Jewish Ethnocentrism

The Persian Jewish Community in Beverly Hills

Ashkenazi Jews are the dominant group of Jews in the US and Europe, but I think it’s worthwhile to discuss other Jewish groups, particularly those from the Middle East because Middle Eastern Jewish groups  illustrate Judaism in its purest forms. Middle Eastern Jewish groups are quite similar to Ashkenazi groups as they existed in traditional Europe. Among contemporary Ashkenazim, they resemble the more Orthodox and fundamentalist segments of the community.

A good example are the Syrian Jews that were the subject of a previous blog. Despite living in the US for over 100 years, they remain hermetically sealed off from the rest of America, including other Jews. They aggressively police group boundaries, particularly intermarriage. Their business relationships are with other Syrian Jews, particularly family members. Recently, the Syrian Jewish community has been implicated in scandals involving money laundering, drug and organ trafficking, and tax evasion (See here and here). Reflecting practices in traditional Jewish communities, a community member who ratted out other Syrian Jews to the police was renounced by his own father.

A recent article, “The Persian Conquest” describes  a more recently arrived group of Oriental Jews who emigrated from Iran since the fall of the Shah and mostly settled in Southern California, particularly Beverly Hills. This is an elite group:

Although dispossessed, the thousands of Iranian Jews who flocked to Beverly Hills … had assets most immigrants lack: advanced education, business experience and, in the majority of cases, some cash in overseas accounts.

The following paragraph gets at the insular, clannish nature of these Jews.

A complaint sounded by Beverly Hills old-timers was that the Persians could be clannish, self-segregating and indifferent to the established norms of the community they were entering. … Thanks to their wealth and numbers, Persians didn’t need to adapt. Instead, they developed a self-sufficient Farsi-speaking enclave, complete with grocery stores, restaurants and even taxi services. And rather than courting the local social establishment, rich Persians stuck to their own social world, which revolved around lavish 1,000-person bar mitzvahs and weddings. “My mother really doesn’t need to speak English, although she does,” says Nazarian.

The comment on lack of concern for established norms recalls the behavior of Lubavitcher Jews in Postville, Iowa: No concern for even trivial things like mowing lawns or shoveling sidewalks.  More importantly, it reminds one of the lack of respect for Christian traditions that has been so characteristic of the mainstream Jewish community in the US, as recounted, for example, by Edmund Connelly (see here, here and here).

An informant goes on to say, “Cultural preservation is one part of the experience of being displaced, and as with any immigrant community, we naturally want to associate with one another. Middle Eastern countries also tend to be very tribal.”

This comment on the tribal nature of Middle Eastern societies is right on the mark — a critical difference between Jewish and Western cultural traditions. It’s no surprise then that marriage with another Persian Jew is the norm. In the following quote, notice that marriage is at least as much about fitting into the other person’s family as it is about finding someone who satisfies your psychological needs as an individual — a clear marker of the collectivist mindset:

Likewise, a majority in the younger generation choose to marry fellow Persians—much to their parents’ relief. “They don’t have to marry Persian,” says Jasmine Yadegar, in a tone suggesting that she hopes her two twentysomething daughters—both of whom still live at home—eventually will. “All I want for them is to be happy and find people with the same background.”

“For me,” says daughter Sabrina, an aspiring fashion designer, “I think it’s a lot easier to fall in love with someone who has the same ideas and experiences.”

“I need to love their family, and they need to love mine,” adds older sister Jessica, a documentary filmmaker. “Some of my American friends have told me that you’re not dating the parents. They say you don’t need to meet the parents on the first, second or third date. That’s not my view. I think the longer you postpone the introduction to the family, the longer it takes you to get to know if this is someone you want to spend the rest of your life with.”

If you married an outsider, you would be completely cut off from the intense social life of the community.

It will be interesting to see if this group is as able as the Syrian Jews to remain separate in the American context.

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Shlomo Sand’s Invention

Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People is a book full of counter productive ideas for our side. I know it will attract interest for being anti-Zionist, but the author takes up the anti-Zionist argument for all the wrong reasons. He opposes the idea of an ethnostate — a result that would rule out everything except enclaves of implicit white communities. He is extremely anti-nationalist in political outlook; rejects the idea of race as a biological reality; dismisses research findings on Jewish genetics (see the recent blogpost by Ted Sallis for what the scientists say). He rejects the idea of Israel as a ethno-homeland for Jews. Ideologically Sand seems very much in line with the Jewish socialist tradition of Trotsky and Saul Alinsky.

