Jewish Influence

My paper on Jewish influence blows up

My paper “The Default Hypothesis Fails to Explain Jewish Influence” has generated considerable controversy. Springer Nature has put up the following statement at the beginning of the article:

04 January 2022 Editor’s Note: The Editor-in-Chief and publisher are aware of concerns raised with the content of this article and are investigating. Editorial action will be taken as appropriate once investigation of the concerns is complete and all parties have been given an opportunity to respond in full.

The good news, of course, is that they are saying that I will be able to “respond in full.” This could get very interesting.

Meanwhile, I have come across two media accounts of the controversy. Justin Weinberg’s The Daily Nous, described as “news for and about the philosophy profession, useful information for academic philosophers, links to items of interest elsewhere, and an online space for philosophers to publicly discuss it all. The site is maintained by me, Justin Weinberg, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina.” The article, “Philosophy Journal Hosts Debate on “Jewish Influence” (updated),” by Weinberg, begins with a quote from the hostile Wikipedia article on me where I am labeled an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, white supremacist,  and evolutionary psychologist.”  Weinberg:

Philosophia is edited by Asa Kasher (Tel Aviv). In response to questions about the publication of these articles, he wrote that the papers were refereed prior to publication, but that it was “a mistake” to publish them, explaining that he was “not aware of the general background of the debate” and that he is “sorry for treating the discussion as an ordinary philosophical debate.” He added that further comments from him may be forthcoming.

Yesterday, Moti Mizrahi (Florida Institute of Technology) who was until last night the associate editor of Philosophiawrote on Twitter: “I had nothing to do with the publication of this [McDonald’s] paper in Philosophia. I’ve asked the EiC to reconsider its publication in Philosophia.” Later in the day, he announced his resignation from the journal.

Weinberg seems particularly interested in publicizing my brief section titled “Should Jews be welcomed in White advocacy?” The idea of White advocacy is so far beyond the pale at this point that such a discussion is sure to anger activist Jews—and so obviously anathema that Weinberg included a screen shot of the section. I knew that the passage would result in anger, and one reviewer suggested I delete it. But Cofnas had argued that it’s no mystery why Jews don’t join White advocate movements that take a dim view of the effects of Jewish activism, so I thought it was important enough to keep in.

There is a sort of irony here because I started out my academic career by majoring in philosophy and then becoming a graduate student in philosophy, both at the University of Wisconsin. At the beginning I loved philosophy but gradually, due to the upheaval of the 1960s and having developed the idea that philosophy was really irrelevant to the contemporary world, I dropped out. A very difficult decision at the time, but probably the right one in the long run because by the time I came back to academia several years later, I had decided that biological, evolutionary perspectives on human behavior were what I was really interested in. Anyway, publishing an article in an academic philosophy journal is kind of a homecoming for me, and I’d have to say that my article is hardly evidence that an article in academic philosophy journal is irrelevant to the real world. Irrelevant articles don’t ignite furious public debate among activists.

It’s interesting that one section of my article discusses my personal experience with the New Left as a philosophy grad student; another discusses the general rise of Jewish academics to positions in elite universities: ‘Hollinger (1996: 160) notes that “One force in this [culture war of the 1940s] was a secular, increasingly Jewish, decidedly left-of-center intelligentsia based largely . . . in the disciplinary communities of philosophy and the social sciences.’ Lipset and Ladd (1971), using survey data of 60,000 academics from 1969, show that the 1960s were a critical period for the rise of Jewish academics in elite universities who were in general well to the left of non-Jewish professors.” The influx of Jewish faculty and the retirement of non-Jewish faculty were certainly obvious at the University of Wisconsin during that period. I can’t find an official history of that period in the department, but I can think of around 10 Jews, including Haskell Fain (my advisor, a good guy!), including most of the younger faculty.

The other article appeared in The Algemeiner, “a global news destination published online and in print, serves as an independent media voice covering the Middle East, Israel and matters of Jewish interest around the world”: “Israeli Philosophy Journal Scolded for ‘Legitimizing’ Notorious White Supremacist by Publishing Article on ‘Jewish Influence.’”

