In the Matter of Leo Frank

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In 1913 Mary Phagan, a 13-year old girl, was murdered. The absolutely barebones account of the fascinating story behind this event and all that followed is that Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman who managed the factory in Atlanta where Mary worked, was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death by hanging. His sentence was later commuted to life in prison by the governor of Georgia after several rounds of legal appeals failed to change the judgment of the trial court. While in prison, Frank’s throat was slit by another prisoner, and soon thereafter a group of Georgians broke into the prison and lynched Frank.

Leo Frank at his trial, 1913

The Leo Frank case is important if only because it continues to be the focus of Jewish activism. Recently a film on the events, The People vs. Leo Frank, was released, to much fanfare by the ADL, including special screenings and teacher guide books for use in classrooms. Leo Frank, therefore, has become an icon of all that was wrong with the old America and a morality tale with important lessons for the present— a miniature version of the Holocaust. Like the Holocaust, it is used as an indictment of the entire culture in which the events occurred — the trailer for the film begins ominously: “Set against the backdrop of an American South struggling to shed its legacy of bigotry and xenophobia …” More on that later.

In this series of articles, I review and discuss some of the writing about the Leo Frank affair, including especially Steve Oney’s very balanced and exhaustive account, And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank.

However, before embarking on that adventure, I should say that my first exposure to the Leo Frank affair was in reading Albert Lindemann’s important 1991 book,The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Incidents. Lindemann’s writings on Jewish history and anti-Semitism, most notably Esau’s Tears, are by far the most balanced and nuanced available from academic historians. In The Jew Accused, he takes the view that Jewish accounts of the Frank affair have virtually assumed anti-Jewish conspiracies: “People then and later have in some sense wanted to find anti-Semitism. They have not been entirely disappointed in their search, but they have also been inclined to dramatize inappropriately or exaggerate what they found of it” (p. 236).

LEO FRANK: THE TRIAL OF LEO FRANK IN 1913 WAS MOTIVATED BY THE RAMPANT ANTI-SEMITISM OF THE TIME. THE FOUNDING OF THE ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE THAT SAME YEAR WAS MOTIVATED BY A PASSION TO ERADICATE SUCH INJUSTICE AND BIGOTRY. DESPITE HIS INNOCENCE, FRANK WAS ABDUCTED FROM JAIL IN 1915 AND LYNCHED. ADL REMEMBERS THE VICTIM LEO FRANK AND REDEDICATES ITSELF TO ENSURING THERE WILL BE NO MORE VICTIMS OF INJUSTICE AND INTOLERANCE.

Whereas much of the writing on Mary Phagan’s murder makes it into a Jewish morality tale emphasizing Southern racism, bigotry and xenophobia — not to mention Jewish victimhood, Lindemann notes that Jews were better received in the South than in the rest of the country. There were relatively few Jews in the South, and those who did live there did not act as a “dissenting minority” (p. 224) — that is, they were not engaged in constructing a high profile culture of critique that has been the hallmark of Jewish intellectual activity since the Enlightenment. Jews participated in Southern culture like other Whites. Before the Civil War, they bought and sold slaves and they owned them. Southern attitudes toward Jews “tended toward philo-Semitism” (p. 227).

In Atlanta in 1910, Jews comprised around 2.5% of the population. Jewish businessmen “were respected, and Jewish enterprise was generally welcome.” The one fly in the ointment was the influx of a number of Russian Jews — often described as “barbaric and ignorant” by the established German Jewish community. These Jews often owned saloons and were accused of selling liquor to Blacks, thus contributing to public disorder. After the race riot of 1906, the liquor licenses of several Jewish-owned saloons were revoked.

Nevertheless, Jews had become well-integrated into the elite of Atlanta — far better than was the case in most areas of the North at this time. (Frank was part of the elite of Atlanta’s Jewish community — president of the local B’nai B’rith.) Although the Populist leader and newspaper publisher Tom Watson eventually blamed northern Jewish media and financial interests for the controversies following Frank’s trial and publically advocated Frank’s lynching, Watson eschewed the Jewish angle during the period leading up to the trial, even defending Jewish revolutionary anarchist Emma Goldman, and despite the fact that Jewish business interests in Georgia and elsewhere were opposed to Populism and its issues, such as ending child labor — an issue near and dear to Tom Watson’s heart.

Given this background (and the reputation of Jews as not involved in violent crime), “Frank’s Jewishness weighed at least as much in his favor as against him” (p. 236). Indeed, “Frank’s lawyers and his other defenders, in order to strengthen their case, overstated the role of anti-Semitic prejudice in his arrest” (p. 237), thereby setting up later exaggerations of the role of anti-Jewish attitudes. The defense also appealed to anti-Black attitudes in their attempt to pin the crime on a Black man, describing the prime Black suspect (Jim Conley) as a “dirty, filthy, black, drunken, lying nigger” (p. 245).

Lindemann points out that the evidence at the time of Frank’s arrest was “of far greater substance and persuasiveness than that presented against [Alfred] Dreyfus” (p. 239), the French Jew accused of treason whose case became a cause célèbre for the forces combating anti-Jewish attitudes. In particular, Frank was one of very few people at the factory when the murder occurred. Several female employees testified at a Grand Jury hearing that he had made improper advances toward them and a male acquaintance of Mary testified that she had complained about Frank’s advances. Other stories alleging that Frank had engaged in perverse sexual behavior at local bordellos and had often used the factory as a place for sexual liaisons appeared in the newspapers. Lindemann writes that later this evidence was “demonstrably false or of uncertain validity” (p. 243), stating, for example, that at least some of the women’s evidence was “unreliable” (p. 243). (Based on Oney’s account to follow, the accusations of Frank’s history of sexual impropriety toward his employees are well-founded.) 

Lindemann also notes that Frank’s statements to the police (that he didn’t know Mary Phagan) conflicted with testimony of employees (that he often called her by name). He also gave “seriously conflicting” accounts of what happened when Mary came to his office to pick up her pay. That he seemed very nervous during questioning and had already hired a lawyer and a private investigator before he was arrested were also seen as pointing to his guilt. The “most incriminating evidence” was that Frank had stated that he was in his office for an hour after giving Mary her pay, but this account conflicted with the testimony of another employee who came to his office at this time. This employee, Monteen Stover,

was not suspected of harboring grudges against him; she testified that he was a kind man and in fact well liked by the women employees. Frank could not satisfactorily explain this episode except to speculate that he may have gone to the bathroom when Monteen came to his office. Frank, furthermore, was never able to provide a widely persuasive account of what he was doing during the hour … when it was believed, according to autopsy evidence, that Mary was murdered. In the evening following the murder he repeatedly called the factory, finally reaching the nightwatchman, Newt Lee, and asked if everything was all right (this was before Lee had found the body). Frank’s explanations for making these calls, that the nightwatchman was fairly new and that he was worried about a recently fired employee, were judged inadequate by many, especially since Frank had never made such calls before this. (p. 246)

Lindemann notes that one of these inconsistencies was noted by Governor John M. Slaton in his statement of commutation. He noted that “Frank had made an engagement on Friday to go to the Base Ball Game on Saturday afternoon with his brother-in-law, but broke the engagement, as he said in his statement, because of the financial statement he had to make up, while before the Coroner’s Jury, he said he broke the engagement because of the threatening weather.”

