An issue that comes up when talking about Jewish influence, especially, say, in the early twentieth century, is how to interpret the calls of some Jewish intellectuals for Jews to assimilate. Assimilation can mean many things. We can all agree that Orthodox and Hasidic Jews tucked away in self-created ghettos and eschewing secular education are not assimilated; such groups were more mainstream in the Jewish community in the early twentieth century in America, since the vast majority of Jewish immigrants to the U.S. came from Eastern Europe where they lived quite apart from the surrounding society and often did not speak the language of the country they were living in.

But what about Jews who rejected the ghettos and toned down their religious observance to Reform Judaism or rejected religion altogether? Does speaking English and being a baseball fan mean that one is assimilated to America and its culture? Is Bill Kristol assimilated? What about pro-Israel fanatic and Hollywood mogul Haim Saban (Democrat funder), a dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel who once said of himself: “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.” The late casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson (Republican donor) who also wanted to nuke Iran? Jonathan Greenblatt?

They would all say that they are assimilated despite their intense support for Israel as a Jewish state—which (obviously) may not have the same interests as the United States, as Mearsheimer and Walt and many others have stressed.

The problem is that Jews who have advocated assimilation rarely spell out what they mean, and therein lies the problem. Are they saying Judaism should disappear into the general European-derived gene pool of the U.S. or perhaps into the  U.S. population as a whole, so that after a few generations, Judaism would be a distant, historically interesting memory of no current political or cultural relevance in the U.S.? Or are they saying that Judaism should continue to exist along with Jewish activist organizations like AIPAC, the ADL, and organizations such as Birthright Israel that advance Jewish interests or identity but while also being immersed those aspects of American culture that don’t conflict with Jewish interests—such as professional sports, appreciating non-Jewish writers (even White male non-Jewish writers), or even listening to country music. If the latter, one can certainly argue that Jewish assimilation is at best partial and at worst a façade masking commitment to Jewish interests that may be incompatible with the interests of the society as a whole and with the interests of other important components of the society. Support for Israel is the most obvious example—such as the current trend toward equating anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine attitudes and boycotts with anti-Semitism.

Or does assimilation mean something in between—say strongly identified secular Jews whose world very consciously revolves around Jewish identity and interests to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. Needless to say, such a person is not assimilated in any meaningful sense.

The problem must be addressed historically. During times of heightened anti-Semitism, such as during the 1920s until after World War II, Jews were well advised to be circumspect about their Jewish identities and Jewish commitments. For example, the Zionist movement began in the late nineteenth century but was a minority viewpoint within the Jewish community until the establishment of Israel because of fears of charges of “dual loyalty”—the idea that Jews would be at least as loyal to Israel as to the United States, and perhaps even more loyal to Israel. Even in the twenty-first century, neoconservative Jews with strong emotional and family connections to Israel are careful to frame their proposals for war in the Middle East as serving U.S. interests.

This is a general point. Jews, as a relatively small minority in the West, must attempt to appeal to non-Jews and avoid framing their theories and policy proposals in terms of their Jewish identity and Jewish interests. Thus one searches in vain for public pronouncements and framing of theories explicitly in terms of advancing Jewish interests. And thus the lucrative and therefore tempting infrastructure that Jews have created in support of their causes, such as the network of neoconservative think tanks, positions at universities, and opportunities in the media that undoubtedly attract many non-Jews. But typically, in the absence of evidence of explicit Jewish activism (e.g., being a member of the ADL or AIPAC, or, as in the case of the Frankfurt School, having your central academic work, The Authoritarian Personality (1950), published by the American Jewish Committee), one must must pore over detailed biographies that include, e.g.,  accounts of private conversations and letters. Freud, for example, left behind a great deal of evidence of his Jewish identity and his sense of Jewish interests. Others did not, so one is forced to piece together an account on relatively scant evidence.

One tactic that may be helpful in this regard is to determine whether the attitudes of a particular person are congruent with mainstream Jewish opinion as explicitly stated by prominent Jewish activist organizations like the American Jewish Committee during the 1920s. While a Jewish intellectual intent on establishing scientific credibility in the wider scientific community may be loath to explicitly state his attitudes and opinions on Jewish issues, Jewish organizations are typically not reticent. For example, during the 1920s’ immigration debates during which the American Jewish Committee (fronted by Louis Marshall) played by far the greatest role in opposing restriction, Franz Boas published his study of the skull shapes of immigrants (later found to be likely fraudulent). From Chapter 7 of The Culture of Critique:

Boas was greatly motivated by the immigration issue as it occurred early in the century. Carl Degler (1991, 74) notes that Boas’s professional correspondence “reveals that an important motive behind his famous head-measuring project in 1910 was his strong personal interest in keeping the United States diverse in population.” The study, whose conclusions were placed into the Congressional Record by Representative Emanuel Celler [the Jewish Congressman who was a leader of the anti-restriction forces in the House] during the debate on immigration restriction (Cong. Rec., April 8, 1924, 5915–5916), concluded that the environmental differences consequent to immigration caused differences in head shape. (At the time, head shape as determined by the “cephalic index” was the main measurement used by scientists involved in racial differences research.) Boas argued that his research showed that all foreign groups living in favorable social circumstances had become assimilated to the United States in the sense that their physical measurements converged on the American type. Although he was considerably more circumspect regarding his conclusions in the body of his report (see also Stocking 1968, 178), Boas (1911, 5) stated in his introduction that “all fear of an unfavorable influence of South European immigration upon the body of our people should be dismissed.” As a further indication of Boas’s ideological commitment to the immigration issue, Degler makes the following comment regarding one of Boas’s environmentalist explanations for mental differences between immigrant and native children: “Why Boas chose to advance such an adhoc interpretation is hard to understand until one recognizes his desire to explain in a favorable way the apparent mental backwardness of the immigrant children” (p. 75).

It’s not too much of a stretch to assume that Boas was ethnically motivated along with the mainstream activist Jewish community on this issue. Yet I suspect that if Boas was asked whether his Jewish background influenced his research, he would deny it—something like, “I just think that diversity is intrinsically good. Diversity is our greatest strength!” End of story.

This relates to another fundamental issue: the complexity of Jewish identity in general. The point here is that deception, self-deception and even honest lack of self-awareness (e.g., the example below of a rabbi who “didn’t know how Jewish he was” until he became obsessed about Israel’s Six-Day War) abound among Jews in their relationship to being Jewish and pursuing Jewish interests. The result is that one has to do the best one can while realizing that the historical period makes a difference—Jews are much more apt to expressly identify as Jews and assert their interests as Jews now because there are far fewer downsides to doing so than a century ago. As a result, one can be forgiven for pouncing on relatively small indications of Jewish identity and interests as decisive indicators during some periods more than others. The following is the majority of Chapter 8 of Separation and Its Discontents on Jewish self-deception, without the footnotes. The point is that even Jews who claim not to have a Jewish identity or to work on behalf of Jewish interests may be engaging in deception or self-deception. Both are quite adaptive processes with a likely evolutionary origin.

*   *   *

Jewish self-deception touches on a variety of issues, including personal identity, the causes and extent of anti-Semitism, the characteristics of Jews (e.g., economic success), and the role of Jews in the political and cultural process in traditional and contemporary societies. Perhaps the most important example of self-deceptive Jewish religious ideology, reiterated as a theme of Jewish self-conceptions beginning in the ancient world, is the view that Judaism is an ethically superior, altruistic group and is therefore morally obligated to continue as a cohesive, genetically segregated group purely for the ethical purpose of providing a shining example to the rest of humanity (see Chapter 7).

Because of their critical attitudes toward diaspora Judaism, Zionists have often been quite conscious of the mental fabrications of their coreligionists. Thus the historian Sir Louis Namier (1934, xxxvii–xxxviii) (himself an Anglican convert and Zionist activist [Whitfield 1988]) describes the “better-class” liberal Jew in pre-National Socialist Germany who

was high-minded, broad-minded, open-minded, and without roots, for he lacked the live touch with any living community. . . . His conception of Judaism merely as a religion was curiously superficial and self-contradictory. For that which distinguishes the Jewish religion in its modern form from, say, Christian Unitarianism, is merely the national tradition which most of the adherents of Liberal or Reform Judaism profess to reject. By refraining from complete amalgamation and by maintaining their separate racial and historical identity, of which they deny the existence, they have kept themselves suspended in mid-air—moral Luftmenschen, who provoke criticism among their own people and distrust among the non-Jews. In reality, most of them were perfectly sincere within the limits of their own conscious thinking; they did not avow their insincerity even to themselves.

The German economist Werner Sombart (1913, 264) touched on Jewish self-deception in his work, Jews and Modern Capitalism:

Just as so many Jews do not see themselves—do they not deny their obvious characteristics and assert that there is no difference between them and Englishmen or Germans or Frenchmen? . . . How many Jews still hold that the Jewish Question is only a political one, and are convinced that a liberal régime is all that is required to remove the differences between the Jew and his neighbour. It is nothing short of astounding to read the opinion of so soundly learned a man as the author of one of the newest books on the Jewish Question that the whole of the anti-Semitic movement during the last thirty years was the result of the works of Marr and Dühring. “The thousand victims of the pogroms and the million sturdy workers who emigrated from their homes are but a striking illustration of the power of—Eugen Dühring” (!)

