Tribes, be they black or Chinese or Jewish or Nicaraguan, have a different relationship to America. Sometimes tribes can be even more loyal to the nation than the majority population because they want to prove themselves good citizens. German Jews served at a higher rate in WWI than did regular Germans. Usually, however, minorities have a more attenuated relationship to the nation state. Minorities only survive by constantly walling themselves off from the majority. Without this isolation, they assimilate.
It is in the nation’s self-interest to racially and religiously and ethnically profile its citizens when it comes to crime. Certain minorities dominate certain categories of crime. I want Muslims, for instance, to get more scrutiny in airports because every airline act of terror over the past 45 years has been done by Muslims. Every act of terror against the West in the past 45 years has been done by Muslims. So if you see a Muslim photographing potential terror targets, you understandably get nervous and want to tell someone.
Secular Ashkenazi Jews of East European origin tend to get more ideologically committed to things such as communism than other peoples and many Jews have strong loyalties to Israel and to Jews around the world that surpass their loyalty to their host nation, so it is not anti-semitic to scrutinize Jews more closely regarding state secrets (remember Jonathan Pollard, Julius Rosenberg, etc) than you would for somebody whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. On the other hand, Jews are less likely than the average citizen to commit 99% of crimes (the exceptions might be certain high IQ intricate white collar crimes). Young black males are 23 times more likely to commit violent crime than other groups, according to the Obama administration. They deserve a closer eye than do Japanese-Americans.
Stereotypes are useful when they are accurate and when stereotypes cease being accurate, they don’t get used much. Blacks do play basketball more than Jews and they generally play it better. Jews do read more books, on average than blacks. Blacks, in general, have a better sense of rhythm than other peoples. Asians tend to be more dedicated than other races to work, study and family and they are less likely than whites, latinos and blacks to commit crime. They drive more carefully and they are less likely to get killed in criminal violence.
Samuel Dickstein was short and silver-haired, “a slim little man in a natty gray suit,” the New York Times once characterized him. It was said he never left his red brick home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan without his Malacca walking stick, strolling past the teeming tenements with the air of what his Jewish immigrant constituents would call a big macher.
But Dickstein, a Democrat from New York City who served in the House of Representatives from the early 1920s to the mid-1940s, conducted himself in public life with none of the refined elegance that his self-presentation suggested. At a time when Joseph McCarthy was still an unknown lawyer in Wisconsin, Dickstein invented the modern practice of naming names—broadcasting the identities of suspected subversives without the slightest pretense of due process. If anyone can be credited (or blamed) with introducing the phrase “un-American activities” into the nation’s lexicon, it is he. An unusually shameless publicity hound in a legislative body full of them, Dickstein had a habit of inviting his antagonists to step outside and settle matters like men, once announcing such a fistic challenge to Rep. Thomas L. Blanton of Texas on the House floor. (Blanton appears to have declined.)
So over-the-top as to be ineffectual—he had the poor taste to call for Noel Coward to be barred from the country because the English wit made a quip about the manliness of Brooklyn soldiers—Dickstein left Congress in 1946, and served as a state Supreme Court justice until his death in 1954. In 1963, a portion of the street grid close to where he used to live on East Broadway was christened “Samuel Dickstein Plaza.” No controversy attended the occasion. He then went about the time-honored practice of being forgotten.
That is, until 1999, when Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev published The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era, which through the use of previously unavailable KGB records went a long way toward convincing those who could be convinced that Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg were in fact working for the Soviet Union. The authors also revealed that Stalin had a spy in Congress, an exasperating character who once “blazed up very much, claiming that if we didn’t give him money he would break with us,” according to his Soviet contact. To this day, Sam Dickstein is the only known U.S. representative to have served as a covert agent for a foreign power. His codename was Crook.
