Jews and the Left

Elena Kagan and the Decline of WASP America

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

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

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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Part 2 of Connelly on White Victimization

Part 2 of Edmund Connelly’s article on White victimization is posted. I was unaware of the following quote from Solzhenitsyn that Connelly found on Israel Shamir’s website:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn summed up the process during the Bolshevik Revolution, when the

executed army officers were Russians, the noblemen, priests, monks, deputies were  Russians. . . . In 1920s, the pre-revolutionary engineers and scientists were exiled or killed. They were Russians, while their place was taken by Jews. The best Russian Psychiatric institute in Moscow, its Russian members were arrested or exiled, while their place was taken by the Jews. Important Jewish doctors blocked the advancement of Russian medical scientists. The best intellectual and artistic elites of Russian people were killed, while the Jews grew and flourished in these (deadly for Russians) years.

It’s passages like this that make an English translation of Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together essential. Americans must be made aware of the enormous risks that lie ahead when White political power diminishes and Jews continue to be a hostile elite.

Solzhenitsyn shows that the Bolshevik revolution meant the rise of Jews in psychiatry. The following passage from Ch. 4 of Culture of Critique shows that the result of Jewish domination of psychiatry in the USSR was that psychoanalysis became official dogma. It also shows the strong overlap among Jews, psychoanalysis, and political radicalism. As noted throughout CofC, psychoanalysis proved to be a very useful tool in constructing theories in which White identity and interests were analyzed as a sign of psychiatric disorder. To some extent, this revolution has already occurred bloodlessly in the West since WWII, given the influence of the Frankfurt School and other Jewish intellectual movements in the contemporary world. Psychoanalysis has died a well-deserved death and for that we should all be grateful. But the theoretical basis for rejecting White identity and interests has simply migrated to other pathologies of the academic left.

This belief in the curative powers of sexual freedom coincided with a leftist political agenda common to the vast majority of Jewish intellectuals of the period and reviewed throughout this book. This leftist political agenda proved to be a recurrent theme throughout the history of psychoanalysis. Support of radical and Marxist ideals was common among Freud’s early followers, and leftist attitudes were common in later years among psychoanalysts (Hale 1995, 31; Kurzweil 1989, 36, 46–47, 284; Torrey 1992, 33, 93ff, 122–123), as well as in Freudian inspired offshoots such as Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich (see below) and Alfred Adler. (Kurzweil [1989, 287] terms Adler the leader of “far left” psychoanalysis, noting that Adler wanted to immediately politicize teachers as radicals rather than wait for the perfection of psychoanalysis to do so.) The apex of the association between Marxism and psychoanalysis came in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, where all the top psychoanalysts were Bolsheviks, Trotsky supporters, and among the most powerful political figures in the country (see Chamberlain 1995). (Trotsky himself was an ardent enthusiast of psychoanalysis.) This group organized a government-sponsored State Psychoanalytical Institute and developed a program of “pedology” aimed at producing the “new Soviet man” on the basis of psychoanalytic principles applied to the education of children. The program, which encouraged sexual precocity in children, was put into practice in state-run schools.

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The Howard Zinn Cancer Spreads to Australia

I blogged recently on radical historian Howard Zinn and his lack of concern for historical truth. An article in Quadrant, an Australian journal, discusses Howard Zinn’s disastrous influence. It also discusses Zinn’s main disciple in Australia, Robert Manne — also Jewish. First, about Zinn’s most influential book:

Zinn’s radical (and radically unsound) tome, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present, has gone through five editions and multiple printings since it was first published in 1980, selling almost two million copies, and is assigned in thousands of university and college courses in America, making it the best-selling work of history ever written by an American leftist. It also has a high profile in popular culture, being the basis of several documentaries, inspiring pop songs, serving as the basis for a highly successful graphic novel, being referenced in the Academy Award-winning film Good Will Hunting (1997), and even in an episode of The Simpsons, where Marge is shown reading the book at college. Its penetration into American popular consciousness is both unparalleled and insidious.

