New article: The Israel Lobby: A Case Study in Jewish Influence (Review of The Israel Lobby, by John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt.) Occidental Quarterly, 7(3), Fall 2007, 33-58.

Campaign Against Me by the SPLC

 

April 12, 2008

 

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been conducting a campaign against me since September, 2006. As part of this campaign, academic departments at CSULB are being pressured into releasing negative comments on my work. The History Department has complied with this pressure and has released the following statement:

CSULB History Department Statement of April 4, 2008

My reply is in two parts:

Reply #1 on Jewish involvement in influencing U.S. immigration policy

Reply #2 on Issues in European social history.

New Book: Cultural Insurrections

Ordering Information

This book is a collection of essays, most of which originally appeared in The Occidental Quarterly or vdare.com.

Foreword by Virginia Abernethy
Introduction
Jewish Influence
 1. Background Traits for Jewish Activism
 2. Stalin’s Willing Executioners
 3. Zionism and the Internal Dynamics of the Jewish Community
 4. Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement
 5. Neoconservative Portraits
 6. Jews, Blacks, and Race
Anti-Semitism
 7. Henry Ford and the Jewish Question
 8. Enemies of My Enemy
Western Civilization
 9. What Makes Western Culture Unique?
10. Psychology and White Ethnocentrism
11. Biological Roots of Ethnocentrism and Group Conflict
12. Immigration and Ethnic Interests
13. Was the 1924 Immigration Cut-Off “Racist"?
14. Can the Jewish Model Help the West Survive?

New Vdare Article (3/27/08): The Utter Normality Of Ethonationalism—Except For Whites

The Neocons as a Hostile Conservative (!) Elite

January 24,2008

I haven't read Jacob Heilbrunn's book on the neocons yet, but  I'm not sure I need to after seeing Philip Weiss's review. Weiss's review makes it clear that Heilbrunn's book corroborates several of the themes in my writing on the neocons and on Jewish intellectual and political movements generally.

First, neoconservatism is a Jewish movement. That should have been clear to everyone by now, but references to the Jewish basis of the movement have been noticeably missing from much of the mainstream media, to the point that Bill Kristol was introduced as a columnist at the New York Times as simply a "conservative."  This is critical because the neocons have now become the conservative establishment. When Kristol (or Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity) hold forth at Fox News, most people have no idea that they are tuning into the public face of a fundamentally Jewish movement that elbowed out more traditional conservatives.

Secondly, Jewish neocons not only have a strong Jewish identity, they also have strong Jewish interests. This is obvious from their involvement in pro-Israel activism, their personal relationships with Israeli leaders, and close ties with other Jews and with the wider Jewish community. In fact, I have argued that the neocons are more strongly identified as Jews than the mainstream liberal/left Jews — that the neocons form the vanguard of the Jewish community. After all, neocons were the first segment of the Jewish community to strongly condemn the USSR, both for its domestic anti-Semitism and for its alliances with Arab governments. Prominent neocons like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz began their political careers by making alliances with Cold War hawks like Henry Jackson  This was at a time when the Jewish left was prominently involved in defending the USSR, apparently blind to the fact that the status of Jews as an elite in the USSR had changed greatly following World War II..

And the neocons are notorious for their strong ties to the most extreme racialist and nationalist segments of Israeli society  — elements that the mainstream liberal/left Jewish community probably wishes would disappear or at least be less visible. (Hence the uproar over Christiane Amanpour's God's Jewish Warriors.) Indeed, the Jewish liberal/left has a huge blind spot, continuing to pursue its leftist multicultural agenda in the U.S. while ignoring the fact that the organized Jewish community is deeply complicit in dispossessing the Palestinians and erecting a racialist, apartheid state in Israel. As Weiss has noted elsewhere, "Steve Rabinowitz, Clinton friend, told me this year that if anyone did a study of how much [Democrat] money comes from Jews, it would fuel conspiracy theories." The Jewish liberal/left lavishly supports Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but makes no attempt to wrest control of the pro-Israel lobby from the hands of what James Petras terms the "reactionary minority of American Jews" who head the major American Jewish organizations.

But more interestingly, Heilbrunn points to the “lifelong antipathy toward the patrician class among the neocons … [that] prompted them to create their own parallel establishment.” In this regard, the neocons are entirely within the American Jewish mainstream. As I noted in a previous blog (also commenting on Philip Weiss), "Jews have become an elite, but an elite that does not identify with its subjects — a hostile, estranged but very wealthy elite that still sees themselves as outsiders." And along with the American Jewish mainstream, the neocons have been vital players in the establishment of a variety of policies opposed to the interests and attitudes of the American majority, most egregiously unrestricted immigration which has successfully altered the ethnic composition of the country. Indeed, neoconservative Ben Wattenberg famously wrote that "The non-Europeanization of America is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality."

This hostility toward the traditional peoples and culture of America among people calling themselves conservatives is striking — the antithesis of normal and natural conservative tendencies. As Sam Francis noted, what the neocons dislike about traditional conservatives is simply that they "are conservative at all":

There are countless stories of how neoconservatives have succeeded in entering conservative institutions, forcing out or demoting traditional conservatives, and changing the positions and philosophy of such institutions in neoconservative directions…. Writers like M. E. Bradford, Joseph Sobran, Pat Buchanan, and Russell Kirk, and institutions like Chronicles, the Rockford Institute, the Philadelphia Society, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute have been among the most respected and distinguished names in American conservatism. The dedication of their neoconservative enemies to driving them out of the movement they have taken over and demonizing them as marginal and dangerous figures has no legitimate basis in reality. It is clear evidence of the ulterior aspirations of those behind neoconservatism to dominate and subvert American conservatism from its original purposes and agenda and turn it to other purposes…. What neoconservatives really dislike about their “allies” among traditional conservatives is simply the fact that the conservatives are conservatives at all—that they support “this notion of a Christian civilization,” as Midge Decter put it, that they oppose mass immigration, ... that they entertain doubts or strong disagreement over American foreign policy in the Middle East, that they oppose reckless involvement in foreign wars and foreign entanglements, and that, in company with the Founding Fathers of the United States, they reject the concept of a pure democracy and the belief that the United States is or should evolve toward it.

Francis, S. (2004). The neoconservative subversion. In B. Nelson (ed.), “Neoconservatism.” Occasional Papers of the Conservative Citizens’ Foundation, Issue Number Six, 6–12. St. Louis: Conservative Citizens’ Foundation, p. 9.

That the New York Times can call Kristol a conservative without shame or irony is a striking commentary on the death of American conservatism.

There are several other themes highlighted in Weiss's review that are worth mentioning because they are typical of other Jewish intellectual and political movements. Heilbrunn describes neocon "cabals" in the State Department and in academic departments at elite universities. This is a reference to Jewish ethnic networking. In general, all of the important Jewish intellectual and political movements — from psychoanalysis and Boasian anthropology to neoconservatism — have a mutually reinforcing core of Jews centered around charismatic leaders. In the case of the neocons, individuals such as Leo Strauss, Richard Perle, and Norman Podhoretz have played this role. Neoconservative cabals have been largely successful in controlling or at least heavily influencing elite institutions in academia, the government, think tanks, and the media.

