Long Stephen Steinlight essay: 12,800 words. The average New York Times or Washington Post article is around 1,200 words.
Quotes from the essay below.
The white "Christian" supremacists who have historically opposed either all immigration or all non-European immigration (Europeans being defined as Nordic or Anglo-Saxon), a position re-asserted by Peter Brimelow, must not be permitted to play a prominent role in the debate over the way America responds to unprecedented demographic change.
I'll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical [American] Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months for 10 formative years during my childhood and adolescence I attended Jewish summer camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting its colors, sang a foreign national anthem, learned a foreign language, learned foreign folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the true homeland. Emigration to Israel was considered the highest virtue, and, like many other Jewish teens of my generation, I spent two summers working in Israel on a collective farm while I contemplated that possibility. More tacitly and subconsciously, I was taught the superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us. We were taught to view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people from whom sudden gusts of hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive, intelligent, and moral than ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson of our dark history is that we could rely on no one.
What are some of those large vexing questions we would prefer not to speak aloud? Let's throw out a few and see how many sleepers we can awaken. The big one for starters: is the emerging new multicultural American nation good for the Jews? Will a country in which enormous demographic and cultural change, fueled by unceasing large-scale non-European immigration, remain one in which Jewish life will continue to flourish as nowhere else in the history of the Diaspora? In an America in which people of color form the plurality, as has already happened in California, most with little or no historical experience with or knowledge of Jews, will Jewish sensitivities continue to enjoy extraordinarily high levels of deference and will Jewish interests continue to receive special protection? Does it matter that the majority non-European immigrants have no historical experience of the Holocaust or knowledge of the persecution of Jews over the ages and see Jews only as the most privileged and powerful of white Americans?
Center for Immigration Studies
October 2001
by Stephen Steinlight
Dr. Stephen Steinlight was for more than five years Director of National Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Jewish Committee. For the past two and a half years he has been a Senior Fellow at AJC. He is co-editor of the forthcoming Fractious Nation: Race, Class and Culture in America at the End of the Twentieth Century (UC-Berkeley Press), and he has recently been appointed editor of South Asia: In Review. The views expressed in this essay do not reflect the current policy position of AJC with regard to immigration.
Preface: Challenging A Crumbling Consensus
This piece is the fruit of an authentic and deeply felt conversion experience, but much as one hankers to grab the reader's attention with a dramatic retelling of a great and sudden epiphany, it didn't happen that way. My change of heart, of thought, came gradually, even reluctantly. It was the product of a long evolution, one that occurred incrementally and unevenly over the years I spent as an advocate in the immigration debate who came increasingly to doubt and now, finally, to disown his own case and cause. The conversion is also the result of the consumption of many books and monographs on many aspects of the issue, as well as my own reflections on the innumerable (and often interminable) coalition meetings and conferences I attended on the subject. Writing in the immediate wake of the nightmare America has experienced (I live in Manhattan and watched the second plane strike the World Trade Center), it must be added that the enormities committed by Islamist terrorists in my city, Washington, and Pennsylvania have given these thoughts greatly increased emotional urgency. But they developed unremarkably, slowly, steadily.
Most of all, my conversion is the consequence of my contact over the years with Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies, and the Center's work. We dialogued and formally debated on several occasions, and I moderated public forums in which Mark took part. If dialogue has any meaning, if speakers actually listen to each other rather than close their ears and merely wait impatiently to say their say, then the possibility that one can change as a result of what one hears must be acknowledged. The Socratic method was alive and well in our exchanges, and I did. But, as I've noted, the change came slowly, the process recalling not St. Paul on the road to Damascus but the Latin proverb Stillicidi casus lapidem cavat, "constant dripping hollows out a stone." My thought was also significantly influenced by a superb conference on immigration, "Thy People Shall Be My People: Immigration and Citizenship in America," sponsored by the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation in July of 2000. Perhaps its principal contribution to challenging my point of view was having the opportunity to listen to my own side's thesis articulated by those willing to take it to its extreme, and their reductio ad absurdum made plain the very great dangers within it.
Read more . . . (pdf)
Links:
Book Review of 'The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography' by Stephen Steinlight Review by Joseph Fallon (Spring 2002)
Single value that ties Jews together more than any other: They're anti-Christ [USA Today] Their anti-Christianity unites them more by far than the country of Israel does.
For most American Jews, the core of their Jewish identity isn’t solidarity with Israel; it’s rejection of Christianity. [Commentary.com]
2012 Jewish Values Survey [Public Religion]
Jews write about Jesus Christ [Jew or Not Jew] Oct 17, 2006