Lindemann also rejects the theory that Hugh Dorsey, the prosecutor, was “a ruthlessly ambitious man, one who harbored anti-Semitic beliefs and knew perfectly well that Frank was not guilty” (p. 250). This “morality tale”(p. 250) is contradicted by the lack of any indication of animosity toward Jews prior to the trial, his moderate views on Blacks, his Jewish law partner, his Jewish roommate in college, and his support from Jews in running for his office. His concluding summation at the trial included philo-Semitic statements.

Lindemann suggests that the best explanation of Dorsey’s actions is that he genuinely did believe in Frank’s guilt, “as did other astute observers” (p. 252).“In particular Dorsey seems to have been firmly persuaded of Frank’s bad moral character, of his perverse sexual escapades, about which he claimed to have an overwhelming mass of evidence, most of which he did not introduce at the trial” (p. 252).

Nevertheless, Lindemann asserts that “the best evidence now available indicates that the real murderer of Mary Phagan was Jim Conley” (p. 254), a person employed by Frank. Frank, “in spite of some strong evidence against him, was not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, especially in light of the evidence that later emerged” (p. 254).

One gets the feeling, however, that Lindemann himself is far from convinced that Frank was innocent. What was this evidence that supposedly exonerated Frank? Rather than present any obviously exonerating facts, Lindemann instead continues to point to things that support the prosecution case. He notes that Conley’s testimony was “extraordinarily rich in details, sometimes of the most minute and graphic sort” (p. 255). “Many observers simply could not believe that a southern Black, a man with Conley’s supposedly limited mental powers, could make up such an intricate story or even repeat a story in which he had been coached by Dorsey, without tangling himself in contradictions” (p. 255), especially considering that he was cross-examined for 16 hours by lawyers who were “some of the most experienced and sharpest legal minds in the South” (p. 255).

Lindemann also notes that Dorsey would have been foolish to coach Conley on a false story: “It seems … unbelievable that … the prosecution could have been so reckless as to thus risk a humiliating collapse of their case against Frank” (p. 256). Indeed, the careers of the prosecutors would be in jeopardy if Conley had broken down in court and implicated the prosecution in coaching fraudulent testimony. Add to that the fact that before the trial Frank refused an offer to confront Conley. And, even more damningly, Frank refused to implicate two other Black employees, never mentioning Conley to the police, “as if he feared to have Conley interrogated.” Finally, Frank “knew perfectly well that Conley could write (a key point because of the notes left at the scene of the murder) but remained silent when Conley initially denied that he could” (p. 256).

Moreover, Lindemann accepts the idea that whether or not Frank murdered Phagan, there was a great deal of support for the claim that Frank was a sexual pervert. Besides the claims of the prosecution for a mass of evidence that hadn’t been introduced at the trial, the defense at times acknowledged that Frank “had not been perfect in the past” (p. 257). Indeed, Dorsey later stated that he would have brought charges against Frank for sexual perversion and criminal assault if he had been freed of murder charges.

Lindemann also questions the claim that the jury was intimidated by the crowd — the focus of an appeal that was rejected by the US Supreme Court. Such intimidation was not reported by any newspaper, the jury denied that they felt intimidated, and the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that pressure from the crowd “did not have a decisive impact on the jurors” (p. 258). Nevertheless, despite his own marshaling of facts on crowd influence and never citing even one source for the claim of undue influence, Lindemann writes that “these denials [of  pressure from the crowd] are puzzling and finally difficult to believe” (p. 258).

Lindemann pays special attention to the role of Tom Watson in inflaming passions after the trial. But even then, Watson the populist seemed much more motivated by his perception that a rich person was throwing around money in an effort to overturn a just verdict for a heinous crime against a poor southern girl —“that rich men escaped scot-free for doing things that brought down harsh punishment upon the poor” (p. 263). He warned about a “gigantic conspiracy of big money” aimed at undermining the judicial system to free a“rich Sodomite” (p. 263).

“Watson repeatedly observed that a non-Jewish convicted murderer, no matter how flagrantly unjust his trial, would never have benefited from such a massive infusion of money, nor would a non-Jew have benefited from such a network of men who had privileged access to those who formed public opinion in the United States” (p. 266), including especially Adolf Ochs, publisher of the New York Times.

Eventually the Atlanta newspapers got in line in asking for a new trial. Frank petitioned for a new trial some thirteen times, twice going all the way to the US Supreme Court, but failed each time. As Georgia governor John M. Slaton stated in his justification for commuting Frank’s sentence, “A court must have something more than an atmosphere with which to deal, and especially when that atmosphere has been created through the processes of evidence in disclosing a horrible crime” (a reference to the allegations of Frank’s sexual behavior that came up during the trial and in the newspapers).

Lindemann labels Governor Slaton a “heroic figure” for risking his reputation in commuting Frank’s sentence. Nevertheless, he also notes that Frank’s lead defense attorney was Slaton’s law partner and that Slaton had had a Jewish partner in the 1880s. In running for governor in 1916, prosecutor Dorsey alsopointed out that immediately after commuting Frank’s sentence, Slaton had met with Louis Marshall, Frank’s attorney before the US Supreme Court and doubtless the most prominent and visible leader of the American Jewish community at the time. Slaton controlled a very large “slush fund” — doubtless contributed by wealthy Jews — aimed at defeating Dorsey in his campaign for governor of Georgia. (Oney also describes the very warm reception Slaton received on his trip to New York after the commutation.) Dorsey won the election and Slaton never ran for office again in Georgia.

Lindemann points to a number of “minor inconsistencies” brought out by Slaton in his commutation order or at the trial, but none that in his judgment warranted discrediting Conley’s testimony. Rather, Lindemann places the entire weight of his judgment that Frank should not have been convicted on Slaton’s justification for his decision to commute Frank’s sentence. In particular, Slaton noted that during the trial Conley had testified that on the morning of the day of the murder he had deposited a pile of excrement where the elevator landed when it went to the basement (what became known as the “shit in the shaft” issue). He also testified that he and Frank had ridden the elevator to the basement to dispose of Mary’s body. However, the detectives testified that when they climbed down the elevator shaft to search the basement, the pile of excrement had not been crushed as it would have been if the elevator had been used by Conley and Frank to dispose of the body, as per Conley’s testimony. (Oney provides an explanation compatible with Frank’s guilt.)

In the end, Lindemann’s account of the Leo Frank affair is tantalizing, if not definitive. It certainly is a far cry from the account that continues to be disseminated by the ADL. Lindemann’s work is courageous given the previous mainstream scholarship and the continuing campaign by Jewish activist organizations to distort the events into a morality play of evil non-Jews martyring a heroic and upright Jew. Its strong suit is the foregrounding of the murder and trial, showing that anti-Jewish attitudes were not rampant before the trial. As discussed in the following articles in this series, the fact anti-Jewish attitudes developed in the course of the trial is hardly surprising given the course of events.

