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“I went to England in 1947 and then to the United States in 1956,”
he wrote. “But I never quite became an American. I had left Hungary
behind, and my Jewishness did not express itself in a sense of tribal
loyalty that would have led me to support Israel. On the contrary, I
took pride in being in the minority, an outsider who was capable of
seeing the other point of view. Only the ability to think critically and
to rise above a particular point of view could make up for the dangers
and indignities that being a Hungarian Jew had inflicted on me.”
Judaism was a burden to him. It offered no special advantage, only
the “dangers and indignities” that had been “inflicted” upon him for
being born a Hungarian Jew. Accordingly, during the postwar years
he played down his religion. None of his intellectual ideas sprang
from Jewish sources.
His longtime friend and business associate Byron Wien noted that
“George has never thought of himself as anything but Jewish. He
never tried to suggest that he wasn’t Jewish. He never backed away
from his identity, but I think at the same time he did not want that to
be the central fact of his identity.