A Jewish Cure for American Atomization

The black Jewish baseball player Chick Levy was the son of one of Jamaica’s most prominent Freemasons, and was himself very involved in the U.S. Masons, along with other civic pursuits, after his retirement. Such civic associations once played a tremendous role in American life, a fact that made a major impression on its most acute observer, Alexis de Tocqueville. This Frenchman saw the ways American came together as a sign of social strength and a bulwark against democracy’s dangers. By contrast, thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson proposed a different version of Americanism, based on the self-reliant individual.