2794 Words

Many of the great works of counter-Semitism from the past fifty years are splendid attacking books. They lay out their cases against Jewish power and subversion and let the reader decide how to respond. Some of the most famous of these, of course, are Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together, Israel Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion, and Igor Shafarevich’s Russophobia. Less common are defensive works of counter-Semitism, ones that exonerate White gentiles from the demonization often found in Jewish historiography. Albert Lindemann’s 1997 book Esau’s Tears is once such work since it shields European peoples from the collective guilt with which leftist historians—many of whom are Jews—continually smear them. Lindemann also humanizes many notable anti-Semites from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thus clearing their names and the names of the people who followed them.

This is not to say that Lindemann champions anti-Semitism or makes apologies for it; rather, he strives to make two major points. One, that many ideas and episodes from history which today would be labeled anti-Semitic were in fact perfectly reasonable, based in truth, and the result of demonstrably bad Jewish behavior. Lindemann never fails to present Jews of the past feeling this way as well, thereby qualifying them as anti-Semites by today’s utopian standards. And two, that such pushback against the Jews did not and does not inexorably lead to mass murder. This is the thesis which many leftist historians wish us to swallow, and Lindemann strikes out against it:

How we interpret history is always powerfully influenced by the concerns and values of our own age, but it is finally misleading and unjust to single out and indignantly describe, for example, the racism of nineteenth-century Germans (“proto-Nazis”) without recognizing how much beliefs in ethnic or racial determinism were the norm in most countries and were to be found among oppressed minorities, Jews included, as much as oppressive majorities – how they were, in short, part of a shared intellectual world, a zeitgeist – but did not lead to mass murder in every country.

Jewish historian Salo Baron coined the term “lachrymose theory” to describe “the eternal self-pity characteristic of Jewish historiography.” In German, this is known as Leidensgeschichte (“suffering history”), and is often employed not to present a balanced, disinterested narrative of past events but to prevent future suffering by ignoring Jewish culpability and vilifying gentiles. This “denunciatory theory” of Jewish historiography could easily walk hand-in-hand with Baron’s “lachrymose theory,” since it brands gentiles with the stigma of eternal guilt (the absolution of which can only be achieved of course through philo-Semitism). Resisting both theories is the hill upon which Lindemann makes his stand. In his sights are three popular volumes of Jewish history from three Jewish polemicists—The War Against the Jews by Lucy Dawidowcz (1975), Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (1991) by Robert Wistrich, and Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) by Daniel Goldhagen. These works, as Lindemann rather politely puts it, have “a tendency to a colorful and indignant narrative, accompanied by weak, sometimes tendentious analysis.” In dispelling the blatant anti-gentilism of these authors, however, Lindemann never wishes to exclude Jews from his readership. He never explicitly ceases to strive for rapprochement. A major theme in Esau’s Tears emerges which warns Jews that a hostile, polemical, and frankly dishonest approach to history will only give real anti-Semites more ammunition to hurl at Jews.

Lindemann’s central conceit springs from the Book of Genesis. Twin brothers Esau and Jacob vie for their father Isaac’s affections, which Jacob—the younger of the pair—deceitfully swindles from Esau. Enraged and heartbroken, Esau forces Jacob to flee into Mesopotamia, where he gives rise to the Jewish people. Esau, on the other hand, gives rise to gentiles. It is said that anti-Semitism will cease only when Esau’s tears stop flowing. I don’t think Lindemann—who himself is not Jewish—could have selected a better title for a work which counteracts the “lachrymose theory” of Jewish historiography. Gentiles have tears too, and as with their innocent Old Testament forebear, they often spring not from fantasies or psychoses, but from the palpable misdeeds of Jews. An eye for an eye, a tear for a tear.

