In his book Why Are Jews Liberals?, Norman Podhoretz states that Jews fund the left in America. He states it as a rather obvious truth — so obvious that it doesn’t really require a great deal of research.

And he is not writing simply about explicitly Jewish activist organizations like the ADL, but also to organizations like the ACLU and the $PLC. In fact, in his 1996 book Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, J. J. Goldberg pointed out that “within the world of liberal organizations like the ACLU and People for the American Way, Jewish influence is so profound that non-Jews sometimes blur the distinction between them and the formal Jewish community.”

For example, SUSPS, an environmentalist activist group attempting to influence  the Sierra Club  to oppose immigration, recounts the notorious donations north of $100 million by David Gelbaum to the Sierra Club on condition that they not oppose immigration. As Gelbaum famously said to the president of the Sierra Club, “”I did tell [Sierra Club President] Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”

It turns out that Gelbaum is also a major donor to the ACLU — more than $20 million annually. The New York Times reports that Gelbaum will not be making his donation this year. But the gap will be at least partially filled: “Donors like the Leon Levy Foundation, the Open Society Institute [funded by George Soros], Peter B. Lewis and John Sperling had stepped up with pledges totaling $23 million spread over the next three years.”

The only thing these sources have in common is Jewishness. Sperling, Soros, and Lewis are on an authoritative list of the 139 Jews on the 2009 Forbes 400 list of wealthiest  Americans;  Leon Levy was also Jewish, not making the list only because he died in his 70s with a net worth of around a billion dollars (which would qualify him for the list today). The Times report also notes that donations had been hurt because some foundations had been harmed by the Bernie Madoff fiasco — also presumably Jewish money.

Several implications:

Lists of wealthiest Americans underestimate Jewish wealth because people like Levy don’t appear on lists of wealthy people even though their money is still being used to advance Jewish causes.

Secondly, Jews are very good at using their financial power to advance their ethnic interests. One of the biggest problems for European-Americans is that wealthy non-Jews seem far more interested in funding the opera or getting their name on a building at the local university than in helping their people. A good example is the Chandler family who formerly owned the L. A. Times. They had no interest in the media, and the company is now controlled by Sam Zell, who is Jewish. The family remains wealthy but in general seems to be involved in finding fun and interesting ways to spend their time (one of them flies around the world to attend the opera; another is into building outsize model trains) rather than influencing the world.

Finally, in researching this, I couldn’t help but notice that Lewis, Soros, and Sperling have gotten together previously. The Wikipedia entry for Sperling notes, “Together with George Soros, and Peter Lewis of Progressive Insurance, Sperling raised considerable amounts of money for drug [legalization] and other related causes, especially during the 2004 presidential campaign.” Sperling also exhibits the Jewish tendency for disdain of the traditional culture of America. The Wikipedia entry includes a comment on his book The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America: “One America, to judge from the book’s illustrations, … lives in ‘vibrant’ cities with ballet troupes, super-creative Frank Gehry buildings and quiet, tasteful religious ritual; the other relies on contemptible extraction industries (oil, gas and coal) and inhabits a world of white supremacy and monster truck shows and religious ceremonies in which beefy men in cheap clothes scream incomprehensibly at one another.”

Not much doubt what side of the culture wars Sperling (and Lewis and Soros) are on.