3
Spinoza’s ethics were no longer the Jewish ethics, but the ethics of man at large—just as his God was no longer the Jewish God: his God, merged with nature, shed his separate and distinctive divine identity. Yet, in a way, Spinoza’s God and ethics were still Jewish, except that his Jewish monotheism carried to its logical conclusion and the Jewish universal God thought out to the end; and once thought out to the end, that God ceased to be Jewish.
—ISAAC DEUTSCHER, 1958
HANNAH ARENDT, Kenneth Arrow, Daniel Bell, Saul Bellow, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Leonard Bernstein, Harold Bloom, Daniel Boorstin, Louis Brandeis, Joyce Brothers, Stanley Cavell, Noam Chomsky, Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein, Jason Epstein, Leslie Fiedler, Abraham Flexner, Jerome Frank, Felix Frankfurter, Betty Friedan, Milton Friedman, George Gershwin, Allen Ginsberg, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Todd Gitlin, Nathan Glazer, Samuel Goldwyn, Paul Goodman, Clement Greenberg, Peggy Guggenheim, Oscar Hammerstein, Oscar Handlin, Louis Hartz, Joseph Heller, Lillian Hellman, Will Herberg, Abraham Heschel, Richard Hofstadter, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Jacob Javits, Pauline Kael, Elena Kagan, Alfred Kazin, Henry Kissinger, Thomas Kuhn, Norman Mailer, Groucho Marx, Louis B. Mayer, Robert K. Merton, Thomas Nagel, Louise Nevelson, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ayn Rand, David Riesman, Richard Rodgers, Sigmund Romberg, Julius Rosenwald, Walt Rostow, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, Jonas Salk, Paul Samuelson, Bernie Sanders, Beverly Sills, Peter Singer, Susan Sontag, I. F. Stone, Barbra Streisand, Irving Thalberg, Lionel Trilling, Jack Warner, Ruth Westheimer, Stephen Wise, Janet Yellen.
Every person on this list of culturally prominent Americans was born to at least one Jewish parent, and in most cases two, and thus, no matter what their personal intentions, participated in a demographic challenge to Protestant cultural hegemony. The encounter of a Protestant culture with Jewish immigrants and their descendants, religious and secular, has been a pivotal event in the modern history of the United States.1 Both of the two families of Protestant churches, ecumenical and evangelical, were confronted with this striking novelty. The idea of a “Christian America,” widely shared in both families, was harder to maintain as non-Christians occupied more and more cultural space.
Exactly when did Jews have the greatest impact on public life? In what specific domains did Jews achieve leadership, and with what results? Where was Judaism, as opposed to Jewish ethnicity, important in the process of cultural change? Why is the story of Catholic immigrants and their descendants—who throughout most of the twentieth century were about six times as numerous—so different?
Jews were present in the colonial era of British North America but did not begin to diversify American society on a significant scale until a mid-nineteenth-century migration from German-speaking Central Europe. That episode was dwarfed by the massive immigration from Eastern Europe that began in the early 1880s and increased rapidly through the 1910s. Two million Jews entered the United States during those decades. A third, much smaller but highly distinctive wave of Jewish immigrants appeared in the 1930s, when scientists, writers, and artists were driven out Hitler’s Europe.
Already by 1920 Jews constituted one-fifth of the population of New York City, even though they represented less than 4 percent of the national population. Since New York was the cultural and economic capital, the concentration of Jews there made them more significant players in public life than had they been widely distributed geographically. Jews were discriminated against in most institutional and social settings through the 1930s, but many managed to flourish in a variety of businesses, in labor unions, and in the service professions. Empowered Protestants encountered them regularly.
The upward social and economic mobility of Jews was enabled by several social characteristics that distinguished them from most other immigrants. Many Jews brought commercial experience and artisanal skills from the Old World. They also had a much higher rate of literacy than other immigrant groups. Jews were also more committed to making the United States a permanent home. About one-third of the non-Jewish immigrants of 1880–1920 actually returned to Europe, but Jews, many of whom were fleeing the pogroms of the Russian Empire, quickly put down roots in America and became as fully involved in public institutions as the Anglo-Protestant gatekeepers allowed.
