Jews as An Elite

Elena Kagan’s “diversity problem” and Jewish privilege

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The reaction to the appointment of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court in 2010 was a case study in how taboos are maintained in our society regarding the 600-pound gorilla of Jewish power. It is not just that little was said about the fact that she would be the third Jewish justice on the nine-member court in a country barely two percent Jewish, leaving the majority-Protestant country without a Protestant on the high court. It is not just that she was generally lacking in qualifications for the appointment and for pretty much every other job she has ever gotten. What was really interesting was how the Jewish media diverted attention from the phenomenon of Jewish power and privilege by raising the specter of White privilege. And when I say specter, I really mean ghost, because White privilege for all intents and purposes is dead and gone, as the Elena Kagan nomination “controversy” illustrates.

When Obama was set to make his second nomination for the Supreme Court, Kagan’s selection was neither a surprise nor ever seriously in doubt. She had already been on the short list of candidates to fill the first vacancy, which eventually went to Sonia Sotomayor. There were some voices raised, mostly on the “right,” regarding Kagan’s complete lack of judicial experience and her relative lack of courtroom experience. However, the truly interesting objections were raised by observers on the “left” regarding the lack of “diversity” in her recruitment of professors while she was the dean of Harvard Law School.

The liberal on-line magazine Salon published an article by four law professors from less prestigious schools noting that all but one of the 32 tenure-track professors hired while Kagan was dean were White. These professors, two of whom were black, one south Asian, and one with a half-Hispanic hyphenated surname (Luis Fuentes-Rohwer), make seven references to Whites in their 1679-word piece, yet never once use the word “Jew.” Read more

Free to Cheat: “Jewish Emancipation” and the Anglo-Jewish Cousinhood, Part 1

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“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

                           Charles Mackay, 1841[1]

Shortly after his election to Parliament in 1830, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), a famous historian and one of Britain’s leading men of letters, took up the cause of removing Jewish “civil disabilities” in Britain. In a succession of speeches, Macaulay was instrumental in pushing the case for permitting Jews to sit in the legislature, and his January 1831 article Civil Disabilities of the Jews had a “significant effect on public opinion.”[2] Professing Jews residing in Britain at that time were unable to take seats in the House of Commons, because prior to sitting in the legislature one was required to declare a Christian oath. In addition, Jews were “excluded from Crown office, from corporations, and from most of the professions, the entrance to which bristled with religious oaths, tests, and declarations.”[3] Even the 1753 Naturalization Act which had granted citizenship to foreign-born Jews had been repealed following widespread popular agitation, and a pervading atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust of Jews generally, and foreign Jews especially.[4] Ursula Henriques states that because of the resolute opposition of the British people to the involvement of Jews in British political life, since their readmission in the 17th century “the Jews had remained quiet.”[5]

However, buoyed by the granting of political emancipation to Protestant Dissenters and Catholics in 1828 and 1829, British Jews began to agitate for their own “emancipation,” and this agitation was augmented and spearheaded to a great extent by Thomas Macauley. Within thirty years the British elite had capitulated; not only had all Christian oaths been abandoned, but six unconverted Jews sat in the House of Commons. Within fifty years, Britain had sixteen Jewish Members of Parliament, and a Jewish Prime Minister who espoused a doctrine of Jewish racial superiority — Benjamin Disraeli; and under Disraeli Britain would pursue a foreign policy dictated to a large extent by what future Prime Minister William Gladstone called “Judaic sympathies.”[6] This foreign policy would include support for the Ottomans who were friendly to Jews and were massacring Christians in Bulgaria. And it would include waging of war on the Boers in a move highly beneficial to Jewish mining operations in South Africa.[7] How and why did such a dramatic change in circumstances occur? And how did the Anglo-Jewish elite repay Britain for its act of ‘justice’? Read more

Jews at US Colleges and Universities

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Reform Judaism has posted a chart listing the top 60 colleges and universities attended by Jews. See here. Six of the 8 Ivy League universities are included, with Jewish enrollments of around 25% of the total undergraduates.

The topic of Jewish overrepresentation at elite universities has been discussed several times at TOO. See, e.g.,  Edmund Connelly’s “Harvard Hates Whites“,  Trudie Pert’s “Post Genome Princeton” and my “Jewish overrepresentation at elite universities explained.” Princeton is especially interesting because it is not among the Ivy League universities highest Jewish enrollment. From “Jewish overrepresentation at elite universities explained“:

One might simply suppose that [Jewish overrepresentation] is due to higher Jewish IQ. However, on the basis of Richard Lynn’s estimates of Ashkenazi Jewish IQ and correcting for the greater numbers of European Whites, the ratio of non-Jewish Whites to Jews should be around 7 to 1 (IQ >130) or  4.5 to 1 (IQ > 145). Instead, the ratio of non-Jewish Whites to Jews is around 1 to 1 or less. (See here.) …

These data strongly suggest that Jewish overrepresentation at elite universities has nothing to do with IQ but with discrimination against non-Jewish White Americans, especially those from the working class or with rural origins. It would be interesting to see the dynamics of the admissions process. How many admissions officers are Jewish? And, whether or not they are Jewish,what pressures are they under to admit Jewish students? The brouhaha that engulfed the Princeton campus because Jews were “only” overrepresented by around 6.5 times their percentage of the population suggests that there is considerable pressure for high levels of Jewish admission. The Daily Princetonian ran four front-page articles on the topic, and the New York Times ran an article titled “The Princeton Puzzle.” (See here;  the NYTimes article is here.) Clearly anything less than 20% Jewish enrollment would be met with raised eyebrows and perhaps intimations of anti-Semitism. Read more

Philip Weiss on the Disintegration of WASP Society

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Philip Weiss, whom I once described as “a Jew without all the usual rationalizations and blind spots–at least most of them,” has a Mondoweiss column commenting on the collapse of WASP America (“WASP society is disintegrating“). It starts out with one of his WASP inlaws commenting on the decline his tribe. Weiss asked him if he “grieve[d] for its passing?”

