Jewish Support for Multiculturalism

Jonah Goldberg and Harold Meyerson on the election: It’s all good

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Two op-eds in the LATimes illustrate two Jewish reactions to the election. Although they supposedly are on the opposite sides of the political spectrum, they have much in common.

On one hand is Jonah Goldberg, editor of National ReviewOnline. Goldberg is a neocon—a faux conservative who recently was noted as supporting the firing of John Derbyshire for telling the truth about race. Goldberg has also attacked Peter Brimelow for what he described as “the narrow and nasty emphasis on what … Brimelow calls America’s ‘specific ethnic core'” (“Peter Brimelow (“a once-respected conservative voice”) on Goldberg of National Review (a once-conservative, now respected, magazine“). Brimelow’s main point is that Goldberg has been an enthusiastic supporter of displacement-level non-White immigration and is horrified at the thought of an identity politics for White people (for other groups, it’s just fine).

So it’s not surprising that Goldberg is not particularly upset by the election (“The right isn’t waving a white flag“). Goldberg claims that conservatism will come back, as it has before. Not one mention of the demographics of the vote or what that portends for the GOP or what the GOP ought to do about it. Read more

Surprise! Jewish Republicans want amnesty and gay marriage

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Lots of soul-searching among Republicans on how best to proceed. And not much of a surprise on the direction advocated by the major Republican Jewish donors.

A number of Romney’s financial backers — including Fred Zeidman of Texas, Mel Sembler of Florida and Sheldon Adelson — are among the RJC’s leadership, and Brooks made clear that their voices would be heard.

“A lot of the major financial support the candidates received was from the members of this organization,” Brooks said. “There is a lot of weight behind their message on that.”

William Daroff, the Washington director of the Jewish Federations of North America and a former deputy to Brooks at the RJC, said Republican Jews would likely advise the party to moderate.

“The conventional wisdom is that the election will result in the shift of the Republican Party to the center, particularly on issues of immigration,” Daroff said. “To the extent that the party does shift, it would make Republican candidates more appealing to Jewish voters who may be inclined to vote Republican on foreign policy and homeland security issues but who have been turned off by conservative Republicans rigidity on social issues.

Some of the leading voices counseling moderation of hard-line Republican policies have been Jewish conservatives. One of the first post-election posts from Jennifer Rubin, who writes the Right Turn blog for the Washington Post, said it was time to stop opposing gay marriage in the political arena.

“Republicans for national office would do well to recognize reality,” Rubin said. “The American people have changed their minds on the issue and fighting this one is political flat-earthism. As with divorce, one need not favor it, but to run against it is folly, especially for national politicians who need to appeal to a diverse electorate.” (“On the morning after: Jewish Republicans Advise the Party“

See also John Graham on Jewish Republican donors on behalf of gay marriage: “New York gay marriage: Follow the Jewish money“). Read more

Norman Lear’s “All in the Family” resurfaces

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In an argument about Jewish domination of the media, once you get your opponent to admit that yes, Jews do run the media, the usual fall back line is to say that it really doesn’t make any difference. Jews are Americans like everyone else, so we really couldn’t expect anything different no matter who was in charge.

I thought about this reading an LATimes article on the 40th anniversary of Norman Lear’s All in the Family (“Norman Lear Recalls ‘All in the Family’s’ Beginning“). The article begins with Lear recounting how proud he is of getting “a reference to sex that would be considered tame today” into the first episode  The show was wildly successful: “The series was brilliant, daring, funny and poignant. Over the seasons, “All in the Family” explored racism, homosexuality, women’s liberation, menopause, impotence, the Vietnam War and the loss of faith. It was the No. 1 series for five years, won 22 Emmys including four for comedy series…”

I remember reading an article about Carroll O’Connor, who played the main character, Archie Bunker, being wildly applauded whenever he went out in public during the height of the show’s popularity. The show was indeed brilliant—brilliant propaganda because it managed to identify ingrain in the American mind the idea that illiberal thinking was a sure sign of being an uneducated buffoon.