Lindemann proceeds by disclosing one inconvenient fact after another to underscore his point. Jews in history were not relegated to ghettos; they lived there on their own accord to keep apart from gentiles. Jews in history were not forced into usury, liquor trades, and criminal activity because no other vocations were open to them; they did such things because they wanted to and didn’t care so much about the harm they caused peasant gentiles. And yes, even in Russia, they were able to own land, they just chose not to work the soil themselves. Often, Jews in history were poor because the overwhelming majority of gentiles around them were also poor. And the ancient and medieval ones were not so innocent. Lindemann gives us examples of ancient Jewish oppression of Christians and pagans, as well as some frankly hateful language from the Talmud (for example, “The best among the gentiles should be slain”). The Book of Deuteronomy, Lindemann points out, can reasonably be seen as sanctioning genocide, and many Jewish thinkers throughout history expressed views which today would seem racist, supremacist, or chauvinistic. In comparison, Jews were treated better in official Church doctrine than were Muslims or heretics. Lindemann never lets gentiles off the hook for their bad behavior, but simultaneously never ceases to remind the reader of the many long periods during which Jews and gentiles got along reasonably well.

Esau’s Tears offers a brief history of the Enlightenment, which, due to the premium it placed on egalitarianism and fraternity, got the ball rolling for Jewish emancipation in Europe. Not surprisingly, many Enlightenment thinkers, most famously Voltaire, were irked by Jewish intolerance and separatism. That the Ashkenazi Jews in France were rude and lacked manners didn’t help (the Sephardim, on the other hand, were much better behaved and so faced fewer obstacles to citizenship). Also not surprisingly, those Frenchmen who had the most experience with Jews—such as the National Assembly delegates from Alsace—were the ones most bitterly opposed to granting them equal rights. In an ironic twist, Lindemann reports that after the Jews won their equality . . .

[m]any Alsatians insisted that Jewish vices, far from disappearing under the new laws, had actually gotten worse in their province. Jews had not taken the opportunity to assume honest physical labor but had pursued with even greater success their old ways of usury and exploitation.

In another ironic twist, Sephardic leaders in France often staunchly resisted equal rights for the Ashkenazim “due to their low moral character.” This is one of many instances in Esau’s Tears of Jews behaving anti-Semitically and having good reason to do so. Most commonly, it sprang from the embarrassment and discomfiture many assimilated Jews in Western Europe felt when confronted with their Eastern European brethren whose morality, hygiene, and manners left much to be desired.

In eastern Europe things were much worse due to the millions of Jews that had recently become subjects of the Tsar by the mid-nineteenth century. These teeming Ostjuden (eastern Jews) comprised by far the largest concentration of Jews in the world and put Russia in a state of crisis almost right away with their exploitive relationships with the peasants. Lindemann pre-dates John Klier in exonerating the Tsarist government regarding the pogroms of the early 1880s. And when discussing the more violent pogroms which occurred in places like Kishinev in the early twentieth century, Lindemann mordantly recalls that Jewish revolutionaries had been disproportionately responsible for the assassination of leading Russian officials and police officers leading up to those events, including that of Vyacheslav von Plehve, the Russian Minister of the Interior. Lindemann touches on the Jewish tendency to exaggerate atrocity, such as when Ukrainian insurrectionist Bogdan Chmielnicki rose up against the Poles in 1648, and targeted not only Jews, but Polish nobility and the Catholic Church. Jewish Leidensgeschichte has it that at least 100,000 Jews were massacred, but modern historians, including Paul Johnson in The History of the Jews (1987), seriously doubt this. Lindemann also points out that while this was going on, Europe was embroiled in equally brutal wars, and it “is open to serious question if Jews suffered in substantially larger numbers than others caught up in the raging battles.” And in a drily humorous moment, for those who complain about Jews being cooped up in the Russian Pale of Settlement during this time, Lindemann reminds us that the Pale was forty times larger than the modern state of Israel.

No review of Esau’s Tears would be complete without addressing the mileage Lindemann gets out of Benjamin Disraeli, the Jewish novelist and British Prime Minister from the late nineteenth century. The zeitgeist of the age was, in effect, race- or ethnic-realism. Very few people—least of all Jews—denied that different peoples had differing ingrained capabilities and temperaments, both negative and positive. (Linemann thankfully does not deny it either.) Anyone who offers nineteenth-century racial determinism as exhibit A in favor of the inevitability of Nazism will have to come to grips with Disraeli, whom Lindemann describes as “the most influential propagator of the concept of race in the nineteenth century”:

In his novel Coningsby, Disraeli depicted a vast and secret power of Jews, bent on dominating the world. His noble Jewish character, Sidonia (whom Disraeli let it be known was based on Lionel Rothschild), describes race as a supremely important determinant (“all is race; there is no other truth”). Race, he argued, had always been a central factor in the rise of civilization, and western civilization could not have flourished without the Jewish race.

