds suspiciously like American slang for an East European laborer.

As recently as a year ago a CBS survey found no more than 4 per cent of Negroes in the country as a whole supporting the best-known militant leader (Stokely Carmichael). Roy Wilkins drew about eight times as much support from Negroes as H. Rap Brown.

While applauding Mr. Himmelfarb’s polemic against the tolerators of black anti-Semitism, I don’t share his alarm. The tactic of talking revolution but attacking only those already on your side (liberals, Jews, intellectuals) is unlikely to recruit a large number of adherents to the cause. While ethnic minorities may stand in the path of some middle-class Negroes, the quarrel of the poor is with the centers of power not with its periphery. Such an attack the militants have scrupulously avoided, standing aside both from Chicago and the Poor People’s Campaign.

And while we are at it, let us set the record straight on Mr. Himmelfarb’s claims as a prophet. He mentions a conference on anti-Semitism at which he “was a guest” and at which he expressed doubts concerning the findings. As the principal author of the study (Jews in the Mind of America) on which the conference was based, I can assure you that Mr. Himmelfarb was present not as a guest but as a member of the advisory committee on the analysis of poll data which, in the words of the Executive Vice-President of the American Jewish Committee, “scrutinized the original drafts, supplied additional information, and often suggested interpretations that gave meaning to obscure findings.”

Mr. Himmelfarb was of enormous help to my study and at no time in the many meetings I had with the advisory committee over a two-year period did he express skepticism that anti-Semitism had indeed declined. Neither did he voice doubts concerning the meaning of the assembled data. Moreover, the report of the conference, while discussing at length the doubts of some others, nowhere includes Mr. Himmelfarb among the doubters.

My guess, of course, is that Mr. Himmelfarb’s record as a prophet would have been better served had he not tried to dissociate himself from conclusions with which he concurred at the time. These findings—that anti-Semitism among Americans has declined massively since the war—are in no way vitiated by the present posture of some Negro militants. One might even guess that if the Jews were not so firmly entrenched and accepted in the society, it is most unlikely that they would have been selected as an appropriate target for anti-white hostility.

Charles Herbert Stember
Department of Sociology
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey

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To the Editor:

Yes, American Jewry is in crisis, in no small part because of such over-reaction and under-imagination as are found in Mr. Himmelfarb’s article. One can only hope that his article will not be cited as “the Jewish rhetoric” in the same unscientific and overgeneralizing way that Himmelfarb quotes the blacks.

The Jews have to make a stand, argues Himmelfarb. Our Straits of Tiran are being blockaded and damned if we’re going to act like golus Yidn. Nasser has guns, bombers too. Leslie Campbell? Who knows what weapons are cached throughout black America? I’ve heard from a friend that. . . .

What is the evidence for the assertion that we must make a stand? Himmelfarb suggests that we are soft and “they” know it. Why else is education the field upon which the blacks launch their attack? That we are soft? Merely look at the voting record. If that doesn’t satisfy, there’s Izzy Stone and all the other anti-Jewish Jews, and Jewish civil libertarians who de-tend unto death procedural justice, except when Jewish teachers are involved. These are all good points. and we learn once again that Jewishness takes perverse forms in America.

But to assert that we are in danger because our weaknesses are known to them, and that is why “they” make an issue of educational policy rather than “employment policy or agricultural policy or housing policy or anything silly like that” is either transparent sophistry or is itself another example of American Jewish perversity. It is certainly obvious that of the alternatives suggested by Himmelfarb none is as available to politically effective action as education. Even where the enemy teachers are not Jews, in cities like Los Angeles or Boston, education is the focus of black militant demands.

And the merit system—which, “to hear some people talk these days, one would think . . . is a Jewish conspiracy.” Of course it is not a conspiracy—but it did function to advance Jews, and it does function to exclude blacks. What are the choices? Fight the blacks and keep our hard-fought gains, or give up and be suckers once again?

