Trudie Pert on Princeton

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Trudie Pert’s current TOO article (Post-Genome Princeton) illustrates once again that all of our elite institutions are essentially enemy-occupied territory. Princeton’s president, Shirley Tilghman, is the sort of White person that is absolutely poisonous to our cause. She doubtless feels morally superior as she champions Black causes, investing millions of dollars in faculty and facilities for the Black Studies Department and admitting Blacks with an average of 230 points less on the SAT than Whites. She is also doing her best to absolutely eliminate White males from high-profile positions. My favorite is making a woman dean of the School of Engineering even though she is not an engineer. Non-Jewish Whites are vastly underrepresented as students by a factor of around 4, while Jews are overrepresented by a factor of around 5 (unusually low for an Ivy League University).

It is common among White advocates to see White politicians and at least some anti-White activists (such as Morris Dees) as sociopaths, and there is much to recommend this point of view. I don’t think that is the case with people like Tilghman, even though she has profited mightily from her position (>530,000 salary + millions in stock and stock options from being on the Google Board of Directors). People like Tilghman believe in what they are doing with a moral fervor. They feel good about themselves, and they really are virtuous people — exactly the sort you would want in your tiny hunter-gatherer band during the Ice Age. I think it’s that Puritan moralism that seems to be so common among White people:

What is striking is the moral fervor of the Puritans. Puritans tended to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues. They were susceptible to appeals to a “higher law,” and they tended to believe that the principal purpose of government is moral. New England was the most fertile ground for “the perfectibility of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms.’”

There was a tendency to paint political alternatives as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as evil incarnate—inspired by the devil. Whereas in the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts the moral fervor was directed at keeping fellow Puritans in line, in the nineteenth century it was directed at the entire country. The moral fervor that had inspired Puritan preachers and magistrates to rigidly enforce laws on fornication, adultery, sleeping in church, or criticizing preachers was universalized and aimed at correcting the perceived ills of capitalism and slavery.

My view is that this is an ethnic trait of our people — adaptive in small ingroups during our evolutionary history and massively maladaptive now given the current anti-White moralism that pervades our culture.

We have to convince people like Tilghman  that there is a morality in White advocacy as well. The ultimate irony is that without altruistic Whites willing to be morally outraged by violations of multicultural ideals, the multicultural utopia that they envision is likely to revert to a Darwinian struggle for survival among the remnants. But the high-minded descendants of people like Tilghman won’t be around to witness it.

What is striking is the moral fervor of the Puritans. Puritans tended
to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues. They were susceptible
to appeals to a “higher law,” and they tended to believe that the
principal purpose of government is moral. New England was the most
fertile ground for “the perfectibility of man creed,” and the “father of
a dozen ‘isms.’”13 There was a tendency to paint political alternatives
as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as
evil incarnate—inspired by the devil.
Whereas in the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts the moral fervor
was directed at keeping fellow Puritans in line, in the nineteenth
century it was directed at the entire country. The moral fervor that
had inspired Puritan preachers and magistrates to rigidly enforce laws
on fornication, adultery, sleeping in church, or criticizing preachers
was universalized and aimed at correcting the perceived ills of capitalism
and slavery.

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Young White Advocates

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A very encouraging recent trend is the emergence of some very talented young people in the movement for White advocacy and cultural preservation. One of the reasons I was attracted to American Third Position was the presence of young men willing to go out into the street and very publicly proclaim their beliefs. Young men are the backbone of every revolution in history, and the revolution to take back America and the West will be no different.

Of course, it’s still rather dangerous to do so, as I discuss in an article on the A3P website (Being White in Public) two A3P people manning a booth in San Juan Capistrano were harassed by a Latino gang. Vastly outnumbered, they had to withdraw.

Peter Brimelow has recently documented the obvious fact that although there was a media-driven moral panic about the Hutaree militia, the left has repeatedly engaged in violence and intimidation:

“Political violence” in the U.S. and throughout the Anglosphere exclusively comes from the Left. Who shut down the recent American Renaissance conference with death threats? (An atrocity, incidentally, that the Washington Post did not deign to report, although it happened in its home town). Who prevents Ann Coulter or Tom Tancredo from speaking on campuses? Has this ever happened to any Left-wing group or speaker?

As I note in the article, Anti-Racist Action is quite upfront about their willingness to resort to violence to keep White advocates off the streets. We have to be willing to be publicly visible. I think one of our first priorities should be to loudly and proudly participate in public events aimed at explicit White advocacy. Doing so in large numbers would make it very difficult for the left to shut it down.

The encouraging thing is that the number of intelligent, articulate young people who are willing to do that. These people have somehow grasped the depth of the problem faced by their people in the  teeth of wall-to-wall propaganda directed against White identity that they have endured throughout their school years and the enormous social pressures they face as adults against advocating for their people.

Another very promising group of young people is Youth for Western Civilization — an organization aimed at college students that certainly deserves financial support as they try to fund a full-time staff. (Needless to say, A3P is also deserving of financial support and for the same reasons.) Kevin DeAnna, the founder and president, is a very articulate and effective spokesman for the preservation of our culture and traditions. And he understands that in the end it’s about the people who will make up the country. His excellent video, linked below, shows the true face of the immigrant invasion: Ethnocentric and unassimilable non-Whites with historical hatreds against Europeans; commitment to far left ideologies rather than constitutional government and the rule of law; trampling on the American flag while waving their own flags; minority activist organizations like La Raza, often with an explicit ideology of conquering the US for their people — well-funded by corporate America and leftist foundations; unions of public service employees such as the Service Employees International Union, led by Andy Stern, that are committed to big government and non-White immigration;  and sell-out politicians like Dick Armey who are attempting to influence the Tea Party movement to welcome immigration amnesty as somehow good for the Republican Party.

As the film shows, Armey is indeed a sell-out, receiving huge fees from pro-immigration activist groups. One of our biggest problems is that it is financially lucrative for  Whites to become whores for the interests of people who hate them. Funding organizations like A3P and Youth for Western Civilization means that a critical mass of young people have a viable career option in what amounts to pro-White activism.

