The Jewish Question in the United States has existed for years, but until now in silence and suspicion. Everyone knew that there was such a Question; the Jew himself knew best of all; but very few possessed the courage to open the Question to the sanitary influences of sunlight and speech. The mention of courage in this connection is needful to explain the silence. A few men of insight have attempted publicly to define the Question in the United States, and they have been so effectually dealt with by an invisible power of which the public could have no knowledge, that Free Speech on the Jewish Question naturally became unpopular. The fact, it is true, reflects far more seriously on non-Jews than on Jews. But it is a fact nevertheless. He who undertakes to speak truth on this question must expect far more opposition than he could ever withstand were he not speaking the truth.
One fact that militated against Free Speech on the Jewish Question was the condition into which our American people have been trained, of expecting applause and approval to follow every act and word. There was a time in American history, and it was the most glorious period of out past, when opposition was considered an often desirable attitude. A man’s weight was accounted equal, whether computed by the number of his enemies or his friends. But a softening change has come over us. We have grown to like applause. Hisses used to stir our fathers; hisses cow their sons. Public speech has thus grown flabby; the Press has thus become neutral; we have grown pudgy and futile in our program of “helping the weak,” so pudgy and futile that we no longer have gristle to attack the strong who have brought weakness upon the others.
As a people, we have passed the “bunk” around so habitually; we have enervated our judgement and moral convictions so seriously by our fake “philosophy of Boost,” we have become so accustomed to measure the effectiveness of work by the applause it immediately provokes, that we have lost all stomach for courses that call for contest, unless it be those spurious contests of the political arena, which are all managed from the same Great Headquarters, or those verbal assaults against “Big Business,” which bring no reaction. We have lost all taste for tangible foes who have a ready retaliation.
Nevertheless it is true that, whereas a year ago it was not possible to speak the word “Jew” in the United States, it is now possible. The name appears on the front page of every newspaper nearly every day. It is the subject of discussion everywhere. For the time at least, speech has been liberated, although our friends of the B’nai B’rith in every state are doing their best to throttle it.
This freedom is of benefit both to Jew and non-Jew. The Jew need no longer look askance at the name of his race on the lips of the non-Jew. It only means that suppression and deceit are past, that is all; the Jew is a Jew, is recognized as a Jew, is spoken of as a Jew; and thus an honest relation between the mind and the fact is established in both the Jew and the non-Jew. The air is cleared. Concealment on the one hand is done away; on the other hand a missing fact, whose absence meant confusion, is supplied. The Jew may now say, “I am a Jew,” as casually as any other man might claim his race. We may even see some noted Americans who all their lives have tried to conceal their race, come forward now and say, “We are Jews.” It is freedom to the Jew; it is interpretation to the non-Jew. Half the confusion which men meet in their efforts to account for the world is due to their ignorance of just where the Jew is. He is always a key. But if the key be disguised as something else, how can it be used?
About eight months ago THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT began a series of studies on the Jewish Question. It was an attempt to state the facts on which the Question is based. It was not at its beginning, nor has it since developed into, an attack on Jews as Jews. Its purpose was enlightenment, and if it secretly indulged a hope, it was this—that the leaders of American Jewry might be wise to see that this is the country and this is the time in which the causes of distress and distrust and disrepute might be removed from Jewry and a genuine modus operandi, not of toleration, but of reconciliation, arrived at.