Jewish Americans and Asian Americans as 'the Model Minority': A Literary Perspective

This essay aims to repair the omission of the Jewish American experience in the creation of the image of the model minority, which was promulgated in the 1960s and predominantly based on the Asian American experience. The essay contains an introduction to the historical background of both Jewish and Asian immigration into the United States with a short outline of the difficulties in their assimilation, followed by the analysis of Philip Roth’s and Gish Jen’s novels. Philip Roth’s American Trilogy portrays the Jewish generational rise to the American normative culture, while Gish Jen’s novels Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land convey the Asian immigration into the United States and their rise to the status of the model minority following in the Jewish American footsteps. Using their novels as illustrative examples, the essay presents a comparative ethnic study of the parallels in the rise of Jewish Americans and Asian Americans to the status of the model minority