In the Century Magazine, Richard Watson Gilder published both her poems and her prophetic but sometimes disdained Zionist essays. In an exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage near Battery Park in Manhattan, Gilder is given credit for persuading the politicians to use the full Lazarus inscription on the Statue of Liberty. One of her poems calling for a new homeland was entitled “The New Ezekiel” and “celebrates,” in Esther Schor’s words, “the coming together of all the dry bones of Israel”:
Prompting the Lazarus poems and essays were the ongoing pogroms in Russia that also inspired “The New Colossus” and brought millions of Jews to the United States. Here they began their relentless rise through all the nation’s hierarchies and ladders of accomplishment. Here they challenged all the established powers and principalities.
At the time, WASPs were impregnably on top, running the businesses and media of the day. With notable friendships with two U.S. presidents and such leading lights of literature as Twain, my family was perched near the top of the American establishment. Like most exalted WASP families, my forebears and their descendants were about to face their Israel test.
Lazarus’s biography by Esther Schor is heavily based on hundreds of letters of correspondence between Lazarus and Helena Gilder and reports a suspected romance between Lazarus and Helena’s brother, the poet Charles de Kay. By usual standards, my family was actively philo-Semitic. A leading Zionist professor at Columbia told Richard Gilder: “My people owe thanks to you at the Century more than to any other publication.”
A Tiffany sister of my grandmother was Dorothy Burlingham, the lifetime best friend and collaborator of Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund, one of the prime forces of modernist Jewish intellect in the twentieth century who revolutionized the treatment of psychiatric illness in children with her own pioneering methods. The tempestuous story of Anna and Dorothy is well told by Dorothy’s grandson Michael in his book The Last Tiffany. On all sides I had relatives with intimate links to Jews.
In our family, however, we were not immune to the general miasma of ambivalent disdain, admiration, and anxiety toward Jews. We took for granted that a person’s religion and ethnicity were significant elements of “background.” This background stuff was important, and lots of people failed the background test. In describing someone, we regarded their roots to be as worthy of note as their fruits. Jokes about rabbis, priests, and preachers, inflected in rich accents, evoked uproarious laughter around our dinner table. It was another era, I might nervously say today, when one did not consider it offensive to exalt one’s own heritage over others or to laugh at ethnic foibles. We were led to believe that our cultural heritage was supreme, and, with some ambivalence, we knew that it had roots entangled in the heritage of the Jews. I suppose we knew also that Jewish intellectuals and entrepreneurs were slowly daring to challenge the preeminence of WASPs in American cultural and commercial life.
Jews were beginning to gain admission into Harvard University in limited numbers, confined by strict quotas that continued into my own era at Harvard in the early 1960s and well into that decade. As a student at Harvard in the class of 1936, my father roomed with a Jewish classmate named Walter Rosen, who became my own godfather before he, like my father, too, died as a pilot in World War II. Several of my father’s other good friends were Jewish. Aunts and cousins married Jews. After graduation, my father visited Germany with another roommate, David Rockefeller, and returned with a passionate revulsion against Hitler’s frothing anti-Semitic speeches. My father was convinced that Nazism was a dire threat to civilization and must be stopped by military force.
In 1938, one of the youngest members of the Council on Foreign Relations (to this day the library is named after him), my father famously and impertinently confronted John Foster Dulles, later to become secretary of state under President Eisenhower, for believing that some rapprochement between Germany and the United States was still possible. In sophisticated circles there persisted a fashionable belief, fostered in part by Bloomsbury economist-philosopher John Maynard Keynes, that Germany was essentially a victim of World War I and of the postwar settlement and reparations. There was a notion abroad that Germany had earned by this grievance a moral edge against the winners of that horrendous conflict.
My father was having none of it. In a conviction that air power would be decisive in the coming war, he took up civilian flight training to be ready while working as an executive trainee at his grandfather’s firm, Tiffany and Company. My father died in 1943 commanding a squad of B-17 bombers, called Flying Fortresses, on the way to the war in Europe. The entire squad was lost to what was suspected to have been sabotage at the Gander, Newfoundland, fueling station.
A piano teacher and concert pianist, my mother, Anne, after the war became a close friend of the famed virtuoso William Kapell and taught him how to drive a car in the Berkshires, where he practiced his incandescent musical art in a converted red barn next to our house. Only six or seven at the time, I mainly remember how loudly he played compared to my mother. We were all shocked and dismayed by his death in a plane crash in San Francisco while returning from a triumphant concert tour in Australia. When tapes of Kapell’s performances in Australia were rediscovered early in this new century, the event was front-page news in The New York Times.
Several years younger than my mother, Kapell consulted her about his romantic pursuit of a mutual friend and gave her piano lessons. At the time, he was her favorite pianist, but other Jews soon joined the lists of virtuosi, including Serkin, Horowitz, Rubinstein, Istomin, Fleischer, Barenboim, and Ax, as Jewish genius dominated the global culture of the piano.
On my father’s side, Tiffany and Company is no longer independent, having been absorbed by Avon Products, as the “family” jewelry business surrendered to Jewish entrepreneurs, who outperformed the stodgy WASPs in control at Tiffany.
In many walks of life, from finance to higher education, American WASPs have undergone such a displacement. Some are ambivalent about it, but very few in my experience are anti-Semitic, and even those who are anti-Semitic admire many Jews. Nearly all cherish their Jewish friends, associates, and connections. They are proud to know Henry Kissinger, who became my tutor at Harvard, just as they boast of their youthful encounters with Bob Dylan or appreciate the supremacy of Leonard Cohen or Irving Berlin as songwriters. The American economy and culture is not a zero-sum game, and the creative ferment fostered by Jewish inventors and entrepreneurs has enriched the entire nation and made the current generation of WASPs the most prosperous and successful in history. Jews have not only succeeded in America but have saved America as well. They are now so deeply entwined in American culture and enterprise — and in the lives of most Americans — that it is difficult to imagine life in the United States without its Jewish leadership and Jewish accomplishments.
Virtually all Americans who have achieved anything important in the twentieth century have had crucially important Jewish colleagues and collaborators. Virtually none of the significant scientific and technological feats of the last century would have been possible without the critical contributions of Jews. Even some of the best Christian preachers and theologians turn out to be Jewish.