And finally, the neocons are prime examples of another important theme of Jewish intellectual life — self-deception. Weiss writes:

The reader is left with the shadowy sense that the neocons have a pro-Israel agenda that they are not upfront about. But it isn’t a conspiracy, Heilbrunn warns. The neocons have convinced themselves that the U.S. and Israel have congruent interests. “They just believe this stuff. They’re not agents,” an anonymous source tells him, speaking of Cheney aide David Wurmser, who is married to an Israeli.

Married to an Israeli. The neocons may believe it, but the rest of us need not be so foolish. For example, Douglas Feith is depicted by Heilbrunn as having published a letter defending the capture of the West Bank while still a teenager. Feith has also been credibly charged with spying for Israel, and was deeply involved in the disinformation used by the U.S. government to justify the invasion of Iraq. He has close ties to the settler movement, and was a participant in the notorious "A Clean Break" paper that advised the Israeli government that removing Saddam Hussein should be an Israeli strategic goal. The authors of this report speak as Jews and Israelis, not as U.S. citizens: “Our claim to the land—to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years—is legitimate and noble.”

European Americans may have a difficult time processing all of this. Their individualism and their own fragile and beleaguered sense of ethnicity make them less likely to attribute ethnic motives to others. And there is an imposing edifice of taboos surrounding even the mention of Jewish influence, much less anything that hints that Israel is the first loyalty of Jewish neocons — an edifice aggressively maintained by the organized Jewish community. But the rather unpleasant facts are staring European Americans in the face, even if the New York Times insists on calling them conservatives.

Philip Weiss II: Jews as a Component of the American Elite

December 23, 2007

Philip Weiss raises a number of important issues in his comment on my last blog. The one that should be on everyone’s mind is the nature of American elites. He quite rightly points out that the American elite is much more than just Jews. The essential point, however, is that Jews have played a critical role in the American elite, particularly in the construction of culture. This is certainly not surprising. Jews have shown repeatedly that they tend to become an elite. I regard this as more or less inevitable given the characteristics of Jews. But, since Jews in the Diaspora are a small minority, this typically involves making alliances with other elites. This is true throughout Jewish history. Indeed, a common theme of historical anti-Semitism has been that non-Jewish elites — often alien non-Jewish elites — have made alliances with Jews in opposition to the interests of other sectors of the population.  

However, given that Jews compose a significant part of the elite in the United States, Jewish issues and concerns have become part of the consensus among elites. Minimally, this has required a repudiation of anti-Semitism, and at least since WWII, the non-Jewish components of the American elite have indeed done so, at least overtly

The problem arises because, as Weiss acknowledges, the Jewish component of the elite still perceives itself and therefore acts as outsiders. Weiss notes that the WASPs had a sense of noblesse oblige, which is another way of saying that the WASPs identified to a considerable extent with their country as a whole and their countrymen, and they were willing to contribute to public goods. As Frank Salter and Robert Putnam note, individuals are less willing to contribute to public goods in ethnically diverse societies. But this also implies that Jews as outsiders have been less concerned about the interests of the American majority. And not only do Jews see themselves as outsiders, they are outsiders with a long sense of history — an often tragic history in which people very much like the American majority participated in anti-Jewish movements. They are thus not simply indifferent to the interests of the American majority, they form a hostile elite, as they did in the Soviet Union.

In his 1997 Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, J. J. Goldberg identified several consensus Jewish issues, including Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee policy, and church-state separation. All of these carry the potential for conflicts of interest with the American majority. Moreover, immigration policy since 1965 and church-state separation can only be understood as anti-majority because they involve the displacement of the traditional culture and ethnic mix of America. There is no question that Jewish influence was decisive in both the area of church-state separation and immigration policy.

To the extent that non-Jewish elites have been major players in these issues (and I have no doubt that they are, especially in the area of immigration policy), it must be seen as an individualist strategy. That is, elite non-Jews may reasonably believe that the cultural and demographic changes resulting from the transformation of the American elite will not hurt them personally because they can retreat to their gated communities, elite schools, and exclusive country clubs.

And it must be said that American individualism had strong strands of universalism that long preceded Jewish influence. This struck me once again in reading a review of a recent book on the history of American transcendentalism. The reviewer points to the universalist, democratic, and egalitarian impulses of this movement originated by descendants of the Puritans. Divine energy “coursed through the natural world, especially the human heart. … The only thing they would not tolerate was intolerance.” No ethnocentrism here. Indeed, the transcendentalists were very involved in the abolitionist movement, including some who funded John Brown’s violent uprising.

These are powerful currents in Western culture, and they seem to predispose non-Jewish European elites to engage in altruistic punishment against their own people for perceived moral transgressions. Not coincidentally, the Jewish intellectual and political movements I discuss in The Culture of Critique all had strong moral overtones.

Nevertheless, these individualist elites are paying a heavy price in terms of ethnic kinship. The eclipse of European America will certainly result in huge costs for the European majority, but they will be borne mainly by less intelligent and less conscientious whites. Nevertheless, if the transcendentalists tell us anything, European-American elites have done that before. If there is a difference in the current situation, it is perhaps that the transcendentalists may well have implicitly envisioned a morally purified white America rather than the present specter of a non-white America where they themselves are displaced. It is certainly the case that European-American elites are individualistic, but, as noted above, until the rise of the Jewish component of the American elite, there was a sense of noblesse oblige and a connection to the people. That seems to be missing now.

Regarding Weiss’s other points, my comments on contemporary Jewish marriage patterns appear in an earlier blog and Chapter 9 of Separation and Its Discontents. Weiss agrees that Jews tend to be psychologically intense, but seems to think that I mean that all Jews are psychologically intense. Not so. It’s like the bell curve for IQ: There is a higher average IQ among Jews, but there is variation around the mean, with some Jews quite a bit below the mean and even below the white average. In general when dealing with Jewish issues, one has to be aware of the complexity of the Jewish community. Responsible treatments of Jewish involvement in promoting the Iraq war, including that of Mearsheimer and Walt, are careful to distinguish different elements of the American Jewish community. Indeed, a recent poll once again shows the gap between most American Jews and the organized Jewish community, especially on issues related to Israel and the policies of the Bush administration. There is far less of a gap, if indeed there is any at all, on issues such as immigration or church-state separation. Indeed, as James Petras points out:

Given the high salience of being pro-Israel for the majority of American Jews and the fact that the source of their identity stems more from their loyalty to Israel than to the Talmud or religious myths and rituals, then it is clear that both the ‘progressive, majority of Jews and the reactionary minority who head up all the major American Jewish organizations have a fundamental point of agreement and convergence: Support and identity with Israel and its anti-Arab prejudices, its expansion and the dispossession of Palestine. This overriding convergence allows the reactionary Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations in America to speak for the Jewish community with virtually no opposition from the progressive majority either within or without their organizations.

