Emphasizing one’s Jewish difference could be a career asset rather than a handicap.
Evidence
His innocence made him recognize how foolish it would be to feel déclassé and how much more exciting it would be for himself and for others, how much more useful for his career, to accentuate the fact that he was a Jew “by dressing differently, combing his hair oddly, and by queer manners of expression and verbiage.” He cared for admission to high and highest society more passionately and shamelessly than any other Jewish intellectual did; but he was the only one of them who discovered the secret of how to preserve luck, that natural miracle of pariahdom, and who knew from the beginning that one never should bow down in order to “move up from high to higher.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 226
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
Related
- Pariah Jews could preserve social luck by accentuating rather than hiding their difference (similarity 0.87)
- Assimilated Jews could reconstruct Jewishness as a chosen performance rather than a fixed fate (similarity 0.80)
- Disraeli rose to popularity by emphasizing only the privileges of Jewish birth (similarity 0.80)
- Jewish admission into society hinged on perceived exotic difference, not similarity (similarity 0.79)
- Political antisemitism and social discrimination arise from opposite emancipation aspects (similarity 0.78)