- MAIN STREET -
The Jewish Thoroughfare
By
PHILYIP RUBIN
Main Street — an outgrowtti oi the old market-place — is still primarily a place for the sale ana exchange of goods. But it is something more than that. It is also the place where the bright Jights, the glamor of a town are concentrated and where entertainment and culture, of some sort, is distributed for a price.
It is not the place where the most important work of the world is dtone. On Main Street are not located the world's farms and factories and mines, nor are books written or music created on that thoroughfare. Main Street does not produce. It only exchanges and distributes, whether the things it handles be material products or human services or the products of cultvu-e.
This is not to say that Mam Street is an altogethter useless place, only that its usefulness is not primary and fundamental, but secondary. Main Street facilitates our economic life. It makes things
A
HAPPY NEW YEAR
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easier foi* all of us but in a piach we could live without it, as we could hardly live without the farm or the factory or the mine.
On Main Street are most of the Jewish business establishments. "We Jews are attracted to Main Street, and quite naturally so. Since we are a people with a commercial tradition, Main Street v/inks to us as the place to do business in. Our whole history in the Diaspors has been the history of our attempt to giet out of the Ghetto and get on Main Street where the chances for advancement were bright. At times the results were very tra^c — the "goyim" got jealous and kicked u& right back into the Ghetto, if they didn't do anything worse to us as they recently did in Germany ■snd Poland. But in most ooimtries the so-called Jewish Emancipation of a century and a half ago succeeded in establishing and maintaining us pretty tightly on Main Street. And so we are there still.
Perhaps what has also attracted
us Jews to Maui Street, besides its commercial possibilities, are the afore-mentioned bright lights, glamor, bustle and, as is the case with the bigger Main Streets, the very noise of it. Most Jews seem to dislike and fear the very quiet places; they might take out then: cars for a drive in the coimtry ana whisk by the farms and fields on the side roads, but they would not like to live there. As between thg highways and byways of the world, Jews much prefer the highways. It must be our specific Jewish neurosis, our restlessness, that U\ attraced by tumalt and repelled by quiet. Perhap it hlas something to do with our passion for ;being in the limelight or to bask in the reflected glory of others, our passion for the bright lights of Mam
Street which we Jews so often exhibit.
Our Jewish restlessness, the results of centuries of abnormal life among people who didn't want us, has made us over-ambitious and this in turn has given rise to a superficial vanity, to a lack of modesty and poise, which is only the outward expression of imcer-tainty and an inferiority complex. First it was others who did not allow us to till the soil and to strike deep roots in the lands of habitation. Gradually we became accustomed to tliis and uncertain and finally, as himian inertia wall always exhibit itself, we came to love it.
Because of oxn- history of persecutions, because we Jews always, (Continued on Page
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