that were brand-new. The United States stood for unabashed Mercurianism, nontribal statehood, and the supreme sovereignty of capitalism and professionalism. It was— rhetorically—a collection of homines rationalistici artificiales , a nation of strangers held together by a common celebration of separateness (individualism) and rootlessness (immigration). It was the only modern state (not counting other European settler colonies, none of which possessed the iconic power and global reach of the United States), in which a Jew could be an equal citizen and a Jew at the same time. “America” offered full membership without complete assimilation. Indeed, it seemed to require an affiliation with a subnational community as a condition of full membership in the political nation. Liberalism, unlike nationalism and Communism, was not a religion and could not offer a theory of evil or a promise of immortality. It was—especially in the United States, which came closer than any other nation to speaking Liberalese—always accompanied by a more substantial faith (which tended to gain further substance by being “separate from the state”). The role of such spiritual scaffolding might be played by a traditional religion, tribal ethnicity, or both religion and ethnicity (fused, in the case of the Jews, into one harmonious whole). Whatever it was, a Jew became American by subscribing to a particular (at least outwardly religious) definition of Jewishness. As Abraham Cahan, who used to be a “member of the human race” by virtue of being a member of the Russian intelligentsia, wrote in New York in April 1911, In many educated, progressive Jewish families people sat down to the Passover Seder last night. Twenty years ago, if anyone had heard that a Jewish socialist was interested in a Jewish religious holiday like that, they would have called him a hypocrite. But today, such a thing is perfectly natural. Twenty years ago a freethinker would not have been allowed to demonstrate any interest in the Jewish people, but today he can! 3 Ia. Bromberg wished to remain a member of both the human race and the Russian intelligentsia and repeatedly ridiculed “the flood of thoughtless, superficial, and banal ethnic boastfulness of the Jewish-American press.” As he wrote in 1931, In those who used to bring to the altar of the fraternity of nations all the bitterness and pain of centuries-old misery and discrimination, there rose