LAWRENCE AUSTER: JEWS—THE ARCHETYPAL MULTICULTURALISTS
The following piece, which I consider very interesting, is brought here in its entirety from the blog of the late Lawrence Auster. As “badthink” tends to vanish from the Internet, especially with Auster no longer alive to defend his blog, I have copied it here for safekeeping (if we’re infringing upon any copyrights, ping us).
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JEWS—THE ARCHETYPAL MULTICULTURALISTS
The below is a chapter—written in 1998 and not edited or changed since then—from the vast unpublished book on mass non-Western immigration, its consequences, and related topics that I worked on through most of the 1990s. It was tentatively entitled, The Death of America, and its Possible Rebirth. Recently a right-wing publisher has expressed interest in the manuscript and I am in the process of organizing the long-finished chapters for publication. Meanwhile this chapter may be read as a standalone article. (Note: it is very long, over 11,000 words.)I read the entire chapter last night for the first time in fifteen years and made some fixes in punctuation and spelling. I see one serious flaw in the piece: that there are not enough qualifications showing that the objectionable attitudes I have attributed to “Jews”—i.e., to the Jewish people or the Jewish community as such—are, of course, not shared by all Jews, not by any means. But at this point I lack the will and the physical ability to re-work the chapter. So I hope that readers will understand that when I speak of “Jews” I do not mean all Jews, or even perhaps of a majority of Jews, but of a large and influential part of the Jewish population.We could look at the problem this way. The great majority of Jews are extremely liberal and will remain so, but a large number of white gentiles (perhaps a majority) are also liberal and will remain so. To put the point differently, a large majority of Jews do not identify with or support the white race, but a large majority of white gentiles also do not identify with or support the white race. A significant number of Jews are conservative and traditional (I am not speaking of most Hasids, who are simply not part of our country and civilization), and I believe that such Jews are a positive part of our body politic and of the prospective growth of a traditionalist movement, and ultimately, perhaps generations hence, of a reborn America, named by me America 3.0, that will have separated from liberal America, America 2.0, which has now definitively destroyed and replaced the original America, America 1.0.Also, to understand better where I’m coming from, readers may want to jump ahead and read the last section first, “How to oppose the Jewish agenda without anti-Semitism.”
Here is the article:
Jews: The Archetypal Multiculturalists
“Any large number of free-thinking Jews” is “undesirable” if one wants to maintain or develop a society in which a Christian tradition can flourish, said T.S. Eliot in 1934. He was right.
David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews and Secular Culture, 1996
When it comes to Jewish enthusiasm for the great egalitarian project I think we may be grateful that we are such a small people.
Ruth Wisse, If I Am Not For Myself
… the great take-over by Jewish-American writers dreaming aloud the dreams of the whole American people.
Leslie Fiedler, Partisan Review, 1967
[W]e have spent most of our history as a vulnerable minority … That is why Jews both value and insist upon multicultural societies where the rule of law prevails, where distinctive identities can flourish, and where tolerance and respect are values equally applicable to all citizens.
Abraham Foxman, Ha’aretz, February 13, 2006
We’ve looked at the immigrant and nonwhite cultures that are displacing white America from without, and at the nihilist culture eating away at white society from within. But there is one group that lies at the intersection of these phenomena, an ethnically and religiously distinct group that is of relatively recent immigrant origin, yet is also part—though a largely distinct part—of the white race and a major influence in the mainstream culture. I am speaking, of course, of the Jews. Given the extraordinary role that this extraordinary people has played in modern America, no serious discussion of ethic diversity on American life can ignore them. Yet because of the Jews’ tragic history as a persecuted people, and because of their own ability, through their leading role in American intellectual life, to set the terms of permissible discourse, it is impossible in today’s society to have an honest discussion on the subject of Jewish cultural impact. While every other ethnic group can be spoken of in a critical light, if only to a very limited extent, nothing that is even implicitly critical is allowed to be said or inferred about Jews. An opinion poll by the Anti-Defamation League searching for anti-Semitic attitudes in America perfectly captured the prevailing assumptions of what is permissible to say about Jews. If people responding to the poll agreed even with true opinions about Jews, such as that “the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews,” the poll considered that to be evidence of anti-Semitism. Using such a broad definition of anti-Semitism, the ADL, unsurprisingly, always finds lots of “anti-Semitism” in America. [ADL National Study, May 1992].
If “anti-Semitism” is to be a meaningful word, and not just a weapon used to frighten people into silence, then its usage must pass the same definitional test we have established for “racism.” Just as behavior must be morally bad if it is to be properly considered racist, so it must be morally bad if it is to be properly considered anti-Semitic. Unless to be impolitic is to be immoral, it is no more anti-Semitic to engage in rational, critical discourse about the role of Jews in American society than it is racist to engage in rational, critical discourse about blacks or Chinese or white Protestants or anyone else.
While this sort of honest discussion may imply a challenge to the political and cultural agendas promoted by Jewish organizations, it does not threaten Jews as individuals or as a community. Notwithstanding the Jews’ own exaggerated fears on this subject, anti-Semitism has steadily declined since World War II. Jews do not face any serious bigotry in this country, except from some black nationalists (who are beyond the reach of Western discourse in any case) and from a tiny, though growing, number of powerless and marginalized whites, some of whom are serious anti-Semites. Indeed, it could be argued that the current increase of anti-Semitism at the margins of white society is to a significant extent driven by the fact that no critical opinions about Jewish influence are ever permitted, even while the role of this tiny minority in American politics and culture keeps waxing spectacularly before everyone’s eyes. To forbid people to remark upon such a remarkable phenomenon does not conduce to mental or social health. It leaves the normal energies of criticism—and even of just plain griping—no outlet except for dark and inarticulate resentment, coded hate messages, conspiracy theories, devil theories, Holocaust denial, and so on.