Lindemann even quotes a Rothschild who in private correspondence flatly blamed anti-Semitism on Jewish “arrogance, vanity, and unspeakable insolence.” A paragon of such insolence is nineteenth-century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz who despised Germany despite living there. He once claimed that Jews who convert to Christianity are “like combatants who, putting on the uniform of the enemy, can all the more easily strike and annihilate him.” Lindemann makes it plain that such destructive attitudes were not terribly unusual among prominent Jews and that the oft-exaggerated notion of Jews as culture destroyers “reflected an undeniable reality.” Lindemann reports how Jews often weaponized the press against Christians or goyim in general while taking great umbrage at even the slightest criticism of Jews. And then there’s all the scams and boondoggles Jews have been involved in, epitomized by the Panama Canal scandal which occupied French headlines in the 1880s and early 1890s.

Investigation into the activities of the Panama Company revealed widespread bribery of parliamentary officials to assure support of loans to continue work on the Panama Canal—work that had been slowed by endless technical and administrative difficulties. Here was a modern project that involved large sums of French capital and threatened national prestige. The intermediaries between the Panama Company and parliament were almost exclusively Jews, with German names and backgrounds, some of whom tried to blackmail one another.

The fiasco caused thousands of small investors to lose their fortunes, to say nothing of the 5,000 Frenchmen and 20,000 Afro-Caribbean laborers who lost their lives in the tropical heat for nothing.

So, the anti-Semites were often correct, or at least were not thrashing about in fantasies, when they accused Jews of clandestine misdeeds or bad behavior. And the more Ostjuden there were in a particular region, the more misdeeds and bad behavior there were to complain about—usually. The bulk of Esau’s Tears covers these as well as the anti-Semites who used their powers of analysis and pattern recognition to call attention to them. Most importantly, Lindemann humanizes these individuals, warts and all, and in almost all cases exonerates them from the blood guilt with which the denunciatory school of Jewish history wishes to stamp them. For a history of anti-Semitism from 1870 to 1939, one can do no better than Esau’s Tears.

Lindemann goes high and low, and far and wide, in his assessment of anti-Semitism. In the 18th century, Johann Gottfried von Herder established the idea of volkgeist, or, spirit of the people, which famed composer Richard Wagner made use of in the next century when discussing Jews in music. French researcher, Paul Broca was a man of the Left whose data forced him to conclude that racial differences exist, quite against his intentions. Where zealots such as Wilhelm Marr—the man who coined the term anti-Semitism—and Georg Ritter von Schönerer saw Jews through a racial lens, religious men such as Adolf Stoekel and Baron Karl von Vogelsang saw the behavior of Jews as a threat to Christianity. Otto Böckel, a popular demagogue known as “the peasant king,” tirelessly spoke out on behalf of the German lower classes, who often suffered as a result of Jewish predations. Meanwhile, anti-capitalist theoretician Eugen Dühring wrote about the “cosmic evil” in Jews. Above them all were top-flight intellects such as Heinrich von Treitschke and Houston Stewart Chamberlain who lent great credibility to anti-Semitism and were respected by Jews and non-Jews alike.

Then of course there was Karl Lueger, the immensely popular anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna prior to the First World War. Lindemann refuses to defend Lueger on all accounts, but points out that his anti-Semitism was often little more than red meat for his base and may not have been entirely genuine. Vienna’s Jews were not materially harmed during his tenure and in fact thrived when this supposed enemy of the Jews ruled the roost—as did many others. The only notable anti-Semite that Lindemann discredits is Edouard Drumont whose popular writings he dismisses as “inconsistent scribblings.” Still, Lindemann credits Drumont as the muck raking journalist who exposed the Jewish role in the Panama Canal scandal.

