George Gilder - The Israel Test

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:

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.