Jewish Ethnocentrism

Jewish “Anti-Semitism”

Some of the worst atrocities committed against Jews were by other Jews. In particular the Jewish power elite have inflicted heinous violence and death on the Jewish masses, though other infighting and control dramas amounting to pogroms and terrorism are part of Jewish history as well. By no means exhaustive, we will review just some of the “anti-semitism” Jews have committed against their own kind.

The Levite Priests

When the ancient Hebrew patriarch Moses descended from Mt. Sinai, having received the Ten Commandments from the Hebrew tribal god Yahweh, he found his people straying from their faith and worshipping a golden calf under the leadership of Aaron. Such idolatry was not permitted by Yahweh, and Moses was commanded to enact vengeance on the idolators.

Those who were faithful among the Hebrews gathered with Moses and received their instructions. They took up swords and spears and went among the wayward people, slaughtering men, women and children. They even murdered some of their own immediate family members and close clan kin.  3,000 blasphemous Hebrews were slaughtered. These were the Levis, Moses’ own clan, especially zealous vengeful slaughterers.

Afterward, Yahweh through Moses rewarded the Levis for their faith and devotion in carrying out Yahweh’s vengeance, and bestowed on them a spiritual leadership over all the Hebrews. These became the Levite Priests. Their cruelty, deceit, blood-lust and terrorism over the Hebrews and others they encountered went on to become legend. Whether this story is itself legend or contains historical fact, it is undeniably a case of Jewish “anti-semitism”. 

Radicals vs. Moderates. Kevin MacDonald writes: 

Zionism is an example of an important principle in Jewish history: At all the turning points, it is the more ethnocentric elements—one might term them the radicals—who have determined the direction of the Jewish community and eventually won the day.3 As recounted in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Jews who returned to Israel after the Babylonian captivity energetically rid the community of those who had intermarried with the racially impure remnant left behind. Later, during the period of Greek dominance, there was a struggle between the pro-Greek assimilationists and the more committed Jews, who came to be known as Maccabeans.

At that time there appeared in Israel a group of renegade Jews, who incited the people. “Let us enter into a covenant with the Gentiles round about,” they said, “because disaster upon disaster has overtaken us since we segregated ourselves from them.”

The people thought this a good argument, and some of them in their enthusiasm went to the king and received authority to introduce non-Jewish laws and customs. They built a sports stadium in the gentile style in Jerusalem. They removed their marks of circumcision and repudiated the holy covenant. They intermarried with Gentiles, and abandoned themselves to evil ways.4 The victory of the Maccabeans reestablished Jewish law and put an end to assimilation.

 The Pharisees and Jesus

It’s hard to know whether this example is mythology or history, though devout Christians would insist it happened literally as described. Either way, Jewish “anti-Semitism” is deeply codified in the Christian religion.

If Jesus truly existed as an historical person, he was most likely a Jew, or more properly a Hebrew or Israelite, descended from King David. Jesus began his ministry at age 30, and it included deposing the ‘money changers’ from the temple, and challenging the authority of the Sanhderin council, a body of Hebrew or Israelite leaders that today we would call Jews. The ‘money changers‘ were certainly what we would call Jews as well.

The Sanhedrin council arranged for Jesus to be apprehended by the Romans. When the Romans gave the crowd—mostly Jews—the option to crucify Barabas or Jesus, Sanhedrin agents in the crowd incited it to condemn Jesus, and so he was crucified and apparently killed by the Romans. This is one of the more flagrant cases of Jewish “anti-semitism”, since certain Jews—the powerful Sanhedrin—oversaw the brutal torture and execution of another Jew, Jesus the Nazarene. Whether this is mythological, historical or some combination is irrelevant to our theme: Jew-on-Jew hate.

Jacob Frank

This son of a Rabbi was one of the most depraved madmen of all time. He declared himself the reincarnation of the Jewish Messiah, and many other Jews were willing to recognize this and follow him. Frank interpreted a verse from the Talmud to mean that if all Jews were to become sinners, the prophecy of the Jewish paradise on Earth would ensue.  Talmud Sanhedrin 98a states “The Son of David (Jewish Messiah) will come only in a generation that is entirely innocent… or in a generation that is entirely guilty…”So Jacob Frank set about enacting evil in the most grotesque ways, engaging in incest, sodomy, polygamy, orgiastic rituals, providing his own wife (or both of them) to his followers for sexual sport, and other depravities in order to create the entirely guilty generation.