These features of the immigrant experience distinguished Jews from most Catholic immigrants. Of the major Catholic ethnic groups, only the Irish, escaping the poverty of Ireland, were as likely as Jews to cross the Atlantic as families and to make America a permanent home from the time of their arrival. Polish and Italian immigrants were overwhelmingly male and often returned to their European homes after several years of employment in America. Moreover, few Catholic immigrants of any ethnicity were as literate as even impoverished Jewish immigrants, and few had as much commercial experience. The Eastern European Jews who arrived in the 1880s and after were also assisted by the philanthropies of the small but well-established population of German Jews who descended from the mid-nineteenth-century migration. Further, while some Catholic children attended public schools, many others went to parochial schools, which fostered a greater degree of social separation from the Anglo-Protestant majority. Finally, most Catholic priests were educated in Europe, while the immigrant Jewish community established schools to train their own Orthodox and Reform rabbis. These differences between Catholic and Jewish populations in the United States diminished over time, especially after Congress in 1917, and more decisively in 1924, cut off the immigration that kept Italian and Polish connections to Europe active. But by then the Jewish experience of upward mobility was well under way.
Congress’s termination of large-scale immigration of Catholics and Jews in the 1920s played well with the majority of Anglo-Protestants. But a vocal minority disagreed. The Federal Council of Churches, dominated by Social Gospel Protestants, lobbied against anti-immigrant legislation and, after it had been enacted, worked unsuccessfully to reverse it. Beyond the churches, several leading figures in the legal profession, including US Supreme Court associate justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., made a point of praising the intellectual power of Jewish lawyers and legal theorists. At the same historical moment, an outspoken group of young intellectuals based in New York’s Greenwich Village welcomed Jews for the same reasons that the majority of Anglo-Protestants did not. These cultural radicals recognized the Jews they had come to know as instruments for diminishing the authority of what they regarded as flatulent pieties handed down from the Puritan and Victorian past. These poets, writers, and political activists celebrated Jews as agents of liberation, subverting outmoded ways of thinking.
The essays of the 1910s by the American progressive writer Randolph Bourne were emblematic of a number of cosmopolitan manifestos identifying Jewish immigrants as just what the United States needed to bring it into the modern world. “The intellectual service” to the country being delivered by young Jewish intellectuals, wrote Bourne, “can hardly be overvalued.” What they are contributing “is so incomparably greater than that of any other American group of foreign affiliation that one can scarcely get one’s perspective.”2 Hutchins Hapgood’s The Spirit of the Ghetto (1909) encouraged his contemporaries to see the streets of New York’s Lower East Side as filled with working-class Spinozas. Thorstein Veblen’s “The Intellectual Preeminence of Jews in Modern Europe” (1919) credited Jews with a unique capacity for critical detachment highly functional in a modern, science-centered world.3
This domestic revolt against provincialism might not have been so confident and prolific had it not discovered and allied itself with a parallel movement of Jewish youth against the limited horizons of their own Eastern European heritage. The revolt against the shtetl had its own dynamic, but it dovetailed with the revolt against the Protestant village. Two autonomous antiprovincial initiatives connected and reinforced each other. Jewish youth eager to escape the constraints of Jewish communal life absorbed Western learning with alacrity and passion. They interacted with Columbia University students like Bourne, and with Greenwich Village writers like Hapgood and Floyd Dell, who were just then proclaiming their annoyance with the church-inflected culture they saw all around them. H. L. Mencken’s legendary attacks on “Puritanism” were typical of this Anglo-Protestant spasm of annoyance.
The philosemitic engagements of Anglo-Protestants like Bourne, Holmes, and the leaders of the Federal Council of Churches are easily lost in a public memory that rightly emphasizes the hostility displayed toward both Jewish and Catholic immigrants. Madison Grant’s racist volume The Passing of the Great Race (1916) was by far the most widely quoted document in the debates leading up to Congress’s curtailing of immigration in 1924.4 Catholics and Jews were violently targeted by the Ku Klux Klan, along with African Americans. Anti-Catholic attitudes had been common among Anglo-Protestants since well before the Civil War. The Klan reinforced the idea that Catholics were pawns of Rome, a foreign power. There is no question that the defenders of Protestant cultural hegemony won the political battles of the interwar decades. Voices defending a more pluralist, inclusive America were defeated at the time, but they demand our attention because they were harbingers of a future in which Jewish immigrants helped to inspire cosmopolitan strivings among Anglo-Protestants.
