by Amy Chua
success is a “sign of divine favor”: James Carroll, “The Mormon Arrival,” Boston Globe, Aug. 7, 2011.
Word of Wisdom: Matthew Bowman, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (New York: Random House, 2012), pp. 169–70.
“Family Home Evening”: Ibid., pp. 168–9.
Missionary work increased: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “History of Missionary Work in the Church,” Jun. 25, 2007, http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/history-of-missionary-work-in-the-church. The over 650,000 post-1990 estimate stated in the text is an extrapolation from the figure given by the Church for 1990–2007, which was approximately 535,000. Ibid.
banned polygamy, in 1904: Bowman, The Mormon People, pp. 159–60.
Mormons turned outward: Ibid., pp. 151, 152–3, 217; Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), pp. 114–6. On the separatist Utah phase of Mormon history, see Franklin D. Daines, “Separatism in Utah, 1847–1870,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1917 (Washington, DC, 1920), pp. 331–43.
refused to go along with the renunciation: Bowman, The Mormon People, pp. 178–9.
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints: Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (New York: Doubleday, 2003), pp. 10–5, 167.
don’t refrain from alcohol, cigarettes, or coffee: Nate Carlisle, “Alcohol, Coffee and Why the FLDS Drink Them,” Salt Lake Tribune, Mar. 1, 2013, http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/blogspolygblog/55924890-185/flds-coffee-church-sltrib.html.csp.
Colorado City is one of the poorest: U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table DP03: Selected Economic Characteristics (2010 5-year dataset) (geographical designations: United States; Colorado City, Arizona) (showing a 36.5 percent poverty rate for all Colorado City families, compared with 10 percent for the country overall).
post-traumatic stress . . . genetic scars: Jeffrey Kluger, “Genetic Scars of the Holocaust: Children Suffer Too,” Time, Sept. 9, 2010; Harvey A. Barocas and Carol B. Barocas, “Separation-Individuation Conflicts in Children of Holocaust Survivors,” Journal of Contemporary Psychology 11, no. 1 (1998), pp. 6–14.
outperform other groups economically: Aaron Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 44; Ephraim Yuchtman-Yaar and Gila Menachem, “Socioeconomic Achievements of Holocaust Survivors in Israel: The First and Second Generation,” Contemporary Jewry 13 (1992), pp. 95–123; Morton Weinfeld and John J. Sigal, “Educational and Occupational Achievement of Adult Children of Holocaust Survivors,” in Usial Oskar Schmelz and Sergio Della Pergola, eds., Papers in Jewish Demography 1985: Proceedings of the Demographic Sessions Held at the 9th World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1985), p. 359.
“I remember as a child always worrying”: Fran Klein-Parker, “Dominant Attitudes of Adult Children of Holocaust Survivors Toward their Parents,” in John P. Wilson, Zev Harel, and Boaz Kahana, eds., Human Adaptation to Extreme Stress: From the Holocaust to Vietnam (New York: Plenum, 1988), pp. 207–8.
“‘For this I survived’” . . . “I, my needs” . . . “Acts of rebellion”: Hass, In The Shadow of the Holocaust, pp. 51, 53. For additional quotations from other survivors’ children, see ibid., pp. 60, 62–3; Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979), p. 37.
“inhibited from making noise”: Barocas and Barocas, “Separation-Individuation Conflicts in Children of Holocaust Survivors,” p. 11.
“My parents always said”: Epstein, Children of the Holocaust, pp. 23, 27.
“When college ended”: Sonia Taitz, The Watchmaker’s Daughter: A Memoir (New York: McWitty Press, 2012), p. 152.
“My mother raised us”: Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, p. 58. For an article discussing the prevalence of anxiety and feelings of insecurity among second generation survivors, see Miri Scharf, “Long-term Effects of Trauma: Psychosocial Functioning of the Second and Third Generation of Holocaust Survivors,” Development and Psychopathology 19 (2007), pp. 604–5, 617.
“They felt it was up to them”: Klein-Parker, “Dominant Attitudes,” p. 206; see also Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010).
