"Oh! Well, anyway, the point I was trying to make is that all the years I had been dealing with them, it never struck me that they were Jewish, the whole firm is, at least all the top brass. What do you think of that?" He shook his head in wonder.
"You guys make me sick." said Burkhardt, pushing away from the table as if to give physical demonstration of his disgust. "You talk like a bunch of Ku Klux red-necks."
"You mean me?" Jason Walters was indignant. "Don't you try to make me out a bigot. I'll have you know our family physician is Dr. Goldstein here in town and we think tha world of him."
"If you mean me. Don." Megrim drawled, "it's hogwash. My last year in college. I roomed with a Jew, he lives out in Detroit now, and whenever I get there on business, he's the first one I call, we go to dinner and then maybe a show and afterward we might go to a bar and just talk. Why, there are things I tell him that I wouldn't tell my own brother, or my wife, either, for that matter, he's probably closer to me than—"
"And I might point out," Jason Walters went on loftily, "that a couple of years ago, instead of going to Bermuda or Palm Beach for our winter vacation the way we usually do. Grace and I went to the Holy Land, and I told everybody what a terrific job they were doing. Of course, they've got to do something about the Palestinian refugees, but on balance they've done wonders, and I said so every chance I got."
"You’ve got to understand, Don," said Albert Megrim soothingly, "that this is a social club. It's a place where you come to meet people. Naturally, you prefer your own kind because you're more comfortable with them."
"That's right." said Walters earnestly. "Look, my daughters go to the dances here, well, naturally, I want them to meet their own kind of people, that doesn't mean I'm prejudiced."
"Sure," said Burkhardt scornfully, "everybody denies being anti-Semitic, but—"
"I don't," said Ellsworth Jordon.
"You don't?" The young man stared at him. "You mean you are anti-Semitic?"
"Certainly, all of us are, and you are, too, Burkhardt. You're ashamed to admit it because you have a lot of crackpot liberal ideas about how only the ignorant are prejudiced. But you are just the same. Having one as a business partner, or as a family physician whom you think the world of, or as a best friend proves nothing. Or, rather, to a Jew it proves you are anti-Semitic, that's a kind of inside joke among them, anytime anyone says his best friends are Jews, they know it's an anti-Semite talking." He smiled broadly. "I know, because at one time some of my best friends were Jewish."
"But you just said—" Don Burkhardt was nonplussed.
"Oh, I can admit it because I know why we're anti-Semitic."
"You do? Why?"
"Because they make us feel uncomfortable."
"Why should they make you feel uncomfortable?"
"Because they're better than we are." said Jordon simply.
They stared at him.
"Hogwash! How do you mean, better?" demanded Megrim.
"Morally, ethically," said Jordon. "I guess they're just more civilized than we are, that's what makes us feel uncomfortable, and that's why we dislike them." He laughed aloud. "And the joke is that the buggers don't have any idea why they're disliked, not a clue, they just don't understand the psychology of it, they point out that they're good and loyal citizens with a low divorce rate and a low crime rate, that they're sober and industrious and ambitious, they're active in all kinds of worthwhile movements and reforms and are usually on the side of the underdog. But that doesn't get you liked, you know. Quite the contrary, they were the first to help the Blacks, foa instance, and the result is that they are the ones the Blacks resent most."
"Yeah, but they helped the Blacks because they're both minority peoples," Megrim pointed out. "But you take in Israel, where they are in the majority—"
"They're making the same mistake." said Jordon promptly.
"They set up a two-bit country on a two by four piece of land, and the first thing they do is to take in all their kinfolk from all the Arab countries, the old and the sick, and not a dime among the lot of them, and they feed them when they themselves haven't got a pot to pee in, and there were almost as many of these refugees as the total population of the country at the time."
Jordon took a sip of his drink and continued, "On the other hand, the entire Arab world, about eighty million of them with Lord knows how many millions of square miles of territory, could not find room for a couple of thousand of their own kinfolk and left them in refugee camps to rot, and everybody like Jason Walters here says the Israelis have got to do something about their Palestinian refugees, the Israelis, mind you, not the Arabs."
"Yeah, they take care of their own." said Megrim. "Everybody knows that. But today—"
"Today they have the Good Fence over at the Lebanon border." said Burkhardt. "And those aren't their own they're giving free medical treatment, any Arab who comes to the fence. Christian or Moslem, who needs help, gets it."
"Yeah, how about that. Padre?" Jordon jeered. "Those are Christians that are being slaughtered, and nobody in the Christian world lifts a finger or even protests, not the Pope, not your World Council of Churches, not the Christian countries. Only the damn Jews. It's downright embarrassing. No wonder that no one supports them in the UN, that's the point I was making, they make everybody uncomfortable, so everybody votes against them."
"The United States doesn't do much better there." Jason Walters pointed out. "And if you come right down to it, most countries hate us, too."
Jordon chortled. "Sure they do, and it's for the same reason, we're a little that way, ourselves."
"Hogwash! They hate us because we're rich and powerful."
said Megrim.
"No, that's not it." Jordon asserted. "When you're powerful, you're feared. Sure you may be hated, but only as long as there's reason for being afraid of you. In World War II we hated the Japs and the Germans because we were afraid of them, we didn't hate the Italians because we weren't, and as soon as the war was over, we also stopped hating the Japs and the Germans. You want to know whv America is hated today? Whv all this 'Yankee. Go Home' propaganda? It's because we were guilty of perpetrating a terrible act of charity, the Marshall Plan. Never before in the history of the world had a conquering country set out to rebuild the countries it had defeated, we gave away millions, with no strings attached, and we've been hated for it ever since, and they'll go on hating us until the memory of that tremendous moral act is dimmed or forgotten."
"That's pure hogwash, Ellsworth," Megrim drawled. "The reason they dislike us is because we're brash and pushy when we're in their countries, maybe it's because we're away from home, or because we don't know their language or their customs, so we feel a little uncertain and we cover up by being, well, assertive, and that's why we tend to dislike Jews—because they're pushy."
"I wouldn't say they were pushy," said Burkhardt. Now that the conversation was on a philosophical level, he could speak calmly. "I think they're a little more intense than we are, that's all. My partner, for instance, when he gets involved in a project, it's as though the whole world depended on it, the same when he tries to relax and play golf, he races through the course. It's as though everything he does is a little bit more, as though he's operating on a higher body temperature, if you see what I mean, and I've noticed it in others, too. It may be something in their genes. Stands to reason, with all the trouble they've been through, pogroms and what not, those living today must be the result of a special selection process."
"Not at all. It's their religion," Jordon declared flatly.
"They don't have any religion," said Dr. Springhurst, his interest stirred for the first time.
"Cummon, Padre, they invented it, the modern kind, I mean," said Jordon.