In Culture of Critique I had a brief section on philosopher Jacques Derrida’s strong Jewish identity and how that informed his writing. (See here, p. 198ff.) It emphasizes the point that Derrida thought of himself as a crypto-Jew. Despite his pose as “a leftist Parisian intellectual, a secularist and an atheist,” Derrida descended from a long line of crypto-Jews, and at one point he explicitly identifies himself as a crypto-Jew: “Marranos that we are, Marranos in any case whether we want to be or not, whether we know it or not.” Derrida changed his first name to the French Christian sounding ‘Jacques’ in order better blend into the French scene.
Indeed, one might say that Derrida’s crypsis is typical of Jews on the left:
[Leftist] universalism may thus be viewed as a mechanism for Jewish continuity via crypsis or semi-crypsis. The Jewish radical is invisible to the [non-Jew] as a Jew and thereby avoids anti-Semitism while at the same time covertly retains his or her Jewish identity. Lyons (1982, 73) finds that “most Jewish Communists wear their Jewishness very casually but experience it deeply. It is not a religious or even an institutional Jewishness for most; nevertheless, it is rooted in a subculture of identity, style, language, and social network. . . . In fact, this second-generation Jewishness was antiethnic and yet the height of ethnicity. The emperor believed that he was clothed in transethnic, American garb, but [non-Jews] saw the nuances and details of his naked ethnicity.” (Chapter 3 of CofC, p. 91)
The Forward has an article on a recent biography of Derrida that adds to the portrait. It notes that Derrida was “acutely aware of his ethnic identity” and as a result much of his early writing was on “fellow Jews.” He took his crypto-Judaism to the grave:
Abundant details provided by Peeters prove Derrida’s lasting devotion toYiddishkeit … When Derrida was buried, his elder brother, René, wore a tallit at the suburban French cemetery and recited the Kaddish to himself inwardly, since Jacques had asked for no public prayers. This discreet, highly personal, yet emotionally and spiritually meaningful approach to recognizing Derrida’s Judaism seems emblematic of this complex, imperfect, yet valuably nuanced thinker.
In other words, Derrida was a crypto-Jew until the end and instructed his family to participate in the charade.
The article also implies ethnic networking at the heart of the Derrida phenomenon and central to all the intellectual movements discussed in CofC:
Derrida was always surrounded by ardently supportive Jewish friends and colleagues, like Sarah Kofman, Peter Szondi, Hélène Cixous and Avital Ronell. The last mentioned was so devoted to the Derrida family that in 1979, at age 28, Ronell began a love affair with Derrida’s then-16-year-old son, Pierre, under the tolerant eye of his parents.
A cursory examination reveals the strong Jewish identity of these intellectuals, all of them quite well known and influential—one might call it a microcosm of The Culture of Critique. Sarah Kofman is Holocaust-obsessed, with a large dose of Freud, perhaps the iconic Jewish philosopher (I hesitate to call him a psychologist) of the 20th century. She argued that “among the many human capacities, the ability to kill and the ability to ‘tenir parole’ (that is to say, to speak and to let speak, but also to keep promises) are the two most important. To learn to read well is to teach others to ‘tenir parole.’ In doing so, one impedes killing, that is to say, one postpones the return of Auschwitz.”
Szondi was very close to Paul Celan, the Holocaust poet, and wrote the first book of criticism on Celan. Hélène Cixous is a feminist theorist who has used Derrida-type ideas to deconstruct traditional attitudes about women and sexuality. In many ways she is a female version of Derrida:
Contemporaries, lifelong friends, and intellectuals, Jacques Derrida and Cixous both grew up as French Jews in Algeria and share a “belonging constituted of exclusion and nonbelonging”—not Algerian, rejected by France, their Jewishness concealed or acculturated. In Derrida’s family “one never said ‘circumcision’ but ‘baptism,’ not ‘Bar Mitzvah’ but ‘communion.’” Judaism cloaked in Catholicism is one example of the undecidability of identity that influenced the thinker whom Cixous calls a “Jewish Saint.”
Avital Ronell was one of the first translators of Jacques Derrida’s work into English; “she in effect introduced his work to the American academy.” Like Derrida, her works are “relentlessly destructive”; “rigorous interruptions of certitude.” She envisions a postfoundational era –an era in which “all the transcendental navigation systems are down.”