An Israeli academic journal stirred controversy this week after its publication of a paper on “Jewish influence” by notorious white supremacist Kevin MacDonald, prompting the resignation of its associate editor and a condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

On Sunday, the peer-reviewed Philosophia: Philosophical Quarterly of Israel journal published the essay by MacDonald, a retired California State University-Long Beach professor and a virulently antisemitic figure influential in the US white supremacist movement.

Notice both articles use quotes around the word ‘influence.’ The Algemeinger article also baldly refers to my work as “antisemitic” and, like Weinberg, it emphasizes the section on Jews joining White advocacy movements, as in:

In a lengthy piece defending his earlier antisemitic work, MacDonald called Cofnas’ assessment of Jewish “influence” on US history “inadequate,” arguing among other things that “Jews should be allowed to join [pro-white] movements if they acknowledge the role and the power of the Jewish community in transforming America contrary to white interests and direct their efforts at converting the Jewish community to pro-white advocacy.”

And we hear from the predictably outraged ADL:

The report’s author, ADL Center on Extremism Senior Research Fellow Marilyn Mayo, told The Algemeiner on Tuesday that MacDonald’s body of work was “blatantly antisemitic,” and said that publishing his article was “not a mistake that can just be shirked off.”

“I think it’s disappointing that a journal based in Israel would publish the work of an antisemite,” Mayo said. “Promoting the work of an antisemite in an academic journal legitimizes it.”

But rest assured, the ADL’s attempt to have the article withdrawn is not about censorship. It’s about truth.

“It’s not about censorship, but looking at what someone is saying and whether you’re validating views that are antisemitic or racist or promoting ideas that have proven to be conspiratorial and not true,” she continued.  “Of course, in academia there is understandably a drive to present all different kinds of views, and that’s understandable — but it is also incumbent upon institutions and journals to vet what’s put out there or put it in context.”

The phrase “ideas that have proven to be conspiratorial and not true” is a classic. Which ideas is she referring to? There are literally dozens of ideas discussed in my paper. Is she saying that the activist—c Jewish community didn’t really organize, lead, fund, and perform most of the work of the most important anti-restrictionist organizations active from 1945–1965? Is there no basis to my claim that they recruited prominent non-Jews, such as JFK and Hubert Humphrey, as spokesmen for immigration? Did Jews own the three major television networks and Hollywood studios during that period? Did Jewish academics attempt to shape public views on race? Was the activist Jewish community hopelessly split between different perspectives so that in aggregate they had no influence—or were there virtual consensuses during particular times and places? To name a few.

And something Ms. Mayo should be able to comment on directly. Cofnas claimed that I maintained that Jews are hypocritical in their attitudes re Israel vs the U.S.—concerned about demographic eclipse in Israel if there was a one-state solution, but championing replacement-level immigration in the U.S. In response I noted that the ADL described Tucker Carlson’s claim that White people are being replaced in the U.S. as “antisemitic, racist and toxic,” and noted that Carlson put up a screen shot from the ADL website pointing out that Jews in Israel would be in danger if Jews became a minority. Why was this statement removed from the ADL website? I accessed it on the ADL website at the time Carlson mentioned it, but the link that worked in April, 2021 (https://www.adl.org/education/resources/fact-sheets/response-to-common-inaccuracy-bi-national-one-state-solution) now says, “You are not authorized to access this page.”

Of course, there is no attempt to dispute my assertions on these matters. Nothing concrete that I could respond to. We’ll see if anyone else does. But rest assured, the vast majority of academics will be intimidated by such pronouncements and will stay inside their safe spaces. Being labeled an “anti-Semite” is the kiss of death for pretty much everyone these days.

I recently posted a blog item on the passing of E.O. Wilson. It was generally laudatory, and notes that he emphasized the roles of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin in the academic attacks on him. But one wonders if he was intimidated from publicly noting that their Jewish identities growing up in a radical Jewish subculture influenced their views, as discussed in  Chapter 2 in The Culture of Critique. I recently came across an interview EOW did for Quillette in 2011 where he elaborates on Gould and Lewontin. He singles out Gould and Lewontin among the many academics who had condemned Sociobiology:

Furious ideologically based opposition had built up in 1978. That opposition had been fanned by a small number of academics including [paleontologist] Stephen Jay Gould and [evolutionary biologist] Richard Lewontin and two or three others on the Harvard faculty who thought this was a very dangerous idea and said so. These people helped organize the so-called “Science for the People” movement, or the branch of it called the “Sociobiology Study Group.” Their purpose was to discredit me personally for having brought up such a dangerous and destructive idea. …

Even before the Internet, there were colleagues I’ve had to watch closely, out of self-defense. Gould and Lewontin could change your identity to evil. Until the end, Gould was continuing to speak out against studies on human genetics and the biological basis of human behavior. At every opportunity, he would put the needle in.

