Jews and the Left

Kevin MacDonald: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's “The 1920s.” Chapter 18 of 200 Years Together

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The English translation of Chapter 18 of 200 Years Together, “The 1920s,” is now available. (See here, and notice the link requesting donations.) It has a very different feel from Chapter 20, on the Gulag. Whereas Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Gulag stresses his own experiences, this chapter relies on a wide range of academic historical writing to paint his picture of the USSR during the critical decade of the 1920s. His account is therefore based on mainstream scholarship and overall is similar to other accounts, such as Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. However, it goes beyond other accounts in several important ways and provides a great deal of new information for Western audiences. It is a very long chapter (>26000 words). In the current TOO article, I summarize some of the main points and draw analogies to the current situation in the West. I encourage comments on Solzhenitsyn’s chapter and my article here.

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More on Peter Beinart

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The Peter Beinart event continues to reverberate within the Jewish community. (See here.) The whole thing is rather surreal. Critics focus a great deal on why American Jews might be excused for carving out a special place for ethnic nationalism while holding on to their liberal attitudes in the US. James Kirchick writing in Foreign Policy is among many who say it’s all the Palestinians’ fault.

There’s never any mention of the possibility that the liberalism of American Jews is a strategy that is well suited to Jewish ethnic aims in the Diaspora but is quite unsuited for Israel. Jewish liberalism in the Diaspora is a sign that Jews are morally superior people who have been forced by circumstances to accept a certain amount of illiberalism in order to have a Jewish state at all. As I noted previously, the reality is that the most prestigious and powerful Jewish communal organizations, such as the ADL, see no problem at all in supporting the most extreme forms of ethnonationalism in Israel while at the same time framing their advocacy of liberal policies in America as stemming from the very nature of Judaism as an ethically superior group — despite the fact that these liberal policies conform to Jewish group interests in the US and effectively undermine White identity and interests. Beinart is a bit more honest in at least feeling a tad of cognitive dissonance in this state of affairs.

In general, there is very little mention of one of Beinart’s main points–that the entire Jewish community in Israel and in the Diaspora is likely to become more religious and more nationalistic over time because of demographic trends. Simply put, the orthodox and nationalist elements are the ones having the babies. In his critique of Beinart, Steven M. Cohen writes that the main factor influencing the lack of involvement of young Jews is intermarriage — the “departure from all manner of Jewish ethnic ‘groupiness,’ of which Israel attachment is part.” Beyond that, secular Jews have fewer children than their religious/nationalist brethren, with the result that the Jewish community in general is moving in their direction.

As an evolutionist, I see this as natural selection for ethnocentrism within the Jewish community. In traditional societies, even the less ethnocentric Jews were more or less forced to marry within the community. Marrying a non-Jew effectively removed one from the community. It also carried huge penalties to the entire family that remained behind–a blot on their name for as long as communal memory remained. But since the Enlightenment, Jews have been able to marry outside the community, and many have done so. In the same way, traditional pressure to marry kept genes for homosexuality in the gene pool because people with homosexual tendencies got married and had children. There is doubtless strong selection pressure against homosexuality now — ironically, because gay activists have succeeded in making homosexuality an acceptable lifestyle  in the West. Intermarriage was seen as a serious problem by the early Zionists who viewed the creation of a Jewish state as preventing intermarriage and allowing Jewish ethnic continuity. As Cohen implies, liberal, secular Jews cannot maintain Jewish group ties over the long haul. The demographic engines both in Israel and the US are the more Orthodox and conservative elements–precisely the people who have aggressive, nationalistic attitudes toward the Palestinians.

So Cohen agrees with Beinart that American Jewish activist organizations will be run by nationalist Jews and the entire American Jewish community will be increasingly nationalist. And I predict that American Jewish nationalists will continue to advocate liberal policies in America. Psychologically, greater ethnocentrism would be expected to be linked to seeing issues more in terms of what’s good for the Jews–and rationalizing whatever  is good for the Jews in terms of whatever principles place them in a positive light. As Beinart notes, the Conference of Presidents continues to insist that  “Israel and the United States share political, moral and intellectual values including democracy, freedom, security and peace” — despite the obvious reality that Israel is an apartheid ethnonationalist state. The more ethnocentric one is, the less cognitive dissonance one will feel for holding such attitudes.

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Elena Kagan on the Jewish radical tradition in American politics

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JudicialWatch.org has some important material on Elena Kagan. Judicial Watch President Thomas Fitton notes the “most disturbing”  parts of her senior thesis at Princeton are the following:

Through its own internal feuding, then, the SP [Socialist Party] exhausted itself forever and further reduced labor radicalism…to the position of marginality and insignificance from which it has never recovered. The story is a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America.