The article notes that Derrida has been criticized because his writings “lead to ‘nihilism,’ which threatens to ‘efface many of the essential differences between Nazism and non-Nazism.’” However, Derrida’s writings have certainly not had any effect on the power of the Holocaust industry, and indeed, some of Derrida’s biggest boosters have been intellectual Holocaust activists. But Derrida’s writings have been part and parcel of the ideology of the deconstruction of Western culture and the belief systems that sustained it in the past (e.g., Christianity, nationalism) or could be recruited to save it now (race realism and evolutionary theories of the ethnic basis of cultural conflict in the West since at least the beginning of the 20th century). As I noted in CofC, quoting Derrida scholar John D. Caputo:
The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and native tongue. . . . The idea is to disarm the bombs . . . of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants, . . . all of whom . . . are wholly other.
It is of course revealing that academics who are concerned about the possibility that deconstruction could lead to an inability to condemn National Socialism and are concerned that deconstruction would undermine the foundation of the Holocaust as the central icon of post-World War II Western society would never express concerns about the role of deconstruction in undermining Western self-confidence and will to resist the invasion of millions of “others.” This is particularly the case among the associates and intellectual descendants of Derrida who now staff elite academic departments of humanities throughout the Western world.
Facing the Future as a Minority
Was the Immigration Act of 1924 Illiberal?
Noam Chomsky said that, in his opinion, Derrida in his later writing was playing with the French intellectual elite, seeing what he could get away with.
Cixous also wrote a book about Derrida called “Jacques Derrida: A Jewish Saint.”
Derrida’s critique of Heidgger (if that is what it can be called) can only be properly understood when it is understood that Heidegger’s thought was, as far as a properly Western future was concerned, the most salutary thinker of the last 150 years. Derrida hated Heidegger’s later thought precisely because it was capable of nourishing a Western Renaissance.
I don’t even regard Derrida as a philosopher in the true sense. He was a Marxoid ethnic activist who dressed up his rabid anti-White activism in opaque pseudo-academic verbiage. His was simply the French face of the Frankfurt School. Speaking of which, check out this interview with the Devil himself (Marcuse) from the seventies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pzfy2izu44
In the modern world, how much of this phenomena of being a crypto-Jew is explicitly known to the Jew in himself and how much is implicit or unconscious? Of course, historically there have been Jews who were very consciously aware that they were hiding. But I wonder how much self awareness there is in the case of someone like Derrida or Christopher Hitchens?
It’s been said that the best way to fool others is to first fool yourself. and this kind of self deception has been documented in evolutionary biology. Of course, many Jews are quite aware they are working to explicitly undermine Western Civilization and White culture. But many seem to act more on an half-formed instinct to side with other Jews and denigrate the larger society they are in.
It’s tragic what they’ve done.
why crypto? he’s everywhere touted as a 100% kosher ashkenazi Jew. not that it makes any difference as to the balderdash he has produced and that was triggered, as he states himself somewhere, by the sad fact that he had been, as a Jew, prohibited to enter a French school.
I think he identifies as a Sephardic Jew (i.e, marrano)
The majority of contemporary Eastern European Jews are Crypto-Jews.
Most of them were communists so they had to downplay their Jewish identity, in order to deceive Gentiles into thinking that communist parties were not Jewish.
Many of them are still hiding their Jewishness, especially those who are now involved in globalist-leftist international organizations like the Open Society Institute.
But their Jewishness is still obvious to everyone (mostly because they tend to form social, political, family and other relations with other Jews).
One of those “famous” Crypto-Jews is Žarko Puhovski (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BDarko_Puhovski).
He translated the works of the Frankfurt Schools in Croatian, and has been until recently leader of the Soros-funded leftist organization called “the Helsinki Committee”.
His brother Nenad (another hard-core leftist) is much more open about his Jewishness:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nenad_Puhovski#cite_note-0
Derrida was Sephardic, not Ashkenazi. He was both crypto and non-crypto.
sorry, my mistake.
what means both crypto and non-crypto?
He was crypto in his youth. From the late 1980s he gradually came out of the closet.
Saussure gave us Linguistics; Levi-Strauss’ Structuralism de-centered and provided the framework.
Post-Structuralists (following hints in Freud, and in order to castrate Nietzsche) read Nietzsche as a sort of linguist, not as a metaphysician or as a sort of ontologist. Post-Structuralists and Deconstructors like Derrida, for whom all real meaning is purportedly in what a text doesn’t say, brought Marx and his idea of eternal historical-cultural struggle to the Seder. In a sort of kosher full-circling he (and others) matched this Freudo-Marxist-Linguistic hybrid to the way Torah is traditionally interpreted in Midrash, and then applied it to the cultural products of the West.
