Jewish Ethnic Networking

Bernard Lewis as an Academic Ethnic Activist

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In doing some research on Geert Wilders, I came across a recent article by Andrew G. Bostrom favorably describing Bernard Lewis’s views of Islam (“Geert Wilders and the Rise of Islamic Political Correctness,” Dec. 8, 2010). Bernard Lewis is the best known academic expert on the Muslim world, so his views carry quite a bit of weight. Bostrom quotes a 1954 essay of Lewis as follows:

I turn now from the accidental to the essential factors, to those deriving from the very nature of Islamic society, tradition, and thought. The first of these is the authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition… There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law…For the last thousand years, the political thinking of Islam has been dominated by such maxims as “tyranny is better than anarchy,” and “whose power is established, obedience to him is incumbent.” Read more

"The Social Network"

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Is The Social Network a  Jewish movie and, if so, what can we make of it? Of course, if Alan Dershowitz had his way, such a question is completely off limits. The movie is simply a movie written by a screen writer who happens to be Jewish (Aaron Sorkin) about people, some of whom happen to be Jewish. End of story.

That seems to be the take of the vast majority of critics if Wikipedia’s summary is any indication. Writing in the New York Times, David Brooks, who is about as obsessively Jewish as Dershowitz, does see a Jewish message, but you have to read between the lines: Mark Zuckerberg is the symbol of the new Harvard, smart and driven to succeed (i.e., Jewish), but without social or moral graces. “It’s not that he’s a bad person. He’s just never been house-trained. He’s been raised in a culture reticent to talk about social and moral conduct.” And he compares Zuckerberg to the Jews who elbowed out the WASPs and invented their version of Hollywood: “Immigrant Hollywood directors made hyperpatriotic movies that defined American life but found after fame and fortune they were still outsiders. In this movie, Zuckerberg designs a fabulous social network, but still has his reciprocity problem. He is still afflicted by his anhedonic self-consciousness, his failure to communicate, his inability to lose himself in the throngs at a party or the capacity to deserve the love he craves.”

Brooks’ version presents Jews as they want to be seen—smart and driven, sweeping away the bad old WASP Harvard, their minor blemishes deriving from a culture “reticent to talk about social and moral conduct.” No mention of discrimination against Whites and in favor of Jews in admissions to elite universities. And Brooks would be the last person to produce a serious discussion of the issue of how Jewish culture contributes to lapses in moral conduct.

One obvious subtext is Jewish ethnic networking. The idea for developing a social networking site at Harvard came from the Winklevoss twins and their Indian business partner. The Winklevosses are presented as quintessential Aryans—right out of central casting for a movie on the SS. But when they approach the Zuckerberg character about doing the technical work on the site, Zuckerberg steals their idea,  ditches the Aryans, and forms a partnership with two Jews, Eduardo Saverin and Dustin Moskowitz. In the end, the Winklevosses settled for $65 million.

The other moral lapse is when Zuckerberg screws his best friend Saverin out of his share of the company—an obvious moral failing that was eventually settled for $1 billion. Saverin was taken in by assuming that his friend would not cheat him, effectively signing away his share of the company without knowing it.  Granted Zuckerberg didn’t like what Saverin was doing for the business, but there was an obvious moral failing with how Zuckerberg handled it.

Is there a Jewish story to what Zuckerberg did to the Winklevosses? The reality is that there is a long tradition enshrined in canonical Jewish texts where Jews who commit fraud  or other dishonesty against non-Jews are accepted in the Jewish community, particularly if they are generous to Jewish charities. Certainly not all Jews would have done what Zuckerberg did, but his actions fit into a pattern  of behavior that is tolerated within the Jewish community.

So far, Zuckerberg has attempted to rehabilitate himself by a $100 million gift to the Newark Public Schools. There’s a scene in the movie where Bill Gates gives a talk at Harvard and mentions the possibility that someone in the audience could be the next Bill Gates. Zuckerberg clearly fills the bill in the sense that, like Gates, he is quite adept at flushing his money down the toilet: Test scores are “among the lowest in New Jersey” despite 15 years of state control of the system.

Is there a Jewish story in what Zuckerberg did to Saverin? Like the Jewish victims of Bernie Madoff, Saverin relied on his sense that a fellow Jew would not cheat him. But Saverin got screwed anyway.