“need to resurrect their lost families”: Barocas and Barocas, “Separation-Individuation Conflicts in Children of Holocaust Survivors,” pp. 8–9, 12.
“I was not David Greber”: Natan P. F. Kellerman, Holocaust Trauma: Psychological Effects and Treatment (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse Books, 2009), p. 73.
“I wondered what I could do in my life”: Epstein, Children of the Holocaust, pp. 169–70.
“I make a differentiation”: Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, p. 122.
“I may have said”: Epstein, Children of the Holocaust, p. 19.
“My father and mother were both”: Taitz, The Watchmaker’s Daughter, p. 9.
“sense of superiority”: Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, p. 108.
“lingering insecurities”: Weinfeld and Sigal, “Educational and Occupational Achievement of Adult Children of Holocaust Survivors,” p. 363.
“Permeated by an intense drive”: “Conspiracy of Silence: A Conversation with Yael Danieli,” Reform Judaism Online (2009), http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1530.
Ron Unz: Ron Unz, “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” The American Conservative, Nov. 28, 2012.
many have criticized: See, e.g., Janet Mertz, “Janet Mertz on Ron Unz’s ‘Meritocracy’ Article,” andrewgelman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Mertz-on-Unz-Meritocracy-Article.pdf?a43d93 (suggesting that the true figure for Jewish top scorers in the Math Olympiad more like 25 to 30 percent in the 1970s, not over 40 percent, and 13 percent since 2000, not 2.5 percent).
a mean ranging from 108 to 115: See Steven Pinker, “The Lessons of the Ashkenazim: Groups and Genes,” The New Republic, June 26, 2006.
U.S. mean of 100: In most IQ studies, the average American IQ is set at 100. See James R. Flynn and Lawrence G. Weiss, “American IQ Gains from 1932 to 2002: The WISC Subtests and Educational Progress,” International Journal of Testing 7, no. 2 (2007), p. 210.
theory most in the news . . . “essentially cannot do”: Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending, “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence,” Journal of Biosocial Science 38 (2006), pp. 659, 662–5, 674–9.
“bad genetics” . . . “bullshit”: Jennifer Senior, “Are Jews Smarter?,” New York Magazine, Oct. 24, 2005 (quoting Harry Ostrer and Sander Gilman). For work building on the Cochran/Hardy/Harpending thesis, see, e.g., Hanna David and Richard Lynn, “Intelligence Differences Between European and Oriental Jews in Israel,” Journal of Biosocial Science 39 (2007), pp. 465–73.
IQ is not a complete predictor of success: See, e.g., Steinberg, Beyond the Classroom, pp. 59, 64–5; Flynn, Asian Americans, p. 77 (discussing the “IQ/Achievement Gap”); Harold W. Stevenson et al., “Mathematics Achievement of Chinese, Japanese, and American Children,” Science 231 (1986), pp. 693–9; Harold W. Stevenson et al., “Cognitive Performance and Academic Achievement of Japanese, Chinese, and American Children,” Child Development 56, no. 3 (1985), pp. 733–4. See also the sources cited in chapter 5 on the superior predictive power of impulse control over IQ in numerous studies of academic and economic outcomes.
“first- and second-generation Asian”: Suet-ling Pong et al., “The Roles of Parenting Styles and Social Capital in the School Performance of Immigrant Asian and Hispanic Adolescents,” Social Science Quarterly 86 (2005), pp. 928, 946–7; see also, e.g., Hao and Woo, “Distinct Trajectories in the Transition to Adulthood,” pp. 1623, 1635; Grace Kao and Marta Tienda, “Optimism and Achievement: The Educational Perfo
rmance of Immigrant Youth,” Social Science Quarterly 76 (1995), pp. 9–17; Rumbaut, “The Coming of the Second Generation,” pp. 196, 205, 219.
third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation: Jewish Virtual Library, “Family, American Jewish,” http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0006_0_06269.html.
secure . . . economically: Paul Burstein, “Jewish Educational and Economic Success in the United States: A Search for Explanations,” Sociological Perspectives 50, no. 2 (2007), pp. 209–14; Barry R. Chiswick, “The Postwar Economy of American Jews,” in Jeffrey S. Gurock, ed., American Jewish History (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 93–98 (discussing the “dramatic increase in the professionalization of the Jewish labor force” in the second half of the twentieth century and the disproportionately high mean incomes of American Jews).
and in their identity as Americans: See Alan M. Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century (New York: Touchstone, 1997) pp. 1–2.