…if the history of Local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope.

As Fitton says, “Do we really need a Supreme Court Justice who once lamented the lack of unity on the part of the Socialist Party?”

Judicial Watch had a link to Kagan’s thesis but it doesn’t work as of today. Her senior thesis is consistent with other historical studies in showing that the Socialist Party in New York in the early 20th century was a Jewish phenomenon. She notes that Jews were the backbone of the Socialist Party and that other ethnic groups, such as the Irish and Italians, could not be motivated to join even though they were in a similar economic situation.

Not only were Jews the backbone of the Socialist Party, socialism was very mainstream within the Jewish community.  Her account parallels those of other historians who describe the Jewish community from 1890 to 1920 as “one big radical debating society” (see here, p. 71ff).

From [1886] on Jewish districts in New York and elsewhere were famous for their radical voting habits. The Lower East Side repeatedly picked as its congressman Meyer London, the only New York Socialist ever to be elected to Congress. And many Socialists went to the State Assembly in Albany from Jewish districts. In the 1917 mayoralty campaign in New York City, the Socialist and anti-war candidacy of Morris Hillquit was supported by the most authoritative voices of the Jewish Lower East Side: The United Hebrew Trades, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and most importantly, the very popular Yiddish Daily Forward. This was the period in which extreme radicals—like Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman—were giants in the Jewish community, and when almost all the Jewish giants—among them Abraham Cahan, Morris Hillquit, and the young Morris R. Cohen—were radicals. Even Samuel Gompers, when speaking before Jewish audiences, felt it necessary to use radical phrases.

The result was a radical mainstream Jewish culture that persisted in New York and elsewhere into the 1960s and beyond. With the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, many Jews opted out of the Socialist Party, resulting in a Jewish Communist subculture that was also entirely mainstream within the Jewish community.

Kagan’s comments in her thesis suggest a sympathy with this radical Jewish culture — even a desire to carry it to fruition. Everything we know about her indicates that she continues to be immersed in a Jewish culture whose attitudes are well to the left of the American mainstream–a subculture that was hostile to the  traditional people and culture of the US and has now become a hostile elite.

This fits well with Kagan’s childhood in New York’s Upper West Side — described by Dan Freedman as “as conservative’s worst nightmare.” During her college years she wrote, “Where I grew up _ on Manhattan’s Upper West Side _ nobody ever admitted to voting for Republicans.”

Elena Kagan and many of this culture’s children emerged from the Upper West Side political cauldron as committed to making the world a better place for all, mindful that everyday people can affect change as teachers, doctors, lawyers _ and, yes, even journalists _ and make government work for the common good.

There is no indication that Kagan has changed her views, and there’s not much doubt that indeed she will be a judicial activist on the left. Fitton quotes from her Oxford thesis:

As men and as participants in American life, judges will have opinions, prejudices, values. Perhaps most important, judges will have goals. And because this is so, judges will often try to mold and steer the law in order to promote certain ethical values and achieve certain social ends. Such activity is not necessarily wrong or invalid.

Well, at least we know what we can expect when Kagan gets on the court.

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Philip Weiss: "The American Jewish revolution is over"

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Philip Weiss is a unique American Jewish voice — a Jew without all the usual rationalizations and blind spots–at least most of them. A recent piece of his, titled “This is how the world now sees Jews,” consisted simply of this photo, with a note that it probably depicted Israeli settlers:

How the world now sees Jews

Below is a Palestinian woman whose house in East Jerusalem has been occupied by settlers. She is arguing with nationalist Jews.

Making the case for seizing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem

The photo is from Weiss’s article, “Making the case for Zionism,” which quotes Peter Beinart in the NY Review of Books:

In the American Jewish establishment today, the language of liberal Zionism—with its idioms of human rights, equal citizenship, and territorial compromise—has been drained of meaning.

Weiss comments: “Why? Because the territorialist-nationalists have won, and from Deir Yassin to Al-Atatra to Sheikh Jarrah, they have uprooted and humiliated Palestinian women.”

The point is that Israelis are  thugs with machine guns and ethnic cleansers. More importantly, all Jews, including the organized American Jewish community which supports Israel to the hilt, have lost the moral high ground.

This is familiar territory for Weiss, but his article “Lame Specter, Blumenthal, and Kagan show — the American Jewish revolution is over” extends his critique of Jews to their role in the contemporary American elite.  The basic message is that Jews in America started out as morally aggrieved outsiders who have ultimately morphed into symbols of the worn out establishment (Arlen Specter), liars (Richard Blumenthal), and calculating achievers and hacks (Elena Kagan).