As sensitive as it is, the subject of Jewish cultural impact is unavoidable in a book that purports to deal with immigration and diversity. The Jews are, and have always been, the archetypal minority. For their entire history since the expulsion of Jewish elites to Babylonia in the early sixth century B.C. (the time when the Israelites first began to be called “Jews”), the Jews have lived as a conspicuous, and intermittently persecuted, minority among non-Jewish majorities. For this reason, many contemporary Jews regard the essence of Jewishness as identification with the Outsider (whoever the Outsider might be), combined with hostility, or at least a deeply questioning attitude, toward the majority culture.
The Eastern European Jews entered America as immigrants whose religion, folkways, and characteristics were alien to those of the historic American population. Although they have made phenomenal contributions to American life in many fields, and assimilated to a far greater extent than some conservatives a hundred years ago could have imagined, the Jews also (as few people recognize, because the subject is forbidden) changed America in some profound and not always positive ways. In terms of national identity, Jews were instrumental in the reformulation of America as a universalist society based strictly on ideology rather than on peoplehood, a change that set the stage for mass Third-World immigration and the much more profound redefinition of America as a multicultural society. In terms of morality, many Jewish intellectuals, writers, and entertainers deliberately undermined the older Anglo-American Victorian ethos, a program of moral/cultural subversion that climaxed in the Sixties counterculture and the dominant nihilist culture of the 1980s and 1990s. In terms of politics, Jews were instrumental in replacing the old American order of Constitutional self-restraint with the statist politics of unrestrained compassion.
Thus, even as Jews more or less successfully adapted to America, America—in redefining itself as universal, in giving up its Anglo-Saxon Christian culture, and in adopting a politics of compassion, adapted to the Jews. The pattern of the Jews’ interaction with the majority culture is a textbook case on the effect of ethnic diversification on a host society.
Jews re-made America
The traditional belief is that all immigrants, regardless of their cultural background and numbers, can be equally well assimilated. But even the Jews, now that they’ve reached a position of unassailable power in American life, admit that this notion is false. As the well-known attorney and law professor Alan Dershowitz writes in his 1991 best-seller Chutzpah:
Jews have been extraordinarily successful in America. We have not melted into anyone else’s pot. Instead, we have reshaped the pot to accommodate our unusual dimensions. In the process we too have reshaped ourselves somewhat to fit into our environment. [Emphasis added.] [pp. 6-7]
In other words, the Jews did not assimilate into America (or, as Dershowitz grudgingly concedes, they only assimilated “somewhat”); rather they “reshaped” America to make it “accommodate our unusual dimensions.”
Dershowitz claims a similar right to redefine Judaism:
I do, therefore, precisely what orthodox religions say you can’t do: I pick and choose—hopefully on some principled basis—among the religious practices and select those with which I wish to comply. It’s my religion, after all, and I don’t see why I can’t be the final arbiter when it comes to its content. [p. 12].
Note the all-consuming narcissism. Judaism is his religion, so he can define it according to his whims—a most convenient philosophy for a man who abandoned his family’s orthodox Judaism but still insists on his total Jewishness. In the same way, America is his country, therefore America is anything he feels like saying it is—a convenient philosophy for a man who is openly hostile to America’s historic civilization. “We need not compromise either our Americanism or our Jewishness,” Dershowitz declares. “Nor can anyone else define our Americanism or our Jewishness for us.” (pp. 4-5.) This, in brief, is chutzpah, which Dershowitz defines as self-assertion and boldness in the face of authority, but which most people regard as unmitigated, brazen arrogance. However defined, it is a quality Dershowitz celebrates in his fellow Jews and urges them to cultivate.
Thus he writes admiringly of David Bazelon, former Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, for whom Dershowitz worked as a law clerk:
Judge Bazelon rarely went to synagogue, but he was a Jewish judge in every sense. He saw the world through his Jewish background. His humor was frequently in Yiddish. His speeches referred to the rabbinical literature. He described himself as a secular American with a “Jewish soul.” If a defendant deserved compassion but no writ of habeas corpus—or other formal legal remedy—was technically available to him, Bazelon would wink at me [italics added] and order that I find some ground for issuing a “writ of rachmones.” Rachmones is the Hebrew-Yiddish word for “compassion.”
Bazelon was always an outsider, a questioner, even as one of the most influential jurists of his time. [pp. 58-59].
In this inadvertently devastating portrait, we see the chief judge of America’s second most powerful court busily reshaping Anglo-American Constitutional law according to his Jewish outsider’s sense of compassion, while conspiratorially winking at his young law clerk. Equally revealing is Dershowitz’s tribute to Bazelon and his other mentor, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg: “[T]heir Jewishness—their rachmones—resonated in me more powerfully than the Jewishness of ritual.” (p. 60). It is clear that these secular Jews, leading architects of the modern omnicompetent state, regard the liberal agenda as an emotionally fulfilling substitute for the religious tradition they have cast aside.
Unfortunately, Dershowitz’s cult of Chutzpah, which we’ve only begun to explore here, cannot be dismissed as an extreme position among American Jews. If anything, the extraordinary popularity of his book and the glowing reviews it received from many quarters of Jewish opinion suggest that his views—particularly his narcissistic claim of a Jewish right to remake America—are representative. Even Ruth Wisse, a harsh critic of Chutzpah, noted with regret that Dershowitz’s outlook seems to resonate deeply among American Jewry. [Ruth Wisse, review, Commentary, September 1991].
Notwithstanding the critical framework of the present discussion, we must always remember that there is a fundamental difference between Jews and other European immigrants, on one hand, and non-Europeans on the other. While the immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe changed American culture in some dramatic ways, America still remained, at bottom, a nation. By contrast, the non-European immigration since 1965 has changed America from a nation into a multiethnic empire. At the same time, we must understand that the cultural changes brought by the turn-of-the-century immigrants and their descendants prepared the ground for the more radical changes that came later.