Bellow and Roth . . . wrote “Jewish American” literature: Ethan Goffman, “The Golden Age of Jewish American Literature,” Proquest Discovery Guides, March 2010, pp. 1, 5–8, http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/jewish/review.pdf.
Matthew Weiner: Celia Walden, “Matthew Weiner: The Man Behind Mad Men,” The Telegraph, Mar. 18, 2012.
not unlike the mid-twentieth-century WASP establishment: On WASP decline, see, e.g., Robert C. Christopher, Crashing the Gates: The De-WASPing of America’s Power Elite (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989); Eli Wald, “The Rise and Fall of the WASP and Jewish Law Firms,” Stanford Law Review 60 (2008), pp. 1828–58; James D. Davidson et al., “Persistence and Change in the Protestant Establishment, 1930–1992,” Social Forces 74, no. 1 (1995), pp. 157–75; E. Digby Baltzell, “The Protestant Establishment Revisited,” The American Scholar 45, no. 4 (1976), pp. 499–518; Robert Frank, “That Bright, Dying Star, the American WASP,” The Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2010; Noah Feldman, “The Triumphant Decline of the WASP,” New York Times, June 27, 2010.
but the memory yet lingers: See Charles E. Silberman, A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today (New York: Summit Books, 1985), pp. 327–31.
an almost ethnic identification: See Theodore Sasson et al., Still Connected: American Jewish Attitudes About Israel (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, Marice and Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, 2010), pp. 1, 9–13.
220 million people: See Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Doubleday, 2003), pp. 212, 223–4. Population estimates for the Middle East vary considerably. Our rough figure for the region’s total population is a conservative one, based on the 1990 estimate reported in Youssef M. Choueiri, Arab Nationalism: A History (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. vii.
Cheerful Money: See Tad Friend, Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2009).
Jews are insecure about losing their insecurity and as anxious as ever: See, e.g., Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew, pp. 1–18; Lee Siegel, “Rise of the Tiger Nation,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 27, 2012.
Jews are also among America’s preeminent poets . . . opinion leaders: See Steven L. Pease, The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement (Sonoma, CA: Deucalion, 2009), pp. viii–ix, 76–7, 103–4, 126–7, 156–7, 388–9.
Mormons . . . bridling at the culture of conformity: Bowman, The Mormon People, pp. 234–45.
“speak up, stand out”: Buck Gee and Wes Hom, “The Failure of Asian Success in the Bay Area: Asians as Corporate Executive Leaders” (Corporate Executive Initiative, March 28, 2009), p. 5; see also Wesley Yang, “Paper Tigers,” New York Magazine, May 8, 2011.
“no longer confined”: Anita Raghavan, The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund (New York and Boston: Business Plus Books, 2013), p. 416.
much less observant: Fewer than 30 percent, and perhaps as few as 16 percent, of American Jews attend synagogue even once a month; 80 percent or more no longer keep kosher. See Humphrey Taylor, “While Most Americans Believe in God, Only 36% Attend a Religious Service Once a Month or More Often,” Harris Poll No. 59, Oct. 15, 2003, p. 5, Table 3; Sue Fishkoff, Kosher Nation (New York: Schocken Books, 2010), p. 330 n. 29.
often described as “permissive”: See, e.g., Elliott J. Rosen and Susan F. Weltman, “Jewish Families: An Overview,” in Monica McGoldrick, Joe Giordano, and Nydia Garcia-Preto, Ethnicity & Family Therapy (3d ed.) (New York: The Guilford Press, 2005), pp. 667, 675 (“Jewish parents have tended to be permissive”); Lila Corwin Berman, “Blame, Boundaries, and Birthrights: Jewish Intermarriage in Midcentury America,” in Susan A. Glenn and Naomi B. Sokoloff, Boundaries of Jewish Identity (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), pp. 100–2 (describing turn to “permissive parenting” among American Jews in the 1950s and 60s).
drawn to American attitudes: Institute for Jewish & Community Research, “Projects: Ethnic and Racial Diversity: The Be’chol Lashon Initiative,” http://www.jewishresearch.org/projects_diversity.htm (discussing how “Jews have become so integrated into American society that they tend to mirror American culture in many ways”).