As DeAnna says toward the  end of the film, if the Republican Party accepts amnesty, it really means the end of the country. He is absolutely right. And the sad thing is that even if amnesty is defeated, it will simply slow down the process of White displacement. Unless the illegals are deported and legal immigration is stopped, White America is doomed. That is the position of American Third Position.


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March on America from Western Youth on Vimeo.

Post-Genome Princeton

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Shirley Tilghman, President of Princeton, lectures on race

Shirley Tilghman, president of Princeton University and an accomplished molecular biologist, recently spoke about the “vexing issue of race” during a public lecture at Princeton University. The address, “The Meaning of Race in the Post-Genome Era,” was sponsored by Princeton’s Center for African American Studies.

Established in September 2006, the Center for African American Studies had existed as an academic certificate program at Princeton for 37 years. The center moved to its home at Stanhope Hall in 2007 under the leadership of its first director, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature Valerie Smith (left), who opened the doors at the dedication ceremony with President Shirley M. Tighman.

Because of her strong and sustained support for Princeton’s Black Studies, Tilghman was introduced as, “Sister President.”

“Sister President” began her lecture by dismissing as biased the works of her dead White male predecessors.  According to Tilghman, the Swedish scientist, Carl Linnaeus, equated race with innate character and based his conclusions on prejudice rather than observation. The German physician, Franz Joseph Gall, was the first person to postulate that the brain was the organ of the mind; he claimed that Europeans possessed superior skulls. Francis Galton, an English polymath and cousin of Charles Darwin, proposed “assortative mating”  for traits like intelligence and confused social class with race. Tilghman did not mention Darwin, probably because his conclusions would be jolting (See here and here.)

Finally, she criticized the American eugenicist and biologist, Charles Davenport, for claiming that complex traits such as high intelligence and personality characteristics were tied to race and for influencing the passage of the eugenically inspired and restrictive Immigration Act of 1924.

Tilghman stated that current evidence shows that the genetic differences between human beings are very small, and that individual differences are significantly greater than differences between groups. Predictably, she rejected the possibility of finding distinctive racial characteristics determined by genome sequencing. In spite of the enormous variation in physical attributes regarding size, color, hair texture, etc., she stated that at the level of the genome these differences are infinitesimal in number when compared with the enormous number of identical shared genomes. Though one can predict the geographic origin of today’s Europeans, Africans, and Asians with great accuracy, genetic distinctions are declining rapidly as widespread immigration and intermarriage are occurring.

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These ideas ignore the work of Frank Salter and Henry Harpending showing that, although there is indeed more variation within than between races and despite a great deal of genetic commonality among all humans, the amount of genetic variation between human races is significant, and therefore racial and ethnic groups constitute large storehouses of genetic interests for everyone.

It also ignores research showing important racial differences in traits like intelligence that have very large effects on achievement that are so important in contemporary societies. An exclusive emphasis on human commonality and downgrading the importance of genetic variation grossly distorts the reality that genetically-based differences have huge impacts on individual and group performance.

Further, no one has come up with a formula to get rid of ethnicity as a form of identity and as a vehicle of expressing interests. Throughout the world, ethnically diverse societies are marked by ethnic conflict. Intellectuals like Tilghman have utopian dreams about a racial future free from conflict and filled with peace and harmony, but we already know that ethnic diversity increases social isolation and lowers trust both within and between races.

According to Tilghman, it is the small race-specific component that constitutes “the challenge ahead” because information on race-specific genetic influences on traits like IQ could potentially be employed to “sustain prejudice and discrimination.” The lurking fear of finding incontrovertible evidence of race-specific differences  in important traits is the “vexing issue” of genetics.  But we already have good evidence that genetic differences are important. When even more evidence is available, Tilghman and her ilk will doubtless ignore it. In the end, it’s all about politics for these people.

White feminists seem to believe that they share a common enemy with African Americans, namely, dead and living White men, and have therefore become great friends of Blacks. They have found that by advancing the Black agenda they can better further their own minority position (see: Feminist Coalitions, ed. Stephanie Gilmore, 2008; Radical Sisters, Anne Valk, 2008).  Since becoming Princeton’s president in 2001, Tilghman has greatly expanded Black studies, has recruited a number of controversial Black faculty, and has encouraged the extension of the university’s affirmative action admission and hiring policies.

Professor Cornel West was the first to be welcomed to Princeton by Tilghman after he left a position at Harvard where management did not appreciate his merits. In 2000, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, rebuked West for missing too many classes, contributing to grade inflation, neglecting serious scholarship, and spending too much time with his economically profitable projects such as issuing two rap CD’s, and appearing in several Matrix movies. West, in turn, accused Summers of elitism, a serious sin to the multi-culturally minded. He was welcomed into the Princeton fold in 2002, apparently because Princeton does not limit itself to rarified interests.

Cornel West

The second Tilghman Black studies appointee is Professor Van Jones, who was recently appointed as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow. An attorney and environmentalist, Jones was selected by Pres. Obama in March, 2009, for the newly created post of Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation, at the White House Council for Environmental Quality. Jones, called by Time Magazine one of the “Heroes of the Environment,” was founder of the Black advocacy group, “Color of Change,” in 2005.

Alas, due to his outspoken manner, his time at the White House was all too brief. Due to allegations of associations with Marxist groups in the 1990’s, his published, disparaging remarks about Congressional Republicans, (calling them “a$$holes”), and several nasty publicized vendettas, he was too publicly uncouth even for Obama. Jones resigned from his White House position just six months after he had been appointed to it. Not to worry – Princeton immediately offered him a sinecure. The government’s loss is Princeton’s gain.