 

We have two different accounts of the story from there. One says his perversion and depravity became known to other local Jews, and they excommunicated him and his followers, banishing them from the Polish town. One reason they did this was because the Frankists were burning Talmuds and accusing the other Jews of blood libel, conducting occult rituals by torturing children to death and drinking the blood and anointing their bodies with it.  Another account says that after their excommunication, the Frankists sought refuge with the Catholic Church. In exchange, the Church required the Frankists to denounce their fellow Jews by burning their Talmuds and accusing them of blood libel. Either way, this was a case of vicious Jewish in-fighting. Jewish “anti-semitism” was inflicted in both directions. 

The SS Patria

On November 25, 1940, the SS Patria, a passenger ship operated by the British was prepared to leave Haifa harbor in Palestine enroute to Mauritius. Too many Jewish “refugees” from the beginning of World War II in Europe were coming to Palestine illegally, and the British were trying to prevent Arab unrest due to excessive Jewish illegal immigration into Palestine. The Rothschild bankers and other Jewish Zionist zealots at the time were eager to place more Jewish residents in Palestine in preparation for declaring their new state of Israel. Zionists had even arranged a deportation plan with the National Socialist government of Germany called the Haavara or Transfer Agreement, where Germany could rid itself of troublesome Jews in an orderly fashion, and Zionists could increase their stocking of Palestine with Jews.

However, the British refused to allow the up to 1800 Jewish “refugees” on the Patria to stay in Palestine. but before it could depart for Mauritius, a bomb exploded at the water line, blowing a six-meter hole in the hull and sinking the Patria in the shallow port. About 270 passengers were killed, mostly Jews though including around 50 British crew members.

At first authorities and media blamed Arabs for the bombing, then later declared that the passengers themselves detonated the bomb, so committed were they as Jews to remain in Palestine that they would risk their own lives rather than let the British deport them. Much later, in 1957, the man who actually placed the bomb, Munya Mardor, wrote a confession of his crime, claiming that there was no intention to sink the ship, only to disable it. But obviously, the project entailed severe risks to other Jews that he, as a member of the Zionist terrorist organization Haganah, was willing to take. It also emerged that another Jewish terror group, the Irgun, had tried to place a bomb a few days prior, but failed. Irgun became today’s Likud party in Israel. Mardor eventually became the director general of the Israel Weapons Research and Development Authority. Jewish terrorists and mass murderers are promoted for their service.

Mardor’s Haganah officer in charge was Yitzak Sadeh, who was in turn under the command of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department head Moshe Sharett. Sharett went on to become Israel’s second Prime Minister after David Ben Gurion, who was the official head of the Jewish Agency at the time, but was away in the US on other terrorist business.[1]

This act left hundreds of Jews dead at the hands of other Jews. The death of innocent British crew members doesn’t factor into the analysis. The placement of European Jews into Palestine was a fundamentalist goal of Zionist Jews, and the deaths of hundreds of other Jews was an acceptable sacrifice to ensure it.

Rabinnical “Anti-Semitism”

A great deal can be written on the brutality and cruelty Jewish Rabbis have inflicted on their own Jewish populations, mainly in order to control them, including strict isolation from other liberating influences. Here we will take only a few examples from the iconic insider analysis by Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, the Weight of 3000 Years:

In the period 1500-1795, one of the most superstition-ridden in the history of Judaism, Polish Jewry was the most superstitious and fanatic of all Jewish communities. The considerable power of the Jewish autonomy was used increasingly to stifle all original or innovative thought, (and) to promote the most shameless exploitation of the Jewish poor by the Jewish rich in alliance with the rabbis…[2]

The Jewish religion Judaism established from the beginning a totalitarian mind control over its adherents/victims resulting in subjection to Rabinnical authority:

According to (Rabbi) Hadas, a crucial feature of the Platonic political system, adopted by Judaism as early as the Maccabean period (142–63 BC), was ‘that every phase of human conduct be subject to religious sanctions which are in fact to be manipulated by the ruler’. Judaism adopted what ‘Plato himself summarized [as] the objectives of his program’, in the following well-known passage:”
‘The principle thing is that no one, man or woman, should ever be without an officer set over him, and that none should get the mental habit of taking any step, whether in earnest or in jest, on his individual responsibility. In peace as in war he must live always with his eyes on his superior officer. … In a word, we must train the mind not to even consider acting as an invidual or know how to do it. (Laws, 942 ab)’
If the word ‘rabbi’ is substituted for ‘an officer’ we will have a perfect image of classical Judaism. The latter is still deeply influencing Israeli-Jewish society and determining to a large extent the Israeli policies.[3]

Rabbis had been in the habit of killing Jews who departed from strict Talmudic doctrine. One wayward Jew was boiled alive in the public baths.