Although I am far less romantic about the Jewish left and its moral imperative of revolution against the traditional people and culture of America than Weiss is, he certainly does understand that the new Jewish elite is fundamentally corrupt. This Jewish elite consists of people like Adam Kirsch “who steps into the New Yorker and all the other magazines with an air of entitlement, and who can blame him, Jews run the important magazines, with all the passion of printing a train timetable.”

Notice that Kirsch “steps into” his job at the New Yorker — his position as the editor of an elite publication simply handed to him as part of his Jewish entitlement. No need for struggle or for particularly great qualifications. Jews have arrived.

Kagan too “stepped into” her position as Supreme Court nominee. Her only qualifications are being Jewish and knowing the right people. The entire passage bears quoting:

Kagan is the ultimate sign that our brand is finished. She is the best of breed, as they say at Westminster. According to this Times profile, she comes out of the same hothouse I came out of, in her case the Upper West Side. Achievement, liberalism, and no partying. Arguing at the dinner table. Presumably no physical life. [Interesting comment on what it means to be Jewish. On the other hand, there’s that famous photo in the WSJ of her playing softball.] …

Kagan’s world is the Jewish success world, she stepped into it like Kirsch did. She loved the hothouse. She emulated Felix Frankfurter, who didn’t stand for much either, and is pals with Sarah Walzer,daughter of Michael Walzer, the political theorist and Jewish parochialist. She went to Jeffrey Toobin’s wedding, she was picked by Larry Summers at Harvard around the time he was saying that divestment was anti-semitic. Eliot Spitzer, Ted Weiss and Elizabeth Holtzman were among her backers. She clerked for Abner Mikva, a Chicago macher who backed Obama.

It’s a Jewish world — a world where being in the right circles counts far more than genuine talent. Kagan, the Harriet Miers of the Obama Administration, simply “steps into” her position in the top court in the land.

This reminds me of Jews as an elite in the Soviet Union, where a nascent Jewish elite motivated by moral fervor  and hatred unleashed by their exclusion under the Czar morphed easily into a corrupt, nepotistic elite that was hostile to the traditional people and culture of Russia. A report to the Soviet Central Committee reminds me of Kagan’s route to success: “They gather around themselves people of the same nationality, impose the habit of praising one another (while making others erroneously believe that they are indispensable), and force their protégés through to high posts” (see here, p. 78). Another report, from 1942, noted that elite cultural institutions “turned out to be filled by non-Russian people (mainly by Jews)” (see here , p. 51, ff). For example, of the ten top executives of the Bolshoi Theater—the most prestigious Soviet cultural institution—there were eight Jews and one Russian. Similar disproportions were reported in prestigious musical conservatories, the Soviet Academy of Science Institute of Literature, and among art and music reviewers in elite publications. Ethnic nepotism, not IQ, is the only way to explain these disproportions.

So now we are looking at a Supreme Court that is one-third Jewish–another disproportion that can’t be explained by Jewish IQ but reeks of ethnic nepotism. The ADL will of course attempt to squelch anyone who talks about the new Jewish elite publicly. But as time goes on, it’s going to be more and more apparent who runs the US.

Fundamentally, White Americans have to wrap their minds around the fact that this new elite is corrupted by nepotism,that it supports policies like massive non-White immigration aimed at the racial dispossession of Whites, and that it has no moral standing, most obviously because of the gap between its moral posturings in the US versus the reality Israel as a an aggressive, ethnonationalist state.



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Elena Kagan and the Decline of WASP America

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Elena Kagan’s impending confirmation on the Supreme Court has produced several comments on the decline of WASP America. Writing in the Wall Street Journal (“That Bright, Dying Star, the American WASP”), Robert Frank’s article is an expression of Jewish triumphalism and contempt for WASPs. Discussing the New York banking elite, he points to the bad old days when “the strictly homogenous crowd of Protestant blue-bloods spent their mornings comparing golf scores and vacation homes.” Among several causes for the decline of the WASPs, Frank mentions the decline of family connections and the rise of a meritocracy.

This is a favorite aspect of contemporary Jewish self-conception — the idea that Jews replaced WASPs because they are smarter and work harder. But this leads to the ultimate irony: Kagan is remarkably unqualified to be a Supreme Court Justice in terms of the usual standards: judicial experience, academic publications, or even courtroom experience. Rather, all the evidence is that Kagan owes her impending confirmation to her Jewish ethnic connections (see also here).

So we are replacing one type of ethnic networking with another. At least the WASPs’ ethnic networking had a certain legitimacy given their percentage of the population and their role in founding the country and defining its culture for much of US history.

