By Elissa Strauss for The Jewish Daily Forward
Jewish
husband Jed Rubenfeld and in it she looks at the parenting practices of
six cultural groups who, she claims, create more successful people.
These include Indians, Chinese, Iranians, Lebanese-Americans, Nigerians,
Cuban Exiles, Mormons and, you got it, Jews.
Her thesis in “The
Triple Package” is that all these cultures have a competitive edge
because they impart on their children feelings of superiority,
insecurity and impulse control, which push their children to do better
in America than others in terms of income, test scores and occupational
status.
The book, which I haven’t read yet, has already ignited a
backlash from those who see a little too much overlap between Chua and
Rubenfeld’s superior cultural groups theory and the racist social
philosophy of eugenics. I too feel uncomfortable with the
essentialization of certain groups and am no fan of Jewish
exceptionalism, or how it can backfire, either.
Still, there is
one more thing that bugs me about this new book and it is the way Chua
and Rubenfeld have hijacked the Jewish mother stereotype.
Not
that I love stereotypes any more than I like the idea of making a list
of superior races, but if we are going to be trading in stereotypes
about Jewish mothers can we please go back to the old one because she is
so much more likeable.
“The Triple Package” mother sounds like a
cold and stern task-master who imparts upon her children a feeling of
inferiority, chosenness and discipline. Yuck. The stereotypical Jewish
mother is an endlessly doting, food-pushing, busy-body who wants their
child to succeed, but not if it takes them too far away or makes them
unhappy. She may not be the most open-minded woman, nor is she
necessarily calm under-pressure, but she can be relied on for love, and
unconditionally.
Of course most Jewish mothers are not either of
these, but if one stereotype about Jewish mothers is being promoted out
in the world I much prefer the loving one. And, for whatever its worth, I
imagine that that love and the sense of security it provides is a
factor in creating well-adjusted children, even if Chua and Rubenfeld
left it off the list.
For more Jewish books, check out our 
page.
We
usually think of historical fiction as storytelling that attempts to
simulate the events and atmosphere of the past—but what if historical
fiction recreated not the past itself, but the historian's process of
trying to put the past back together?
Last
month, readers at London’s celebrated annual Jewish Book Week were
introduced to a strikingly polished Holocaust memoir titled Motherland,
written by Rita Goldberg, a professor of comparative literature at
Harvard. Goldberg reconstructs the complex trajectory her family
followed from Germany and through Amsterdam, Belgian war resistance
cells, DP camps, independence-war-era Israel and then America. The book
focuses on Goldberg’s mother as she begins to lose her memory to
Alzheimer’s in the late 1980s, yet as with any Dutch Holocaust memoir,
the book is by necessity inextricably shadowed by and linked to the
story of Anne Frank. Unlike most Dutch Holocaust memoirs, the connection
in this case is a deeply abiding one: Hilde Jacobsthal was a childhood
friend of Anne Frank’s; her father and Otto Frank cofounded a liberal
synagogue together in Amsterdam after immigrating from Germany; and Otto
Frank was the godfather of the book’s author.
Using the second meaning of each word Megilla Esther literally means to expose the hidden.
Today,
the building at 23 Washington Place in Manhattan, just off Washington
Square, is known as the Brown Building, and it is part of NYU’s
ever-growing Greenwich Village empire. But in 1911, it was called the
Asch Building, and its eighth, ninth, and 10th floors were occupied by a
sweatshop called the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where some 500
workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian girls, produced women’s
blouses. When fire broke out there on March 25 of that year, nearly 150
workers died, in part because their bosses had locked the exit doors
from the outside. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was the deadliest
disaster in New York City until the collapse of the World Trade Center
90 years later.
In
this rich and provocative book, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen examines the
worldwide resurgence of anti-Semitism in the twenty-first century. Its
reach is unparalleled, both historically and today and hundreds of
millions of people have been exposed to it, especially in the internet
and satellite television age. It is practically an article of faith in
much of the Arab and Islamic worlds which subscribes to the foundational
anti-Semitic paradigm that holds Jews to be essentially different from
non-Jews and dangerous. But it also exists in subdued forms among
Christians. The range of people spreading and believing in anti-Semitism
is unusually broad. From common “folk” to university professors and
political leaders, from people on the political right to those on the
left, from the secular to the devout believers in God—all sectors of
society have been moved by its associated passions, including hatred and
violence. One of the most effective and disturbing arguments Goldhagen
musters is that the resurgence of anti-Semitism over the past decade or
so is shocking because it does not seem to shock. The horrific
calumnies leveled against Jews in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa
seem to be accepted without challenge by the masses, opinion makers and
elites alike. This has a self-reinforcing dynamic of persuading more and
more people of anti-Semitism’s claims.
Cheuse: How did you begin writing?