As a young child, my grandfather fled Communist Russia in the back of a horse-drawn wagon, hiding underneath a pile of hay—which a Bolshevik border guard stabbed with a pitchfork to prevent such escapes from totalitarianism. Fortunately, he was unharmed, and found refuge in America.
It’s true that, once they arrived in the United States, Jews of my grandfather’s generation endured antisemitic slurs, were held back by quotas at universities, prevented from renting apartments and buying homes, and excluded from social organizations. Still, they knew with certainty that America was the land of freedom and opportunity. They grasped its fundamental goodness, which is why they were willing to endure the not-so-good. And they understood their new home’s capacity for progress was assured, rooted as it is in timeless moral principles.