Lindemann concedes that the historical record is filled with vulgar no-accounts and charlatans who climbed aboard the anti-Semitism bandwagon after failing in other endeavors. But for over a century, the anti-Semites with talent, energy, convictions, and discipline had reacted rationally to real problems and were by no means drawing a straight line to the Nazis. Indeed, Lindemann points out how the diversity of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism makes drawing such a line very difficult. After all, there were plenty of racists who were not anti-Semitic, and quite a few anti-racists who were. And what to make of anti-Semites who assailed Jews from the standpoint of religion or socialism or conservatism? Furthermore, Lindemann demonstrates that despite the breathtaking variety anti-Semitic thought and policy prior to the Nazi era, there were two aspects in which there was almost no diversity at all. One, from the leadership of all anti-Semitic movements outside of Russia or Romania, there were no calls to violence against Jews. And two, all of them, with the possible exception of Lueger, rarely succeeded in making anti-Semitism stick with the people. Before the First World War, anti-Semitism never gained much of a foothold in Western or Southern Europe, or in Hungary. Yes, its presence was stronger in Germany and Austria due to their larger Jewish populations. But even in these places it never enjoyed prolonged mainstream popularity. It was only in Romania and Russia where it was so common that it did not need demagogues or ideologues to prop it up. According to my reading of Lindemann, the tepid success of anti-Semitism resulted not only from European forbearance, but also because assimilated Jews and the Sephardim were in general better behaved and more respectful of their gentile hosts than were the pushy, ill-mannered Ashkenazic Ostjuden who often ruthlessly pursued money or revolution.

In his first chapter, Lindemann suggests that “the notion of the anti-Semite as underdog is one that needs to be given serious analysis.” This is because the highly influential historians of the Jewish denunciatory school continually dehumanize and demonize the anti-Semites of history as if framing a case of first-degree murder in a court of law, with the victim, of course, being the martyred six million. Exculpatory evidence is downplayed or ignored, and goals other than the impartial search for the truth are pursued. In the latter chapters of Esau’s Tears Lindemann condemns Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution, of course, but still humanizes the man. He points out what so many of us know today—that Hitler and the Nazis were in large part a reaction to the widespread atrocities of the Soviets, a people that the denunciatory school of Jewish history rarely smears with the same vigor it exerts when smearing the Nazis and their innocent anti-Semitic predecessors. Perhaps this is because a highly disproportionate number of these Soviet criminals were Jews themselves.

If Esau’s Tears tells us anything, it’s that nothing good can come out of this, except for perhaps more anti-Semitism.

“[Jews] have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes [their] agenda.”
Kanye West, 2022

“The Jews have a grip on America.”
Professor Griff, Public Enemy, 1989.

The narrator of the opening chapter of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is Benjy Compson, a 33-year-old man with an intellectual disability who is very much the embarrassment of his disintegrating family. Compson’s diminished mental capacity, and the ‘stream of consciousness’ manner in which his thoughts and perceptions are presented to the reader, make for an extremely challenging read. The result is that relatively few who embark upon the novel outside of a university setting will persevere and finish it. Those who do finish the novel, and better yet those who re-read it, are however rewarded with the understanding that behind the verbal ‘noise’ of Benjy’s apparent nonsense is an astute and unbiased insight into the motivations and behaviors of many of the novel’s other characters. In other words, despite his limitations, Benjy has some important things to say.

Ye’s Sound and Fury

Faulkner’s difficult novel came to mind during this month’s moral panic, and subsequent attempted financial annihilation, over comments made by Kanye West, now known simply as Ye, on the Jews. West’s comments certainly have a Benjy-esque quality to them, jumping from one observation to another without elaboration or logical progression. It’s probably best recounting them, more or less in the order of utterance:

• Blacks are the 12 lost tribes of Israel, and therefore the real Jews.
• It is impossible for West to be described as antisemitic because he is a Jew.
• Jared Kushner only worked on a peace deal between Israel and Arab nations in order to make money.
• Ye wished his children had learned about Hannukah instead of “a complicated Kwanzaa,” because Hannukah would at least “come with some financial engineering.”
• “Jewish people have owned the Black voice. Either it’s through us wearing the Ralph Lauren shirt, or it’s all of us being signed to a record label, or having a Jewish manager, or being signed to a Jewish basketball team, or doing a movie on a Jewish platform like Disney.”
• “Paparazzi taking a photo of you, you ain’t getting no money off of it. You’re used to getting screwed by the Jewish media. And I’m saying, you poked the bear too fucking long.”
• “They blocked me out. The Jewish media blocked me out.”
• “This ain’t a game. Imma use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me. I told you this is war. Now gone get you some business.”
• “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE. The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also. You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.”