Frank also quotes a passage from E. Digby Baltzell’s The Protestant Establishment:

A crisis has developed in modern America largely because of the White-Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment’s unwillingness, or inability, to share and improve its upper-class traditions by continuously absorbing talented and distinguished members of minority groups into its privileged ranks.

Perhaps. But that wouldn’t explain the eclipse of the WASPs, only that they resisted the inroads of others — futilely, as it turns out. Mr. Frank, of course, finds the passage useful because he sees himself as a member of a certain upwardly mobile minority group that he feels was not greeted warmly enough by the WASPs.

Baltzell’s comment is quite consistent with my view that that the WASPs did not voluntarily cede control but were pushed out by a rising Jewish group whose base of influence was the academic world, finance, the legal profession, personal wealth, and the media (where anti-WASP movies became a staple at least by the 1960s; see also here).

Frank says that as a result of its downfall, “WASP culture has been left to live out its days as a fashion statement, on the shelves of Ralph Lauren stores, or as a social badge at defiantly old-world clubs like the Knickerbocker Club in New York or the Bath and Tennis Club in Palm Beach.” A triumphalist statement if ever there was one. The battle is over and we won.

Frank quotes an Episcopalian bishop who acknowledges defeat, but isn’t much concerned: “tracking the ups and downs of socioreligious groups like WASPs [is] no longer relevant: ‘That kind of calibration of ‘what members of my team are on the front lines’ seems to me to be an antique kind of thing to do.’”

That’s the kind of broad-minded, liberal thinking that got the WASPs into trouble in the first place. There was always a tension between the WASPs as a clubby, snobbish elite cemented by family connections and their very liberal, broad minded world view stemming from their New England base. Writing in the LA Times, Gregory Rodriguez credits Kagan’s nomination to “The triumph of WASP culture.” Whereas Frank is filled with contempt for his vanquished ethnic rivals, Rodriguez seems quite thankful that the liberalism of the WASP elite was triumphant, presumably so that his people can now swarm over the border and aspire to power while WASP principles still count for something. He summarizes Eric Kaufmann’s view of WASP culture:

The Yankee sense of ethnic superiority often competed with their belief in universalist liberal ideology — equality, liberty and human rights. One way that worked itself out is that non-Yankees could aspire and acculturate to the Yankee norm and ideal — by gaining entrance to their schools primarily, but also by joining their churches, appreciating their art forms and imbibing their ideas, adopting their aesthetic.

Rodriguez concludes:

Students don’t just strive to attend Harvard and Yale for their educational excellence. There is also the matter of absorbing those universities’ sense of authority, legitimacy and historical legacy that leads back to their Yankee founders. If Kagan is confirmed, as seems likely, don’t cry for the WASPs. The educational pedigree of the Supreme Court will be a powerful example that their culture abides and still anoints power. The only thing that has changed is that today’s “WASP elites” are just as likely to be Jews and Catholics as they are to be Yankees.

I do cry a bit for the WASPs because I think they were more public spirited than our current elite and less likely to welcome a radical change in the ethnic balance of the country that they built. After all, the WASP elite did make common cause with the rest of White America in fashioning the 1924 immigration law (the “period of ethnic defense”). But they ultimately fell to the rise of a new Jewish elite that has shown itself as intent on establishing alliances with non-White ethnic groups and has taken an oppositional stance toward the traditional people and culture of America — including the WASPs. The “Jews as a hostile elite” theme of much of my writing.

And to claim that it really doesn’t matter what people’s ethnic or religious identity are as long as they graduate from an Ivy League university is completely nutty. Ethnicity matters a great deal, no matter what university one graduates from. The fact that Elena Kagan is the product of New York’s Jewish leftist sub-culture makes a huge difference in what we can expect from her — particularly given her views on the First Amendment and executive power that are in line with the mainstream Jewish community.

The Jewish leftist subculture is light years away from traditional WASP culture. Indeed, in her article on Thurgood Marshall, Kagan completely rejects the WASP cultural influence:

The Constitution today … contains a great deal to be proud of. But the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality.’

The fact that Kagan’s Jewish leftist subculture has become ensconced at Harvard and other elite academic institutions speaks volumes on the massive changes that have taken place in the academy and WASP America generally. Rodriguez is deluded (in a self-interested way) to suppose that changing the ethnicity of Supreme Court justices won’t change anything as long as they graduated from Ivy League colleges.

