Kevin MacDonald

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When will they finally start talking about IQ?

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Diane Ravitch’s recent LA Times op-ed (“The Big Idea — it’s bad education policy“) opposes “Big Ideas” in education policy, but what it is really saying is that the educational establishment is running out of ideas. “We now face a wave of education reforms based on the belief that school choice, test-driven accountability and the resulting competition will dramatically improve student achievement.” She argues that none of this is working:

Today there is empirical evidence, and it shows clearly that choice, competition and accountability as education reform levers are not working. But with confidence bordering on recklessness, the Obama administration is plunging ahead, pushing an aggressive program of school reform — codified in its signature Race to the Top program — that relies on the power of incentives and competition. This approach may well make schools worse, not better. …

On the federal tests, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, from 2003 to 2009, charters have never outperformed public schools. Nor have black and Latino students in charter schools performed better than their counterparts in public schools.

When charter schools have performed well, it’s because of selection: Better, more motivated children attend them, and this does  nothing for the masses of Black and Latino children. Holding teachers accountable doesn’t work either.

But if course, Ravitch can’t really come to grips with the problem. In pointing to things that could affect student achievement besides teachers, she comes up with this list:  “students’ motivation, the schools’ curriculum, family support, poverty and distractions on testing day, such as the weather or even a dog barking in the school’s parking lot.”

No mention of IQ — 16 years after The Bell Curve placed IQ and the intractability of changing became front and center for the American public. Coming on the heels of the finding that the Head Start pre-school program has no demonstrable effects on IQ or academic achievement, one would think that at long last it would start to dawn on people that there are no easy solutions because no one has come up with a way to improve IQ. The result is that race differences in achievement are going to be here long into the future. And that means that importing millions of low-IQ people is a long term disaster for the country.

Ravitch herself seems to have given up the fight. There are no Big Ideas that will work, so she advocates returning to a well-rounded curriculum rather than the Obama Administration’s focus on math and reading. If you can’t teach them to read or do math, you might as well entertain them by having them do art and music.

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John Derbyshire, Sam Francis, and the War on Middle Class White Americans

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John Derbyshire’s “No Life on MARS” is valuable mainly because he quotes a 1998 essay by Sam Francis as follows:

Today, the main political line of division in the United States is not between the regions of North and South (insofar as such regions can still be said to exist) but between elite and nonelite. As I have tried to make plain … for the last 15 years, the elite, based in Washington, New York, and a few large metropolises, allies with the underclass against Middle Americans, who pay the taxes, do the work, fight the wars, suffer the crime, and endure their own political and cultura1 dispossession at the hands of the elite and its underclass vanguard. …

The leaders of the alien underclass, as well as those of the older black underclass, invoke race in explicit terms, and they leave no doubt that their main enemy is the white man and his institutions and patterns of belief. … Middle Americans now face [the imperative] of constructing their own autonomous political movement that can take back their nation rather than assisting the new underclass and the globalist ruling class in breaking it up. The time left for us to do so is shorter than it has ever [been] before in our history.

Francis also pointed out that the elites had developed a powerful new weapon against Middle Americans in the form of mass immigration. The result is what we see now: Accelerating White dispossession and the polarization of politics along racial/ethnic lines rather than social class lines.

As usual, Derbyshire fails to mention any role of Jews as a critical part of the anti-White elite and the historic role of Jews in creating an elite that is hostile to the interests of middle class White Americans. (This is unlike Francis who, in a chapter in Race and the American Prospect written shortly before his death, described Jews as “as the cultural vanguard of the managerial class, providing ideological justification of its structure and policies, disseminating its ideological formulas to the mass population, formulating and often implementing specific policies, and providing much of the specialized educational training essential to the transmission and perpetuation of the technocratic skills of the elite.”)  In addition to being vastly overrepresented in all areas of the elite, Jews have allied themselves with the “alien underclass.” The Black-Jewish alliance is over a century old, and now Jewish groups are busy aligning themselves with the myriad ethnic groups that will soon make up the American majority.

Derbyshire is right to be pessimistic about the prospects of White Middle American anger for really changing things. What it really comes down to is the lack of intellectual leadership able to challenge “liberal ruling-class rhetoric about ‘nativism’ and ‘racism.’” “The Tea Partiers will be marginalized by appeals to political correctness, a thing easily done as practically all of them are white.”