The Zinn cancer metastasized from America to Australia, spreading the culture of the left that has come to dominate the academic world in recent decades:

Zinn’s book had an immediate impact on the neo-Marxist, Foucaultian, and feminist academic clique that came to dominate the study, teaching, publishing, and grant-allocating activities of Australian history in the 1980s, giving rise to the four volume collectivist effort, A People’s History of Australia Since 1788. This was published in 1988 in order to promote the negative mythology of Australian history in time for the Bicentennial and to ensure that the nation had no illusions about the depths of its historical depravity.

Manne is a worthy acolyte to Zinn:

Manne [and] the many other Australian historians who follow his lead …  make no attempt to champion the Australian people or recognize their efforts to build a nation. Instead, Australians emerge from their historical writings as unrepentant and non-reflective racists who support ignorant, oppressive, and racist policies, and deserve nothing but the unrelenting contempt of morally superior intellectuals like Manne and his colleagues — a contempt they are happy to provide.

Manne is a worthy disciple of Zinn for another reason. He has no scruples about falsifying history in order to advance the Jewish ethnic agenda of undermining a confident, homogeneous White Australia. It is well known that the Jewish community in Australia has been a strong supporter of non-White immigration and multiculturalism (summarized in CofC, where, e.g., I quote Miriam Faine, an editorial committee member of the Australian Jewish Democrat: “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 feel more confident of my freedom to live as a Jewish Australian.” [Sound familiar?] See also here.) Manne is also totally on board with multiculturalism. Here he is discussing his Jewish roots at a website dedicated to making Australia multicultural.

Keith Windshuttle has charged Manne with professional malfeasance in claiming that the Australian government during the 1930s supported a policy of “breeding out the colour” by encouraging White men to marry “half-caste” women in order to eventually make their descendants White. Because of Manne’s position as an elite academic, his word carried a great deal of weight with the government, resulting in an abject apology to appease the contemporary gods of multiculturalism. As Windshuttle notes,

In failing to mention these three critical responses, while pretending the government gave “full endorsement” to the very opposite approach, Manne falsified Australian political history on an issue that he, more than almost any other academic commentator in the country, had the opportunity, the interest and the ability to investigate thoroughly and report honestly. If Manne can get away with behaviour of this kind, it would mean Australian universities no longer demand any standard of truthfulness from their academic staff.

I rather doubt that anything will happen to Manne. Falsifying historical and scientific data is par for the course in all of the Jewish intellectual movements covered in The Culture of Critique. Boas, who shaped American anthropology, and the Frankfurt School are great examples. (This blog discusses Boas’s falsifying data in his notorious head shape study that was used by immigration advocates for decades to argue that the environment would shape everyone into good Americans.) Luminaries like Freud didn’t really falsify data, but he produced untestable theories that successfully masqueraded as science while being very useful in the assault on the traditional people and culture of the West.

The common denominator of all this intellectual work has been to undermine the confidence of Western societies and their willingness to remain racially and culturally homogeneous. The hypocrisy in all this is stunning. For example, Australian Jewish leader Rabbi Isi Leibler, a staunch defender of multiculturalism as a model of Australia, was recently reported as saying that multiculturalism has no place in Israel. “[Israel] is a country which was set up and created as a Jewish country for the Jews.” In another context he stated “”There is a need to sit together and establish a way in which Australians can recapture that spirit of multiculturalism which I think we are all proud being part and parcel of, and which is really under threat.”

As usual, one needn’t bother to look for high principle to explain Jewish activism. The only common denominator is what is good for the Jews.

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Jews and Other Minorities

In this video, Ann Schaffer, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Belfer Center for American Pluralism, states the basic philosophy of Jews in America:

The Jewish community has always worked on the premise that as a minority, our security, our strength, our well being in America is interdependent with those of other minorities. This is a Jewish issue. It’s very much a Jewish issue.

This is quite correct, but it’s nice to see it so explicitly and baldly expressed. This is from The Culture of Critique: The quote is from Jewish academic activist Earl Raab:

“The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country.