Sombart’s comments touch on the apologetic nature of Jewish historiography which is a central theme of Chapter 7. Much of this work undoubtedly involves self-deception. In a comment that also stresses the complexity of Jewish identity processes, Lindemann (1997, 535; italics in text) writes that “Jews actually do not want to understand their past—or at least those aspects of their past that have to do with the hatred directed at them, since understanding may threaten other elements of their complex and often contradictory identities.”

Zionist historian Gershom Scholem (1979) describes the massive self-deception among the “broad Jewish liberal middle class” (p. 16) living in Germany from 1900 to 1933. Scholem describes the “contrast between the general principles that were consciously upheld in domestic discussions and the mental attitudes that remained subconscious and in many cases were even explicitly disavowed” (p. 17). They accepted the ideology that Judaism was nothing more than a religion despite the fact that most of them had no religious beliefs and many had developed “Jewish feeling which no longer had anything to do with religion” (p. 20). Many accepted the ideology that “the mission of Judaism was its self-sacrifice for the common good of mankind” (p. 26), despite the fact that Jews were vastly overrepresented in all of the markers of economic and cultural success in the society. Jews would lead humanity into a universalistic, ethically superior golden age, while they themselves retained “semi-conscious” feelings of solidarity with international Jewry. Their avowals of anti-Zionism and German patriotism were often “more evident than real” (p. 18)—a comment that brings to mind the much earlier observation of Moses Hess, who wrote in 1840 about the despised assimilated Jew “who denies his nationality while the hand of fate presses heavily on his own people. The beautiful phrases about humanity and enlightenment which he employs as a cloak for his treason  . . . will ultimately not protect him from public opinion” (in Frankel 1981, 12). The self-image of being completely socially assimilated also coexisted with exclusive socialization among other Jews and criticism of upper-class Jews who socialized with gentiles. Self-images of assimilation also coexisted with very negative or ambivalent attitudes toward conversion and intermarriage.

Moreover, the image of being submerged in completely “German” activities coexisted with the reality of engaging in activities that only Jews engaged in, and also in taking great pride in Jewish accomplishments, Jewish suffering, and in a Jewish history that was very different from German history. They took great pride in their invention of monotheism and in the concept that Christianity was the “daughter-religion” of Judaism—an ideology that clearly places Judaism in a superior role vis-à-vis Christianity. Their intellectual idols were people like Moritz Lazarus, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig—all Jews, many of whom were themselves engaged in intellectual work involving self-deception. (Cohen believed that Jews had to survive as a people in order to promote a unique ethical vision [Rubin 1995a, 53].) Their literary idols were Jews who had achieved popularity among gentiles and thus were a source of group pride.

The reality of anti-Semitism was almost completely blotted out of Jewish consciousness.[1] Very few Jews read anti-Semitic literature, and the general tendency was to suppose that anti-Semitic practices “were unimportant marginal phenomena” (p. 23).[2] Jewish cultural domination was a theme of anti-Semitism, but in 1912 when Zionist author Moritz Goldstein made his famous comment that Jews should contemplate the implications of the fact that the German cultural heritage was now largely in Jewish hands, the reaction was self-deception:

The unexpected frankness with which a Jew who eschewed self-delusion thus broke a taboo which otherwise had only been violated by anti-Semites with malicious tendencies, illuminated with lightning clarity the prevailing socio-political tensions. And perhaps more illuminating was the embittered reaction of most of the Jewish participants . . . who repudiated the thesis as such, declared the ventilation of the question to be improper, and tried with all their might to efface the divisions thus exposed. (Scholem 1979, 30)

Goldstein was a Zionist, and his essay was greeted with hostility by liberal Jewish organizations who assailed the “excessive nationalism” and “racial semitism” of the Zionists (see Field 1981, 248). As Field (1981, 248) points out, another aspect of Jewish self-deception revealed by this incident was that these liberal Jewish critics never confronted the central problem raised by Goldstein when he noted that anti-Semites such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain were “the best spirits, clever, truth-loving men who, however, as soon as they speak of Jews, fall into a blind, almost rabid hatred.” The credibility of the anti-Semites, not Moritz Goldstein, was the fundamental problem for German Jews.

Interestingly, Scholem himself would appear to be involved in similar forms of self-deception, and his particular form of it bears on the issue of the apologetic nature of Jewish historiography. Scholem (1976, 87) describes Jews as engaging in a one-sided, unreciprocated love affair with Germany in the post-emancipation era. “The Jews did meet with gratitude [for their contributions to culture] not infrequently, but almost never did they find the love they were seeking.” To Scholem, Jews were seeking love from gentile Germans—a twist on the familiar theme of Jews as an altruistic group. While Scholem is oblivious to conflicts of interest between Jews and Germans in the construction of culture, anti-Semites accused Jews of being hostile toward German culture as the culture of an outgroup and as seeking to dominate that culture in order to bend it to their own interests by, for example, being less enthusiastic about the German interest in developing a cohesive and unified national culture.

However, in the same essay Scholem states that “during the generations preceding the catastrophe [i.e., the Holocaust], the German Jews—whose critical sense was as famous among Germans as it was irritating to them—distinguished themselves by an astounding lack of critical insight into their own situation. An ‘edifying’ and apologetic attitude, a lack of critical candor, taints almost everything they wrote about the position of Jews in the German world of ideas, literature, politics, and economics” (p. 89). Put together, the passages imply that Jews sought the love of the Germans via their contributions to culture despite the fact that a prominent feature of this cultural contribution was to subject German culture to intensive criticism and despite the fact that this critical sense provoked German hostility. At the same time, Jews failed to critically analyze their own role vis-à-vis German culture. It makes no sense to suppose that Jews actually sought the love of the Germans while simultaneously subjecting the loved one to intensive criticism and failing to critically examine why they were doing so. Failure to see the contradiction in his own analysis is self-deception.

Similarly, the historian Donald Niewyk (1980, 196) attributes Jewish status seeking during the Weimar period to a desire to be loved by Germans rather than to the baser human goals hypothesized by an evolutionist: “Few elements of Jewish life were untouched by the painful consciousness of unrequited love. Jewish overachievement in every area of German economic and cultural life arose from a profound wish to win respect and acceptance.” Niewyk agrees with the statement of Franz Oppenheimer, a prominent Zionist, who commented in 1926 that Jewish “overcompensation” “betrayed a powerful longing to counteract antipathy by proving the value of Jewish contributions to Germany.”

Scholem may have developed his self-deception in his family, which, if it is at all representative of assimilating German Jewry, illustrates the self-deception involved for many Jews in establishing personal identity in a modern Western society. His father Arthur was an ardent assimilationist who forced his son to move out of the house when Gershom was charged with treason for demonstrating against Germany’s war effort in World War I. However, Arthur’s assimilation was perhaps not as complete as he conceived it to be.

[Gershom] should have been used to incongruities: his mother owned a kosher restaurant, but his father had renamed himself Siegfried in honor of Wagner’s opera. In the Scholem house, customs were similarly mixed up. Arthur forbade Jewish expressions, but his wife used them anyway. Friday night was a family night when prayers were said but only partly understood, and Arthur scorned Jewish law by using the Sabbath candles to light a cigar after the meal.

On Passover, the family ate both bread and matzo. Arthur went to work on Yom Kippur and did not fast. He praised the Jewish mission to spread monotheism and ethics, and he disparaged conversion. But the family celebrated Christmas as a German national festival and sang “Silent Night.” Arthur insisted on his German identity, but almost all his friends were Jews, and no Christian ever set foot in his home. And when Gershom became a Zionist, his parents bought a portrait of Herzl and put it under their Christmas tree. (Rubin 1995a, 32–33)

Self-deception regarding personal identity continues as an aspect of contemporary civil Judaism, where it functions to reconcile a strong Jewish ethnic identity with membership in the broader social context of contemporary Western individualist societies.

