Do the Jews Own Anxiety? Let's say that, on a whim, you decide to form a baseball franchise made up of history's greatest anxiety sufferers - a sort of neurotic all-star team, like the 2004 Red Sox, only too debilitated to make it out of the dugout. What would you call the team? Last Rosh Hashana, I asked a group of friends this question, and the answers I got suggested that the team would be exclusively ... Jewish. Responses included but were not limited to the following: the Los Angeles Kvetches, the Brooklyn Nazi Dodgers, the Kansas City Mohels, the Chicago Schlubs, the Miami Meshugeners, the Westchester Rhinoplasties, the Hollywood Indigestives and - my favorite, a late entry from my brother Scott - the Upper West Side Ativans. We, the Jews, have encouraged the world to think of us as anxious. The results of my informal survey were admittedly overdetermined. As Jewish-Americans, the participants were highly susceptible to the kind of ironic, self-deprecatory ethnic pride that many American minorities - not just Jews - like to indulge in. To dispel any suspicions: although my last name isn't Jewish, my family and ancestry is; our name was said to be changed from Gomolski to Smith by a clerk at Ellis Island. Ask a Korean-American or a Greek-American or an Italian-American or an Arab-American who the nuttiest, most nervous, most irreparably self-conflicted people in the world are, and he will invariably point to the members of his own tribe. And yet who could dispute the fact that, when it comes to unabashed, even triumphalist declarations of collective neurosis, the Jews have had the market locked down for a long time - so much so, in fact, that they are the only ethnic group I know of that members of other ethnic groups will unabashedly declare to be suffering from collective neurosis. The relationship between the Jews and nervousness is by now so widely accepted that it barely registers. The Chosen People, at least in the American consciousness, are the very image of of anxiety. But there is a fundamental problem here: it isn't true. That anxiety all-star team, were it actually to be assembled, would contain at least a couple of Jews - Moses at third, say, and Franz Kafka in right - but plenty of gentiles would make the cut, too. As the self-appointed general manager I'd offer contracts to Charles Darwin, who suffered from debilitating insomnia and panic attacks; to Emily Dickinson, who "lived on Dread" and almost never left the house; to William James, who spent a decade paralyzed by uncertainty, and his sister Alice, a nervous invalid (I'd put them at second and shortstop, respectively, so they could talk to each other); and on the mound, Soren Kierkegaard, who made anxiety not only a way of life but also a central philosophical concept, declaring (with suspicious exaggeration), "The greater the anxiety the greater the man." In short, the Jews don't own anxiety and never have. So why do so many people think otherwise? The answer to this question, I think, is that we, the Jews, have encouraged the world to think of us as anxious. We've done this by propagating the figure of the Neurotic Jew - our hysterical clown. When you think about the personification of anxiety - think quickly, without reflection - whom do you think of? If you are anything like me, what jumps first to mind are the great fretful Jews of American fiction and film: the harmless Tevye, portly shtetl hero of "Fiddler on the Roof," foreshadowing decades of New World pathology to come with his Talmudic indecision ("On the other hand ... on the other hand ... on the other hand"); Philip Roth's Alexander Portnoy, the son of doting Newark Jews, raging to his analyst about his inability to reconcile his id and his superego, begging for help (..." it hoits, you know, there is pain involved, a little human suffering is being felt ..."); the Coen brothers" Barton Fink, a nebbish idealist with a paralyzed will, nightmarishly unnerved by the conflict between his artistic ambitions and the vulgarity of Hollywood; and of course, above all, Woody Allen, in almost any of the 40-plus movies he has appeared in. This "We are the champions" pose that so many Jewish artists have struck in regard to anxiety has been, to some, a strange and upsetting project, mainly because the Neurotic Jew figure bears a close resemblance, at least superficially, to the Jew of the anti-Semitic imagination. He might not bake Christian blood into matzos or conspire to control the global means of production, but he is, when compared with those around him, flawed - weak-willed, ill at ease, quavering and chronically maladjusted. In a word: inferior. Or, to be more precise about the concerns of a certain group of Jewish detractors, he can be seen as inferior. There is a strong possibility that his exquisite sensitivities will be interpreted by the world at large as a kind of congenital defect - like hook noses or Tay-Sachs. Such maestros of the character as Roth and Allen couldn't be more aware of this risk, or its reward: the contrast between the Neurotic Jew and the rest of the world, its manners and muscularity of action, is precisely what makes the character exciting, poignant and funny. That's why Roth, for example, has "Portnoy's Complaint" culminate in a confrontation between Alex and a representative of the one class of Jew that the "What's best for the Jews?" contingent likes to point to as psychologically