That future was accelerated by the arrival after 1933 of Jewish scientists, scholars, writers, and artists escaping Hitler’s Europe. The federal government, lobbied by a host of private parties, granted these exceptional individuals the opportunity to enter the country, circumventing the prohibition enacted in 1924. The illustrious newcomers made the Jewish presence in American life more visible to everyone and a source of political pride in the Hitler era. Albert Einstein was the most famous, but after the Manhattan Project’s work became widely known in 1945, the public became aware of the importance of a whole cohort of Jewish émigré physicists—including Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, and Leo Szilard. In the meantime, émigrés Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, and Franz Neumann and other social theorists were speaking to the desire for explanations of the rise of fascism. Elsewhere in academia and the arts, Billy Wilder, Albert Hirschman, Erwin Panofsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Ludwig von Mises, Kurt Weill, Hans Morgenthau, and Leo Strauss gained recognition for their achievements. Similarly, émigré psychologists and psychiatrists Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson, and Bruno Bettelheim played pivotal roles in the unprecedented popularization of psychology in the postwar era.
The refugee intellectuals were fully formed, established figures who brought with them the reputations they had made in Europe. Suddenly, Jews were much more heavily represented in the ranks of the most famous Americans than ever before. The 1931 edition of Who’s Who reveals how novel this was. About fourteen thousand of the sixteen thousand Americans listed with a religious affiliation were Baptist, Congregationalist, Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Unitarian.5 The Jewish émigrés of the Hitler era shattered the presumption of Anglo-Protestant cultural leadership.
The arrival of the refugee intellectuals, along with popular awareness of the European political context that brought them to the United States, dramatically improved the prospects of the pre-1924 Jewish immigrants and their offspring. American discriminatory practices against Jews were discredited by what had happened in Germany and by the constructions of American democracy that had been articulated during World War II. Anti-Semitic barriers to education, employment, and access to services could not survive.
The ending of discriminatory practices in higher education had stunning results because of the rapid expansion of universities during the postwar economic boom and the financing provided by the GI Bill. Jewish American academics who had been waiting for professional opportunities suddenly had them. Protestant tribal dominance diminished at the level of routine appointments of junior academics, not just for marque individuals arriving from Europe. Yale appointed its first Jew to the faculty of its undergraduate college in 1946, but less than a quarter century later about one-fifth of that faculty was Jewish.6 The Carnegie Commission found that by the end of the 1960s, 17 percent of the faculties of the leading universities were Jewish. The opening of academia to Jews was especially apparent in disciplines relevant to public affairs: 36 percent of law professors, 34 percent of sociologists, 28 percent of economists, and 24 percent of political science professors on the most highly ranked campuses were Jewish.7
A closer look at the discipline of philosophy illustrates the de-Christianization of academia. Philosophy is an especially useful window on this process because it has been traditionally concerned with the place of religion in understanding the world.
Well before Jews entered the profession, some American philosophers of Protestant origin moved independently to challenge the old habit of sheltering Christian belief from skeptical questioning.8 John Dewey, born in Vermont into a Congregationalist family in 1859, did not need a change in his ethnoreligious company in order to become, by the early twentieth century, an advocate for a science-driven philosophy. Yet in Dewey’s time the discipline was still dominated by two intellectual giants who continued to protect Protestantism from serious epistemic challenges. William James’s greatest work was titled The Varieties of Religious Experience, Josiah Royce’s was called The Problem of Christianity.9 The pragmatist James assured his large following that religion could survive scientific scrutiny. The idealist Royce developed an ambitious metaphysics organized around an all-seeing, all-powerful force he called “the Absolute,” which he presented as fully consistent with the Apostle Paul’s construction of the Christian faith. Hence some of the substance of Christianity had disappeared in the leading American philosophers, but its theistic frame and theologically inflected language remained largely in place. This was the context in which Dewey, Roy Wood Sellars, and other secularists wrote the “Humanist Manifesto” of 1933, taking direct aim at the persistence of Christianity in the intellectual life of the nation and even in the gradually secularizing but still Protestant-toned domain of academia.10
These secular philosophers of Anglo-Protestant origin were then joined by Jewish colleagues who eagerly engaged the latest work of British and Continental European thinkers that emerged from cultural settings in which there was no longer a habit of favoring religion of any kind. Yet because presidents and trustees of colleges and universities were reluctant to appoint Jews in what was recognized as a religiously relevant discipline, it took several decades for Jews to gain institutional standing. Prior to World War II, only one Jew was recognized as a leader in American academic philosophy. Morris R. Cohen had immigrated from Russia as a child in 1892 and was the first Jew to earn a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard University.11 He taught at the City College of New York but was passed over for more prestigious appointments despite his obvious professional qualifications. By the early 1940s a handful of Jews had obtained philosophy appointments, but only during the postwar academic boom, accompanied by the end of anti-Semitic barriers, was the discipline’s ethnoreligious demography transformed.
