DANIEL BELL
625
A more difficult question: the word "our." Who is the "we"? The
we
are not just those born here, schooled here, who have voted,
taken part in political controversies, pay taxes, and think ofourselves
as Americans; the
we
now think of ourselves also as Jews. Most of
the intellectuals in the reprise of the
PR
symposium are Jewish . • In
the original symposium, eleven of the twenty-four participants were
Jewish; two others had Jewish parents but do not consider them–
selves Jews . What is quite striking is that in the original symposium
-I am not being invidious, because I probably would have done the
same- no one spoke of the problem of a double tie. Even though
almost all the Jewish respondents were children of immigrants , the
discussion of culture was a claim to the inheritance of American
culture, with no mention of the particular role of the Jewish ex–
perience . Yet today almost all, I would say, are highly conscious of
being Jewish; many are involved with the Jewish community; and
the relation to and the survival of Israel loom large in our lives.
Yet we are American Jews. We do not think of ourselves as
Jewish-Americans, in the way that one still writes of Italian–
Americans, or Irish-Americans, or Polish-Americans. What is the
nature of this tie? Is it a double identity, or is there something
unique in the relation of Jews to American life?
It was difficult for intellectual Jews in Western Europe, not
only in Germany but also in France and Italy, to think of themselves
as Jews in addition to their identification with their country. They
were
G~rmans
or Frenchmen or Italians who had been or were also
Jewish , but often only if they retained an affiliation with some
Ge–
meinde
or had religious ties . The Dreyfus case may have made many
persons aware of anti-Semitism (and we forget that individuals such
as Cezanne and Degas were anti-Dreyfusards), but the case was
complicated by the fault lines of clericalism and anticlericalism, the
secularists and the antisecularists, the partisans of the Revolution or
the Restoration , all of which derived from the deep historic divisions
of the society. Leon Blum on the left and Georges Mandel on the
right may have suffered the indignity of being called
les sales Juifs
•r
refer here to the four sessions of the Y.M.H.A. meetings. The two non-Jews were
William Barrett and Christopher Lasch. The other participants were Hilton
Kramer, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe, Leon Wieseltier, William Phillips, and
myself.
