Jewish Ethnic Networking

The SS Empire Windrush: The Jewish Origins of Multicultural Britain

‘Will you find out who is responsible for this extraordinary action?’
Oliver Stanley, M.P., June 1948.

The SS Empire Windrush holds a special place of infamy in the minds of British Nationalists. When the ship arrived at Tilbury docks from Jamaica in June 1948, carrying 417 Black immigrants, it represented more than just a turning point in the history of those ancient isles. In some respects it signalled the beginning of mass, organized non-White immigration into northwest Europe. Back in November, TOO published my research on the role of Jews in limiting free speech and manipulating ‘race relations’ in Britain in order to achieve Jewish goals and protect Jewish interests. I’ve recently been revisiting some of my past essays, delving deeper and expanding each of them in an effort that I hope will result in the publication of a book-length manuscript on aspects of Jewish influence. During this process, I’ve been particularly compelled to research further into the role of Jews in Britain’s immigration and racial questions. What I present in this essay is a survey of some interesting facts, which I hope to document and integrate further as my work on the volume proceeds.

One of the things that struck me most when I began looking into the origins of multicultural Britain was the hazy and confused background to the arrival of that notorious ship. First though, I might point out one of history’s bizarre ironies —  the vessel that would signal the end of racial homogeneity in Britain started life as a Nazi cruise liner. The ship began its career in 1930 as the MV Monte Rosa. Until the outbreak of war it was used as part of the German Kraft durch Freude (‘Strength through Joy’) program. ‘Strength through Joy’ enabled more than 25 million Germans of all classes to enjoy subsidized travel and numerous other leisure pursuits, thereby enhancing the sense of community and racial togetherness. Racial solidarity, rather than class position, was emphasized by drawing lots for the allocation of cabins on vessels like the Monte Rosa, rather than providing superior accommodation only for those who could afford a certain rate. Until the outbreak of war, the vessel was employed in conveying NSDAP members on South American cruises. In 1939 the ship was allocated for military purposes, acting as a troopship for the invasion of Norway in 1940. In 1944, the Monte Rosa served in the Baltic Sea, rescuing Germans trapped in Latvia, East Prussia and Danzig by the advance of the Red Army.

Read more

The Friends of Greville Janner

See also Francis Carr Begbie’s “The Silence of Greville Janner”

With the clamour of protest over the decision not to prosecute one of Britain’s most senior Jewish politicians over child rape allegations showing no sign of abating, it is worthwhile looking back at the career of the man at the centre.

Even without these lurid claims, Greville Janner must rank as one of the most unpopular specimens to ooze his way onto Parliament’s famous green benches.

With his pink carnation, clammy handshake and faint after burn of eau-de-cologne, his grinning approach was guaranteed to send a shiver down the spines of the toughest parliamentarians, even in his own Labour Party.

Nevertheless, this ingratiating, limp-wristed flatterer has prospered over the decades of his slithering along the corridors of power, not least due to his astute playing of the Jewish ethnic card.

His modus operandi was as a backroom operator, a Mr Fixit, a dispenser of favours and passer-on of messages. He was one of those types who would insist on doing someone a favour whether it was wanted or not. In his autobiography he says it was his mother who taught him his most important political lesson — there are few problems that could not be solved with a quiet word in the right ear. Read more

Susan Sontag’s Jewish World

A theme of The Culture of Critique is that Jewish intellectual movements created a fundamentally Jewish intellectual and social world whose members promoted each other and socialized with each other. People outside that world didn’t matter. They could be subject to mobbing-type attacks or simply ignored.