Sometimes, in partibus infidelium, [a consciousness of Jewish ethnicity] is “magically,” uncannily revived: in the very midst of the cool civil nexus that binds the goyim into their solidarity of the surface, in the very heart of the sociable Gesellschaft, across a crowded room, you “know” that “somehow” you share a primordial solidarity of the depths. . . . What is most inward in their Jewish self-definitions is precisely what cannot become outward and legitimately Anglo-American, namely, the particularist inwardness of the ethnic nexus. The Western value system refuses to legitimate publicly this primordial ethnic tie. . . . Hence its stubborn, residual reality is forced “underground,” and, when it travels aboveground, it is forced to assume the fictive identity of a denominational religion (Conservative Judaism serves this function in America). (Cuddihy 1974, 86–87)

It is this perceived need to hide a deeply felt but publicly illegitimate personal ethnic identity that I suppose tends to result in identificatory self-deception among Jews. Woocher (1986, 97; see also Liebman 1973) views contemporary civil Judaism as “a complex ideological mechanism” for dealing with the ambivalence resulting from the attempt to retain group identity and also achieve full social integration. The ideology simply states that there is no conflict in these aspirations, that both are “appropriate and necessary.” However, civil Judaism’s “intense anxiety about the prospects of Jewish survival in America, its struggle against assimilation, is a signal that its denial of ambivalence is not to be taken entirely at face value.” Within the civil religion, if a Jew feels ambivalence, it is a sign that he or she truly understands the meaning of being a Jew in contemporary America. The religion simply asserts as self-evident and beyond debate that “by being a better Jew, you will be a better American; by being a better American, you will be a better Jew” (Woocher 1986, 99)—a twist on Louis D. Brandeis’s (1915) remarkable assertion that “to be good Americans we must be better Jews; to be better Jews we must be Zionists.” Such a perspective is facilitated by the self-aggrandizing and presumably self-deceptive ideology that “America is, after all, created in their image, and in pursuing the civil Jewish version of Jewish destiny they are merely reinforcing the terms of America’s own self-understanding” (Woocher 1986, 102). Indeed, Woocher’s survey results of American Jewish activists in the late 1970s indicated that for most of these individuals the primary identification was as Jews rather than as Americans, but they also endorsed statements indicating they were glad to be American and that by being better Jews they would be better Americans.

The Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell articulates well the intensity with which many secular, highly assimilated Jews are aware of a double identity; that even in 20th-century America there is a Marranoism that Jews in 15th-century Spain would have sympathized with: “I was born in galut [exile] and I accept—now gladly, though once in pain—the double burden and the double pleasure of my self-consciousness, the outward life of an American and the inward secret of the Jew. I walk with this sign as a frontlet between my eyes, and it is as visible to some secret others as their sign is to me.” Bell concludes that “one realizes that one does not stand alone, that the past is still present, and that there are responsibilities of participation even when the community of which one is a part is a community woven by the thinning strands of memory” (Bell 1961, 477, 478).

Identificatory questions were characteristic of the German-Jewish economic elite in the period from 1800 to 1933. They engaged in very intricate intellectual rationalizations centered on their own personal identity and that of their children (see Mosse 1989, 45ff). These rationalizations, some of which were predicated on the idea that Jewish identity presented no problems, suggest a degree of self-deception:

Whilst some “ideological” solutions to [the search for personal identity] had an apparent logic and whilst some forms of practical engagement provided empirical solutions, many of the ‘solutions’ offered . . . were far-fetched and unconvincing. . . . However thoughtful and well-educated, no member of the of the Jewish economic élite, probably, could find a satisfactory theoretical (or “ideological”) solution to the dilemma. . . . Basically, the eternal and inevitable “outsider” could achieve no full identification—almost by definition—with the “solid majority.” (Mosse 1989, 90–92)

Self-deception and identificatory ambivalence among Jewish leftists is a major theme of The Culture of Critique. Consider the following summary of the attitudes of a sample of Jewish-American communists:

Most Jewish Communists wear their Jewishness very casually but experience it deeply. It is not a religious or even an institutional Jewishness for most; nevertheless, it is rooted in a subculture of identity, style, language, and social network. . . . In fact, this second-generation Jewishness was antiethnic and yet the height of ethnicity. The emperor believed that he was clothed in transethnic, American garb, but Gentiles saw the nuances and details of his naked ethnicity. . . .

Evidence of the importance of ethnicity in general and Jewishness in particular permeates the available record. Many Communists, for example, state that they could never have married a spouse who was not a leftist. When Jews were asked if they could have married Gentiles, many hesitated, surprised by the question, and found it difficult to answer. Upon reflection, many concluded that they had always taken marriage to someone Jewish for granted. The alternative was never really considered, particularly among Jewish men. (Lyons 1982, 73–74)

Indeed, Jews may not consciously know how strongly they in fact identify with Judaism. For example, Silberman notes that around the time of the 1967 Arab/Israeli war, many Jews could identify with the statement of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel that “I had not known how Jewish I was” (in Silberman 1985, 184; emphasis in text). Silberman comments that “This was the response, not of some newcomer to Judaism or casual devotee but of the man whom many, myself included, consider the greatest Jewish spiritual leader of our time.” Many others made the same surprising discovery about themselves: Arthur Hertzberg (1979, 210) wrote that “the immediate reaction of American Jewry to the crisis was far more intense and widespread than anyone could have foreseen. Many Jews would never have believed that grave danger to Israel could dominate their thoughts and emotions to the exclusion of everything else.”

In contemporary America there is a potential for identificatory ambivalence resulting from the very central role which a foreign government, Israel, plays in the civil religion of American Jews. For example, a survey conducted in the late 1970s found that among highly committed Jews, 70 percent agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I feel more emotional when I hear Hatikvah [the Israeli national anthem] than when I hear the Star Spangled Banner,” while less than 33 percent agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “The primary loyalty of American Jews must be to the United States and their fellow Americans.” However, as Woocher (1986, 99) notes, the ideology that there is no ambivalence and no inherent difficulty is a powerful one, since “it has sufficient face validity to make its articulation as a general principle plausible.”

There has also been self-deception (or deception) regarding Jewish economic success. Shapiro (1992, 118) notes that Jews are overrepresented by at least a factor of nine in the highest levels of economic success in American society. He also notes that Jews have taken steps to prevent this vast Jewish overrepresentation from being widely known, because of fears of anti-Semitism. Further, he notes that Jewish historians of Judaism in America have traditionally paid scant attention to the many instances where Jews have accumulated great wealth or have distinguished themselves intellectually, preferring, in the words of Irving Howe, to depict the Jewish immigrant experience as “a readiness to live for ideals beyond the clamor of self, a sense of plebeian fraternity, an ability to forge a community of moral order even while remaining subject to a society of social disorder” (in Shapiro 1992, 118). Similarly, Shapiro notes that in the 1940s the ADL downplayed the vastly disproportionate role of Jews in science, the professions, the arts, government, and the economy, pointing instead to the existence of Jewish laborers. In England during the 1930s Sidney Salomon, a journalist and secretary of the Defence Committee of the Board of Deputies, published a volume The Jews of Britain that deliberately downplayed the role of Jews in finance and commerce and emphasized their accomplishments in medicine and the arts (Alderman 1983, 122).

This type of deception or self-deception is also illustrated by another work by Irving Howe. In his discussion of Jewish influences on American culture, Howe (1978) completely ignores the consistent theme of post-Enlightenment anti-Semitism that Jewish influence on culture serves Jewish interests and conflicts with the interests of many gentiles. Instead, he concentrates on several Jewish influences on American culture perceived as entirely benign, including bringing Old World influences to bear on American culture (e.g., the Modernist movement) and especially a sense of alienation and separation from the wider culture: “To feel at some distance from society; to assume, almost as a birthright, a critical stance toward received dogmas, to recognize oneself as not quite at home in the world” (p. 106). Or as Barry Rubin (1995b, 144) expresses it, “with partial assimilation as normative, to be at home was never to be at home, living a reflexive high-wire act of anxiety and marginalism: rage, anxiety, restlessness, insatiability, as well as alienation, skepticism, intellectual orientation, and moralism infused with passion.”

I agree that this is an insightful interpretation of one form of Jewish cultural influence, and one can easily see in it the traditional separation of Jews from the surrounding society that is so essential to all forms of Judaism. However, it is also easy to see that it is exactly this latter influence that tends to undermine the fabric of gentile social structure and has been a potent source of anti-Semitism since the Enlightenment (see Ch. 2). Howe’s failure even to mention these considerations may be interpreted as another example of self-deception.

Indeed, Robert Alter (1965, 72) notes that the view of many Jewish writers of themselves as outsiders had “dwindled into an affectation or a stance of pious self-delusion.” Their fiction creates a “double sentimental myth: the Jew emerges from this fiction as an imaginary creature embodying both what Americans would like to think about Jews and what American Jewish intellectuals would like to think about themselves.” An example is the “pious self-delusion” (Alter 1969, 39) involved in depicting the Jew as an intensely morally sensitive, Christ-like sufferer who bears the world’s guilt on his shoulders.[3] Cuddihy (1974, 183) terms it “the ‘moralistic style’ of the modern oppositional intelligentsia.” It is the secular equivalent of the “light unto the nations” self-conceptualization that has been at the heart of Jewish identity since the beginning and particularly since the Enlightenment.