Kevin MacDonald is editor of The Occidental Observer and a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. Email him.

Race & Religion: Awkward Friends of the White Man, Part II

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A non-White immigrant residing in Europe or America must be bewildered, bedeviled and bemused by the spectacle offered by his White hosts. On the one hand he must be scared to death of those unpredictable, self-assured, conceited White males and their attractive White women who are capable of walking on the moon and curing plague in his jungle or his desert. On the other, he gleefully rejoices when he hears stories of endless religious and ideological conflicts amidst his White hosts. The pristine, pastoral and puerile picture of the White race, so dearly longed for by modern White nationalists, is daily belied by permanent religious bickering, jealousy and character smearing within the White rank and file. Add to that murderous intra-White wars that have rocked Europe and America for centuries, one wonders whether the proverbial and much vaunted Aryan, Promethean, and Faustian man, is worthy of a better future.

For the Greater Glory of God

Surely, the White man saved Greco-Roman Europe from the Levantine Hannibal’s incursion, which nearly resulted in a catastrophe in 216 b.c. at Cannae, in southern Italy. The White man also stopped Attila’s Hunic hordes on the Catalaunian Fields in France in 451 a.d. The grandfather of Charlemagne, Charles Martel, defeated Arab predators near Tours, in France in 732. One thousand years later in 1717, a short and slim Italo-French Catholic hero, Prince Eugene of Savoy, finally removed the Islamic threat from the Balkans.

But the unparalleled White will to power, couched later on in Christian millenarianism, had also prompted large crusades against “infidels.” Their commander in chief, the pious Godfrey de Bouillon, did not have pangs of consciousness after his knights had put to the sword thousands of Muslim civilians in captured Jerusalem, in 1099 a.d.  All was well meant for the greater glory of Yahweh!

The power of the newly discovered universal religion and the expectancy of the “end of history,” later to be followed by bizarre beliefs in “global democracy,” often eclipsed racial awareness among Whites. As a rule, when White princes ran out of Muslim or Jewish infidels — they began whacking each other in the name of their Semitic deities or latter day democracies. The  6’4” tall Charlemagne, in the name of his anticipated Christian bliss, went on the killing spree against his fellow pagan Germans. In 782 a.d. he decapitated several thousand of the finest crop of Nordic Saxons, thereby earning himself a saintly name of the “butcher of the Saxons” (Sachsenschlächter).

And on and on the story goes with true Christian or true democracy believers. No Jews, no Arabs, no communists have done so much damage to the White gene pool as Whites themselves. The Thirty Years War (1617–1647) fought amidst European Christians with utmost savagery, wiped out two thirds of the finest German racial stock, over 6 million people. The crazed papist Croatian mercenaries, under Wallenstein’s command, considered it a Royal and Catholic duty to kill off Lutherans, a dark period so well described by the great German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller. Even today in Europe the words “Croat years” (“Kroatenjahre”) are associated with the years of hunger and pestilence.

Nor did Oliver Cromwell’s troops — his Ironsides — during the English civil war, fare much better. Surely, as brave Puritans they did not drink, they did not whore, they did not gamble — they only specialized in skinning Irish Catholic peasants alive.  Not only did their chief, the Nordic looking fanatic Cromwell consider himself more Jewish than the Jews — he actually brought them back from continental Europe, with far-reaching consequence both for England andAmerica.

A slim, intelligent, Nordic looking, yet emotionally unstable manic depressive, William Sherman, burnt down Atlanta in 1864 — probably in the hopes of fostering a better brand of democracy for the South. We may also probe some day into the paleocortex of the Nordic skull of an airborne Midwest Christian ex-choir boy, who joyfully dropped fire bombs on German civilians during WWII. The results may not be too difficult to detect considering that the same Biblical mindset was reenacted in 2002 in Iraq by G. W. Bush and his advisors enraptured by Talmudic tales of “weapons of mass destruction.”  Biblical or liberal-democratic crimes, when couched in political choseness and theological messianism are perfect tools for a perfectly good consciousness.

Many European White nationalists are dazed at good looking Nordic men and women from the Bible Belt raving, ranting and dancing on TV in trance to Christian-Zionist tunes. Equally stunned are American White nationalists when they observe blood-stained victimhood quarrels pitting Irish against English nationalists, Serb against Croat nationalists, Ukrainian against Russian nationalists, Walloon against Flemish nationalists, Polish against German nationalists, and so on and on.

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The Faith or the Sacred?

No subject is so dangerous to address among White nationalists as the Christian religion. It is commendable to lambast Muslims, who are on the respectable hit-parade of the Axis of Evil. Jews also come in handy in a wholesale package of evil, which needs to be expiated — at least occasionally. But any critical examination of Judeo-Christian intolerance is viewed with suspicion and usually attributed to distinct groups of White people, such as agnostics or modern day self-proclaimed pagans.

Why did the White man accept the Semitic spiritual baggage of Christianity even though it did not quite fit with his racial-spiritual endowments? The unavoidable racialist thinker Hans Günther — a man of staggering erudition and knowledgeable not only of the laws of heredity, but also of comparative religions — reminds us that the submissive and slavish relation of man to God is especially characteristic of Semitic peoples. In his important little book, The Religious Attitudes of the Indo-Europeans, he teaches us about the main aspects of racial psychology of old Europeans.  We also learn that Yahweh is a merciless totalitarian god who must be revered — and feared.

Ancient Europeans did not believe in any kind of salvation. They believed in inexorable destiny. Gods were their friends and enemies, as seen in ancientGreece and Rome. Among old Europeans the notion of polarity between Heaven and Earth, between soul and body, i.e., dualism of any kind, was nonexistent. Man was part of an organic whole, embedded in his tribe and race, and tolerant of others’ religious ideas:

Mutual tolerance of religious forms is a distinctive feature of the Indo-European. The memorial stones in the Roman-Teutonic frontier region reveal through their inscriptions that the Roman frontier troops and settlers not only honoured their own Gods, but also respected the local deity of the Teutons, the genius huius loci. (p.36)

The messianic, chiliastic, or “communistic” mindset was unknown among ancient Europeans. They could not care less which gods other races, other tribes or other peoples believed in. Wars that they fought against the adversary were bloody, but they did not have the goal of converting the adversary and imposing on him the beliefs contrary to his racial heritage. Homer’s epic the Iliad is the best example. The self-serving, yet truly racist liberal-communistic endeavour, to wage “final and just war” in order to “make the world safe for democracy,” was something inconceivable for ancient Europeans.

Zeal to convert and intolerance have always remained alien to every aspect of Indo-European religiosity. In this is revealed the Nordic sense of distance between one man and another, modesty which proscribes intrusion upon the spiritual domains of other men. One cannot imagine a true Hellene preaching his religious ideas to a non-Hellene. (p.36)

A German-British racialist author of the early 20th century, Houston Stewart Chamberlain in his The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century writes that“a final judgment shows the intellectual renaissance to be the work of Race in opposition to the universal Church which knows no Race (p. 326). Unlike Christianity, which preaches individual salvation, for ancient Europeans life can only have a meaning within the in-group — their tribe, theirpolis, or their civitas. Outside those social structures, life means nothing.

