American Jews: “We can be racialists in the Diaspora”

Under pressure from American Jews, the Israeli government has withdrawn TV ads urging Israelis to return to Israel to avoid being contaminated by intermarriage and non-Jewish culture. The ads emphasize a central motivation of Zionism: Jewish racial purity. That is, prominent early Zionists (most notably Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of the Likud faction that now dominates Israel) were deeply worried that Jews in the Diaspora in the West were succumbing to intermarriage.  Zionism  has always been first and foremost a tribal preservation project. As Jewish racial scientist Elias Auerbach phrased it, “Zionism would return Jews ‘back into the position they enjoyed before the nineteenth century—politically autonomous, culturally whole, and racially pure’” (see here, p. 158).

Responding to the ads, a Jeffrey Goldberg blog in The Atlantic was titled “Netanyahu Government Suggests Israelis Avoid Marrying American Jews.” Goldberg claimed that

the idea, communicated in these ads [is] that America is no place for a proper Jew, and that a Jew who is concerned about the Jewish future should live in Israel… The message is: Dear American Jews, thank you for lobbying for American defense aid (and what a great show you put on at the AIPAC convention every year!) but, please, stay away from our sons and daughters.

As Goldberg notes, the real sin of the Israeli government in the eyes of American Jews was that there was no distinction between marrying American Jews and American non-Jews.  The implicit message of the ADL and other Jews who objected to the ads is that Israeli endogamy is a wonderful thing, but it is an insult to American Jews to think that they can’t remain remain culturally separate and racially pure in the Diaspora.

I know that the Jewish double standard on endogamy is an old story around here, but it bears repeating again and again. Whites who are concerned about the future of their race and about retaining their culture are considered moral reprobates—psychiatric cases not fit to participate in civilized political discourse. But analogous Jewish concerns are absolutely mainstream, both in Israel and the Jewish Diaspora in the West.