Post-Structuralists and Deconstructors imitate rabbis ancient and modern tickled pink by the notion of Torah’s supposed interminable interpretability; as they say of Torah: “Turn it and turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.” When matched with Freud and Marx, this means everything about, say, Shakespeare or the Constitution of the United States, that a Jewish English or Law professor at one of our Ivy League universities can do to serve his ethnocultural agenda. It’s a hyper-sophisticated mode of bullshit, buttressed by a secret ancient pseudo-pedigree, and in which nothing is ever final or complete; it thereby allows them to undermine authority while indulging in endless “interpretation” of “texts.” Instead of the infinity of Yahweh (and the creative staving-off of the boredom of 2500 years of being confined to a single book, surely) as propellant, for those like Derrida the infinitude of the godhead has been replaced with the notion of the eternal Marxist struggle, and the text is Middlemarch (which is fair game for Jews) instead of Deuteronomy (which is not). Like the ancient rabbis, they and their progeny churn out universes of erudite nonsense pointing towards an imaginary Heaven; in the case of Derrida and company, it is Marxist discourse on their favorite subjects: “gender” and “race” and “power” and “capital” pointing at a purported earthly Utopia. But its purpose is not impartial analysis, of course, but to dismantle anything perceived as threatening to Jews by exposing it as a ‘myth’ and then framing it as nothing more than a “discourse”– a complex, dangerous and destructive word-game (!). Anything that doesn’t serve Jewish interests is freely ‘interpreted’ via inversions and reversals in typically “bold” analyses that would make an honest person cringe. If that method fails or is simply untenable, however, whatever it is is outright destroyed as racist, sexist, bourgeois & et cetera. And, of course– as if it were some sort of Neo-Jewish-Gnostic cult-speak– it’s all written in a hermetic jargon that only the initiated can understand, but once understood it’s clear that the purpose is serving their fellow wordmongers laboring in the only way the Tribe (and their goy dupes) know how. They also follow Freud in imitating the Midrashic methodology of creating exegeses based on supposed puns and supposed wordplay, as well as by heavy reliance on abstruse parsing and etymologizing to ferret out chains of supposedly meaningful linguistic associations. Also like the rabbis, they are fond of projecting themselves and their methodology into earlier texts that could have no knowledge of them, pointing it out as a discovery, and then congratulating the author on his prescience, as well as patting themselves on the skullcap for finding it.
All this wretched stuff was pressed into service against Western Art and Law and cultural ideas and values.
But of course, since it is a tool created to break down the West, they never really turned this mode of ‘analysis’ on the Jews themselves, as KMD rightly points out.
Derrida’s philosophy was pretentious nonsense; the paradigmic case of Jews hyping one of their own until he was accepted as a profound thinker.
Exactly. Kevin M
it’s truly amazing how common the “guru phenomenon” is in Jewish intellectual history. It’s one of the things I’ve learned recently from this site. I read somewhere that Chomsky was the most widely cited intellectual of the 20th century. Even giving him full credit for his work in linguistics (which I can’t judge), that’s ridiculous.
From Culture of Critique:
“Lyons (1982, 73) finds that ‘most Jewish Communists wear their Jewishness very casually but experience it deeply. It is not a religious or even an institutional Jewishness for most; nevertheless, it is rooted in a subculture of identity, style, language, and social network. . . . In fact, this second-generation Jewishness was antiethnic and yet the height of ethnicity.’ ”
It just so happens that I was going through the names of Americans listed on the Venona papers yesterday to try and determine how many of the spies/informants (for the Soviets) were jewish. My internet searches were a bit tedious, as suspects with seemingly jewish names (which were a majority) usually didn’t have noteworthy religious affiliations, at least according the internet sources I found. “Crypto-jew” seem to be the rule of thumb here. Presumptuousness about one’s jewishness based on a surname, however, has led to problems on another blog recently, so I wanted to be a bit more factual.
Is there a list on the net that specifically identifies which of the Venona suspects were jewish? Surprisingly, my searches didn’t find any. I certainly don’t want to reinvent the wheel.