This is quite correct, and it points to a reality that Derbyshire underplays. This is fundamentally a low-level race war between middle class Whites and the people who would displace them. It’s not just the alien underclass that is favored by elite opinion. The coalition commanded by the ruling elite includes not just the underclass, but all non-Whites as well as sexual minorities and aggrieved feminists. Moreover, it’s notorious that mainstream “conservative” intellectuals have knuckled under to this rhetoric as well. Hence the furor among respectable conservatives over the establishment of AltRight and the constant harassment and vilification of any murmurings of White identity on the part of activist organizations like the SPLC and the ADL.

This is really what it comes down to, but we certainly can’t blame middle class Whites for the fact that they are not up to challenging the consensus on race. Middle class Whites respect elite opinion and trust the basic institutions of the society. They are strongly patriotic. They are intellectually insecure when it comes to thinking about race, subjected as they are to constant media images of racially conscious Whites as Klansmen, Nazis, psychopaths, and intellectual cretins. And “conservatives” like Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, and O’Reilly keep telling them that the main problem is those nasty Democrats. These media conservatives bend over backwards to show that they have signed on to elite opinion about race. It takes a great deal of intellectual self-confidence and a very thick skin to withstand the onslaught of the intellectual and media elites who occupy all the prestigious positions in society, especially since many of the middle class targets of this onslaught could lose their jobs for asserting a White identity.

Until White identity and interests are legitimized, it’s certainly naïve to suppose that respectable middle class White people are going to start complaining about their displacement in explicitly White terms. But they will not be an effective political force until they do so. Although they will be in the forefront of the looming battle on illegal immigration (and that is certainly all to the good), they will remain silent in the face of the much greater problem of legal non-White immigration. (Glenn Beck on legal immigration: “I’m not a racist. [Illegal immigration] isn’t to be confused with legal immigration.”)

The war against middle class White America is therefore a war that “cannot tell its name” — it can’t be labeled for what it is but must masquerade as a moral crusade for certain abstract concepts like “diversity,” and “tolerance.” The Tea Partiers are left with no alternative but to fight back with their own abstractions, like “limited government” and “individual freedom.” The liberal establishment has nothing to fear from this.

That’s why the White middle class revolution has to be top-down in the sense that it must have an intellectual vanguard that legitimizes White identity and interests among the broad mass of White people. Until then, there will be much rage but no basic change. And this implies that a huge part of our energies must be directed at legitimizing the simple idea that White people, like everyone else, have ethnic interests.

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Christian Zionism

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Max Blumenthal has a post that he  claims shows that “Biden should have known that Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu intended to upset his plans by Netanyahu’s appearance with John Hagee.” This refers to one of the oddest phenomena in American politics: The rabid pro-Israel activities of the Christian Zionists as exemplified by Pastor Hagee. Hagee is the ultimate Christian Zionist, using his speech before a who’s who of the Israeli government and other elements of the Israeli far right to state that Jerusalem is “the undivided, eternal capitol of the Jewish people.” He called Iranian President Ahmadinejad “the Hitler of the Middle East” and denounced the Goldstone Report as “character assassination by an unbiased and uninformed committee.”

In the audience was “Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the chief rabbi of the illegal West Bank settlement of Efrat who gained notoriety for lobbying President Bill Clinton to pardon his friend, fugitive billionaire Marc Rich. Ayalon had stirred controversy days before when he refused to meet with a US congressional delegation brought to Israel by the progressive Jewish group J Street.”

What’s amazing to me is that the point of Hagee’s speech was to tout the $58,000,000 (!) that his group of Christians have donated to far-right causes in Israel since 2001, including settler groups and a group that aims to ensure” that students in Israel are on the right path, the path of Zionism, the love of Israel, the path of solidarity.”

As it was explained to me, Hagee, believes that God actually decreed not one, but two, plans of salvation:  one for the church, which requires faith in Christ’s atonement, and another for the Jews, which does not require them to have faith in Christ at all, but is a parallel covenant that bypasses the Church and Christ completely.  They regard the creation of the modern state of Israel as nothing less than the precursor of that heavenly kingdom, the fulfillment of prophecy, and the sign of Christ’s imminent return.

