Soup or Stew

Should We Force Assimilation to end Separation?

With retirement comes an excess of time to read and reflect.  Those activities have led me to the unhappy conclusion that my chances of ever attaining a new and independent idea are virtually nil.  But great pleasure can still be gained by embellishing the ideas of greater minds.  And so I was struck by a few diamond-hard sentences of Charles Krauthammer’s in his essay collection, Things That Matter.  On page 266 of my paperback edition, he writes of the gradual dilution of Judaism in the Western world.  He notes that tolerance, (a method of coexistence between groups touted by Maya Angelou and many others) is not the solution to the problems of sorting or discrimination.  “…tolerance bespeaks non-persecution bestowed as a favor by the dominant upon the deviant.”  At its worst interpretation, tolerance means leaving others free from active interference yet still subject to passive aggression. Grouping seems an inherent quality of humankind.  In more developed societies, many lessen th…