Once the transformation began, it was swift and sweeping. By the end of the 1960s, one in five of the members of the nation’s leading philosophy departments was Jewish. A newspaper article of 1964 illustrates this and reveals how little it was remarked upon once it had taken place. In “How Today’s Thinkers Serve Society,” eight of the nation’s most acclaimed professors of philosophy were invited to describe their work and its social contributions.12 Each offered a few accessible paragraphs that, taken together, add up to a reasonably accurate summary of the almost entirely religion-free engagements of their discipline at that historical moment. Yet this article in the National Observer said nothing of the fact that seven of the eight, chosen apparently at random from the ranks of the recognized leaders of the discipline, were Jews. Only W. V. O. Quine was not. Four of the seven had been students of Cohen’s at CCNY: Sidney Hook, Ernest Nagel, Paul Weiss, and Morton White. Three others were Max Black, Abraham Kaplan, and Walter Kaufmann, all of whom had arrived from Europe as children or youths. Less than twenty years after the end of World War II a journalist could work up a list of leading philosophers without thinking their ethnoreligious identities invited any mention at all.
Hook, Kaufmann, and White sometimes wrote skeptically about the intellectual claims of Christianity. Kaufmann made a stir in 1958 when he dismissed the philosophical capabilities of the most popular theologian of the era, Reinhold Niebuhr. “Occasionally hailed as America’s greatest thinker,” Kaufmann scoffed, “he has not made his mark as a scholar,” and his crude apologetic writings prove he can read scripture only as a mirror of his own ideas.13 But what mattered more was something less direct and immediate: the simple shifting of the discipline’s center of gravity away from theories of knowledge, of the world, and of morality in which a God recognizable to Protestants was an even passive presence. The non-Jewish Quine voiced this consensus, insisting that philosophy of science was the only philosophy needed. The discipline that had been one of the most attentive to Christianity had become one of the least.
In that respect the discipline of philosophy was merely an unusually explicit case of a general transferal of cultural authority from religion to Wissenschaft. “Religion had to go,” writes a sociologist, because “a continuing influence of the Protestant establishment” in higher education, science, and literature “would restrict the potential autonomy, status, and authority of … aspiring knowledge elites.”14
In 1960 Princeton University president Robert F. Goheen characterized this de-Christianization as a basic reality in “most of the realms of culture for which the university takes responsibility.” Those realms “have attained a variety and maturity which require that the worldly pursuit of learning in them be free from explicit connection with the enterprise of religion and theology.”15 This academic emancipation did not result solely from the presence of Jewish intellectuals, but without them the transformation would have been slower and less decisive.
Beyond academia, Jewish clinical psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists were prominent players in the process by which ministers were gradually replaced by mental health professionals as authorities for dealing with personal problems. One did not have to be Jewish to appreciate the value of psychotherapy, but Jewish clinicians were heavily overrepresented in the mental health professions in the United States during the midcentury decades. And psychoanalysis, one of the major approaches to therapy, had been invented by a Jewish atheist who treated religion as a form of superstition.
This displacement of the clergy by therapists relying on secular methods, rather than the application of church doctrine, took place quietly. It was almost never advanced as an explicitly secularizing project. Regular churchgoers, while respecting their ministers, relied on clerical authority for less than their parents and grandparents did. Often, the clinicians themselves were former preachers who regarded the change in vocation as consistent with the values they had espoused from the pulpit and in “pastoral counseling.”
The switch made sense to ministers who found that the anxieties, depressions, and marital problems brought to them by their parishioners were best dealt with through therapy. Prayer and biblical precepts were not abandoned, but they were not enough. The dilemmas parishioners shared with their ministers were “no longer signs of God’s word, or occasions for thinking about ultimate reality,” notes scholar Andrew Abbott, but immediate social and emotional events driven by the opportunities and constraints of contemporary culture. The displacement took place, Abbott adds, not so much through the aggression of nonclerical analysts and therapists but through “the clergy’s willful desertion of its traditional work.”16
Several of the most influential of the midcentury’s clinical psychologists, including Carl Rogers and Rollo May, had begun their own careers as Protestant ministers. The “gospel of clinical psychology,” as it was sometimes characterized sardonically, became widespread in the 1950s. It took institutional form in many ecumenical congregations. Roy Burkhardt’s huge Congregational church in Columbus, Ohio, operated its own clinic and supervised a national network of “Burkhardt Seminars” popularizing the practice. Although Freud was a powerful influence on many of the preachers-turned-therapists, more were attracted instead to the “self-realization” psychology developed by the “humanistic” school led by Rogers, May, and Abraham Maslow, another Jewish intellectual who influenced modern American culture. “Self-realization could be discussed and marketed,” as historian Edwin S. Gaustad observed, “quite apart from the Christian religion.”17 So, too, could psychoanalysis.
