The doubters felt that when the Jews began to make such demands as that Christmas carols should be suppressed in the schools, as “offensive to the Jews”; and that Christmas trees should be banished from police stations in poor neighborhoods as “offensive to the Jews”; and that the Easter holidays should be abolished as “offensive to the Jews”; and that the phrase, “a Christian gentleman” should be protested everywhere, as “offensive to the Jews”;—the business class of Jews felt that the American would not stand for it.
The American has never interfered with any man’s religious observances; would he stand to have his own prohibited in his own institutions and in his own country?
However, the Jews’ misgivings were not justified. The Americans made no protest. The Kehillah went ahead with its campaign and the native population submitted. New York is Jewish. From the City Hall to the Bowery, from Fifth Avenue to Hester street, in board of education, newspaper row, and courts of justice, New York is Jewish. It is actually an offense, an offense speedily though unofficially punished, to intimate in any public way that New York may possibly be other than Jewish. New York is the answer to those who ask, “How can a numerically inferior group dictate the terms of life for all the rest?” Go into a New York school, and see. Go into a New York court, and see. Go into a New York newspaper office, and see. Stand anywhere in New York, and see.
But with it all one gets a sense of the insecurity of this usurpation of power. It doesn’t belong to those who have seized it; it doesn’t belong either by right of numbers, or by right of superior ability, or yet by right of a better use made of the power thus taken. They have taken it by audacity; they have taken it in such a way as to make resentment of it seem like an anti-racial movement—and that is why they have held it as long as they have.
That is the only way to explain the meekness of the American in this matter, and it also accounts for the sense of insecurity which even the Jews feel in the position they hold. The American is the slowest person in the world to act on any line that savors of