In the late 1830s a ‘Holy Rabbi’ (Tzadik ) in a small Jewish town in the Ukraine ordered the murder of a (Jewish) heretic by throwing him into the boiling water of the town baths.

Other Jews were poisoned to death by their Rabbis. Kevin MacDonald notes:

During 1848, when the (Austrian) regime’s power was temporarily weakened, the first thing the leaders of the Jewish community in the Galician city of Lemberg (now Lvov) did with their newly regained freedom was to poison the liberal rabbi of the city, whom the tiny non-Orthodox Jewish group in the city had imported from Germany.[4]

These groups were highly authoritarian—another fundamental feature of Jewish social organization.32 Rabbis and other elite members of the community had extraordinary power over other Jews in traditional societies—literally the power of life and death. Jews who informed the authorities about the illegal activities of other Jews were liquidated on orders of secret rabbinical courts, with no opportunity to defend themselves. Jews accused of heretical religious views were beaten or murdered. Their books were burned or buried in cemeteries. When a heretic died, his body was beaten by a special burial committee, placed in a cart filled with dung, and deposited outside the Jewish cemetery. In places where the authorities were lax, there were often pitched battles between different Jewish sects, often over trivial religious points such as what kind of shoes a person should wear. In 1838 the governor of southwestern Russia issued a directive that the police keep tabs on synagogues because “Very often something happens that leaves dead Jews in its wake.”33 Synagogues had jails near the entrance, and prisoners were physically abused by the congregation as they filed in for services.

Conclusion

Kevin MacDonald describes the basic dynamic of division within the Jewish community:

  • Zionism began among the more ethnocentric, committed segments of the Jewish community (1880s).
  • Then it spread and became mainstream within the Jewish community despite its riskiness (1940s). Supporting Zionism comes to define what being Jewish is.
  • Then the most extreme among the Zionists continued to push the envelop (e.g., the settlement movement on the West Bank; constant pressure on border areas in Israel).
  • Jewish radicalism tends to result in conflicts with non-Jews (e.g., the settlement movement); violence (e.g., Intifadas) and other expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment increase.
  • Jews in general feel threatened and close ranks against what they see as yet another violent, incomprehensible manifestation of the eternally violent hatred of Jews. This reaction is the result of psychological mechanisms of ethnocentrism: Moral particularism, self-deception, and social identity.
  • In the U.S., this effect is accentuated because committed, more intensely ethnocentric Jews dominate Jewish activist groups.
  • Jews who fail to go along with what is now a mainstream position are pushed out of the community, labeled “self-hating Jews” or worse, and relegated to impotence.

We have reviewed only some of the many acts of Jewish “anti-Semitism” in history. Certain Jews, mostly the ruling elite, have inflicted heinous death and torment on other Jews—a testament to their fanaticism, authoritarianism, and powerful sense of collectivism. The Jewish community has often been divided, with the more deeply committed, ethnocentric, and fanatical Jews forcing others to conform to their way of seeing things or separating themselves from the rest. And at all the major turning points in history, the radicals have won the day in conflict with their less ethnocentric brethren, quite likely leading to genetic selection for ethnocentrism within the Jewish community.

In general, in the last few centuries at least, the more ethnocentric White people in Western countries have not been victorious. The West is far more prone to individualism than any other culture area, but there is certainly variation among us for ethnocentrism, although we have not been under centuries of selection for ethnocentrism, as have the Jews. Quite the opposite. But the bottom line is that the Zionists were successful, and we have to think about what that means for us. Israel would not have become a state without a great many deeply ethnocentric Jews willing to engage in any means necessary to bring about their dream: a state that would be a vehicle for their ethnic interests. It would not have come about without the most radical among them—people like Vladimir Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and groups like Haganah and Irgun. And although there have been American Jews, especially in the early decades of the twentieth century, who vigorously rejected Zionism, the vast majority of the organized American Jewish community is now intensely Zionist and doing all they can to support Israel, even as it’s become obvious that Israel is an apartheid state energetically engaged in ethnic cleansing–while at the same time working to accuse the White majority of racism if they resist their dispossession.