Tilghman’s sympathy for Black causes is of long duration. In 2003, Princeton joined an amicus brief filed with the US Supreme Court in support of the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy. The brief ensured that racial and ethnic diversity constitutes a “compelling” interest in the admissions process of “selective” universities like Princeton. In Dec., 2009, she received the W.E.B. DuBois Medal, the highest honor bestowed by Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and American Research, for her leadership in strengthening Princeton’s commitment to African American studies. Princeton’s Center for African American Studies was established under Tilghman’s direction in 2006 after existing as an academic certificate program for 37 years. Tilghman recommended a greatly expanded curriculum because she found race study for all liberal arts students to be an “indispensable element of preparation for life in this country.” Since 2006 core faculty members have grown from 2 to 18. Associated and affiliated members contribute another 18 additional faculty. Courses have increased by 40%.

Below are two of the ten courses offered in Princeton University’s Center for African American Studies, Spring, 2010.

AAS 314/COM 39 Model Memoirs: The Life Stories of International Fashion Models

This course explores the life-writing of American, African, and Asian women in the fashion industry as a launching point for thinking about race, gender, and class.How do ethnicity and femininity intersect? How are authenticity and difference commodified? How do women construct identities through narrative and negotiate their relationships to their bodies, families, and nations. Course will include guest lectures by fashion editors and models; discussions of contemporary television programs, global fashion, and cultural studies, and student self narratives about their relationships with cultural standards of beauty, whether vexed or not.

AAS 339/ENG 339 Josephine Baker and the Modern

What does a black burlesque star have to do with the making of Euro-American modernity? This course situates the performance art of Josephine Baker as a dynamic fulcrum through which to trace the unexpected connections between the invention of what might be called the “modernist” style and the staging of black skin at the turn of the 20th century.We will study her work in film, photography, and cinema as an active and profound engagement with a range of modernist innovations and theories in the fields of film, photography, architecture, art and literature.

Josephine Baker

What next?  Courses to extoll the virtues of O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson? To a president who has supported Princeton’s first post doctoral fellowship in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered studies, who endorsed the creation of a new LGBT campus center, and who has acted in a student production of the Vagina Monologues, these Black studies courses are, no doubt, most suitably diverse.

The Princeton University admissions policy is very welcoming of Black students. If race is merely a social construct, as Shirley Tilghman implies in her Post-Genome speech, then Princeton’s admission policy is most puzzling. Why give admission preferences based on race if racial differences are only superficial? In their article, “The Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities”, Thomas Espenshade and Chang Chung, two Princeton sociology researchers, describe who gains and who loses as a result of admission preferences.  They concede, that “a decision to admit one student involves a choice not to admit someone else.”

According to Espenshade and Chung, currently, African-American candidates for admission at the elite universities receive on average 230 extra SAT points, Hispanics 185 additional SAT points, recruited athletes, 200 points, and legacy applicants, 160 points. If bonus points were eliminated, the following would result. African-American acceptance rates would fall from 33.7% to 12.2%, a decline of almost two-thirds. In other words, the proportion of Black students would decline from 9% to 3.3%. Hispanic acceptance rates would fall in half, from 26.8% to 12.9%, a decline of 7.9% to 3.8% of all admitted students.  The category of recruited athletes and legacy students is mostly White and negligible.

Asian applicants would be the biggest winners if racial preferences were eliminated from the admission process. Their acceptance rates would increase from 17.6% to 23.4%. They would comprise 31.5% of all accepted students compared with the actual proportion of 23.7% However, were Princeton to place a ceiling on foreign Asian students, this number would be much lower.  In the absence of admission preferences and ceilings for Asians, the number of White students would rise only 2.4%, an acceptance increase from 23.8% to 24.3%. Jewish enrollment at Princeton is 13%, well below the Ivy League average of 25%. These figures match up well with the many studies which have found corresponding average normal racial IQ: Asians 104, White 100, and Blacks 85 (see, for example, “Is Race a Valid Taxonomic Construct, by J. Philippe Rushton).

In order to attract minorities to Princeton and the other elite universities, there is a great deal of money available to fund financial aid to students from families with low incomes. In their book, “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission on Campus Life,” (Princeton University Press, 2009), Prof. Espenshade and Alexandria Radford concluded that social class matters in the admission process, but it is usually given less weight than race or ethnicity. Having a lower-class family background was equivalent to having 130 additional points on the SAT.  However, the admission preference accorded to low-income students appears to be reserved largely for nonwhite students.

Tilghman’s enthusiasm for increasing the number of Black faculty and Black students at Princeton is exceeded only by her eagerness in placing feminists into key positions.  For some time now criticism of her many appointments of women, to the exclusion of qualified men, has been growing. Because she herself had no administrative experience when she was appointed president, her very selection to that office caused alarm, as it most certainly was based on gender. And gender parity is always on her mind.

Once chosen, she moved aggressively to appoint an assistant dean “to oversee gender equity.”  Within her first two years as Princeton’s president, Tilghman appointed Princeton’s first woman provost, first woman dean of admissions, first woman dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and first woman dean (a non-engineer) of the school of engineering. Recently she appointed a second woman to become dean of the Woodrow Wilson School. She favors preferential treatment of women, and envisions policies whereby women faculty will be granted a longer tenure review period and subsidized nannies.

“A decision to admit one student involves a choice not to admit someone else,” applies not only to student selection but also to university hiring. When the goal is to achieve race and gender parity, White men are side-lined.  Not only are White males losers in the racial affirmative action student selection process, they are doubly cheated when women receive preferential treatment in the hiring process.

A recent alumni magazine quotes Tilghman bragging, “This is not your great-grandfather’s Princeton.” What a pity. Princeton was established in 1747 through the efforts and with the financial resources of mostly Scottish immigrants as the institution of higher learning for young Anglo men. Princeton’s association with the Presbyterian Church was close, and its first thirteen presidents, until Woodrow Wilson, were clergymen. The beautiful English neo-gothic campus chapel is the third largest college chapel in the world. Princeton’s sixth president, the Scottish born Presbyterian minister, John Witherspoon, was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence.