While there is a lot of ‘noise’ and nonsense (Blacks as Jews) here, there are also some discernible and perfectly reasonable observations. Through his comments on Kushner and Hannukah, West suggests that Jews have a special relationship with money. Jews have, of course, been at great pains in the many volumes of apologetics and propaganda they have produced for over a century to deny any such relationship. Yet all historical and contemporary sociological data suggest that such a special relationship exists. The fact that Jews worry that widespread understanding of this relationship with money will result in a lowering of their reputation, and possible action to mitigate their success in obtaining and utilizing wealth, does not take away from the truthfulness inherent in the basic fact their privileged position in the West is long-standing, empirically observable, and obvious.

This obviousness is inferred in West’s observation that Jews occupy leading positions in many industries, including the fashion industry, the music industry, sports management and ownership, and the movie industry. West’s claim that “Jewish people have owned the Black voice,” would seem to me not only to refer to Jews profiting from managing Black musicians and seeking their works, but also more subtly to such phenomena as Jews historically taking leading roles in organizations like the NAACP. By far the most glaring comments made by West are those referring to the Jewish power to censor. West talks of “blocking out,” threats and influence against him, and the attempt to “black ball” anyone opposed to Jewish interests.

Whether or not West’s comments are helpful to those wishing for a rise in awareness of these precise issues is a matter for debate. Their presentation in such a ham-fisted and outrageous manner is far from ideal, but this downside may be offset by the fame of people like West (over 31 million followers on Twitter) and, ironically, the fact this kind of communication is relatively well-received and understood by the target audience, the Black population. That being said, few celebrities have come forward to support West. To my knowledge the only person of note is Black comedian Dave Chappelle, who once courted controversy himself for a Netflix special joke about “Space Jews” which jabbed at Jewish brutality against Palestinians. The jury is still out on the utility of West’s comments.

Lessons in Power and Censorship

For me, the biggest takeaway from the Ye outburst and its aftermath is the impressive demonstration of Jewish influence and power, exhibited in the form of censorship. In this regard, it’s important to point out that there have been prior cases of celebrities, and rappers in particular — see the case of Ice Cube, daring to mention the existence of Jewish dominance within the entertainment industry and subsequently being forced into grovelling apologies or, in more extreme cases, into exile. One example worth highlighting, purely because it has so many astonishing parallels with the Ye case, is that of Richard ‘Professor Griff’ Griffin, from the hip hop group Public Enemy, who uttered some controversial remarks in 1989.

In an interview with David Mills of the Washington Times in May 1989, Professor Griff responded to one question by telling Mills he believed “the Jews are wicked,” and that he could prove it. “They have a history of killing black men,” said Griff. “The Jews can come against me. They can send the IRS after me. They can send their faggot little hit men. I mean, that don’t move me. Listen, they have a history of doing this.” Griff supported his comments with references to Henry Ford’s “The International Jew,” and added that he’d obtained his knowledge of Jewish history from the Nation of Islam’s historical research department. Griff, like the other members of Public Enemy, belonged to the Nation of Islam. As the interview with Mills progressed, he further alleged that “The Jews have their hands right around (President) Bush’s throat. He won’t make the wrong move. You understand what I’m saying? The Jews have a grip on America.”

As with Ye’s comments, the emphasis here is on Jewish power and control, over the lives of Black people but more generally over the entire nation. Retribution was swift. Griff was labeled a “stone-cold racist” by Lyor Cohen of Rush Management, perhaps the most influential hip hop manager of the period (Cohen later moved to Warner, but is now YouTube’s Global Head of Music). Although Rush had been founded by Russell Simmons (a Black man whose other ventures involved a close partnership with Jew Rick Rubin), Cohen slowly assumed almost total leadership before handing control of the holding company for all Rush’s entertainment assets to fellow Jew Todd Moscowitz. Cohen’s other protégé within Rush was fellow Jew Julie Greenwald (Cohen was himself the protege of Jewish music moguls Jerry Moss and Herb Alpert). In fact, Cohen was part of a long history of powerful and often exploitative Jewish networking in Black music that has been “whitewashed” in every sense of the term. Take, for example, the following description of Cohen from a 2001 Rolling Stone article:

In these years, he has grown into perhaps the most powerful white executive in an African-American business. The history of rock & roll is, of course, riddled with pioneering white record men who built careers recording and, sometimes, exploiting black artists: Morris Levy, that burly, cigar-smoking product of the Brill Building, allegedly stealing writing credits from Frankie Lyman; Herman Lubinsky, the founder of Savoy Records in Newark, New Jersey, throwing around nickels as if they were manhole covers. But Cohen – Cohen is something different. [emphasis added]

Cohen, Levy, and Lubinsky — just your average “White” guys.

