It was the Russian and Polish Jew. He swarmed into this district, the most typically American of any outside of Boston and Philadelphia, from the first. Nowhere else would the sweatshops go except in the very heart of Goy respectability. There were protests and organizations; Jews were appealed to in the name of the city; they smiled and promised, but like a tide coming in, the invasion swept farther and stronger every week. New Yorkers hesitated to go down into the district to trade, and merchants lost their business. Real estate values dropped in consequence, the Jews bought valuable properties at low figures. Today, at noontime, Fifth Avenue is packed from wall to curb with dark, squat figures in masses of thousands. They parade in dense throngs and make the street impassable. They make a strange, un-American atmosphere, Slavonic with some Oriental admixture. Their tongue is alien, their attitude is one of sullenness mingled with a sense of power. You leave the New York of American meaning whenever you approach that alien throng. They have taken over the district as completely as if they had invaded it with the bayonet. All this would be very hopeful, of course, if we could take and sustain the attitude of the unsophisticated young reader of fiction, and regard these people as “new Americans.” There is a mass of moving stories (mostly written by Jews, by the way) pretending to describe the glowing hearts with which these throngs look out upon America, their intense longing to be American, their love of our people and our institutions. Most unfortunately, the actions of these people and the utterances of their leaders give the lie to this fair picture which, as Americans, we would fain believe. The resistance offered to Americanization, consisting in the limitations put upon the Americanization program, has been sufficient to convince all observers that, so far as the Jewish invasion is concerned, it is not their desire to go the way America is going, but to influence America to go the way they are going. They talk a great deal of what they bring to America, hardly anything at all of what they found here. America is presented to them as a big piece of putty to be molded as they desire, not as a benign mother who is able and willing to make these aliens to be like her own children. The doctrine that the United States is nothing definite as yet, that it is only a free-for-all opportunity to make it what you will, is one of the most distinctive of Jewish political teachings. If it be provincialism to insist that our alien guests become American and cease their endeavors to make America something alien, then there are hundreds of thousands of Americans to plead guilty to provincialism.