626
PARTISAN REVIEW
when they headed or served in French cabinets in the Third Re–
public, but they thought of themselves primarily as Frenchmen . (Yet
both, of course , were taken to concentration camps, and it was in
Vichy France that the latent anti-Semitism in the country became
more manifest.)
But the United States has been different : in part because we
were a "created" nation and lacked the long threads of history and
culture that gave other nations a distinctive cast ; in part because of
the idea,
aufond,
that we are all foreign-born . There have been dis–
tinctive stamps. New England Puritanism and transcendentalism
shaped a large part of American culture . The South has been a
region with a common culture, rooted in a way of life which fused
family , land, and
apartheid,
and decried the levelling of industrial
life . And there has been a long history of WASP supremacy, largely
in the social and economic spheres , and a great deal . of anti–
Semitism. Yet none of these were large enough or strong enough to
contain the restlessness and dynamism of the technologically-driven
economy and the large admixture of foreign-born groups who, in
their own regional and urban concentrations, created a diversity of
striated hues.
Thus, as Jews, it has been easier for us to think of ourselves as
Americans and as Jews in a way different from other subordinate
Jewish communities in the world- whether in Argentina, Mexico,
South Africa, or the Soviet Union . In those countries, Jews still have
a special status , or lose their identity. In the United States we are, as
American Jews, a natural designation .
This has been particularly true since World War II , which has
seen the rapid onrush ofJews into the centers of academic, cultural,
and public life .
Partisan Review
itself has been a platform for the
American Jewish writers: Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Isaac
Rosenfeld were first published in these pages . Jews are prominent in
the major universities . At Harvard, where before World War II
there were few Jewish professors (and these largely in the profes–
sional schools), one finds major Jewish figures in almost every de–
partment of the university. The rise into the professions and upper–
middle-class status of the children of the East European immigration
is one of the remarkable feats of social mobility in modern times.
American culture, elite and mass, has been indelibly etched with
Jewish influences- in the rhythms of inflection and language; in the
number of Nobel laureates in literature, economics, physics, and
medicine; in the wisecracking wit of Broadway and Hollywood , the
music of Tin Pan Alley; and in the literary criticism of the New York
