Yuri Slezkine's new history of the Jews in the 20th century describes modernity, according to reviewer Y. Michal Bodeman (Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 10 January, 2007), as

…the Jewish era, [that] in which all people are urban, mobile, textual (verschriftlicht), intellectual and career flexible: We don't keep herds or plow fields, we work with people and symbols. Modernization is thus about all people becoming Jews…

And of course, Slezkine himself adds, "nobody is better at being Jews than the Jews themselves."

Wow. Isn't that essentially what all of us telecommuters and internet workers are doing - being flexible, manipulating symbols and information instead of material tools? Doesn't this analogy apply to us more than anybody?

First, they were telling us that we are internet "Bohemians," essentially a nice word for the rather dubious term "gypsies," applied to the new media. Now, if we generously ignore, as this example does, the pre-collectivization and pre-Holocaust Jewish agricultural communities of Eastern Europe and the Jewish ideal kibbutz communities in Israel, Judaism is held up as our model, a model of quintessential modernity. Are we, the "Bohemians" of yesterday, not then the the Jewiest of the Jews?