Jewish Writing on Anti-Semitism

Joel Pollak and Bill Kristol on Obama’s rabid anti-Semitism

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Not to be outdone by the Tablet article labeling Obama a “Jew baiter,” Joel Pollak writing in Breitbart came out with “Barack Obama’s Anti-Semitic Rant on the Iran Deal: President Barack Obama is using anti-Jewish language to sell the Iran deal.”

On Thursday, Obama led a conference call with left-wing activists in which he repeatedly railed against his political opponents by using the old canard of rich Jews using their money to exert control.

Accusing critics of the deal of being “opposed to any deal with Iran”–i.e. of advocating war–Obama railed against “well-financed” lobbyists, as well as the “big check writers to political campaigns,” and  “billionaires who happily finance super-PACs.” He complained about “$20 million” being spent on ads against the deal—a subtle reference to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC–whose support he had repeatedly courted when running for office).

Some of Obama’s references were thinly-veiled attacks on specific (Jewish) individuals—columnist Bill Kristol, for example, the Weekly Standard publisher and former New York Times resident conservative who served in the George H.W. Bush administration, and also helps run the Emergency Committee for Israel, which opposes the Iran deal; or billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who is a prodigious Republican benefactor, super PAC donor, and well-known hawk on Israel issues.

So now merely referring to the fact that the opposition to the Iran deal is well-funded makes Obama’s statements into an “anti-Semitic rant.” Calling attention to the deep pockets of political opponents is fair game with a long history in American politics. But if Jews are the ones with the deep pockets, suddenly, it’s “anti-Semitism” — defined I guess as “something Jews dislike because it brings attention to their actions.”  Read more

“Jew baiter” Obama: The same people who brought you Iraq are opposing the Iran deal

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Sometimes Jewish comments related to anti-Semitism seem so unhinged that they surprise even me.  A Tablet article describes the meeting between Obama and a raft of Jewish leaders on the Iran deal (“Obama to Jewish Leaders: Lay Off the Iran Deal, and I Will Lay Off You“).

Words have consequences, and when they come from official sources, they can be even more dangerous, the president was told. The community worked hard to keep it from getting personal and didn’t make it specific to him. The president complained about the lobbying, and said some of the same people who brought you Iraq are opposing the Iran deal. He was told those characterizations are not accurate. Jewish lobbyists didn’t support the Iraq war.

Another participant who also asked to remain anonymous told me that some people expressed discomfort with  “how the debate is being framed—framed as, ‘if you are a critic of the deal, you’re for war.’ The implication is that if it looks like the Jewish community is responsible for Congress voting down the deal, it will look like the Jewish community is leading us off to another war in the Middle East.”

Read more

A Review of “The Devil That Never Dies” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Part 3

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 Part 1
Part 2

Jews and Communism

Goldhagen angrily declares that any claim that Jews “were responsible for the Russian Revolution and its predations” is a “calumny” and that: “If you associate Jews with communism, or worse, hold communism to be a Jewish invention and weapon, every time the theme, let alone the threat, of communism, Marxism, revolution, or the Soviet Union comes up, it also conjures, reinforces, even deepens thinking prejudicially about Jews and the animus against Jews in one’s country.”[1]

So any linkage made between Jews and communism is, for Goldhagen, a “calumny” despite the fact that mainstream Jewish historians readily confirm that Jews were vastly disproportionate participants in providing the ideological basis for, and the governance and administration of, the murderous communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe.  Bernhard Wasserman, professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Chicago, notes, for example, that “the European left was in large measure a Jewish creation. In Germany in the mid-nineteenth century Marx, Hess, and Lassalle, all three of Jewish origin, had founded and shaped the socialist movement.”[2] Further,  the Jewish historian Norman Cantor pointed out that “In the first half of the twentieth century, Marxist-Leninist communism ran like an electromagnetic lightning flash through Jewish societies from Moscow to Western Europe, the United States and Canada, gaining the lifelong adherence of brilliant, passionately dedicated Jewish men and women.’[3]

The prominent Jewish intellectual and writer Chaim Bermant observed that, “To many minds, at the beginning of this [twentieth] century, the very words radical and Jew were almost one, and many a left-wing thinker or politician was taken to be Jewish through the very fact of his radicalism.” He also observed that “When, after the chaos of World War I, revolutions finally erupted all over Europe, Jews were everywhere at the helm”[4] To take just one example, of the forty-nine commissars who governed Bela Kun’s short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, thirty-one were Jewish.[5] Read more

