There is no getting around the fact that we Jews are the best and smartest people. Mi ke’amkho yisro’eyl goy ekhod , as the Prophet says—how can you even compare a goy and a Jew? Anyone can be a goy, but a Jew must be born one. Ashrekho yisro’el —it’s a lucky thing I was, then, because otherwise how would I ever know what it’s like to be homeless and wander all over the world without resting my head on the same pillow two nights running? 173 Fiddler on the Roof ends with Tevye, Golde, and two of their daughters going to America. One of the daughters is little Beilke; there is no Podhotzur; the reason they are leaving is anti-Semitic persecution. This is a crucial part of the American Jewish genealogy. Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye is expelled from his home by the government decree banning Jews from rural areas, but the real reason for his plight as he understands it is God’s mysterious ways (“a lot of good it does to complain to God about God”) and of course “today’s children,” who are “too smart for their own good” and only too ready to fall for all sorts of “craziness.” As for the local “Amalekites,” they never get around to smashing Tevye’s windows. “Bring out the samovar,” they say, “and let’s have tea. And if you’d be kind enough to donate half a bottle of vodka to the village, we’ll all drink to your health, because you’re a clever Jew and a man of God, you are. . . .” IntheUnited States of the 1960s, such an ending did not ring true. Act 1 of the musical ends with a pogrom (one that never takes place in the book); and act 2 concludes with a procession of somber families carrying their scant possessions into exile. As far as Tevye’s American grandchildren were concerned, the locomotive of Jewish history had been anti-Jewish violence. According to the musical, there had been no Jewish Revolution and virtually no Russian Revolution (outside of the pogroms) in Eastern European Jewish life. The Jews had been unique in the Russian Empire but they were not—yet— unique in the United States. As Seth Wolitz put it, “the musical Tevye becomes a Jewish pilgrim, a victim of religious persecution, fleeing intolerant Europe to the land of fulfillment, America.” 174 American Jews rediscovered their Jewishness at the same time and for essentially the same reasons as their Soviet cousins. The Nazi mass murder (not yet conceptualized as the Holocaust), the Soviet purges, and the formation of Israel were all important factors (debated and remembered as such), but it was the spectacular Jewish success in the Soviet Union and the United States that provided the context and the impetus for the new allegiances. In both places, Jews had entered crucial sectors of the establishment: in the Soviet Union, the