In the 1st century, words of far-reaching consequence for all Whites were pronounced by a Jewish heretic, the Apostle St. Paul, to the people of Galatia, an area in Asia Minor once populated by the Gauls (i.e., Celts). Galatia was then well underway to become a case study of multicultural debauchery — similar to today’s Los Angeles:  “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” (Galatians 3:28).

Christianity became thus a Universalist religion with a special mission to transform the Other into the Same. The seeds of egalitarianism — albeit on the religious, not yet on the secular level — were sown. The pagan notion of the mystical sacred was gradually being displaced by the dogmatic notion of one omnipotent faith:

Yahweh in the Bible is not just the only and unique god who wields power. He is only and unique in the sense of his Absolute Otherness. He is only and unique in his own kind — that is to say he is the Absolute Other away from this world. The essence of biblical monotheism is its constitutive dualism …. Where paganism establishes bridges and links, the monotheism of the Bible creates fractures, ruptures, and forbids anybody to span them. Yahweh forbids mixtures between Heaven and Earth, between Man and the Divine, between humans and other living beings, between Israel and the “nations.” (Alain de Benoist, “Sacré païen et désacralisation judéo-chrétienne” in Quelle religion pour l’Europe?[Which Religion for Europe?]1990, pp 30-31, my trans.)

Although Christian Churches never publicly endorsed racial miscegenation, they did not endorse racial segregation either. This was true for the Catholic Church and its flock, as observed by the early French sociologist and racialist Gustave Le Bon. Consequently, Catholic Spaniards of White racial stock in Latin America could not halt decadence and debauchery in their new homelands as WASPs in North America did — at least prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Naturally, it is not only in politics that decadence of the Latin race, which inhabits the south of America, manifests itself. It is in all elements of its civilization. If they were reduced to themselves, these unhappy republics would return to barbarism. All industry, all commerce is in the hands of foreigners, English, Americans and Germans. Valparaiso has become an English town. Nothing would remain of Chile if its foreigners were removed. (p. 86). Gustave Le Bon,  Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples, 1895, my trans.).

Later, in 1938, in light of eugenic and racial laws adopted not only in Germanyand Italy, but also in other European countries and many states in America, Pope Pius IX made his famous statement: “It is forgotten that mankind is one large and overwhelming Catholic race.” This statement was to become part of his planned encyclical under the name “The unity of the human race.”

“The unity of the human race”, as noble as these words may sound, is a highly abstract concept. On a secular level communist and liberal intellectuals constantly toy with it — in order to suppress real tribes, real nations, real peoples and their real racial uniqueness.  Even if this white race, constantly defamed as “wicked”, “racist” , “bigoted” and “fascist,” disappeared from the face of the earth, non-White immigrants know that they would soon have to climb back onto their native tree or return to their despotic cave.

To be continued.

Tom Sunic (http://www.tomsunic.info; http://doctorsunic.netfirms.com) is author, translator, former US professor in political science and a former Croatian diplomat. He is the author of Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age (2007). His new book of essays, Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity, prefaced by Kevin MacDonald, will soon be released. Email him.

How Pro-Life Are White Evangelicals?

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Reginald Thompson: White Evangelicals talk a good game when it comes to being Pro-Life, which is here defined as words or actions that cause more children to have life, and less unborn children to be annihilated in the womb.

But are they just putting on a show to make themselves look righteous, with the possible motive of improving their own self-regard?

To find out I looked at the 2008 Presidential Exit Polls to determine the percentage of voters in the 39 states with the relevant data who described themselves as White Evangelicals.

Then I looked up the Abortion and White Total Fertility Rates for these 39 States.

Now hopefully there’s a positive correlation between White Evangelicals and White Babies, and a Negative Correlation between White Evangelicals and Abortions. For one thing, I really don’t want to be made more cynical than I already am.

Abortion         White TFR
White Evangelical              -.692              +.553

Churched                               -.517               +.399

As can be seen above, both the arrows of correlation are strong and in the predicted direction.

Moreover, we can see that though White Evangelicals are greatly outnumbered by the Churched (here defined as people who report visiting Church at least once a week), they nonetheless have a stronger influence on the Abortion and White Fertility Rates of a State.

And remarkably, even though the positive correlation between percent White Evangelical and the White Total Fertility Rate is smaller than the negative correlation found with Abortion, we find 31% of the State to State variation in White TFR is explained by the Percentage of White Evangelicals in a State.

And this is being accomplished by a group that was only 26% of the voters in the 2008 Election!

Recently on My Blog I reported the correlation I found between White Ethnocentrism, as measured by the capacity to elect Senators against giving Amnesty to Illegal Immigrants, and White Fertility.

Given this finding, I find it extremely notable in this context that Evangelical Protestants were found by a recent poll to have the most Ethnocentric Attitudes toward Immigration of any major American Religious Group:

% Supporting Enforcement over Amnesty

Evangelicals                                    +64%
Other Protestant.                         +41%
Catholics                                          +41%
Jews                                                    +3%

Like I said in my post about ethnocentrism and fertility: Love for one’s family and love for one’s race spring forth from the same roots.  And I think this is the best explanation for my finding that members of the most ethnocentric Major White Religious Group cause the White Birth Rate to go up simply by virtue of there being more of them in a state.

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Reginald Thompson is the Pen Name of an Advisor to an International Software Company. He lives on the American East Coast and is proprietor/manager of a recently created Blog called Statsaholic.

Controlling Historical Memory

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Dovid Katz’s article in The Guardian “Halting Holocaust Obfuscation” is yet another example of Jewish intellectual activists with access to the media attempting to control historical memory in a way that highlights Jewish suffering and presents Jewish behavior as nothing more than innocent victimhood. Katz is determined to disallow any equivalence between the horrors inflicted on the populations of Eastern Europe by the Germans and by the Soviets. He condemns Polish MEP Michal Kaminski, linking to this article, for bringing up Jewish behavior in the Jedwabne incident in which Jews were murdered during the German occupation of Poland during WWII:

One of the participants in the 2001 meeting, Maria Mazurczyk, told us: “I think that Mr Kaminski, like us, wanted everything to be revealed: the times before the war when things were good – and the time of the Soviet occupation when the Jews didn’t respect their Polish neighbours – and later the effect of all this.”

At the time Kaminski condemned Poles who’d killed Jews – though he suggested the massacre was principally carried out by Germans. But it appears his principal concern was with alleged Jewish guilt. Anna Bikont of the liberal Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, who spent much time in Jedwabne in 2001 while researching a book, says: “Mr Kaminski came to the place where an incredible crime was committed – and he told not about the women, children, old people who died in this horrible manner, but he told about Jews who collaborated with Soviets and who killed Poles.”

