e Jewish minority within the then-Soviet Union led to open clashes with the Communist leadership. Much of what has resulted from Jewish struggles with Arabs and Communists has at times re-evoked older forms of anti-Semitism and has caused Jews, especially Holocaust survivors, to see themselves still as an embattled people. This has resulted in the adoption by some Jews in a stance toward the rest of the world that approaches ethnocentrism - a concept that will be elaborated below (Brodkin, 1999, p. 81).
Within its own community Jewry is faced with the increasing secularization of Jewish identity in these three major centees, each in its own way. In the United States the open society and the melting pot ideologies of past generations have fostered among many Jews a sense of Jewish identity increasingly devoid of concrete religious, national, or historical content; in the former Soviet Union government policy from the 1930s had banned the teaching of Judaism and Jewish culture to the young and had severely discouraged any manifestation of Jewish identity as a sign of the disloyalty of "rootless cosmopolitans" to the Russian state; and in Israel a secular nationalism has taken root, raising questions as to the role that Judaism plays in the identity of the average Israeli. For Holocaust survivors, this loosening sense of what it means to be a Jew can be troubling, even horrifying, suggesting that what they have suffered was in vain and that Jews, for all that suffering, are no better than anyone else. Many Holocaust survivors and their children have in some way fashioned for themselves an identity in which they are in fact better in some way than other people, members of God's chosen race. This ethnocentrism exists (unlike most varieties of ethnocentrism) not as a direct put-down of other ethnicities but as a way of providing coping mechanisms for those who have come through the horror of genocide and want to find some small scraps of m...