John Witherspoon

White men established Princeton University and Whites have continued to finance the institution which now has the 4th largest institutional endowment fund in the Ivy League, and the largest endowment per student of $2,000,000. One wonders why racial descendants of Princeton founders, i.e., parents and students of European heritage, do not demand a White preferential admission policy and a faculty and an administration reflecting their own ethnic heritage.

Trudie Pert is a pen name.  Email her.

Kevin MacDonald: Review of Podhoretz, Part II

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Kevin MacDonald: Part II of my review of Podhoretz is now posted on Alternative Right. Quite a bit of it relates to the current discussion of Jewish intellectual style on this site. I agree with Podhoretz that Jews are attracted to religious thinking in which they accept theories that explain everything but are incapable of disconfirmation. The problem is that Jews have advanced these religious theories as “scientific” not only in the social sciences and humanities, but also, perhaps, in theoretical physics, as some have argued here.

The other point is to underline the fact that the only theory that can account for Jewish political behavior in the Diaspora is that it is motivated by ethnic conflict with the White, Christian majority seen as the historical enemy. I note that the status as an elite outsider has grave moral implications. In fact, Jews are actively engaged in making alliances with the soon-to-be non-White majority. Whites should be deeply concerned about what this portends for the future.

It’s interesting that in the Comments section Paul Gottfried agrees with my analysis but also points to White guilt as a critical factor. I agree with that and have written about it several places. For example, White predispositions to guilt and the manufacture of White guilt by prominent Jewish intellectual and political movements is the topic of my review of Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo America. (see also here.)

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Christopher Donovan: Frank Rich is Right About One Thing

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Christopher Donovan: The rage isn’t, in fact, about healthcare.  Nobody is throwing bricks through windows in defense of insurance companies.  Bricks get thrown when people are angry about very fundamental things, like racial displacement.

So, Frank Rich, the Jewish New York Times pundit with a history of white-bashing, is at least half right in the notorious Sunday column that drew 606 reader comments.  He is more correct on that point than “Laurie from Bartlett, NH”, a “tea party” sympathizer and one of 606 commenters on the column:

Dangerous piece. Horrified when I read this because this writer obviously has never attended a “tea party” and knows not of what he speaks. The Americans who are giving of their precious time,limited funds and heart wrenching courage should NEVER be demonized and misstated like this.There were 10,000 people in Nevada today,there will be thousands in Boston on 4/14…these are faithful,hardworking,honest Americans. They have seen the takeover of our biggest freemarket institutions by government. They are frightened,concerned and,yes,angry. How dare you misinterpret and misrepresent the message of this great uprising. This has NOTHING to do w/race..it has everything to do with what our fathers,grandfather,greatgrandfathers fought for..LIBERTY!! LIBERTY!! LIBERTY!!!

Laurie from Bartlett, NH

Rich is more correct on the white rage point than even the venerable Pat Buchanan, who weakly suggests in this reaction column that because some non-whites think immigration needs controlling, the “tea party” crowd isn’t necessarily white resistance by another name.

But Laurie is wrong.  Pat Buchanan is wrong.

It is about race.

Where I part sharply with Frank Rich, of course, is whether the white anger is justified — and requires organized action by whites to act on that anger.  He dreads the prospect, while I cheer it.

But Frank Rich, to my mind, is only part of our problem.  “Laurie from Bartlett, NH” is an equally bedeviling problem for white advocacy.  Here’s a (no doubt) conservative white woman who appears to have convinced herself that “This has NOTHING to do w/race…”  It instead has to do with “LIBERTY!!”  Among the liberating aspects of race realism and white advocacy is the abandonment of the belief that anyone anywhere is motivated by abstractions like “freedom” or “liberty”.  Of course, they’re not.  Blood and soil is more like it.  It seems to me that a more important task for us to persuade “Laurie from Bartlett, NH” to shake herself from slumber and realize what’s really going on.  I don’t think debating with Frank Rich will do any good.

There are fewer more disturbing trends than your average white conservative’s hyperventilating that “I’m not a racist” and “race has nothing to do with it — it’s about the free market!”  Trust me, white-conservative-in-denial:  admitting that race is real — and that whites have legitimate group interests — is like untying that other hand from behind your back.

As a reader service for TOO, I waded through all the comments.  Most, disappointingly, cheered Rich on.  Some openly disparaged whites, like this likely Jewish commenter:

We can’t say the GOP is not diverse. They run the gamut of white billionaires, white millionaires, white run-of-the mill McMansion “owners”, white trailer inhabitants, white gun nuts, to white oolitical opportunists, etc., etc.,

Anne Green from Columbia, MD

The “conservative” responses all took the tack of “Laurie from Bartlett, NH”:  don’t smear us tea party activists as “racists.”

There was, that I saw, a lone pro-white comment:

what a disgusting article. the real people who face discrimination are whites (that is, people of european descent). white students are purposefully rejected from colleges just because of affirmative action for ‘minorities’ (who will very soon become the majority.) meanwhile, white adults are denied jobs just for the color of their skin! this, my friend, is racism.

whites are becoming a minority in the usa, canada, europe, australia, etc. europe will become majority muslim. and yet, it is a sin to want to preserve one’s heritage? in the usa, we have indian groups, asian groups, black groups, but white groups are racist!

it is about time we fight for our rights, and values and culture. it is not racist, everyone else is doing it. it is just fighting against racism and discrimination that is facing whites all over the world.

John from USA

Quite right, John from USA.

As a post-script, I’m doubting that my letter will run in the NYT.  Here’s a piece by letters editor Thomas Feyer that sheds light on why.  He is, he says, the son of “survivors of Nazism.”  Where does this crap end, for God’s sake?

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.

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Ethnic Conflict in German Physics

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Johannes Stark (1874-1947): Leader of the German Physics Movement

After the Napoleonic Wars the Jews began for the first time to enjoy the benefits of full citizenship in the countries of Europe. By virtue of their innate talents, pent-up energy, drive, and ambition, they quickly climbed the social ladder, becoming especially prominent in the first instance in commercial pursuits and later in financial, professional, cultural, and scientific circles. Generally, the leaders in the countries in which they lived, recognizing the talents of the new comers, quickly embraced and employed them as tax collectors, bankers, and investment advisors in order to protect and increase their own wealth and position.

