around which their considerable wealth, education, and political influence could be organized: the welfare of their overseas cousins. 224 The American Jewish mobilization on behalf of the Soviet Jewish exodus from the USSR ended—as abruptly as it had begun—with the demise of the USSR and the emigration of all the ethnic Jews who wished to leave. The American Jewish identification with Israel proved more durable because it transformed America’s ethnic Jews into the most accomplished and the most beleaguered of all American ethnics. But it was the identification of both Beilke’s America and Chava’s Israel with Tsaytl’s martyrdom that became the true source of late twentieth-century Jewishness. In a world without God, evil and victimhood are the only absolutes. The rise of the Holocaust as a transcendental concept has led to the emergence of the Jews as the Chosen People for the new age. 225 In the competitive world of American ethnic communities, there are two paths to success: upward mobility defined according to wealth, education, and political power, and downward mobility measured by degrees of victimhood. 226 Beilke’s descendants are among the leaders on both counts: at the very top by dint of their own efforts along traditional Mercurian lines, and at the very bottom because of their association with Tsaytl, the universal victim. Once again, the majority of the world’s Jews combine economic achievement with the status of a punished nation. But the world has changed: at the end of the Jewish Century, both titles are in universal demand. Economic achievement is an inescapable standard of worth, and victimhood is a common sign of virtue (especially for those who lack economic achievement). Jealousy of the Jews may remain both a fact of life and an ineradicable Jewish expectation. But then again, it may not. The majority of the world’s Jews live in a society that is Mercurian both by official faith and—increasingly—by membership, a society without acknowledged natives, a society of service nomads destined to redeem humanity. As the historian Joseph R. Levenson put it, “a Jewish style of life . . . may be more endangered when everyone eats bagels than when Jews eat hot cross buns.” In 1940, the rate of outmarriage for American Jews was about 3 percent; by 1990, it had exceeded 50 percent. The American pastoral that eluded Swede Levov and his “gruesomely misbegotten” daughter may yet work for his son, Chris. Hodl’s choice may still be available, for better or worse, in Beilke’s America. For better or for worse? Tevye was not sure. Why raise Jewish daughters if they were going “to break away in the end like the leaves that fall from a tree and are carried off by the wind?” But then again, “what did being a Jew or not a