JACOB NEUSNER

JACOB NEUSNER From the beginning, America has stood for the capacity to make anyone a real American. Conservative opinion cannot now despair of that tradition. e Jews, whether descended from 18th...

...Black, red, white, yellow, brown— these are the all-American-colors of skin...
...If we Americans lose faith in the power of our country and its unique social system to make the foreigner, the stranger, one of us, in our image—and to make ourselves over too—then we deny the power that has made us unique...
...First, they came from Western Europe and Africa, then from Eastern Europe and Asia and now from South Asia and Latin America— all colors, shapes, sizes, languages...
...That is how it always will be—I hope...
...And we can make Americans of the dark-skinned as well as light-skinned people, Moslems as well as Anglicans, Hindus as well as Jews...
...I shall fear for America when nearly everybody in the world no longer wants to come and become one with us...
...Jacob Neusner is Graduate Research Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa...
...The perpetual encounter with the other explains who we are as a nation...
...We are not a declining population, like Europe...
...For the immigrant— whether my mother's grandmother leaving as a young woman from Odessa or the young Irish woman from Dublin or a young black from Jamaica or a Mexican crossing the border—takes the initiative, shows the enterprise that sustains a free economy...
...Nothing new about that...
...Racial diversity has characterized this country from the beginning...
...it is much too late to conceive otherwise...
...We will be a far more interesting country than we already are if this happens: More of humanity's experience will be ours...
...But for us, there is nothing un-American about the Moslem faith...
...His most recent books includeThe Ecology of Religion (Abingdon, 1989) and Struggle for the Jewish Mind: Debates and Disputes on Judaism Then and Now (Univ...
...Race a problem...
...I: "Yes, so the Jews found out, too...
...Conservative opinion has always affirmed the power of received traditions and institutions to govern the social order...
...If today racial groups compete on racial terms alone for top positions, that is something to which we conservatives have long objected in the name of the hierarchy of talent...
...Although Fleming and I are political conservatives—Bush-Quayle enthusiasts—his ambivalence toward immigration seems to me not a conservative position at all...
...From the beginning America has stood for the capacity to make anyone a real American...
...Migration from the Third World, as from the First and the Second, replenishes our work force...
...I wouldn't want it any other way: A greater, not a smaller, America surely is what we conservatives affirm...
...millions who are Moslem, Hindu and Jewish, not Protestant, not even Christian...
...all Protestant, though we have never known merely a narrowly defined Protestant faith...
...True, my family brought a different religion, which would change America...
...Some hold a false vision of an America that was all white, though we have always been black as well as white...
...Insofar as our story bears meaning, it is a tale of newcomers coming to be changed by, and to change, this country...
...No country in the world except this magnet of ours has such a compelling power to win the commitment of strangers: we want to be with you and be like you, share what is yours and give what is ours...
...Our history is an ongoing adventure in building a nation that is always new and surprising...
...No other nation in the world has the power that we take for granted, to take to ourselves millions of people, decade by decade, and accord them the same opportunity that the native-born enjoy...
...English than German, better Scottish than Irish), although we have always been more than this...
...and the Turk as well as the Italian or the Pole or the Norwegian or the Mexican can find a home ^and a welcome here...
...Absent jobs, people would not come, or would come and go home (as many do...
...So, all in all, I find in the newest mass migration further evidence of the astonishing success of the American system...
...Press of America, 1988...
...And the Chicano youngster in California will one day identify, as much as I do, with the Declaration of Independence...
...and the Chicano today brings us a second language—Spanish—that may last longer than Polish or Yiddish or Italian or Norwegian or Finnish did, each in its day...
...That is how it has always been...
...In a recent issue of Chronicles (published by Rockford Institute, Illinois), the classicist Thomas Fleming calls immigration "the real American dilemma...
...If it is a problem, it began in 1619, when the first Africans were forcibly brought to this country, and not in 1865 or in 1945...
...e Jews, whether descended from 18th or 19th century immigrants or just arrived, have a heavy stake in the outcome of current debate on the value of immigration to this country...
...Immigration brings to this country the already-grown up and ready to work, the already-educated: a rich investment in nurture and education by foreign economies that has readied the immigrant for productive work beside us...
...Immigration nourishes America, affirming the power of its national ideal: a society capable of remaking the entire world in the image of democracy...
...I hope it lasts longer, because Spanish opens to us the experience of a whole world to our South...
...They are not even Christian...
...For what is really at issue is not immigration, but difference...
...The issue is not whether this country can take in more millions, but whether it can take in more millions who are yellow, black and brown, rather than white—millions from South Asia and Korea and Vietnam, not Germany or Norway or England...
...A German professor once said to me, speaking of the Turkish immigrants in Germany, "But they can never really become Germans like us...
...all descended from Northern and Western European lines (even then, better...
...No other nation in history and none today exercises such power over the mind, and imagination, of outsiders...
...This affirmation is a profoundly conservative reading of our history, for it asserts that our institutions remain vital and valid, our way of life normative, our system strong and entirely capable of changing everyone who chooses to beNEUSNER continued from page 12 come an American into precisely what the system requires...
...My great grandmother knew nothing of the "Pilgrim Fathers," but Thanksgiving Day is very much mine...
...Those of us who see our social order—our laws and institutions—as the best that humanity has ever devised must regard the immigrants' commitment as a rich resource for conserving what we affirm...
...Our system has not only accommodated difference but has always been nourished by it...
...Our institutions and our way of life have the capacity to change every kind of stranger—who has, in turn, changed us in rich and subtle ways...
...I disagree...
...The same can be said of our diversity in language and religion and geographical origins whether long ago or today...

Vol. 15 • June 1990 • No. 3


 
Developed by
Kanda Sofware
  Kanda Software, Inc.