The New York Intellectuals spent their careers entirely within a Jewish social and intellectual milieu. When Rubenfeld (1997, 97) lists people [Clement] Greenberg invited to social occasions at his apartment in New York, the only gentile mentioned is artist William de Kooning. Revealingly, Michael Wrezin (1994, 33) refers to Dwight Macdonald, another Trotskyist contributor to [Partisan Review, the flagship journal of the New York Intellectuals], as “a distinguished goy among the Partisanskies.” Another non-Jew was writer James T. Farrell, but his diary records a virtually all-Jewish social milieu in which a large part of his life was spent in virtual non-stop social interaction with other New York Intellectuals (Cooney 1986, 248). Indeed, [Norman] Podhoretz (1967, 246–248) refers to the New York Intellectuals as a “family” who, when they attended a party, arrived at the same time and socialized among their ingroup. (CoCChapter 6, pp. 220-221)

A discussion in the Forward of a recent biography of Susan Sontag is a nice illustration of this phenomenon (Susan Sontag’s Not-So-Secret and Not-Always-So-Jewish History: Biographer Demonstrates Author’s Persistent Charms). 

Very soon, Sontag would draw inspiration from a series of Jewish mentors and friends, or as Schreiber puts it, the “dominant, exotic European-Jewish father figure to whom Sontag was attracted throughout her career.” These include the political philosopher and classicist Leo Strauss and the sociologist Philip Rieff with whom she studied at the University of Chicago— she married Rieff at age 17. At Harvard, Sontag was taught by another sociologist, Jacob Taubes; his wife Susan’s fascination with the French Jewish philosopher Simone Weil inspired one of Sontag’s ardent campaigns to get the American reading public to heed hitherto overlooked writers and thinkers. Her publicization of “the achievements of such authors as Walter Benjamin [of the Frankfurt School], Elias Canetti, Paul Goodman, and Leonid Tsypkin, who wrote the novel “Summer in Baden Baden,” are among Sontag’s most sympathetic labors.

While respectful of literary elders, Sontag had an ironic attitude toward a few “dominant, exotic European-Jewish father figures” such as French Jewish philosopher Jean Wahl, whom she met in Paris in 1958. The septuagenarian Wahl, who had escaped from Drancy internment camp during the Nazi occupation, was mocked by Sontag for having “three holes in his pants through which his underpants were visible.” By the time she moved to New York in 1959, her Jewish influences were her contemporaries, often gay writers including the novelist Alfred Chester, poet Richard Howard and film critic Elliott Stein. The last-mentioned apparently inspired Sontag to write her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” which, if necessarily of its time, still has value as a cultural artefact today.

Read more

Steven Pinker on Harvard Admissions: Ignoring the Elephant in the Room

Steven Pinker (“The Trouble with Harvard“) argues that students should be selected on the basis of standardized testing. He is tone deaf on Jewish overrepresentation and on the underrepresentation of non-Jewish Whites.

Like many observers of American universities, I used to believe the following story. Once upon a time Harvard was a finishing school for the plutocracy, where preppies and Kennedy scions earned gentleman’s Cs while playing football, singing in choral groups, and male-bonding at final clubs, while the blackballed Jews at CCNY founded left-wing magazines and slogged away in labs that prepared them for their Nobel prizes in science. Then came Sputnik, the ’60s, and the decline of genteel racism and anti-Semitism, and Harvard had to retool itself as a meritocracy, whose best-and-brightest gifts to America would include recombinant DNA, Wall Street quants, The Simpsons, Facebook, and the masthead of The New Republic.

This story has a grain of truth in it: Hoxby has documented that the academic standards for admission to elite universities have risen over the decades. But entrenched cultures die hard, and the ghost of Oliver Barrett IV still haunts every segment of the Harvard pipeline.

Sounds like Pinker is implying that WASPs like Oliver Barrett IV still run the show at Harvard, keeping out the Jews and anyone else who can’t trace their ancestry to the Mayflower.