This should put Zuckerberg into the lowest level of Jewish hell. So far I haven’t seen any attempt to make it up to the Jews. I think a major contribution to the ADL or AIPAC is in order.

Elena Kagan and the new (unprincipled) elite

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Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman had a bit of Jewish triumphalism published recently in the NY Times (“The Triumphant Decline of the WASP“).  Now that the WASPs have gone down to zero seats on the Supreme Court and there’s a Black president, it’s time to congratulate the WASPs for holding onto their principles even though their principles caused their demise: WASPs as the first and only proposition ethnic group.

Satisfaction with our national progress [by having 3 Jews on the Supreme Court and no WASPs] should not make us forget its authors: the very Protestant elite that founded and long dominated our nation’s institutions of higher education and government, including the Supreme Court. Unlike almost every other dominant ethnic, racial or religious group in world history, white Protestants have ceded their socioeconomic power by hewing voluntarily to the values of merit and inclusion, values now shared broadly by Americans of different backgrounds. The decline of the Protestant elite is actually its greatest triumph.

I would go beyond Feldman by saying that no other elite has ever voluntarily allowed itself to be eclipsed because of steadfast adherence to principle. Feldman is doubtless quite happy because he realizes that the new elite (including himself) will not allow itself to be eclipsed by such madness–suicide by principle.

Indeed, Kagan’s arrival on the Supreme Court is a sort of official coming out party for the new elite. It’s been there for quite some time, but the Kagan nomination is an in-your-face-demonstration of the power of Jewish ethnic networking at the highest levels of government. And the first thing one notices is that the new elite has no compunctions about nominating someone for the Supreme Court even though she has no real qualifications.  So much for the principles of merit and inclusion: Inclusion does not apply to WASPs now that they have been deposed. And the principle of merit can now be safely discarded in favor of ethnic networking.  As I noted previously,

This is a favorite aspect of contemporary Jewish self-conception — the idea that Jews replaced WASPs because they are smarter and work harder. But this leads to the ultimate irony: Kagan is remarkably unqualified to be a Supreme Court Justice in terms of the usual standards: judicial experience, academic publications, or even courtroom experience. Rather, all the evidence is that Kagan owes her impending confirmation to her Jewish ethnic connections (see also here).

The same goes for Jewish over-representation in elite academic institutions–far higher than can be explained by higher Jewish IQ. Does anyone seriously think that Jewish domination of Hollywood and the so much of the other mainstream media  (see, e.g., Edmund Connelly’s current TOO article) is about merit rather than ethnic networking and solidarity? And then there’s the addiction of the new elite to affirmative action for non-Whites.

Whatever else one can say about the new elite, it certainly does not believe in merit. The only common denominator is that Whites of European extraction are being systematically excluded and displaced to the point that they are now underrepresented in all the important areas of the elite compared to their percentage of the population. The new elite distinguishes itself mainly by its hostility to the traditional people and culture of those they displaced. It is an elite that cannot say its name. Indeed the ADL was all over Pat Buchanan for merely mentioning that Kagan is Jewish and that, upon her confirmation, Jews would be one-third of the Supreme Court.

This lack of principle at the foundation of the new elite extends to every area of the culture: The financial elite that produced the greatest economic recession since the Great Depression by participating in and massively profiting from wholesale fraud in the mortgage market; the academic elite that systematically excludes ideas related to the legitimacy and reasonableness of White ethnic interests; the media elite that routinely provides invidious depictions of Whites and especially Whites with a sense of White identity and ethnic interests; the political elite that fails to perform the most basic function of government: protecting the people and culture from invasion and displacement; the organized Jewish community with its influence spread throughout the government, routinely supporting an expansive ethnonationalism in Israel while condemning any hint of ethnonationalism in White Americans.

This lack of principle will certainly extend to Elena Kagan once she accedes to the  Supreme Court. Her academic publishing record, meager as it is, indicates someone who does not believe in principles such as free speech:

Kagan [will]  be quite willing to fashion her legal arguments to attain her liberal/left policy goals, and that is exactly what her other writings show. Her 1993 article “Regulation of Hate Speech and Pornography After R.A.V,” (60 University of Chicago Law Review 873; available on Lexis/Nexis) indicates someone who is entirely on board with seeking ways to circumscribe free speech in the interests of multicultural virtue: “I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.” She acknowledges that the Supreme Court is unlikely to alter its stance that speech based on viewpoint is protected by the First Amendment, but she sees that as subject to change with a different majority: The Supreme Court “will not in the foreseeable future” adopt the view that “all governmental efforts to regulate such speech … accord with the Constitution.” But in her view there is nothing to prevent it from doing so. Clearly, she does not see the protection of viewpoint-based speech as a principle worth preserving or set in stone. Rather, she believes that a new majority could rule that “all government efforts to regulate such speech” would be constitutional. All government efforts.

