The Jewish origins of multiculturalism in Sweden
In The Culture of Critique and other writings I have developed the view that Jews and the organized Jewish community were a critical necessary condition for the rise of multiculturalism in the West. In Chapter 7, on Jewish involvement in shaping immigration policy, I focused mainly on the U.S., but also had brief sections on England, Canada, Australia (greatly elaborated recently in TOO by Brenton Sanderson), and France.
One question I often get is about the role of Jews in Sweden and other European countries with relatively few Jews. Now there has been a translation from Swedish of an article, “How and why Sweden became multicultural,” that summarizes academic writing on the Jewish role in making Sweden into a multicultural society. This article should be read in its entirety, but some salient points:
The ideological change started in 1964 when David Schwarz, a Polish born Jew and Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Sweden in the early 1950s, wrote the article “The Immigration problem in Sweden” in Sweden’s largest and most important morning newspaper – the Jewish-owned Dagens Nyheter (“Daily News”). It started a rancorous debate that mostly took place in Dagens Nyheter, but which subsequently continued even in other newspapers, on editorial pages and in books. …
Schwarz was by far the most active opinion-former and accounted for 37 of a total of 118 contributions to the debate on the immigration issue in the years 1964-1968. Schwarz and his co-thinkers were so dominant and aggressive that debaters with an alternative view were driven on the defensive and felt their views suppressed. For example, Schwarz played the anti-Semitism card efficiently in order to discredit his opponents. …
It was the conservative Rightist Party who first embraced the idea of cultural pluralism and greatly contributed to shape the new radical direction. It is worth mentioning that the chairman of the Rightist Party 1961-1965, Gunnar Heckscher, was the party’s first leader of Jewish descent.
As in the U.S. and elsewhere, Jewish activists were aided by Jewish media ownership. Activists stressed the need to reshape immigration policy to atone for persecution of Jews—in the case of Sweden, the role of the Swedish government vis-à-vis Jews during World War II. (Similarly, in the U.S., Jewish activists emphasized that the 1924 immigration restriction law was motivated by anti-Semitism, and many activists, including academic activists like Stephen J. Gould [in his notorious The Mismeasure of Man; see here, p. 30ff] claimed that U.S. immigration restriction resulted in Jews dying in the Holocaust. Even Stephen Steinlight, who advocates restriction of Muslim immigration [and only Muslim immigration], termed the 1924 law “evil, xenophobic, anti-Semitic,” “vilely discriminatory,” a “vast moral failure,”a “monstrous policy”; see here, p. 5.) Read more