The reality, of course, is there is more than a grain of truth to the idea that admission to Ivy League universities is anything but meritocratic. In fact, Jews are vastly overrepresented on the basis of any available metric, while Whites and Asians are underrepresented, as Ron Unz has shown. Pinker is aware of Unz, but interprets Unz’s results as showing only that the deck is stacked against Asians, with the implication that folks like Oliver Barrett IV are the beneficiaries of unearned privilege:

Jerome Karabel has unearthed a damning paper trail showing that in the first half of the twentieth century, holistic admissions were explicitly engineered to cap the number of Jewish students. Ron Unz, in an exposé even more scathing than Deresiewicz’s, has assembled impressive circumstantial evidence that the same thing is happening today with Asians.

Read more

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Jewish Ethnic Networking

American Whites of European extraction — particularly White males — are being systematically displaced in the very country they built. This surely will not be news to TOO readers. As editor Kevin MacDonald has already pointed out, the appointment of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court is testimony to this trend:

Kagan’s arrival on the Supreme Court is a sort of official coming out party for the new elite. It’s been there for quite some time, but the Kagan nomination is an in-your-face-demonstration of the power of Jewish ethnic networking at the highest levels of government. And the first thing one notices is that the new elite has no compunctions about nominating someone for the Supreme Court even though she has no real qualifications. So much for the principles of merit and inclusion: Inclusion does not apply to WASPs now that they have been deposed. And the principle of merit can now be safely discarded in favor of ethnic networking. As I noted previously,

This is a favorite aspect of contemporary Jewish self-conception — the idea that Jews replaced WASPs because they are smarter and work harder. But this leads to the ultimate irony: Kagan isremarkably unqualified to be a Supreme Court Justice in terms of the usual standards: judicial experience, academic publications, or even courtroom experience. Rather, all the evidence is that Kagan owes her impending confirmation to her Jewish ethnic connections (see also here).

The same goes for Jewish over-representation in elite academic institutions — far higherthan can be explained by higher Jewish IQ. Does anyone seriously think that Jewish domination of Hollywood and so much of the other mainstream media  (see, e.g., Edmund Connelly’s article) is about merit rather than ethnic networking and solidarity?”

In conclusion, MacDonald writes, “Whatever else one can say about the new elite, it certainly does not believe in merit.” Allow me to offer a newer case in point — that of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who grew up in a Jewish family in Miami. Sandberg’s key break was admission to Harvard, despite the fact that her academic background hardly seemed to warrant it. As she admits in her best-selling book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. (New York, Random House, 2013), she was clearly not prepared for the rarified atmosphere of Harvard:

Freshman year of college was a huge shock for me… [M]y professor of political philosophy assigned a five-page paper. I was panicked. Five whole pages! I had only written one paper that length in high school, and it was a year-long project. How could anyone write five pages in just one week? I stayed in every night, plugging away, and based on the time I put in, I should have gotten an A for effort. I got a C. It is virtually impossible to get a C at Harvard if the assignment is turned in. I am not exaggerating — this was the equivalent of a failing grade.”

How unprepared was she? Well, in a class called “The Concept of the Hero in Hellenistic Civilization,” she hadn’t even heard of the two main texts, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Meanwhile, most of her classmates had already read them, and about a third of them had read them in the original Homeric Greek. Yet there sat Miss Sandberg right beside them. Read more

Victoria Nuland’s family ties: The Permanent Government in action

Intertwined Jewish power families are an important aspect of Jewish history, cementing business relationships by creating networks of close relatives who married only among themselves—e.g., the Court Jews of 17th- and 18th-century Europe (see here, pp 150-152).  We see echoes of that in the contemporary world, as among the neocons.

