Success Quote by Jack Schwartz

Exodus is doing double duty here: it names a founding story of liberation while also pointing to the way that story becomes a permanent script imposed from the outside. Schwartz’s word choice, “dogged,” is telling. It’s not celebratory. It suggests a narrative that won’t let go, a myth that follows Jews through history like a shadow, turning a tale of escape into an expectation of perpetual otherness: always leaving, always arriving, never simply belonging.

The second sentence snaps the moral trap shut. “Their very success attracts resentment” captures a recurring political chemistry of antisemitism: admiration curdled into suspicion. Success becomes evidence, not of integration, but of illicit advantage. The subtext is that prejudice doesn’t merely survive Jewish achievement; it feeds on it, using prosperity or visibility as a pretext for grievance. That’s why the Exodus metaphor matters: it frames Jews as a people out of place, and that framing makes it easier for societies to recast Jewish flourishing as provocation.

As a scientist, Schwartz writes with a kind of cool compression, almost like stating a grim hypothesis about social behavior. He isn’t litigating theology; he’s describing a durable pattern of narrative politics. The line also quietly warns against comforting explanations that bigotry is only a reaction to difference or poverty. Even “success” won’t buy safety when the surrounding culture is primed to read achievement as threat. The tragedy is that a story meant to signify deliverance becomes, in hostile hands, a rationale for why deliverance must never be complete.