The Golden Age of American Jewry Hasn’t Ended. It May Have Just Begun

This essay reflects on the inspiration that can be drawn from an unlikely pair of people: the first English, the second American. The first seemed destined from birth for heroism; the second exhibited courage in the face of surprising and terrible events. The first is Winston Churchill; the second is Jerry Seinfeld.

Let us begin with Churchill. In October 1941, Churchill visited Harrow, the school he had attended as a boy. The previous ten months had been the most perilous in Britain’s history, when France fell, and Britain stood alone. In honor of Churchill, the students added a stanza to the traditional school song. It went as follows:

Not less we praise in darker days
The leader of our nation,
And Churchill’s name shall win acclaim
From each new generation.

Moved by what he had heard, Churchill spoke about courage, human greatness made manifest, and then concluded:

You sang here a verse of a school song: you sang that extra verse written in my honor, which I was very greatly complimented by and which you have repeated today. But there is one word in it I want to alter—I wanted to do so last year, but I did not venture to. It is the line: “Not less we praise in darker days.” I have obtained the headmaster’s permission to alter darker to sterner. “Not less we praise in sterner days.”

Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days—the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part.

What did Churchill mean? Were these not dark days? Were those past months not England’s darkest hour? Were there not countless dead. Was not England still without the United States? Did they not face the nightly terrors of the bombings of the Blitz?

Churchill, I think, had in mind those who wistfully looked back to the years between the wars as a time of peace and prosperity for England, and indeed for Europe. But Churchill understood that those purportedly blissful times were an age of illusions, that actually it was a time when evil was allowed to fester, when the seeds were sown for the danger and destruction that was to come, a time when his own prophetic warnings were ignored, culminating in the cheering of Neville Chamberlain at Buckingham Palace after he returned from Munich proclaiming “peace in our time.”

The age for which there was nostalgia, in other words, was a shameful period in British history, or as Churchill, still alone after Munich, declared in parliament, the British people must know

that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

He was saying, in 1941, that what was clear to him years ago had become clear to so many, and that meant that the current moment, which was seen by many as a dark time, was a time of clarity. Now so many understood what they were fighting for, and just as importantly, they understood what they were fighting against.

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