In other words, this is a book by a radical leftist — Sand’s Wikipedia biography notes that he was a communist in his youth. Not  surprisingly, it was published by Verso, a leftwing publisher that has also given us the likes of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, etc.

Although his book at times contains interesting admissions, overall his thesis rests on a number of flawed, counter-productive, and perilous arguments that racially conscious Whites should reject.

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Jewish Revenge Fantasies

A recent panel discussion of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds had some interesting tidbits about Jewish revenge fantasies:

But [Dr. Amy] Kalmanofsky quickly put that argument [that Jews should feel guilty about revenge]  to bed, noting that Jewish texts have always embraced revenge fantasies, from the destruction of the Egyptians in Exodus and Haman & Co. in Megillat Esther. And [Rabbi Jack] Moline — echoing the message of one of his Yom Kippur sermons from earlier this year — also praised the film, describing it as a way of helping American Jews shed some of their Holocaust baggage and getting more comfortable with their Zionist sides.

Moline told his congregants: “To my surprise, my complete and utter surprise, there was something cathartic and deeply satisfying watching this revenge fantasy play out. It was as if something I did not dare admit — my secret blood lust to do unto them what they did unto us — was being acknowledged, permitted and validated. I was liberated from victim hood.”

For making Jews feel good about their blood lust, Tarantino’s future in Hollywood is assured. The producer, Lawrence Bender, told Tarantino “Quentin you are about to make your Bar Mitzvah movie, you are going to be officially let into the tribe.”

This reminds me of Alison Weir’s wonderful recent article Israeli Organ Trafficing and Theft: From Palestine to Moldova.” She discusses the work of Prof. Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California-Berkeley:

Scheper-Hughes discussed the two motivations of Israeli traffickers. One was greed, she said. The other was somewhat chilling: “Revenge, restitution – reparation for the Holocaust.”

She described speaking with Israeli brokers who told her “it’s kind of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We’re going to get every single kidney and liver and heart that we can. The world owes it to us.’”

Scheper-Hughes says that she “even heard doctors saying that.”

I think that revenge fantasies are a common among Jews and it goes way beyond Nazis. In “Memories of Madison” I wrote that

In my experience at Madison during the 1960s, there was also a strong desire [among Jews] for bloody, apocalyptic revenge against the entire social structure—perceived by them to be the goyish, fascist, capitalist, racist, anti-Semitic social structure. … This fits well with the set of interviews with New Left Jewish radicals in Percy Cohen’s Jewish Radicals and Radical Jews: many had destructive fantasies in which the revolution would result in “humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors.” These fantasies of destruction of the social order were combined with a belief in their own omnipotence and their ability to create a non-oppressive social order.

As Whites become a minority in Western societies and Jews constitute a hostile elite, this Jewish focus on revenge  has grave implications for the future. Revenge becomes an important issue given that Jews tend to interpret their history of living among Europeans as a long series of persecutions beginning with Christianity and ending with the Holocaust. (See, e.g., Norman Podhoretz’s Why are Jews Liberals?.)

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More on the culture of deceit: Solomon Dwek is just the tip of the iceberg

Back in August, Edmund Connelly wrote about a culture of corruption that pervades the Orthodox Jewish community in New York and New Jersey.  Solomon Dwek’s rabbi father renounced him after he informed on money laundering within the community as part of a plea bargain in his case of bank fraud. Now New Jersey.com reports that the feds are investigating Dwek’s charitable contributions. The basic scheme is to contribute to a Hassidic charity in order to get a tax write-off, but then receive kickbacks of up to 95% of the money from the charity. But it’s far wider than just Dwek: “In Los Angeles, more than 100 contributors to a Hasidic Jewish sect in Brooklyn are being investigated by the U.S Attorney for the Central District of California in connection with the same kind of kickbacks spelled out in the New Jersey cases.”

Those involved are often religious leaders and the wealthy:

A similar scheme led to federal charges in 2007 against the Grand Rabbi of Spinka, the spiritual leader of an Orthodox sect based in Brooklyn. Millions of dollars were contributed to Spinka organizations from donors who secretly got back up to 95 percent of their money — despite declaring all of it as charitable giving on their federal income taxes.

Grand Rabbi Naftali Tzi Weisz, 61, of Brooklyn pleaded guilty earlier this year in Los Angeles, where the case was prosecuted, and is awaiting sentencing.

One of the contributors to the Spinka charities, David Hager, 55, of Los Angeles, was sentenced earlier this year to six months in federal prison after pleading to two counts of tax evasion. He was accused of claiming deductions for contributions that had been reimbursed at a rate of 90 cents for every dollar he donated.

Hager was worth over $400 million, according to court records.

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