Christian Zionism is a very powerful force for philosemitism in the US.  There is a fascinating history (see, e.g., here) that suggests but falls short of proof that early Zionists like Samuel Untermeyer were important in promoting and publicizing the work of C. I. Scofield whose annotated Bible, published by Oxford University Press in 1909, is the basis of Christian Zionism. In any case, the above source discusses footnotes to the Scofield Bible added in 1967 that emphasize Zionist aims. For example,  “For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgment.” ” God made an unconditional promise of blessing through Abram’s seed to the nation of Israel to inherit a specific territory forever.” “It has invariably fared ill with the  people who have persecuted the Jew, well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.” (Footnotes to Genesis 12:3)

Jews have not stood by idly on this but have actively supported the Christian Zionism movement. Beginning in 1978, the Likud Party in Israel has taken the lead in organizing this force for Israel, and they have been joined by the neocons. For example, in 2002 the Israeli embassy organized a prayer breakfast with the major Christian Zionists. The main organizations are the Unity Coalition for Israel which is run by Esther Levens and Christians United for Israel, run by David Brog. The Unity Coalition for Israel consists of ~200 Christian and Jewish organizations has strong connections to neocon think tanks such as the Center for Security Policy, headed by Frank Gaffney, pro-Israel activist organizations the Zionist Organization of America, the Likud Party and the Israeli government. This organization claims to provide material for 1,700 religious radio stations, 245 Christian TV stations, and 120 Christian newspapers.

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Kevin MacDonald: Israel again illustrates the true nature of Judaism

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Kevin MacDonald: Any doubt about the real attitudes within Israel toward peace have been removed with the announcement of housing starts in East Jerusalem timed to coincide with Vice-President Joe Biden’s visit. For that, we should be thankful to Eli Yishai, the Israeli Minister of Internal Affairs, who, by most accounts is responsible for the timing of the announcement. As Gideon Levy noted in Haaretz, “the timing, which everyone is complaining about, was brilliant. It was exactly the time to call a spade a spade. As always, we need Yishai (and occasionally [Foreign Minister] Avigdor Lieberman) to expose our true face, without the mask and lies, and play the enfant terrible who shouts that the emperor has no clothes.”

Rather than the 1600 units that were announced originally, now we learn that there are 50,000 housing units planned for Jerusalem in various stages of the approval and construction process. And the “settlement freeze” turns out to be at best a slowing down. Even the settlers aren’t complaining about the policy any more because they are basically getting what they want.

So Yishai’s announcement saves everyone lots of time. The “proximity talks” will now be called off — a blessing because otherwise there would have been another charade of talking while construction continues. We would have had to hear endless hyping of the talks in the media and from governments. In the end, they would collapse anyway, and the US media would treat us to nuanced and articulate op-eds by Israel’s fifth column.

Because the problem is that the Israelis want the land — all of it. They want all of Jerusalem and they want the West Bank (for starters), and there is nothing to stop the slow motion, grinding process by which they are getting it. As a result, there really is nothing to negotiate. Negotiations are simply ways to entertain people who read newspapers and watch television and make them think something is really happening. Or might possibly be happening way off  in the future.

The Obama Administration is doubtless rather unhappy with what happened, but its acolytes in Congress will certainly not allow settlements and construction to stand in the way of total support for Israel. As noted here, perhaps the only potentially serious consequence is that the Obama Administration will be more reluctant to take the initiative in promoting Israel’s project of destroying Iran. That’s all to the good, but it won’t change the US’s bedrock fealty to Israel.

Nevertheless, like the horrific Gaza invasion, there will also be effects on perceptions of Israel. Despite increasingly desperate attempts at image management, it becomes even less possible (if that is conceivable) to argue that the Palestinians are the main impediment to peace. Slowly but surely people are getting the message that Israel is an aggressive, expansionist ethnostate committed to apartheid and fewer rights for Israeli Arabs, with a long term goal of ethnic cleansing. It is able to be all this while maintaining US fealty even as it sticks yet another finger in its eye.

Ultimately the behavior of Israel will also affect perceptions of Jews in the US and other Western countries. How long can the various positive narratives about Jews that have been so common in the West, especially since World War II, survive? The narratives of Jews as passive victims suffering at the hands of brutal and irrational enemies throughout history, of Judaism as representing a unique moral vision for all of humanity, of Judaism as a light unto the nations. People are increasingly realizing that there is a complete disconnect between these images and the actual behavior of Jews when they have power. The image of Israelis carrying out ethnic cleansing will be seen as far more congruent with the image of Jewish Bolsheviks engaged in political oppression and mass murder than with the self-images that Jews have managed establish for themselves throughout the West.