In many other public arenas, Jewish Americans achieved leadership. In literary culture, the popularity of Jewish novelists—especially Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and J. D. Salinger—led critic Leslie Fiedler in 1967 to hail “the great take-over by Jewish American writers … of the task of dreaming aloud the dreams of the whole American people,” a task inherited “from certain Gentile predecessors, urban Anglo-Saxons and Midwestern provincials of North European origin.”18 In Hollywood, the film industry from the 1920s through the 1960s was largely run by the sons of Eastern European Jewish immigrants whose movies invited the public to behold an idealized America generic enough to accommodate highly assimilated Jews like themselves. Matinee idols, whatever their own ethnicity, were designed to be accessible to all white Americans, not to serve as accurate mirrors of subgroup particularism. James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Ginger Rogers, Clark Gable, Lauren Bacall, Cary Grant, and Ava Gardner inhabited a world in which, as Neal Gabler explains, “fathers were strong, families stable, people attractive, resilient, resourceful, and decent.” This “invention” of the Jewish lords of Hollywood, Gabler remarks, “may be their most enduring legacy.”19
The US Senate had no Jewish members in 1949, but thirty years later there were ten. By the end of the 1970s, nearly 40 percent of the partners in the leading law firms of New York and Washington were Jewish, as were about a quarter of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcasting media.20 Secular Jewish men and women made up approximately one-third of the young white participants in the Mississippi Summer voting rights campaign of 1964.21 Nearly all of the recognized leaders of “second-wave feminism” in the 1960s and 1970s were secular Jewish women. These included Bella Abzug, Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, Shulamith Firestone, Betty Friedan, Vivian Gornick, Florence Howe, Gerda Lerner, Robin Morgan, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Alix Kates Schulman, Gloria Steinem, Meredith Tax, Naomi Weisstein, and Ellen Willis. Indeed, very few of the recognized feminist leaders of that generation were not Jewish. Mary Daly, bell hooks, and Kate Millett were unusual in that respect.
These Jewish feminists, historian Joyce Antler notes, almost never proclaimed Jewish identity. They understood their political and cultural labors in a universalist framework. “They refrained from explicitly asserting that ancestral inheritances drove the momentum for change.” Antler observes that this preference for universal over particular identities was in itself an ancestral inheritance, however, since Jews had so long been treated unfairly on ethnoracially particularistic grounds.22
The secular orientation of the Jewish feminists exemplified one of two ways in which Jews contributed to the decline of Anglo-Protestant cultural hegemony. The other was the greater acceptance of Judaism, which was central to the celebration of the “Judeo-Christian tradition.” This concept was not new to the Cold War era, but it was then widely affirmed as part of the struggle of the United States against “godless communism.” A number of Protestant theologians, Catholic priests, and Jewish rabbis participated in this celebration of a “tri-faith America,” hailed as an inclusive step, repudiating the anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic elements in the national past. In a best-selling book of 1955, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in Religious Sociology, Will Herberg popularized this elevation of Catholicism and Judaism as symbolically equal partners in defining American life.23
But the popularization of a Judeo-Christian America was no more a Jewish project than a Catholic and Protestant one. It could not have happened without a strong Jewish presence in public life, but Catholic and Protestant leaders had their own reasons for welcoming the representation of Jews as Judaic. Early in the Cold War, the Catholic hierarchy pivoted toward ever-more adamant anti-Soviet postures, putting behind them the display of sympathy for fascist regimes in Italy and Spain that had been common prior to the American entry into World War II. Protestants like Reinhold Niebuhr, worried about secularization, were glad to have a religious conception of the United States affirmed.
The “Judeo-Christian tradition” welcomed Jews only in their capacity as children of the Old Testament. A tri-faith America made no provision for Jews who were not religious. The dynamic, as K. Healan Gaston has documented, was one of exclusion as well as inclusion.24 Moreover, the Judeo-Christian model for American life excluded Americans who had departed from an ancestral Catholicism or Protestantism. The concept of a Judeo-Christian America, while popular with many ecumenical Protestant leaders who saw it as consistent with their liberalizing goals, projected an America that was de-Christianized only to become more inclusively biblical. The potentially secularizing force of the Jewish population was partly neutralized by Judaizing it, incorporating it into a religiously defined nation.