I suspect  that the new elite will continue to pay lip service to the founding documents, the rule of law, and high principles like merit. But in reality these documents will be interpreted in ways that benefit the new elite and allow it to consolidate and maintain its power. I believe that with one more vote after Kagan’s confirmation, the First Amendment will be a historical curiousity.

And the principle of merit will mainly come down to promotional hype  in the media (when not obviously a matter of affirmative action).  Feldman represents Kagan as an exemplar of the shift to an American meritocracy — despite her remarkably undistinguished record. (A Google ssearch for “Elena Kagan” and “Harriet Miers” yields dozens of articles on the very real question of her qualifications.)  Senator Jeff Sessions correctly called Kagan the least experienced nominee “at least in the last 50 years.” He also noted that his main concern about her is his fear that she lacks a firm sense of the  rule of law–in other words, that she does not see law as defending the principles that were so sacrosanct to her WASP antecedents: “Will she as a judge subordinate herself to the constitution and keep her political views at bay?”

That is the question precisely. And all the evidence is that Kagan, like the rest of the new elite, will reject principle in favor of interest. We already see that honest, empirically grounded analyses of the Jewish role in the new elite and how this new elite serves Jewish ethnic interests will continue to be proscribed. As in the USSR, the topic will be officially off limits. (Solzhenitsyn makes this point in 200 Years Together.)

Finally, I agree with Feldman that the WASP elite was extraordinarily principled–uniquely so. This is not the entire story, however, since the WASPs did mount an ethnic defense culminating in the 1924 immigration law. It failed, in my opinion mainly because of the rise of Jews as a hostile elite who attained their position by seizing the moral high ground and making alliances with and promoting the more principled (suicidal) component of the WASP elite. (WASPs like Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, and A. Lawrence Lowell were not part of the the WASP suicide mission; they could see the writing on the wall and I think they understood who the enemy was.)  As Israel Zangwill said in opposing the 1924 immigration restriction law, “You must make a fight against this bill; tell them they are destroying American ideals. Most fortifications are of cardboard, and if you press against them, they give way” (see here, p. 266).

Jewish intellectuals understood that WASP dedication to principles and ideals was their soft spot. We can expect that the new elite will not be similarly inclined to adhere to principles at the expense of self-interest. The result will be a catastrophic loss to the people who founded and built America.

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Kevin MacDonald: Translation of Solzhenitsyn's "In the Camps of GULag" — Chapter 20 of "200 Years Together"

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Kevin MacDonald: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s important 200 Years Together has unfortunately not been translated into English. However, this process is now beginning with the posting of Chapter 20, “In the Camps of GULag.” As the title suggests, the chapter discusses the role of Jews in the Gulag. There are several important themes.

Despite apologetic claims by Jews, in fact Jews lived better in the camps. Obviously, it’s a touchy subject–just like everything else about the role of Jews in the Soviet Union.

If I wished to generalize and state that the life of Jews in camps was especially difficult, then I would be allowed to do so and wouldn’t be peppered with admonitions for unjust ethnic generalizations. But in the camps, where I was imprisoned, it was the other way around – the life of Jews, to the extent of possible generalization, was easier.

Jews also looked out for each other–yet another example of ethnic networking. Free Jews were often in positions of authority and they favored their own people. For example:

A Lett Ane Bernstein, one of my witnesses from Archipelago, thinks that he managed to survive in the camps only because in times of hardship he asked Jews for help and that the Jews, judging by his last name and nimble manners, mistook him for their tribesman – and always provided assistance. He says that in all his camps Jews always constituted the upper crust and that the most important free employees were also Jews (Shulman – head of special department, Greenberg – head of camp station, Kegels – chief mechanic of the factory), and, according to his recollections, they also preferred to select Jewish inmates to staff their units.

