Europe's Indian, America's Jew

The title of this piece could easily be taken to imply a playful inversion of a straightforward analogy. I once thought of using that analogy as my title, writing it as a question in logic: : Jew :: America : Indian? The question mark is not coy. Are the relations really that closely comparablebetween two empires, on one hand, and two peoples within those empires, both repressed to the point of genocide, on the other hand-that they could be reduced to such a neat, schematic rendering? To do so would cancel out (as we used to say in math class) the specifics of each term in both matched pairs on either side of the double colon. I will not be offering a direct answer to one question implied by the title, which can be articulated thus: To what extent have Jews fulfilled the same function for the imagination of Europe as Indians have in the invention of America? The juxtaposition that constitutes my title, then, is not at all meant to equate Europe with America, Indians with Jews. We will not gain any more insight by squeezing dispa

Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Jewish Identity and Society