The Public Schools
The dynamic of diversification, which we’ve discussed at length elsewhere, works as follows. Believing that ethnic differences don’t matter and that discrimination is always wrong, a majority culture that had once excluded a minority begins admitting them. But once the minority group are inside that culture, they proceed to alter its identity. In the case of American Jews, this has applied particularly to the public schools, and to intellectual culture generally. Up to the late nineteenth century, writes historian Naomi W. Cohen, there was broad public consensus that the “United States was a Christian nation whose freedoms rested on Christian precepts.” The public schools were nonsectarian—meaning no distinction was made among Protestant denominations—and included readings from the Protestant Bible and moral Christian teachers along with prayers and holiday exercises. While both Catholics and Jews opposed this religious element in the public schools, the Jewish attitude was more complicated. Jews embraced the public schools because they saw them as the great path to Americanization, yet they also hoped that by entering the public school system they could overturn their Christian customs. The problem was that those Christian customs had always been an organic part of the America that Jews were so eager to join.
Conservative Protestants noticed the contradiction, and resented it. In an 1888 editorial, the New York Tribune said that while it appreciated the value and virtues of “our Hebrew fellow-citizens,”
they should recognize … that the Republic which offers a refuge and the broadest religious freedom to all men, expresses, in so doing, the highest teaching of Christ—the brotherhood of humanity. If it had not done so [the Jews] would have had no foothold here. The United States … is Christian in its foundation, its structure and its development, and none … who have taken refuge here have more reason to thank God for its Christian spirit than the Hebrews. [quoted in Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Religious Equality, Naomi W. Cohen (NY: Oxford U. Press, 1992), p. 71].
This counsel was not heeded. Far from being grateful for America’s Christian spirit, the Jewish community resented and feared any manifestation of it—particularly the traditional Christmas observances in the public schools.
The conflict came to a head in 1906. During a Christmas assembly at a predominantly Jewish public school in Brooklyn, the principal engaged in what he probably saw as an appeal to America’s religious and ethical foundation, but which Jews saw as a provocation. Basically, the principal’s offense was that he called on his students to “be more like Christ … taking less and giving more.” New York’s Jewish community erupted. Jewish newspapers called for a student strike to protest Christmas observances, with one paper referring to Jesus as the person because of whom “the Jewish people bathed in blood and tears for 2000 years.” The next day, December 24, 1906, tens of thousands of Jewish children stayed home from school. The strike, which was backed by mainstream as well as Jewish newspapers, was successful. The Morgen Journal triumphantly reported that “the principals and teachers were frightened … and removed from their programs everything that pertained to Christendom.” [Italics added.] Ultimately a compromise was reached. Christmas hymns and assemblies were banned, but Christmas trees and pictures of Santa Clause and recitals of the Lord’s Prayer were allowed. [Leonard Bloom, “A Successful Jewish Boycott of the New York City Public Schools—Christmas 1906,” American Jewish History, December 1980, 180-188].
While the principal’s upholding of Jesus as a moral ideal (without any mention of his theological status), does not exactly rise to the level of pogroms and 25-year conscriptions into the Tsar’s army, I do not criticize New York’s Jews for their resistance to Christian preaching in the public schools. What I am saying is that, given the Jews’ religious differences from Christians, given their memories of persecution by Christians, and given their extraordinary activism and intelligence, the mass entry of Jews into America was destined to have the effect it ultimately had—of delegitimizing public expressions of Christendom in what had previously been a Christian country. Mass immigration and integration of a culturally alien group inevitably weakens the historic culture of the host country.
The culturally transforming effect of Jews on the liberal arts universities was more profound. In a groundbreaking study, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, Professor David A. Hollinger of the University of California at Berkeley, an outspoken liberal, examines the role Jews have played in the de-Christianizing of American universities and intellectual life. At the end of the nineteenth century, he writes, a generic, trans-denominational Protestantism “was taken for granted by nearly all of the Americans in a position to influence the character of the nation’s major institutions, including those controlling public education, politics, the law, literature, the arts, scholarship, and even science.” Over the course of the twentieth century, the view of America as a Christian nation was replaced by the view of America as a universalist, pluralist society, in which Christianity is but one of several legitimate religions. Two principal factors account for this transformation: The first was the loss of Christian belief on the part of old-stock Protestant intellectuals who had embraced the world view of modern science. The second was the demographic diversification brought about by immigration. These two phenomena, though separate, were linked. As Hollinger explains it, prominent Jewish intellectuals “reinforced the most de-Christianized of the perspectives already current among the Anglo-Protestants,” with Protestant and Jewish intellectuals supporting each other in the secularization project. While WASP intellectuals such as Sinclair Lewis and Randolph Bourne lionized Jewish thinkers for leading the Protestants out of their “provincialism,” Jewish intellectuals such as Felix Frankfurter and Harold J. Laski made Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—who was both an old-stock American and an atheist and relativist—into an American cultural icon, thus building a secular vision of America upon which secular Protestants and Jews could unite.
At the same time there was still much resistance to Jewish influence at conservative institutions. Jewish students in the 1920s and 1930s were systematically discouraged from going into academic fields involving the transmission of culture, such as philosophy, history, and literature, and were urged instead to enter technical and service fields such as business, engineering, economics, medicine, and law. There were also quotas limiting the number of Jewish students at elite universities. Ernest M. Hopkins, the president of Dartmouth, was frank about the reason for this policy: “Dartmouth is a Christian College founded for the Christianization of its students,” he unapologetically told the New York Post in 1945. Hopkins’s straightforward comment suggests that his views, while controversial, were not considered shameful, but at least reasonable. [“Dartmouth Reveals Anti-Semitic Past,” New York Times, November 11, 1997, A16.]
This situation changed dramatically after World War II, when all boundaries to Jews in the liberal arts were dropped. The Yale College faculty, which had no Jews in 1945, became 18 percent Jewish by the 1970s. A 1969 study found that Jews, who then accounted for three percent of the U.S. population, made up 17 percent of the faculties of the 17 top-ranked universities. During the same period, these universities also became aggressively secular, eliminating Christian symbols and practices (such as obligatory chapel) and discouraging any open profession of Christian belief by faculty members. Hollinger suggests that this secularization was not just due to the general trends of the academic culture, but specifically to the presence of Jewish professors. [“Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century,” in David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, Princeton University Press, 1996].
