Free The Triple Package by Jed Rubenfeld, Amy Chua Page A

States Supreme Court, made the following extraordinary statements at a speech in New York City:
    And what people in the world has . . . anobler past? Does any possess common ideas better worth expressing? . . . Of all the peoples in the world those of two tiny states stand preeminent as contributors to our present civilization, the Greeks and the Jews. The Jews gave to the world its three greatest religions, reverence for law, and the highest conception of morality. . . . Our conception of law is embodied in the American constitution. 
    For Brandeis, thepersecution Jews had suffered through the ages was a point in their favor. “Persecution,” he added, had “broadened” the Jews’ “sympathies,” training “them in patient endurance, in self-control, and in sacrifice. . . . It deepened the passion for righteousness.”
    The idea of Jewish historical exceptionality made the concept of chosenness practically irrelevant. “The point is not whether we feel or do not feel that we are chosen,” declared Martin Buber, the Austrian-born Jewish philosopher. “The point is thatour role in history is actually unique.” This feeling of historical uniqueness, seemingly proven by a three-thousand-year record of survival and accomplishment, beats close to the heart of Jewish culture everywhere.
    But uniqueness is a double-edged sword. Michael Chabon has described the “foundational ambiguity” in Jewish exceptionalism: simultaneously a “treasure” and a “curse,” a “blessing” and a “burden,” a “setting apart that may presage redemption or extermination. To be chosen has been, all too often in our history, to be culled.” Yet even the Nazi genocide became a kind of twisted emblem of Jewish superiority for some Jewish leaders—particularly in America, starting around the 1970s—who engaged in what many other Jews, such as the historian Peter Novick, viewed as a “perverse sacralization” of Auschwitz, competing with other groups over “‘who suffered most,’” and behaving as if they were “almost proud of the Holocaust.”
    Most American Jews today would politely applaud Britain’s former chief rabbi Lord Sacks, who in 2001 condemned the notions of both “Jewish superiority” and “Jewish inferiority” as “two sides of the same coin.” But they might take greater satisfaction, if only in private, from articles like “Jewish Genius,” Charles Murray’s 2007 catalog of the “extravagant” Jewish overrepresentation in “the top ranks of the arts, sciences, law, medicine, finance, entrepreneurship, and the media.”
    In 2009,70 percent of Israeli Jews said they still believed that Jews were God’s chosen people. The figure cannot be nearly so high for American Jews, given that less than half say they believe in God, but even for those without theological faith, the sense of Jewish exceptionality is often part of their upbringing. Some are taught tolocate this exceptionality in a Jewish commitment to justice, law, or morality; others, in a Jewish insistence on questioning; others, in Jewish intellectual achievements.
    Or, according to the novelist Philip Roth, there may be no articulated basis for it whatsoever. Roth said that American Jews inherit from their parents “no body of law, no body of learning and no language, and finally, no Lord,” but rather “a kind of psychology,”a “psychology without content” that could be “translated into three words: ‘Jews are better.’” He added: “There was a sense of specialness, and from then onit was up to you to invent your specialness; to invent, as it were, your betterness.” Whether rooted in divine election, history, intellect, morality, or “a psychology without content,” the Jewish sense of being somehow exceptional has lasted three thousand years and is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
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    M ORMON SUPERIORITY IS, like Jewish superiority, historically founded on the idea of chosenness—only without the