Jews and the Left

Lee Siegel: Exuding Jewish Triumphalism

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A bit of Jewish triumpalism by Lee Siegel in the Wall Street Journal (“Rise of the Tiger Nation“). The basic plot line is that Jews overcame WASP dominance to attain the high ground in American culture. Now there is a rising Asian minority which, according to a Pew  Research Center Study is “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.”

My basic premise is that it is entirely reasonable for elites to resist displacement. For Siegel, the Jewish displacement of the WASP elite is a morality tale, with Jews as the good guys. The WASPs resisted by establishing quotas at Ivy League universities. They resented Jewish incursions into “WASP bastions such as rarefied country clubs, exclusive professional clubs, white-shoe law firms, prestigious foundations and the like…[;] these were the very institutions that resisted them the most intensely.” Writing from his position as a dominant elite, Siegel is not shy at hinting that some complaints about Jews were quite reasonable:

One reason that anti-Semitism persisted even as Jews ascended in American life was that Jews were frequently in the vanguard of American social and political dissent, from the anarchist Emma Goldman to Yippie Abbie Hoffman and beyond. Not only that, but many of the architects of America’s archenemy, Soviet Communism, had been Jews. As the WASP establishment lost ground to Jewish newcomers, the words “communist” and “Jew” often became synonymous. The association of Hollywood with lax morality, and of Jews with Hollywood, heightened a kind of low-grade hum of anti-Jewish feeling, even as it proved the general acceptance of the Jewish sentiments and sensibility that permeated American entertainment.

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Liberal Bias in Academia: The role of Jewish academics in the creation and maintenance of academic liberalism

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A study to be published in September in Current Directions in Psychological Science, prominent peer-reviewed academic journal, goes beyond the well-known fact that the vast majority of social psychologists are on the left (“Survey shocker: Liberal profs admit they’d discriminate against conservatives in hiring, advancement“).

Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues.” …

More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.” …

Generally speaking, the more liberal the respondent, the more willingness to discriminate and, paradoxically, the higher the assumption that conservatives do not face a hostile climate in the academy. …

A 2007 report by sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons found that 80 percent of psychology professors at elite and non-elite universities are Democrats. Other studies reveal that 5 percent to 7 percent of faculty openly identify as Republicans. By contrast, about 20 percent of the general population are liberal and 40 percent are conservative. …

[While much larger percentages of faculty are economic conservatives,] the widest divide occurs on social issues, the contested terrain in the culture wars shaking the academy. On these contentious issues, 90 percent identified as liberal and only 4 percent as conservative.

Of course, social psychologists by definition perform research on social issues—precisely the areas where they are overwhelmingly liberal. Don’t expect any race realist research on criminality or ethnic differences in aggressiveness to come out of mainstream social psychology. Read more

Sheldon Adelson: Israel and Immigration

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VDARE.com’s Patrick Cleburne has a nice article on Sheldon Adelson (“Has Romney Sold Immigration Policy To Sheldon Adelson?“), the billionaire who has emerged as the largest single donor in the current presidential campaign, promising up to $100 million for the Republicans. After supporting Gingrich in the primaries, Adelson has thrown his considerable weight behind Romney. We all know what that money buys: fealty to Israel. Throughout the campaign, Romney and Gingrich competed on who would be more slavish to Israel; Gingrich must have seemed slightly more reliable to Adelson, but Adelson must have been impressed with Romney as well.

There is no question about Adelson’s support for the most racialist and nationalist elements in Israel. Adelson owns an Israeli newspaper that supports PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard right Likud government. And there can be little question of where his loyalties lie. He has stated that he wishes he would have served in the Israeli military rather than in the US Army, and that he wants his son to grow up to “be a sniper for the IDF.”

All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli born, Israel is in my heart. … All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli born, Israel is in my heart,” he said toward the end of his talk.

I was surprised to read that Senator John McCain, referring explicitly to Adelson, complained that foreign money is entering the US presidential election race. This seemed too good to be true, and it was. It turns out that he was only making the point that a lot of Adelson’s money comes from his casino operations in Macau. What McCain should have been saying loud and clear is that Adelson is for all practical purposes a citizen of Israel with no demonstrated loyalty to the US and that he should not be allowed to influence the US political process.

But he won’t.  Read more

“Careful reflection” about having children: Christine Overall and Paul Ehrlich

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Christine Overall, a philosopher at Queen’s University in Ontario, writing in the New York Times, says we should think long and hard before we have children. Accoring to her website,  her expertise is ” feminist philosophy (especially questions about gender, sex, sexuality, trans identities, disability, age, or socioeconomic class),” so it’s not hard to guess her politics. An exemplar of the contemporary academic culture of the left, rewarded with prestigious titles and an op-ed in the Times promoting her book. Just the thing for liberals to be seen reading at the beach this summer.

The title of her essay  is “Think before you breed.” The word ‘breed’ in the title, perhaps bestowed by a New York Times op-ed editor, is a clever way to link human reproduction with our animal natures in a negative way. Breeding is what animals do. Unthinking and brutish. Humans must strive to get above all that and do the right thing. One is reminded of the common label of “breeders” bestowed on heterosexuals by homosexual activists.

