both wealth and learning. The Jews are the wealthiest of all religious groups in the United States (including such traditionally prosperous denominations as the Unitarians and Episcopalians). They have the highest household incomes (72 percent higher than the national average), the highest rate of self-employment (three times as high as the national average), and the highest representation among the richest individual Americans (about 40 percent of the wealthiest forty, as reported by the Forbes magazine in 1982). Even the new immigrant households from the former Soviet Union begin to earn more than the national average within a few years of arrival. 220 The Jews are the most educated of all Americans (almost all college-age Jews are in college, and the concentration of Jews in professional occupations is double that of non-Jews). They are also the best educated: the more prestigious the university as a general rule, the higher the percentage of Jewish students and professors. According to a 1970 study, 50 percent of the most influential American intellectuals (published and reviewed most widely in the top twenty intellectual journals) were Jews. Among the academic elite (identified in the same fashion), Jews made up 56 percent of those in the social sciences and 61 percent in the humanities. Of the twenty most influential American intellectuals, as ranked by other intellectuals, fifteen (75 percent) were Jews. The overall Jewish share of the American population is less than 3 percent. 221 Wealth and learning come in due course, but Mercury’s original job was that of a messenger. According to studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, Jews made up between one-quarter and one-third of the “media elite” (the news divisions of the three television networks and PBS, the three leading news magazines, and the four top newspapers). More than one-third of the most “influential” critics of film, literature, radio, and television were of Jewish background, as were almost half of the Hollywood producers of prime-time television shows and about two-thirds of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing movies between 1965 and 1982. In October 1994, Vanity Fair profiled twenty-three media moguls who made up what the magazine called “the new establishment”: “men and women from the entertainment, communications, and computer industries, whose ambitions and influence have made America the true superpower of the Information Age.” Eleven of them (48 percent) were Jews. 222 “Establishments” and superpowers may change, but the degree of congruence between posttraditional economies and traditional Mercurian skills remains very high. The American Jews are successful in the same occupations as the