A Review of “The Devil That Never Dies” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Part 2

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Part 1

“Antisemitism” as “The Real Devil that Christianity Spawned”

Rather than hostility toward Jews having its origins in group competition for resources, Goldhagen contends that “antisemitism” is “the real devil that Christianity spawned.”[1] He conveniently ignores the fact that antipathy to Jews was widespread throughout the pre-Christian civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Rome, and instead claims that “antisemitism”

began in ancient Israel during the time of Jesus and migrated shortly thereafter to Greece. There it was codified in the context of early Christians’ desires to appropriate the early Jewish religious and messianic tradition, really Judaism revamped, for themselves. In Greece the Gospels were written, at best based on a long chain of hearsay, not until fifty to one hundred years after Jesus’ death by people who never knew or saw Jesus or the events surrounding his life. Antisemitism then moved to and became entrenched in Rome, the center of the Western world, where Christianity and simultaneously antisemitism had its greatest conquest when Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity for himself and the Roman Empire in the early fourth century. As his empire spread to more European lands in particular, the secular and religious authorities brought the antisemitic gospel with them, which, after Rome’s fall (which did not see the Church fall), spread to all of Europe, so that during the Middle Ages antisemitism, together with Christianity, had solidified itself as the one pan-European belief system, about which different peoples, peoples of different classes and stations, different professions, and eventually even different and warring forms of Christianity could agree upon and coalesce. Then, with European and Christian colonization of much of the world, antisemitism spread farther.[2]

In addition to ignoring the extensive and often violent pre-Christian aversion to Jews, Goldhagen also makes no mention of the fact that Christianity, unlike Judaism, is a universalist creed which eventually led to Europeans being the first people in history to ban slavery for moral reasons. Instead, he maintains that the New Testament is an “antisemitic” and “eliminationist” tract:

The Christian bible is, whatever its subsidiary pronouncement to the contrary, at its heart an eliminationist document. A codification of eliminationist antisemitism against Jews. Their evangelical calls for Jews to follow Jesus aside, the Gospels so deprecate the Jew’s existing cultural core (namely the Jewish bible’s laws and codes), implicitly and explicitly calling for an end to this people as Jews, and so demonize Jews in the process for putatively being Jesus’ enemies and murderers, and so threaten them with violence and destruction, that it is hard to see this as anything but an eliminationist mindset, a blueprint for eliminationist politics, and, if only tacitly, a call to eliminationist action — and this is how it has been taken by Christians and others beholden to the foundational paradigm it grounded.[3]       

Goldhagen claims that the New Testament contains “four hundred fifty antisemitic verses just in the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, averaging more than two per page.”[4] Conveniently, he has nothing to say about the “eliminationist” mindset, politics and actions that are far more clearly evident in the Jewish Bible, and how this has shaped Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews. Read more

A Review of “The Devil That Never Dies” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Part 1

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Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is best known for his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Despite its flawed historiography, this polemical work attracted enormous media attention and established his reputation as a putative authority on “anti-Semitism” and the “Holocaust.” He was soon given a regular platform to peddle his extreme brand of Jewish apologetics in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and other Jewish-controlled media organs around the world.

A former associate professor of political science and social studies at Harvard University, Goldhagen has since produced further books that morally indict Europeans for their inveterate “anti-Semitism” and supposedly enthusiastic participation in the “Holocaust.” These include A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (2002), and Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (2009). His latest offering is his 2013 book The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise of Global Antisemitism, published by a major commercial publisher and touted as “a groundbreaking — and terrifying — examination of the widespread resurgence of antisemitism in the twenty-first century.”

Goldhagen favors using the term “antisemitism” over the hyphenated “anti-Semitism” — doubtless because the latter implies the existence of a “Semitism” which could (and indeed does) provide the dialectical basis for “anti-Semitism.” Goldhagen, in this way, signals his rejection of the reality that hostility to Jews stems from conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in a Darwinian world. The assertion by Jews of their ethnic interests (Semitism) inevitably leads to resentment from those whose interests are compromised as a result (so-called anti-Semitism). To admit this basic truth is to admit that non-Jews (including Europeans) have interests that are legitimate, and that the desire to resist those opposed to our interests is eminently rational.

