Steinlight does well to warn his people of the dangers of indulgence and appeasement of enemies. It could be that we have here an instance of lemming-like behavior in a population which may care especially about its image with a nihilistic professoriate ( the displeasure of officials would have little motivating effect here perhaps ). Very few will observe that it is the allowance of aggression in the field of ideas that generates the anti-culture; not intelligence, scholarship,creativity, idealism or superior arguments. But how can being approved-of by such intellectuals be worth more than life? A population which is inclined to value the opinion of official aggression’s own professoriate more than other groups do, is in a vulnerable position, when those same scholars urge them on towards oblivion. Shouldn’t he also contradict the notion that the earlier immigration policies were restrictive against Jews, when it appears that this group received dozens of times more than their pro-rata share of immigration visas, during the relevant period of the decade after the establishment of the dictatorship in Germany?

Steinlight’s article is excellent; in fact despite its evident targeting of a Jewish audience it makes many points worth making for a more general one, e.g. about chain immigration. He is particularly good at understanding the mentality of (so-called) Jewish community leaders. I would have some relatively minor criticisms. He may be too optimistic about winning over “progressive” Jewish opinion (meaning, actually, far-left types.) He seems to have bought into the fantastically exaggerated complaints abotu the “failure to save European Jews” that have become obsessive over the last thirty years. (As though the Allies controlled what was going on in Nazi-occupied Europe.) A substantial part, possibly one-quarter to a third, of the pre-Nazi German Jewish population actually did obtain refuge here. He also talks of the fall of anti-Semitism in the US since World War II as though it were some novel improvement in what had always been a major problem. In fact hostility to Jews was rare in the US except for the era of the World Wars.

A more important strategic criticism of Steinlight’s views is that he has not quite reasoned out the consequences of the changes in Europe that he rightly fears and deplores. At one point, he sharply insists that large “First World” immigration is no longer to be expected. Yet, it can be argued that if Europe is actually Islamicized, that practically guarantees a horde of people fleeing here at some point. I make this point because many people, including myself at times, have been apt to react to the immigration catastrophe by simply arguing that we should simply shut the door, and permanently, to all immigration, whatever the source, to avoid the straw issues of “racism” involved in picking and choosing sources of what immigration should be allowed. Maybe we should do that, but we must think this point through. Of course, neither I nor anyone else here would be surprised that the left would welcome uncontrolled Latin and Muslim immigration and then try to shut out European refugees when and if the latter showed up…

In fact hostility to Jews was rare in the US except for the era of the World Wars.

I think this statement would be more correct if you had modified the word hostility with the word overt, or perhaps physical. I admit to not having done much research on this topic, but my sense of American history recently is that anti-semitism was quite wide-spread among all levels of society and all areas of the country.

Mal

I cannot cite chapter and verse for my statement that hostility to Jews was rare in the US up to the twentieth century, but at least until recently that seems to have been the view taken by most Jewish historians of the subject. The impression to the contrary is the result of the atypical, but unpleasant memories of the older generation of Jews who grew up between the World Wars. By the way, it was certainly not equally widespread in all regions and certainly not all the time. For example in the pre-Civil War South, which elected Jewish Senators and Congressmen. As for all levels of society, even between the wars there doesn’t seem to have been much hostility to Jews among old-stock New Englanders, Italians, or German-Americans. (Notwithstanding the totally unrepresentative German-American Bund!)

By the way, my remarks about the older generation are a generalization… My own relatives did not personally encounter the hostility described.