Jewish difference serves as a trope for unassimilability across postcolonial fiction.

Evidence

The multicultural view that the Jews are the ultimate victims because of their experience in the Shoah is tied to the physicality of difference. Jewish difference is the inability to integrate into a society, to be able to claim true command over language, culture, and physical difference. In Kureishi’s world, the Jewish experience is the litmus test for essential difference. In Dangor’s world, it is the key to a form of belonging. For Zadie Smith it becomes something quite different and yet very much the same. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 756

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior interest in how groups are defined by external discourse — echoes Milgrom on reputational institutions and the broader reading on identity construction.