States, like the European Jews, was conspicuously successful at capitalism without having recourse to the much needed protection of nationalism. Or rather, the official nationalism in the United States was primarily political, not tribal, and thus in need of constant intravenous injections. Freudianism was one, briefly; subnational tribalism (often in the form of religion) was another— permanently. In the Mecca of rootless cosmopolitanism, the existence of secondary loyalties is a constituent part of the political arrangement. That is why America is the most church-going of all modern societies, and that is why American Jews, having exhausted the relatively meager resources of Marxism and Freudianism, joined the fold by becoming nationalists. It was only when they entered American institutions, in other words, that secular American Jewish intellectuals felt compelled to become Jewish—while American Jewish traditionalists felt fully justified in having preserved their tradition. In the two decades after World War II, that tradition was primarily represented by the memory of the shtetl—a shtetl shorn of its economic function and Gentile surroundings (other than the pogroms); a shtetl comparable to everyone else’s rural “old country”; a shtetl embodying the piety and community of the ancestral home; a shtetl all the more radiant for having been extinguished. This quest for the blessed lost past and a meaningful American present was launched in 1943 by Maurice Samuel’s remarkably eloquent The World of Sholom Aleichem —“a sort of pilgrimage among the cities and inhabitants of a world which only yesterday—as history goes—harbored the grandfathers and grandmothers of some millions of American citizens.” These grandfathers and grandmothers were so many Tevyes and Goldes because Tevye and Golde were the real Abraham and Sarah of American Jews—just as Sholem Aleichem (“the common people in utterance, . . . the anonymous of Jewish self-expression”) was —or should be, at any rate—their new Pentateuch. To become good Americans, Jews were to become the Chosen People again. “The study of history will never become obsolete, and a knowledge of one’s grandfathers is an excellent introduction to history. Especially these grandfathers; they were a remarkable lot.” 167 The next landmark on the pilgrimage to Tevye’s world was Life Is with People , an extremely popular anthropological “portrait of the shtetl” produced in 1952 under the auspices of Ruth Benedict’s Research in Contemporary Cultures project at Columbia University. As Margaret Mead wrote in her foreword, “This book is an anthropological study of a culture which no longer exists, except in the memories, and in the partial and altered behavior of its members, now scattered over the world, rearing their children in new ways, to be Americans or