Jewish Americans have played a leading role in American intellectual and political life through the 20th century and into this one. We Jews increasingly dominated the arenas of literature, academia, medicine, law, news media, and show biz. Business and government, too. In America, we mostly overcame (or seemed to) the deep, old-world superstitions against us, thanks to successful near-total cultural assimilation. I, for example, came from a Jewish family far more interested in baseball than Talmud, who put up a Christmas tree in the living room, and ate sweet-and-sour pork frequently. Perhaps this made us “bad” Jews, but frankly, it was more important to be good Americans — that is, people who cared more about our country than our ancestral origins.
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For the Jews who arrived here in the late 19th and early 20th century, America became even more of a promised land than that sliver of Biblical real estate on the Mediterranean. They succeeded here beyond their wildest dreams. Why dream idly about returning to the Middle East when the USA turned out to be the real Land of Milk and Honey?
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