So the good news from all of this is that Israel is gradually revealing itself for what it really is — a very telling commentary on the real nature of Jews and Judaism that is supported to the hilt by the organized Jewish community throughout the Diaspora. The sooner people get that message, the sooner there will be real change away from the transformational public policy changes that have been so successfully advocated by Jewish activist organizations in the last 50 years in the West. All of these changes relied on a moral vision — the moral imperative of mass immigration, the moral superiority of multiculturalism, and especially the moral illegitimacy of White identity and interests. The Jewish community has been the most powerful voice preaching this vision, but it has no moral standing at all. Truly, the emperor truly has no clothes.

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Tim Wise on Zionism

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Someone sent me this quote from an article by Tim Wise, “Anti-Semitism, Real and Imagined: Judaism, Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine.”

Zionism’s problem is not that it is Jewish nationalism, per se, but rather a form of ethnic supremacy. And more than that: a form of European supremacy to boot. After all, there were Jews who had remained in and around Palestine for millennia, without substantial conflict withtheir Arab and Muslim neighbors. Likewise, many Jews lived under Muslim rule in the Ottoman Empire, where they received a generally warm or at least neutral reception–far better indeed than at the hands of Christian Europe, which expelled them from one place after another.

These Jews, unlike the European Jews who sought to displace said Arabs from their land, lived there peacefully and sought no grand designs for “Greater Israel.” They did not create Zionism, nor lead the charge for the development of a Jewish state. For that, it took a decidedly Western, European and frankly white Jewish community. The Jews who were most indigenous to the land of Israel, or those of Africa, or the rest of Asia Minor — in short those who were most directly Semitic language group peoples — were never the problem. Nor indeed was their faith. A decidedly colonial mentality, itself an outgrowth of European thought and culture from the late 1800s forward, was the fuel for the Zionist fire. Zionism’s problem is that it is a form of white supremacy and Western domination.

In short, Zionism as just another form of White evil. This certainly establishes Wise’s bona fides as an anti-Zionist Jew, but I am still suspicious that his attitudes are just another form of anti-White strategizing among Diaspora Jews. Self-deception?

It is certainly true that Zionism was the creation of European Jews and that at its beginnings it was closely tied intellectually to European racial nationalism. As I noted in Ch. 5 of Separation and Its Discontents:

Important Jewish intellectuals [in the late 19th century and well into the 20th century] developed Volkischeideologies as well as racialist, exclusivist views, which, like those of their adversaries, were no longer phrased in religious terms but rather in [the] … language of evolutionary biology. These intellectuals had a very clear conception of themselves as racially distinct and as a superior race (intellectually and especially morally), one that had a redemptive mission to the German people and other gentiles. As expected by social identity theory, while the Germans tended to emphasize negative traits of the Jewish outgroup, the Jewish intellectuals often conceptualized their continued separatism in moral and altruistic terms.

The result was that anti-Semites and zealous Jews, including Zionists, often had very similar racialist, nationalist views of Judaism toward the end of the 19th century and thereafter (Katz 1986b, 144). Zionism and anti-Semitism were mirror-images: “in the course of their histories up to the present day it has looked as if they might not only be reacting to one another but be capable of evolving identical objectives and even cooperating in their realization” (Katz 1979, 51). Nicosia (1985) provides a long list of German intellectuals and anti-Semitic leaders from the early 19th century through the Weimar period who accepted Zionism as a possible solution to the Jewish question in Germany, including Johann Gottleib Fichte, Konstantin Frantz, Wilhelm Marr, Adolf Stoecker. All conceptualized Judaism as a nation apart and as a separate “race.”

What had changed for Jews was not the reality that they were a closed racial and national group. The charge that Jews were a state within a state was common among Enlightenment intellectuals. What had changed was that the (temporary) triumph of Darwinism had changed the language of racial separatism so that Jews were no longer seen as a religious state within a state but as a racially exclusive strategizing group often in competition with the ethnic majority. Zionism then became a logical solution to the problem of chronic conflict between Jews and non-Jews. Jews would simply leave Europe. Indeed, Zionists cooperated with the National Socialist government in the 1930s to get Jews out of Germany to Palestine.

This strand of racial Zionism continues as a prominent ideology within Israel, particularly with the intellectual descendants of Vladimir Jabotinsky. And, as Geoffrey Wheatcroft has pointed out, at the present time Israel “is governed by [Jabotinsky’s] conscious heirs.”

The problem isn’t ethnic nationalism, and ethnic nationalism is certainly not restricted to White people. Ethnic conflict is apparent as well throughout the developing world, and will likely lead to more partitioning and nation-creation. As Jerry Z. Mullerhas noted, ethnostates are the norm, and “In areas where that separation has not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly.” Ethnostates have a number of advantages besides the lack of chronic ethnically based conflict over everything from political power to affirmative action. As noted by Frank Salter, because of closer ties of kinship and culture, ethnically homogeneous societies are more likely to be open to redistributive policies such as social welfare and health care.  Sociologists such as Robert Putnam have also shown that ethnic homogeneity is associated with greater trust of others and greater political participation.