Considered as an affirmation of religious pluralism, the notion of a Judeo-Christian America obscured the more thoroughly secular versions of de-Christianization that were well under way. The great majority of ethnic Jews who exercised leadership in public arenas were not conspicuously Judaic, whatever their measure of personal interest in Judaism. They contributed to an ethos in which religious identity mattered less, not more. Indeed, Jews were more likely to have drifted away from their natal religion than their contemporaries who had grown up in Catholic or Protestant churches. The Carnegie Commission’s study of the American professorate at the end of the 1960s revealed that among faculty in colleges and universities, those from Jewish families were about twice as likely as those from Protestant or Catholic families to say they had abandoned the religion of their natal community. At the most prestigious universities, 72 percent of the ethnically Jewish faculty represented themselves as having no religion at all.25 Nearly all of the Hitler-era refugee intellectuals were aloof from religion.
Secular and religious Jews were important players in mid-twentieth-century efforts to sharpen church-state separation. As the most conspicuously non-Christian group in the country, Jews enhanced the credibility of several organizations lobbying for a more strictly secular civic sphere, free of any religious sectarianism and free, in particular, of implications that the United States was a nation of Christians. The American Civil Liberties Union and other secular organizations had been spearheading this litigation during the 1920s and 1930s. They were joined in the early 1940s by the American Jewish Committee and other Jewish organizations, whose attorneys—especially Leo Pfeiffer—became central to the separationists’ campaign. Primarily at issue in a series of suits Pfeiffer and his colleagues brought was how much the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment restricted the use of public funds for any kind religious instruction.26 Many pains were taken ensure that few of the plaintiffs in church-state litigation carried Jewish names.27 To make the Jewish organizations feel more comfortable, Pfeffer hired an Episcopalian lawyer to be the public face of a 1952 suit. Names that conveyed a presumption of Protestantism were preferred. Were Jews helping to make the United States a less Christian country? Of course they were. But this was a dangerous truth. Advocates of stronger church-state separation knew better than to trumpet it.
Worries about “Jewish influence” existed long before the Jewish involvement in church-state litigation and remained alive long after the litigation of the midcentury decades. In what became a widely quoted example, Billy Graham once joined President Richard Nixon in complaining about Jewish influence. Both chatted about this candidly in 1972, while accepting Nixon’s observation that neither of them could say such things in public. Graham warned against a Jewish “stranglehold” that “has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain.” The famous preacher added, without prompting, that if Nixon were to be reelected, “we might be able to do something” about it. When tapes of this conversation were made public in 2002, Graham apologized. But there is no reason to doubt his sincerity at the time, nor to suppose this was the only time Graham spoke in this manner, distant, of course, from recording devices. When given a chance to challenge Nixon’s anti-Semitic opinions, the evangelist at the height of his prestige and authority instead endorsed them and volunteered that his own Jewish friends, while flattering him, “don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country.”28
What were Jews “doing to the country”?
Irving Berlin’s songs “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade” popularized an entirely de-Christianized image of and a secular point of access to the most sacred Christian holidays. Bing Crosby’s 1942 recording of Berlin’s nostalgic, highly sentimental “White Christmas” was an immediate hit and remains the biggest-selling single record of all time.29 The Jewish songwriter was not attacking Christians, but he was rendering the holiday safe for every American. Philip Roth gave the point an ironic and mocking twist that would probably have puzzled Berlin. “God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas,’ ” Roth wrote in Operation Shylock: A Confession. “The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.”30
Roth’s fantasy about Jews slipping unnoticed into Anglo-Protestant American life was belied, as he well knew, by sentiments like Graham’s and Nixon’s, even if rarely expressed outright. T. S. Eliot did not mind saying them out loud: “free thinking Jews” threatened America. In his notorious 1934 defense of religious and racial uniformity, Eliot declared that “the population should be homogeneous.” What is “still more important,” the great poet told an audience of Virginians, and later the entire English-speaking world in his book After Strange Gods, “is unity of religious background.” Eliot continued, more explicitly: “Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”31 Yet, gradually, the people Eliot had in mind did exactly what he feared they would do: they diversified the United States. They made it more difficult to maintain the old habits of sheltering Christianity’s epistemic claims from modern scientific interrogation and of uncritically accepting Christianity as the spiritual frame for American national destiny.