Some obviously weren’t jews- Alger Hiss, the Browders and Beth Bentley, Of course, some names are a safe bet, like Jacob Epstein and Sol Bernstein, and I don’t bother checking. Is this info in the Culture of Critique? (I’ll read it soon, I promise.) If anyone can direct me to this info, I’d appreciate it.
That period of the Verona Project is fascinating. Quite a few of those spies were Jewish. I haven’t found any master list yet, but figures like Harry Dexter White were Jewish and he was a senior official at the Treasury Dept. with access to FDR.
Below is a link from Pravda, so take it as a sketchy source, but still may be of value. It discusses the Jewish to provoke a war between Japan and the US. I suspect this is how real conspiracies work. They go in an work with a situation that is already amenable to manipulation.
http://engforum.pravda.ru/showthread.php?82879-VENONA-PROJECT-reveals-Soviet-Spies-sucker-USA-and-Japan-into-war-against-each-other
Also, note this rather chilling plan that was authored by Harry Dexter White for Germany after the way. Of course, remember this was in the heat of the war around 1944.
“White was the principal architect behind the Morgenthau Plan.[3] The Morgenthau postwar plan, as authored by White, was to take all industry out of Germany, eliminate its armed forces, and convert the country into an agricultural community, in the process eliminating most of Germany’s economy and its ability to defend itself if attacked. A version of the plan, limited to turning Germany into “a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character”, was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ”
Sounds pretty much the plan they have for America today. FYI, White (Weiss) died of a heart attack shortly after testifying at the HUAC and defending himself against the charge of being a communist spy. Glad to hear he died young.
Thanks for the link, Jeff.
The Morgenthau plan, had it been implimented in it’s original form, might’ve been a war crime on the scale of the holocaust. I’ve read it could’ve led to the deaths of 10 million Germans. An act of revenge, if there ever was one.
Secretary of war Henry Stimson was outraged by it. Churchill hated it, too, but they had him over a barrel.
For the cryptos, in Spanish, the spelling should probably be “marano” as “marrano” means ‘pig’ in Spanish (as does ‘puerco’, etc.). I’m sure many will find humor in that.
The porcine connotation was definitely part of the original meaning of the term. Marranos weren’t well liked by the Spaniards. Kevin M
I view the crypto-Jew phenomenon, particularly on the ostensibly universalistic Left, as an epically cynical ploy by Jewry to hoodwink and manipulate those in the West by pursing the Jewish nationalist interest under the auspices of pursing the universal interest.
For example, universal “social justice” was the pretense used by the Communists to break the Christian order in pre-Soviet Russia; crypto-Jews new the main idea behind exaggerated claims of social Injustice was to discredit Christianity in order to get a Jewish foot in the door to open the floodgates for a crypto-Jewish nationalist takeover of the state, which is exactly what happened for a time with the Jewish Bolsheviks before Stalin brought down the hammer.
Of course in the West, the other institutionally tribal “minority” factions recognize Jewry’s angle as a vast scam and shakedown, and correctly view Jewry as an integral element of the larger left-wing swindle, but there are plenty of gullible and earnest Whites on the Left who honestly believe these Jewish-nationalist lefties are working for universal human rights AND Jewish rights, or even universal human rights and against Zionism.
The crypto-Jews make it possible to successfully ear whisper/pass off policies that are actually in the Jewish nationalist interest as being in the universal interest, similar to Joe Lieberman successfully passing off U.S. policies that are actually engineered to serve the Israeli interest and damaging to the American interest as being in U.S. interests. The crypto-Jews are simply more slippery and suave than the Lieberman Jews, just as certain Lefty Jewish billionaires like Bloomberg are more slippery and suave than, say, the Sheldon Adelsons and the Haim Sabans. Perhaps the lefty crypto-Jews are the slipperiest of them all.
IMO, unless a political Jew is aggressively anti-Zionist like Philip Weiss (who is nonetheless in deep denial about Leftism/liberalism as a Trojan horse for the Jewish nationalist interest in the West) or even “anti-Semitic”, he’s not to be trusted. History demonstrates as much.
I’d say the rational position for a white person is not to trust ANY Jew at all. Deception and self-deception are so hard-wired into their DNA that I wouldn’t even trust an ostensibly anti-Semitic Jew. Marx made what could be regarded as anti-Semitic statements, yet he was a catastrophe for Western civilisation and white people. With Jews there is ALWAYS a hidden agenda.