We [Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible—and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever (Raab 1993b, 23)”

Positive attitudes toward cultural diversity have also appeared in other statements on immigration by Jewish authors and leaders. Charles Silberman (1985, 350) notes, “American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief—one firmly rooted in history—that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of U.S. Jews to endorse ‘gay rights’ and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called ‘social’ issues.”

The footnote is as follows:

Moreover, a deep concern that an ethnically and culturally homogeneous America would compromise Jewish interests can be seen in Silberman’s (1985, 347–348) comments on the attraction of Jews to “the Democratic party . . . with its traditional hospitality to non-WASP ethnic groups. . . . A distinguished economist who strongly disagreed with Mondale’s economic policies voted for him nonetheless. ‘I watched the conventions on television,’ he explained, ‘and the Republicans did not look like my kind of people.’ That same reaction led many Jews to vote for Carter in 1980 despite their dislike of him; ‘I’d rather live in a country governed by the faces I saw at the Democratic convention than by those I saw at the Republican convention’ a well-known author told me.”

I recall reading that in the 1930s well-meaning Whites advised Jews not to ally themselves with Blacks — obviously to no avail. The Jewish-Black alliance, although a bit shaky at times, has been remarkably strong over the last century, and now the alliances are expanding to other non-White groups. Shaffer goes on to discuss current projects aimed at making alliances with non-Whites, claiming disingenuously that it’s good for “all Americans.”

I think this is going to result in huge management problems down the line for Jews — not the least of which is White anger at the role of Jews in these transformations when they find themselves as a minority surrounded by an alliance of hostile non-White minority groups.

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Controlling Historical Memory

Dovid Katz’s article in The Guardian Halting Holocaust Obfuscation” is yet another example of Jewish intellectual activists with access to the media attempting to control historical memory in a way that highlights Jewish suffering and presents Jewish behavior as nothing more than innocent victimhood. Katz is determined to disallow any equivalence between the horrors inflicted on the populations of Eastern Europe by the Germans and by the Soviets. He condemns Polish MEP Michal Kaminski, linking to this article, for bringing up Jewish behavior in the Jedwabne incident in which Jews were murdered during the German occupation of Poland during WWII:

One of the participants in the 2001 meeting, Maria Mazurczyk, told us: “I think that Mr Kaminski, like us, wanted everything to be revealed: the times before the war when things were good – and the time of the Soviet occupation when the Jews didn’t respect their Polish neighbours – and later the effect of all this.”

At the time Kaminski condemned Poles who’d killed Jews – though he suggested the massacre was principally carried out by Germans. But it appears his principal concern was with alleged Jewish guilt. Anna Bikont of the liberal Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, who spent much time in Jedwabne in 2001 while researching a book, says: “Mr Kaminski came to the place where an incredible crime was committed – and he told not about the women, children, old people who died in this horrible manner, but he told about Jews who collaborated with Soviets and who killed Poles.”

Would a British politician who’d behaved in a similar way survive in the mainstream of British politics?

Probably not. But that’s only because mentioning Jewish behavior as contributing in even the slightest way to anti-Jewish attitudes is off limits, even if they collaborated with the Soviets against the Poles or against the Baltic peoples. The following is from a review of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together (italicized quotes are translations of Solzhenitsyn):

“Everyone was listening intently to determine if the Germans were already on the way.”

In June and July of 1941 those living in the regions of eastern Poland occupied by the Red Army – Polish farmers, the bourgeoisie, the clergy, ex-soldiers, and intellectuals – all awaited the invasion of German troops. This quote is from the Polish Jewish historian J. Gross, author of the book Neighbors: The Murder of the Jews of Jedwabne.Solzhenitsyn explains why Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Belorussians, Bukowina-, and Moldava-Romanians could hardly wait for the Germans to invade.