We are suckers if we accept these as the choices, which Mr. Himmelfarb seems to do. It should be clear that competition for scarce resources will prevail until the scarcity itself is eliminated. All of the energy (hysterical, outraged, or otherwise) which is being turned against the blacks should be directed toward the Establishment Himmelfarb describes. They should be the target, not because of imagined backroom anti-Semitic machinations, but because of their inaction on the real need to enlarge the economic and social pie. If there are WASPS who favor decentralization and community control in order to avoid increasing educational resources, we should fight them—and discuss decentralization on its own merits. If WASPS are sacrificing Jewish college admissions in favor of blacks, without touching the athletes, alumni sons, or anyone else, then we Jews should be screaming about that, not about the increased opportunities for blacks.

To our knowledge power politics is not particularly un-Jewish. Self-defense is no crime. And yes, there are some Jews, especially young people, who ought to be at least as sensitive to the humanity of their own people as they are to that of blacks. But those young people are not frightened—and they will not accept an older Jewish community which is only frightened. They cannot be enlisted into a struggle for mere survival—not when it begins to look as though there were no particular raison d’être anymore. So a defensive survival strategy, while it might be successful in the short run, would ultimately be self-defeating.

Mr. Himmelfarb would like to “examine the credentials of the doctors who brusquely diagnose our complaint as hysteria.” We have no particular credentials: we would like to be Jewish, but not in Mr. Himmelfarb’s way. We are hoping that organized Jewry will provide other ways, and we are all working with in those structures to bring such new ways into being. Sometimes it seems impossible. Himmelfarb discourages us.

Judith Magidson
Linda Rose
David Geller
Linda Ackerman

[The writers are members of the staff of the American Jewish Committee; their letter represents their personal views.]

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Mr. Himmelfarb writes:

I wish what Mr. Danzig says did not remind me of what Masaryk said: “In Czechoslovakia there are Czechs and there are Slovaks. Only the Jews are Czechoslovaks.” The Czechs and the Slovaks remain, the Jewish Czechoslovaks have passed into history. In the United States Mr. Danzig sees a complacent majority on the Right and a frenetic minority on the Left, with Jewish liberalism, or liberal Jews, bound to be crushed between the two unless the Jews succeed in making liberalism viable. The United States has more than two hundred million people. Fewer than six million of them are Jews.

I like Mr. Davis’s letter. In the midst of so much change and transience, it is a comfort that some things abide. Vulgärmarxismus, for instance.

I like Mr. Robison’s letter, too. Convicting me of having long expressed “disagreement with the prevailing view in the Jewish community,” he spares me the necessity of explaining to Mr. Davis that my job as mercenary propagandist for a cynical Jewish establishment is only part-time. Besides, these days we can use a laugh, and Mr. Robison’s “defense of religious liberty” is good for at least a giggle. So is the suggestion that the other Jewish organizations were as zealous as his for the holy war against stamp and lottery ticket.

To Mr. Selzer we are indebted for earlier lessons about the Israelis’ absolute corruption by absolute power. Now we learn from him that equally in New York “the Jews are . . . powerful . . . almost unchallengeably so . . . not . . . by accident . . . rather . . . as a result of a deliberate and determined resolve. . . .” That is marvelously sinister and sends delicious quivers of excitement through you. Mr. Selzer must have his reasons for not trusting us with a few more details, but I wish he would reconsider. It is unkind of him, tantalizing us like that with hints.

Mr. Selzer does confide that he is like Moses, in strictness about golden calves. The resemblance does not end there. “The man Moses,” likewise, “was very humble, more than any other man on earth.” And Mr. Selzer understands English (and statistical tables) just as well as Moses. In statistical words of one syllable I showed how the Jews are unique: at the top of the group ladder in average income and education but voting with the Puerto Ricans and Mexicans at the bottom of the ladder. For Mr. Selzer this means that Jews now exult in—blech!—“‘normalcy.’” It means that “now we can persecute and exploit.”

Mr. Clurman proposes something like veterans’ points for Negroes taking civil-service examinations. That is worth discussing, but Mr. McCoy and the Rev. Mr. Oliver have not asked for veterans’ points. They have denounced the merit system as such, and their white supporters have not disagreed. As to Malcolm X, my quarrel is less with the young Negroes he inspires than with the whites, and especially Jews, who cannot help being aware of Malcolm’s anti-Semitism but pretend to be unaware. I have heard that by some in the white, young (and not altogether non-Jewish) New Left, Malcolm’s icon is venerated with those of Che, Ho, and Mao.