No, he said. Things change. Orders change all the time. It’s the nature of society. And besides, we had a good run.

How broad-minded of him. “Oh, well. We lost fair and square. Life goes on.” I am sure he takes great pride in being known far and wide as tolerant, principled,  and fair-minded–a moral paragon; an upstanding member of his community with an excellent reputation for honesty and fair play; an example to one and all; a virtual saint. Just the sort of guy you would want in your hunter-gatherer band of non-relatives during the Ice Age.

The bloodless (so far) coup made possible by valuing principles more highly than power comes to its fruition. In this he reminds me of Justice Paul Stevens‘ “strong sense of principle–even to the extent of making decisions that could not possibly be seen as helping his ethnic group.”

Such people do not think of the power of their ethnic group as a vital necessity in a world still fraught with ethnic conflict–including, most relevantly, the conflict between the new elite and the people they rule over. They don’t think of their loss of power as a catastrophic blow that will make them vulnerable to  non-White ethnic coalitions with festering historical grudges against people like them. One of the characteristic flaws of WASPs, as noted by Eric Kaufmann, was to think that other peoples are “just like them,” so that the people who replace them will be just like them in the sense that they will uphold the same ideals. The republic will live on but with different faces–a utopian idea, to say the least. Read more

SEC’s Becker/Madoff saga: How could it smell worse?

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"It was THIS big!"


The announcement on Monday Former SEC Counsel Rejoins Cleary Gottlieb Amid Madoff Scrutiny by Joshua Gallu (Bloomberg May 9, 2011) pretty much settles the matter: former General Counsel David Becker’s departure from the Agency was hasty and unplanned. Becker had been unemployed since the end of February: no professional living by generating hourly fees would normally permit such a gap.

As I have previously noted, Becker was recruited to the Agency in February 2009 by incoming Chairwoman Mary Schapiro — who herself got her job as a direct consequence of the Madoff fiasco which had shattered the reputation of the SEC the previous December. The following month, in a meeting with Schapiro and whistleblower Harry Markopolos, Becker

picked a quarrel over extraneous trivia and threw a tantrum so violent that Markopolos’ lawyer “thought that he was about to come right over that table and go for my throat” (Markopolos, 249). Consequently, the meeting was terminated

See Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic? In this essay, Kevin Macdonald and I suggested this was another example of the typically lethal Jewish response to those deemed to have been instrumental (however innocently) in harming Jewish interests. We cited the notorious Cliff Robertson blacklisting: and Professor Macdonald has subsequently reported another. However, it turned out that David Becker had a more personal motive: a few days after the abrupt February 1st announcement of his departure he and his two brothers were sued by the Madoff trustee for some $1.545 million of the $2.045 million Madoff account they inherited from their mother in 2004 and liquidated the following year. While he claimed not to know this was happening, the suit was filed in late 2010 and it is inconceivable that the Trustee did not try to settle before litigating. It rapidly became clear that few if any of his colleagues with whom he dealt on Madoff matters had any idea that Becker had such an involvement. Read more

Navigating Hollywood: Conservatives and Christians Need Not Apply

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From time to time I get letters from students who say they are on page with ideas like mine and want to pursue  a career in the academic world. I always tell them they have to be a secret agent, not only as a grad student but at least until they get tenure. And if you come out of the closet after you get tenure, don’t expect to get any grants or be invited to any of those cool faculty parties.

It’s pretty much the same in the movie industry, and for much the same reasons: A powerful and pervasive bias toward the left. In both areas and particularly in Hollywood, there is a strong Jewish influence that means that overt displays of Christianity are a ticket to oblivion.

This came out recently in an article in the Hollywood Reporter (“Conservative Actors Reveal Life of Secrecy, Lost Jobs Amidst ‘Intolerant Left’“).

Morgan Brittany, an actress perhaps best known for her work in Dallas, the prime time soap opera of the 1980s, says that “I’d go out on location with the Dallas crew. .. Everybody in the van was bashing (President Reagan). I never said anything because I thought I’d lose my job. And I probably would have lost my job.” Read more

In the 1930s: Chapter 19 of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s “200 Years Together”

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The project of translating Alexandr Solzhenitisyn’s 200 Years Together into English continues apace. The 18,000-word Chapter 19, “In the 1930s” is now available (see here). The decade of the 1930s was tragic almost beyond description. The main idea advanced by Solzhenitsyn is that all segments of Soviet society suffered, including Jews who had been members of the elite. However, the suffering of Jews pales in comparison to the suffering of the Ukrainian and Russian farmers undergoing forced collectivization. Moreover, Jews were never targeted as Jews, and in general Jews remained vastly overrepresented in elite positions throughout the period, even after the purges.

Solzhenitsyn emphasizes the culpability of the West. The brutal process of industrialization was carried out with the cooperation of Western merchants and bankers eager to do business with the Soviet Union. Such commercial cooperation had been prohibited under the Czars because Jewish activist organizations had pressured governments not to do business with Russia because of its treatment of Jews — much as there are now sanctions against trading with Iran because of the concerns of the Israel Lobby. As we also see today, financial and commercial interests were not concerned with ideological commitment to capitalism or with human rights but simply sought to expand their profits.  Trade was allowed because there was the perception in the West that “Soviet power would not oppress the Jews, but on the contrary, that many of them would remain at the levers of power.” Read more