Joseph Sobran on changing moral fashions in 20th century America

Catholics "arrived" as Americans from the Thirties to the Sixties - between Al Smith and Jack Kennedy.  They made their mark as citizens, politicians, celebrities, moralists, intellectuals, and whatnot.  They helped set the tone of public life in all sorts of ways: think Notre Dame football, the Legion of Decency, the Knights of Columbus, Bing Crosby, Bishop Sheen, Cardinal Spellman, Joe McCarthy, countless movies featuring crusty-saintly Irish priests.  Catholic intellectuals like John Courtney Murray made their debut in secular society.  It was rather fashionable to be Catholic: tony converts wrote books like "The Seven-Storey Mountain."  It was easy to get the feeling that if you weren't Catholic, you were really missing something.  The secular world treated Catholicism with great deference.  And Catholics had clout.

This was the wave Kennedy rode to the White House.  But then it ended suddenly - and for Catholics, traumatically.  Catholicism suffered abrupt deflation and even some rough debunking.  Instead of converts' pious autobiographies, the best-sellers were memoirs of angry apostates.  The Church lost both political clout and moral glamour in the secular world.  Hollywood either ignored or ridiculed Catholicism: Catholic morality and sensibilities simple ceased to count for anything.

For Catholics, this was a painful loss of public respect.  We'd been riding high and assuming it would go on forever.  But, all the same, Catholics were still acceptable as citizens.  Their fall from secular grace didn't mean their rights were in question; nobody doubted a Catholic could get elected.  Only some of the grander Catholic moral pretensions had been rejected.

At about the same time Catholics saw their prestige and power decline, Jews arrived.  Israel's victory in the Six-Day War helped make it acceptable - even fashionable - to be openly and proudly Jewish.  "Passing," Anglicizing, converting, etc., were contraindicated.  The Holocaust (a new word for most of us) moved to the center of our sense of recent history.  "Anti-Semitism" became the deadliest of cultural accusations.  More movies about Nazis were made in this period than in all of World War II (most films at the time, lest we forget, featured gross Jap-bashing: it was only in retrospect that we decided we'd been fighting for racial justice).  Jewish intellectuals, entertainers, politicians all stressed their "ethnicity" (another new word): frank "Jewishness" replaced religious "Judaism" as the ticket to respectability.  Yiddish slang entered the language.  Jewish sensibilities were accorded special deference, and even became morally defining for gentiles.

The Jewish Moment is winding down now.  Maybe it's for no better reason than that moral fashions change like all others.  Be that as it may, certain exaggerated Jewish moral claims are being deflated.  The Holocaust doesn't seem unique since the revelations about Stalin and Pol Pot.  Loose charges of Anti-Semitism are arousing resentment.  Above all, Israel has become a moral embarrasment; even its defenders find themselves forced to do less boasting and more excusing these days.

[...]

In short, Jews are going through a pretty normal period of adjustment - the bumpy side of assimilation, as I sometimes call it.  Protestants and Catholics have both survived having their self-absorption punctured; so will Jews.  They'll be less special but more normal.

~ Joseph Sobran, letter-to-the-editor to The New Republic, reprinted in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, December 1990, pp. 11-12