In the immediate aftermath of Professor Griff’s May 1989 comments, Lyor Cohen announced the full disbandment of Public Enemy. A few days later, however, Cohen decided to reinstate the band on condition that Griff be removed. It then fell to another “White” music mogul, Def Jam records publicist Bill Adler, to announce that Griff would be fired from Public Enemy.

Whose body language indicates dominance and submission? Jewish Def Jam Records publicist Bill Adler introduces Rapper Chuck D, left, of Public Enemy, as the latter prepares to bow to pressure and fire bandmate Professor Griff for making anti-Jewish remarks, June 21, 1989.

Not only did band member Chuck D make a grovelling apology on behalf of Professor Griff, but he also made what was presumably a much more acceptable call to arms (at least to his Jewish superiors) when he said that “the problem is the system of white world supremacy.”

In a 2020 interview, Griff explained he felt like he was “thrown under the bus” by Chuck D, and that Chuck D didn’t want him out of Public Enemy but that the heads of Def Jam, in league with “Jewish groups like the ADL,” put pressure on Chuck D to kick him out of the group. Chuck D was reported to have had an angry outburst after the public firing of Griff, and in Public Enemy’s first single after the episode, “Welcome to the Terrordome,” he exorcised his frustrations, drawing more criticism from the ADL, which deemed the lyrics antisemitic: 

Crucifixion ain’t no fiction
So-called chosen frozen
Apology made to whoever pleases
Still they got me like Jesus.

Bill Adler later said of Griff’s comments, “It wasn’t just a PR nightmare. It affected me personally because I’m Jewish and I didn’t like the idea that one of our groups was spouting these anti-Semitic comments. It was upsetting to me.” Adler explained that he called Griff in for a discussion but was dismayed that Griff appealed to “a book written by Henry Ford.” Rather than debunk Ford’s work, Adler began to describe the manner in which Ford had created two Detroit suburbs, one for White workers (Dearborn) and the other (Inkster) for Black workers. In other words, Adler tried to deflect Griff’s animosity away from the Jews, and towards Ford/segregation/Whites, even going so far as to tell Griff “[Ford] would have gladly upholstered his cars with your Black hide as well as my Jewish hide.” Griff replied, “Bill, I can’t help it. It’s in the book.”

Griff’s refusal to bow to Jewish pressure in 1989 led to career annihilation. Public Enemy later quietly attempted to reintroduce him into some form of participation in band activities, but were condemned by then ADL chief Abe Foxman who accused Public Enemy of a “repugnant charade characterized by cynicism and disdain for the public.” Public Enemy responded by releasing a track called “Swindler’s Lust” in 1999 and by forming “Confrontation Camp,” a short-lived spinoff project that put Griff in a starring role. But Griff never fully recovered.

In recent years he’s more or less taken to begging Jews to forgive him. According to an article in The Forward:

Ambassadors from Jewish organizations said in recent interviews that they simply do not think Griff has made the proper admission of guilt required for public forgiveness and re-entry into the world of mass culture. But in a series of conversations over the last several weeks, Griff told me that he is still seeking that cultural passport, and vindication for having his life “destroyed” by being labeled a Jew-hater. He said he would do whatever it takes — but that the Jewish world won’t let him. “I’ll go to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Black Power movement center, the Black Lives Matter, the White House, and I’ll apologize everywhere I need to apologize,” Griff told me. “They will never be fucking satisfied. … You can go fucking do back flips, apologize to until the fucking cows come home. You will always be antisemitic.”

