During the Summer of 1987 I should prepare an op-ed piece for The New York Times this coming Thanksgiving. It should be entitled, “Thanksgiving is a Pain.” The theme will be that of course we are deeply grateful to the Almighty for America, but the very gratitude brings with it a feeling of aching guilt, perhaps “survivor’s guilt,” especially for Jews. By some quirk of fate, my grandfathers decided to emigrate to this country when so many of their peers did not. I am therefore grateful – but I am pained by the knowledge that my destiny and the fate of so many of my cousins who perished in the Holocaust was determined by a seemingly innocent and casual decision taken some seventy, eighty, or ninety years ago. Can not this same attitude be replicated for Mexicans? Poles? Chinese? (Blacks?)... So, Thanksgiving is a pain, but a pain that generates even more Thanksgiving.