Weiss dislikes ethnocentrism among Europeans as well as among Jews, but excuses Jewish ethnocentrism because of the Holocaust. But the idea that the Holocaust resulted in Jewish ethnocentrism is demonstrably incorrect. There is ample historical evidence for a deep concern about intermarriage as well as for ethnic networking and ingroup charity among Jews throughout history. One simply can’t read this without coming away with a deep appreciation of the commitment of Jews to their group and their concern about keeping the group’s ethnic integrity. See A People That Shall Dwell Alone. Nevertheless, there is every reason to suppose that Jewish ethnocentrism would be increased as a result of a disaster. This has been noted quite often by Jewish historians and it is consistent with psychological research on people with strong commitment to a group. It is also powerfully woven into the very fabric of the Old Testament where there is a constant drumbeat to the effect that disasters happen because the Jews have strayed from the word of God.

Outside the Jewish Mainstream: Robert Weissberg and Philip Weiss

Robert Weissberg is something of an unconventional Jew. An emeritus political scientist at the University of Illinois, he has written articles for American Renaissance, Jared Taylor’s publication, and he has spoken at their conferences. His 1999 AmRen article, “In Defense of the Racial Spoils System,” argued that because of the intractable cognitive difference between blacks and whites and the propensity of blacks to resort to violence unless they are provided middle class jobs and a constant stream of government benefits, whites have in effect decided to keep the peace by appeasing them. “Most whites, even those dispensing the benefits, understand that this is little more than extortion but they say nothing. Blacks, by contrast, see it all as legitimate ‘racial fairness.’”  The racial spoils system, then, is a form of taxation — the price whites pay to keep the peace.

And in a talk to an AmRen conference, Weissberg stated that in his personal experience Jews had a private fear and dislike of blacks because they perceived them as violent and inept. Jews are the first to move away when blacks move into a neighborhood, and they do not socialize or intermarry with blacks. However, they supported black causes—indeed, they were the backbone of the civil rights movement—because of an even greater fear of white anti-Semitism — a view that is at least partly compatible with mine. He also predicted that more Jews would become white nationalists, but only if white nationalism is free of anti-Semitism. In a news report on an AmRen conference, “Weissberg said that while he likes some folks at the conferences and loathes others, he keeps coming because he finds the open discussion of race so rare and refreshing.” I guess the idea is that Jews and whites should let bygones be bygones in the event that whites eventually develop an identity and a sense of having interests that conflict with other groups.

But, according a recent comment, the real problem that whites have in establishing an identity is that “our side lacks a sufficient number of loud, obnoxious Jews willing to intimidate those who deny reality.”

I spent most of my life in a research university setting where one argued with hard evidence — this study versus that study, my data versus your data, on so on.

When I recently moved to Manhattan, I was amazed at how one "won" arguments. I was equally amazed about how little so-called smart people knew, especially about race. But to listen to the smart alecks talk, they clearly think they have a true grasp on the subject. …

Those who perceive themselves as debate winners reject real science to instead offer a bag of verbal tricks and over the top emotional appeals. If all else fails, they try to destroy tangible evidence by claiming to "be offended" by the truth.

Sadly, these bullying techniques are all very "Jewish". And I say this as a Jew of good standing.

There are a lot of things going on here, but one of them surely is that Weissberg is accepting the “Jews are aggressive” stereotype that has been on my mind quite a bit too (see also here).

Jewish aggressiveness is also much on display in a recent column by Philip Weiss. I first came across Weiss when he wrote a gutsy article for New York Magazine (January 29):25–32, 1996) entitled “Letting go.” These were my comments on it in a chapter on Jewish self-deception:

Philip Weiss (1996) created a considerable stir when he acknowledged the unreality of the Jewish self-conception as an outsider and several other self-delusionary aspects of being Jewish in late 20th-century America. … Being Jewish is highly salient to him and strains his relationships with gentiles. He pictures his gentile Yale classmates as “blond and slightly dull witted, while the Jewish professor spews out brilliant lines. . . . We held them [gentiles] in a certain contempt. But we were marginalized. We were the outsiders. I’ve carried those lessons around with me all my life as I’ve made my own steady progress in the world. . . . Feelings of marginalization have informed my journalism, my humor, my social navigations” …. (Even the aggressively ethnocentric Alan Dershowitz is quoted by Weiss as saying, “There is in our tradition, understandably but tragically, an anti-Gentile bias that we must root out.”) Indeed, his relationships with gentiles are strained by his “relentlessly defensive Jewish identification,” another way of saying that he is unable to relate to gentiles without invoking … ingroup/outgroup comparisons … .

Jews cherish feelings of exclusion not just because there is wisdom in foreboding but because these feelings are useful. They preserve our position as outsiders, a status that has certain moral and practical advantages. As an outsider you have motivation: to get in. And you get to be demanding without any particular sense of reciprocity: the ADL (which is committed to fighting all forms of bigotry) running its Geiger counter over the goyim while failing to gauge Jewish racism. Perhaps most important, these feelings solidify Jewish identity. (p. 30)

Jews have . . . prevaricated about the question of Jewish influence — whether we have it, how we gain it, what it means. . . . When the NRA exercises political power, it’s a hot-button issue. When Jewish money plays a part, discussing it is anti-Semitic. (p. 32)

I couldn’t agree more. And Weiss adds to the accusation of a Jewish double standard on concerns about racial purity by noting that many of his family’s closest friends emigrated to Israel in order to prevent the marriage of their children to non-Jews.

Which reminds me that the original motivation of many of the early Zionists was that Israel would ensure racial purity. For example, all of the fin-de-siècle Zionist racial scientists studied by John M. Efron, including Elias Auerbach, Aron Sandler, Felix Theilhaber, and Ignaz Zollschan, were motivated by a perceived need to end Jewish intermarriage and preserve Jewish racial purity. For Auerbach, Zionism would return Jews “back into the position they enjoyed before the nineteenth century — politically autonomous, culturally whole, and racially pure.”

In his recent blog, Weiss expands on his point about Jews-as-outsiders. Jews have become an elite, but an elite that does not identify with its subjects — a hostile, estranged but very wealthy elite that still sees themselves as outsiders.

The Republican Party is now losing the money race to the Democratic Party … and meantime the Washington Post reported some years ago that more than half of Democratic presidential giving is coming from Jews, while Steve Rabinowitz, Clinton friend, told me this year that if anyone did a study of how much Dem money comes from Jews, it would fuel conspiracy theories.  … Obviously Jewish wealth is playing a huge part in U.S. politics and foreign policy. My theory is that the strength of the Israel lobby is a reflection of class and economic power in American life. … But because Jews still think of themselves as outsiders, there's nothing like the "noblesse-oblige" ethos which characterized the WASP ascendancy of the previous 200 years. The WASPs resigned. Mutilated by the Vietnam War and sensitive to the criticism of their caste as exclusive and snobbish and racist, they calmly decamped and left the scene. Joseph Epstein wrote that there has never been a sociological surrender like that one, without a shot being fired, in history. I'm hoping for a sociological capitulation on my people's part, a return to other values. Yes we are the kings of the information age. But look how disfiguring it is.  