The few Jews who did share in the common labor did so out of principle–in order to avoid the stereotype of Jews who did not work. They were rewarded for their efforts by being rejected by “both sides” — indicating that everyone in the camps was aware of the ethnic divide–just as American prisons are organized along ethnic fault lines. But Solzhenitsyn optimistically describes Jews who countered the common tendencies: “I try not to overlook such examples, because all my hopes depend on them.”

Nevertheless, the resentment and hatred of the Jewish position in the camps was real. Solzhenitsyn realizes that all humans are prone to these tendencies, but he also understands that the ethnic divide exacerbated the “heavy resentment”:

When an alien emerges as a “master over life and death” – it further adds to the heavy resentment. It might appear strange – isn’t it all the same for a worthless negligable, crushed, and doomed camp dweller surviving at one of his dying stages – isn’t it all the same who exactly seized the power inside the camp and celebrates crow’s picnics over his trench-grave? As it turns out – it is not, it has etched into my memory inerasably.

The Russians did not show ethnic networking and accordingly suffered. Notice that he sees the mass murder involved in collectivization as a personal loss to his ethnic group.

Those who know about terrific Jewish mutual supportiveness (especially exacerbated by mass deaths of Jews under Hitler) would understand that a free Jewish boss simply could not indifferently watch Jewish prisoners flounder in starvation and die – and not to help. But I am unable to imagine a free Russian employee who would save and promote his fellow Russian prisoners to the privileged positions only because of their nationality, though we have lost 15 millions during collectivization: we are numerous, you can’t care about everyone, and nobody would even think about it.

The White Sea canal, completed in 1933, has gone down in history as a particularly brutal forced labor project in which thousands of workers died. Solzhenitsyn points out that all six of the people in charge of the project were Jews:

Genrikh Yagoda, head of NKVD.

Matvei Berman, head of GULag.

Semen Firin, commander of BelBaltlag (by that time he was already the commander of Dmitlag, where the story will later repeat itself).

Lazar Kogan, head of construction (later he will serve the same function at Volgocanal).

Jacob Rapoport, deputy head of construction.

Naftaly Frenkel, chief manager of the labor force of Belomorstroi (and the evil daemon of the whole Archipelago)

Solzhenitsyn’s observations fit well with the findings of historians like Yuri Slezkine showing that Jews were a political and cultural elite in the Soviet Union. Slezkine draws special attention to Jews as Stalin’s “willing executioners” supervising the greatest crimes of the 20th century.

Throughout the chapter Solzhenitsyn’s brutal honesty shines through. He bends over backward to give examples of Jews who behaved in ways contrary to the general tendencies he and others observed. Nevertheless, he recounts how he was often accused of anti-Semitism simply for recording his observations. It’s okay to depict an evil person as a Russian, but never identify him as a Jew.

Solzhenitsyn’s observations add to the growing evidence of the role of Jews as a hostile elite in the USSR–hostile to the native Russian population and willing to engage in the most brutal crimes against them. This translation is very important for bringing this message to the English-speaking world, if only to dispel the common representation of Jews as always and inevitably historical victims.

White Americans should think long and hard about what these observations imply for them as they become a minority in a country dominated by hostile minorities, including Jews as a hostile elite.

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Kagan’s journalist supporters

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We at the TOO blog have been emphasizing how Jewish ethnic networking is the real story of the  Kagan nomination. One is led to that conclusion from simply looking at how utterly ordinary she is in terms of scholarly accomplishment or anything else that would qualify her for the court–truly the Harriet Miers of the Obama administration. Now Politico has an article discussing Kagan’s friends among journalists (“Kagan’s journo friends“). Of the 8 journo friends mentioned, 7 have obvious Jewish names, the other, Jonathan Capehart, is a Black homosexual. And two of the comments show that the journalist met Kagan in the context of a Jewish social event:

“I first met Kagan in the mid-’90s when we were both former law clerks for Judge Abner Mikva on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit,” wrote The New Republic’s Jeffrey Rosen.

“Elena danced at our wedding in 1986,” wrote The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin. “When my wife, Amy, and I bought our first apartment, Elena’s father was our lawyer.”

Patrick Cleburne has another excellent blog on Kagan. It calls attention to her hostility to free speech, but also makes a point of Kagan’s (Jewish) journo friends, this time at the NYTimes, but also explicitly calls attention to some of her other Jewish connections:

That curious specimen Dick Morris appears on NewsMax.com to ludicrously argue that

Kagan ‘Moderate’ Democrat Tuesday,11 May 2010

Based on the Elena Kagan that I knew, she would be a moderate on the court. She’d be a little bit like Sandra Day O’Connor . .