I think its reasonable to strongly suspect Marx wrote “On the Jewish Question” merely to shore up his universalist cred with left-wing Gentiles, particularly given his close formative association with Jewish Zionist, anti-German racist Moses Hess. Weiss, on the other hand, basically threw away his career as a journalist to take up the Jewish question as a full time occupation, and while openly leftist, he’ll often suboordinate the left-wing interest to nail the Jewish interest. Outside of the Jewish question, I wouldn’t trust Weiss on politics, but IMO, he “gets” the problem. There are other Jewish ethnics who get it, as well: Gilad Atzmon, Nathanael Kapner, etc.
My personal rule of thumb is: If they’re regularly accused of anti-Semitism by the usual suspects, they might be trustworthy.
*When I refer the “problem,” I don’t mean the existence of Jews is a problem, I mean the existence of tenacious Jewish nationalism in the West is a problem for the same general reasons that the existence of tenacious Islamism in the West is a problem. To deny that either is a problem is intellectually dishonest and totally irresponsible, and is a betrayal of young Westerners and their entitlement to a Western civilization heritage.
I’m trying to figure Rudolf Arnheim out.
“Rudolf”.
LOL.
What is it with all you people?? I always thought that anti-Semitism
ended with the Nazis! All this detailed descriptions of Jews and
all the “horror” which Jews evoke at every hand is just downright
silly. Try using some real, down-to-earth reason as you talk
about other people who just might be a little different from you,
and just might be a little more intelligent than you.
Just in case you wonder, I am not a “crypto-Jew” in disguise.
I am of Scottish descent (proudly), and am a Baptist, with a
PhD from a major private Southern university. Get real, all of
you anti-Semites!!!
Dr McCullough. Activist Jews aren’t ‘just a little different from you’. They are implacable enemies of Western European civilisation and HATE Christians like you and everything you stand for. Read Professor MacDonald’s Culture of Critique and get back to us when you have familiarized yourself with the issues. Good to hear you’re proud of your Scottish descent – if you want people like yourself to still exist in 100 years time you have a duty to educate yourself about the role of organised Jewry in the decline of the West.
Dr. McCullough, are you an open fan of White culture? It’s mighty interesting that you wind up on this site and use your real name (supposedly). What is your PhD in? Where do you teach? How did you find yourself to this site? Did you read all the articles and go through all the commentary?
I suspect you’re more proud of the prefix “Dr.” than you are of being Scottish, being as you’ve tagged it to the front of an otherwise lovely name.
Look, this is standard procedure around here…some self-righteous academic pops in now and then and thinks their PhD is gonna carry some weight with people who’ve probably done five times the reading (and CRITICAL THINKING!!!) on the subject that they themselves have.
I am married to a university professor, so I’m painfully aware of the mental/psychological “uniform” that all of you are required to wear. We aren’t impressed.
Not every view expressed here is reflective of every other view expressed here, and there may be valid arguments against the positions that some of us take, but “you oughta be ashamed of yourself!” ain’t one of ‘em. C’mon “doc”, start thinkin’ like a PhD.
The problem of crypto Jews is a serious one IMO for all the reasons above. I think someday everyone should have mandatory DNA testing to determine our ethnic background. This information should further be accessible by the public. To people who have nothing to hide, this should not be a problem.
Geiseric: “Derrida was Sephardic, not Ashkenazi. He was both crypto and non-crypto.”
Many Jews practice double-speak. In the morning they are Jews, in the afternoon they are no longer really Jews. They feel they belong to the Jewish people but still claim to belong to the French people, the English people, the German people, and so on. There is no coherence in what they say.
Wikipedia says that Derrida was a representative of the French Theory school. The main authors of the school were Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida (Jewish), Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, Louis Althusser(Jewish), Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous(Jewish).”
I think it should be called the Franco-Jewish theory. Those authors were criticized in the book Fashionable Nonsense (1997), by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Wikipedia says the stated goal of the book “is not to attack “philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general…but to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism.” In particular to “deconstruct” the notion that some books and writers are difficult because they deal with profound and difficult ideas. “If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing.”
Sokal and Bricmont’s book didn’t mention Derrida. Maybe it is was safer not to mention too many Jews in their book, so they would not seem specifically critical of Jewish charlatanism.
The likes of Derrida did not only claim to be French. They were the essence of French and Parisian intelligence. In fact, they were Frencher than the French.
In the second part of the 20th century, many people in France used to be unhappy about America’s cultural domination. They took consolation in the thought that French culture was much subtler than American culture. Unfortunately, the French thinkers who symbolized French intelligence in the mass media were Jewish fakes (and their French sidekicks).