The problem is that Western societies have embarked on a public policy project in which the ethnonationalism of White people is officially proscribed as an unadulterated evil.  Everyone else’s ethnonationalism is just fine. And at the risk of repeating myself, the organized Jewish community has adopted a strategy of rationalizing and promoting even extreme forms of racial Zionism in Israel while being a pillar of multiculturalism and massive non-White immigration in the West. What’s good for the Jews and all that.

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Mark Green on Tim Wise’s Hypocrisy

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Mark Green’s current TOO article “My Smackdown with Anti-White Crusader Tim Wise” is a must read. The article is an email exchange between Green, the editor of Persecution Privilege And Power, and the notorious Tim Wise who makes a living laying guilt trips on Whites about how privileged they are. Wise turns out to be Jewish (Why am I always the last to find out?). The interesting thing then is how Wise deals with the fact that he has directed all his energies against White “racism” in America and against apartheid South Africa while pretty much avoiding the issue of Jewish ethnocentrism and apartheid in Israel.

Wise is typical of the vast majority of American Jews. 83% voted for Obama, and the Jewish community is a pillar of multiculturalism in America. At the same time the Jewish community strongly supports Israel even though it has become dominated by racial Zionists and religious fundamentalists dedicated to Israeli expansion and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

I think that Wise is better than most Jews in trying to be intellectually consistent. He desperately wants to feel like a good guy, but there’s a huge blind spot. When I brought these issues up on faculty email battles at CSU-Long Beach in responding to morally superior Jewish professors who accused me of racism, the response was a mild version of Wise’s — something like “I oppose some of Israel’s actions” — and then immediately go back to attacking me. They didn’t feel any need to oppose Israeli racism with the same energy and intensity as they oppose any manifestation of White ethnocentrism. And yet as members of the Jewish community they certainly bear a huge burden of responsibility for Israel’s actions, since US support for Israel continues to be critical to its ability to create an apartheid state and oppress the Palestinians.

As Green’s article makes clear, the only consistency is “What’s good for the Jews.” Wise and other Jewish leftists are consistently pursuing their ethnic interests — opposition to the White majority in the US motivated by fear, loathing, and a desire for power, while supporting at least implicitly the aggressively ethnonationalist state of Israel. Hard-nosed, aggressive ethnic politics all around. But Tim Wise will be the absolutely last person to see his own actions as the height of ethnocentrism.

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J.J. Goldberg’s Reflections on Purim

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Forward columnist J. J. Goldberg is distinguished among Jewish writers for acknowledging that yes, Jews are indeed powerful. The basic message of his 1996 book, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment,  was that American Judaism is well organized and lavishly funded. It has achieved a great deal of power, and it has been successful in achieving its interests.

Goldberg’s book is a good rejoinder to those who claim that the Jewish community is hopelessly divided on all issues and therefore doesn’t have any net effect on public policy. His book acknowledged that in fact there is a great deal of consensus on broad Jewish issues, 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. As I noted in CofC, the massive changes in public policy on these issues beginning with the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s coincide with the period of increasing Jewish power and influence in the United States.

Goldberg tackled Jewish power again in a recent Forward column, “Purim’s Lessons About Diaspora Power.” Again the point is that Jews are certainly not the weak, beset group typically presented by activist organizations like the ADL. He notes that since WWII, Jewish power increased while the enemies of Jews “declined in numbers and influence.” However, he sees a fundamental change:

Today, quite unexpectedly, we’re back where we started. Diaspora Jews still have resources to protect their interests and values, as they’ve had since World War II. But Jewish communities also face mounting threats from real enemies once again, thanks to the combined effects of the September 11 attacks, the Al-Aqsa Intifada and the Iraq War. Anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activists and ideologues have taken to claiming with unaccustomed boldness that organized Jewry controls and undermines whole governments and industries. Israel’s sworn enemies are broadening their focus and taking aim — with words and sometimes with bombs — at Israel’s closest overseas ally, the Jewish community. Perhaps most important, verbal attacks on organized American Jewish activity are no longer taboo. Diaspora Jewry hasn’t lost legitimacy, but its enemies have regained theirs.