and morally superior to the gentiles, namely the Israeli: By dawn I had been made to understand that I was the epitome of what was most shameful in "the culture of the Diaspora." Those centuries and centuries of homelessness had produced just such disagreeable men as myself - frightened, defensive, self-deprecating, unmanned and corrupted by life in the gentile world. It was Diaspora Jews just like myself who had gone by the millions to the gas chambers without ever raising a hand against their persecutors, who did not know enough to defend their lives with their blood. The Diaspora! The very word made her furious. The Neurotic Jew is perceived as inferior not just by the representatives of American rectitude and power but by the members of his own beloved species, who have allegedly evolved beyond him, toward mental clarity and physical courage and a bracing, unselfish submission to the commonweal. He is derided and disparaged, the poor man, both outside and inside his ethnic group. He's a weakling, a vulgarian, a schmendrick, a schlemiel. But here's the twist: he's a schlemiel on top. Other people may see his anxious thrashing as a mark of inferiority - not the least of his anxieties is that he tends to agree with them - but simply by virtue of where he has been made to stand in comparison with everyone else he can't be inferior. It's a technical impossibility. He isn't some craven, venal caricature with horns and cloven hooves. He isn't a side thought or a scarecrow or a bogeyman. He isn't even an object of moral ambiguity, like Shylock. He's the hero of the tale, the most complex, vibrant, fully ensouled, attention-worthy human being in the dramatic universe he inhabits. And since he is defined above all else by his tendency toward anxiety, that tendency inevitably takes on the quality of a heroic trait - a virtue, like Achilles" bravery, Socrates" wisdom, Jesus" compassion or George Washington's honesty. This is all very weird and topsy-turvy because anxiety isn't a virtue. Or if it is a virtue it's an unpleasant and problematic one. Which raises an important question: If anxiety is so painful, why celebrate it? Jewishly speaking there are, I think, two reasons - or actually two and a half. First, the purveyors of the Neurotic Jew figure recognize - they feel in their bones - that Jewish anxiety isn't a genetic affliction or even so much a consequence of histrionic parenting as it is the nontransferable cost of being born Jewish. As a Jew born since, say, A.D. 200, you are forced to live in a world in which you are - for perplexing, unfathomable reasons - not only the object of a widespread psychotic rage but also, as the very consequence of that rage, urged and expected to associate all the more strongly with your heritage. Indeed, you are urged and expected to act as a kind of personal repository for nearly 6,000 years of collective memory and as a bearer of an entire people's hopes for surviving into the limitless future. You don't want to be anxious? You don't want to be neurotic? Tough. You were born into anxiety. Second, celebrating anxiety exhibits pride. Anti-Semites stereotype Jews as hopelessly head-bound and urbanized, lacking in old-fashioned pastoral virility, and a lot of Jews spend a lot of time and energy trying to put the lie to that stereotype. But for centuries being Jewish has also meant a willingness to question, discuss, scrutinize, interpret, dissect and argue over every last niggling aspect of human existence. Exegesis - endless, mind-numbing exegesis - is the soul of the Jewish religion. The corollary to this - reason two and a half - is the current of self-flattery that runs through the Jew-as-anxiety-hero trope. Because if anxiety is rooted in excessive intellectual activity, then it is also rooted, by association, in excessive intelligence. When a Jew says he's a member of the most neurotic tribe in existence, it's a backhanded way of saying he's a member of the smartest tribe in existence, the tribe of Spinoza and Marx and Freud and Einstein - and Roth and Allen. It's a way of claiming mental power. Which says as much or more about anxiety, I think, as it does about Jewish identity. There are people who argue that mental illnesses are outgrowths of noble faculties - that, for example, depression is related to emotional depth and schizophrenia to the fertility of the imagination. But no one could argue sensibly that it is nobler to be depressed or psychotic than not. No one could argue that depression and psychosis are desirable. Whereas lots of people - Kierkegaard foremost among them - have made this argument about anxiety. There's a whole history of claiming that anxiety, for all the pain it causes, is a sign that the person who struggles with it exists in a higher state of being than those who don't - that they are more alive to life's contradictions, more receptive to the true nature of things, that they have sharper vision, more sensitive skin. That they are more conscious than other people. And I am here to tell you: this is a really dangerous position to accept. Daniel Smith is the author of the forthcoming book "Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety" (Simon & Schuster, July 2012). His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, n+1, New York, The New York Times Magazine and elsewhere. He writes regularly about anxiety at his Web site, The Monkey Mind Chronicles.