The Blessings of Exile: Why Minority Status is Good for the Jews鈥攁nd Everyone Else
Abstract
As the scholar Jacob Neusner has remarked, the Holocaust followed by Israel鈥檚 creation constituted a kind of civil religion for Jews, reminding them of their eternal vulnerability while offering salvation in the form of statehood. Memories inevitably change, however, and as the impact of these two titanic events fade, an increasing number of the next generation of Jews are starting to reject the particularism associated with both events in favor of a rebirth of the universalism that once characterized life in the Diaspora. Professor Wolfe argues this is a positive moment, for both Jews and the non-Jews with whom they live.