Reflecting self-deception and negative perceptions of the outgroup, Jewish intellectuals have held on to the idea of the Jew as outsider and underdog long after Jews had achieved vastly disproportionate success in America (Shapiro 1992, 123). This self-deception of Jews as oppressed can be seen in a recent work by Tikkun editor Michael Lerner (Lerner & West 1995) in which he argues that for Jews in contemporary America “there is a level of spiritual and psychological oppression that is as real and as fundamental as any other form of oppression. . . . It’s the oppression and pain that comes from denying our human capacity” (p. 237). Jews are outsiders in American society because American white society as a whole does not conform to a specifically Jewish ethical ideal despite the fact that Jews are highly overrepresented among all the indices of economic and cultural success in American society, including ownership of large corporations. In Lerner’s perspective, this high-income economic profile of the Jews occurs because Jews are passive victims of the gentile “ruling elite” that uses them as helpless servants to further its own interests just as it did in traditional societies: “Jews have been put into an intermediate position, in between the ruling elite who own the major economic institutions and the American majority, which has little real economic power. Jews become the middlemen—the lawyers, doctors, government bureaucrats, social workers, school teachers, and college professors. They appear to the vast majority of the population as the public face of the ruling elite” (p. 232). From Lerner’s perspective, Jews must not identify as whites and must act to transform American society in the image of this specifically Jewish ethical ideal—an astonishing example of ingroup glorification, coming as it does from a 20th-century intellectual, but one that is entirely congruent with Jewish self-conceptualizations throughout history.

Indeed, in Lerner’s view, an important source of traditional anti-Semitism is that “even before Christianity emerged, Jews were a troublesome people to ruling classes of the ancient world, because they had emerged with a revolutionary message, articulated in the Exodus story: the message that ruling classes were not inevitable, that the world could be fundamentally transformed” (p. 49). “No wonder then that ruling elites have always hated the Jews, worried about their passion for social justice, and done their best to portray them as ‘weird’ and ‘untrustworthy’ and ‘manipulators’ whom everyone else in the world would do best to avoid or distrust. . . . Ruling elites who found this message [of social justice] disturbing did all they could to stir up their own domestic populations against the Jews, to spread vicious stories about us” (pp. 9–10).

This is a remarkably fanciful reading of Jewish history—a reading that is possible only by ignoring the general tendency for Jews to exist only at the sufferance of gentile elites and also the frequent role of Jews as intermediaries between oppressive elites and native populations, as well as the general tendency of gentile elites to protect Jews against repeated outbreaks of anti-Semitism from the lower orders of society.

Recently Philip Weiss (1996) created a considerable stir when he acknowledged the unreality of the Jewish self-conception as an outsider and several other self-delusionary aspects of being Jewish in late 20th-century America. As expected from a social identity perspective, being Jewish is highly salient to him and strains his relationships with gentiles. He pictures his gentile Yale classmates as “blond and slightly dull witted, while the Jewish professor spews out brilliant lines. . . . We held them [gentiles] in a certain contempt. But we were marginalized. We were the outsiders. I’ve carried those lessons around with me all my life as I’ve made my own steady progress in the world. . . . Feelings of marginalization have informed my journalism, my humor, my social navigations” (pp. 25–26). (Even the aggressively ethnocentric Alan Dershowitz is quoted by Weiss as saying, “There is in our tradition, understandably but tragically, an anti-Gentile bias that we must root out.”) Indeed, his relationships with gentiles are strained by his “relentlessly defensive Jewish identification,” another way of saying that he is unable to relate to gentiles without invoking the ingroup/outgroup comparisons so central to the evolutionary version of social identity theory sketched in Chapter 1.

Jews cherish feelings of exclusion not just because there is wisdom in foreboding but because these feelings are useful. They preserve our position as outsiders, a status that has certain moral and practical advantages. As an outsider you have motivation: to get in. And you get to be demanding without any particular sense of reciprocity: the ADL (which is committed to fighting all forms of bigotry) running its Geiger counter over the goyim while failing to gauge Jewish racism. Perhaps most important, these feelings solidify Jewish identity. (p. 30)

Jews have . . . prevaricated about the question of Jewish influence—whether we have it, how we gain it, what it means. . . . When the NRA exercises political power, it’s a hot-button issue. When Jewish money plays a part, discussing it is anti-Semitic. (p. 32)

As indicated in Chapter 2 (p. 55), the fact that Jewish power and influence is off-limits is a component of contemporary writing deemed anti-Semitic by Jewish organizations. During a discussion of the “disproportionate” influence of Jews, Weiss quotes the ADL’s Abraham Foxman as saying “You say ‘disproportionate’ to your numbers’—to me that is dangerous. To me that is sinister. To me that feeds all the undertones. How do you combat an attitude that has been out there for 200 years that says you’re too successful, you’re too smart, you’re too powerful, you’re too influential? How do you deal with people who covet your success? What do you do—do you hide it?” Weiss comments: “But that’s what he does; goes into panic mode when you try to make observations about Jewish achievement” (p. 33). Indeed, when Foxman describes the great interest foreign governments have in asking him to influence the American media and government, he is careful to phrase the description in a manner that is consistent with supposing that these perceptions are entirely illusory. Foxman notes that when a world leader seeks him out it is because

someone sold him the concept that the Jewish community is very strong and powerful. You know it because when you finish the conversation, they want to know what you can do for them in the media, what you can do for them in the Congress and so on. . . . That’s why the prime minister of Albania comes, and the foreign minister of Bulgaria and El Salvador, Nicaragua, you name it. You’ve got to ask yourself, what is this about? The answer is, it’s because they believe a little bit of that. (In Goldberg 1996, 17)

Whether it is deception or self-deception, the implication is that some truths are better left unstated or even unacknowledged, and regarded as pathological expressions of anti-Semitism. As Weiss says, there is moral capital to be gained by adopting an identification as an outsider. I believe that the moral capital obtained by being a psychological outsider has been a critical component of the movements of social criticism discussed in The Culture of Critique. To a very considerable extent Jewish status as outsiders has allowed them to engage in radical criticism of the moral and intellectual foundations of Western society while retaining a perspective of their own ingroup as ethically and morally beyond reproach. But as Weiss points out and as I have tried to document extensively, ethnocentrism and hostility toward outsiders is rife among Jews, and this is exactly what would be predicted from an evolutionary perspective based on social identity theory. Moreover, Judaism, because it is characterized by high intelligence and resource acquisition ability, has produced ethnic warfare virtually wherever Jews have lived. But by retaining the view of themselves as the morally pure outsider arrayed against a pathologically anti-Semitic gentile society, Jews are able to simultaneously pursue their own ethnic interests and conceptualize their opponents as morally depraved (and also, as Weiss notes, as “dim-witted”). Self-deception is very useful in this warfare, because it essentially allows Jewish leaders to deny the reality of Jewish wealth and political and cultural influence.

Similarly, Goldberg (1996, 6) notes that “the average American Jew views his or her community as a scattered congregation of six million-odd individuals of similar origins and diverse beliefs, fortunate children and grandchildren of immigrant tailors and peddlers.” In their own self-image, “Jews are utterly powerless and must live by their wits. Compromise is useless or worse. Politics is made of messianic visions and apocalyptic goals. Some of these visions, like Zionism and socialism, may occasionally become reality” (p. 11).

The reality, as Goldberg extensively documents, is that Jews are widely perceived as very powerful within America by friends and foes alike, as well as by foreign governments interested in influencing the American media and American foreign policy. Far from being a community with widely diverse interests, Jewish political involvement is highly focused, particularly in the areas of Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties (Goldberg 1996, 5). It is noteworthy that Jewish attitudes in these areas are markedly different from other Americans and that since the great increase in Jewish political power in the 1960s all of these areas have shown massive public policy shifts that are congruent with Jewish attitudes.

There is indeed a long history both in the United States and England in which Jewish organizations have denied any concerted Jewish political behavior. For example, the AJCommittee has reacted very negatively to any mention of a “Jewish vote” by politicians or the media, while at the same time often threatening politicians by emphasizing the possible effects of the Jewish vote (e.g., Cohen 1972, 378; Goldstein 1990, 147, 163). Despite the fact that the “Jewish vote” “is not a reactionary stereotype but a fact of American politics” (Petersen 1955, 84), gentiles are encouraged to suppose that Jews have no group interests.

Louis Marshall stated at the time of the AJCommittee’s founding in 1906 that “what I am trying to avoid more than anything else is the creation of a political organization, one which will be looked upon as indicative of a purpose on the part of Jews to recognize that they have interests different from those of other American citizens” (in Goldstein 1990, 55). Goldstein comments that the attempt to aid Jews suffering from discrimination in other countries “would inevitably promote ‘interests different from those of other Americans.’ ” Marshall also stated that “there is no such thing as a Jewish Republican or a Jewish Democrat. . . . Jews have no political interests which are different from those of our fellow citizens” (in Goldstein 1990, 335–336). In fact, the AJCommittee was well aware that its perspective on immigration policy was not shared by the majority of Americans: During the fight over restrictionist legislation at the end of the Taft administration, Herbert Friedenwald, AJCommittee secretary, wrote that it was “very difficult to get any people except the Jews stirred up in this fight” (in Goldstein 1990, 203). Later Marshall himself stated that “We are practically the only ones who are fighting [the literacy test] while a “great proportion” [of the people] is “indifferent to what is done” (in Goldstein 1990, 249). Marshall made a number of other “curious distinctions” (Goldstein 1990, 336) aimed at urging Jews to vote a certain way because their interests were involved, but nevertheless denied that Jews had any group interests at all. “According to the AJC, the Jewish vote did not exist—unless, of course, politicians failed to support the organization” on specific issues (Goldstein 1990, 336). Similarly in the contemporary U. S., the ADL’s Abraham Foxman states regarding the disproportionate number of Jews in Congress, “I say to you that they are Democrats who happen to be Jews, and their Jewishness is something they wear once a week, once a month” (in Weiss 1996, 33).

