Arthur Read’s Reviews > You Gentiles > Status Update

Today, w/ race triumphant over ideal, anti-Semitism uncovers its fangs, & to the heartless refusal of asylum, is added cowardly insult. We are not only excluded, but told, in the unmistakable language of immigration laws, that we are an "inferior" people..the country prepared itself, through its journalists, vilification of the Jew, and, when sufficiently inspired by popular & "scientific" potions, committed the act.

If America had any meaning at all, it lay in the peculiar attempt to rise above the trend of civilization—the ID of race w/ State, purely an ideal, & nationality was identical only w/ its acceptance. But it seems now that the entire point of view was a mistaken one, incapable of rising above..The ideal which constituted US nationality disappears now, & in its place emerges again, with atavistic certainty, the race.

the Jew is not being forced to stay at home: while one part of the gentile world persecutes him, the other part refuses him a chance to escape. For very shame—if you were capable of it you should give the Jew free immigration everywhere. The irony of it is, of course, that it is chiefly against the Jew that anti-immigration laws are passed here in America as in England and Germany.

If the struggle between us is ever to be lifted, your democracies will have to alter their demands for racial, spiritual & cultural homogeneity within the State. But it would be foolish to regard this as a possibility, for the tendency of this civ. is in the opposite direction. There is a steady approach to the identification of gov w/ race, instead of w/ the political State..it is perhaps futile to expect a change.

Your demand is not connected w/ views. It is a question of identity. You want us to be Anglos or Teutons, if you are to call us English or German. And we cannot be that..That strangers should come to dwell in your midst is one thing. That they should claim, after a generation, complete identity with you, is as absurd as it is insolent. And even if they dwell in your midst 1000 years, yet keep apart, they are not you.

Among our simple people you do not find the delight in constructive trifles which is one of yourcharacteristics. Your simple people like to build things, fix this and that in the house, play the handy man; they take pleasure in putting up shelves, looking to the plumbing, adding and altering. We are devoid of this kind of craftsman's pleasure; we do what is necessary, only because it is necessary.

We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers for ever. Nothing that you will do will meet our needs and demands. We will for ever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which it is not in your nature to build…The wretched fate which scattered us through your midst has thrust this unwelcome role upon us.

The unbelieving, radical Jew is as different from the radical Gentile as the orthodox Jew from the reactionary Gentile. The cosmopolitanism of the radical Jew springs from his feeling (shared by the orthodox Jew) that there is no difference between Gentile & Gentile. You are all pretty much alike: then why this fussing & fretting & fighting? He is not one who feels difference between national & nation, & overrides it

You must learn to dislike & fear the modern "assimilated" Jew more than the old Jew, for he is more dangerous. At least the old Jew kept apart, was easily recognizable…you were afraid of him & loathed him. To a large extent he was insulated. But as the Jew assimilates, cultivates a certain intimacy, handles your instruments, you are aware that his nature, once confined safely to his own life, now threatens yours.

We have joined your capitalistic world…yet Jewish socialism & socialists are the banner bearers of the world's "armies of liberation." 3 or 4 million modernized Jews, a ludicrously small number, have given to the world's iconoclastic force its chief impetus & by far its largest individual contribution. America & England put together have not played that role in world revolution which a handful of Jews have played.