Would a British politician who’d behaved in a similar way survive in the mainstream of British politics?

Probably not. But that’s only because mentioning Jewish behavior as contributing in even the slightest way to anti-Jewish attitudes is off limits, even if they collaborated with the Soviets against the Poles or against the Baltic peoples. The following is from a review of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together (italicized quotes are translations of Solzhenitsyn):

“Everyone was listening intently to determine if the Germans were already on the way.”

In June and July of 1941 those living in the regions of eastern Poland occupied by the Red Army – Polish farmers, the bourgeoisie, the clergy, ex-soldiers, and intellectuals – all awaited the invasion of German troops. This quote is from the Polish Jewish historian J. Gross, author of the book Neighbors: The Murder of the Jews of Jedwabne.Solzhenitsyn explains why Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Belorussians, Bukowina-, and Moldava-Romanians could hardly wait for the Germans to invade.

Pursuant to his central thesis, Solzhenitsyn writes that without the high Jewish presence among the leaders and executioners of the Bolshevik dictatorship, Lenin’s newly born Soviet state would have been at an end, at the latest, by the time of the Kronstadt Sailors Rebellion in 1921. Solzhenitsyn examines specific decisive questions, as for example: Why, in the period 1939-41, did such a large percentage of Jewry in eastern Poland, Galicia, and in the Baltic States collaborate with the Red Army, Stalin’s secret police, and Bolshevism in general? And why did the pogroms in these regions take place under the slogan “Revenge for the Soviet Occupation”? Solzhenitsyn:

“In eastern Poland, which had been incorporated in the Soviet Union in September 1939, the Jews, especially the younger generation, welcomed the invading Red Army with frenetic jubilation. Whether in Poland, Bessarabia, Lithuania, or Bukowina, the Jews were the main support of Soviet power. The newspapers report that the Jews are enthusiastically supporting the establishment of Communist rule.” (p. 329)

In that fateful year a Polish Jew who had emigrated to France prophesized that the non-Jews who had been subjugated to Bolshevism would one day exact a fearful war of vengeance. In 1939 Stanislav Ivanowich, a left socialist sympathetic to the Soviet Union, warned:

“Should the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks end one day, the collapse will be accompanied by the atavistic, barbaric passions of Jew hate and violence. The collapse of Soviet power would be a terrible catastrophe for Jewry; today Soviet rule equates to Judeophilia.” (p. 310)

See here for a comment on the distortions of Jan Gross’s Neighbors which attempts to blame the massacre solely on the irrational anti-Semitism of Poles. This compilation notes, among other things, that “There was significant collaboration on the part of some Jedwabne Jews with the Soviet invaders from 1939 to June 1941; the victims were primarily the town’s Polish population, several hundred of whom were deported to the Gulag.”

When a significant percentage of people from an alien ethnic group support an invader and collaborate in the deportation of people from one’s own ethnic group, it is not at all surprising that there would be reprisals when there is a shift of power; nor would be be surprising if the reprisals were directed all Jews, not just the ones known to collaborate or sympathize. That’s how our evolved psychology of ethnic competition works.

I notice in my notes that Checinski (1982, 9) writes that “even then [in 1943] there was an attempt to rationalize this blind hatred [of Jews] by recalling the ‘improper’ attitude of the Jewish population in eastern Poland towards the Bolsheviks in September 1939 when the Soviet army, in connivance with the Nazis, occupied their territories.” Checinski also notes that immediately after WWII Jews welcomed the Soviet army and the new regime “with favor if not with outright enthusiasm” and that “the small Jewish community was seen by friends and foes alike as one of the mainstays of the Soviet sponsored regime. This only further alienated it from the great majority of the Polish population” (p. 8). This comment  is highly compatible with Jaff Schatz’s (1991) treatment which I discuss extensively in Ch. 3 of Culture of Critique. It is interesting that American Jewish representatives visiting Poland after the war presented the new Polish regime as “a paragon of liberalism and tolerance, unequaled in Eastern Europe” (Checinski, p. 11).

To conclude, anti-Jewish attitudes in Eastern Europe had a basis in the real behavior of Jews. No doubt the events of 1939 and thereafter were influenced by traditional grievances between Poles and Jews, but actual Jewish behavior during this period is also relevant. Jews were correctly perceived as more welcoming to the Soviets after the 1939 invasion and as more loyal to the Communist regime and as willing executioners of the remnants of Polish nationalism after 1945. (As I and others have noted, the common denominator of the behavior of Diaspora Jews in European countries has been to oppose nationalist movements; further, during this period, Jews throughout Europe and in America saw communism as good for the Jews at least partly because Jews had become an elite in the USSR and the USSR had outlawed anti-Semitism.)

The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Jews were also highly placed in the government and in the security forces. Under these circumstances, social identity theory predicts that Poles would develop the well-attested stereotype of “zydokomuna” (Judeo-Communism) and exaggerate the differences between themselves and all Jews in Poland. It simply reflects typical ethnic conflict that has gone on throughout the ages — nothing more than a reflection of our evolved psychology.

In the West, Jewish activists have had a relatively easy time erecting the image of innocent Jews and evil Nazis as a complete explanation of the events of World War II. This message is much more difficult in Eastern Europe where there is a collective memory of collaboration of Jews with the horrors of communism and in the extermination of nationalist elements of the non-Jewish population.

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Baltasar Nordstrom: Tiger Woods' matrimonial betrayal and its relevance for Whites

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Baltasar Nordstrom: As the new year gets underway and the Tiger Woods affair begins to wind up, Tiger may be about to be given a late Christmas gift that he probably did not want. With the number of his paramours peaking (at least for now) at 14, his badly betrayed wife Elin has reportedly hired a high-caliber attorney for the purposes of divorce. The mass media portray his story, of course, as nothing more than that of a highly talented and tremendously well-compensated American athlete who goes wrong and indulges widely in extramarital affairs with willing, amoral tarts over his five years of marriage. What Tiger did to Nordic Elin is symbolic of a much larger, ongoing phenomenon that goes to the heart of multi-racial, multicultural America. 

Tiger had been marketed by the media and his corporate sponsors as, to quote Lisa Schiffren, “an all-purpose icon: a man of personal rectitude, a lovely smile, apparent openness; a family man, with a lovely wife and two adorable babies.” The Woods image was “constructed for corporate consumption” for business reasons. Though the talent was real, the image was a “fraud,” “an act,” manufactured for corporate profits. He was also, because of the marriage of the dark-skinned Tiger to the pure Nordic (blond, blue-eyed, very White-skinned) Elin, packaged, or at least understood by some to be, to quote Schiffren again, “our first living embodiment of the collective hope for racial reconciliation.” It all went very well for a while until this particular deck of cards came crashing down on November 27th. 