CHAPTER 8: AMERICA
“all the animals are much smaller”: See Dwight Boehm and Edward Schwartz, “Jefferson and the Theory of Degeneracy,” American Quarterly 9, no. 4 (1957), pp. 448–53; Lee Alan Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. ix. The Buffon quotes are from Count de Buffon, Natural History: General and Particular, trans. William Smellie (3rd ed.) (A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1791), vol. 5, p. 115; see also ibid., pp. 124–53.
No wonder, concluded Raynal: The Raynal quote is from Kevin J. Hayes, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 599.
American “exceptionalism”: See Deborah L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 2 (“America and Americans are special, exceptional because they are charged with saving the world from itself. . . . America must be as ‘a city upon a hill’ exposed to the eyes of the world”); Kammen, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,” American Quarterly 45 (1993), pp. 1, 6 (“American exceptionalism is as old as the nation itself . . . and has played an integral part in the society’s sense of its own identity”). There is a large literature critiquing, or pronouncing the death of, American exceptionalism. For a small sampling, see Godfrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2009); Michael Ignatieff, ed., American Exceptionalism and Human Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Harold Hongju Koh, “On American Exceptionalism,” Stanford Law Review 55 (2003); Daniel Bell, “The End of American Exceptionalism,” The Public Interest 41 (1975), pp. 193–234.
“City upon a Hill”: George McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 6–7.
“reserved to the people of this country”: Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist 1” (1787), in Jack N. Rakove, ed., The Federalist by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay: The Essential Essays (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2003), p. 36.
“the Israel of our time”: Herman Melville, White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War, in Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 506.
exhorting his hunter friends: Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose, pp. ix–xii; see also Mark V. Barrow Jr., Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 15–9; Boehm and Schwartz, “Jefferson and the Theory of Degeneracy.”
s
ent one proof after another: See Howard C. Rice Jr., “Jefferson’s Gift of Fossils to the Museum of Natural History in Paris,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Survey 95, no. 6 (1951), pp. 597–627.
Notes on Virginia: Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on Virginia,” in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), vol. 3, pp. 411-5 (discussing the “tremendous” mammoth); pp. 422–4 (chart comparing animals in Europe and America).
wrote an entire book: Richard L. Bushman, “The Romance of Andrew Carnegie,” American Studies 6, no. 1 (1965), pp. 36–7; Andrew Carnegie, Triumphant Democracy (New York: J. Little & Co. 1886).
“the most self-conscious people”: Henry James, Hawthorne (1887) (New York: AMS Press, 1968), p. 153.
no “stations”: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1862), vol. 2, part III, chap. 14, p. 262; see also ibid., chap. 21, pp. 301–2 (noting that in America, nothing keeps men “settled in their station,” that “every man, finding himself possessed of some education and some resources, may choose his own path, and proceed apart from all his fellow-men,” and that “there is no longer a race of poor men . . . [or] a race of rich men”).
“longing to rise”: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer and Max Lerner, vol. 2, part III, chap. 19 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 603.
Franklin’s parents were Puritan: See Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003) pp. 5–15, 526, n. 35.
“Industry, Perseverance & Frugality”: “Poor Richard for 1744,” in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Prefaces, Proverbs, and Poems of Benjamin Franklin Originally Printed in Poor Richard’s Almanacs for 1733–1758 (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons), p. 147.
“Dost thou love Life” . . . “There are no Gains” . . . “Leisure is Time”: “Poor Richard for 1758: Preface,” in Ford, The Prefaces, pp. 270, 271, 273.