Nor is this all. Bearing an unmistakably Jewish name, I am spared the crude comments of virulent anti-Semites, for even they retain a modicum of manners in my presence; and, there being no possibility of mistake, I am not asked to join groups that do not "take" Jews. I am accepted by my fellows as a human being, or I am rejected as a Jew, and while I have no apparatus for measuring hatred and love as they move the hearts of millions of non-Jews, I do know this: that Gentiles, knowing me to be a Jew, have all my life taken me into their hearts and homes, with no self-consciousness on their part or mine, with no abrogation of dignity on either side, without condescension by them and without obsequiousness by me.

The fact that I have been free of most of the blatant prejudices that often run against so many of my coreligionists does not make me insensitive to their plight, nor do I detach myself from them as though I lived upon a private planet of my own. The war between good and evil never ceases. It was once suggested to Luigi Luzzatti, a Prime Minister of Italy and a Jew, that he change his faith. "I do not think of myself as a Jew or a Gentile," he replied, "but only as an Italian. But when Jews are attacked, then the voice of Isaiah rises in my soul" Here it would seem meet to do battle under true colors rather than false.

If I should resort to the plastic surgery of the courts, it would be only because I should like to pass myself off on the community as a synthetic Plantagnet. This, conceivably, could bring me certain dubious "advantages," such as eligibility for clubs that reject me because I am a Jew, or admission to hotels in "restricted" resorts that refuse me for the same reason. With a new name – preferably one suggesting kinship with a high-church bishop – I might even be asked to dine with some newly minted family that, having gouged the government during the First World War, is now almost as pedigreed as a grand champion bull. These considerations leave me cold.

We already have an overproduction of social climbers in this country; folks who, in the telling and contemptuous rural Negro phrase, have "got above their raisin'." There is no reason why I should add to their number; I can derive a sufficient knowledge of their obscene antics, without closer relationship, by reading the considerable Americas literature that deals with them.

Yet it is not surprising that there should be so many of them among us – Gentile and Jew – seeing that, paradoxically, snobbery reaches its ultimate in a shirt-sleeve democracy such as ours. For snobbery, generally speaking, flows from social insecurity and only two groups are free of it. The one is the tiny group of aristocrats at the top who feel that no matter what they do, they cannot lose their social position. The other is the group of men it the bottom who have no social position to lose. One finds, therefore, few snobs among true aristocrats and truck drivers. The place to look for them is among large numbers of the American middle class – especially its women. Corroded by a sense of social insecurity, they are almost pathologically concerned with the "right thing" – the right friends, schools, resorts, clothes, clubs, addresses. Nothing stops them in their search for social position.