Citing corporate profits as the underlying motive for the construction and maintenance of this false idol only begins to tell the story, however. It is undeniable that large enterprises like Nike, Gillette, AT&T, and Gatorade did have a stake in portraying Tiger as a clean-cut all-American, and, according to Shiffren, some of his philandering, as well as his “personal nastiness, arrogance, and general non-cuddly nature”, may have been known to at least a couple of his corporate sponsors and media outlets. He is rumored to be the most-fined player on the Professional Golfers Association Tour, throwing his clubs and having a dirty mouth (frequent “audible obscenities”), among other things, something that could not have escaped the attention of all his corporate benefactors. Other dynamics are in play, however. 

First, to state the obvious, Tiger himself is a member of the corporate class that has showered him with wealth. His wealth lies somewhere in the $500 million to $1 billion dollar range. The cover-ups of his character flaws, to the extent these cover-ups existed, were done in collusion with him, for his personal profit. He knew he was not the clean-cut, all-American male he was presented as, yet raked in his sponsorship fees nevertheless. 

Second, his philandering could not have happened were it not for his wealth and fame. It is highly unlikely that he would have been the target of so many attractive women if he were a handyman or office clerk, for example. His infidelities were enabled by his membership in his class and are a result of the way wealth and fame are distributed in the United States. 

It would be too much to say that the wealth-infidelity connection is causal, however. Presumably, most wealthy people do not engage in extramarital affairs to the extent Tiger did. Though wealth made it possible, the causality must lie elsewhere. 

This brings us back to the mass media’s portrayal of Tiger’s affairs as the result of the weaknesses of a single man — a man who perhaps let his talent and success go to his head — but his transgressions are the problems of an individual man nevertheless. Other professional athletes like Kobe Bryant, Alex Rodriguez, Michael Jordan, Wade Boggs, and Babe Ruth have had the same problem, though none except for Ruth to the same or greater degree, and there is no reason to suspect infidelity is significantly more typical of professional athletes than of other males. (Joe Namath and Wilt Chamberlain are often included in lists like this, but they frequented women only as bachelors.) The rambunctiousness of professional golfers in particular remains to be documented. Nevertheless, professional athletics does bring with it money and fame, facilitating the sexual and relational appropriation of women. The question is whether this provides a full explanation of Tiger’s proclivities. The answer is that his profession most likely does not, since most professional athletes, at least married ones, abstain from such extensive philandering as Tiger’s. 

Class and profession provide dynamic semi-causal social forces that, as suggested, are insufficient in cases like Tiger’s to explain all forms of behavior. Society comprises other social groupings besides class and profession, however, so for a full analysis of Tiger’s behavior we are scientifically and rationally obliged to look at other social groupings to see if they might explain, or at least add to the explanation of, what Tiger did. This includes racial/cultural heritage. 

Race differences in sexuality are basic to Prof. J. P. Rushton’s life history theoryof race. Rushton finds a general racial ordering from Blacks, to Whites, to Asians such that Blacks show less paternal involvement in children, less pair bonding between partners, and greater attraction to short-term sexual relationships. The theory and data compiled by Rushton suggest that Tiger Woods’ Black racial heritage would be part of the explanation for his behavior. 

For example, according to Treas and Geiden (2000), “There is racial variation in the proportion of families headed by a single parent: 22 percent for white, 57 percent for black, and 33 percent for Hispanic families.” Even though single-parent, the great majority of these “families” were headed by women: 90.1 percent of Black single-parent households and 79.3 percent of White single-parent households. Most Black children under age 18 (58.27 percent) lived with one parent, compared to 23 percent of all White children under age 18 that same year. 

Further, almost 70 percent of Black children are born to single mothers, compared to 24 percent of White children born to single mothers, nearly three times as many. This is a kind of infidelity, a familial and not only marital infidelity, to expand the meaning a bit, that rejects obligations to the woman, marriage, family, and fatherhood even prior to a child’s birth. And, according to Treas and Giesen, being a Black male is associated with an increased risk of infidelity even within marriage. Given Rushton’s theory, it is safe to assume that Black males are more inclined to sexual irresponsibility and opportunism. 

When it comes to infidelity, racial heritage makes a difference and is a likely contributing factor to Tiger Woods’ behavior. But you won’t read about it in the media. 

The author is a freelance writer and uses a nom de plume. 

Reference 

Treas, J & Gieden, D. “Sexual infidelity among married and cohabiting Americans,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 62(1), pp. 48-60, 2000, cited at The Kinsey Institute, “Frequently Asked Sexuality Questions to the Kinsey Institute”: http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/FAQ.html#Treas.

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Jews and immigration policy — Again

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A friend sent along Steve Sailer’s review of historian Otis L. Graham’s  Immigration Reform and America’s Unchosen Future. Misleading title. American immigration policy was chosen. It just wasn’t chosen by the vast majority of the American people, and this is Graham’s point. As I have tried to show, it was chosen by the organized Jewish community and put into action as a result of Jewish political pressure and financial wherewithal. Graham notes that the successful immigration restriction of 1924 was seen by historians as one of the reforms of the Progressive Era’s campaign against the excesses of capitalism, since immigration lowered wages.

It’s fair to say, however, that Jews never saw it that way and there’s at least a fair amount of truth in the idea that the 1924 law was enacted to achieve an ethnic status quo that Jews saw as unfair to them. (Jewish immigrants were correctly seen by restrictionists as disproportionately involved in political radicalism, and it was generally a period of ethnic defense of White America.)

As Sailer’s review shows, Jews have not ceased seeing the 1924 law as exclusion of Jews. Graham points out that Jews live in the past when it comes to thinking about immigration: “the “filiopietistic” urge (“of or relating to an often excessive veneration of ancestors …”) is particularly strong among Jewish media figures. Italian-Americans, in contrast, tend to approach the immigration policy question by thinking about the future rather than by obsessing over the past. This anti-rational emotional reflex about immigration contributes to the kitschy quality of MSM discourse on the topic.”

In other words, Jews see the 1924 immigration law as part of their lachrymose history among Europeans, It’s just another example of irrational anti-Semitism — an example that warrants the evil nature of  the people and culture who created it. Since, as Sailer notes, Jews constitute half of the most influential media figures, and since the other half are rigorously vetted to exclude anyone who opposes what amounts to the Jewish consensus on immigration, there really isn’t much real debate in the above-ground media.

Of course, there is a lot of self-censorship. Graham recounts the example of Theodore White, then the most influential journalist in America (and a Jew), refusing to publish his views on immigration. “‘My New York friends would never forgive me. No, you guys are right [on immigration], but I can’t go public on this.’ ” Sailer quotes Graham:

Hearing White’s agitated response, I had my first glimpse of the especially intense emotional Jewish version of that taboo [against immigration skepticism]. His whole heritage, and his standing with all his Jewish friends, was imperiled (he was certain) if he went public with his worries about the state of immigration. …

I did not suspect it then, but this would become an important subtheme of our experience as immigration reformers. American Jews were exceptionally irrational about immigration for well-known reasons. They were also formidable opponents, or allies, in any issue of public policy in America.

In a nutshell, that’s the problem with Jews: They get what they want and what they want is not necessarily what others want (leading to conflicts of interest) or what is good for the country as a whole. It really wouldn’t matter if the only group that wanted open borders was African Americans. But it matters greatly that Jews do.

