I hold no brief for the Slovak or for any Slav; there are many things in his nature which are repellent. He is too much of a realist by nature for my taste, and there is a certain kind of crudeness and cruelty in his make up, from both of which I have had occasion to suffer. Yet in spite of these handicaps I believe that, given the proper environment and the proper example, or if you please the proper masters, he will develop into that kind of American which we, the average, are. He usually takes more than he leaves behind; he inherits more than he bequeaths; he is human material in the rough; very, very rough but human material nevertheless. Made of as good clay as any of us, although perhaps not yet fashioned into the best mould. The moulding will be the problem; for the New American is more Slavic than anything else.
The Jews, a subject race everywhere, have suffered so much from friends and foes alike, that to defend or accuse them would be a work of supererogation. It is, however, undeniably true, that Judaism in America faces a greater crisis than it faced in the captivity of Babylon. There Judaism was made, here it is being unmade; there foes tried to make the Jews forget Jerusalem, here their friends have difficulty in making them remember it; there a hope of the Messiah grew up within them, here the term is so strange to them that it needs reiteration and interpretation. The loss to Judaism in America amounts to a catastrophe, and from the present outlook its complete dissolution is merely a matter of time, only retarded by the constant influx of immigrants from Russia and Poland. The average Jew in America has become so American that he does not remember the hole from which he was dug, or that Abraham was his father and that Sarah bore him.
A certain vague racial fealty holds one Jew to the other; but a strong and mighty passion holds him to America, making him so much an American and so little a Jew. It may be true that the leopard does not change his spots; but even the leopard may lose his spots when he does not need them. Many of the racial marks of Jew and Gentile alike will disappear when the need of them passes away; and they will take on readily other marks which fit them for a better environment.