European and Soviet Jews—which are, essentially, the same occupations that have always been pursued by literate Mercurians (and are being pursued in today’s United States by the Lebanese Christians and Overseas Indians and Chinese, among others). “Doctors and lawyers” are both the oldest Jewish professions in Europe and the badge of middle-class accomplishment (and Jewish upward mobility) in the United States. In the mid-1980s, the concentration of Jews in elite positions and the occupational and educational gap between Jews and non-Jews were still growing. 223 In the nation-states (or would-be nation-states) of Europe, Asia, and Africa, similar triumphs of strangers over the natives have led to discrimination and violence. But the United States—rhetorically—has no state-bearing natives and therefore no permanent strangers. What makes the United States different is that Mercurianism, including meritocracy, is the official ideology of the state; that traditional Mercurians, including the Jews, have no legal handicaps; and that nativist tribalism, including anti-Semitism, plays a relatively minor role in political life. American Jews are free to succeed because they are Americans— the way Soviet Jews of the 1920s and 1930s were free to succeed because they were Soviets. Of all the non-Jewish polities in the history of the world, the postwar United States is second only to the prewar Soviet Union in the importance of Jewish participation in the political process. Jews are strongly overrepresented in both houses of Congress (three to four times their percentage of the general population), and they are extremely prominent among political consultants, staffers, funders, and volunteers. Jews provide between one-fourth and one-half of all Democratic Party campaign funds, and, according to Ze’ev Chafets, in twenty-seven out of thirty-six senatorial races of 1986, “at least one of the candidates (and often both) had a Jewish campaign manager or finance chairman.” A 1982 study of the American economic, cultural, and political elite found that most Protestants included in this category owed their rise to business and electoral politics; most Catholics, to trade union and party activism; and most Jews, to work in the media, public-interest organizations, and civil service. There is little doubt that the Jewish strategy is the most effective of the three because of its high degree of compatibility with the modern postindustrial state. Indeed, the Jewish prominence in the American political elite began to grow perceptibly in the 1970s, during the ascendance of nonprofit organizations, political foundations, regulatory agencies, new information technologies, and public-interest law firms. There was no single “Jewish interest,” of course (other than the tendency to support the continued growth of those same institutions), but there was one question on which most of Beilke’s grandchildren agreed and