Thus the American institution that had been the chief defender and transmitter of the older Protestant culture, not only in terms of an official religious identity, but in terms of manners, literature, a cultured way of life, the ideal of the Christian gentleman, and so on, had become—in no small part because of the entry of Jews—the most secularized institution in America. The elite universities had changed from guardian of the old Western order to its subverter. This transformation in the universities then reverberated through the rest of the culture, stripping America’s public institutions, entertainments, symbols, and manners of the Christian and bourgeois values they had once embodied. America’s transition from a Protestant culture whose public institutions, celebrations, and symbols reflected Christian belief, to a pluralist, secular society with no identity at all, was complete. When the next waves of change came—the Sixties radical left, black power, feminism, and multiculturalism—the universities and other institutions had no remaining cultural identity to defend against the onslaught, which explains why the radical movements triumphed so easily.
Hollinger, himself a secular, liberal Protestant, explains the frankness with which he discusses the Jewish role in secularization by pointing out that he approves of it. Indeed, he barely conceals his pleasure at Christianity’s being pushed aside. In what may be a reflection of our thoroughly radicalized times, some Jewish spokesmen are also acknowledging, without embarrassment, their own anti-Christian agenda. In a letter to the Harvard Magazine, Rabbi Abram Goodman, from the Harvard class of 1924, recalls the Harvard of the 1920s when the enrollment of Jews in Harvard College was strictly limited, and adds: “Now I witness a Harvard that has been thoroughly cleansed and Judaized. [Italics added.] My reaction [is] to recite the ancient Hebrew blessing: Blessed art thou, oh Lord, our God, King of the universe, who has kept us in life and sustained us, and caused us to reach this (happy) occasion.” [Abram Vossen Goodman, Harvard Magazine, September/October 1997, p. 6]. Thus an American Jew in 1997 unselfconsciously boasts of eliminating America’s former Christian culture, describing this elimination in terms (“thoroughly cleansed and Judaized”) not unlike those once used by the Nazis about the Jews. Goodman’s apparent lack of fear that his remarks may provoke anti-Semitism—like Hollinger’s lack of fear of being charged with anti-Semitism—is a signal that the long march of ethnic minorities and the cultural left through America’s institutions has triumphed. Now that their enemies have been scattered and silenced, the left and the minorities can admit that their real agenda all along was not simply inclusion, equality, justice, or tolerance toward Jews and other minorities, but the destruction of the Christian culture.
Even worse, Jewish spokesmen have repeatedly attacked Christian evangelism, if it was directed at Jews, as hateful and anti-Semitic. But to say that evangelism is hateful is to say that Christianity is hateful. We must be frank about the fact that a deep animus against Christianity and Christian culture is found among both religious and secular Jews. Here is Philip Rieff, author of the influential book The Triumph of the Therapeutic, writing in 1972:
I am no advocate of some earlier credal organization. In particular, I have not the slightest affection for the dead church civilization of the West. I am a Jew. No Jew in his right mind can long for some variant of that civilization. Its one enduring quality is its transgressive energy against the Jew of culture…. [Italics added.] The gospels were not good news; the ungospelled present has its supremely pleasant feature, the death of the church. [Philip Rieff, “Fellow Teachers,” Salmagundi, no. 20 (Summer-Fall 1972), p. 27; quoted in John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility, p. 172.]
Just as black novelist Toni Morrison believes that the defining trait of white Americans is their hatred of blacks, so Philip Rieff believes that the one enduring quality of Christianity is its anti-Jewishness! For Rieff, Christianity seems to have no meaning or value apart from the harm it does to Jews. But this, in effect, is to deny the collective identity and the subjectivity of Christians.
Similarly, as John Murray Cuddihy writes in his classic study The Ordeal of Civility, Freud felt that basically all gentiles were anti-Semitic, and he interpreted Gentile politeness as nothing but a polite form of anti-Semitism:
This is one root … of the ethnic-specific animus of Freud and Eastern European Jewry generally against Gentile civility: they defined it as a (middle-class) mask concealing anti-Semitism. They defined it as refined anti-Semitism … [The Ordeal of Civility, pp. 78-79.]
Just as nonwhites and white multiculturalists see Western ideals (e.g., individuality and truth) as intrinsically oppressive, earlier Jewish intellectuals saw Gentile ideals (e.g., courtesy and self-control) as intrinsically anti-Semitic. In both instances, reform is impossible. The only way the “oppressive” culture can stop being “oppressive” is to be deprived of its being.
The Jewish role in open borders
The majority culture is deprived of its spiritual being through cultural transformation, and of its physical being through demographic diversification. The latter was the ultimate aim of the American Jewish Committee’s 40-year-long campaign to repeal the 1924 National Quota Act and open America’s borders to the world. Significantly, Jewish immigration reformers of the 1950s and 1960s were no longer concerned with augmenting the number of Jews coming into the U.S., but with increasing all immigrants from non-traditional sources. Their purpose was not to help any particular group; their purpose was to eliminate any sort of preferences for immigrants whom the restrictionists thought would be more assimilable to America’s existing culture. To do this, it was necessary to create a sense of resentment among the America ethnic groups whose fellow ethnics in their home countries were being excluded under the National Quota.
This intention was made clear in an article by immigration historian Oscar Handlin in the July 1952 issue of Commentary, the journal of the American Jewish Committee. In the article, titled “The Immigration Fight Has Only Begun.” Handlin repeatedly complained about the “widespread apathy in sectors of the population that ought to be most actively concerned” about the exclusion of their fellow ethnics by the national quota. The problem from Handlin’s point of view was that most Italians, Poles, and other recent immigrant groups accepted the immigration restrictions, did not feel insulted by them, and did not seem to feel that America was obligated to keep admitting large numbers of their own national-origin group. In other words, the problem was that the white ethnics identified more with America than with their own ethnic group and its chances for further immigration. Literary critic Carol Iannone offers an anecdote about her Catholic high school in the 1960s which seems to confirm this impression:
One day in school we were shown a film about all the immigrants and what they had done for America. The next day our teacher Sister Eustacia said: “What did you think of the film? I didn’t like it. Immigrants! Immigrants! You’d think there wasn’t a whole society here before the immigrants came! Nothing but immigrants.” In our class, many of whom were offspring of immigrants, we were not offended because we knew there was a country here before our families came. And that was totally the ethos.