Morris must really think Newmax.com readers stupid. The New York Times puff piece yesterdayA Pragmatic New Yorker on a Careful Path to Washington
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and LISA W. FODERARO.) reports Kagan worked on Liz Holtzman’s 1980 Senate campaign, having also interned with Representative Ted Weiss. She then benefited from the patronage of former Congressman Abner Mikva who as a Federal Judge gave her a clerkship. All dedicated leftists (the first two usually 100% in the Americans for Democratic Action rankings) – and fellow Jews.

But then again, so is Morris. There has been a surprsing amount of MSM comment on the exclusion of Protestants from the Court; this is the boot that hasn’t dropped.

Not only are Protestants excluded, Whites will now be in a minority (3 Jews, 1 Latina, and 1 Black are the new majority). This transformation into a non-White elite is happening with breathtaking speed, so much so that Whites are actually a minority in this elite institution well before becoming a demographic minority. Perhaps this will help to make Whites conscious of what is really happening.


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Elena Kagan Gets the Nomination

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It’s great to be Jewish in the year 2010. The latest evidence is the appointment of Elena Kagan as the third Jew on the Supreme Court. Philip Weiss puts it this way:

The Kagan appointment means that we have entered a period in which Jews are equal members, if not actually predominant members, of the American Establishment. Obama’s two closest political advisers are Jewish, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, and are said to be his foreign-policy braintrust. The economy is supervised to a large degree by Jewish appointees, Larry Summers and Fed Reserve Board chair Paul Bernanke (Time‘s man of the year last year, a selection overseen by Rick Stengel, the Time magazine editor, who is also Jewish).

Of course, that’s just scratching the surface on Jewish representation among the elites in politics, law, the financial world, the media, and personal wealth. Weiss goes on to take the standard line that Jews have achieved so much because of their bookish culture. But if there’s anything that stands out about Kagan, it’s how utterly ordinary she is in terms of scholarly accomplishment or anything else that would qualify her for the court–very few publications, no experience as a judge, little courtroom experience — the Harriet Miers of the Obama administration. (I stole that one from someone on the Rachel Maddow show, maybe Maddow herself. But it shows the depth of her inaptitude that even liberals are sensitive to it. For example, Paul Campos writes on the Daily Beast, “if Kagan is a brilliant legal scholar, the evidence must be lurking somewhere other than in her publications. Kagan’s scholarly writings are lifeless, dull, and eminently forgettable. They are, on the whole, cautious academic exercises in the sort of banal on-the-other-handing whose prime virtue is that it’s unlikely to offend anyone in a position of power.”  Here’s my version: “When she received tenure at the University of Chicago in 1995, she had exactly two scholarly articles published in law journals — a record that would ordinarily not get her tenure even at quite a few third tier universities much less an elite institution like the University of Chicago.”)

Her only talent seems to be getting really prestigious jobs without any obvious qualifications apart from her ethnic background. And her appointment is a sure thing for the left: Whereas Republicans have been disappointed several times by nominees who converted into liberals (like John Paul Stevens), Kagan’s ethnic identity ensures that she is on the side of all things multicultural.

My take (see also here) is that this is an affirmative action appointment of someone who has benefited greatly from Jewish ethnic networking and has dangerous views on the First Amendment that are in line with the views of the ADL, the SPLC, and the rest of the organized Jewish community. (See also Patrick Cleburne’s post at VDARE.com.)

It’s amazing to see liberals expressing doubts about Kagan. (In fact, one wonders where these people were before her nomination was a done deal. Kagan’s name has been floated since the Sotomayor nomination, but suddenly we see all these doubts about her — mainly from liberals feigning concern.) She is clearly on the left, perhaps with some neocon tendencies regarding executive power. But that is hardly reassuring. Put these tendencies together and you have someone who could be very dangerous to an incipient racialist movement: Anti-“hate speech” and comfortable with using government power to suppress political action that conflicts with the aims of the regime.

