Assimilated reasoning

Excerpt from Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track:

Tina Levitan wrote to Feynman requesting a biographical sketch and a black and white photograph for inclusion in her book-in-progress, The Laureates: Jewish Winners of the Nobel Prize.

Miss Tina Levitan
New York, New York

Dear Miss Levitan:

It would not be appropriate to include me in “Jewish Winners of the Nobel Prize” for several reasons, one of which is that at the age of thirteen I was converted to non-Jewish religious views.

Sincerely yours,
Richard P. Feynman

Levitan then argues that her listing includes “not only professing Jews and those partly of Jewish ancestry but also those of Jewish origin.” Feynman responds with what I thought to be a sad, flawed rant on how “it is evil and dangerous to maintain, in these days of little knowledge on these matters, that there is a true Jewish race…” But although I found his argument largely disagreeable, there were a couple of amusing lines, like, “The error of anti-Semitism is not that the Jews are not really bad after all, but that evil, stupidity and grossness is not a monopoly of the Jewish people but a universal characteristic of mankind in general.”