Jews and Other Minorities

In this video, Ann Schaffer, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Belfer Center for American Pluralism, states the basic philosophy of Jews in America:

The Jewish community has always worked on the premise that as a minority, our security, our strength, our well being in America is interdependent with those of other minorities. This is a Jewish issue. It’s very much a Jewish issue.

This is quite correct, but it’s nice to see it so explicitly and baldly expressed. This is from The Culture of Critique: The quote is from Jewish academic activist Earl Raab:

“The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country.

We [Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible—and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever (Raab 1993b, 23)”

Positive attitudes toward cultural diversity have also appeared in other statements on immigration by Jewish authors and leaders. Charles Silberman (1985, 350) notes, “American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief—one firmly rooted in history—that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of U.S. Jews to endorse ‘gay rights’ and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called ‘social’ issues.”

The footnote is as follows:

Moreover, a deep concern that an ethnically and culturally homogeneous America would compromise Jewish interests can be seen in Silberman’s (1985, 347–348) comments on the attraction of Jews to “the Democratic party . . . with its traditional hospitality to non-WASP ethnic groups. . . . A distinguished economist who strongly disagreed with Mondale’s economic policies voted for him nonetheless. ‘I watched the conventions on television,’ he explained, ‘and the Republicans did not look like my kind of people.’ That same reaction led many Jews to vote for Carter in 1980 despite their dislike of him; ‘I’d rather live in a country governed by the faces I saw at the Democratic convention than by those I saw at the Republican convention’ a well-known author told me.”

I recall reading that in the 1930s well-meaning Whites advised Jews not to ally themselves with Blacks — obviously to no avail. The Jewish-Black alliance, although a bit shaky at times, has been remarkably strong over the last century, and now the alliances are expanding to other non-White groups. Shaffer goes on to discuss current projects aimed at making alliances with non-Whites, claiming disingenuously that it’s good for “all Americans.”

I think this is going to result in huge management problems down the line for Jews — not the least of which is White anger at the role of Jews in these transformations when they find themselves as a minority surrounded by an alliance of hostile non-White minority groups.