The Israel test revolves around a fact that is recognized by most people in some form, surreptitious or partial, but is rarely acknowledged openly or explored for its consequences: in any rivalry with intellectual dimensions, disproportionate numbers of both the challengers and of the winners will be Jewish.
Today in America and around the world many of the rich and powerful are Jewish as well. But few people seem to worry much about old money. We are relatively comfortable with traditional wealth and privilege. What is threatening is creative destruction from brilliant and ambitious outsiders. The French have been so preoccupied with this phenomenon that they have supplied us with no fewer than three pejoratives to capture it: the nouveau riches, arrivistes, and the parvenus. All three terms apply readily to Jewish immigrants and business successes as well as to Israel, which stands accused of being the newcomer and upstart nation-state in the Middle East.
In most advanced countries, according to the available data, a hugely disproportionate number of brilliant and ambitious outsiders engaged in intellectual and entrepreneurial activities are Jews. Around the globe, wherever freedom opens up, however briefly in historical terms, Jews quickly tend to rise up and prevail. Jews, historically, have shown vigilance in identifying the main chance and courage in taking it. Together with superior knowledge and talent, this visionary audacity is the essence of entrepreneurial prowess. Understanding and combating the rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism requires fathoming the anxious sense of vulnerability of traditional establishments — intellectual, commercial, military, political, and cultural — as they face the Israel test.
As a youth I learned first-hand the temptations of anti-Semitism. Attending Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, I devoted nearly all my efforts as a junior at the school to writing for The Exonian, the school’s daily newspaper, while managing barely to scrape by in my classes. I expected to be named an editor of the school paper for my senior year. For generations, my forebears had been editors. I was entitled. Since virtually no other undergraduate had written as many news stories, feature stories, books reviews, and editorials, I thought my ascension was assured.
When the next editorial board was announced, I was shocked to discover that the editor-in-chief was to be a student named Peter Sobol, whom I had scarcely met and who had contributed nothing notable to the paper. I found that most of the other prospective new editors were also only occasional contributors. Three of them were “New York Jews,” as I invidiously observed, who unlike me had achieved high grades, almost effortlessly as it seemed, while I struggled to eke out Cs. If truth be told at the time they were also more accomplished writers than I.
That summer, in a parental campaign to help me catch up on my studies, I was assigned a Radcliffe student two years my elder as a tutor in the classical languages. In an effort to avoid the famously demanding Exeter courses such as American history and calculus, I was aiming for a Classics diploma. The Radcliffe girl (in those times of atavistic “sexism,” we still called female college students “girls”) was named Valerie Ann Leval. The name still can suffuse my brain with remembered effervescence and longing.
Enlisted to teach me the Greek language so I could qualify for second-year Greek in my senior year at Exeter, she was a tall, willowy creature, both intelligent and beautiful. On long walks through the fields and over the hills of Tyringham Valley, Massachusetts, I accompanied her in besotted bliss as we recited Greek phrases and conjugated polymorphous Greek verbs from a textbook coauthored by my Exeter teacher.
One day toward the end of the summer, as we strode up a sylvan dirt road by the Gilder Farm in the late afternoon, en route to a hilltop field spread out with mosses and tufted with blueberry bushes and reaching out toward rolling horizons and wide sunset vistas, she asked me how I liked Exeter.
How I ached to impress her! I knew that she would not be taken with callow effusions about the virtues of this famous preparatory school, its oval tables, its fabled teachers, its austere standards. I hesitated to tout Exeter’s athletic exploits, my true enthusiasm, to this refined intellectual girl. What to say? We beat Andover 36 to 0? I chose what seemed to me at the time a path of seductive candor and salty sophistication. Echoing sentiments I had heard both at home and at school, I responded, “Exeter’s fine, except that there are too many New York Jews.”
At first, Valerie did not reply. We continued crunching up the dirt road. I sensed there was something wrong. My hopes for the evening seemed to be slipping fast away while Valerie contemplated how to respond. Then she commented dryly: “You know, of course, that I am a New York Jew myself.”
My stomach turned over like a cement mixer. I gasped and blathered. I cannot remember exactly what it was I said. I suppose I prattled something about all my Jewish friends and my well-known offbeat sense of humor.
To this day I recall the moment as a supreme mortification and as a turning point. Rather than recognizing my shortcomings and inferiority and resolving to overcome them in the future, I had blamed the people who had outperformed me. I had let envy rush in and usurp understanding and admiration. I had succumbed to the lamest of all the world’s excuses for failure — blaming the victor. I would pay by losing the respect of this woman I then cared about more than any other. I had flunked my own Israel test. But I had learned my lesson.
I was brought up in a highly literary and artistic Anglo-Saxon Protestant family in New York City and western Massachusetts. I had learned the family legends. We were classic WASPs all, scions of stained-glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, the Century Magazine editor Richard Watson Gilder, Episcopal pastor Reese Fell Alsop of the Church of St. Ann’s in Brooklyn Heights, and Chester W. Chapin of the Boston and Albany Railroad. Gilder forebears and their children had been painted exhaustively by Cecilia Beaux and engraved in bronze by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. My great-aunt Mary O’Hara had written the equine sagas of the Flicka series.
One of the favorite family stories recounted an exploit of my great-grandmother, Helena de Kay Gilder, who was an obsession of the artist Winslow Homer. At her wedding to my great-grandfather, Homer presented to her a special painting. It depicted Helena in a chair, dressed in black. At her feet was a red rose, symbolizing, according to art historians, Homer’s heart.
Homer was just one of many artists and writers in my family’s circle. My great-grandfather was a close friend to both Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, among many others who visited at our farm in the Berkshires. When Twain’s wife died, he retreated to Tyringham and rented from my great-grandfather a house next to ours. But among all the literary figures in the family circle, Helena and my great-grandfather were particularly close friends and backers of Emma Lazarus, the now-celebrated Jewish American poet who wrote the inscription on the Statue of Liberty in New York:
The New Colossus