On the ease of academic publishing if you are on the left:

Gould and Lewontin could publish fast and easily. In the early days of forensic DNA analysis, Lewontin came out with a tremendous blast against it and, to my astonishment, he actually had a paper published in Science. He said that since the odds of making a mistake with an African American was greater than making a mistake with whites, forensic DNA analysis was racist and should not be used. He was talking about how the chances of making a false match by chance alone was one in, say, 150 million (I’m just making up numbers here to illustrate his point) in African Americans, while in whites it was something like one in 300 million, so we shouldn’t use the technology. Of course, soon afterwards we saw not people being unjustly convicted, but people being freed when their convictions were overturned, many of whom were African Americans who had been wrongly convicted!

On the other hand, as EOW noted in a 1994 book Naturalist (345), Lewontin imposed the highest scientific rigor on those attempting to publish ideas he disagreed with: “By adopting a narrow criterion of publishable research, Lewontin freed himself to pursue a political agenda unencumbered by science. He adopted the relativist view that accepted truth, unless based on ineluctable fact, is no more than a reflection of dominant ideology and political power.”

Going back to the Quillette interview, EOW on Gould’s Machiavellian personality:

I have a certain cynical feeling towards Gould. Gould was going around attacking racists wherever he found them, especially in the early part of his career. He was the great anti-racism crusader. He acted as though other scientists were all racists or incipient racists. He almost implied that he was the champion who would step out of science as a scientist and fight racism everywhere. He had a technique. I knew him when he was a graduate student following me around. He used to be very polite and solicitous. I watched him develop into a very different kind of person.

So Gould was polite and solicitous as a graduate student and likely as an untenured faculty member, but as soon as he had power and security at an elite academic institution, he became a different person—probably a common phenomenon as second- and third-generation Jews were ascending the ladders to elite status in American society. Indeed, EOW notes “I knew [Gould] well enough to know he sought fame and riches. He sought that out.” Lewontin also enjoyed an upper-middle-class lifestyle:

Here was a guy who was an intense Marxist, who spent so much time rallying on behalf of the proletariat, who was all about the class struggle. And he struck me absolutely as a BMW-driving, Cambridge-living, Romance-language-phrase-dropping snob.

This contrasts with EOW’s description of Ruth Hubbard, another Harvard professor who rejected his work:

I always thought of [Hubbard] as burning with a pure fire. She believed all of this. She was dedicated in an honest way to all of this. She was doing other things, too. She was putting herself into civil rights movement, she was an early environmental activist. She was on the wrong side of the problem that culminated in [Napoleon Chagnon’s] difficulties, but at least she was sincere.

Hubbard seems to have been the sort of WASP idealist discussed extensively in Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition (Chaps. 6 & 7), but that was definitely not how EOW saw Gould and Lewontin. I am wondering if Wilson ever thought about their Jewish identities and how that impacted their work. He must have known they were Jewish and he must have known about the Jewish radical subculture they grew up in. From Chapter 2 of The Culture of Critique:

Gould learned his Marxism “at his Daddy’s knee” (see Gould 1996a, 39), indicating that he grew up as part of the Jewish-Marxist subculture discussed in Chapter 3. In a recent article Gould (1996c) reminisces fondly about the Forward, a politically radical but also ethnically conscious Yiddish newspaper (see Ch. 3), stating that he recalls that many of his relatives bought the newspaper daily. As Arthur Hertzberg (1989, 211–212) notes, “Those who read the Forward knew that the commitment of Jews to remain Jewish was beyond question and discussion.”

Did he think their personalities had something to do with their Judaism? Their political commitments? We’ll never know, but it’s  pretty clear that if he had mentioned these issues, his life would have been turned upside down once again, just like in the 1970s. I very much doubt he wanted to go there.

