In all departments of life the Jew has prospered. It may be questioned whether ever in the past he has been blessed with such success. While it is erroneous to assume, as some people do, that all Jews are rich, or that the richest men are Jews (assumptions which are contradicted by facts), it is true that nowhere else have the Jewish people been given such an unhampered opportunity for advancement and such an unrestricted field of work and usefulness.
As a result, Jews are found in every sphere of work, in every honorable and useful occupation. In commerce, in the liberal and practical professions, in all the various forms of industry, the American Jew is found, and many have achieved eminent success. No longer can it be said, as they were wont to say of old, that the Jew is nothing but a usurer or a trader. In America hundreds of thousands of Jews work with their hands, there are numerous trade unions entirely composed of Jews, and nothing is more significant in this regard than that the President of the American Federation of Labor for years has been a Jew (at least, a man born a Jew).
It used to be said that the Jew will not be a farmer. Even if elsewhere the Jew had not disproved this assertion, he has done so on American soil, where numerous Jewish families have settled on farms and demonstrated their fitness to succeed even under adverse conditions.
What America has done for the material progress of millions of Jews is one of the marvels of history--a marvel augmented by the moral transformation which has accompanied the process. Men, who for generations had been hounded and haunted by persecution, who had been engrafted with all the moral evils of persecution, who had been humiliated and all but crushed--millions of such men by the liberty and humanity of America have been freed from the old chains, purged of the old stains, turned into free, strong, courageous, self-reliant, and self-respecting human beings. For this transformation we can never be sufficiently thankful, as it must ever continue to excite the admiration and the wonder of the world.
But the spiritual achievements of the Jew in America have been no less significant.
Now and then on this score we hear laments. Material progress, we are told, has occurred in American Israel at the expense of his spiritual life, and lurid pictures are drawn of our spiritual estate. It is even maintained that there is no hope for us spiritually in America, and that for this purpose we must turn our eyes to other parts.