Incidentally, Otis Graham’s brother Hugh Davis Graham, agrees with me on the forces behind the 1965 law. He wrote in his 2002 book Collision Course (pp. 56-57):

Most important for the content of immigration reform [i.e., loosening], the driving force at the core of the movement, reaching back to the 1920s, were Jewish organizations long active in opposing racial and ethnic quotas. These included the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the American Federation of Jews from Eastern Europe. Jewish members of the Congress, particularly representatives from New York and Chicago, had maintained steady but largely ineffective pressure against the national origins quotas since the 1920s…. Following the shock of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders had been especially active in Washington in furthering immigration reform. To the public, the most visible evidence of the immigration reform drive was played by Jewish legislative leaders, such as Representative Celler and Senator Jacob Javits of New York. Less visible, but equally important, were the efforts of key advisers on presidential and agency staffs. These included senior policy advisers such as Julius Edelson and Harry Rosenfield in the Truman administration, Maxwell Rabb in the Eisenhower White House, and presidential aide Myer Feldman, assistant secretary of state Abba Schwartz, and deputy attorney general Norbert Schlei in the Kennedy-Johnson administration.

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Goyland: Where the Wild Things Are

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“Living so long in exile and so often in danger, we have cultivated a defensive and apologetic account, a censored story, of Jewish religion and culture.”

Michael Walzer, quoted in Kevin MacDonald. Separation and Its Discontents, p. 217

The $100 million-dollar film Where the Wild Things Are was released last October. Older readers might remember the 1963 children’s book on which the film is based. The original book was penned by Jewish American writer Maurice Sendak, who grew up in Brooklyn. Today I will consider whether or not the writer’s Jewish background played a role in the book’s creation.

Many accounts of the book (and film) ignore the Jewish angle. For example, right around the time of the release of the film, The New York Times carried Bruce Handy’s review of the book. No mention at all was made of Jewishness.

Just to bring the reader up to speed, let me share Handy’s summary of the story:

Max, a young boy in a wolf costume, makes mischief of one kind and another, is called “wild thing” by his unseen mother, and is sent to bed without supper. As he stews, his room transforms into a jungle. He finds a boat and sets sail across the sea to discover a land full of real wild things — big monsters with “terrible teeth” and “terrible roars.” Max tames them, plays with them, sends them to bed without their suppers and then returns home, where he finds dinner waiting for him. “And it was still hot,” the book concludes — a lovely and reassuring grace note.

Handy relates how he only came to appreciate the book upon rereading it as an adult, perhaps because Sendak himself was revealing his adult anxieties in the book. As Sendak said in 1966, “It’s only after the act of writing the book that, as an adult, I can see what has happened, and talk about fantasy as catharsis, about Max acting out his anger as he fights to grow. . . . For me, the book was a personal exorcism. It went deeper into my own childhood than anything I’ve done before.”

I suspect Sendak is being honest when he says it goes deep into his childhood. But one angle I think he is describing is his urban Jewish view of the non-Jews around him. And his book — which he also illustrated — likely represents his view of the world outside the Polish shtetl of his parents and relatives. That unknown world, malevolent and dangerous, was, in Sendak’s mind, full of lurking creatures. Brandeis professor Stephen J. Whitfield, a specialist in American Studies, realizes the extent to which Jewishness animates Sendak’s work. Sendak, Whitfield notes, “wrote out of personal obsessions rather than formulas.”

To be sure, we all have various aspects to our personalities, so Sendak may indeed be mixing various memories and such. For instance, according to his Wikipedia bio, he admitted in an interview that he is homosexual, which may or may not influence his individual stories. (In the Night Kitchen is a 1970 story about a naked boy — roughly three years old — who is almost baked into a cake. Sendak’s drawings depict the boy’s penis and testicles, which caused many parents to object to libraries stocking the book.)

To further challenge my thesis that Jewishness played a role in Where the Wild Things Are, we must also consider this: “The monsters in the book were actually based on [Sendak’s] relatives who would come to weekly dinners. Because of their broken English and odd mannerisms, they were the perfect basis for the monsters in Sendak’s book.”

I believe his relatives may have provided a rough frame on which to hang the fleshed-out monsters, but I still think Sendak’s primary inspiration for the book was his conscious and unconscious views of the wider non-Jewish world. I think this because it jibes so well with other accounts by contemporary Jewish Americans, thus revealing a shared Jewish mindset.

Let me start with this account of what West Coast Jews think of their non-Jewish fellow countrymen, as related by social scientists Martin Lipset and Earl Raab:

In 1985 about a third of those affiliated with the Jewish community in the San Francisco area said, in response to a questionnaire, that Jewish candidates could not be elected to Congress from San Francisco. Yet three out of the four congressional representatives from that area — as well as the two state senators and the mayor of San Francisco — were, in fact, well-identified Jews at the time the poll was conducted. And they had been elected by a population that was about 95 percent non-Jewish.

In 1981 nine out of ten respondents in the same regional Jewish population said that they felt “comfortable” in America. But seven out of eight also believed that anti-Semitism is a serious problem in this country. Nationally, about eight out of ten affiliated Jews voiced serious concerns in 1990 about anti-Semitism, while the same overwhelming proportion replied that they felt “close” or “very close” to the American people.

Clearly, many American Jews are battling with cognitive dissonance when it comes to assessing their safety and welfare in America. Objectively, there is very, very little that has threatened American Jews financially, socially or physically. Yet deeper inside their psyches, there is something telling them that all non-Jews are potentially dangerous and unfriendly anti-Semites. (As the old saw goes, “Scratch a goy, find an anti-Semite.”)

This fear and defensiveness may stem from what Professor Salo Baron, a prominent Jewish historian, has called the “lachrymose view of Jewish history.” Or, as Barbara Fuerlicht writes, “The diaspora is often presented as 2,000 years of uninterrupted martyrdom.” Again, however, we find that paradox spawned by the incongruity between reality and perception. Consider, for example, that one scholar wrote, “Most medieval Jews in most places in most years were not the targets of pogroms. Most lived lives that, protected by geniz charters [i.e., charters specifying Jewish rights] and privileges, were far more secure and prosperous than the overwhelming percentage of non-Jews around them.”

For example, this charter for the Duchy of Austria from 1244 is summarized as follows:

This document is important because it was soon adopted, with some changes, by most East European countries to which the masses of Jews finally drifted: Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, Silesia, and Lithuania. This charter — a very favorable one — was issued to encourage money-lending among the Austrian Jews and probably also to attract moneyed Jews to migrate to this outlying German state which was in need of ready credit. Every effort is therefore made in this Latin constitution to grant the Jews ample opportunity to sell their wares and, above all, to lend money. They were given adequate protection: they were subject to the direct jurisdiction of the Duke who guaranteed them safety of life and limb. The right of the Jews to govern themselves in communal and religious matters was not specified by the Duke, but this was taken for granted. We may assume, indeed, that the Jews of Austria enjoyed extensive political autonomy under this pact.