“The Default Hypothesis Fails to Explain Jewish Influence”

Nathan Cofnas published a paper in the Israel-based academic journal Philosophia: Philosophical Quarterly of Israel in February of last year titled “The Anti-Jewish Narrative.” Andrew Joyce wrote a masterful reply, “The Cofnas Problem,” while I decided to try to  publish a response in Philosophia. My paper went through two rounds of peer review and was finally accepted. It was the lead article in the January issue of Philosophia,  and is available as an open-access paper on Springer Nature [The two links in the previous sentence go to the original paper but now with the retraction notice.] I provide a local version due to [well-founded] concerns the article will be pulled by Springer Nature.

This is the first time I have attempted to publish an article on Jewish influence in the mainstream academic literature since The Culture of Critique was published in 1998 by Praeger, so it is something of a milestone. I have updated quite a bit of the material, particularly the scholarly writing on Jewish involvement in influencing U.S. immigration policy—Chapter 7 of The Culture of Critique. I have always felt that Chapter 7 was the most important chapter in the book. Intellectual movements can decline drastically in influence. This was the fate of psychoanalysis—but not Boasian anthropology, and the intellectual descendants of the Frankfurt School remain influential throughout postmodern academia. Moreover, at least in Western democracies, even political movements, as embodied in the Jewish subculture of radical leftism, can be reversed at the ballot box—unless the people against whom the 1965 immigration law was directed are replaced by a new electorate with no attachment to the people and culture of the West. As argued in the paper, this is exactly what the 1965 immigration law was intended to accomplish in the minds of the Jewish activist community that was by far the most influential force in enacting the law.

Besides updating some critical aspects of The Culture of Critique, the paper emphasizes the point that the enactment of the 1965 immigration law did not occur in a vacuum and cannot be understood apart from the wider context of the rise of a new Jewish elite with influence in a wide range of areas. As I note in the article, the rise of this new elite “implies that vital issues of public policy, including immigration, the civil rights of African-Americans, women’s rights, religion in the public square (Hollinger’s “secularization of American society”), the legitimacy of white racial identity and interests, cosmopolitanism [identifying a “citizen of the world”], foreign policy in the Middle East, and many others will be affected by the attitudes and interests of this new elite.” The post-World War II era saw the emergence of a new, substantially Jewish elite in America. This new elite exerted influence on a wide range of issues that formed a virtual consensus among Jewish activists and the organized Jewish community, including immigration, civil rights, and the secularization of American culture” The 1950s saw the decline of the old WASP elite, recounted in Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. By the 1960s this new elite was flexing its muscle, resulting in a cultural and demographic revolution which is ongoing and indeed accelerating. This new, substantially Jewish elite was (and remains) centered in academia and the media, and, because of Jewish wealth, this new elite has been able to have decisive influence in the  political process via donations to political causes.

The abstract:

The role of Jewish activism in the transformative changes that have occurred in the West in recent decades continues to be controversial. Here I respond to several issues putatively related to Jewish influence, particularly the “default hypothesis” that Jewish IQ and urban residency explain Jewish influence and the role of the Jewish community in enacting the 1965 immigration law in the United States; other issues include Jewish ethnocentrism and intermarriage and whether diaspora Jews are hypocritical in their attitudes on immigration to Israel versus the United States. The post-World War II era saw the emergence of a new, substantially Jewish elite in America that exerted influence on a wide range of issues that formed a virtual consensus among Jewish activists and the organized Jewish community, including immigration, civil rights, and the secularization of American culture. Jewish activism in the pro-immigration movement involved: intellectual movements denying the importance of race in human affairs; establishing, staffing, and funding anti-restrictionist organizations; recruiting prominent non-Jews to anti-restrictionist organizations; rejecting the ethnic status quo as a goal because of fear of a relatively homogeneous white majority; leadership in Congress and the executive branch.

Minority Control: From the Neolithic to the Present

In my hate-article “Booty without Scrutiny,” I looked at the media silence that greeted the knighthood given by Theresa May to Ehud Sheleg, the Israeli treasurer of the British Conservative Party. It’s plain that mainstream journalists in Britain are too frightened to ask some very important questions about the consequences of a foreign national controlling the finances of Britain’s governing party.