As with the other Jewish intellectual movements I have studied, neoconservatives have a history of mutual admiration, close, mutually supportive personal, professional, and familial relationships, and focused cooperation in pursuit of common goals. For example, Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary, is the father of John Podhoretz, a neoconservative editor and columnist. Norman Podhoretz is also the father-in-law of Elliott Abrams, the former head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (a neoconservative think tank) and the director of Near Eastern affairs at the National Security Council. Norman’s wife, Midge Decter, recently published a hagiographic biography of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose number-two and number-three deputies at the Pentagon, respectively, are Wolfowitz and Feith. Perle is a fellow at the AEI. He originally helped Wolfowitz obtain a job with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1973. In 1982, Perle, as Deputy Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, hired Feith for a position as his Special Counsel, and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Negotiations Policy. In 2001, Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz helped Feith obtain an appointment as Undersecretary for Policy. Feith then appointed Perle as chairman of the Defense Policy Board. This is only the tip of a very large iceberg. “Neoconservatism as a Jewish movement” (p. 32)
Ethnic networking and ties cemented by marriage are on display in the flap over Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s phone conversation with Geoffrey Pyatt, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine. As VDARE’s Steve Sailer puts it, Nuland is a member of
a talented, energetic [Jewish] family that is part of the Permanent Government of the United States. It doesn’t really matter who wins the Presidential election: some Kagan-Nuland will be doing something somewhere in your name and on your dime.
The Kagan connection is via her husband, Robert Kagan. As noted by Your Lying Eyes, “Robert and brother Fred seem to have strategically implanted themselves in key policy-making positions within the Democratic and Republican party apparatus. Robert is embedded at Brookings, while Fred is ensconsed at AEI.”
So we have another Jewish neocon family tree, beginning with Donald Kagan, a Yale historian whose history of the Peloponnesia War has been used by neocons as a rationale for invasions of countries Israel doesn’t like (see Sailer). Donald Kagan was also a signatory to a 2002 letter to George W. Bush put out by Bill Kristol’s Project for the New American Century (PNAC) equating threats to Israel (Iran, Syria, Iraq) with threats to the U.S.
The next generation, Fred Kagan (American Enterprise Institute) and Robert Kagan (Brookings) are neocon stalwarts as well. (E.g., Donald, Robert and Frederick are all signatories to the neocon manifesto, Rebuilding America’s Defenses (2000), put out by PNAC.)   They and their wives, are all graduates of elite universities and well entrenched in the neocon thinktank/government infrastructure. Fred’s wife Kimberly (nee Kessler) is the head of the Institute for the Study of War and holds typical neocon positions.
And although U.S. policy toward Ukraine likely stems from other issues besides the neocon hostility toward Russia (the latter due to issues such as Putin’s crackdown on the oligarchs and Russia’s support of Israel’s enemies, Iran and Syria), there be little doubt that Nuland’s energetic support of the pro-EU opposition to the Yanukovych government dovetails with the attitudes of her neocon network. Our Permanent Government at work.

Samuel Goldman on Nathaniel Rich: “mild nepotism” or ethnic networking?

Jewish ethnic networking has been a theme at TOO, ranging from appointments to the Supreme Court (notoriously, Elena Kagan), admissions to elite universities, the world of art (e.g., Mark Rothko), literature (e.g., pro-Israel writers Shani Boianjiu and Risa Miller), and philosophy (e.g., Spinoza). Not to mention the intellectuals discussed in The  Culture o f  Critique.

Now comes an article by Samuel Goldman in The American Conservative Mild Nepotism and the Illusion of Meritocracy,” the point of which is that the path of Nathaniel Rich to fame and fortune in the literary world has been greatly aided by having a “famous name and the connections that often go along with it.” Rich is the son of former New York Times columnist Frank Rich who has come to the attention of TOO several times, including for a piece of Jewish triumphalism in which, like the New York Times editorial page, he eagerly looks forward to an America with a White minority.

Goldman cites Margaret Sullivan’s comment in the Times:

It’s beginning to feel like Nathaniel Rich Month at The Times. The author’s new novel was reviewed in the Arts section on April 10, then again in the Sunday Book Review on April 14. Mr. Rich also wrote an essay for the Sunday Book Review, with many references to that novel, “Odds Against Tomorrow.” In addition, the Editors’ Choice section of the Sunday Book Review listed Mr. Rich’s novel second on its list.

Read more