ways—by anti-Semitic influences, and “by the large stream of Jewish emigration, on the other hand, which, proceeding from the lands of oppression to the lands of freedom, carries with it, on or under the surface, the preserving and reviving influences of the ghetto.”
The same authority, in an article entitled “The Americanization of the Jewish Immigrant,” frankly prefers the Jew fresh from the ghetto to the Jew who has been influenced by American life.
He says that he “prefers the kaftan-clad, old-fashioned Jew, with his unattractive appearance and ungainly manners, whose whole life is dominated by the ideals and mandates of an ancient religion and civilization * * * to that modernized, amphibious creature, the gaudily attired, slang-using, gum-chewing, movie-visiting, dollar-hunting, vulgar and uncultured, quasi-Americanized ‘dzentleman.’”
The “kaftan-clad, old-fashioned Jew” of whom Mr. Friedlaender writes, is the Polish Jew, 250,000 of whom are coming to the United States as “a preserving and reviving influence” upon Judaism in the United States.
Not to use more space, however, on the identity of the normal type of Jew as precisely stated by those who have expressed themselves on this subject, it is possible to preserve the idea and add its logical complement, by quoting some testimony on the Jewish view of Americanization.
What now follows is of special interest because it is so generally stated and received throughout Jewish circles, that the center of Jewry has shifted to America. That is the form in which Jewish spokesmen make the statement: they say “America,” not the United States.
A little story—a true one—may be worth while here. It may throw a sidelight on the use of the word “American” as used in the testimony. A certain editor of an American newspaper gave a trifling bit of publicity to this series of articles. Jewish advertising was withdrawn from his columns