Jews won the culture war without a shot being fired and without the losing side seeming to realize that it was a war with real winners and real losers — where the losers have not only given up their cultural preeminence, but have failed to stand up to the ultimate denouement: demographic displacement from lands they had controlled for centuries. The new elite retains its outsider feelings toward their new subjects — a hostile elite in the United States as it was in the Soviet Union.

Unlike Weissberg, then, Weiss seems to feel a twinge of guilt about the role of Jews as victors in the culture war — guilt stemming from his understanding that the new elite has some very glaring moral failings of its own, including its own brand of ethnocentrism that seems far deeper than anything imagined by the WASPs.   

The danger for Jews is that non-Jews will come to realize the deep wellsprings of Jewish ethnocentrism and see Jewish involvement in the displacement of European-descended peoples as resulting from ethnic conflict over the construction of culture. Ultimately, Europeans may come to realize that the conflict is really about the ethnic displacement of themselves as a people.

Speaking for myself, it would be difficult for me not to have developed something of a sense of my peoplehood after delving into the 2000-year history of Jews who were intensely concerned about preserving their people and their culture. As I’ve come to realize, preserving one’s people and culture is a virtual human universal. No one would contend that, say, Koreans have a moral obligation to allow millions of other peoples into Korea so that what we would call ethnic Koreans become a minority and their culture put up for grabs. Certainly, the idea that Israel is a Jewish state is central to its entire self-concept — so much so that the idea of the Palestinians who were basically expelled in 1948 being allowed to return to create a multi-ethnic, pluralistic society is a political impossibility. The idea that European-descended peoples have no right to preserve their peoples and cultures while others do is a glaring double standard.

The fact is that the US did have a sense of being a European, Christian society until very recently. Christianity was an uncontested part of public culture until large-scale Jewish immigration in the early 20th century. The immigration laws were biased in favor of Europeans until 1965 when the long Jewish campaign to change them finally succeeded. Such laws were no different from exactly what Israel continues to do with the strong support of the organized American Jewish community. Nevertheless, my research shows that the organized American Jewish community has led the campaign to make assertions of white identity and interests illegitimate. I see that as hypocritical. The big question is whether the WASPs will put up a fight.

Permanent link

Jon Entine’s Screed

In 2002, Jon Entine interviewed me at my university office for a book he was doing on Jewish genetics. I remember looking forward to the interview because Entine had a reputation as an iconoclastic journalist, unafraid to puncture reigning taboos about race.  

I also remember that in the end I didn’t feel that the interview went well. Always trust your feelings.

Entine’s recently published Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People contains a section on me (pp. 323–328) that is really quite appalling. For starters, he begins by quoting me as saying “I’m a scientific racist.” I really can’t imagine that I would express myself this way and really have no idea what such a statement might mean. If it means that I think that it’s reasonable to suppose that there are different races with some genetic distinctiveness and that different racial and ethnic groups have different interests that might conflict, then it’s quite reasonable and I can imagine myself saying something to that effect. Indeed, Entine himself explores the genetic uniqueness of Jews, as he previously examined athletic prowess of Blacks, so he must not dismiss the idea of racial/ethnic distinctiveness. But the word ‘racist’ obviously has very negative connotations, and it’s simply not a word that I use to describe myself, nor do I accept being described this way. So I suspect that he began his treatment by inventing this in order to get his readers upset with me from the beginning. [Addendum, March 27, 2008: On a private email discussion list Entine has acknowledged that my comment, whatever the exact wording, was preceded by a "convoluted" statement, presumably along the lines suggested above. He has resisted releasing the recording.]

And one really has to suspect the accuracy of such a quote when there are so many little details that are reported incorrectly. My office has always been on the fourth floor, not the second, and I have never had a “sofa chair” in it. I didn’t receive my Ph. D. at the University of Illinois (that was the post-doc; the Ph. D. was from the U. of Connecticut). Entine says that I went back and finished my undergraduate degree after doing the 1960’s radicalism/jazz musician/Jamaica kumbaya thing for awhile; but the fact is that I got my undergraduate degree and then spent four years as a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin before dropping out and then eventually going back to UConn to get my Masters and Ph. D. And I never attended the University of California-Berkeley; this is probably a misunderstanding of my telling him that I took music lessons at the Berklee College of Music in Boston when I was trying to become a musician.

But there are some deeper things wrong with Entine’s account that warrant scrutiny. Entine writes, “MacDonald and a small but growing group of evolutionary psychologists believe that humans will sometimes sacrifice their own self-interest for the greater good of the group. Some proponents of this theory believe this altruistic behavior is reflected in the gene pool of ethnic and racial groups” (p. 324).

I do make an argument to this effect in Chapter 1 of Separation and Its Discontents and elsewhere. But readers should understand that the basic theory of group evolutionary strategies as laid out in Chapter 1 of A People That Shall Dwell Alone is based on an interplay between genetic tendencies toward ethnocentrism and cultural group selection. I do not argue that group evolutionary strategies resulted from genetic selection for altruistic groups.

The idea is that because of human cognitive ability — what psychologists call explicit processing — we are able to form cohesive groups that monitor group members, enforce group goals, and develop ideologies that rationalize all of this to ingroup members. Animals can’t do this, so their groups tend to break down as selfish defectors prosper at the expense of the altruists. My theory is that group evolutionary strategies are possible among humans because there is a complex interplay between genetic tendencies toward ethnocentrism (including altruistic self-sacrifice on behalf of the group) with social controls and ideologies that support the goals of the group.

Think of a military unit. There are often strong controls against defecting or cheating, and there may well be an ideology of self-sacrifice for the good of the group. Successful military groups are able to enforce group goals. This need not be the result of the genetic traits of individuals, but it certainly helps if the soldiers making up the unit are highly group-oriented to start with. In fact, even the most ethnocentric Jewish groups nevertheless maintain strong external controls on individual behavior — a good example being the Syrian Jews discussed in a previous blog. When intermarriage started to occur, they responded with a strong decree that effectively eliminated intermarriage in subsequent generations. Without such controls, the barriers between groups would gradually erode. Individuals would pursue attractive marriages with outgroup members, and over time the genetic differences between groups would blur and eventually disappear entirely.

Entine also writes as follows:

MacDonald’s account of Jewish ‘exceptionality’ and the hubris that can accompany it is often persuasive, but the thesis reads like a genetically updated version of the Protocols of Zion: Jews have an almost diabolical, biologically programmed plan of dominance… The Jewish promotion of multiculturalism is a charade. Even the anthropologist Franz Boas, who initiated the historic shift in anthropology from biology to culture was supposedly motivated by a desire to end the criticism that Jews were a race so they could more easily pursue their strategy of Jewish racial dominance. That’s just the devious nature of Jews, he said. (p. 325)

Devious nature of Jews?? I’d like to see him produce that quote. My claim about Boas — supported by a great deal of evidence — is that he was motivated by a desire to end racial anti-Semitism (which was quite common at the time) and by a desire to demolish developmental theories of culture that implied that contemporary European culture was the epitome of human accomplishment. This latter thrust of Boasian thinking is a typical result of social identity processes in which the outgroup is negatively valued, especially under conditions of between-group hostility. It is consistent with a theme of much of the writing on Jewish intellectual movements, including mine: These movements are often motivated by an attitude of hostility toward Europeans and their culture because of perceived history of irrational persecution.