The following comments about American anti-Semitism toward the end of World War II typify the attempt to erase any notion of group characteristics or group interests among Jews.

[Jews] are Republicans and Democrats, like everybody else. A few of them are Communists—as are a few Irishmen, Italians, and a few everything else. They are divided many ways over their own Zionist question. Through thousands of years, armies of Jews have gone to battle against each other—as loyal citizens of warring nations. Human beings who profess one religion have, indeed, seldom been so divided as the Jews and seldom shared the blood of so many different peoples and nationalities. This is the way it really is. (In Dinnerstein 1995, 148)

Similarly, discussion of Jewish political behavior, especially the idea of a Jewish vote, has been off limits in official Jewish circles in England (Alderman 1983, vii). At times the very same people who make highly salient denials of a Jewish vote do their best to influence Jewish voting behavior regarding issues important for Jews. For example, when alien restriction legislation was pending in 1904 and 1905, the Jewish Chronicle, the principal newspaper for the British Jewish community, strongly opposed immigration restriction in its editorials and provided highly detailed coverage of the parliamentary debates as well as lists of how particular MPs were voting. Moreover, “although the paper delivered its usual eve-of-poll disavowal of a Jewish vote, it was quick to attribute certain Tory losses and Liberal gains to Jewish voters” (Cesarani 1994, 99).

The taboo on discussing Jewish political behavior functions to promote self-deception because it maintains an illusory Jewish self-conception of the extent to which Jews are assimilated within British political culture and the extent to which specifically Jewish interests influence their political behavior. Alderman (1983, viii) notes that “I am well aware that my work in researching and writing this book has not found favour with those who lead and articulate the opinions of Anglo-Jewry. The major conclusion of this research—that far from being totally assimilated within British political culture, Jewish voters in Britain have always been capable of independent political behaviour, sometimes in marked contrast to national or regional trends—is also one which runs counter to the most cherished beliefs of Anglo-Jewish leaders” (pp. viii–ix).

Similarly, in 19th-century England Jews often publicly denied that they had interests different from any other Englishman despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary. In 1870 a writer in the Jewish Chronicle emphasized the idea that “Jewish ethics” would prevent any Jewish political parochialism—another example in which the perceived ethical superiority of Judaism facilitates the pursuit of group self-interest in a self-delusionary manner (Alderman 1983, 35). In order to give credence to the idea that Jews had no group interests as Jews, an effort was made to get Jews to support both major political parties. As Alderman shows, however, Jewish support for particular political parties changed as a function of their support for particular Jewish issues, particularly in the area of foreign policy toward Turkey in the late 1870s and, after 1880, when Jewish attitudes toward czarist Russia, immigration, and eventually Zionism differed quite markedly from those of other Englishmen.

The self-deceptiveness of Jewish rhetoric on the “Jewish vote” issue can also be seen in the official policy of the Jewish Chronicle to forbid advertisements from political parties on “what may reasonably be regarded” as community special interests, despite the fact that the paper deals with such issues routinely in its own writing. Alderman (1983, 152) comments that “such reactions . . . ignore historical and political realities, and they fly in the face of human nature. But the fact that they continue to be displayed shows how strong the vision remains, at least in the top echelons of Anglo-Jewry, of a community totally integrated with the existing political structure and politically indistinguishable within it.”

Deception and/or self-deception may also have been involved in the activities of the AJCommittee to combat public perceptions of Jews as radicals. In 1918, the AJCommittee stated that there was no connection at all between Jews and Bolsheviks, despite having been told by a Jewish official of the Kerensky government that in fact Jews were prominently represented among Bolshevik leaders (Cohen 1972, 126). The AJCommittee was also well aware of the fact that Jews had a predominant role in radical political organizations in the United States but continued to deny these links publicly. An official of the executive committee (Cyrus Adler) stated privately that

We have made a noise in the world of recent years . . . far out of proportion to our numbers. We have demonstrated and shouted and paraded and congressed and waved flags to an extent which was bound to focus upon the Jew the attention of the world and having got this attention, we could hardly expect that it would all be favorable. (In Cohen 1972, 132)

Similarly, in England during the 1890s attempts were made by the established Jewish community to misrepresent the prevalence of radical political ideas among the newly arrived Eastern European immigrants (Alderman 1983, 60). A spokesman for the Federation of Minor Synagogues organized to meet this threat commented that “although there might be one or two Socialists, these were quite the exception to the rule.”

In conclusion, from the standpoint of social identity theory, at the heart of these activities is an attempt to influence the social categorization process in a manner favorable to Judaism. This process often functions to provide positive descriptions of Jews and their role vis-à-vis gentiles and their culture. Self-deception is thus also a critical component of the effectiveness of the rationalizations and apologia reviewed in Chapter 7. But beyond that, we have seen that self-deception appears to be critical in maintaining fictions related to Jewish self-conceptualizations as truly assimilated to gentile culture (as in Wilhelmine Germany), or as a marginalized outsider (as in the contemporary United States), or as having no group interests at all.

I have noted several times that the human mind was not designed to seek truth but rather to attain evolutionary goals. The Jews of the pre-National Socialist period in Germany “preferred ambiguity and obfuscation over clarity and had little use for those who wanted to throw light on the situation” (Scholem 1979, 32). Once again one is impressed by the flexibility and adaptability of the human mind. In Chapter 7 it was noted that Jewish intellectuals were able to mold the ideological basis of Judaism to react to a wide range of unforeseeable contingencies in an adaptive manner and thereby attain the fundamental goal of maintaining the group strategy. Self-delusionary conceptions of the Jewish ingroup are continually adjusted to meet current challenges. While at times self-deception may be maladaptive (as in failing to accurately gauge the causes and consequences of anti-Semitism in particular historical eras), self-deception has been and continues to be a highly adaptive and critical component of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy.

The Biblical scholar John Allegro (1923–88) once argued that Jesus Christ was a magic mushroom. His theory was utter nonsense, of course. It’s obvious that Jesus was in fact a horse. After all, he was born in a stable. His supposed Greek title, ὁ Υἱὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ, ho Huios tou Theou, “The Son of God,” must be a corruption of ὁ Ἵππος τοῦ Θεοῦ, ho Hippos tou Theou, “The Horse of God.”

Abandoning facts, embracing fantasy

Well, I can tell you’re not convinced. But if you think “Jesus as horse” is a stupid theory, let me introduce you to the award-winning Black historian David Olusoga (born 1970) and his children’s book Black and British: An Illustrated History (2021). The book has become part of what is officially but inaccurately known as Black History Month, which runs in October in Britain. I prefer the unofficial and accurate title of Black Bullshit Month. Olusoga’s book is leftist propaganda plugging the lie that Blacks have long been an important and valuable part of British life. They haven’t: before mass immigration began, they were a minor presence and unable to make the vibrant contributions in murder, rape and general criminality for which they are outstandingly successful throughout the modern West. But at least Olusoga’s book bases some of its lies on genuine history. Blacks were definitely present in Britain under the Tudors and Stuarts, for example. They were very few in number, but they were there. However, at the beginning of the book, Olusoga abandons facts altogether and uses an argument even stupider than “Jesus must have been a horse because he was born in a stable.”

Septimius Severus was born in Africa and died in Britain, but was neither Black nor British (image from Wikipedia)

Olusoga pretends that the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (145–211 AD) and Roman governor Quintus Urbicus (fl. 140 AD) were Black because they were “born in Africa.” This is the equivalent of arguing that a human is a horse because he was born next to a stable. Severus and Urbicus were from North Africa, which was not inhabited by Blacks but by proud and ancient peoples like the Berbers, who are actually closer genetically to White Europeans than to Black Africans. North Africa is separated from Black regions of Africa by the vast wastes of the Sahara Desert. In other words, Olusoga is guilty of an act of blatant racial, cultural and geographic “erasure.” No leftist would condemn him for it, however, because he is working in two sacred causes: first, power for the elites of leftism; second, punishment for the enemies of leftism. Olusoga blatantly erases Berbers again when he pretends that the “Aurelian Moors” stationed “on Hadrian’s Wall in the Third Century” were Black because they came from North Africa. And that the “Ivory Bangle Lady” found buried in York was Black because she too came from North Africa.

“North African = Black” — lying illustration #1 from Black and British

“North African = Black” — lying illustration #2 from Black and British

Born of “North African” parents, but not a bit Black:  Zinedine Zidane (image from Wikipedia)

The Aurelian Moors and Ivory Bangle Lady were no more Black than the great soccer-player Zinedine Zidane (born 1972), whose parents are Algerian Berbers from “North Africa.” To give Olusoga his due, he doesn’t explicitly lie in his text and say that “African means Black.” The illustrators of the book have no such scruples and portray the Aurelian Moors and the Ivory Bangle Lady as unmistakably Black. Olusoga made no objection to that. But his “erasure” of Berbers is only the first of his transgressions against leftist piety. He also implicitly supports the brutalities of imperialism and colonialism. After all, North Africans — Olusoga’s pretended “Blacks” — were in Britain only because Romans had brutally invaded and colonized most of the island. He notes briefly that, in 60 AD, “Boudicca leads a rebellion against the Romans.” But that’s all he says: he doesn’t say that Boudicca was driven to rebellion by Roman greed, her own flogging by Roman soldiers, and the rape of her daughters.