With the Jewish rise to prominence, even dominance in some areas, Jewish thought and teachings have transformed Western society — even the sciences. The ascendancy of the Jews in society in general may be seen in microcosm in the competition for the laurels awarded to the most distinguished researchers in the physical sciences by the Nobel Prize selection board.

Although an imperfect measure, the number of Nobel Prize winners is a handy gauge of outstanding achievement in the sciences. Some consider the measure unreliable because they question the impartiality of the selection board. Others would prefer emphasizing the ethnicity of the laureate rather than the country he happens to reside in, believing that ethnicity is a more significant criterion than citizen ship in a particular nation state. Without a homeland of their own, ethnic Jewish scientists have always carried out their research in diverse countries and have won their Nobel Prizes as citizens of those “host” countries. Some Jewish groups, motivated by pride, have taken to identifying and publicizing the Nobel Prize laureates who are Jewish. Ethnic identification is made according to strict Halachic definition based on the interpretation of Hebrew Scriptures, stipulating that to be a Jew requires being born to a Jewish mother (adherence to the Jewish Volk is inherited down the female line in the same manner as mitochondrial DNA) or undergoing formal conversion to Judaism. In other words, a Jew by that definition can be either one who adheres to the religion of Judaism or a non-believer whose mother happened to be Jewish even if she was not practicing her religion.

To avoid ethnic chauvinism, the Nobel Prize committee itself does not take the ethnicity or the heredity of a laureate into account. The Nobel Committee does not choose the winning Laureate as exemplars of a specific racial group but as citizens of the county in which they reside.

On the basis of the Nobel committee’s official criteria, in the overall compilation of winners (in all fields: physics, chemistry, bio medicine, economics, literature, peace) Ger many, without reference to race or religion of its citizens, has had a total of about a hundred laureates. On the other hand, the Jewish world community, using its own Halachic identification criteria, proudly claims today that the number of Jewish laureates to date in all fields has already far surpassed that number, which is to say that approximately 25% of all Nobel laureates to date have been Jews. Using the Halachic method of counting, many American Nobel laureates are of course scored as Jewish.

Based on the citizenship of the country in which they reside, the United States is the grand master with over 160 winners in all fields, repre senting one-third of all Nobel laureates. Before World War II the Ger mans held the overall lead, but have fallen behind owing to the human and territorial losses in World War II as well as the postwar emigration (voluntarily or forcible) of scientists to the United States, Great Britain, Soviet Russia, and elsewhere. In addition, the reorganization and democratization of the German school system by the Allies after the war also lowered standards.

Both peoples, German and Jews, have unquestionably contributed more than their share to the advances made in the various fields of scientific endeavor and especi ally in the natural sciences, as exemplified by physics since about 1900. In the specific field of physics, Germany has produced 26 winners 5 of which were Jews, or roughly 20%. By Halachic definition, Jews worldwide have earned some 44 laureates in physics alone. An educated guess, if not by actual count, suggests that an even greater per centage of U.S. laureates, perhaps 25–30 %, were also Jewish. Four of 6 Russian winners in physics, i.e., two-thirds, were Jewish. Roughly the same numbers and percentages would pertain to chemistry and medicine as well.

The high number of winners for the United States and ethnic Jews since about 1950 can partially be attributed to the fact that increasingly multiple (2–3 or more) scientists may be awarded the laureate for the same accomplishment, i.e., a team of researchers may share the award. Another factor at work affecting the high number of U.S. and Jewish laureates is the high costs involved in modern research that favor the rich countries and put the smaller countries at a disadvantage. Also, the personal wealth of a significant number of U.S. Jewish laureates permitted them to study at the best universities in the world, which, in turn, helps to explain their remarkable success. Moreover, the gifted and affluent ethnic Jewish laureates were able to use and build upon the scientific infrastructure (labs, universities, scholarship, traditions, preexisting and accumulated achievements of earlier, indigenous scholars, etc.) of the advanced Western countries in which they resided.

Intelligence tests have consistently shown that Ashkenazi Jews score higher on average than Whites and Asians.  And among the Jews themselves, the Ashkenazi group rates somewhat higher than the Sephardim. However, IQ is apoor explanation of Jewish success in being Nobel laureates because non-Jews greatly outnumber Jews. For example, if we take an IQ of 145 as a cutoff for genius and assume that Jews were around 3.4% of the White US population in 1950, there were nearly 4 times more non-Jewish White geniuses in the US than Jewish geniuses. And there would have been a much greater disparity in pre-World War II Germany where Jews were around 1% of the population.

Ethnic Competition in Physics

Nationalism in the first half of the 20th century, especially in Europe, was so strong that many thought the sciences themselves were pervaded with the spirit of the people who developed them. It was in this age and atmosphere that Zionism too (secular Jewish nationalism) was aborning. To a considerable extent it is true that each nation has its own specific approach or style of research, but can the results of research be colored by the ethnicity of the researcher? The following is based mainly on Johannes Stark‘s Jüdische und deutsche Physik(Jewish and German Physics, originally published in 1941). Stark was a leader of the German Physics movement during the National Socialist period.

No one has ever accused the Jews or the Germans of being underachievers in matters intellectual. If anything, it is precisely because both peoples are notorious overachievers that they have incurred the suspicion and dislike of the less ambitious who often claim to find the manners of Jews and Germans offensive. Compounding the situation, Jews and Germans often find each other’s behavior objectionable, most probably because they are in competition with each other. Like two magnets of the same strength, they can attract each other in one configuration or they can repel each other in another. We have seen both configurations, though admittedly more of the latter.

Both Germans and Jews are proud peoples and have earned the right to be so.