Second to Israel, of course

Indeed, mainstream journalists are too frightened to mention Ehud Sheleg’s knighthood at all. However, that silence didn’t extend to the Jewish Chronicle, which published an article saying that the “Tel Aviv-born Tory treasurer” was “surprised but delighted” by his “knighthood from Theresa May.” The article quoted this very significant admission by Sheleg:

Discussing his upbringing he has said: “I was brought up, albeit in Israel, with the sentiment of very strong ties to Britain. In the family of nations, this has to be my favourite one. Second to my homeland, of course.” (Ehud Sheleg, Tel Aviv-born Tory treasurer ‘surprised’ by knighthood from Theresa May, The Jewish Chronicle, 16th September 2019 / 16th Elul 5779)

Sheleg is expressing a vile anti-Semitic “trope” that is explicitly condemned by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in its list of “contemporary examples of antisemitism.” According to the IHRA, it is anti-Semitic to accuse “Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.” Sheleg has added British citizenship to his natal Israeli citizenship, which makes him a “Jewish citizen” of Britain. And now he openly admits, in Britain’s main Jewish newspaper, that he is “more loyal” to Israel than to Britain.

Rule of the few, not the many

How on earth can this be acceptable in a genuine democracy? Sheleg’s primary loyalty is to his “homeland” of Israel, so he will always ensure that any conflict between the interests of Israel and Britain (or anyone else) is settled in favour of Israel. This isn’t acceptable in a genuine democracy, from which we can conclude that Britain isn’t a genuine democracy. Instead, it’s an oligarchy, from the Greek oligo– “few” and arkhia, “rule.” An oligarchy is a political system in which a small number of people exercise control for their own ends and without reference to the wishes of the majority. Read more

The Levers of Sociobiology: Power Laws from Stalin to Starlings

They strut, they chatter, they gleam with gem-like colours: starlings are one of the joys of summer right across Europe. You could spend a lifetime studying them, but one thing is already certain. There has never been a starling Stalin.

Khans and canals

In other words, no individual starling has ever been millions of times more powerful or influential than the average starling. No starling has ever exercised power over a vast number of other starlings like Josef Stalin (1878-1953) or left a genetic legacy like that of Genghis Khan (c. 1162-1227), who is the ancestor of about 16 million men in modern Eurasia, according to DNA analysis. By exploiting certain aspects of human sociobiology, Genghis Khan achieved huge political success and thereby won sexual access to vastly more women than the average man. Stalin pulled the levers of sociobiology in a comparable way but, at a later period and in a different culture, didn’t translate his political success into offspring as Khan did.

Stalin vs Starling

But the similarities between the two men are more important than the differences. Josef Stalin and Genghis Khan were clearly exceptional members of their species, Homo sapiens, in a way that no starling ever has been of its species, Sturnus vulgaris. It’s interesting to ask what aspects of biology permit human Stalins and prevent starling Stalins. Human beings and starlings are alike in that no individual in these species is, as an individual, vastly more intelligent or physically powerful than other individuals. Stalin could not have dug the White Sea Canal or designed and built the T-34 tank by himself. Nor could any other individual human. Those were collective endeavours, but they expressed the will of the individual known as Stalin or of the small number of individuals at the top of Soviet society.

Flight is not might

Starlings too engage in a collective endeavour known as flocking, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of individual birds behave as a single coordinated entity. But there is no guiding mind in a flock, no controlling will, and no individual starling could exploit the power of a flock to win itself vastly increased social and reproductive success. Why not? Well, try a thought experiment and imagine that you were an omniscient biologist who could completely control the behaviour of an individual starling. How would you turn it into a starling Stalin or starling Genghis Khan? You couldn’t, because certain levers are missing in starling biology.

The most obvious missing lever is language. Starlings can’t give or follow orders. In a hierarchical species, language is the key to what you might call force-multiplication. Stalin was dominant in more than a crudely physical sense: he was also charismatic, that is, he could beguile and dominate people with his words and manner. That is how he was able to rise steadily in an organization that enabled him to give orders and have them obeyed. He was able to translate his individual will into collective action against those individuals who opposed him. In Mongol society, Genghis Khan must have been charismatic and dominant in a comparable way. A warrior nation like the Mongols could not have been led by a weakling or a mild-mannered scholar. Read more