It is repeatedly brought out that the main character, Archie Bunker, is uneducated and none too smart—constantly mispronouncing even ordinary words and lacking a basic understanding of geography or history—Lincoln signed the Declaration of Independence, Denmark is the capital of Colorado, and Florida is on the West Coast. But this TV show still shapes current attitudes about people who have a problem with multiculturalism. I found the following posted online by a fan of the show:

This is definitely my favorite show and I am glad that there are re-runs on Nick-At-Nite. One of my favorite episodes is when Archie gets locked in the cellar and is finally “rescued” by a repair man, but Archie is drunk, and he thinks that the repair man is God; little does he now, that the repair man is black! (Not that it matters, but to Archie?!) And when Archie bows down to him and lifts his head to see his “God” the audience roared in laughter as did I. . . . I hope this show remains  on the air for a long time, because I could never get sick of watching All in the Family! (see here) Read more

The War on White Australia: A Case Study in the Culture of Critique, Part 5 of 5

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Jewish anti-White activism and Australia’s Aborigines

As in the United States, Australian Jews have formed strategic partnerships with various the non-White “victim” groups, who, like them, have been the alleged victims of White oppression and injustice. Prominent among these non-White groups is Australia’s indigenous people. One Jewish source describes Jews and Aborigines as “two peoples with histories of dispossession and humiliation and killing who recognise each other, who find points of intersection and of parallel.”

Seeing a parallel between the “Holocaust” and the White Australia’s treatment of Australia’s Aborigines, the Jewish Australian Professor Robert Manne has written that: “Although there was never a time when I was tempted by the thought that the Holocaust and the dispossession [of Australia’s Aborigines] were morally equivalent horrors – the British settlers did not intend to wipe out the Aborigines and would have been content if the Aborigines had uncomplainingly abandoned their way of life and their land – I have no doubt that in part I was drawn to this chapter of Australian history because of the role the Holocaust played in my thought.”[i] Thus, while careful not to detract from the metaphysical preeminence of the “Holocaust,” Manne has been particularly keen to make the plight of Australia’s Aborigines an important part of the anti-White narrative. Read more

The War on White Australia: A Case Study in the Culture of Critique, Part 4 of 5

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Opposition to multiculturalism in Australia and the Jewish response

Australian Jewry, now just one ethnic group among many in a “multicultural” society, remains, as Rubinstein observes, “one of the best organised Diaspora communities in the world and is frequently at the forefront of ethnic and multicultural affairs in Australia.”[i] The one-time editorial committee member of the Australian Jewish Democrat, Miriam Faine, got right to the heart of the Jewish support for large-scale non-White immigration and multiculturalism when she noted that: “The strengthening of multicultural or diverse Australia is also our most effective insurance policy against anti-Semitism. The day Australia has a Chinese Australian Governor General I would be more confident of my freedom to live as a Jewish Australian.”[ii] Comments like these make it clear that Jewish promotion of non-White immigration and multiculturalism has been first and foremost a form or ethnic strategizing (or ethnic warfare) concerned with preventing the development of a mass movement of anti-Semitism in Australia and other Western societies.  

It is, therefore, not surprising that Australian Jewry has reacted aggressively to any manifestation of White ethnocentrism or opposition to multiculturalism from among the White Australian population. Markus notes that: “The post-Holocaust generation [of Australian Jews] has been acutely aware that any public manifestation of bigotry and racism, whoever the immediate target, has the potential to impact across society, on all minorities, however defined.”[iii] He further observes that “Changes occurred in Australian society in the last decade of the twentieth century, which heightened the significance of multiculturalism for the Jewish community and for the wider society.”[iv]

Conservative commentator John Stone recalls that by the mid-1980s support for Australia’s immigration program was increasingly “qualified by growing doubts about the increasingly contrived use of that program to remake Australia in a politically-correct ‘multiculturalist’ image.” The then Leader of the Opposition, John Howard, when asked by a journalist in 1988 whether the sharply increased rate of Asian immigration was too high, had replied: “I am not in favour of going back to the White Australia policy. I believe that, if it is in the eyes some in the community… too great, it would be in our immediate term interest and supportive of social cohesion if it were slowed down a little, so that the capacity of the community to absorb [it] was greater.” For having expressed even such mild a criticism of Australia’s immigration program, Howard was assailed by all sections of the liberal elite with his arguments about “social cohesion” being seen as a smokescreen for “racism.” Under sustained attack, Howard backed down in humiliating fashion. Read more

The War on White Australia: A Case Study in the Culture of Critique, Part 3 of 5

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Walter Lippmann – The Jewish architect of Australian Multiculturalism

While the Minister for Immigration in the Whitlam government (1972-1975), Al Grassby, is widely renowned in politically correct Australian circles as the “father of Australian multiculturalism,” the real architect of this poisonously anti-White ideology and policy in Australia was Walter Lippmann, a German-Jewish refugee who settled in Melbourne in 1938. Lippmann was a businessman and a prominent member of Melbourne’s Jewish community who by 1960 had become president of the Australian Jewish Welfare and Relief Society.

