Politics & Power Quote by Arnold Rothstein

Rothstein’s line has the snap of a man policing the border between belonging and liability. “Who cares about that stuff?” isn’t indifference; it’s a command to stop making identity everyone’s problem. By setting “America” against “Jerusalem,” he turns Jewishness into something foreign, private, exportable - a faith relocated to an elsewhere so he can occupy the clean, powerful category of “American.” The move is strategic: in an early 20th-century climate of nativism, quotas, and polite antisemitism, “American” reads as safety, access, and legitimacy. “Jerusalem” becomes a caricature of Old World entanglement.

The sting is in “Let Harry be a Jew.” It’s not a celebration of pluralism; it’s delegation. Jewishness is assigned to someone else (likely a friend or associate) as a kind of role, while Rothstein claims the universal, unmarked identity. The name “Harry” does cultural work, too: it’s assimilation’s nickname, the Anglicized mask many immigrants adopted to pass through doors that didn’t open for “Herschel.” Rothstein is choosing which version of himself can sit at the table and which one gets left outside.

Coming from a businessman with Rothstein’s reputation - a figure associated with gambling empires and the 1919 Black Sox scandal - the quote also reads as self-justification. He’s not simply rejecting religion; he’s rejecting the idea that ethnicity should complicate his ambition. It’s assimilation as hustle: shed the label, keep the advantage, and call it patriotism.