Regarding the Boasian push toward multiculturalism, here is what I actually wrote:  

As Frank (1997, 731) points out, “The preponderance of Jewish intellectuals in the early years of Boasian anthropology and the Jewish identities of anthropologists in subsequent generations has been downplayed in standard histories of the discipline.” Jewish identifications and the pursuit of perceived Jewish interests, particularly in advocating an ideology of cultural pluralism as a model for Western societies, has been the “invisible subject” of American anthropology—invisible because the ethnic identifications and ethnic interests of its advocates have been masked by a language of science in which such identifications and interests were publicly illegitimate. (Ch. 2 of The Culture of Critique. The citation is to Gelya Frank’s article “Jews, multiculturalism, and Boasian anthropology,” American Anthropologist 99:731–745, 1997.)

I never wrote anything like “the devious nature of Jews.” Such a statement would be an outrageous overgeneralization. Rather, I simply stated that Jewish identification and interests among the Boasians were unstated in their public writings and that the movement was couched in the language of science and universalism. These comments apply only to Boasian anthropology and the other Jewish intellectual and political movements discussed in The Culture of Critique, not to all Jews.

Entine goes on to claim that in my view, “the Jews who were killed in ancient Rome, the Crusades, the pogroms, etc., were invariably zealots who all but deserved their fate” (p. 326). Not true. I do try to show that historically important outbreaks of anti-Semitism have tended to occur in a context of perceived resource competition and conflicts of interest. But I never argue that the victims were “invariably zealots.” In fact, pogromists probably selected their victims rather indiscriminately. Nor do I argue that they deserved their fate. Trying to develop a social science of between-group hostility is an attempt to understand the phenomenon, not moralize about it. Presumably, Entine realizes this and, perhaps because of his own Jewish identification, he paints me as a moralist in order to discredit me to his readers.

Entine writes, “MacDonald conjures the ghosts of Nazis past by modestly calling his obsession an ‘effort to develop a Wissenschaft des Judentums — a scientific understanding of Judaism,’ echoing the racist spirit that produced the firestorm of National Socialism” (p. 326). But, as I note in the relevant passage (see the preface to the original hardcover edition of A People That Shall Dwell Alone), Wissenschaft des Judentums was a label used by Jewish thinkers working in Germany in the 19th century who were trying to provide a scientific understanding of Judaism. It was not at all a concoction of the National Socialists.

Entine: “He systematically downplays Jewish scientific success, riffing on the Wagner-Hitler thesis of Jewish cleverness-disguised-as-accomplishment” (p. 327). In fact, my estimate of Ashkenazi Jewish IQ is the highest of anyone who has written on the topic in recent years — higher, for example than found in The Bell Curve, and quite a bit higher than suggested by Richard Lynn. Perhaps more than most other writers I have emphasized high Jewish verbal IQ, as opposed to performance IQ, based on several studies dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. (In his book, Entine also emphasizes the gap between verbal and performance IQ among Jews.)

Relatively high verbal IQ makes Ashkenazi Jews more inclined to become lawyers and writers than engineers. But I certainly don’t minimize or trivialize Jewish success in science or their accomplishment in general. My discussion of the different profiles of Jewish entrepreneurs and non-Jewish entrepreneurs is based not on Wagner or Hitler, but on W. E. Mosse’s Jews in the German Economy: The German-Jewish Economic Élite 1820‑1935. (Oxford, UK: The Clarendon Press, 1987.)  And I preface my discussion by noting, “This is a difficult area because a theme of anti‑Semitic writing in Germany was that Jews were not innovators, but only appropriated the inventions of others (Mosse 1987, 166, 404).”

The bottom line is that I do believe that high Jewish IQ is a sine qua non for Jewish success and influence. And I have no doubt that Ashkenazi Jews have a higher than average general intelligence. The entire theory of general intelligence clearly implies that a high g would lead to relatively greater success in all intellectual endeavors involving cognitive complexity.

Entine writes: “When the genetic research on Jewish distinctiveness began coming out in the late 1990s, MacDonald could not have been more pleased. … By his guess, the few converts did not ‘pollute’ the ‘Jewish gene pool’” (p. 327). Again, I have never used phrases like “polluting gene pools,” just as I have never used labels like “scientific racist” and “devious Jews.” Likewise, Entine’s book is about the distinctiveness of the Jewish gene pool, but I rather doubt that he uses a word like ‘pollution’ to describe genetic admixture.

Moreover, research on the distinctiveness of the Jewish gene pool did not originate in the 1990s but in the 1970s. It was already fairly well developed when I reviewed the field in 1994 in Chapter 2 of A People That Shall Dwell Alone. These new developments added to the story, but they didn’t fundamentally change it.

Which brings me to my last point. Entine writes:  

As he even admits, his dark ‘science of Jewry’ rests precariously on his belief in a tidy universe of Jews, genetically almost pure since ancient times, relentlessly pursuing their interests in hand-to-hand psychosocial combat against gentiles … [quoting me:] “If it’s true [that most modern Ashkenazi Jews are descended from non-Jewish women and Jewish men] that sort of rocks my foundations…. I’m really in doubt about it. I would be amazed if it was right.” … He now slumped into silence, keenly aware that if the DNA research holds up, his theory is kaput. (pp. 327–328)

This is flat-out wrong.  My recollection is that Entine asked me if I was surprised by any developments that had occurred since writing my trilogy on Judaism. I replied that the recent research by David Goldstein and his colleagues (Thomas et al., 2002) on founder populations in different Jewish groups did indeed surprise me. These data suggest that small founding groups of Jewish men married non-Jewish women, after which there was very little intermarriage. This was a complete surprise to me. I had realized that this must have happened with the Lemda in southern Africa. But I did not expect that this may have been the story with Ashkenazi or other important historic Jewish populations.

However, I told Entine that these findings, even if true, did not destroy my theory precisely because my theory does not depend on a strict genetic separation of Jews and non-Jews. If borne out by other data, these results would only change sections of Chapter 2 of A People That Shall Dwell Alone because I would have to make room for this possibility in discussing the population genetic data. But it wouldn’t change anything else of importance: 

·         It wouldn’t change the importance of the practices of shunning intermarriage and converts that were so common in historical Jewish societies (Ch. 4) and clearly prescribed in the Old Testament (Ch. 3). As Thomas et al. note, “After the establishment of these communities, inward gene flow from the host populations must have been very limited.”

·         It wouldn’t change the importance of resource competition between genetically distinct groups (Ch. 5). No one, least of all someone writing a book with a subtitle referring to the “DNA of the Chosen People,” would question the idea that genetic distinctiveness remained.

·         It wouldn’t change the material on the regulation of in-group behavior (e.g., in-group charity, regulations governing business dealings with Jews and non-Jews) (Ch. 6).

·         It wouldn’t change the discussion on eugenic selection for intelligence and high-investment parenting (Ch. 7).