My father, who immigrated to America in 1923, always talked about how he came here to be an American. It wasn’t what we immigrants have done for America, but how great America was for taking us in. That was the ethos then. [Carol Iannone, conversation with author, 1997].
It was precisely such feelings of gratitude, and even more the lack of a sense of grievance or entitlement, that Handlin wanted to uproot. The key to immigration reform, he argued, was to wake up the mass of contented white ethnics to the real injustice of the existing restrictive laws:
The laws are bad because they rest on the racist assumption that mankind is divided into fixed breeds, biologically and culturally separated from each other, and because, within that framework, they assume that Americans are Anglo-Saxons by origin and ought to remain so. To all other peoples, the laws say that the United States ranks them in terms of their racial proximity to our own “superior” stock; and upon the many, many million of Americans not descended from the Anglo-Saxons, the laws cast a distinct imputation of inferiority.
In other words, as long as there are immigration laws designed to preserve a nation’s historic ethnic majority, then all people not related by blood to that majority are, by that very fact, being categorized as inferiors, making a mockery of America’s democratic pretensions. By Handlin’s logic, moreover, it is not just immigration restrictions that are offensive. If an immigration law that is designed to preserve the nation’s ethnic majority is racist (because it implicitly puts down other groups), then the same must be true of any manifestation of the ethnic majority, including its very existence. After all, if a nation still has an ethnic majority, and a culture that reflects that majority, doesn’t that impute inferiority to all people not related by blood to that majority? Therefore the only way to procure real democracy is to turn the ethnic majority into a minority, which is to be accomplished (and since 1965 has largely been accomplished) by immigration.
Question: Why did Handlin bristle at the supposed second class citizenship of white ethnics, including Italians, but the Italians didn’t? A theory: The Jews feel they can never assimilate, that they will always be outsiders. Since they will always be outsiders, they must valorize the outsider status. Italians by contrast don’t feel like outsiders, and do feel that they can assimilate, so they were not disturbed by the majority’s reduction of Italian immigration in the 1921 and 1924 laws.
In 2000, 48 years after Handlin’s article, Ron Unz wrote in Commentary about the coming nonwhite America and said that the main thing to be concerned about was—no, not what all these non-Western immigrant groups would do to America, but that there might be a white backlash. The problem in Commentary’s eyes was still America’s white majority and what it might do.
The 1965 Immigration Act, the culmination of a forty-year, largely Jewish-led campaign, was not simply a piece of “liberal” legislation (i.e., an act aimed at formal equality) which later turned out to have unforeseen, radical consequences. As early as 1952, the liberal idea of equality before the law was already linked in the minds of Jewish immigrationists with the radical project of dispossessing America’s white, Anglo-Saxon, Christian majority.
The aim is to destroy the majority culture
As was the case with the campaign against Christianity in the public schools, there is a vanishingly thin line between the Jewish desire to be protected from the majority culture, and the Jewish desire to destroy the majority culture. For many Jews, white gentile society, in and of itself, is a threat. Earl Raab, of Brandeis University’s Institute for Jewish Advocacy and a columnist for the Jewish Bulletin, welcomes the prospect of whites becoming a minority in the U.S., because it means that “[w]e have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country.” [Earl Raab, Jewish Bulletin, February 19, 1993, 23, quoted by Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation, p. 120.]
We should not ignore the implications of this appalling comment. In Raab’s mind, a white majority, by its very existence, poses a never-ending threat of Nazism. White gentiles, left to themselves, are all potential Nazis. When Patrick Buchanan criticized President Clinton for welcoming the end of America’s “dominant European culture,” New York Post reader Joshua Sohn wrote:
The most tragic events in American history have surrounded the attempted entrenchment of the majority European culture at the expense of non-Europeans. If Mr. Buchanan is right and the dominant European culture … is on the way down, I would like to thank Mr. Clinton for his immigration policy and wish it nothing but success. [Italics added]. [Joshua Sohn, letter to editor, New York Post, July (no date), 1997.]
If any effort to preserve a European majority culture is wicked and harmful, it follows that the European majority culture itself is wicked and harmful. Therefore Sohn applauds its coming demise.
For some Jews, the desire to destroy white society is not based on any perceived threat posed by that society, but on pure animus. When Charles Moore of the London Spectator described how his Muslim neighbors prayed loudly next-door during the Gulf War in 1991, and spoke of his worries of what would happen to England if the number of Muslims kept increasing, an enraged Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, fired off this riposte:
Three cheers, I say, for the neighbors. I hope that they pray noisily, and that they pray five times a day, and that the evening prayer comes just as the Moores and the Mellors and turning to the claret … It is amusing to watch the colonizers complain about being colonized. [The New Republic, January 6, 1992.]
Wieseltier is not exactly shy in his hatred. He mocks an Englishmen’s fears about the survival of English culture. He rejoices at the thought of Englishmen being discomforted, disoriented, and displaced in their own country by Muslims. If anyone is driven by an ethnic animus, surely it is Wieseltier and the many Jews who think and feel as he does.
All of which brings us to a disturbing question which, unfortunately, no honest mind can ignore.
As everyone knows, Jews are deeply interested in their collective survival as a people. This is reflected both in fears that the growing Israeli-Arab population may threaten the Jewish state, and in fears that intermarriage is shrinking American Jewry. In his book Fear or Faith: How Jews Can Survive in Christian America, Elliot Abrams has argued that if Jews don’t want to go extinct, then, when it comes to choosing a mate, Jews must care not just about the contents of a person’s character, but about whether that person is Jewish. Most Jews (and most Christians) take it for granted that these are legitimate concerns. The Jews feel that they have a right to homogeneity and collective survival. But, as we have seen, the Jews deny this same right to white gentiles.
Alan Dershowitz, for example, mercilessly blasts gentiles who excluded Jews from historically gentile institutions. As a Yale law student he discovered that many Wall Street law firms deliberately limited the number of Jews they hired, an experience he describes as
my introduction to the world of bigotry, discrimination, racism, and anti-Semitism called the American bar. Its distinguished leaders—who are still honored by law school scholarships, in paintings in law libraries, and in the mastheads of the great firms—were operating an apartheid-like system of law practice, nearly a decade after Brown v. Board of Education and nearly two decades after the Nuremberg trials. [p.52.]
