Not By the Power and the Strength of My Own Hand (kohi v’ otzem yadi)
by Rivka Press Schwartz
The story of American Jewry is one of remarkable success, integration, and “Making It.” For all of the caveats that we can offer, all of the historical and current examples of antisemitism and anti-Jewish animus and discrimination, the American diaspora has been an exceptionally hospitable one, one in which generations of Jews have arrived, set down roots, and flourished. For the “tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free” who arrived, tempest-tost and pogrom-chased, from Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1924, and who were the ancestors of the majority of American Jews,^1 their descendants’ rapid climb over the course of a few generations to the heights of politics, culture, finance, the professions, and the academy, would have been experienced as – was experienced as – the full realization of the American dream. Even with recent anxieties about renascent antisemitism in American public life, and the concern about whether the Golden Age of American Jewry is over,^2 we are still far better off as a minority population in this country than we were in 1950, when educational, social, and employment discrimination against Jews was still commonplace. (And that is to say nothing of 1920 or 1870.)
Because this is our experience, as families, as communities, as a people, we can understandably find ourselves generalizing, assuming that what was true for us was true for everyone. That our experience was a general experience. That the path out of poverty for American Jews, from tenement to suburb, was paved by a totalizing commitment to education and relentless hard work and could have been trod by anyone willing to do what our ancestors did. This story can reinforce for us a deep sense of gratitude to this country and the opportunities it afforded us. (See Tamara Tweel on hakarat hatov elsewhere in this collection.) But it can also curdle into disdain, even contempt, for those whom we see as not having taken similar advantage of the opportunities we seized. Put most bluntly, it is the question I hear from my high school students: “If we made it, why can’t they?”
Crediting ourselves with our own success is one short step from blaming others for not having achieved the same. It militates against the solidarity of shared citizenship, of working together to support the flourishing of all Americans. Instead of inviting us to think about how to enable others to share in the American dream, it invites us to blame them for having failed to do so.
This thinking undermines our commitment as citizens to the shared work of building a more perfect union. That is the pragmatic, outcome-driven reason to reject it. But there is another, important one: it is a misunderstanding of American history. It is simply not the case that “our” story – the story of Jewish Americans of European background, who while they faced obstacles, challenges, and discrimination were afforded opportunities that they grabbed with both hands – is everyone’s American story. And a first step in our work of shared citizenship is to learn the history that helps us understand that.
For all that my immigrant grandfather faced many challenges upon his arrival to America, through his enlistment as a GI in World War II and the difficult years of building a family and building a life that followed, he was afforded one crucial, unearned advantage: when he arrived in this country from Poland in 1928, he entered a system that was highly stratified (one might say segregated) by race. And my grandfather, through no choice, fault, or merit of his own, was labeled white.
The implications of this even in his own life were enormous. The Servicemembers’ Readjustment Act, universally known as the GI Bill, was passed in 1944 to provide for the successful transition to civilian life for the millions of American men mobilized for World War II. Its benefits included funding for higher education and backing for mortgages. But the bill was structured to be administered in partnership between government and private entities, ensuring that Black GIs – who had been drafted and served their countries just as much as my grandfather – were deprived of its benefits. If there was no university that would accept them, no bank that would lend to them, the GI Bill’s guarantees of tuition payments or mortgage guarantees were hollow, even mocking. (Nor was this a coincidence, or an oversight – FDR’s New Deal Coalition of Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress was an uneasy admixture of Northern liberals and Southern segregationists, who sought to ensure that as few government benefits as possible flowed to Black people.)^3
But that official governmental denial of benefits to Black Americans who had served their country, benefits afforded to white Americans who had served theirs, is not the extent of the answer to “why couldn’t they?” (Although the locking-out of Black Americans from the real estate market of the mid-20th-century United States, a massive engine of wealth-creation for white families, had immeasurable impact on the generational wealth of Black families.) Because the next part of the answer has to include learning about what happened when “they” did.
Less than a decade before my grandfather arrived in the United States, in the early summer of 1921, a white mob burned the Greenwood Business District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the ground, expelled its inhabitants, stole their property, and killed dozens who were later buried in mass graves. The Tulsa Race Massacre, as it is now known, was nominally occasioned, as so many acts of terrorism against Black communities were, by the alleged disrespect shown by a Black man to a white woman (in this case, in an elevator). But it is not hard to see how a lethal stew of jealousy, grievance, and racism meant that many white Tulsans were eager to take the opportunity to raze a neighborhood known as Black Wall Street.
The descriptions of that day are harrowing, and evocative. Most stunningly, attorney Buck Franklin recounts seeing airplanes dropping incendiaries on the neighborhood to help it burn ^4 – evidence of governmental involvement in destroying an American community. But the oral histories of survivors, collected by Mary E. Jones Parrish,^5 are particularly difficult and painful to read. Because this country, the one that we looked to for haven and hope, did to others precisely what was done, in other places, to us. Our ancestors would have recognized the Tulsa Race Massacre. It would have been legible to them as a pogrom.
Understanding American history does not mean denying the truths of our families’ experiences, denouncing our grandparents or renouncing their hard work. It does mean recognizing that their hard work was platformed, advanced, leveraged by circumstances not of their making – even not of their choosing – to which other Americans did not have access. Peggy McIntosh, in her essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack” ^6 refers to this dyad as “Earned Strength, Unearned Power.”
The capaciousness of the Jewish tradition means that nothing is strange to us. Every question we encounter, even in circumstances unimaginable to our predecessors, rhymes with something in Jewish experience, tradition, texts. And in this case, it is our Moshe Rabbeinu who, in his leave-taking speech in Deuteronomy before his death, first addresses the importance of distinguishing the earned from the unearned, the strength from the power.
For your God ה is bringing you into a good land, a land with streams and springs and fountains issuing from plain and hill; a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey; a land where you may eat food without stint, where you will lack nothing; a land whose rocks are iron and from whose hills you can mine copper….
When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget your God ה… and you say to yourselves, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.”
Remember that it is your God ה who gives you the power to get wealth….
Deuteronomy 8:7-17
Of course, the exhortation to the Israelites as they enter Canaan not to allow their material success to lead them to forget God is not the same as our need not to allow our material success to blind us to other Americans’ realities, or to shirk the responsibilities of shared citizenship that an awareness of those realities imposes on us. (Any more than admission to the universities or employment in the law firms is precisely the same thing as hewing copper from mountains.) But our Jewish tradition offers us ways into thinking about how we can celebrate our accomplishments without becoming self-satisfied, how we can recognize what we have done without failing to recognize what factors beyond kohi v’otzem yadi, beyond our control have given us “the power to get wealth.”
^1 This is, of course, the experience of the majority of American Jews, but by no means all of them. The substantial numbers of Sefardi and Mizrachi Jews, and of Jews of color, in the United States, mean that there are significant groups of American Jews with different American Jewish stories. But this remains the story of the majority of American Jews (as measured by Pew 2020, among others).
2^ Franklin Foer, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” The Atlantic, 4 March 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/us-anti-semitism-jewish-american-safety/677469/.
3^ Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America, W.W. Norton, 2005.
4^ Allison Keyes, "A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921," Smithsonian Magazine, May 27, 2016, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/long-lost-manuscript-contains-searing-eyewitness-account-tulsa-race-massacre-1921-180959251/.
^5 Mary E. Jones Parrish, The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2021).
^6 Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August 1989, 10–12.
