Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States

8. Rich, Powerful, and Smart: Jewish Overrepresentation Should Be Explained Instead of Avoided or Mystified

8 Rich, Powerful, and Smart Jewish Overrepresentation Should Be Explained Instead of Avoided or Mystified Some people think it unwise to speak at all of the demographic overrepresentation of Jews among the wealthiest, most politically powerful, and most intellectually accomplished of Americans. I encounter this sentiment among some readers made uncomfortable by my references to Jewish overrepresentation in my book of 1996, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, and in my article on the Veblen thesis, reprinted in this volume. Although I understand the reasons for this reticence—e.g., do we want to feed anti-Semitic fantasies of a Jewish conspiracy to run the world?—I believe the time has come for historians and social scientists to apply their skills to the question. AntiSemitism is not so great a problem in the United States today to justify the avoidance of the issue, and, as I argue in the intervention reprinted below, failure to address the question at this point in time may actually facilitate the perpetuation of racist and other biocentric ideas. The truth is the best defense against bigotry. The interlocking economic, political, and cultural conditions of Diaspora Jewry over many centuries do much to explain Jewish preeminence in the many practices of modernity, just as the conditions of slavery and Jim Crow racism do much to explain the overrepresentation of black men in 154 American prisons. History, not essentialist ideas about communities of descent, tells us what we most need to know. The immediate occasion for my writing this follow-up to my article on the Veblen thesis was an invitation from the editors of Jewish Quarterly Review to contribute to a symposium on new directions in the study of American Jewish history. Shortly after I had drafted it I had the opportunity to read in manuscript the book of my colleague, Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, 2004). Slezkine’s massively documented explanation for Jewish overrepresentation grounded in the specific historical conditions of the Jewish Diaspora in Europe strongly reinforced and extended my own thinking. I incorporated some of Slezkine’s findings concerning the role of Jews in the Soviet bureaucracy. I want to take this occasion to again thank Slezkine for his contribution , a genuine breakthrough in the study of Jews, modernity and cosmopolitanism . This piece was first published in Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2004): 596–602. In the closing scene of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (New York, 2000) two white men, one a Jew and one who might be called a “poor white,” confront one another while standing on a sheet of white ice beneath which is an expanse of blackness. The dark water beneath the ice is an obvious symbol for a dead man the reader has learned was born black but had managed to pass as white, although at enormous personal cost. Indeed, his whiteness was like the ice, easily broken in the event of a change in the social weather. The Jew knows that the man born black had died some months earlier in the very waters of the now-ice-covered lake, murdered by the crude, uneducated man he was facing. But he can’t prove it. After a few minutes of tense and evasive dialogue the Jew turns and walks away. The Jew, as a well-to-do, highly educated, self-aware person, is able to drive then to New Jersey to engage the black family of the dead man openly and honestly. But the local poor white, who never had much going for him to begin with and Rich, Powerful, and Smart 155 • lost what humane capabilities he had when the government made him into a killing machine in Vietnam, remains on the white ice of the remote Berkshire lake. The “cracker” is imprisoned by his warrelated clinical depression and by the petty prejudices against which his class and culture have given him all too little protection. This scene, created by a writer whose unyielding preoccupation for more than thirty-five years has been the psychology of Jewishness in the historically specific conditions of late-twentiethcentury America, displays features of American life that invite the sustained attention of historians: the success of Jews, and the relevance of a Jewish background to lives lived outside communal Jewry. Neither Roth nor his protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, is significantly defined by the communal framework that is central to what we normally understand as “Jewish...