An excerpt from a great commentary… The author is pointing out that America still offers great opportunities found nowhere else in the world. He uses the self-reliance of the Jews to present his example that you have to take personal responsibility to get ahead:
The most beleaguered people on the planet, the Jews, who have faced persecution since their birth as a people, are a living refutation of your claim. When they labored in slavery in Egypt, clamored in Palestine, made magnificent contributions to human civilization in European capitals, sojourned in Africa and Asia, and founded the modern State of Israel, no one gave these heroic people an affirmative-action plan to work anywhere. In spite of vitriol and invidious comparisons to vermin and pigs, and despite being subjected to countless pogroms and mandated ghettos, they thrived and flourished because not for one moment did they ever believe that their struggle for liberation lay in any hands other than their own.