 Jews Fear Black anti-Semitism

While Jews are obviously desirous and capable of snuffing out any and all criticism, they are particularly sensitive to influential examples from the Black population. In Separation and Its Discontents, Kevin MacDonald identifies the key themes of anti-Semitism as including an understanding that, speaking in general terms, Jews

• represent a separate and clannish foreign group with their own set of interests;
• are highly adept at resource competition and have a tendency towards economic domination;
• tend to engage as cultural actors in order to shape non-Jewish culture to suit Jewish interests;
• form a cohesive political entity that seeks politically dominant roles in non-Jewish societies;
• possess negative personality traits, including the pursuance of a system of dual ethics in which non-Jews can be treated badly and exploited;
• are disloyal to the host nation in all fundamental and meaningful ways

Among Black expressions of animosity toward Jews, the same themes can be observed, arising first from more modest economic conflicts and, as such, having something more in common with the complaints of the early modern European peasantries. Horace Mann Bond, in his own 1965 reflections on “Negro Attitudes Toward Jews,” comments on the fact Jews historically appeared in the African-American environment overwhelmingly as pawnbrokers, as monopolists of the liquor trade (“The Jews have a stranglehold on the liquor stores in this town”), as the primary sellers on credit of clothing and other essential items, and, perhaps most crucial of all, as the slumlord and property dealer (“Some Jews have bought up that urban re-development land and are putting up shoddy apartments they call “Nigger housing” on it”).^[1]  In 2016, local news website Patch published a list of the 100 worst slumlords in Harlem, with the top ten including seven Jews (Mark Silber, Adam Stryker, Joel Goldstein, Marc Chemtob, Moshe Deutsch, Solomon Gottlieb, and Jason Green), a representation that has remained roughly constant every year, with Jews persistently claiming top ranking for building violations, rodent infestations, lack of maintenance, exploitative rent, mold, and other forms of building decay injurious to health. Indeed, this situation has at times resulted in considerable embarrassment to Jews.

Indeed, it is the sheer dominance and proximity of the Jews as primary exploiters of Blacks that has often caused a quite radical break in the Black imagination between perceiving wholesale “White oppression,” and the more nuanced understanding that Jews are a distinctive class unto themselves. Moreover, the reality of day-to-day interethnic exploitation leaves little room for abstract apologetic theories of anti-Semitism, since the problem is never that Jews arouse hostility merely on account of their religion or identity, but rather that Jews arouse hostility because of their behavior within certain ecological contexts (i.e., as a dominant clique within the rap scene). As Bond explains,

It is my considered view that Negro attitudes and actions towards Jews that are frequently interpreted as “antisemitic” actually lack the sinister thought-content they are sometimes advertised as holding. The occasional riots against small businessmen and landlords in Harlem — persons who may happen to be Jews — do not, in my opinion, actually possess the “classic” emotional load of aggression against a Jewish “race” or “religion,” that has been considered the essence of antisemitism.

One of the most prominent Jewish strategies when discussing Black anti-Semitism is the attempt to preserve both Jewish and Black senses of victimhood, and thus preserve the idea of an alliance against an allegedly oppressive White society. So it was hardly surprising for me to hear that Bill Adler’s first approach to Professor Griff involved a quite ludicrous attempt to turn him against the ‘racist’ Henry Ford.

*****

The very existence of a Black anti-Semitism is highly disruptive to established victim narratives which deny the privileged status of Jews as a wealthy and influential elite within Western society. While White anti-Semitism can still be portrayed (thanks to endless propaganda) as a top-down form of oppression directed against Jews, Black anti-Semitism flips the narrative since a received wisdom of modern culture is that Blacks are the most disadvantaged ethnic group in society. When Blacks “punch up” and the target is Jews, the only available solution to Jews is censorship. Blacks who grovel enough, and with enough sincerity (like Nick Cannon and Ice Cube) will be rehabilitated through Holocaust tours and such, and their apologies will be widely broadcast as a form of propaganda literature in its own right.

But those who don’t, like Professor Griff, will have their careers destroyed and they will vanish from the cultural spotlight. It may even be worse than that. In a remarkable incident covered by Tucker Carlson, Jewish trainer Harley Pasternak even threatened to have Kanye West drugged and institutionalised: “You go back to Zombieland forever.” The future of Kanye ‘Ye’ West is currently uncertain, but will undoubtedly be dictated by the extent to which he apologizes to his masters.

Lyor Cohen and Kanye West

^[1] H.M. Bond “Negro Attitudes Towards Jews,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, Papers and Proceedings of a Conference on Negro-Jewish Relations in the United States (Jan., 1965), 3-9, p.5.