Another thought that crossed my mind was that Obama and his advisers may have wanted to court Jews [bad pun] because of the fallout from the tensions with Israel. Despite the fact that, as John Mearsheimer recently noted, the confrontation with Israel was won hands down by Israel, a recent poll shows that American Jews are defecting from Obama in droves, with only 42% saying they would now vote for Obama (down from 83% who voted for him in 2008). A recent visit to the White House (“Obama Tries to Mend Fences with Jews“, NYTimes, May 4, 2010)  by Elie Wiesel indicated shows that Obama sees a need to placate the Jewish community:

The lunch meeting between Mr. Wiesel and Mr. Obama came three weeks after Mr. Wiesel took out a full-page advertisement in a number of United States newspapers criticizing the Obama administration for pressuring Mr. Netanyahu to stop Jewish settlement construction in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians would like to put the capital of an eventual Palestinian state.

The advertisement, in which Mr. Wiesel wrote that “Jerusalem is the heart of our heart, the soul of our soul,” alarmed White House officials, in part because it came on the heels of similar advertisements from the World Jewish Congress and grumbling from members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, that Mr. Obama was pushing Mr. Netanyahu too hard.

Giving them yet another appointment to the Supreme Court certainly can’t hurt.

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Does Jewish financial misbehavior have anything to do with being Jewish?

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As expected, the fraud charges brought against Goldman Sachs by the SEC and now the Senate hearings are producing a lot of anxiety in Jewish quarters. Back in January, Michael Kinsley wrote an article telling us how to think about the Jewish angle in the financial meltdown (“How to Think About: Jewish Bankers”). The question for Kinsley isn’t whether negative qualities of Jewish bankers or the bad behavior of Jewish firms like Goldman have anything to do with being Jewish.

The question is whether anyone who criticizes Goldman is an anti-Semite:

Because Goldman is thought of as a “Jewish” firm, and because it dominates the financial industry, criticism of Goldman, or of bankers generally, is often accused of being anti-Semitic. Commentators including Rush Limbaugh and Maureen Dowd have been so accused. When, if ever, are such accusations fair?”

So Kinsley passes his Geiger Counter over non-Jews like Limbaugh and Dowd and passes judgment on their moral worthiness. Any link between Jewishness and misbehavior is automatically out of bounds for serious discussion: “Certainly any explicit suggestion that Goldman’s alleged misbehavior and its Jewishness are related in any way is anti-Semitic.”

This statement draws on a general reluctance to ascribe negative traits as being reasonably associated with a certain group. But this can easily be seen to be just another example of political-correctness think. What if indeed a particular group is more likely to engage in some sort of bad behavior? For example, J. Philippe Rushton and Glayde Whitney have claimed on the basis of a rather powerful theory and a considerable amount of data that Blacks are prone to criminality and this is true wherever there are Blacks — whether in Africa, North America, South America, or the Caribbean.

If indeed that is true or at least reasonable, then it would also be reasonable to say being Black contributes to the likelihood that a certain group of Blacks are criminals — that a considerable part of the explanation for the criminality of these particular Blacks stems from their group membership. It would certainly not imply that all Blacks or even anywhere near all Blacks are criminals. Just that Blacks are more likely than other groups to be involved in certain kinds of crime — Rushton and Whitney would argue for a strong role of their common genetic ancestry.

Or take a presumably benign example: It’s well known that the Ashkenazi Jewish mean IQ higher than the European mean. If then one finds that Jews are highly overrepresented in a particular high-IQ occupation, say among mathematicians, then it is certainly reasonable to explain this as partly due to the general traits of the group, as writers ranging from Charles Murray, Henry Harpending and Greg Cochran, and I have argued

Can such an argument be made Jewish involvement in financial scandals has something to do with being Jewish? Back in the 1980s a major financial scandal revolved around Michael Milken. Much of the discussion of the Jewish role in this financial scandal centered around the book Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart. Jewish activist Alan Dershowitz called Den of Thievesan “anti-Semitic screed” and attacked a review by Michael M. Thomas in the New York Times Book Review because of his “gratuitous descriptions by religious stereotypes.”  Thomas’s review contained the following passage:

James B. Stewart . . . charts the way through a virtual solar system of peculation, past planets large and small, from a metaphorical Mercury representing the penny-ante takings of Dennis B. Levine’s small fry, past the middling ($10 million in inside-trading profits) Mars of Mr. Levine himself, along the multiple rings of Saturn — Ivan F. Boesky, his confederate Martin A. Siegel of Kidder, Peabody, and Mr. Siegel’s confederate Robert Freeman of Goldman, Sachs — and finally back to great Jupiter: Michael R. Milken, the greedy billion-dollar junk-bond kingdom in which some of the nation’s greatest names in industry and finance would find themselves entrapped and corrupted.