Israel and Diaspora Jewish communities are indeed being criticized as never before. Right now, there is Israeli Apartheid Week aimed at boycotts, demonstrations, and divestment from Israel.  At this point, you would  have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the iron grip that the Israel Lobby has on US foreign policy and at its role in fomenting the Iraq war.

I would also  like to think that people are becoming more willing to openly and honestly discuss Jewish influence in the other areas mentioned in Goldberg’s 1996 book, especially on immigration policy and other areas related to multiculturalism. That is certainly what we at TOO are trying to do.

Goldberg makes two remarkable recommendations:

First, remember that [in the Purim story] Haman plotted to destroy the Jews because Mordecai insulted him. Sometimes your enemies hate you because of something you did, not just who you are. Sometimes a small concession now can save a lot of grief later.

Wouldn’t it be great if people like Abe Foxman, Heidi Beirich, and Mark Potok took that to heart? — that some criticisms of Jews are not just “canards” based on ancient prejudices but reflect real conflicts of interest in the contemporary world. But of course, it’s unrealistic. The organized Jewish community cannot acknowledge Jewish involvement in promoting the Iraq war any more than it can acknowledge its role in promoting and financing immigration and multiculturalism into Western societies. The changes unleashed by Jewish influence in America have been profound–literally transformational. Taking any responsibility would be dangerous indeed for Jews, especially as we see that American politics is increasing defined by racial identity.

Further, especially in Israel, Jewish behavior is on “feed forward” in the sense that the most committed Jews are in determining the direction of policy. It’s always been that way, and in the contemporary world, this means that the fundamentalists, the settlers, and the overtly racialist Zionists are in the driver’s seat, dominating the most right wing government in Israeli history.  The result is that Israeli expansionism, apartheid, and the oppression of the Palestinians will not be halted as a result of pressures within the Jewish community. The American Jewish community will continue to support all this — despite the glaring hypocrisy such behavior implies given the role of Jews as a pillar of multiculturalism in the Diaspora. There will be no concessions.

As a result, the ADL’s policy of condemning any discussion of Jewish influence will doubtless continue. Reasonable criticism must be completely suppressed because any leak in the dike is likely to lead to a deluge. And yet, as Goldberg seems to be admitting, Jewish influence can’t be ignored forever. I think he’s probably right. At least, I hope so.

Goldberg’s second bit of advice is: “Don’t abandon your intermarried relatives. They might save your life some day.” In other words, there is likely to be an anti-Jewish backlash at some point, and Jews had better be prepared. It’s an interesting suggestion to look to intermarried Jews for help. Goldberg’s implicit theory is that blood ties are critical in the end, and I couldn’t agree with him more.

Although intermarriage is often condemned in the Jewish community and there are high profile programs like Birthright Israel aimed at reducing it, several Jewish theorists have pointed out that intermarriage has certain strategic benefits for Judaism.  Chapter 9 of Separation and Its Discontents has the following quote from two Jewish scholars of the Diaspora:

The successful exercise of influence is best achieved in a community with a large subset of members interacting with politicians and opinion leaders. Through intermarried Jews themselves, and certainly through their social networks involving Jewish family and friends who may be closer to the core of the community, Jewish concerns, interests, and sensibilities can be articulated before a wider, more influential audience. In a recent interview, Presidential aide Robert Lipshutz traced the origin of Jimmy Carter’s concern for Israel to his close friendship with a first cousin, an Orthodox Jew (Carter’s aunt married a Jewish man, and their two children were raised as Jews). Intermarrying Jews, while perhaps diluting the community in one sense, perform compensating strategic functions in another. (Lieberman and Weinfeld, Demographic trends and Jewish survival. Midstream 24 (November), 1978, 16.)

Goldberg’s comment agrees with my conclusion:

The deepest layers of Jewish commitment [i.e., Orthodox, Conservative and other strongly ethnic forms of Judaism] constitute the long-term well spring of Judaism, with the outer layers acting as mere temporary appendages that will be cast off in the long run. This deep inner layer of very intense group commitment provides demographic vigor to replenish those in the outer layers [i.e., they’re the ones having the babies] who are gradually moving away from Judaism while nevertheless performing political and social roles that are indispensable for the contemporary vitality of Judaism. Such a perspective essentially agrees with the views of political scientist Michael Walzer (1994, 5), who notes that without radical transformation, secular Judaism cannot reproduce itself; since the Enlightenment, “it [has] remained parasitic on an older religious Judaism that it didn’t and couldn’t pass on.”

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