Yet having equated the social selectivity of old-line Anglo law firms with apartheid and Nazism, Dershowitz describes his own lifestyle as a Yale law student during the period when he was applying for a job in those firms:
I ate only kosher food and therefore could not eat lunch with my classmates in the common dining room. My wife packed me a sandwich each morning and I ate with a few married friends who also brown-bagged it…. I was an active participant in the class at Yale Law School, and yet as an Orthodox Jew I remained apart from its social fabric. [p. 57.]
He lived a life apart as a Jew, yet at the same time he expected high-society lawyers to staff their firms with people who couldn’t socialize with them. And he calls them bigots for not wanting to do this!
Dershowitz practices a similarly brazen double standard in his attack on past Ivy League administrators for placing ceilings on the number of Jewish students they admitted in the 1920s:
The “great” men who administered this systematic discrimination today have buildings named after them in Harvard Yard. Their names are honored by students who have no idea that these men were a pack of dishonest bigots unworthy of respect or emulation. Whenever I am asked to speak in any of these buildings, I go out of my way to educate the students about the awful men whose names are memorialized by these edifices…. [President A. Lawrence Lowell] should be honored by no one other than the Ku Klux Klan. [Emphases added.] [pp. 69-70.]
While he wants is to make Harvard’s past leaders into non-persons for the sin of preserving the predominantly gentile character of a historically Protestant institution. Dershowitz defends the exclusively Jewish character of Israel. In a debate some years ago with the leftist Noam Chomsky, Dershowitz dismissed Chomsky’s proposal that Israel be made into a half-Jewish, half-Arab state:
“[W]hy do not considerations of self-determination and community control favor two separate states: one Jewish and one Arab? Isn’t it better for people of common background to control their own life, culture, and destiny (if they so choose), than to bring together in an artificial way people who have shown no ability to live united in peace? I confess to not understanding the logic of the proposal, even assuming its good will.” [Chutzpah, p. 199.]
Dershowitz regards Jewish homogeneity is natural, normal, necessary, and unquestionable, while he regards gentile homogeneity as the equivalent of absolute evil. Similarly, he presents a nuanced treatment of the Arab refugee problem, arguing that the departure of Arabs from Israel in 1948 was a minor matter compared to the much worse refugee situations that have occurred in the twentieth century. He concludes (entirely correctly in my opinion) that it is better for the Arab refugees to be relocated in Arab countries that to have them return to their old homes in Israel.
But when it comes to Harvard’s past policy of limiting the number of Jewish in order to maintain that institution’s historic cultural character, Dershowitz cries “bigots” and “awful men” and wants A. Lawrence Lowell’s statue removed from Harvard Yard. The deft moral nuance with which he dealt with the Palestinian refugee problem has vanished into air.
All of the above should make it clear that the Jewish double standard as embodied by Dershowitz is no mere ethnocentric bias. It is a blind, unreasonable, unappeasable force.
It is time to face the uncomfortable truth that this double standard has deep roots in Jewish culture, and in the Jews’ long history as a hated and persecuted people. According to the Talmud, which is followed by Orthodox Jews (and until two centuries ago all European Jews were orthodox), there is no common ethical standard for mankind. The Jewish laws regarding fair and humane behavior only apply to dealings with other Jews, not to dealings with gentiles, or “goyim.” A Jew, for example, is required to desecrate the Sabbath in order to save the life of a Jew. But a Jew is forbidden to desecrate the Sabbath to save the life of a gentile, unless there is a likelihood of the event become known by the gentles and thus endangering the Jews themselves. The key point is that the gentile’s life has no value in itself, but only in relation to the welfare of the Jews. [Tractate Yoma, p. 47.]
This deeply tribalistic mode of thought runs through the Talmud. If a Jew finds an item belonging to a gentile, he may keep it. If a gentile accidentally gives a Jew extra change, the Jew is not required to tell him. If a Jew has been near a dead body, he is contaminated and must be ritually cleansed. But he is not contaminated if the dead person is a goy, because the Torah commandment in this instance refers to “adam,” man, and a goy is not “adam.” As shocking as it may be to realize this, the Orthodox Jews, like many ancient or primitive peoples, only regard members of their own tribe as “man.”
In bringing these disturbing facts to light, I am not suggesting that Jews are consciously following a Talmudic program in their relations with gentiles. The Talmud is strictly followed only by traditional Orthodox Jews, a group which comprises about ten percent of American Jewry and which has no influence in the larger culture. Most modern Jews know nothing about the Talmud and the Talmudic double standard, and believe that Judaism is about universal values. What I am suggesting, however, is that this tribalist code, studied assiduously by the Jews for over two thousand years, has been unconsciously internalized in the Jewish psyche and value system, even among modern Jews who may be entirely unfamiliar with Talmudic teaching. Further, I would suggest that what makes this tribalism so enduring—and so effective in subverting other tribes—is that it sees itself as universal. Ancient Israel was never simply a tribe like others, but a tribe that had been chosen by the Creator of the Universe to bring his truth to mankind. In the same way, modern Jews employ “universalist” ideals to justify what is often a tribal agenda. What else can explain the fact that so many secular Jews, who see themselves as the champions of the “Other,” have no regard for the subjectivity of the Other if the Other is a white Christian? What else can explain the fact that Jews demand homogeneity and group survival for themselves, and deny the same to others?
This pervasive double standard is the heart of the “Jewish problem,” and there is nothing anti-Semitic—i.e. there is nothing immoral—about pointing it out. Just as it is not racist to say that a significant part of the black community has wrong and harmful attitudes which blacks need to amend and which whites should no longer accept, it is not anti-Semitic to say that a significant part of the Jewish community has wrong and harmful attitudes that Jews need to amend and that others should no longer accept.