The impending dispossession of Europeans will only be avoided if people with the same level of dedication and ethnocentrism as found over the centuries among Jews can be found among the political and activist class of Europeans. Just as the radical Jews have been willing to push their less radical brethren out of the Jewish community, we must be willing to do the same.

_____

[1]     Ryan Dawson, “This day in History Jewish terrorists sank ship full of Jewish refugees”, November 26 2017, Anti NeoCon Report,   https://www.ancreport.com/day-history-jewish-terrorist-sank-ship-full-jewish-refugees/

[2]     Ibid, p. 54

[3]     Ibid, p. 14

[4]     Ibid, p. 18

Leonard Bernstein and the Jewish Cultural Ascendancy – PART 2

Go to Part 1. 

Bernstein’s Mahler obsession

I have previously examined the tendency of Jewish intellectuals to use their privileged status as the self-appointed gatekeepers of Western culture to advance their group interests through the way they conceptualize the artistic and intellectual achievements of Jews and Europeans. Jews have long used their cultural dominance to construct “Jewish geniuses” to enhance ethnic pride and group cohesion (think Einstein). In this endeavor, Jewish music critics and intellectuals have transformed the image of the Jewish composer Gustav Mahler from that of a relatively minor figure in the history of classical music at mid-twentieth century, into the cultural icon of today. The tendency among Jewish intellectuals has been to overstate and ethnically-particularize Jewish achievement, thereby making it a locus for ethnic pride. Meanwhile, European achievement is downplayed, or where undeniable, universalized and thus neutralized as a potential basis for White pride and group cohesion.

Leonard Bernstein played a leading role in the development of the Mahler cult and the movement of the composer’s music to the center of the classical repertory. The proliferation of performances of Mahler’s music in the United States between 1920 and 1960 can be ascribed to the combined efforts of Bernstein and a coterie of Jewish advocates like Bruno Walter, Arnold Schoenberg, Theodor Adorno, Aaron Copland, and Serge Koussevitzky. Lionizing Mahler as the saintly Jewish victim of European injustice, the Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg “canonized Mahler as ‘this martyr, this saint’ and in a Prague lecture in March 1912 announced: ‘Rarely has anyone been so badly treated by the world; nobody, perhaps, worse.’”[1] Frankfurt School music theorist Theodor Adorno later took up this theme, affirming that:

Mahler’s tonal chords, plain and unadorned, are the explosive expressions of the pain felt by the individual subject imprisoned in an alienated society. … They are also allegories of the lower depths of the insulted and the socially injured. … Ever since the last of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen Mahler was able to convert his neurosis, or rather the genuine fears of the downtrodden Jew into a vigor of expression whose seriousness surpassed all aesthetic mimesis and all the fictions of the stile rappresentativo.”[2]

Bernstein likewise conceptualized Mahler as a cruelly persecuted and alienated Jew torn apart by dualisms: “composer/conductor, Christian/Jew, sophisticate/naïf, provincial/cosmopolitan — all of which contributed to the musical schizo-dynamics of his texture, and his ambivalent tonal attitudes.”[3] Bernstein advocated for Mahler with missionary zeal, introducing the symphonies to audiences from New York to Vienna. He considered Mahler “the twentieth century’s musical prophet, whose extremes spoke for the times, and thought his symphonies constituted ‘as sacred a bunch of notes as Brahms’s symphonies.’”[4] While all Mahler’s works were available singly on recordings, it was Bernstein who first recorded the complete set of symphonies. Read more

Edward Dutton on The Culture of Critique: The importance of Jewish ethnocentrism

Edward Dutton, who is affiliated with Richard Lynn’s Ulster Institute for Social Research, has written an article supporting the main contention of my book, The Culture of Critique in an academic journal, Evolutionary Psychological Science: “MacDonald’s model is the more plausible hypothesis due to evidence that people tend to act in their ethnic group interest and that group selectedness among Jews is particularly strong, meaning that they are particularly likely to do so.” This is a most welcome development, and I agree with Dutton’s comments. Here I note some elaborations and a possible anomaly.