Jews used to know that America was different in at least this respect, that no significant American hero or teacher had been an anti-Semite. In Germany, from before Luther to after Treitschke, there was a tradition of anti-Semitic teaching by the great (or ponderous); similarly in France, where Voltaire himself was serviceable; but not in the United States. Here anti-Semites had to forge the anti-Semitic statements they attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Now Malcolm lessens the difference for Jews between America and Europe.

With Mr. Edelstein, too, I agree that Malcolm’s anti-Semitism is not what interests the young black nationalists most. For the rest, Mr. Edelstein’s interpretation of the purpose and effect of what I wrote about the Brandeis ruckus and about Herman B. Ferguson is ingenious, and I suppose it would be unreasonable to expect accuracy in the bargain. Is it not curious that Mr. Edelstein has Mr. Ferguson indicted for conspiracy to murder, when I wrote that Ferguson had been convicted? The class of people to which Mr. Edelstein says he belongs know how to avoid admitting certain things to consciousness.

Speaking of Brandeis, I commend to Mr. Edelstein what his colleague Ben Halpern wrote in Midstream for February (which I had not yet read when I said no one had remarked on the use of Malcolm’s name at Brandeis): “A direct discussion of issues between Negroes and Jews rather than Negroes and academicians . . . would have cut to the heart of the dispute at once . . . faculty action on the nationalist program was based on faculty restatements of the essence of the demands in forms they found academically acceptable. . . . The first consequence was an explosion of catcalls and vituperation from the Brandeis Afro-American Society. ‘Lies! Lies! Lies!’ . . . None of this need have happened, if it were possible . . . for some members of the Brandeis faculty to approach the black demands first as Jews before they resumed their academic hats. The notion that black studies are essential to building a black identity, and that if instituted in a university, they should be effectively run in a spirit the black community accepts, could hardly shock and repel a Jew. . . . Any Jew negotiating this demand would deal with it at once, directly, in its own terms, and his first item of negotiation would be to insist that the personnel and curriculum of such a department at Brandeis could under no circumstances be anti-Semitic. . . . It is hard to imagine . . . black nationalists treating this matter as a subterfuge and a phony tactic.”

Mr. Waxman thinks I concentrate on black anti-Semitism. I repeat that black anti-Semitism bothers me less than the understanding of black anti-Semitism by white liberals and radicals, not least Jews. As Mr. Waxman says, I am not unfamiliar with those opinion-poll data on black anti-Semitism compared with white. But Earl Raab has reminded us that non-anti-Semites can support anti-Semitic movements or parties. Only anti-anti-Semites can be counted on not to support them. At that, the latest poll data are not entirely what Mr. Waxman implies. Among whites, the young remain less anti Semitic than the old. Among blacks, Selznick and Steinberg now find the young more anti-Semitic than the old.

Is it because Miss Segal is a psychologist that she treats words set down on a page as if they were Rorschach blots? Her “impression” is wrong. So far from “advocating that we ‘get the blacks,’” who after all are mostly lower-class, I was a bit snobbish about whom to be beastly to: classy Jews (liberal or radical), the idealistic young WASP Mayor of New York, the director of the Metropolitan Museum and his Jewish retinue. And why does Miss Segal go on so about Jewish merchants? I mentioned them, but I mentioned professors more. The unworthy thought occurs to me that Professor Segal would rather not think about professors. As to her idea that we should help Jewish merchants to move and begin again, with the least possible loss all around, that is being done in a number of places. It should be done in more. Ben Halpern asks whether we should not also help Jewish teachers to move and begin again. About that I am of two minds, as I know he is. Someone else may be asking whether we should not help Jewish professors to move and begin again—possibly, like some of the merchants (“exploiters”), in a more productive line of work? What would Miss Segal say to that?

It appears there are Jews actually more parochial than I. I know that most people who are not Jews seldom think about Jews from one year to the next, or at least from one month to the next. For Miss Segal, Negroes are always thinking about those successful Jews, envying their success, and resenting tactless Jewish reminders of it.

