It is not true to the overall tapestry of Jewish history, and it is not likely to appear credible to younger Jews who know that nowadays we are hardly a persecuted minority. Truth be told, we have done rather well in this country. Israel, too, is not the weak and defenseless orphan among nations that we remember from just two decades past. If anyone in recent years has been left heartlessly alone to suffer, it is not Jews. It is the people of the Balkans who have been systematically murdered by a dictator bent on pursuing ancient tribal animosities, or the African peoples whom we have shamelessly allowed to starve before our eyes.
Chasidic masters treat Jacob's aloneness positively.
He was left alone, they say, to wrestle with a midnight angel. Not so Jews. Ethnic nostalgia for Eastern Europe worked only as long as new immigrants arrived to sustain it. But Hitler destroyed shtetl life. There is almost no one left with living memories of it.