Unfortunately, competition, driven by national pride, has in the past provoked discord and even scandalous contention among Nobel laureates. In Germany, decades before the rise of the National Socialists, a bitter dispute arose between German and Jewish physicists, clearly reflecting group cultural differences. At the center of the storm was Albert Einstein.

A small but important group of German physicists (Wilhelm Wien, Philipp Lenard, Johannes Stark), all early Nobel laureates and suffused with the spirit of German nationalism, resented the fact that natural phenomena discovered by German scientists were quickly appropriated by the British and assigned English names (e.g., Röntgen rays were called X-rays). Even more irritating to the German nationalists was the fact that a number of Jews, domestic and foreign, who studied in Germany, were soon getting an exorbitant amount of publicity and credit for research that had been pioneered earlier by Germans and others.

Philipp Lenard (1862-1947)

This animosity toward the British, like so much of the anger that propelled the rise of the National Socialists, stemmed from World War I propaganda that painted the Germans in the worst possible light, culminating in declaring Germany solely guilty for the war. To counter this propaganda, the Germans, with Wien and other physicists in the lead, joined in the so-called Krieg der Geister (War of Minds) in which leading figures in German society fought a paper war with the French and British to set the record right.

Wilhelm Wien (1864-1928)

The prominence and celebrity accorded to Einstein and “his” Theory of Relativity was, in German eyes of that day, the main provocation and the straw that broke the back of the German nationalists. Several important German physicists believed, for example, that Friedrich Hasenöhrl, a German almost unknown today because his work was not publicized, deserved much of the credit and certainly at least some credit for developing the theory. Hasenöhrl, for example, was the first to postulate the fundamental idea of the equivalence of energy and mass. Underlying the surface dispute of assigning proper credit for the development of the relativity theory was an even more sinister concern. Einstein’s relativity was, in the minds of many, equated with moral relativity, a trait that Germans and others associated with Jews. Even the famous E = mc2 formula had been introduced earlier (1903), albeit for a different purpose, by the Italian Olinto De Pretto and published by the Veneto Royal Science Institute in the scientific journal Atte.

Friedrich Hasenöhrl (1874-1915)

In actual fact, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the Theory of Relativity, but for his work in theoretical physics in general and his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. Nonetheless, Einstein was faulted by German and other physicists for failing to give proper credit to the many scientists upon whose studies he based his own. Stark, among others, asserted that Einstein gave no credit, not even in footnotes, to researchers like Hendrik Lorentz, Jules Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach, and Stark himself, all of whom had contributed much in the field. Not even the German astronomer and geodesist J. G. Soldner, who lived decades before Einstein and who was the first to describe the bending of light in the gravita tional field of the Sun, was mentioned by Einstein.

Methodically, these disgruntled German physicists proceeded to define how German physics differed from Jewish physics. The essential difference, accord­ing to the Germans, resides in each group’s fundamental approach to the study of physics. The traditional approach to the study of physics in Germany has been classical, pragmatic, empirical, and experimental. Jewish physics, on the other hand, was considered dogmatic, intuitive, overly abstract and theoretical. Generally speaking, Jewish scientists tended to rely on mathematical rather than observed physical laws, on inductive leaps rather than on the laborious accumulation of empirical evidence. The two divergent schools of research, many thought, reflected the innate ethnic attributes of the physicists.

In 1941 Stark, who was by then a member of the National Socialist Party, condemned the dogmatic approach as practiced by Einstein and other Jewish physicists:

The dogmatic approach seeks to extract scientific knowledge from the human mind. It builds thought systems based on human concepts of the outside world and sees in these only manifestations of their own thoughts and formulas. Our pragmatic approach draws its knowledge from careful observations and planned targeted experiments. Our own imagination is used only as a means of planning the experiment. If the plan does not confirm the experiment, then it is replaced by another concept that better corresponds to reality. The dogmatic approach believes that new knowledge can be obtained by means of desktop mathematical operations. The dogmatists then spin out their formulas into great theories and propagate them in books and on the lecture circuit. A prime example of this is the worldwide aggressive propagandizing of Einstein’s theories of relativity. The pragmatic approach seeks to understand reality in patient, often yearlong laboratory work and limits itself to the publication of the results so obtained.

Because the pragmatic German physicists rely chiefly on careful, instrument-based, direct observations of experimental data, their approach is occasionally referred to as “brass machine physics” because of the many tools and instruments employed in their investigations. The dogmatists, on the other hand, chose to derive their knowledge of the laws of physics through mathematical operations and formulas that then formed the basis of the grand theories spun by Einstein and other members of that school of physics. Further irritating the Germans was the disproportionately approbative publicity accorded such dogmatic theories by the print and electronic media, which the Germans believed was managed and promoted by fellow Jews.

By the 1930s extreme elements of the National Socialist Party were even labeling ethnic German researchers like Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, and Arnold Sommerfeld “White Jews” for sometimes adhering to the Einsteinian theoretical mathematical approach. Even when Heisenberg postulated his Uncertainty Principle, which challenged Einstein’s belief in a causal, predictable universe, many German physicists opposed him. These scientists rejected quantum physics on the grounds that all unified field theories, including Heisenberg’s, viewed space-time in Einstein’s terms.

Some racially minded individuals further opined that perhaps Jewish dogmatism even harkened back genetically to their Semitic ancestors in the age when Jewish prophets and lawgivers abounded. In a more critical vein some critics accused Jews of using their inherent analytical talent for the destruction of their host society’s existing absolutes and replacing them with a value system of their own creation (i. e., the thesis of The Culture of Critique).  The talent of the Germans on the other hand, was attributed by some to their adeptness in synthesizing proven components into a viable whole (analysis vs. synthesis).

With regard to the employment of Jewish scientists in Nazi Germany, a certain flexibility prevailed. It is said, for example, that that Herman Göring, when once asked to dismiss a valued colleague (Field Marshal Erhard Milch) who was Jewish, told the investigators that “I [Göring] will decide who is a Jew.”  When it suited them, or expediency demanded it, the Nazi Party was even prepared to declare certain Jews “honorary Aryans.” In the field of nuclear physics, for example, Fritz Houtermans was a Communist and the son of a Jewish mother. He was therefore considered Jewish both by according to Jewish law and National Socialist law. Houtermans worked with his German colleagues throughout the war. The higher political echelons of the Party were obviously taking a very prudent approach, preferring not to foolishly alienate modern physicists who might be needed or who might even be correct.