In France, no other public radio station is more heavily Jewish than “Radio France Culture”. The name is misleading because it lets people think that it is about the culture of France, when in fact, it has become a Jewish station, full of phony fakes. They talk a lot about things like the holocaust, psychoanalysis, Jewish thinkers, third-world intellectuals, slavery in the USA, and so on. And they still go on about people like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze…
Even before Jewish influence became so prevalent, French elites may have had a reputation of being frivolous, superficial, intellectual show-offs. Maybe it is in the national character, but I think it has a lot to do with the political centralization in Paris, and government intervention in public intellectual life. As there is no lack of French intellectual poseurs, Jewish charlatans could easily pass as French charlatans. But I think the French were never as bad as the Jews. I used to see myself as a common sense Breton, in contrast to the French effete intellectual fakes who kept rambling on the state radio. But now I think that French intellectual quackery is largely a Jewish thing. Not all of them are Jews, but I doubt people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault, for example, would have had the same career without Jewish support.
On Radio-France-Culture, they used to have a program where the Jewish radio hosts and their Jewish guests would reminisce about the good old days in pre-independence Algeria. French writer Renaud Camus complained about that in a book that was published ten years ago. As a reaction, there was a huge Jewish campaign of vilification against Camus in French newspapers, and Derrida took part in the campaign. He signed a text that called Renaud Camus’ comments criminal opinions. A quote from that text: “Celui qui pense cela, écrit cela et publie cela, qu’il y a trop « d’autres » ici et trop de « juifs » là, pense, écrit et publie des opinions criminelles, racistes et antisémites. Elles ne relèvent pas de la liberté d’expression.” (Anyone who thinks, writes, and publishes that, anyone who says there are too many “others” here and too many “jews” there, thinks, writes and publishes criminal, racist, and antisemitic opinions. It doesn’t come under the heading of free speech).
As far as I am concerned, the real discrimination comes from the Jews who have transformed Radio-France-Culture into a Jewish station.
At the time, the minister of culture Catherine Tasca also issued a absurd statement: “as many proponents of racist theses, Renaud Camus says he is not an antisemite, but, at the same time, he would have us believe that the programs’ contents could be influenced by the composition of the teams.” She said she would support the radio station’s director Laure Adler if she sued Camus.
The whole anti-Camus campaign was a confirmation of the Jewish domination of the French media. I think Tasca was much too close to Jewish circles, and this is also true of Frédéric Mitterrand, the current minister for culture. Also, Sarkozy’s wife has had a son by Jewish radio host Raphaël Enthoven who works for Radio-France-Culture. And in 1994, Derrida’s wife remarried to Jospin, who was France’s prime minister at the time of the Camus affair. She used to work at the EHESS school (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), which is about as Jewish as France Culture.
Here is wikipedia’s (sanitized) account of the Renaud Camus affair: “In his Diary of 1994 (published in 2000 under the title “La campagne de France”), Renaud Camus commented on the fact that the membership of a regular panel of literary critics supposed to cover a broad range of literary genres in a programme series (“Panorama”) run by the French national radio (France Culture) comprised a majority of persons of Jewish descent who tended to exclusively focus discussions on Jewish authors and community-centered issues. This comment, often misquoted in the French media at that time, caused widespread controversy and drew much criticism from observers like the noted French journalist Jean Daniel, who described Camus’ remarks as anti-Semitic.”
“….this means everything about, say, Shakespeare or the Constitution of the United States, that a Jewish English or Law professor at one of our Ivy League universities can do to serve his ethnocultural agenda. It’s a hyper-sophisticated mode of bullshit, buttressed by a secret ancient pseudo-pedigree…”
Idk, Hasbara: one Derrida teacher known to me, who was paid mega-money, had the average mental breakdown during all the crises, whether Paul de Man was a nazi, or psycho Althusser killed his wife, or whatever. The teacher, like many others, was seriously psycho, either too fat or too skinny, and already trying to quit smoking, but couldn’t, so forced grad students to hold and dole out cigs, and could be see alone in diners looking supposedly intense reading some crap, like Althusser who just came out and said he was crazy and just spouting off and it really wasn’t philosophy. Honestly, it never looked “sophisticated,” much less hyper-sophisticated. These were people the average student didn’t want in his/her homes. Many went onto other lives outside that crap. They never looked back.