·         It would result in a minor change in the discussion on the origins of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy (Ch. 8). That chapter emphasizes three factors as being important in the origins of Judaism: the development of Jewish Diaspora ideology; the role of the self-interest of Jewish priests (Kohenim); and Judaism as reflecting typical Middle Eastern tendencies toward collectivism. (This section emphasized Harry Triandis’s work on individualism/collectivism.) All of this would remain.

Finally, the new population genetic data would not change anything in Separation and Its Discontents or The Culture of Critique. The main theoretical basis of both of these books is social identity theory. Psychological research on social identity processes finds negative attitudes toward outgroups even when the groups are randomly composed. For example, social identity processes underlie the hostility that can develop in crowds of football fans sporting different team colors: “My team is better (and more moral and more intelligent) than your team.” Genetic differences are certainly not required.

As a result, even if historical populations of Jews and non-Jews were genetically identical, social identity theory would predict positive ingroup biases and negative attitudes toward outgroups. In fact, it’s interesting that population genetic data consistently place Jewish populations closest to their Middle Eastern neighbors, the Palestinians. Being genetically close doesn’t mean that in-group/out-group hostility can’t develop.

Nevertheless, the fact that Jews and non-Jews were genetically different doubtless added to the feelings of alienation and estrangement of each side. This is the clear implication of J. Philippe Rushton’s Genetic Similarity Theory (i.e., the theory that people assort on the basis of genetic similarity) and the theory that humans possess a "human kinds module" (that is, a psychological mechanism that categorizes people from different groups in the same way we categorize biological species — as having essences that can’t be voluntarily changed). I emphasize the importance of both these mechanisms in my writing on ethnocentrism and they certainly are critical to a comprehensive analysis of between-group conflict. Obviously, it’s not a simple story.

The theory stands.

I’ve found that my views on cultural group selection and on the psychological mechanisms underlying group conflict are prone to being misunderstood. People have a stereotype that evolutionary theories are basically about some form of genetic determinism. I certainly do believe that genetically influenced ethnocentrism is part of the story. But cultural processes (e.g., social controls within the group) and mechanisms that are insensitive to the genetic distinctiveness of groups (e.g., social identity processes) are also a big part of any good explanation of group conflict. And they are critical for understanding how groups maintain their cohesion and their genetic distinctiveness.

Entine didn’t get it, but I have the feeling that he wasn’t really trying. His comments on my work read more like character assassination than honest reportage.

 

The Naked Emperor

December 3, 2007

Several commentators have noted that the rise of Jewish intellectual and political influence was necessarily accompanied by a crisis of confidence in the older order. The culture of critique that resulted from this influence called into question the fundamental moral, political, and economic foundations of Western society. The pillars of the older Protestant intellectual and cultural establishment gave way to variety of complementary and overlapping utopian visions of America, including especially the vision of a multicultural America that has energized the pro-immigration movement from the beginning. .  

But because utopian visions sooner or later must clash with real-world realities, it was perhaps inevitable that this newer intellectual ethos would itself be subjected to the same scrutiny previously reserved for pre-1965 America and its 21st-century remnants. The Achilles’ heel of the new establishment is Israel and the influence of its supporters in America, particularly the organized Jewish community. Some of the very same organizations, such as the ADL, that have been at the forefront of enforcing and extending the cultural revolution of the 1960s—the revolution that views the eclipse of white America as a moral imperative—have also been at the forefront of promoting Israel and defending it against criticism. But it’s becoming apparent to quite a few observers that the emperor has no clothes.

The crisis of the new order has been precipitated by the publication of Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and especially by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Their success is largely because they share two traits that have also characterized successful Jewish intellectual and political movements: First, they originated as an aspect of elite culture—Carter as a former president and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Mearsheimer and Walt as professors of foreign affairs at elite universities. And secondly, at the heart of their critique is a moral indictment. Carter describes “the abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine’s citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank.” He characterizes the Occupied Territories as an apartheid system, calling attention to the “enormous imprisonment wall … now under construction, snaking through what is left of Palestine to encompass more and more land for Israeli settlers.”

Mearsheimer and Walt devote an entire chapter to the “dwindling moral case” for Israel. They excuse the crimes against the Palestinians that occurred as a result of the 1948 war that established Israel—a more or less normal consequence of state formation. But Israel’s brutality toward the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and its behavior in last year’s war in Lebanon have undermined the moral case for Israel: “In fact, a good case can be made that current U.S. policy conflicts with basic American values and that if the United States were to choose sides on the basis of moral considerations alone, it would back the Palestinians” (p. 80). They call attention to the importance of biological kinship in determining Israeli citizenship and to the refusal of Israel to grant de jure equality to Arabs. They also point out that Israel’s Arab citizens “are de facto treated as second-class citizens,” including having to endure marriage laws that prevent Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens from becoming Israeli citizens or living in Israel. [See "Marriage Wall Pains New Israelis".] They also note that some Israeli leaders and a substantial proportion of the Israeli public have “racist” attitudes toward Palestinians, including a deep concern about Arab fertility. A clear majority favor encouraging Palestinians to emigrate. A prominent politician, Avigdor Lieberman, is quoted as advocating expulsion “so as to make Israel ‘as much as possible’ a homogeneous state” (p. 90).

At the heart of this critique is a rather glaring double standard: “Imagine the outcry that would arise here if a U.S. cabinet official spoke of the benefits of a policy that had reduced the birthrates of African Americans and Hispanics, thereby preserving a white majority” (p. 89). Or, one might suggest, imagine the outcry that would greet a similar comment on immigration policy.  

Confronted with the moral critique of America emanating from elite universities and the media, the old Protestant intellectual establishment quickly yielded the high ground. Many of them became avid cheerleaders of the new multicultural zeitgeist that rejected the America and even the Americanism of their ancestors, to the point that the new zeitgeist has become a consensus among elites of all stripes. They accepted their own demographic decline and they gave up their pretensions as cultural leaders and trend setters. And they implicitly paved the way for the eventual loss of political power to other groups, some of which have historically conditioned grudges against them—a dangerous situation to say the least. In doing so, they became the pallbearers for their own people.

One might suppose that the fact that the emperor has been found to be clothed in a massive ethnocentrism of his own while nevertheless working zealously to utterly squelch any murmur of ethnocentrism by American and European majorities would lead to a crisis of confidence among the elites. After all, people who insist on double-standards naturally antagonize other people because they thus repudiate the principle of reciprocity that underlies all enduring moral arrangements in a civil society. But there are several reasons to think that won’t happen.