Overall opines:

The question whether to have children is of course prudential in part; it’s concerned about what is or is not in one’s own interests. But it is also an ethical question, for it is about whether to bring a person (in some cases more than one person) into existence — and that person cannot, by the very nature of the situation, give consent to being brought into existence.  Such a question also profoundly affects the well-being of existing people (the potential parents, siblings if any, and grandparents). And it has effects beyond the family on the broader society, which is inevitably changed by the cumulative impact — on things like education, health care, employment, agriculture, community growth and design, and the availability and distribution of resources — of individual decisions about whether to procreate.

So we get the image of educated White people earnestly and anxiously weighing the pros and cons of procreation. Will it stress the health care system? Will the community be too crowded? Is it good for Africa? Read more

Stephen Jay Gould’s Jewish motivation: Natural selection by any other name

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Stephen Jay Gould is definitely high on the list of ethnically motivated pseudoscientists that populate The Culture of Critique. In reading over the section on Gould from Chapter 2 (see pp. 30-37), I was struck by how many evolutionary biologists viewed Gould as a charlatan and were willing to say so in public. John Maynard Smith’s comment gets it exactly right: Gould “has come to be seen by non-biologists as the pre-eminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with. . . . All this would not matter were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory.”

Gould’s importance comes from his position at Harvard as well as his access to the media. (Gould’s Chair for Politically Correct Popularization of Evolutionary Biology at Harvard is now held by Steven Pinker.) My treatment in Culture of Critique emphasized his obvious political motivation and his defamations of various 19th- and early 20th-century scientists, such as Samuel George Morton.

The point is that Gould’s political motivation, his lack of academic credibility, and his fraudulent use of sources were well-known before the 2011 study showing that in all likelihood Gould committed scientific fraud in his analysis of Morton’s data on race differences in skull size (“Stephen Jay Gould: Next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the Devil’s Mouth at the Center of Hell“).

But Gould is a Jewish intellectual hero, so it’s not surprising to see attempts to rehabilitate him. An article by Benjamin Ivry in the Forward attempts to do just that—badly, beginning with the implication that Gould’s only intellectual sin was his defamation of Morton. But in the process he provides some good material showing Gould’s strong Jewish identity. Indeed, the title, “Evolutionary Biology after Auschwitz,” only makes sense if there is indeed a deep connection between Gould’s work as an evolutionary biologist and his Jewish identity. Read more

Marine Le Pen: Courting the Jews, to no avail

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Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the founder French National Front Jean-Marie Le Pen is doing well in the polls. November last year she even scored higher than the sitting president Nicolas Sarkozy. Moreover, the National Front is doing very well among young voters and the workers. She is gaining momentum and she wants to change the edgy image of the National Front to appeal to a greater public by renouncing anti-Semitism and reaching out at Israel. In November 2011 she was in New York to visit the United Nations, where she had a meeting with the Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor, which later said it was based on a ‘misunderstanding’.

No matter how hard Marine Le Pen tries to reach out for Jewish approval she is not going to get it and never will. Richard Pasquier, the president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, recently expressed his dislike of Marine Le Pen: “Concerning her attempts to lure Jewish voters, pretending to have been far from anti-Semitism, I was never wrong. Her recent appearance at a party in Vienna alongside neo-Nazis reveals what it has always been. I hope this has opened the eyes of the most naive.”

What has happened? Has Marine Le Pen been spotted with streetfighters in army boots?? Read more

A Dissident Meditation on Jewish Identity: A Review of Gilad Atzmon’s “The Wandering Who?”

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Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (Winchester, UK and Washington, DC: Zer0 Books, 2011, 202 pp.)

Gilad Atzmon is one of those rarest of all birds—the sort of person who would be called a “self-hating Jew” by Jewish activists. Except that he doesn’t really hate himself and really doesn’t have much of a Jewish identity at all. He is an honest leftist who happens to be of Jewish origin; or perhaps one should label him a liberal devoted to the values of the Enlightenment,  without the typical Jewish blinders. Although he has a few blinders of his own, he sees quite clearly the incompatibility of Zionism with post-Enlightenment Western civilization.

For Atzmon, Zionism is all about Judaism as racial identity politics, ethnic cleansing, and manipulating Western governments via the Israel Lobby. As a child growing up in Israel, “supremacy was brewed into our souls, we gazed at the world through racist, chauvinistic binoculars. And we felt no shame about it either” (p. 2). He began his journey of embracing the West as a result of immersion in jazz. Eventually, “I somehow already yearned to become a Goy or at least to be surrounded by Goyim” (p. 7).

For Atzmon, the racialism so fundamental to Zionism is an aberration from Judaism the religion. He has no problem with people who “regard themselves as human beings that happen to be of Jewish origin.” The problem arises with “those who put their Jewish-ness over and above all other traits” (p. 16). This sort of Jewish essentialism was central to Zionism from the beginning, often with strong racialist overtones. Quoting Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of the Israeli right:

A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German customs, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish because his blood, his body, his physical racial type are Jewish. Read more