were not significantly more radical than non-Jewish students from other occupational backgrounds. The connection between secular professionalism and political radicalism seemed to apply only to Jews. 200 In nineteenth-century Europe, Jews had been overrepresented among revolutionaries because their extraordinary success in the modern state had not been protected by that state’s legitimizing ideology, nationalism. Or rather, many young Jews had launched a patricidal revolution because their fathers seemed to combine boundless capitalism with “chimerical nationality.” All modernity is about “nakedness” covered by modern nationalism. The Jews—tragically—had become emperors with no clothes. Mid-twentieth-century America was a country of universal nakedness because America’s commitment to capitalism seemed boundless and because the American nationality was, by European standards, chimerical. Once again, however, the most consistent “rootless cosmopolitans” in America were Jews. No one else was quite as secular, urban, or meritocratic as the Jews, and even those non-Jews who were as secular, urban, and meritocratic as the Jews were less patricidal because they were more patriarchal—more attached to the rituals, relatives, and conventions that make life meaningfully tribal. Of all the modern revolutions, the most uncompromising had been the Jewish one. The Jewish American rebels of the 1960s were the only radicals who came from radical households—either because their parents were Communists or because their parents made the mistake of pursuing uncompromising Enlightenment liberalism in a country of subnational ethnic and religious allegiances. The Jewish parents were the only ones who believed in universal nakedness and raised their children accordingly. Philip Roth’s Swede Levov married a Catholic Miss New Jersey, bought a house on Arcady Hill, and raised his daughter Merry to love the America of Thanksgiving and “perfect self- control.” Instead, she grew up to become first a revolutionary terrorist and eventually a priestess of radical nonviolence. As the Swede’s father, the no- nonsense entrepreneur, put it, “once Jews ran away from oppression; now they run away from no-oppression.” Or, as the Swede himself seems to have concluded, once Jews ran away from Jewishness; now they run away from non- Jewishness. “They raised a child who was neither Catholic nor Jew, who instead was first a stutterer, then a killer, then a Jain.” Babel’s and Mandelstam’s little boys had had to overcome their Jewish muteness in pursuit of the “clear and pure” sounds of Apollonian speech. Merry Levov stuttered in her native English because Thanksgiving was a poor substitute for Passover. Or Pushkin. Or Communism. 201