Merry was incurable: she was “gruesomely misbegotten.” But most other Jewish radicals of the 1960s did recover in the 1970s because they found clothes appropriate to their station—a faith that was both warm and modern, messianic and perfectly compatible with Thanksgiving. They became self-conscious Jews sharing in their people’s suffering and accomplishments. They became, in this broad sense, Jewish nationalists. According to Will Herberg, The third generation [of American Jews] felt secure in its Americanness and therefore no longer saw any reason for the attitude of rejection so characteristic of its predecessors. It therefore felt no reluctance about identifying itself as Jewish and affirming its Jewishness; on the contrary, such identification became virtually compelling since it was the only way in which the American Jew could now locate himself in the larger community. . . . As the third generation began to “remember” the religion of its ancestors, to the degree at least of affirming itself Jewish “in a religious sense,” it also began to lose interest in the ideologies and “causes” which had been so characteristic of Jewish youth in earlier decades. Social radicalism virtually disappeared, and the passionate, militant Zionism espoused by groups of American Jews until 1948 became diffused into a vague, though by no means insincere, friendliness to the state of Israel. 202 After the Six-Day War, Hodl’s and Chava’s children resumed their responsibility of endowing the lives of Beilke’s children with meaning: the Soviet cousins, as victims, and the Israeli ones, as both victims and victors. In the 1970s, most American Jews by blood became Jews by conviction—and thus full-fledged Americans. Nostalgia for a lost world was replaced with an allegiance to living relatives; chimerical nationality was transformed into a proper ethnoreligious community; Tevye, it turned out, had had other choices besides martyrdom and Thanksgiving. Tevye, it turned out, had descendants who were at peace with themselves and at war with their oppressors. The American Jews had finally become regular American “ethnics,” complete with an old country that was also a new state with a flag, an army, and a basketball team. More than that, they had become the first among American ethnics because their new old country was uniquely old, uniquely new, uniquely victorious, and uniquely victimized. And of course its very existence—and therefore the continued existence of all Jews, Soviet and American, was (it turned out) a response to an event that was the “most unique” of all events that had ever occurred. As Elie Wiesel wrote in the New York Times in 1978, “Auschwitz