Thomas was attacked as an anti-Semite simply for mentioning so many Jewish names all in one paragraph. His defense was to note that “If I point out that nine out of 10 people involved in street crimes are black, that’s an interesting sociological observation. If I point out that nine out of 10 people involved in securities indictments are Jewish, that is an anti-Semitic slur. I cannot sort out the difference. . . .”

I can’t sort out the difference either. And once again, the current financial meltdown has revealed a large role for Jewish companies and Jewish money managers who engineered the meltdown and profited handsomely from it.

Kinsley acknowledges that Jews predominate on Wall St. and it’s okay to criticize a Jewish firm like Goldman Sachs — but only if there is no mention that Jewishness has anything to do with it.

Sometimes the stereotype about Jews and money takes a harsher form: Jews are greedy, they lie, cheat and steal for money, they have undue influence with the government, which they cultivate and exploit ruthlessly, and so on. In recent weeks, many have said this sort of thing about Goldman Sachs, but with no reference to Jews. Are they all anti-Semites? No. It ought to be possible to criticize Goldman in the harshest possible terms–if you think that’s warranted–without being tarred as an anti-Semite.

So is it possible to frame an argument that bad behavior in the financial realm does indeed have something to do with Jewishness? Note that this is quite different from showing that Jewishness is involved in the creation of culture — the argument of The Culture of Critique. There it was only necessary to show that a movement was dominated by Jews who identified as Jews and saw their work as advancing Jewish interests.

As I see it, the argument has two parts:

1.)    Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy has always had a strong element of ingroup/outgroup thinking. Entirely different moral standards are applicable inside and outside the group. The result is that the Jewish moral universe is particularistic and the attitude toward non-Jews is purely instrumental — aimed at maximizing personal benefit with no moral concerns about the consequences to non-Jews. For example, a common pattern in traditional societies was that Jews allied themselves with exploitative non-Jewish elites.

The evolutionary aspects of this situation are obvious. Jews were the ideal intermediary for any exploitative elite precisely because their interests, as a genetically segregated group, were maximally divergent from those of the exploited population. Such individuals are expected to have maximal loyalty to the rulers and minimal concerns about behaving in a purely instrumental manner, including exploitation, toward the rest of the population. (A People that Shall Dwell Alone, Ch. 5)

2.)    One would then have to show that actual Jewish behavior reflected the double moral standard that is ubiquitous in Jewish religious writing. There is in fact a long history of anti-Jewish attitudes focused around the charge that Jews are misanthropes with negative personality traits who are only too willing to exploit non-Jews. This history is summarized in Ch. 2 of Separation and Its Discontents, beginning with the famous quote from Tacitus, “Among themselves they are inflexibly honest and ever ready to show compassion, though they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies.” Among the more illustrious observers are the following (see here for the complete passage, p. 46 ff):

  • Immanual Kant: Jews are “a nation of usurers . . . outwitting the people amongst whom they find shelter. . . . They make the slogan ‘let the buyer beware’ their highest principle in dealing with us.”
  • Economic historian Werner Sombart: “With Jews [a Jew] will scrupulously see to it that he has just weights and a just measure; but as for his dealings with non-Jews, his conscience will be at ease even though he may obtain an unfair advantage.”
  • Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz: “[The  Polish Jew] took a delight in cheating and overreaching, which gave him a sort of joy of victory. But his own people he could not treat in this way: they were as knowing as he. It was the non-Jew who, to his loss, felt the consequences of the Talmudically trained mind of the Polish Jew.”
  • Sociologist Max Weber: “As a pariah people, [Jews] retained the double standard of morals which is characteristic of primordial economic practice in all communities: What is prohibited in relation to one’s brothers is permitted in relation to strangers.”
  • Zionist Theodor Herzl: Anti-Semitism is “an understandable reaction to Jewish defects” brought about ultimately by gentile persecution: Jews had been educated to be “leeches” who possessed “frightful financial power”; they were “a money-worshipping people incapable of understanding that a man can act out of other motives than money.”
  • Edward A. Ross: “The authorities complain that the East European Hebrews feel no reverence for law as such and are willing to break any ordinance they find in their way. . . . The insurance companies scan a Jewish fire risk more closely than any other. Credit men say the Jewish merchant is often “slippery” and will “fail” in order to get rid of his debts. For lying the immigrant has a very bad reputation. In the North End of Boston “the readiness of the Jews to commit perjury has passed into a proverb.”

