Wall Street Journal Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and former Jerusalem Post editor Brett Stephens (whom I respect) is discovering how much hot water you can get yourself into by using historical analogies to explain a contemporary cause célèbre. He’s being criticized—even wrongly accused of anti-Semitism—for the following comment about the Tsarnaev brothers on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN talk show: “The story is what happens particularly to second-generation Muslims who don’t feel an identity quite with the home country or with their adopted land. And that’s where radicalization tends to take place. That’s where we need to devote some real — some real new thinking to this phenomenon. . . . The assimilation model in the United States works marvelously compared to the way it works in say, let’s face it, France or Germany or Great Britain. And if you look back in history, the Irish, the Jews, all kinds of communities who came to this country faced similar kinds of problems. And by the way, each of them had moments of radicalization. I mean, there was a large contingent of Jewish Americans in the 1920s and 30s who became hard- line Communists. And it was a real problem.” In an email exchange with Stephens, I argued that there may be something to a comparison limited to “second generation” political radicalization across immigrant-ethnic communities, but that compared to what seems to have been the case among the young Tsarnaevs, Jewish assimilation—even among communists—was the much more powerful motive. Hence the appeal of the CP’s Popular Front ideology of “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism” for Jewish communists who wrapped themselves in the white and blue as well as red. There was a pool of pro-Stalinist Jews from whom Soviet agents recruited a handful of spies, including the Rosenbergs—assuming they were guilty (to me a safe assumption!). But that small pool started drying up almost from the moment it emerged. Unfortunately, it’s unclear today—given the weakening of assimilationist forces in American life—if the tendency represented by the Tsarnaevs and their friends with “Terrorista” license plates will similarly decline over time. Of course, there is also the difference that American communists at least partly compensated for their terrible ideological blind spot for “Uncle Joe” Stalin by stellar contributions to the progress of grassroots unionization and civil rights. It doesn’t appear that in the case of the Tsarnaevs—the deceased elder brother is now becoming the focus of an unsolved investigation for a possibly anti-Semitism-tinged triple murder on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks—were likely to make similar contributions! Stephens counters that, despite ideological contrasts, both American Jewish Stalinism and American Islamist terrorism are “evil.” Both certainly had repulsive choices of heroes: the Soviet dictator, Georgia-born Iosif Dzhugashvili, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s namesake, Tamerlane (“Timur Link”), medieval Central Asia’s genocidal, self-styled “Scourge of Islam” as well as a patron of Turkish-style wrestling. It’s also true that totalitarianism should not be mitigated or rationalized (“Mussolini got the trains to run on time”), yet there are historically noteworthy differences in degrees and trajectories of evil (Hitler was a transcendent evil). American life would have been better had the 700,000 or so Americans who passed through the CP did not view politics through Stalinist blinkers. Yet despite their distorted vision, I think America was better off for having had them than if they had never existed. To put it another way, the Popular Front which the American communists, Jews and non-Jews, energized changed American life in ways that, now, even a conservative should be able to appreciate. History is two-edged: bad things can result from the actions of the pure of heart, but good things also can come from the actions of flawed men and women like American Jewish communists. This is one of the redeeming ironies that has made America, on balance, a very special place touched by Providence. The question is: will it remain so? A better historical analogy with the Tsarnaevs than American Jewish communists may be with Italian immigrant anarchists including Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (Sacco, with Vanzetti as an accomplice, almost certainly committed double murder in the course of a robbery for which the pair were convicted after an unfair trial) and the unknown 1920 Wall Street bomber. The difference, again, is that the Italian anarchists—such as Carrara stone and marble cutters who (as Paul Avrich has shown) virtually transplanted their movement into the U.S.—were first-generation radicals, pretty much totally unassimilated and given little if any of the opportunities to assimilate that second and later generations of Italian Americans often enjoyed. The Italian anarchist community was notable for well-meaning souls whose lives sometimes dead-ended in evil acts. The circumstances seem to be very different with the Tsarnaevs, the children of immigrants and beneficiaries of a welcoming society who, without any excuses, betrayed that welcome. The moral to me is that, while trying to punish terrorism, we should also be trying to prevent it not only by preempting attacks, but by encouraging a renewed emphasis on assimilation. The traditional “Americanization” movement, though heavy-handed in ways we would not want to repeat, nevertheless probably did more good than harm. American Jewish communists and their children celebrated Thanksgiving (after all, the Pilgrims were “collectivists”!) and July Fourth. Tamerlan Tsarnaev—also no admirer of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.—refused to celebrate such “un-Islamic” holidays, while willing to amalgamate his Islamism with an interest in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. His younger brother, Dzhokhar, was tutored in Chechen underground history in high school by a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, which Dzhokhar then attended, receiving an “F” grade in Intro to American Government. Apparently, his preferred form of “Americanization” involved cannabis—not civics—leaving an ideological void filled by Tamerlan who indoctrinated Dzhokhar in Dagestan Islamism with an Al Qaeda twist. The American education system—judged by its responsibility to educate good citizens—appears also to deserve an “F” for nonfeasance by not teaching both Tsarnaev brothers about our democratic Republic whose civic culture Jewish communists were American-wise enough to publically embrace even while addicted to Stalinist apologetics. Better vice paying tribute to virtue by doing some good works which live on—as did the American Jewish communists—than the unrestrained viciousness of a fanatical theology solely fueling second-generation American Muslim violent rage. How to deflect or dilute this ideology is the challenge ahead. Twentieth century America came through quite well the excesses of hundreds of thousands of Stalinist true believers. Twenty first-century America could have a harder time coping with equal numbers of unassimilated Islamists dreaming of global revenge.