Miss Segal argues that my “solution”—namely, “join the fascists”—will not work. She persuades me. I am resigning from the fascists and returning my membership card. But she has the advantage of knowing what causes anti-Semitism and what cures it. Once I knew, too. Now it is all rather vague—something about capitalism and abolishing capitalism. (Could I have been that clever?) Miss Segal is right: “fundamentally,” the problem of anti-Semitism will be solved only when “the causes of . . . rage”—black rage, white, or any other—“are removed.” Only, as I need not tell her, one or two psychologists of some standing have thought that ressentiment and civilization’s discontents are pretty fundamental in their own right.

Mr. Stember is kind enough to thank me for my help. (As a diffident Bentley among Rollses, I called myself a guest.) Have I really failed to make it clear that I take the polls seriously, including quite recent ones? There is less anti-Semitism now than twenty-five or thirty years ago. I am skeptical not about the polls but about “a-Semitism”—and about anything like a point-to-point correspondence between public opinion and politics, on which Raab has written so well.

To Mr. Stember’s “You did not!” I must answer, “I did, too!” That scholar I quoted is recorded in the stenotyped proceedings of the 1964 conference (pp. 100–01) as saying, about “what Mr. Himmelfarb had said”: “. . . many people in this room have an interest in the persistence of anti-Semitism as a problem! [Laughter] There is a built-in bias in our situation here to look for anti-Semitism, and I think that we have to be very careful . . . of the propensity to look harder for something when it becomes less easy to see. This does not at all entirely answer Mr. Himmelfarb’s proposition that this can become a major problem in the future and let us not let our guard down too much. . . .” (The reference is to a discussion on pp. 91-95.) And once again, because apparently it cannot be repeated too often: what makes me uneasy is that anti-Semitism has recaptured moral and political legitimacy, if only by being understood, after twenty years or so of all but total illegitimacy.

Last—and for me most importantly—my colleagues’ letter. Although I have read and reread it, it still perplexes me. Least perplexing and least difficult to answer are the not entirely accurate summaries and attributions, like “educational policy.” What I said was that if Negro children do not do well in school in New York, that is at least as much the fault of “employment policy . . . or migration policy” as of the teachers and schools; and that it is a bit much when certified good guys, our friends for many years, in fixing the responsibility for defective education, either proclaim that the (Jewish) teachers are guilty of genocide or refuse to say no to such proclamations.

Customarily, the young grow less young, and then have to give an account of themselves to the new young. Five, or ten, or thirty years from now a young Jew, out of his distress, may ask his elders why they not only did not resist but actually welcomed and justified the quota principle when it began to supersede the merit principle. Will a young Jew then find as much moral and intellectual value as now in the doctrine that the merit principle “did function to advance Jews, and . . . does function to exclude blacks”? We cannot even be confident that if Jews are lowered to 2+per cent of the physicists, at least we shall be raised to 2+ per cent of the Olympic track medalists. Whatever happens anywhere else, something tells me that the merit principle, that pretext or device for advancements and exclusions, will still be in effect for sport. Of course, sport is already the least dishonest sector of American life—a little less dishonest than the used-car business and a good bit less than the professoriat, or the intelligentsia generally.

Now, after the emotion in which my colleagues wrote their letter, they may have come to regret some of their adjectives. The adjective I most regret is not any of their more striking ones. It is the “mere” in their “mere survival.” I would not have thought that in this century Jews with feeling could dismiss the survival of the Jews as mere. Survival needs no raison d’être. Survival is life; no survival, no life. (“What did you do during the Revolution?”—“I survived.”) Since in fact the survival of the Jews in this century has been so chancy, and since what the Jews have done with survival has been so extraordinary, “miraculous” may be more like it.

I understand the desire to make Jews, and Judaism, and the Jewish community, and the Jewish enterprise more—what is that word?—relevant to those Jews, especially students, whose habit it is to attach “mere” to “survival.” How to go about it, I am unsure. I am sure how not to. Beautiful people though they are, we should not concede to them their “mere.” Especially should we not concede it to ourselves. Do Jews like me and thinking like mine put obstacles in the way of the good Jews’ labors for relevance? In every generation they stand over us to make an end of us, but He saves us from their hand.

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