For Goldhagen, however, Jewish behavior is irrelevant for understanding the hostility to Jews that has existed across nations and cultures for over two millennia. He observes that: “Antisemitism has moved people, societies, indeed civilizations for two thousand years, and has done so despite the other vast changes in the world and in these civilizations and societies — economic, scientific, technological, political, social, and cultural.”[1] Despite the persistent, and often intense, antagonism between Jews and non-Jews throughout much of recorded history, Goldhagen argues that “attributing antisemitism to a reasonable (if sometimes exaggerated) reaction against the Jews’ own conduct” is an example of “faulty thinking.”[2]  Read more

On History, Religion, and Anti-Semitism: The Disgraceful Legacy of Gavin Langmuir

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 ‘A nation can survive its fools, even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within….for the traitor appears not to be a traitor…he rots the soul of a nation…he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.’
Cicero

One of the major themes explored at TOO is that the onslaught on Whites and their culture is massively incentivized. In particular, Kevin MacDonald has pointed out that the multicultural left has created a context “in which many Whites benefit financially from the process of White displacement.” One example is that of White businessmen who are handsomely rewarded in the short-term by immigration because it lowers labor costs. But in the longer-term, these same businessmen are cooperating directly in their own eventual displacement, and helping create a future world in which their genetic descendants will occupy a vulnerable, and probably horrific, role as a victimized minority. MacDonald also pointed to the role played by Whites at colleges and universities, where:

professors who want to move into lucrative positions in administration must be warriors on behalf of non-Whites.  A noteworthy example is Mary Sue Coleman, who earns north of $900,000/year as the president of the University of Michigan and has been a leader in attempting to preserve racial preferences and in promoting the educational benefits of diversity. … At a lower level on the academic food chain, one of the most important criteria for professors is whether they can obtain government grants which then pay them extra salary and pay the university for the costs of administering the grant — a major source of funding for the university and a major factor in tenure decisions. Right now there is a lot of money in grants aimed at improving the educational prospects of Blacks and Latinos and no shortage of White professors eager to get their hands on that money.

The fact that taking part in the diminishment of White demographics, culture and political power is incentivized really can’t be stressed enough. It’s also important to note that it takes place on many levels of society, and on smaller scales. Rewards can be promotions, job opportunities, or even just increased esteem within one’s social or professional circle. To illustrate these more subtle examples, in this essay I want to offer a brief survey of the life and work of a White academic who enjoyed good, but unspectacular, success in his career until he styled himself an historian of “Jewish-Christian relations.” After a number of articles and influential books essentially exonerating Jews of any wrong-doing in their history, and mercilessly pathologizing Whites and Western culture, this academic found himself the darling of the Jewish academic establishment, lavished with plaudits, prizes and esteem. It’s the quintessential story of how taking part in the war on Whites can bring with it an abundance of temporary rewards. Read more

A review of Jewcentricity by Adam Garfinkle, Part 4 of 4: Islam

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Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

In Jewcentricity Garfinkle claims that “Muslim societies today are the site of the most virulent and widespread anti-Semitism on the planet.” He traces the source of this anti-Jewish sentiment back to the origins of the religion itself, and notes how it “inheres in the sacred narrative of Islam.” The reasons for this sentiment in Islam are akin to the reasons for it in Christianity — the desire to separate the religion from its foundational rootstock of Judaism. He notes that “just as Christianity had to find some way to separate, distinguish, and distance itself from its foundation in order to justify its claims of superiority, so did Islam.”[1]

Muslims accept a differing account of the stories from the Bible that describes the binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah, the future Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and Isaac inheriting Abraham’s covenant with God. According to the Quran, and as Muslims have always understood it, “it is not Isaac but Ismail who is bound (and of course saved), and the place is the Valley of Arafat, in Arabia, not Mount Moriah in the Land of Israel.” So while agreeing with much that is related in the Hebrew Bible, in-the-tradition Muslims argue that, with regard to the events just described, Jews have distorted the record and that “the Hebrew Bible’s account of this critical event, the “binding” of Abraham’s son, is a post-Mohammedan fabrication.”[2] Read more