In his advocacy of multiculturalism in Australia, Lippmann tore a page out of the writings of the pioneering Jewish-American multiculturalist Horace Kallen. Lippmann deeply resented the assimilated culture of the Australia he entered in 1938, and believed Jewish immigrants had left one type of oppression behind only to be subjected to another: the Australian expectation to assimilate. Kallen had described the corresponding expectation in the early twentieth century United States as “the Americanization hysteria” or the “Americanization psychosis.”[i] The multiculturalism espoused by Walter Lippmann in Australia, a toxic blend of postmodernism and Marxism, implied “a rejection not only of the attempts to promote an amalgam of cultures but also of any assumptions of Anglo-Saxon superiority and the necessary conformity to English-oriented cultural patterns.”

In an article entitled “Australian Jewry – Can It Survive?” published in the Jewish community newspaper The Bridge in January 1973, Lippmann argued that “The positive value of a multicultural society needs promotion in the Australian environment.” His argument was developed against the background of news that Lippmann found deeply disturbing, namely that “for the first time in the history of Australian Jewry, the 1971 Commonwealth Census has disclosed a decline in the number of Jews identifying as such.”[ii] Lippmann identified three major reasons for the decline: the post-WWII migration of Jews had mostly consisted of the middle-aged, the relatively low birth-rate of Australian Jews, and the relatively high rate of marrying out. Read more

The War on White Australia: A Case Study in the Culture of Critique, Part 2 of 5

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The History of Judaism in Australia

Jews have been present in Australia since the beginning of European settlement. Around a dozen Jewish convicts came with the First Fleet in 1788. When the transportation of convicts to eastern Australia ended in 1853, around 800 of the 151,000 convicts to have arrived were of Jewish origin. The first free Jewish settlers arrived from Britain in 1809, and there were three subsequent waves of Jewish immigration to Australia between 1850 and 1930 – mainly German Jews arriving during the gold rushes, refugees from Tsarist Russia from 1880 to 1914, and Polish Jews after 1918. The numbers arriving with each of these waves were, however, comparatively small and Australian Jewry remained a tiny isolated outpost of world Jewry until the 1930s.[i]

Unlike in Britain where Jews were gradually emancipated through Parliamentary Acts in 1854, 1858 and 1866, in the Australian colonies they enjoyed full civil and political rights from the beginning: they acquired British nationality, voted at elections, held commissions in the local militia, were elected to municipal offices and were appointed justices of the peace.[ii] Jews were well integrated into the political and administrative structure of the colonies. Sir John Monash (1865-1931) became a general in the Australian army and was, according to Goldberg, “the only Jew in the modern era outside Israel (with the exception of Trotsky) to lead an army.”[iii]  Sir Isaac Isaacs (1855-1948) became Australia’s first native-born Governor-General.  In Australia under the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 these highly assimilated Anglo-Jews were regarded as “White,” whereas Jews of middle-eastern origin were regarded as Asian and therefore barred from entry.

Sir Isaac Isaacs

Jewish academic Jon Stratton points out that the high level of assimilation of Anglo-Australian Jewry was reflected in the relatively high levels of intermarriage through the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. In 1911, some 27 per cent of Jewish husbands in Australia had non-Jewish wives and 13 per cent of Jewish wives had non-Jewish husbands. In 1921 these figures had increased to 29 per cent and 16 per cent respectively. However, by the 1991 census there had been a decline to an overall rate of 10-15 per cent.[iv] Stratton notes that “the acceptance of intermarriage signifies a lack of racial difference. Jews were thus caught on the horns of a dilemma. If they were accepted as marriage partners by gentiles this was a crucial step in the process of national assimilation but, in marrying gentiles, they destroyed the endogamous basis of Jewish particularity.”[v] This is an acknowledgment of the essentially incompatibility of Judaism and Western culture in the tendency of individualistic Western cultures to break down Jewish cohesiveness.

The Ashkenazi Jews who migrated from central and eastern Europe between 1930 and 1950 created an identity crisis within the established Anglo-Jewish community. In their political radicalism, avowed Zionism and intense ethnocentrism, they differed greatly from the Anglo-Australian Jews. The new migrants had the effect of making the Anglo-Jews more visible as a group through their association with the new European Jews. They also provoked hostility from significant sections of the Australian community, who correctly sensed that the psychologically intense and politically radical newcomers posed a fundamental threat to their nation. Read more