The lobby still exerts massive influence over the political process. Even after Mearsheimer and Walt cogently presented the case within the mainstream media that the lobby was a necessary condition for the war in Iraq, Rep. Jim Moran (Dem., VA) was accused of bigotry and anti-Semitism for saying that the Israel lobby “pushed the war from the beginning.” House Republican Chief Deputy Whip Eric Cantor couldn’t resist invoking history’s arch-anti-Semite: "Unfortunately, Jim Moran has made it a habit now to lash out to the American Jewish community. I think his remarks are reprehensible, I think his remarks are anachronistic, and hearken back to the day of Adolph Hitler, of the others, Mein Kampf, of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.…”  

Despite the high level of critique and the reputations of its authors, there doesn’t seem to be any lessening of Jewish self-confidence or willingness to defend Israel and the lobby. Reviews of Mearsheimer and Walt in the elite mainstream media in the United States (but not Europe) have been uniformly negative. The reviews have mainly been by Jews, prompting Philip Weiss to ask “Do the Goyim Get to Register an Opinion Re Walt/Mearsheimer?” There are the obligatory dark (and intimidating) charges of anti-Semitism. Perhaps the most extreme reaction, presumably aimed at a Jewish audience and intended to keep the funds flowing, is by ADL National Director Abraham Foxman: The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control.

Charges of shoddy scholarship abound, as in Leslie Gelb’s review in The  New York Times Book Review. Some of Gelb’s charges might even seem reasonable—if you haven’t read the book. For example, Gelb fails to do justice to Mearsheimer and Walt’s case on the power of the Israel lobby, dwelling only on their quoting various sources attesting to that power, but ignoring long sections of the book recounting numerous actual instances where the lobby has used its power to control Congress, presidents, and American public opinion on Mideast policy. Nor does he adequately portray Mearsheimer and Walt’s exhaustive account of the role of the lobby, the government of Israel, and administration neoconservatives with their strong Jewish identities and powerful ties to Israel in the build-up to the war in Iraq. Gelb states that, contra Mearsheimer and Walt, “Washington has quietly sided with the Palestinians [on the issues of the settlements and a Palestinian state] for a long time” It has indeed been a very quiet support because, as Mearsheimer and Walt show, the lobby has effectively prevented U.S. administrations from pushing Israel in that direction. There is also a complete disconnect between what Gelb says about the influence of the oil lobby and what Mearsheimer and Walt actually write. The same goes for Gelb’s comments on how U.S. arms sales to the Saudis illustrates the weakness of the lobby.

Gelb also subscribes to two of the central pro-Israel myths of the Mideast.  He unabashedly claims that “(i)n the closing days of the Clinton administration, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak met almost all Palestinian demands for a negotiated solution and was effectively turned down” without even bothering to cite Mearsheimer and Walt’s refutation of that argument.

Gelb also tries to resurrect the moral case for Israel, noting that “the United States is helping to protect one of the few nations in the world that share American values and interests, a true democracy,” again without bothering to tell his readers that Mearsheimer and Walt devote an entire chapter to the dwindling moral case for Israel. As Philip Weiss notes, if reviewers like Gelb are “right and America, i.e., non-Jews, actually love Israel because of shared interests and democratic values, shouldn’t the editors of America put reviewers to the test [by having non-Jews review the book]?  

In making charges of shoddy scholarship, Gelb should look in the mirror.

Some of Gelb’s arguments go beyond shoddy scholarship. For example, he states that “instinctively and without being lobbied, American presidents don’t want to gang up on Israel, since virtually every other state does so.”

When an argument is so silly that even a child could see through it and yet it is put forward by a Harvard Ph.D. in the elite media, you have to ask yourself what is really going on. Mearsheimer and Walt’s mistake may have been to think that they remained in a rational universe of rational actors when in fact they had entered a parallel universe of rationalization, self-deception, and talking points.

Unlike their Protestant forebears, there will be no crisis of confidence among the Jewish proponents of Israel and they will never feel cognitive dissonance for supporting an apartheid ethnostate in Israel while simultaneously being a pillar of support for a utopian vision of a multicultural U.S. Nor should one expect twinges of guilt for the role of the neoconservatives and the organized Jewish community in promoting the war in Iraq, with its thousands of dead and maimed American soldiers, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, typically dismissed as “collateral damage,” and the hundreds of billions of dollars better spent elsewhere.

One of the things that struck me in reading Jewish history was a pattern, stretching back to the ancient world, in which Jews consistently created rationalizations and apologia intended to present themselves in a positive light and their enemies in a negative light. There was a great deal of evidence that at least some of this involved self-deception. A great many commentators have noticed this pattern, but one of the most accurate and succinct is John Murray Cuddihy’s comment that Jewish apologists developed a theory of their own history

emphasizing Gentile persecution as the root cause of Jewish “degradation.” This ideology . . . was shared in one form or another, by all the ideologists of nineteenth-century Jewry: Reform Jews and Zionists, assimilationists and socialists, Bundists and Communists—all became virtuosos of ethnic suffering. . . . The point is that these Diaspora groups were uninterested in actual history; they were apologists, ideologists, prefabricating a past in order to answer embarrassing questions, to outfit a new identity, and to ground a claim to equal treatment in the modern world.

Social psychologists have long known that powerful commitment to an ingroup results in a variety of cognitive distortions, especially glorifying the ingroup and pathologizing the outgroup. So we can’t expect a real dialog or objective analysis here. The deeply committed Jews who form the backbone of the organized Jewish community in America are simply unable to see Israel as morally flawed and a massive strategic burden to the United States.

Those who question the intensity of ethnic commitment among Jews would do well to watch Christiane Amanpour’s God’s Jewish Warriors. This work has typically been criticized by Jewish activists as not depicting a representative sample of Jews. But the question is not how representative these Jews are of Israeli Jews or their American supporters. The question is how much influence they have had. As I have argued, the settlement movement and the organized Jewish community in America that supports them represent the most psychologically committed and most deeply ethnocentric Jews. From the Maccabees (who led a rebellion against Greek influence in the second century B.C.) down to the present, they are the vanguard of Judaism, and Jews who actively oppose this state of affairs are eventually marginalized. If Jewish history shows anything, it's that the radicals eventually come to dominate the Jewish community. In this case, the radicals and their supporters in the Israeli government and among American Jews have created facts on the ground that make a reasonable settlement to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict a virtual impossibility.

If indeed a majority of Americans and their leaders realize that Israel is fundamentally an expression of the deep wellsprings of Jewish ethnocentrism and that American support for Israel is not at all in the national interest and has resulted in enormous costs and suffering, the predicted reaction is that committed Jews will retreat into a psychological world where once again they will see themselves as victims of irrational hatred—a theme that is already the central response to Mearsheimer and Walt.

For example, Eliot A. Cohen, a prominent neocon writing in the Washington Post on the London Review of Books paper by Mearsheimer and Walt that started the controversy: "Inept, even kooky academic work, ... but is it anti-Semitic? If by anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information — why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic."

Or consider the ADL's blurb for Abe Foxman's book, The Deadliest Lies: "In a post-9/11 era of international tension and heightened suspicion, the American Jewish community has found itself having to respond to charges that it stifles free speech, has divided loyalties, and is responsible for pushing the United States into the war in Iraq. The essay by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard on “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” and the 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by former President Jimmy Carter have lent an alarming veneer of credibility to these accusations, which are little more than paranoid fantasies that reinforce persistent, anti-Semitic myths."