How the Jews won the Battle of Charlottesville

“We have been working on the ground and behind the scenes leading up to, during, and after the rally.”
Anita Gray, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the high point in a period of increasing Alt Right confidence and activism, and it was the moment that marked our first major clash with the globalist hydra. In the wake of Charlottesville, the System that we now find ourselves in more or less open conflict with has followed its dissemination of false narratives of the day’s events with opportunistic boldness and a series of actions. In the first few days after ‘Unite the Right’, an event which saw the apparently co-ordinated ambush of White Identitarian attendees, various arms of the Alt Right have suffered logistical attacks on their internet-based activities, Steve Bannon has left the White House, the myth of the ‘right wing extremist’ has been resurrected with a vengeance, and dangerous precedents have been established on the vital issues of internet freedom and freedom of speech. We are, to a greater degree than any point in recent memory, backed into a corner.

However, despite these strained circumstances, and the hectic and confused media coverage of events in Virginia, it is crucial to understand that none of these actions and reactions against the Alt Right have been spontaneous or ad hoc. Rather, what we have witnessed is the culmination of intensive efforts by our opponents to forge a hegemonic anti-White interface encompassing Jewish ethnic activists, the police, all levels of government, Antifa, and the incentivized agents of globalism and Cultural Marxism. In the following essay I want to step back from the finer points of events in Charlottesville in order to illustrate and contextualize some of the broader patterns of Jewish activity that are in evidence. Read more

Review: How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Passivity in the Face of Nazism, Part 2 of 2

Go to Part 1.

After the outbreak of war, Jews were instrumental in restructuring the American economy in order to finance the cost of fighting it — ushering in what has been called ‘the military-industrial complex” and the massive expansion of government power. One of the key features of the Jewish historical profile has been the involvement of Jews in systems of taxation. In keeping with this trend, during the early 1940s Jews were conspicuous in transforming the American economy to one based on mass taxation. The Treasury Department was of course headed by Henry Morgenthau, but what is less remarked upon is the fact that Morgenthau staffed his department very heavily with fellow Jews including Jacob Viner, Walter Salant, Herbert Stein and Milton Friedman. Ginsberg states that these Jews “fundamentally changed America’s tax system.”[1] It is not without irony that while Roosevelt was effectively pardoning high-ranking media Jews such as Joseph Schenk for large-scale income tax evasion, the Jews in his administration were championing the introduction of payroll withholding or “collection at the source” taxation for the common working man.

Although the Constitution’s Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, allowed the levying of an income tax, exemptions and thresholds meant that prior to the New Deal only 3 percent of Americans were subject to it. By 1940, Morgenthau’s Jewish team had added more than 5 million Americans to the income tax machine. The same team’s 1942 Revenue Act brought the number of Americans paying income tax to 40 million — a move Ginsberg describes as a “turning point in the history of American income taxation.” Since closely administering such a huge transition would be difficult, Jews employed much the same style of propaganda as their counterparts in the Soviet Union did to ensure popular compliance in the war effort — blanket efforts of persuasion and coercion.

In the area of persuasion, Jewish treasury officials “presented tax payment as a patriotic duty and launched an extensive propaganda campaign to convince Americans that paying taxes was a form of sacrifice required to win the war.”[2] Ginsberg adds that “Jewish films studios and radio networks, as well as Jewish composers and media personalities, played an active role.” At Mogenthau’s request his co-ethnic Irving Berlin wrote a song, “played incessantly on the radio,” titled “I Paid My Income Tax Today,” aimed at lower-income Americans who had never previously been asked to pay income taxes. Suspicious that this wouldn’t be enough, Morgenthau, along with Milton Friedman and Elisha Friedman, pushed for a permanent coercive system of payroll withholding. Ginsberg comments that:

The result of the gradual increase in tax rates mandated every year between 1940 and the end of the war, accompanied by payroll withholding, was conversion of the income tax from a minor tax levied on wealthy Americans into a major tax levied on all Americans — from a class tax to a mass tax…According to Elisha Friedman, one key, in addition to collection at the source, was gradualism. Raising taxes gradually, Friedman told the Congress, “got the people’s minds accustomed to things” and lessened the chance of tax resistance and political opposition.[3]

Gradualism has of course also been applied with devastating effect in European societies in relation to immigration and the slow erosion of rights and freedoms. Read more

Differences between the Eastern European immigrant community in the US and the older German-Jewish establishment — and their commonalities

