Walter Kerr

“Kerr, Walter (1968). Skin deep is not good enough. New York Times (April 14):D1, D3.

Today, … the immigrants—above all the Jewish immigrants—seem more American than [the WASP] does. They are the faces and voices and inflections of thought that seem most familiar to us, literally second nature. [The WASP] is the odd ball, the stranger, the fossil. We glance at him, a bit startled and say to ourselves, “Where did he go?” We remember him: pale, poised, neatly dressed, briskly sure of himself. And we see him as an out-sider, an outlander, a reasonably noble breed in the act of vanishing. … He has stopped being representative, and we didn’t notice it until this minute. Not so emphatically, anyway.

What has happened since World War II is that the American sensibility has become part Jewish, perhaps as much Jewish as it is anything else. … The literate American mind has come in some measure to think Jewishly. It has been taught to, and it was ready to. After the entertainers and novelists came the Jewish critics, politicians, theologians. Critics and politicians and theologians are by profession molders; they form ways of seeing.”
― Walter Kerr