Edmund Connelly has reviewed the work of two academic historians, Paul Johnson (A History of the Jews) and Albert Lindemann (Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews), who “have shown that this pattern of Jewish deception and fraud in pursuit of wealth and its legitimacy within the Jewish community have a long history.”

The key point is the legitimacy of fraud within the Jewish community. Successful fraudsters are not shunned but rather become pillars of the  community:

Reflecting the legitimacy of white collar crime in the wider Jewish community in the contemporary world, [Michael] Milken is a pillar of the Jewish community in Los Angeles and a major donor to Jewish causes. Indeed, this is part of a pattern: Ivan Boesky donated $20 million to the library at the Jewish Theological Seminary. And the notorious Marc Rich has donated millions of dollars to a wide range of Jewish causes, including Birthright Israel, a program designed to increase Jewish identification among young Jews. The list of people supporting Rich’s pardon by Bill Clinton was “a virtual Who’s Who of Israeli society and Jewish philanthropy.” A rabbi concerned about the ethics of these practices notes, “it is a rare Jewish organization that thinks carefully about the source of a donor’s money. … The dangerous thing is not that people make moral mistakes, but that we don’t talk about it.”

The idea is that the Jewish financial elite sees the non-Jewish world in instrumental terms — as objects with no moral value. As I noted earlier,

there is a strong suggestion that the financial elite behaved much more like an organized crime syndicate than as an elite with a sense of civic responsibility or commitment to the long term viability of the society. Whereas organized crime stems from the lower levels of society, this meltdown was accomplished at the very pinnacle of society — the Ivy League grads …, the wealthy financial firms and investment rating agencies, the strong connections with government that facilitated the bailout and failed to provide scrutiny while it was happening. It seems highly doubtful that all this would have happened with the former WASP elite.

In psychological terms, these Jews are behaving in a sociopathic manner toward the non-Jewish world. That is, they have no concern for the moral consequences of their actions — no empathy or concern for victims. Recent neuroscience data shows that people are quite capable of having a great deal of empathy and concern for people in their ingroup while having no empathy at all toward outsiders, especially if they are highly ethnocentric. This implies that a strongly identified Jew could be the epitome of a well-socialized, empathic group member when he is among Jews, but treat the rest of the world in a cold and calculating manner and have no remorse or empathy for the victims.

Nor would such a person have any concerns about the long-term future of the society he lives in. Richard Spencer discusses the fact that so many of our politicians are sociopaths (my favorite example is Winston Churchill), noting that “Aristocrats governed with a healthy, long-term goal in mind: they wanted their great grandchildren to inherit a prosperous, powerful realm.”

It can safely be asserted that concerns about the long-term health of the society are not uppermost in the minds of our financial elite.

Concerns that Wall Street is socially irresponsible are widespread now. Just last week I saw CNBC reporter David Faber asking Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs whether Wall Street was good for America. Is it serving any positive social function? — with the implication that it’s at least reasonable to think it isn’t. Such a question would have been inconceivable a couple years ago. Rather than producing any tangible goods or allocating financing in a way that benefits good businesses, Matt Taibbi’s analogy seems to hit home:  “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

As Kinsley notes, this analogy was immediately deemed anti-Semitic by the usual thought police: “This sentence, many have charged, goes beyond stereotypes about Jews and money, touches other classic anti-Semitic themes about Jews as foreign or inhuman elements poisoning humanity and society, and—to some critics—even seems to reference the notorious ‘blood libel’ that Jews use the blood of Christian babies to make matzoh.”

It also conjures up a strong image of economic parasitism, another ancient anti-Jewish theme: the financial sector as not producing products or wealth, but extracting wealth to the detriment of the society as a whole.

The problem for Kinsley and like-minded people is trying to seriously rebut the claim that the socially destructive behavior of the  predominantly Jewish financial elite does in fact fit a strong historic pattern of Jewish ethical behavior vis á vis the non-Jewish society — behavior that is well grounded in Jewish religious ethics.

In any case, it is a very troubling sign indeed for the  US that the financial sector is vastly outpacing the rest of the economy in corporate earnings as well as in executive compensation — especially when it’s being run by a group of people who have sociopathic attitudes toward non-Jewish America.

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