Why Jews fear America
These insights into the tribalism and the (often unconscious) double standard that lie at the core of the Jewish psyche, including their (unconscious) disregard for the subjectivity of the white gentile, help us understand other Jewish attitudes. In advancing their anti-majoritarian and countercultural agendas, Jews of various political stripes have been driven, not just by peculiarly Jewish ideals, but by peculiarly Jewish fears. Their main fear is that if America defines itself as a nation, and not just as a democratic or capitalist ideology, then the Jews will be excluded from that nation, or at least be forced into second-class status within it. While the fear is understandable given the Jews’ history of persecution and exclusion in the Old World, it is totally unjustified in America.
Consider the belief of Alan Dershowitz and his friends that that the Jews are second class citizens in America and will always remain so:
All of my friends have personally experienced the second class status they feel. They have been passed over for jobs that were given to less qualified non-Jews. They have felt the sting of rejection in some social settings. They see the real America in which they live. [And what is the “real” America—a Klan rally?] They point to the fact that we have never had a Jewish president, vice president, speaker of the House, or chief justice…. “How many Jews anchor the national, or even local news?” Carl asks. [Dershowitz, p. 324].
In addition to these preposterous “proofs” of second class status, Dershowitz adduces the “shocking” fact that, despite Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish writings (for which the Protestant churches have apologized), “Luther’s ignoble name is still honored rather than forever cursed by mainstream Protestant churches.” [Emphasis added.] [p. 107.] Apparently, unless the Protestant churches abjure the name of their founder, and thus their very identity, they will still be, in Dershowitz’s view, bigoted. Similarly, he attacks Justice Sandra Day O’Connor for having affirmed that past Supreme Court decisions called America a Christian nation: “Justice O’Connor should be ashamed of herself for aiding and abetting religious bigotry.” [p. 323.] Thus to call America a Christian nation, or even to state the historical fact that America was once called a Christian nation, is “bigotry” in Dershowitz’s mind. Meanwhile, Jews can maintain a distinct Jewish peoplehood in the midst of America and can define America any way they like.
When we hesitate to embrace American nationhood out of fear that it would reduce Jews to second-class citizens, we should recall the Jews’ ongoing indictments of American and Christian “bigotry.” We must take cognizance of the amazing fact that many American Jews see themselves as second-class citizens even today. If they can believe such an absurdity, when they are already the most powerful group for their numbers in the country, then it is safe to conclude that they will always complain that they are second-class citizens, that they will always see America as bigoted and anti-Semitic—until, that is, America ceases to exist as a predominantly white, Christian country.
To take the analysis one step further, one reason many Jews have this ungrateful and ungrounded suspicion of America is that Jews, even patriotic Jews, have never truly identified themselves with America. It isn’t so much that gentiles have excluded them, but that many Jews, even after anti-Semitism (as mild as it was) virtually disappeared from this country following World War II, and even after Jewishness became enshrined at the center of American culture in the 1960s, have continued to see themselves as a people apart. The columnist Richard Cohen once remarked that Jews are like “foreign correspondents” in this country. [Silberman, A Certain People.] In his 1967 memoir, Making It, Norman Podhoretz wrote that until he was in his twenties he never thought of himself as an American, but as a New Yorker. In his later years Podhoretz has spoken of his two loyalties—to his nation (America), and to his people (the Jews). [“A History of Commentary,” 1995.] This sounds very uplifting, until the inference sinks in that Podhoretz does not regard non-Jewish Americans as his people. In effect, he sees America as “one nation, many peoples”—which is, of course, the multiculturalist view of America.
Thus Jews distance themselves from America even as they embrace it. In a testimonial in the New York Times paid for by the American Jewish Committee, a West Point cadet named Avraam Isaacson spoke about “What Being Jewish Means to Me”:
I am heir to two great traditions—Jewish and American—which, in my view, stand for the same basic principles: the building of a more just and equitable society; the importance of caring and compassion; the defense of liberty. That’s why Jews have had a love affair with America. And that’s why I’m proud to be an American Jew and to serve my country.
While this seems terribly patriotic at first glance, there is something forced in Isaacson’s notion of having a “love affair” with America. Patriots don’t normally speak of having a “love affair” with their country. They belong to their country, they are linked to it by ties of history and loyalty and devotion. To declare publicly that you have a love affair with America is to place America outside yourself. In Isaacson’s case, it is to see America as the object of an ideological passion, an object one seeks to possess as the fulfillment of (or rather as the instrument of) one’s left-liberal ideals. While this may be an admirable impulse, it is not the same thing as love of country. It also implies that if America did not practice those left-liberal ideals, then Isaacson wouldn’t love it. But then a love affair by its nature is a temporary thing.
Movie critic Michael Medved made a similarly revealing comment when he was asked by an interviewer why he did not follow his father when his father moved to Israel some years ago. Medved answered: “I believe the future of mankind depends to a tremendous extent on what happens in this country.” [Interview on C-SPAN, Dec 27, 1992.] In other words, Medved chose to stay in America, not because it is his country, but because he sees it as an instrument to help mankind.
Over and over, Jewish-American patriotism seems to be based on some factor extrinsic to America itself. According to a history of neoconservatism written by the editors of Commentary, non-Marxist leftist Jews in the 1940s, the ideological forebears of the neocons, abandoned their former hostility to America (which they had seen as a sterile land of Babbitry) when they saw America’s effectiveness in combating Nazism. This strikes me as an unconscious admission that the neoconservatives don’t love America for itself, they love America because it advances global causes that the neoconservatives support. Similarly, the 1960s radical David Ifshin, who had once given an anti-American broadcast over Radio Hanoi, suddenly converted to pro-Americanism when President Nixon’s arms shipments helped save Israel during the 1973 War. As Eric Breindel put it in an admiring column at the time of Ifshin’s death in 1996, Ifshin had “experienced an awakening: The righteous might of the United States of America was a force for good. In fact, Ifshin had concluded, it was the greatest force for good on earth.” [Eric Breindel, “David Ifshin: 1949-96,” New York Post, May 2, 1996]. Thus Ifshin began to like America because it was a force for “good”—and it was a force for “good” (notice the unconscious narcissism) because it helped Israel. While Ifshin’s new-found affection for America was entirely understandable, I would suggest that it was not the same thing as love of country as that phrase is normally understood.
