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PARTISAN REVIEW
teaching my kids Hungarian or marrying a Hungarian was never an issue
for me. I just don't have that sort of sense of togetherness, or identity, or
the need to preserve something. I'm wondering whether I'm somehow
remiss or failing to live up to some expectations.
Robert Wistrich:
That's a good point. Off the top of my head I cannot
think of another group that appears to be as preoccupied with its conti–
nuity, with preserving the chain of the generations, as the Jewish people
are. You could argue that much of modern nationalism, in a slightly dis–
torted sense, actually picks up on that theme in a more secularized form.
And you might even argue that thi,s is an offshoot of something that the
Jewish tradition itself initiated. In the U. S., people from a Hungarian or
Polish background, Irish Americans, Italians, Greek Americans, Afro or
Jewish Americans are all hyphenated Americans, the Jews perhaps more so.
The idea of the melting pot has almost evaporated.
John Raymond:
If intermarriage hadn't occurred on a massive scale, and
Jews kept marrying Jews, would inbreeding have caused genetics to break
down?
Robert Wistrich:
Yes, perhaps there is a price to be paid for endogamy.
There are some negative consequences of inbreeding that have been point–
ed out by Jews themselves. I think that is a valid point. Of course, a century
ago, racists and anti-Semites used to argue that intermarriage with Jews
was corrupting the purity of the white race. Nobody talks about that any–
more, except for the lunatic fringe and sections of the radical Right.Jews,
who favored assimilation sometimes argued earlier in the century that
intermarriage was beneficial because it improved the stock on both sides.
Gunther Stent:
There are identified hereditary medical disorders, such as
Tay-Sachs disease and hyper trophism of the adrenal gland, the incidence
of which is much higher among the Ashkenazi Jews than among the gen–
eral population. Yet these relatively higher incidences are still so low that
they cannot be a substantial factor influencing Jews to intermarry with
gentiles. No doubt, there are many reasons for seeking intermarriage, but
fear of the noxious hereditary consequences of endogamy is unlikely to be
one of them.
Wolfgang Waldner:
There was an article in the
New York Times
recently
about the Holocaust memorial in Vienna. The British sculptor, Rachel
Whiteread, won a competition for a memorial commemorating the
Holocaust victims in Austria. The article was lengthy, with a couple of
photographs by the chief art cri tic of the
New York Times.
He described the
