My Son, The Doctor by Sherwin B. Nuland in "The New Republic". Explains nicely why the Jews are so successful in medical field. Historical examples, coherent line of thought. In short, his point is that practicing religion and practicing medicine has a lot in common. Which is a bit funny, to my opinion, but that's ok. At the end his discource takes somewhat dangerous turn though:

the centuries have interlarded another factor, as universal as it is personal. By this I mean a characteristic that can only be called the Jewish personality.

Among Jews, especially those of an intellectual bent, there is commonly a kind of restlessness, an anticipation of uncertainty, ambiguity, imperfection, and the sense that one must do something about it even though the total solution will never be found.

If one finds something positive about Jewish personality, should not she (if she's intellectually honest, that is) be prepared to find something negative about it? If Mr. Nuland attributes Jewish interest to and success in the medical profession to "Jewish personality", probably he, or somebody else, could write a similar article on Jewis success in other sciences? Or in finance may be?

And how about somebody writing an article about our negative personality traits? Or may be we have only positive ones? Белые и пушистые, как говорят по-русски :)

I would be very interested to read an article in "The New Republic", which explains Jewish greed or Jewish scorn towards goyim using the similar kind of argument. Surely it's not true that all Jews despise goyim, nor that all Jews are greedy. But i do not think each Jewish boy becomes a doctor either.

For a book-length apologetic interpretation of Jewish personality see an entry on The Fiddler's Children and Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.

Neither Mr. Nuland, nor Mr. Slezkine, want to understand that even our positive qualities are seen by some (many?) people without much enthusiasm, never mind negative. They also forget that positive and negative are very relative terms.

The humanity never learns on the past mistakes. And somebody said: Jews are just like any other people. Only more so.

Yes, we know the word chutzpah. I wonder what is the word for modesty in Hebrew or Yiddish, and would be really curious to know if it has derogatory connotations ...  ¶ 9:40 AM