In any serious study of Jewish history, one is surprised to see how true this is for accounts of many different times and places. As we’ve seen, however, this sense of defensiveness continues to haunt Jews in America, as social historian David Gerber details in his insightful 1997 essay “Ill at Ease: The Insecurities of American Jewry”:

The almost universal feeling of anxiety American Jews have about intergroup relations raises many complex questions. Do Jews feel threatened because they really are threatened? Does objective evidence indicate a resurgence of the anti-Semitism that is widely acknowledged to have declined in the decades immediately following World War II? Or, is it the case that little objective evidence is needed to make a people whose conditions of life have historically been so insecure feel threatened, even in the apparently benign American diaspora? [p.95]

Philip Weiss, writing in New York magazine (January 29, 1996), suggests psychological reasons for this defensiveness:

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 . . . Perhaps most important, these feelings solidify Jewish identity.

A personal account that got my attention was one by New Yorker Karen Brodkin, who spent summers in Vermont with her friends and family in a bungalow colony of Jewish families:

Late one summer night, a group of us tied up all the rowboats that belonged to our group of families out in the middle of the lake. We looked forward to parental surprise when they woke up, but we weren’t prepared for their genuine alarm: This could only be an anti-Semitic act by angry Yankees. What did it portend for our group? We were surprised on two counts: that the adults didn’t assume we had done it, since we were always playing practical jokes, and that they thought our Jewishness mattered to Vermont Yankees.

There is no shortage of similar accounts. For instance, American Israeli journalist Ze’ev Chafets relates how his maternal grandmother, born in Sterling, Illinois, maintained a mental map of Jewish and non-Jewish America:

Pontiac [Michigan] never had enough Jews for a Jewish neighborhood, but from the time I was a small boy I was aware that it had a special Jewish geography, and my grandmother was its da Gama. She would point out an unremarkable brick home on a leafy street and confide, “That’s a Jewish house.” Downtown she would pause near a certain store and say, “This is a Jewish business.” Occasionally, when we passed a parking lot, she would point out a Chevrolet or Plymouth and say, “There’s a Jewish car.” None of these cars, shops, or houses impressed me as being especially Jewish, but I was prepared to take her word for it.

At first I thought that mastering Pontiac’s Jewish geography was some sort of Sunday school lesson, like memorizing the Hebrew alphabet or the kings of Judea. But as I grew older, I realized that my grandmother mapped out the town reflexively, more for her benefit than mine. Jewish houses, stores, and offices were safe havens, places she could count on if, for example, she needed to use a bathroom, or was being chased through the streets by a sex-crazed Cossack rapist.

Jewish historian Peter Novick describes the “the fortress-like mentality” of many American Jews, where the institutional imperative was to promote “a wary suspicion of gentiles.” Consider three examples he provides from three “otherwise apparently sensible American Jews” to show how they had internalized these Jewish “collective memories — memories that suffuse group consciousness.” First, a university teacher writes, “When I move to a new town, I give great thought to whom, among my gentile friends, I might entrust my children, should that ever become necessary.” Next, a prominent Jewish feminist shares this thought: “Every conscious Jew longs to ask her or his non-Jewish friends, ‘Would you hide me?’ — and suppresses the question for fear of hearing sounds of silence.” Finally, a professor of psychology reports:

Many Jews report that the unspoken question they ask themselves when interacting with a non-Jew is, “Would she or he have saved me from the Nazis?” I have asked myself this question innumerable times: sometimes I surprise myself by answering, “I don’t know,” when asking this question of a non-Jewish friend I had otherwise assumed was close to me. The answer is the ultimate standard by which to measure trust in a non-Jewish person.

Honestly, do you want to live with such irrationally suspicious people? Worse, do you want to live under such “fellow” Americans now that so many of them dominate the controlling heights of this country?

Take Harvard, for instance. A leading law professorship there is a powerful position. And that’s precisely what Orthodox Jew Alan Dershowitz has held for years. Never mind that this fourth-generation American can write: “It was at Yale that I met and befriended my first Wasps, blacks, and even non-Orthodox Jews.” Are we really living in the same universe?

Dershowitz admits he is so highly invested in the “Holocaust mentality” that the world in which he sometimes lives borders on the horrifically imaginary. Witness his feelings as he sat watching the accused concentration camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk on trial in Israel:

I kept looking at Demjanjuk for another reason. I imagined him as my killer. At the time he was murdering babies, I was five years old. . . . I could have been one of the thousands of nameless and faceless babies he grabbed out of the hands of screaming mothers and shoved into gas chambers. I imagine him laughing with sadistic joy as he killed entire families, ending their seed forever, after taunting and torturing them gratuitously.

This vicarious sense of suffering is intense for Dershowitz and haunts not only his future but the future of Jewish children: “Every time I attend a gathering of Jewish children — at a family event, at a Bar Mitzvah, at Simchath Torah — I imagine SS guards lining up these children for the gas chambers.” Isn’t this evidence enough that Dershowitz needs, at a minimum, counseling?

How might such a mentality be constructed in a place where daily life never offers the chance to experience real persecution? Try this: Jewish American journalist Marjorie Miller relates a childhood story regarding her religious school. In addition to learning the Hebrew alphabet, she also learned about the Holocaust. One Sunday her teacher, “in a scared voice,” called the students to attention and told them to listen carefully: “Had we heard the radio? The government was telling the Jews that we had to convert or leave the country.” This, the teacher explained, “was the first step . . . maybe the beginning of another Holocaust.” Not surprisingly, “Many children in the class began to cry.”

This mentality is reminiscent of interviews done in the 1970s with noted Jewish men, where the question “Do you think it could happen here?” never needed “it” defined.  Nearly unanimously, the reply was the same: “If you know history at all, you have to presume not that it could happen, but that it probably will,” or “It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when” [quoted in MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, p.245].

Reader, think about it: If you’re an average American, you quietly pay your federal taxes, likely knowing that some goes to aid Israel. (On top of that, many of you Christian Zionists support Israel further through donations and political support.) Further, it’s highly improbable that you’ve ever committed a crime against a Jew, let alone actually harmed one. The thought has probably never even crossed your mind.

Yet a good percentage of American-born Jews still consider you a lethal threat simply because you are not a Jew. At this stage in history, is there any excuse for that? Worse, such Jews are often able to translate their fantasy-based fears about goyim into cultural products such as films and TV shows—and books like Where the Wild Things Are. Through the activism of groups like the ADL, they are also able to affect legislation such as the new Hate Crimes Law that may well target people like you for potentially thinking the wrong thing. This is not good.

In any case, it will be interesting to see how the film has been adapted from Sendak’s book. My guess is that the live action animation will not have a theme about dangerous non-Jews, but I should wait until I see it before saying more. Still, it’s got the typical Jewish background of a Hollywood production. For instance, Spike Jonze, born Adam Spiegel in 1969, is the film’s director, replacing earlier director Eric Goldberg. Let’s just hope Jonze is not one of those paranoid Jewish Americans always wondering if “it” could happen here.

Edmund Connelly (email him) is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.