Black narcissism and the mirror of history

It wasn’t a happy precedent, was it? Ethnic enrichment was imposed on native Britons by a brutal empire. No wonder Olusoga doesn’t give further details of Boudicca’s “rebellion.” And even he can’t pretend that Blacks were in Britain after the fall of that brutal Roman Empire. In fact, they first began to enrich Britain only a few centuries ago. Leftist historians are now devoting ridiculous amounts of time and attention to the tiny numbers of Blacks present here before mass immigration. Except that the time and attention aren’t ridiculous: they’re part of the leftist war on Whites and on the West. The possibly Jewish historian Miranda Kaufmann has written a “critically acclaimed” book called Black Tudors: The Untold Story (2017), which reveals that Blacks in Tudor times were remarkable for only one thing: that they were Black in an overwhelmingly White country.

Black Tudors, Miranda Kaufman’s “critically acclaimed” leftist propaganda

But it’s not their Blackness as such that matters to leftists like Kaufmann: it’s their maximal distance from Whiteness. The Blacks of Tudor times are a kind of ideological jimmy that leftists are using to lever open and destroy British identity. Take the Black John Blanke, whom Olusoga calls “the earliest Black person in Britain whose name and face we know. He was a trumpeter in the Tudor royal court” (note that Olusoga is abandoning the pretence that the well-documented Septimius Severus was Black). There is now a John Blanke Project devoted to this utterly insignificant figure. He was Black and played the trumpet. So what? Did he do anything that a White couldn’t have done equally well or better? Would Tudor England have collapsed without him and other Blacks? No, of course not. But he’s deeply significant to narcissists like David Olusoga and the dozens of Blacks who have gathered at the John Blanke Project. He’s Black like them, so he allows them to use history like a mirror. One of those Black narcissists has said this: “Our Spirits, Scars and Creativity have left marks and reminders across Europe and only our own will bring those histories forward to be pointed out and remembered — so thank you to all you Historians.”

The usual leftist magic

I can certainly agree that Blacks have left “marks and reminders” across Europe. Blacks have stabbed women to death in Italy, committed gang-rape in Sweden, and sacrificed children in Britain. Indeed, they’ve done all those things in all those places. And the more Blacks there are, the more those things happen. So what’s not to like for leftists? The criminality and barbarism of Blacks are a feature, not a bug, of leftist minority-worship. Black failure can be blamed on White racism and White taxpayers have to fund leftists in their decades-long and utterly futile quest to cure Black pathologies.

But Blacks are useful to leftists in another very important way. As I’ve said before at the Occidental Observer, Blacks are the most harmful, obnoxious, unintelligent, unattractive and unproductive of all minorities. In other words, they are the group that least resembles Whites and is most harmful to White civilization. Leftism is not genuinely pro-Black, but is genuinely anti-White.

For proof of how leftism isn’t genuinely pro-Black, look at the intellectually and ethically inane cult known as Black Lives Matter (BLM). It has successfully worked the usual leftist magic and has most harmed those it claims to care about most. As Steve Sailer has exhaustively documented, BLM has been directly responsible for thousands more young Black men being murdered and mutilated by other young Black men, because it has discouraged police from maintaining law and order. As ever, when the supposedly racist police retreat, Black barbarism advances and Blacks commit even more murders and rapes. Something similar happened in Britain when the police were accused of “institutional racism” by the Macpherson report into the murder by Whites of the Black teenager Stephen Lawrence. The police retreated and Black barbarism advanced.

Mediocre Blacks hate White achievement

Like the martyr-cult of George Floyd in America, the martyr-cult of Stephen Lawrence in Britain inverts the truth in typical leftist — and Satanic — fashion. It pretends that vicious Whites are an ever-present threat to virtuous Blacks. The reverse is true. Inevitably, the martyr’s mother Doreen Lawrence turns up in David Olusoga’s book of leftist propaganda for children. She was made a Baroness by the traitorous David Cameron. I’d call her a Baroness of Bullshit, because she’s from the very violent and corrupt Black island of Jamaica, but has happily accepted the role of ethical guru for the Whites of Britain. The murder-rate in Britain is about 1 (one) per 100,000; in Jamaica, it’s about 44 (forty-four) per 100,000. Now there’s a truly outstanding Black achievement! The sight of a Jamaican Black lecturing Whites on violent crime is grotesque. And it only becomes more so when you consider that hundreds of murders and thousands of rapes have been committed in Britain by Jamaican Blacks since they began migrating here against the clear opposition of British Whites.

David Olusoga is happy for such murders and rapes to continue. In November 2020, he and other “Black public figures” signed a joint letter opposing the deportation of fifty Jamaican criminals, including “convicted murderers and rapists.” The criminals wouldn’t be safe in Jamaica, Olusoga and company said. They didn’t mention the welfare of British Whites. No-one respectable is worried about the welfare of Whites. But in other ways Whites are ever-present in the psychic life of “Black public figures” like Olusoga. White civilization stings and burns their narcissism, rebuking their mediocrity, inciting their envy and rousing their enmity. That’s why Olusoga is so desperate to pretend that Blacks were important in British history and were here millennia ago, even though, on core leftist principles, it shouldn’t matter in the slightest whether they were or not. If we’re all the same under the skin, British and Roman history is simply human history and Whites are not special in any way. Any human being should be able to “identify” with any other human being, because race and “gender” are irrelevant and unimportant when set against our common humanity.

An ugly Black in color surrounded by great Whites in monochrome: Black Bullshit Month at the Guardian

But David Olusoga and other Black mediocrities obviously don’t truly believe in core leftist principles. They know that Blacks aren’t part of the West, which is why they want to pretend Blacks have been important in Western history even as they wage war on that history. Blacks and other leftists can’t match White civilization or contribute to its greatness, but they can do what is, in their minds, the next best thing: rule the ruins. The aim of Black Bullshit Month (BBM) is summed up for me by an image from the Guardian that is reproduced above. It shows the portrait of an ugly Black in full and vibrant color surrounded by great White figures in monochrome. The accompanying article asks “Black History Month: Do our children need more Black history lessons?” You won’t be surprised at the answer given by narcissistic Black mediocrities like Joseph Harker, “the Guardian’s senior editor for diversity and development,” Lavinya Stennett, “founder and chief executive of The Black Curriculum,” and Desta Haile, “deputy director of the Royal African Society.”

The Black portrait (possibly misattributed) is supposedly that of Olaudah Equiano, a former Black slave who had been transported across the Atlantic by Whites before converting to Christianity, gaining his freedom, and writing an autobiography. If he’d stayed free in Africa, he would never have been heard of. If he’d been captured by Arab Muslims, he would have been castrated, permanently enslaved and also never heard of. White goodwill — not to mention the White inventions of printing and oil-paints — allowed him to enter history and be seized on by modern leftists for anti-White propaganda. The Guardian is elevating him over Whites and making him literally central to British history. That image is a leftist lie, enviously demoting White greatness and elevating ugly Black victimhood. It’s hard to imagine a better symbol of Black Bullshit Month.

After an interlude, Part IV of this series picks up in the depths of Kings Cross in where the second section of Part III, left off.

Following Portnoy’s victory in 1972, obscene and sexually explicit material was riding high in Australia. The abandonment of threshold censorship by the federal government and the collapse of the enforcement of obscenity law inaugurated a twelve-year period where Australia was treated to one political backdown after another when it came to the policing of what was once considered obscene material. These were the golden years of obscenity from 1972 to 1984 which took full advantage of the explosion of the pornographic industry in America and Europe and the unleashing of sexual mores from the wider sexual revolution. People around the country set about enjoying their new-found freedoms and a whole new world of sex emerged in Australian popular culture; full nudity was appearing on television and on stages, sex could be freely spoken about on the national broadcaster, and films containing strong sexual themes were becoming normal fare for cinema-goers under the newly established R-rating. Men’s magazines had wide distributions, erotic literature and sex toys could be legally purchased, and slowly but surely pornographic films were making inroads.

Obscenity laws remained on the books for a while longer and was only fully dismantled within the Customs Act in 1984[1], but the Portnoy’s Complaint saga (alongside the watering down of the legal definition of obscenity by Crowe v. Graham) had shown that it was now unenforceable, and importation bans on obscene publications were never attempted by the federal government again. The naïve belief espoused by politicians while introducing the Restricted 18+ rating (in 1967 and 1971 for publications and films respectively) that it would not lead to more obscene content being legalized was shown to be farcical. In 1971 customs minister Don Chipp had nominated the high-brow Playboy magazine as the benchmark of permissiveness in Australia beyond which publications were not to be allowed.[2] At most it took two years before cutting-edge publications that had moved well beyond Playboy in their level of obscene content could be freely purchased in Australia.