Pursuant to his central thesis, Solzhenitsyn writes that without the high Jewish presence among the leaders and executioners of the Bolshevik dictatorship, Lenin’s newly born Soviet state would have been at an end, at the latest, by the time of the Kronstadt Sailors Rebellion in 1921. Solzhenitsyn examines specific decisive questions, as for example: Why, in the period 1939-41, did such a large percentage of Jewry in eastern Poland, Galicia, and in the Baltic States collaborate with the Red Army, Stalin’s secret police, and Bolshevism in general? And why did the pogroms in these regions take place under the slogan “Revenge for the Soviet Occupation”? Solzhenitsyn:

“In eastern Poland, which had been incorporated in the Soviet Union in September 1939, the Jews, especially the younger generation, welcomed the invading Red Army with frenetic jubilation. Whether in Poland, Bessarabia, Lithuania, or Bukowina, the Jews were the main support of Soviet power. The newspapers report that the Jews are enthusiastically supporting the establishment of Communist rule.” (p. 329)

In that fateful year a Polish Jew who had emigrated to France prophesized that the non-Jews who had been subjugated to Bolshevism would one day exact a fearful war of vengeance. In 1939 Stanislav Ivanowich, a left socialist sympathetic to the Soviet Union, warned:

“Should the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks end one day, the collapse will be accompanied by the atavistic, barbaric passions of Jew hate and violence. The collapse of Soviet power would be a terrible catastrophe for Jewry; today Soviet rule equates to Judeophilia.” (p. 310)

See here for a comment on the distortions of Jan Gross’s Neighbors which attempts to blame the massacre solely on the irrational anti-Semitism of Poles. This compilation notes, among other things, that “There was significant collaboration on the part of some Jedwabne Jews with the Soviet invaders from 1939 to June 1941; the victims were primarily the town’s Polish population, several hundred of whom were deported to the Gulag.

When a significant percentage of people from an alien ethnic group support an invader and collaborate in the deportation of people from one’s own ethnic group, it is not at all surprising that there would be reprisals when there is a shift of power; nor would be be surprising if the reprisals were directed all Jews, not just the ones known to collaborate or sympathize. That’s how our evolved psychology of ethnic competition works.

I notice in my notes that Checinski (1982, 9) writes that “even then [in 1943] there was an attempt to rationalize this blind hatred [of Jews] by recalling the ‘improper’ attitude of the Jewish population in eastern Poland towards the Bolsheviks in September 1939 when the Soviet army, in connivance with the Nazis, occupied their territories.” Checinski also notes that immediately after WWII Jews welcomed the Soviet army and the new regime “with favor if not with outright enthusiasm” and that “the small Jewish community was seen by friends and foes alike as one of the mainstays of the Soviet sponsored regime. This only further alienated it from the great majority of the Polish population” (p. 8). This comment  is highly compatible with Jaff Schatz’s (1991) treatment which I discuss extensively in Ch. 3 of Culture of Critique. It is interesting that American Jewish representatives visiting Poland after the war presented the new Polish regime as “a paragon of liberalism and tolerance, unequaled in Eastern Europe” (Checinski, p. 11).

To conclude, anti-Jewish attitudes in Eastern Europe had a basis in the real behavior of Jews. No doubt the events of 1939 and thereafter were influenced by traditional grievances between Poles and Jews, but actual Jewish behavior during this period is also relevant. Jews were correctly perceived as more welcoming to the Soviets after the 1939 invasion and as more loyal to the Communist regime and as willing executioners of the remnants of Polish nationalism after 1945. (As I and others have noted, the common denominator of the behavior of Diaspora Jews in European countries has been to oppose nationalist movements; further, during this period, Jews throughout Europe and in America saw communism as good for the Jews at least partly because Jews had become an elite in the USSR and the USSR had outlawed anti-Semitism.)

The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Jews were also highly placed in the government and in the security forces. Under these circumstances, social identity theory predicts that Poles would develop the well-attested stereotype of “zydokomuna” (Judeo-Communism) and exaggerate the differences between themselves and all Jews in Poland. It simply reflects typical ethnic conflict that has gone on throughout the ages — nothing more than a reflection of our evolved psychology.

In the West, Jewish activists have had a relatively easy time erecting the image of innocent Jews and evil Nazis as a complete explanation of the events of World War II. This message is much more difficult in Eastern Europe where there is a collective memory of collaboration of Jews with the horrors of communism and in the extermination of nationalist elements of the non-Jewish population.

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