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 nonJew. The Jew need no longer look askance at the name of his race on the lips of a 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 interpreta¬ tion 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 Inde¬ pendent 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 begin¬ ning, 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.