The whole lachrymose history of Jews as a persecuted but morally superior light unto the nations stretching from the Pharaoh to the Crusaders to the Czar, to Hitler to Ahmadinejad will once again be summoned to confer a sense of psychological affirmation. Only this time, with Israel already a formidable nuclear power, the stakes are raised for the entire planet.

This retreat into a psychological world of ethnic pride and pathologizing their opponents was not an option for the Protestant intellectual and cultural elite displaced by the rise of the culture of critique. Their commitment to individualism and their fragile sense of peoplehood and ethnic identification made them vulnerable to charges of moral failings. It was a vulnerability that was well recognized by Jewish activists: In the debate over the 1924 immigration restriction law, Israel Zangwill noted that “You must make a fight against this bill; tell them they are destroying American ideals. Most fortifications are of cardboard, and if you press against them, they give way.”

But arguments that the Israel lobby is destroying American ideals will fall on deaf ears among Jewish activists. Instead of producing a lack of confidence and a sense of guilt, the result of America turning against the Israel lobby will be the erection of a parallel universe of rationalization and self-deception among the most strongly identified segments of the Jewish community—the backbone of the organized Jewish community.

Turning against the lobby would also produce a political crisis in the United States. Another very clear message of Mearsheimer and Walt is that American political culture is utterly corrupt. The vast majority of American politicians have been only too willing to conform to the wishes of the lobby, and often compete to go beyond what the lobby desires. The good news, perhaps, is that a political crisis over Jewish influence is exactly what the United States needs.

Turkheimer: Is Race Science Good for the Jews?

November 26, 2007

In a recent Cato Unbound piece, Eric Turkheimer makes the surprising claim that questions of race differences are “not empirical, but theoretical and philosophical.” What he means is that “we can recognize a contention that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to be better table tennis players than Africans as silly, and the contention that they are smarter than Africans as ugly, because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.” Such comparisons “are offensive precisely because they violate our intuition about the balance between innateness and self-determination of the moral and cultural qualities of human beings.”

Indeed, such comparisons remind Turkheimer, who is Jewish, of the Nazis:

If I may address my fellow Jews for a moment, consider this. How would you feel about a line of research into the question of whether Jews have a genetic tendency to be more concerned with money than other groups? Nothing anti-semitic, mind you, just a rational investigation of the scientific evidence. It wouldn’t be difficult to measure interest in money and materialism, and it wouldn’t surprise me if as an empirical matter Jews scored a little higher on the resulting test than other groups. As a behavioral geneticist I can assure you without reservation that the trait would be heritable, and, if anyone bothered to take the time to find out, specific genes would have small associations with it. Of course, this research program has already been carried out, at least to the extent the relevant technology was available in 1939. While we are at it we could open a whole scientific institute for the scientific study of racial stereotypes, and finally pull together the evidence on sneaky Japanese, drunken Irish, unintelligent Poles, overemotional women and lazy Italians.

Steve Sailer comments, “hasn’t he just wrecked his credibility as an objective scientist?" Yes, indeed. That was the main theme of The Culture of Critique: A great many Jewish social scientists—including many of those involved in debates about race and IQ a—were strongly influenced by their Jewish identities and their perceptions of Jewish interests. And they did terrible science.

In responding to Turkheimer, James Flynn notes that “are we just to discourage discussions about race that various groups dislike rather than like?”

Good point. When the study by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending on Ashkenazi IQ came out, it was featured in the media around the world. Shortly thereafter, Charles Murray published an article in Commentary (published by the American Jewish Committee) titled “Jewish Genius.” He noted that “from 1870 to 1950, Jewish representation in literature was four times the number one would expect. In music, five times. In the visual arts, five times. In biology, eight times. In chemistry, six times. In physics, nine times. In mathematics, twelve times. In philosophy, fourteen times.” Recently, Jon Entine has published a book on Jewish DNA (including material on genetics and Jewish intelligence): Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People; presently he is busy writing op-eds in the mainstream media promoting his work.

High Jewish IQ is celebrated and considered worthy of learned analyses and commentary in the mainstream media. I don’t recall Turkheimer writing to Commentary complaining that studies showing high Jewish IQ "are offensive precisely because they violate our intuition about the balance between innateness and self-determination of the moral and cultural qualities of human beings."

Flynn goes on to write that “As for my group, Irish-Americans, I welcome a no-holds-barred discussion of the roots of our high rates of alcoholism.” Personally, I would welcome studies of the biological roots of European individualism because, in my opinion, individualism is the key to Western uniqueness while at the same time making Western peoples uniquely vulnerable to invasion by cohesive groups and ideologies of altruistic punishment (i.e., ideologies which highlight the moral shortcomings of Europeans to the point that they are willing to engage in moral crusades against their own interests).

The rub is that such studies might also provide clues on the biological roots of collectivism, and these might be greeted with little enthusiasm by Jews and other groups prone to collectivism. Such studies would start to reveal the genetic underpinnings of endogamy (marrying within the group) and ethnocentrism. Is there a genetic basis for someone like Jakie Kassin, a leader of the Syrian Jewish community in New York, saying that converts should be “push[ed] …away with strong hands from our community. Why? Because we don’t want gentile characteristics.” Wouldn’t it be interesting to understand the genetics of God’s Jewish Warriors? These are people who, as I noted in a previous blog, “don’t seem very democratic… they seem massively ethnocentric. They live in a completely Jewish world where their every thought and perception seem colored by their Jewish identity.” Are there genetic implications to the fact that 80% of the Israeli public describe themselves as traditional [Orthodox] Jews (47%) or hareidi-religious/ religious-Zionist (33%), while only 20% consider themselves secular Jews?  And are there genetic differences between the Syrian Jews and the Ostjuden that influence their very different responses to America and its culture?

Actually, I suspect that, if pressed, Turkheimer would agree that there should be no studies at all that examine group differences in cultural accomplishment—even traits like high Jewish IQ. The problem is that even Jewish IQ is prone to becoming part of a world view that I am sure Turkheimer would find anathema. The one thing that Entine, Murray, and Cochran et al. have in common is that they are perfectly willing to discuss high Jewish IQ and achievement, but they pretty much leave it at that.  (In a comment that is sure to appeal to Jews, Murray ends his piece by “tak[ing] sanctuary in my remaining hypothesis [for high Jewish IQ], uniquely parsimonious and happily irrefutable. The Jews are God’s chosen people.”)

These writers are willing to link high Jewish IQ to Jewish overrepresentation in the arts and sciences (e.g., >160 Nobel prizes), but they don’t consider how this would also be expected to lead to a high level of cultural influence generally, with all that that entails. Most importantly, they don’t consider how Jews and non-Jews may have conflicts of interest over the construction of culture and on important public policy issues such as immigration and policy toward Israel and the middle east generally. For example, the basic thesis of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s work on the Israel lobby is that the influence of the Israel lobby has often been contrary to the legitimate national interests of America.

Nor do they factor in the powerful ingroup attitudes among Jews—particularly their tendency toward a lachrymose view of Jewish history in which Jews have repeatedly been innocent, passive victims of irrational hatred. Such lachrymose views are doubtless an ingredient in the