Dutton defends the multi-level selection model. The argument that group selection applies to Judaism is contained in the first book, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (APTSDA). The argument there really has two parts—a cultural group selection model described in Chapter 1, and the idea that Jews are high on ethnocentrism, discussed in Chapter 8. Both aspects are important in thinking about how group selection applies to traditional Jewish groups. Read more

Review: Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History by Todd M. Endelman

Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History
Todd M. Endelman
Princeton University Press, 2015

“A Jewish question would still exist, even if every Jew were to turn his back on his religion and join one of our major churches.”
Karl Eugen Duehring, 1881

At the heart of the Jewish Question lies an extraordinary level of ethnocentrism. The tremendous capacity of Jews for mutual co-operation and the reinforcement of group identity is one of the behavioral markers that set them apart from most other human populations. This is the case even in comparisons with other populations that, like the Jews, have historically performed roles as ‘middle man minorities.’ Jewish ethnocentrism has thus deservedly been the major focus of attention when scholars or activists have decided to investigate Jewish group behavior. In general these investigations have rested on the obvious expressions of ethnocentrism — clannishness in business, Jewish endogamy, group political strategies, and the manifestation of Jewish group allegiance even in secular cultural contexts (‘Jews without Judaism’).

By contrast, the story of those Jews who ostensibly left both Judaism and their community, apparently cutting all ties with their ethnic group, has been little explored or discussed in explorations of Jewish ethnocentrism. This story is, however, an important one, and it becomes even more important in a contemporary context in which Jewish intermarriage, particularly in the United States, is reaching unprecedented levels.

Key to understanding Jewish ethnocentrism should be an assessment of its strength, not just in terms of its obvious successes and manifestations, but in terms of its failures — when did it fail, how often did it fail, and why? I chose to read Todd Endelman’s Leaving the Jewish Fold as part of my own deeper investigation into this issue — to probe the weaknesses of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy for a future book project on that theme. However, rather than being surprised, I found that it largely confirmed my pre-existing theoretical framework. Endelman merely confirms that Jewish conversions to religions other than Judaism have historically been extremely rare and, despite the title of the book, the author provides very little evidence to suggest that the ‘assimilation’ undertaken by those Jews who ‘left the fold’ was radical, or even genuine. To use Endelman’s terminology, ‘drift and defection’ has always been a small, though passionately resisted phenomenon on the periphery of Jewish populations, serving paradoxically at times, like anti-Semitism, to reinforce group cohesion at the core. But in the overwhelmingly majority of cases an extremely high level of ethnocentrism is a constant feature of Jewish history.

The book is neither entertaining nor intellectually stimulating. Leaving the Jewish Fold is the third book by Endelman that I’ve read, following his Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656–1945 (1990) and The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (2002). His histories tend towards the type of overview perspective that can be useful when trying to get to grips with major events and personalities, but which lack insight or real interest even on a potentially oppositional level — his stances and arguments are often so weak (or non-existent) that they are difficult to detect. This makes his work slightly more factually correct than, for example, the work of the late ethnic activist Robert Wistrich, but ultimately less ‘fun’ to engage with or argue against. The fact that Endelman continues to be published by elite academic publishing houses like Princeton University Press should be regarded as a symptom of ongoing Jewish influence in Western academia [discussed further here] rather than being suggestive of the quality of his work. Like earlier examples of his work, Leaving the Jewish Fold is for the most part a collection of anecdotes and statistics, derived almost exclusively from published secondary sources, and often involving very little or no original research. The structure and narrative cohesion in this instance, where the material concerns Jews who ostensibly abandoned Jewish life, is haphazard and often confusing. As just one example, during his weak first chapter on the medieval period Endelman inexplicably plucks anecdotes from the eighteenth century. Read more

Eric Turkheimer: Jewish Ethnic Interests Masquerading as Ethical Concerns

Recently behavior geneticist Eric Turkheimer participated in a commentary on Charles Murray and the issue of race differences in intelligence. Since I am not a behavior geneticist, I won’t argue the point that there is no present methodology to test for group differences in traits like IQ, although the recent method of estimating group IQ on the basis of the frequencies of the all the known genes associated with IQ seems promising. I focus here on Turkheimer’s claims on the ethics of studying race differences.

In previous comments on the science of race differences, Turkheimer noted:

Why Race Science is Objectionable

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.

This is a naked appeal to the ethnic interests of his ethnic group — exactly the problem with the “scientists” reviewed in The Culture of Critique. Race realists associated with the Alt Right, on the other hand, have tended to go with the data. They accept the findings that the IQs of Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians are higher than White means. The main issue, after all is White identity and White interests in being able to construct their own societies as other groups around the world have done and continue to do — whatever their talents or deficiencies compared to other groups.