As mentioned in Part I, the Whitlam federal government established a new federal classification scheme in 1974, and all states other than Queensland followed suit by passing liberalizing classification laws. These state laws held back on the full extent of liberalization that the federal government outlined and still attempted to prohibit more extreme content. However, prosecuting such publications for obscenity almost always turned out to be more cumbersome than it was worth, with only a slim chance of success, and would always be negated by lack of action in other states and the more liberal federal scheme. Only a brief legislative move around the country to outlaw child pornography in 1977, which had become disturbingly common among publications assessed by classification boards[3], resulted in anything that can be considered a roll-back on the trend towards liberalization.

Freed from the constraints of obscenity laws and importation restrictions, the explosion of sexual content that occurred during this period was by no means a purely Jewish affair.  Nevertheless, as the final essay in the series will outline, Jews were responsible for much of the highlights, and were an ever-present fixture at the vanguard before the adult industry turned legitimate during the latter stages of the 1980s.

1965 vs 1975

An outline of the types of material authorities were dealing with in the year 1965 compared with 1975 offers an insight into how quickly obscene content had taken hold after the Portnoy victory and the further liberalizing government decisions. Putting aside the foreign books, films and magazines that the Australian government was still holding the fort against, the local publications contended with in the mid-1960s were utterly tame compared to a mere decade later. Sore points for authorities were still comic books, bikini-clad magazine covers and paperback pulp fiction which traded in indecent sexual themes. Such novels had begun to take their cue from Kings Cross, the center of sin, as a setting for their stories and used ever more risqué graphic art for their front covers.

This pulp market was dominated by Jewish-owned Horwitz Publications, the largest paperback publisher in Australia. Run by their son Stanley by the 1960s, Horwitz was founded in 1921 by Israel and Ruth Horwitz, who had capitalized on a gap in the market created by import restrictions on cheap literature coming in from America, material that was not deemed appropriate for Australian audiences as it unduly emphasized sex.[4] In 1965, the overtly sexual nature of pulp fiction had not yet been fully realized, but as noted by Nette, the change was not far off:

The dominant characteristic of Horwtiz pulp from 1967 to 1972 was its increasingly sexually explicit nature, both its cover art and contents,…books even delved into non-heteronormative sexual identities, the overt representation of which had, with few exceptions, been largely off-limits in Australian pulp publishing.[5]

During the 1970s, Horwitz turned elsewhere as the market for erotic literature declined in favor of the outright pornographic magazine, publishing the Australian edition of MAD Magazine and in 1982, the company purchased Penthouse Australia. Meanwhile at the universities, the student magazines were just getting started in their Wilhelm Reich-inspired quest to cause grief for governments, and the Film Censorship Board was still banning horror films. Underground newspapers with photos of topless women like the Kings Cross Whisper were regularly seized and publishers charged with obscenity, and copies of the American Playboy magazine were still being confiscated from the luggage of travelers.

A sample of popular Australian magazines and pulp fiction from the mid-1960s.

In 1975, the situation could not have been more bleak, and furor over the written word in pulp fiction and in books like Portnoy’s Complaint probably felt like ancient history. Authorities were instead dealing with illegal screenings of hard-core pornography in the form of movies such as Deepthroat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973). Both had been secretly imported to Australia and screened at a number of Kings Cross venues, and could be semi-legally acquired for personal use via mail-order if you had $200 to spare (close to $1,500 AUD today). Australia-wide there was veritable explosion in all sorts of publications that would have once been immediately seized by police but could now be legally purchased from newsagents and the newly founded sex shops. A sample record can be found in Victoria in the 1974–75 Annual Report of the State Advisory Board on Publications (the second year of operation of the new Police Offences Act), which details all the publications that year that were deemed by the Victorian State Government to be restricted publications—not saleable to people under the age of 18.[6] Alongside all the literary smut (with titles like My Wet Dream, Ebony Orgasm and Two Girls and a Vibrator) one can find the Asia-Pacific off-shoot of Al Goldstein’s Screw magazine[7] and plenty of other pornographic books, magazines and newspapers attributable to Jewish-owned publishers.

Among the more notorious of these was Oceana Press, the Australian imprint for books originally published by Olympia Press, the famous French publisher of English-language erotica and other obscene literature. Founded in 1953 by Maurice Girodias (born Maurice Kahane), Olympia Press flourished by printing obscene books in more tolerant France and shipping them overseas. Famous examples include Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and it was Maurice’s father Jack Kahane that had first published Henry Miller’s ground-breaking obscene book Tropic of Cancer (1934).

The corresponding law in New South Wales, the Indecent Articles and Classified Publications Act, began operating in December 1975, streaming over-18 publications into the categories of Restricted (not to be publicly displayed) and Direct Sale (not to be displayed at all, and only sold after a direct request by a purchaser). The classification listings circulated in the NSW government gazette positively bulge with foreign Jewish-owned publishers, including the more infamous American ventures: Eros Publishing (Rueben Sturman & Ralph Ginzburg), American Art Enterprises (Milton Luros, born Milton Rosenblatt), Marquis Publishing, Classic Publications (Marvin Miller of Miller v California fame) and Golden State News.

Lionel Murphy and Abe Saffron

It is worth also briefly broaching the nature of the Whitlam Government (1972–1975) that was busy dismantling the censorship regime and highlighting one of the more unscrupulous members of this New Left cadre re-shaping Australian society. The dedication of members of the Whitlam government to the anti-censorship cause is well understood, but less well known are the maneuverings of Senator Lionel Murphy when it came to the direct enforcement of customs law.

As Attorney-General from 1972–1975, Murphy presided over many of the other radical legal changes that occurred under Whitlam, such as the introduction of no-fault divorce laws. Persistent allegations of corruption and impropriety against Murphy over the course of the next decade led to the formation of a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry in May 1986, seeking to investigate these claims. The inquiry was withdrawn after Murphy’s diagnosis and subsequent death at the hands of cancer a few months later; however, preliminary documents were tabled with allegations that were to be investigated, which were declassified in 2017. Of interest is Allegation #37—Direction Concerning Importation of Pornography:

The allegations were that in 1973 the Judge [Murphy] had issued a direction that Regulation 4A of the customs (Prohibited Imports) Regulations, as they then stood, should be ignored with the result that pornography was imported without any written permission and thereby contrary to the regulations.[8]

As detailed in Part III, Murphy had been targeted by Abe Saffron’s blackmail operation and is now widely believed to have had a close relationship with Saffron and assisted him in a number of questionable affairs.[9] Allegation # 5 was that Murphy had also directed customs surveillance against Saffron to be downgraded. Directing Customs to ignore the law when it came to the importation of pornography would certainly have been to the benefit of Saffron, as well as for the other Jews coming to the fore. It also put all the more pressure on the state governments to reform their respective censorship laws, which could no longer handle the scale of obscene publications flowing into the country.

The Golden Years of Obscenity

With the law on the back foot (and Murphy apparently directing customs to turn a blind eye to pornography), publishers and importers were emboldened, and more often than not they were ignoring the classification schemes. Now that the federal government had taken a step back from policing the border, the onus fell on the states to control the avalanche of foreign smut. Alongside their disquiet about the increasingly depraved nature of the publications they were assessing, the 1967–1977 Annual Report of the State Advisory Board on Publications in Victoria noted that many publications were simply not being sent to the government for registration, and the board would only find out about them once they were already on sale at shops.[10]

The case of Gold Star Publications, a prominent sex publisher during these early post-Portnoy years, typifies the emboldened nature of local Jewish publishers in the wake of the backdown. Gold Star Publications was founded in the late 1960s by Gerald “Gerry” Gold, the brother of U.K.-based publisher David Gold, who arrived in Australia in 1954 from London. Gold Star published pulp fiction and other more legitimate works but entered into the new world of smut and “sexology,” delivering to the Australian market titles like Nympho, House of Pleasure, Girls in Love, and Female Sex Perversion. In February 1973, police raided the offices of Gold Star in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn, where they found and seized just under 38,000 pornographic books and magazines, with an estimate resale value of $150,000.[11] Ostensibly seized on the grounds of obscenity, Victoria Police was later forced to hand the magazines back to Gold Star, as they were declared restricted material instead.

David Gold was also notable as a publisher of porn magazines in the U.K. through the vehicles Trident Publications and Gold Star Publications—not to be confused with the Australian variant founded by his brother with the same name. Gerald imported and published remaindered books from David’s U.K. business under the imprint Knight Books, and many of his U.K. pornographic magazines made their way to Australia as well. Gerald’s son Geoffrey Gold, a former student radical at Monash University in Melbourne, also entered the world of publishing after a brief tenure at his father’s company. Under the imprint Widescope International, Geoff Gold published a number of books by members of the Whitlam Government during the mid-1970s and later took over the left-wing political magazine National Review in 1978. By 1984, he was publishing Video and Cinema Magazine which was doing its best to legitimize pornography by giving out awards for the “erotic” category,[12] and launched Video-X in 1985, the first Australian trade publication for X-rated VHS tapes.