Eastern European Shtetl Jews; photos from “Rare Photographs and Images of Shtetl Life

In his VDARE article of April 22, “Eastern European Jews And The Case Of the Marginalized Elite,” Paul Gottfried claims that I fail to make important distinctions among Jewish groups:

Though Kevin MacDonald argues his theory about Jewish group behavior ably, I believe it is unwarranted to generalize about the social behavior of all Jews simply because of the behavior of Eastern European Jews. …We are clearly dealing with a group that embraces all kinds of Leftist causes, most of which have a destabilizing effect on what remains of a traditional Christian society. Let me repeat: I don’t find anything about this behavior that has characterized all Jews at all times (unlike MacDonald).

This article summarizes some of my comments on different groups of Jews, some of which may have gotten a bit lost in the shuffle. In fact, beginning with my first two books on Judaism, I have repeatedly discussed differences among Jewish groups (e.g., IQ differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic groups in chapter 7 of A People That Shall Dwell Alone). This includes the important distinction between Eastern European Jews and Western European Jews, beginning with Chapter 6 of Separation and Its Discontents (1994) on Jewish strategies to minimize anti-Semitism.

It has often been critically important for Jews to be able to present a divided front to the gentile society, especially in situations where one segment of the Jewish community has adopted policies or attitudes that provoke anti-Semitism. This has happened repeatedly in the modern world. A particularly common pattern during the period from 1880 to 1940 was for Jewish organizations representing older, more established communities in Western Europe and the United States to oppose the activities and attitudes of more recent immigrants from Eastern Europe (see note 20). The Eastern European immigrants tended to be religiously orthodox, politically radical, and sympathetic to Zionism, and they tended to conceptualize themselves in racial and national terms—all qualities that provoked anti-Semitism. In the United States and England, Jewish organizations (such as the American Jewish Committee [AJCommittee]) attempted to minimize Jewish radicalism and gentile perceptions of the radicalism and Zionism of these immigrants (e.g., Cohen 1972; Alderman 1992, 237ff). Highly publicized opposition to these activities dilutes gentile perceptions of Jewish behavior, even in situations where, as occurred in both England and America, the recent immigrants far outnumbered the established Jewish community.

This difference between the Eastern European immigrant community and the German-Jewish establishment in the US is a central theme of “Jews, Blacks, and Race” (in Samuel Francis (Ed.), Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time [The Occidental Press, 2006]):

Anti-Jewish attitudes that had been common before [World War II) declined precipitously, and Jewish organizations assumed a much higher profile in influencing ethnic relations in the U.S., not only in the area of civil rights but also in immigration policy. Significantly this high Jewish profile was spearheaded by the American Jewish Congress and the ADL, both dominated by Jews who had immigrated from Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920 and their descendants. As indicated below, an understanding of the special character of this Jewish population is critical to understanding Jewish influence in the United States from 1945 to the present. The German-Jewish elite that had dominated Jewish community affairs via the American Jewish Committee earlier in the century, gave way to a new leadership made up of Eastern European immigrants and their descendants. Even the AJCommittee, the bastion of the German-Jewish elite, came to be headed by John Slawson [in 1943], who had immigrated at the age of 7 from the Ukraine.

The AJCongress, a creation of the Jewish immigrant community, was headed by Will Maslow, a socialist and a Zionist. Zionism and political radicalism typified the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. As an indication of the radicalism of the immigrant Jewish community, the 50,000- member Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order was an affiliate of the AJCongress and was listed as a subversive organization by the U.S. Attorney General. The JPFO was the financial and organizational “bulwark” of the Communist Party USA after World War II and also funded the Daily Worker, an organ of the [Communist Party USA], and the Morning Freiheit, a Yiddish communist newspaper. Although the AJCongress severed its ties with the JPFO and stated that communism was a threat, it was “at best a reluctant and unenthusiastic participant” in the Jewish effort to develop a public image of anti-communism—a position reflecting the sympathies of many among its predominantly second- and third-generation Eastern European immigrant membership. Concern that Jewish communists were involved in the civil rights movement centered around the activities of Stanley Levison, a key advisor to Martin Luther King, who had very close ties to the Communist Party (as well as the AJCongress) and may have been acting under communist discipline in his activities with King.

Read more