As James Wyllie has shown in his book The Warlord and the Renegade this political flexibility on the part of the Göring family and the Nazi Party was also evident in the field of psychotherapy, in the German Institute for Psychogenic Research and Psychotherapy in Berlin, directed by Matthias Heinrich Göring, a cousin of Herman. Although Matthias Göring himself and the Party favored Adlerian psychoanalysis, his staff included practitioners in the three major fields of psychotherapy as developed by Freud, Adler, and Jung. The Nazi Party, which saw religion and culture as the main determinants of mental processes and behavior, referred to psychotherapy as Seelenheilkunde, literally “soul therapy.” So successful was Herman Göring in reconciling the Institute’s practices with Hitler and the Party that after the war many of his staff were permitted by the Occupation to continue their work.

The renowned psychologist Carl J. Jung remarked of Hitler:

He belongs in the category of authentic wizards. … He has in his eyes the expression of a prophet. His power is not absolutely political; it is magical. Hitler listens and obeys. The true leader is well led. The idea is confirmed in the word Mahdi, the Islamic Messiah, which translates to ‘He who is well led.’

Adler and Freud described him quite differently.

Thus, German and Jewish scientists can and have worked successfully together, even under the worst possible conditions. Even if the extreme nationalists on both sides have to bite their lips, their scientists were able to cooperate in both the best and worst of times. Indeed, their different approaches to research may actually complement each other.

Postscript: After the war in 1947 Nobel laureate Johannes Stark, who had been actively concerned with ridding the German university system of all Jewish influence, was declared a “major offender” and sentenced to four years imprisonment by a denazification court. Philipp Lenard died in 1947 before the courts could convict him.

Daniel W. Michaels, a native New Yorker, received his BS in geography from Columbia University in 1954. Following five years in the Army (three of which stationed in Germany) and a Fulbright grant for studies in Tuebingen University, Mr. Michaels worked in the Defense Department until his retirement in 1993. He continues to contribute articles to various journals on World War II and Cold War matters. (Email him.)

Ethnic Conflict in German Physics

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Dan Michaels’ current TOO article on Jewish-German conflict in physics raises some fascinating issues about intellectual styles between the two groups. He quotes Johannes Stark, a Nobel laureate and leader of the German Physics movement as follows:

The dogmatic approach seeks to extract scientific knowledge from the human mind. It builds thought systems based on human concepts of the outside world and sees in these only manifestations of their own thoughts and formulas. Our pragmatic approach [i.e., experimental physics] draws its knowledge from careful observations and planned targeted experiments. Our own imagination is used only as a means of planning the experiment. If the plan does not confirm the experiment, then it is replaced by another concept that better corresponds to reality. … The pragmatic [experimental] approach seeks to understand reality in patient, often yearlong laboratory work and limits itself to the publication of the results so obtained..

This struck a chord with me because one could say the same about the ideas in the Jewish intellectual movements described in The Culture of Critique. Psychoanalysis is a paradigm: Freud and his followers projected their own ideas of reality onto the world and then spent the next century elaborating on the ideas without ever being bothered that no one could prove the ideas one way or the other. For this effort in mental gymnastics, Freud was deified not only by his followers but lavishly promoted in the media as a genius.

Meanwhile, American behaviorists of the early 20th century began slowing building up knowledge one experiment at a time — using rigorously controlled methods and altering the theories as new data became available. Behaviorism finally ran out of steam when psychologists showed that human learning couldn’t be explained without cognition, and since then cognitive science has been slowly and gradually accumulating knowledge of the inner workings of the human mind.

It was the same in American sociology, where Jews committed to Marxist ideology conflicted with native Protestants committed to an empirical science framework. From Ch. 2 of The Culture of Critique:

The ethnic conflict within American sociology parallels to a remarkable degree the ethnic conflict in American anthropology that is a theme of this chapter. Here the conflict was played out between leftist Jewish social scientists and an old-line, empirically oriented Protestant establishment that was eventually eclipsed:

American sociology has struggled with the contrary claims of those afflicted with physics envy and researchers . . . more engaged in the dilemmas of society. In that struggle, midwestern Protestant mandarins of positivist science often came into conflict with East Coast Jews who in turn wrestled with their own Marxist commitments; great quantitative researchers from abroad, like Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia, sought to disrupt the complacency of native bean counters. (Sennett 1995, 43)

The struggle of the Frankfurt School to produce empirical data that would be acceptable to American social scientists (reviewed here) provides an interesting saga in its own right. In the end, they managed to produce data that at least had the appearance (and only the appearance) of supporting their a priori commitment to producing a politically effective intellectual rationale for White displacement.

It is tempting, then, to think of Einstein as part of this Jewish tradition in the social sciences, and several commentators over the years have mentioned this to me as a research project. There may be something to this. But one problem is that, unlike psychoanalysis, Marxism, or the ideas of the Frankfurt School, the subject matter of Einstein’s theories cannot be seen as directly furthering Jewish ethnic goals (even though Einstein himself was a strong Zionist and had the usual Jewish fetishes about Jewish racial purity and racial superiority; see here). For example, the theories of Freud and the Frankfurt School were used in the battle to make people think that Whites with a sense of White identity and White interests have a psychiatric disorder and pathological family relationships. These theories were also used to fashion malignant and self-serving theories of anti-Semitism in which Jewish behavior is irrelevant. This was not the case with Einstein’s theories.

Further, whatever else one may say about Einstein’s theories, they have produced an enormous amount of research attempting to confirm them — unlike the Jewish intellectual movements discussed in CofC where agreement was enforced by simply expelling and ridiculing dissenters. In the end, providing a theory that produces a lot of new research is perhaps all that any good theory can do.  Of course, this does not absolve Einstein from the allegations that he didn’t adequately acknowledge the contributions of his predecessors — always an issue in the academic world where priority is everything.

