To the Editor:
In his review of my book, The Ethnic Myth [Books in Review, August], Howard Brotz seriously misrepresents my views on a number of key issues.
It is a gross distortion to accuse me of “advocating assimilation for the length of [my] book.” The issue for us as social scientists is not one of personal values, or of my “pessimism” versus someone else’s “buoyancy,” but of what is happening in the empirical world. In my book I spelled out the reasons why the historical and institutional foundations for a genuine and lasting pluralism have never existed in American society. I fully agree with Mr. Brotz that the nation’s immigrants have developed distinctively American ethnic forms, and that the future of ethnicity cannot be gauged by Old World standards. Nevertheless, as I argued in the book, the weight of evidence suggests that even this “reconstituted ethnicity” is culturally thin, that ethnic communities have been badly fragmented, and that, given the soaring rates of intermarriage across ethnic and religious lines, the melting pot can no longer be dismissed as apocalyptic nonsense. The only thing that I advocate, however, is that Mr. Brotz read my book more carefully.
Mr. Brotz asserts that I am “determined to make it impossible for anyone ever again to hold the Jews up as a model for what minority groups can achieve in the United States.” On the contrary, I believe that any minority group could live up to the Jewish success model—that is, if the group arrived with similar occupational skills, and encountered a similar structure of opportunity. The point of my chapter on “The Myth of Ethnic Success” was that unlike most other immigrants who came from peasant origins, Eastern European Jews were heavily urban and carried with them occupational skills—as merchants, traders, factory workers, and artisans in a wide range of crafts—that were in demand in America’s burgeoning economy. This was true even of shtetl Jews who typically lived in close proximity to cities and worked in commerce or trades that linked them to the urban economy.
Does this emphasis on “material” factors amount to a “lifeless” interpretation of the Jewish saga in America? Certainly not. To say that Jews had an occupational headstart over other immigrants is not to deny that their escape from poverty required fortitude, self-sacrifice, ingenuity, and other similar personal and cultural traits. But these traits were also found among individuals and groups who remained in poverty. Thus, what begs for explanation is why these traits more often yielded beneficial results among Jewish immigrants, and this is where the unique historical and economic background of Jewish immigrants was of critical importance.
Having misunderstood my argument about Jewish success, Mr. Brotz then accuses me of minimizing the importance of education and self-help among blacks today. It is painfully obvious that blacks must rely primarily on themselves to overcome racial and class impediments, and it does not help to make specious comparisons with other groups, past or present. What is the point of Mr. Brotz’s pontifical statements about the importance of self-help? Our mission as sociologists is not to issue moral injunctions, but to address the larger question concerning the circumstances under which a group’s dreams are likely to bear fruit, and the circumstances under which they are destined, as Langston Hughes once wrote, to dry up like a raisin in the sun.
Mr. Brotz, however, believes that some groups have such defective cultures that they are a bane not only to themselves but to the rest of us as well. “Can a liberal democracy survive,” he asks, “if a large segment of the population neither believes in it nor has the habits, civic education, and personal stake in it necessary to make it work?” It is tempting to ask Mr. Brotz exactly whom he has in mind, and why he thinks they are so deficient in elementary civic virtues. Suffice it to say, however, that Jews were subjected to the same vilification from sanctimonious outsiders when they were struggling against poverty and prejudice. Indeed, if the Moral Majority today were to issue Mr. Brotz’s call for a “fundamental ‘monism’ . . . in society to prevent it from disintegrating,” Jews would be among the first to react to the dangerous political implications of such a call. And for good reason.
Stephen Steinberg
Queens College
New York City
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Howard Brotz writes:
I agree entirely with Stephen Steinberg about the importance of giving an accurate account of what is happening in the empirical world. My disagreement with him is concerned precisely with his account. Ethnicity or multi-culturalism may indeed be blown out of all proportion in certain treatments of it. But can one deny that ethnic political machines existed before there were sociologists? Ethnic groups, furthermore, do indeed differ in their original social condition. But does that mean that they cannot acquire new skills? As for the question with which he closes his letter, I was thinking of the Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers.