Turkheimer continues:

Hopefully I am beginning to offend you. Why? Why don’t we accept racial stereotypes as reasonable hypotheses, okay to consider until they have been scientifically proven false? They 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. No reasonable person would be offended by the observation that African people have curlier hair than the Chinese, notwithstanding the possibility of some future environment in which it is no longer true. But 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.

The reason we must not delve in to race science thus depends on “intuition.” Unfortunately, we all have different intuitions. Perhaps he is talking about the intuitions of liberal university professors. Or activist Jews. Read more

Torah Study with Richard Spencer

Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute has emerged as the new media villain du jour, replacing the post formerly held by David Duke in the public imagination. Recently I watched an exchange between him and Hillel Rabbi Matt Rosenberg during the Q&A portion of a talk Spencer gave at Texas A&M University.

Rabbi Rosenberg starts by saying “You come here with a message of radical exclusion. My tradition teaches a message of radical inclusion and love, love as embodied by Torah. Will you sit down with me, and study Torah, and learn love?” he continues.

As a thought experiment I’d like to imagine that at this point Spencer said “Yes. I will study Torah with you Rabbi.” The two of them find a quiet corner somewhere on the Aggie campus, and sit down together.

I thought they might begin with a brief discussion of Hebrew relations with the Amalekites, a nomadic people of Israel descended from Esau, whom the Torah instructs Jews to utterly destroy:

It shall be that when the Lord, your God, gives you rest from all your enemies all around, in the Land that the Lord, your God, gives you as an inheritance to possess it, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under the heaven. Do not forget it. (Deuteronomy 25: 19)

Elsewhere: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox, and sheep, camel and ass” (Samuel I, 15:3).

All of the Amelakites  — men, women, children, babies, and even livestock — are to be slaughtered. Radical, and in its own way, quite inclusive. Read more

America as a Promised Land for Jews: Threatened by Muslims, Israel and White Identity?

Note: This is an edited, linked version of my talk at the NPI conference in Washington, DC, November 19, 2016.

I am going to talk about Jews. It’s not that I relish doing this, but somebody’s got to do it, and it’s definitely a subject that needs to be addressed as best we can, fairly and factually, and with the understanding that we are not talking about all Jews but about activist Jews and the general thrust of the organized Jewish community.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, Jews saw America as a promised land, whose “streets are paved with gold” as they often wrote to their families in Europe. Jews were therefore staunch advocates of unrestricted immigration. Writing in 1914, University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross believed that liberal immigration policy was exclusively a Jewish issue and he quoted the prominent author and Zionist pioneer Israel Zangwill who articulated the idea that America is an ideal place to achieve Jewish interests.

America has ample room for all the six million [Russian Jews]; any one of her states could absorb them. And next to being in a country of their own, there could be no better fate for them than to be together in a land of civil and religious liberty, of whose Constitution Christianity forms no part and where their collective votes would practically guarantee them against future persecution. (Israel Zangwill, in Ross 1914, 144)

Zangwill wrote a famous play called The Melting Pot that premiered in 1908 in Washington, DC, the heart of American political culture. What’s interesting is his idea that America was a land where all the old ethnic hatreds would be abolished in a grand symphony of ethnic harmony. Sound familiar? In the play a Jewish immigrant fleeing Russian pogroms comes to America, writes a great symphony and marries a wealthy Christian woman. Audiences were wildly enthusiastic:

There were cries for Zangwill after every scene, and President Roosevelt himself joined in the applause. During the play he sat next to Mrs. Zangwill “and positively raved.” When Zangwill took his bows afterward, “the President shouted across the theater, ‘that’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill.’ “2 … Throughout the drama [the Jewish character] argues that the United States is a land of universal love and brotherhood. He sees it as a place in which the divisions among men will soon disappear. … Within the stirring and seething of the vast cauldron, the “Great Alchemist” was melting Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow. He was fusing together East and West, North and South, pole and equator, crescent and cross.”[1]

So there you have it. Crescent and Cross. Black, Yellow and White all coming together in blissful harmony — less than 50 years after the Civil War. The reception given the play, and remember this was over a century ago, shows that this optimistic image appealed to many Americans—prominent Americans like President Teddy Roosevelt. Read more