Still, there seems to be a difference in intellectual style between Jews and non-Jews. One of the quotes that was left out of Culture of Critique (because I didn’t know quite what to make of it) was from John Maynard Smith, the prominent British biologist. He made the following statement on contrasting intellectual styles in evolutionary biology:

By and large, those who held that [natural] selection played a major role in evolution were English country gentlemen, but…those who were not have largely been urban Jews….I mean urban intellectuals, people like Stu Kauffman and Steve Gould . It’s the search for universal truths. They seem to say, if there are not universal truths, how can you do science? Natural selection appears to be too ad hoc for them, just opportunistic adaptation. For me, that’s the way nature is.

Again we see the contrast between the Jewish style of universalist abstraction and the style of patient naturalists like Darwin steadily accumulating data over many years —  fascinated with finding out how nature works, developing their theories inductively on the basis of evidence and not having any preconceived ideas about how nature works. E. O. Wilson titled one of his books The Naturalist and another Biophilia, reflecting his fascination and love of the natural world and how it works. Sociobiology, his 1975 synthesis of theory and data on the social behavior of animals and humans, remains a paradigm of powerful theory firmly grounded in empirical reality.

Of course, people like Gould also had ethnic reasons for disliking natural selection since, as Jewish leftists, they feared the development of a robust evolutionary science  of humans. (Gould is a major villain in Ch. 2 of CofC.) Gould was a well-known critic of sociobiology and research on race differences.

Indeed, it is interesting that the only example in CofC where Jewish social scientists deviated from a commitment to weakly grounded universalist abstraction comes in the attack on Darwinism as it applied to the human social sciences. Here the method was radical skepticism and the enshrinement of an anti-theory of the differences between cultures and differences between human races. Gould is a prominent example, but the most important figures historically were Claude Levi Strauss and Franz Boas whose influence meant that anthropology would deify the minutiae of cultural differences rather than seek the sort of unifying theory that had been elaborated by the Darwinian anthropologist Louis Henry Morgan on the basis of patiently accumulating and synthesizing data.

As is the case in other arenas, Jewish intellectual style can be altered radically to suit Jewish interests. Whatever is good for the Jews and all that.  As I note in Ch. 6 of CofC,

Within the intellectual world, the greatest potential danger for a collectivist minority group strategy is that science itself as an individualist enterprise conducted in an atomistic universe of discourse could in fact coalesce around a set of universalist propositions about human behavior, propositions that would call into question the moral basis of collectivist minority group strategies such as Judaism. One way to prevent this is for science itself to be problematized and replaced by a pervasive skepticism about the structure of all reality.

As I argue elsewhere, the decline of the non-Jewish intellectual elite inspired by Darwin was a critical factor in the decline of WASP America and the West generally.

Apart from this destructive effort directed against Darwinism, the thesis of Culture of Critique is that Jewish intellectuals have a long track record of developing theories in the social sciences and humanities that are very difficult, if not impossible, to test. Rather than empirical testing, group cohesion was maintained by ingroup consensus and fealty to god-like figures, with dissenters being expelled. This was also true of traditional Jewish groups: These groups saw the world through the lens of a non-falsifiable, abstract theological theory, and they were centered around charismatic rabbis, with heretics and other non-conformists expelled from the group.

At the same time, these theories — both the religious and secular versions — have been very useful to Jews politically. In traditional societies they enabled cohesive, effective groups where any event (e.g., anti-Jewish persecutions) could be explained by the theory (e.g., Jews had strayed from God’s law). And since the Enlightenment, these theories have been used as weapons against non-Jews and their culture. Conceptually, these theories are similar to Einstein’s theory in being internally consistent and difficult to verify. But Einstein’s theories have resulted in a lot of novel research attempting to confirm them and it is my (unsophisticated) understanding that aspects of his theories have been confirmed. And I rather doubt that Einstein’s theory satisfied Jewish political aims in quite the same way as the theories discussed in The Culture of Critique. Nevertheless, I await comment by people trying to make a case for a stronger relationship.

Finally, whatever one thinks of Einstein as a scientist, the media hype for Einstein is unquestionably intense, and there can be little doubt that the pervasiveness of the cult of Einstein as a Jewish genius has overtones of Jewish influence. For example, in 2000 Einstein was Time Magazine’s “Person of the Century.” Einstein is useful not just as a Jewish intellectual genius (and all the positive aura that provides for Jews generally). He is also useful because he had values typical of a very large section of the Jewish Diaspora in Western societies then and now — the same values that publications like Time wish to celebrate and that dominate the mainstream media and elite intellectual and political discourse now. The implicit logic is that really smart people have left/liberal attitudes — just the sort of person all non-extremists want to be. Indeed, this suggests that a really interesting Einstein project would be to try to figure out how influential Einstein and his cult were in molding elite opinion during the crucial 20 years following World War II.

This is from the Time article, written by Frederic Golden, who is careful to quote non-Jews who worship at the altar of Einstein:

Following World War II, Einstein became even more outspoken [with his leftist political views]. Besides campaigning for a ban on nuclear weaponry, he denounced McCarthyism and pleaded for an end to bigotry and racism. Coming as they did at the height of the cold war, the haloed professor’s pronouncements seemed well meaning if naive; Life magazine listed Einstein as one of this country’s 50 prominent “dupes and fellow travelers.” Says Cassidy: “He had a straight moral sense that others could not always see, even other moral people.” Harvard physicist and historian Gerald Holton adds, “If Einstein’s ideas are really naive, the world is really in pretty bad shape.” Rather it seems to him that Einstein’s humane and democratic instincts are “an ideal political model for the 21st century,” embodying the very best of this century as well as our highest hopes for the next. What more could we ask of a man to personify the past 100 years?

I’m guessing Prof. Holton is a philo-Semite.

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