Cheng's Version of Jews

One last thing about Cheng. Part of what bothered me about his article was the way in which he discussed the idea of victimhood being integral to Jewish identity. Throughout his article, he criticized various definitions of Jewish identity as adopting anti-Semitic standards either in theory or in practice. But then his own description of Today's Jew relied on stereotypes. Although he would casually reference the "midwestern Jew," his general definition of a Jew seemed to mirror his wife and her colleagues. In his world, Jews have to identify with the Holocaust and Israel because they are no longer victims in their countries. He constantly paints this portrait of an upper-middle class Jew with a cushy job who has never experienced anti-Semitism. Assumably that means said Jew must have grown up around a bunch of other Jews. I think this idea that Jews in Western countries today have completely assimilated into society and are totally accepted is nice, but false and uninformed. It's part of a new trend that wants to think of anti-Semitism as a "thing of the past." Maybe Jews in France aren't facing pogroms, but they also aren't allowed to wear yarmulkes and 25% of French people think that there are too many Jews in France, according to a survey. According to an FBI report, in the US in 2004, there were 954 hate crimes against Jews, 738 against male homosexuals, and 2,731 against African-Americans. And a friend of mine felt she had to let people call her "Jew Jew Bean" throughout high school in order to have friends.

I'm not saying all this to prove that Jews are victims; I just think that Cheng's frame of reference is skewed. There's a large spectrum of types of Jews as we are discovering and I think he glosses over the actual circumstances many of them are in in order to make his point that Jews today are adopting an unexperienced victimhood. I think every group uses examples of hardships it has overcome in order to help form a cohesive identity, but any group that defines itself soley on those hardships could not have survived for thousands of years.