Where Is the Asian American Portnoy?

Some years ago, Tablet, a Jewish online magazine for which I was once a frequent contributor, ran a series of articles considering the parallels between the experiences of American Jews and Asian Americans: success, assimilation, complaints about quotas at Harvard as well as a habit of annoying Anglo-Saxons with a striver mentality, hunger for status, and frustrating dedication to all the external signs of a now-vanished WASP elite (the house in Connecticut, the perfect sweater) without cultivating its dedication to the appearance of ease, poise, and discretion or the maintenance of a low speaking volume in restaurants.