Sex Shops

Resistance from mainstream bookshops and newsagents severely limited opportunities for stocking the more hardcore content, but this was quickly rectified with another innovation picked up from abroad. The first sex shops in Australia were appearing just before the federal government issued its final backdown on Portnoy’s Complaint in June 1972. No zoning laws existed to prohibit these shops, and, short of taking the owners to task for publicly displaying goods in shopfront windows or selling the sort of extreme publications that could still get you into trouble with the much-weakened law, they were allowed to flourish. Such shops became the focal point for the nascent Australian sex industry, places where customers could pick up their monthly porn magazine or peruse through the collection of smut and sex toys.

The arrival of the sex shop also took the wind out of strip clubs, which were previously the most depraved sexual attraction the general public had access to. Many of the purveyors of these shops launched their own local publishing companies to supplement imported publications, or in the case of Jan Domabyl and Terry Blake (the founder of the underground newspaper Kings Cross Whisper) came into the process in the reverse. Part III of this series noted the central role of Abe Saffron in the adult entertainment industry in Kings Cross, the logical location for their conglomeration, and that many of the first sex shops around the country were established in Saffron-owned buildings. Saffron himself was obviously not involved in the day-to-day operation of these outlets—this task was left to other entrepreneurial Jews, who easily made up the majority of early sex shop proprietors.

One of the earliest sex shops in Australia can be attributed to a Czech Jewish migrant called Jan Domabyl, which opened in 1972 in a Saffron-owned arcade on Darlinghurst Road in Kings Cross. Under the company name Adult Products Pty Ltd, a family venture which included his wife and his daughter Nelly Vandergroot, Domabyl grew his business throughout the 1970s into a chain of sex shops in Sydney. Domabyl also founded the sex newspaper Searchlight, which doubled as a sex-contact magazine. Before Jews in America created hook-up apps like Tinder and Bumble, such newspapers could be utilized to discreetly organize sexual liaisons via personal advertisements. Domabyl moved back to the Czech Republic in the early 2010s, where he became somewhat of a minor “sex-celebrity” in his country of birth, appearing on local television shows and boasting to Czech newspapers that he had been with over 10,000 sexual partners.[13]

Australian Sex Magazines of the Early 70s.

Another prominent figure in the growing sex shop industry was Gustav Herstik of Visual Enterprises Ltd. Born to a Jewish family in Hungary, Herstik and his wife operated the Love Art network of sex shops and were also the owners of Herd Publishing, which published a variety of pornographic magazines. These included some of the earliest Australian-produced homosexual porn magazines, Stallion and Apollo, the former established in April 1973.

However, arguably the biggest Jewish players were Harry and Hannah Strum of Venus Enterprises, the “Mr and Mrs Big of sex shops.”[14] The pair set up the Venus Shop chain, the largest brand of sex shops by the late 1970s, operating in Kings Cross and elsewhere in Australia. Their publishing company Venus Publications churned out titles like Moist and Ready and published the sex magazine Kings Cross Venus. The Gandali family, minor Jewish property developers and Kings Cross venue operators,[15] also had interests in adult theaters and sex shops like the Pleasure Chest Down Under (later called the Down Under bookshop) on George Street, Sydney. In 1976, David Gandali was convicted for attempting to bribe a vice squad detective $5,000 a month to ignore the pornographic films he planned to screen at the Gandali-owned Barrel Theater in Melbourne,[16] a venue name shared with their strip club in Kings Cross.

Stag Films and Early Video Porn

It was at these sex shops that many Australians also got their first tantalizing glimpses of pornographic films that were now moving into the realm of the general public. With the availability of personal video cameras, amateur pornographic tapes called “stag films” had found a small underground market throughout the 1950s and 1960s, both of the locally produced and illegally imported varieties. These were generally short 5–15-minute sequences of sexual intercourse that were passed around through criminal or other informal networks, and screened only at private showings or on odd occasions at strip clubs, which kept them largely out of view of vice squads.

According to testimony given to the Joint Select Committee on Video Material by a Mr. and Mrs. Somssich, these stag films were

sold in sex shops, exhibited in small unlicensed theaterttes. They were hired out to “bucks parties”, clubs for “private showing” etc. We know of one particular person who owned a large collection of these movies and hired them out.[17]

Multiple sources attest to the fact that Abe Saffron had been showing imported stag films at private parties since the 1950s, and he was a voracious importer and collector of sexual paraphernalia. It doesn’t take much to hypothesize who this “one particular person” likely was.[18]

By the mid-1970s, these stag films and other early hard-core productions were finding their way into sex shops, where they received wider audiences. After having been suitably warmed up by the magazines on display, toward the back of the shop customers could find private viewing booths which screened stag films for a small fee. At intervals of between 20–40 seconds, the projector would break off and demand payment via a coin slot. Upon receiving the desired 20- or 50-cent piece, the film would start up again, and give the purchaser another short period of viewing. New innovations like coin-operated “peep show” machines provided another somewhat more public vehicle for this kind of entertainment. By taking advantage of the viewer in a state of arousal, it is not hard to see how profitable such simple arrangements ended up becoming.

Interior of a Kings Cross sex shop, showing the shelves of porn magazines and coin-operated sex video machines.[19]

Pornographic films continued to fester throughout the latter half of the 1970s, resulting in the emergence of adult theaters, which had evolved out of the viewing booths at sex shops. It was illegal to publicly screen films beyond an R rating (or films without classification) at any theater, let alone an “adult” branded one, but such laws were constantly and easily ignored. Deepthroat and other theatrical-length American and European hard-core films found showings, as did locally produced “sexploitation” films that barely scraped through with an R- rating, films like Fantasm (1976) and The True Story of Eskimo Nell (1976). Both were produced and distributed by Filmways Australasian Distributors, the largest independent film company in Australia during the 1970s. Founded in 1971 by Polish-born Jew Mark (Meyer) Rosem, many of the other foreign sexploitation films of the era also came to Australia via Filmways. Overall, the public nature of theaters and viewing booths left much to be desired, meaning that magazines (which could be taken into the privacy of one’s home) were still the main pornographic vehicle for consumers. This market saw the release of the Australian editions of Playboy and Penthouse magazine in 1979, but as the decade drew to a close, the world of pornography was about to radically change.

Go to Part 2.

[1] Regulation 4a of the Customs Act, which included the category of “blasphemous, indecent or obscene” goods that could be denied entry, was thereafter ignored and was removed by the Hawke Labor government in 1984 and replaced with specific categories relating to depictions of child abuse, terrorism and extreme violence.

[2] Sullivan, B. 1997, The Politics of Sex: Prostitution and pornography in Australia since 1945, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, p.134.

[3] The annual reports of the Victorian State Advisory Board on Publications between 1974-1978 give effect to this.

[4] Nette, A 2022, Horwitz Publications, pulp fiction and the rise of the Australian paperback, Anthem Press, London UK, p.26

[5] Ibid., p.161-163.

[6] State of Victoria 1975, State Advisory Board on Publications: Second Annual Report, retrieved from: https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/papers/govpub/VPARL1974-76No60.pdf

[7]Published by Wynyard Mercantile, the publishing wing of the 24-hour Wynyard Newsagency, owned by a Mr L. M. Stone.

[8] Commonwealth of Australia 1986, Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry 1986, Allegation Number 37, retrieved from: https://dl.aph.gov.au/C50%20-%20Allegation%20No.%2037.pdf

[9] Davies, A 2017, ‘‘Murphy was his main man’: the alleged links between the judge and the crime boss’, The Guardian Australia, retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/sep/15/murphy-was-his-main-man-the-alleged-links-between-the-judge-and-the-boss

[10]State of Victoria 1977, State Advisory Board on Publications: Fourth Annual Report, retrieved from:  https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/papers/govpub/VPARL1976-78No100.pdf

[11] The Canberra Times 1973, ‘Magazines ruled obscene’, Thursday 22 March, p.8.

[12] Nicholson, A.M 1985, ‘The Vice Squad hasn’t time for dirty movies—and no ones complaining’, Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday 14 September 1985, p.186.

[13] See: https://www.blesk.cz/clanek/celebrity-ceske-celebrity/315793/nejvetsi-seladon-ceska-odesel-do-svudnickeho-nebe-domabyl-mel-10-tisic-zen.html (Translated with Google Translate)

[14] Sydney Morning Herald 1981, ‘Upstairs downstairs: the Sex shop owners say its only a product…’, Saturday 7 March, p.45.

[15] The Rhineschloss Hotel being a prominent venue. This was where Lee Gordon had first exhibited drag shows in 1962.

[16] Sydney Morning Herald 1976, ‘Blue movie bribe charge- fine’, Thursday 29 April, p.8.

[17] Commonwealth of Australia 1988, Report of the Joint Select Committee on Video Material, Volume 1, p.168

[18] Nowra gives effect to these claims, and they are found elsewhere in other scattered sources – Nowra, L 2013, Kings Cross: A Biography, NewSouth Publishing, Australia, p.486.

[19] Source: https://www.sex69project.com/gallery.php