THE AMERICANIZATION FORMULA
THE remoteness of our American Jewish ancestry has but recently been discovered. The discovery may be credited to the American Jewish Historical Society: and the application of the discovery to our "enthusiastic" communal leaders. The boast is authorized that when the Jews first landed in New Amsterdam, some two hundred and fifty years ago, irascible Peter Stuyvesant imposed the condition that, always and ever, the Jewish people should take care of their own poor.
The significance of this boast never impressed me before these anniversary "enthusiasts" sent out their press-agents to proclaim the momentous fact. I had never been trained to consider myself an alien. I felt disturbed to think that we Jews were sojourning in America under special conditions, contrary to the spirit of our constitution.
My friend Boruch by reason of his revolutionary bias in his native Russia, has decided opinions on government. The willing slave, he said to me recently, can never be free. The trouble with those alleged Americans, he added, is that they are not, never were, and never in this life will be, Americans.
I wanted to be enlightened.
"They have learned the lessons of American commercialism—acknowledged bymany to be lower in grade than that of theChinese—but they have never shown thatthey appreciate true democracy. Are theyamong the first to advocate freedom of opportunity —social reforms, advancedthought, toleration of opinions at variancewith theirs? They are parvenus in theirsocial relations and contemptuous towardevery thing that would give expression tothe will of the people."
He digressed from the point.
“I despise those who cling to the strength of their fathers for lack of strength in themselves. It is despicable to make use of one's father as a shield. The Jews have become incapable of standing on their own feet because they depend upon the virtues of their ancestors. The urchin who plucks the beard of an old Jew is met with the remonstrance, 'How can you be so rude to a descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?' In a greater extremity the same old man will appeal to God to remember the same ancestors. I suppose it all depends on how viciously one plucks his beard. This is all contrary to true Americanism. In the pioneer days, out in California—I have read—every man stood firmly on his own feet, preferring, for reasons best known to himself, to forget that he ever had a family name. Believing in neither God nor in Sechuth Aboth, he fought for his right to existence. The Jews have never been able to be pioneers for they have never been willing to throw off the burden of their ancient Yichus. They carry their Tephillin and Tefillah into every wilderness. Their household gods trail after them... The principle of equality is not a negation. It is also the assertion of positive virtues. The philosopher who prated of the equality of all mankind in his closet, and on the street disliked to encounter the crowd, was not a democrat. The equality of the first Americans was a real thing in spite of their aberrations about witches, and their religious intolerance. It gave every man just rights, making no distinctions even on the basis of one's special insight into a divine purpose. I can well see that the upstart who claimed to be a witch, or to have occult knowledge, may well have been charged with undemocratic heresies. The culture of the pioneer was