156	The Story of the Jewish Defense League

bdeath knell of anything Jewish. The “religious school” bwhich was meant to give the child, not religion but “culture,” benough culture to make sure that he married a Jewess and bnot a Mary. Alas, the best-laid plans of Jewish parents . . .

bOf course, it was not to be. One could not give bright bJewish youngsters a Jewish education that terminated on a b13-year-old level, mix this with a secular education through bcollege with all the questioning of traditional values, and bexpect anything different to occur than what did. Faced bwith bright professors who cynically shook his childish bJewish beliefs, the Jewish youngster consigned his Jewish- bness to the junk heap of medieval nonsense and carried bthrough his “integration” to its logical end. He rejected bJewishness. He assimilated. He marched for all other causes bbecause they had meaning for him.

bBut while the individual Jew simply turned his back on bmaximum Jewish education, the Jewish Establishment, view- bing it as a dangerous enemy, plunged the knife into it. It bis the Jewish Establishment, led by the half-assimilators, who bhave actively, furiously, and stubbornly done all in their bpower to destroy Jewish education and who, thus, have bpresided over the death of Jewish identity. The men who brun the American Jewish community are not interested in bproud, exclusive, and separate Jewish identity, the kind of bJudaism that their forefathers lived and died for. They are bthe Jews of “melt,” the ones who carry with them, day and bnight, a great pot in which they try to persuade all Ameri- bcans to melt. It is they who are in a death struggle with the byeshiva, the bastion of maximum Jewish education.

bIn their great and never-ending drive to make the Jew bsecure and destroy anti-Semitism through melting, the most bpowerful weapon in the eyes of the men of the B’nai B’rith band American Jewish Congress has been the public school. bAnd indeed, thanks to the AJC-type half-assimilationists, bmen more interested in liberalism and Jewish integration bthan in strong, proud Jewish nationalism and identity, the bpublic school system has been glorified and made into one of bthe many sacred cows of Jewish Establishmentarianism. The bgoal was that of “modernizing” the young Jewish youngster, band the public school was the means of his liberation from b