Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Hertzberg

Hertzberg is poking at a cherished origin myth by shrinking it down to two blunt images: Ellis Island and a candy store in the Bronx. The first is the national cathedral of immigrant memory, the second a deliberately unglamorous storefront of hustle, petty capitalism, and Americanization. Put together, they puncture the idea that American Jewish life was simply European Jewish civilization transplanted intact. His provocation is that migration didn’t just relocate Jews; it stripped down what could be carried, socially and spiritually, and rebuilt identity around survival and upward mobility.

The line about the “lower middle classes” is doing more than class profiling. It’s a critique of how cultural capital works: what gets called “Jewish culture” (texts, institutions, high learning, old-world refinement) is unevenly distributed, and in America it had to be remade in a new key. Hertzberg’s target isn’t immigrants themselves so much as later nostalgia that pretends the community arrived fully formed, already fluent in tradition, already legible to itself.

Context matters: as a theologian and public intellectual, Hertzberg spent years arguing with both assimilationist complacency and romantic ethnic revival. Here he’s warning that the American Jewish “story” often begins where it is easiest to tell - at the moment of arrival, in English-friendly symbols - while obscuring the harder question of what was lost, what was improvised, and what counted as “culture” when the immediate task was to make rent, feed children, and become American fast. The candy store is the punchline and the thesis: identity built not in salons but in commerce, neighborhoods, and reinvention.