The WASPs had their faults certainly. But their main one was their failure to block the emergence of a non-WASP elite — to go down with their principles. I rather doubt that this new elite will be as willing to see itself eclipsed as the old one was. It will hang on to power with no regard at all for principles. Indeed, a good example of corruption and lack of principle among the new elite are the many defenses we now see of Kagan emanating from elite opinion makers despite her being the poster girl for ethnic nepotism and lack of real accomplishment.

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Jewish groups oppose Arizona-type laws–except in Israel

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Finding examples of Jewish double standards and hypocrisy vis-à-vis their attitudes about Israel and the US is like shooting fish in a  barrel. But their posturing on the Arizona immigration law is particularly egregious. Not surprisingly, the organized Jewish community has unanimously come out against the Arizona law (“New Arizona law brings renewed attention to immigration reform.“) We’re talking about all the major Jewish organizations:

The new law has been criticized by an array of Jewish groups, including the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, Simon Wiesenthal Center, National Council of Jewish Women and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a public policy umbrella group comprised of the synagogue movements, several national groups and scores of local Jewish communities across North America.

As usual, Gideon Aronoff , head of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, leads the moral posturing by stating,

“Are most of the Latinos who suffer from this law Jewish? The answer is no, but we look at this through the oral commandment of ‘welcome the stranger,’ ” … “We are all Americans, we are all our brothers’ keepers. We have an obligation not to stand by when legislation so harmful is put through.”

The reality is that Jewish support for legal and illegal immigration is hardball ethnic politics where Jews see themselves as part of the emerging non-White coalition. It is motivated by their fear and loathing of the traditional people and culture of America.

The photo accompanying the article likens the Arizona law to (what else?) National Socialist Germany:

The horrors!

But wait. It turns out that Israel enforces laws that allow police to ask people for their papers.  Writing in Mondoweiss, Azaff Oron’s article is titled “Israel has been ‘Arizona’ all along.”

In Israel, laws like the Arizona one – and worse – have been in effect ever since independence. No, I’m not talking about the Occupation, but inside Israel proper.

Any resident sixteen years of age or older must at all times carry an Identity card, and present it upon demand to a senior police officer, head of Municipal or Regional Authority, or a policeman or member of the Armed forces on duty.

And guess against which ethnic group this requirement is enforced most often….

The answer would be: anyone looking like a Palestinian:

The vast majority of their effort is spent profiling, questioning and strip-searching a single target group: Palestinians. Most other security services have more “suspect” ethnic groups to deal with, or they must intercept risks not immediately evident from appearance or other profiling.

It’s a system that works well. Security, even at airports, is lax for people who are obviously Jewish, but is considerably tougher for anyone else.

Perhaps now that the word is out that their favorite country also requires everyone to carry papers, Jewish organizations will decide to back the Arizona law. On the other hand, maybe people like Gideon Aronoff and Abe Foxman will start to put pressure on Israel to change its laws.

And if you believe that, you are living in an alternate universe — one in which the mantra “Is it good for the Jews” has ceased to be the key to understanding Jewish ethics.

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The SPLC’s "Jihad for Dollars" Is Fueled by Ethnic Conflict

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Having written an informative article on the SPLC, Jerry Kammer is now emphasizing that he is a liberal.  I suppose that’s a good way to dodge criticism when one is going after a pillar of the left. A video clip on Kammer by Media Matters emphasizes his charge that the SPLC is mainly about raking in the money: Morris Dees “learned that he can take in more money by exaggerating the size and menace of the Klan”  — “Jihad for dollars.”

As Kammer points out, many of the most trenchant critics of the SPLC have been on the left. But the interesting thing is not that the $PLC has gotten rich off the Klan. The interesting thing is why going after the Klan has such a strong appeal to its Jewish donor base. The menace of racially conscious White people is what motivates Jewish donors, not poor people. And that’s why the SPLC will lead the looming battle on immigration. The fact that there are millions of unemployed American citizens is completely irrelevant, as are the effects 0f immigration on destroying the labor market for American citizens — especially the among less educated. The massive public costs of immigrant health care and education are overlooked, as are the effects of overpopulation on the environment as amnestied immigrants import their relatives and swell the population to over 500 million by mid-century. This is because, despite all the lofty rhetoric, it’s really all about ethnic conflict in which White people, and especially working class White people, are the big losers and non-Whites are the big winners.

Forget about the Jewish donors to the SPLC. Surely no one would doubt that La Raza’s motivation is ethnic and that it has no concern at all if there are economic and political costs to the rest of America. For them, after all, it’s all about advancing the power and influence of la raza —  just as for the SPLC donors, it’s all about Jewish fear and loathing of a White, Christian America. It’s an ethnic war that White people are supposed to graciously lose in the name of abstract virtues without calling it for what it is — racial dispossession.

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