You Gentiles
Soap Garden City, the Alpha Sigma Mu or the '95 Club, the Progressive Republicans or the Decorators' Association, the United Cigar-makers or the Fascisti. There's good fun in all this; it is exciting, jolly, sporty. It puts rush and gaiety into life. But we Jews are no good at it. Just as we are inaccessible to the meaningless exhilaration of college loyalty, so we are bewildered by the fast and furious games of your general life. We Jews cannot play the game.
Perhaps you will answer that it is you who, taking the chance relationships of life as the all-in-all of existence, are really serious: that it argues seriousness in a man if he gives to every passing association all faculties, all his emotion. Such an argument would be a quibble. A woman may take an absorbing interest in dress—to the exclusion of everything else: one could hardly call her serious. Serious absorption in trivialties is not seriousness. Then you may answer me: "But all life is a triviality"—which would reveal clearly the difference between your outlook and ours.
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