It must also be admitted that a significant number of American Jews don’t seem to regard America as their country at all. After one of the suicide bombing attacks in Israel in 1995, in which an American girl studying in Israel was killed, other young American Jews told the New York Times why they planned to go back to Israel despite the danger. Matthew Binstock of Mamaroneck, New York said: “It’s Israel. I belong there.” Miss Sivan Gottlieb, also of Mamaroneck, said: It’s my home. It’s my country and I love it. I’m not going to leave.” While these young people are to be admired for their courage and devotion to their country, the inevitable question from an American point of view is: If Israel is their country, what are they doing here? Like many immigrants from Latin America and Asia, some American and Israeli Jews regard the United States as a place to stop off, visit friends, go to school, make some money, or enjoy some R&R, while their real life and loyalties remain centered in their ethnic homeland. [Robert Hanley, “Study in Israel: Shaken Youths, Unshaken Resolve,” New York Times, April 15, 1995, A. 21,22.]
An even more pronounced sense of disengagement from America can be seen in Jewish schools. In Hasidic yeshivas in this country, young Jews learn nothing about American history, lore, and literature; indeed, many American-born Hasids barely learn how to speak and write English. Even in modern Orthodox day schools, the pictures, poems, maps, and displays—everything that symbolizes the collective identity and mythopoetic life of a school—is exclusively about Jews and Israel. America—its history and heroes, its wars and tragedies, its great controversies and accomplishments, its geography and political system—is literally not on the chart.
The Jews are not, of course, alone in this shameful neglect of American identity. Even in mainstream, predominately white gentile schools, the stories and songs and observances that used to connect young people with our nation’s past have been replaced by multiculturalism, feminism, minority rights, consumerism and one-worldism. How can Jewish schools be blamed for failing to transmit a sense of American identity when the American majority has done the same?
The answer is that the Jews played a leading role in stripping the altars of American nationhood. Just as nonwhites have forced racial diversity on formerly all-white, mainstream institutions while maintaining their own, ethnically exclusive organizations, Jews have stripped the public schools of their Christian customs and American national traditions, while maintaining exclusive Jewish schools with Jewish traditions.
Subversion through popular culture
In addition to transforming American ideology and national identity, Jews have also, through their extraordinary influence in entertainment and media, changed the style and soul of American popular culture and manners. This is a vast and complicated subject, and all I can do here is try to suggest a few aspects of it.
Here is one glimpse into this phenomenon. Up to the 1950s, school yearbooks and student newspapers were rather serious affairs, without the smiling photographs and self-mocking humor that began to appear in the late 1950s. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, this style of self-mockery and put-down, which had originally percolated into the general culture from Jewish comedians and entertainers, became a dominant feature in the general culture. The harm that was done to the culture, at least in the earlier stages of this process, was not deliberate. The Jews could indulge in in-your-face schtick without harming their culture because it was part of their culture. But its effect on WASPs was quietly devastating. The pop Freudianism of Jewish humor, in which each attitude of the self is immediately exposed as a cover-up for some craven or sexual impulse, has fatally weakened the Anglo-Protestant self, undermining virtues of modesty and self-control, respect for authority, and other values of the older American ethos.
Over and over, Jewish attitudes that had first appeared in mainstream entertainment in the form of harmless comic relief evolved into dominant cultural modes. In 1971, Woody Allen’s brilliant romantic comedy Play it Again Sam, with its insecure, fumbling protagonist, made it socially acceptable for a grown man to be a neurotic. Yet the movie was still basically affirmative, since Allen’s protagonist, despite his angst, nobly gives up the woman he loves, successfully imitating his screen hero Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. The Jewish neurotic becomes a man by modeling himself after an Anglo-Saxon stoic. But by the 1980s, neurotic, hysterical men (who no longer emulate strong men but resent them) had become an accepted norm, not only in innumerable movies and TV shows, but in life. A sign of the times was the man with the pony tail at the 1992 Presidential debate who asked the candidates: “As our symbolic father figure, what are you going to do to meet our needs?” An even grimmer sign was that none of the candidates, including World War II veteran George Bush, rebuffed the fellow for his infantile remark. Woody Allen’s own descent, both artistic and personal, from off-beat humorist to full-blown, self-absorbed nihilist also reflects this decline.
Up to the early 1960s, Jewish comedians pushed the envelope of bourgeois selfhood without trying to destroy it. They remained loyal to, if at the edges of, middle-class normalcy. But by the 1970s, the comic puncturing of the bourgeois had turned into a deliberate program of subversion. In such programs as MASH, the straight, up-tight, pro-authority characters served as contemptible foils for the irreverent, anti-authoritarian, sexually liberated protagonists. In several of television’s most successful sitcoms over the years, the main object of contempt has been a handsome, mentally defective WASP. What John Murray Cuddihy called the “ethnic-specific animus of Freud and Eastern European Jewry generally against Gentile civility” had moved from the esoteric world of the academic literary culture into the world of mass entertainment.
The anti-WASP campaign has been even more pronounced in drama and suspense genres, where it has also intensified over the decades. In every episode of the 1970s detective series Columbo (written by Steven Bochco, later the producer of such flamboyantly decadent programs as L.A. Law and N.Y.P.D. Blue), the slovenly ethnic hero exposed a cool WASP patrician as a murderer. The ethnic-specific animus, partly concealed as a class animus, remained relatively low key, even humorous; the murder was never performed on camera; and Colombo’s prey remained polite if increasingly irritable, even as Columbo zeroed in on him. But by twenty years later, the anti-WASP animus in film and TV had evolved into a formalized demonology. The cold-hearted, inhuman WASP—the WASP as super-Nazi—has been a regular fixture in one suspense/action movie after another, providing second careers for such middle-aged actors as Donald Sutherland and John Voigt. In the 1994 movie Outbreak, Sutherland plays a top U.S. Army general with an inhumanly cold voice and inhumanly sinister features, who turns out to be the leader of a monstrous conspiracy to kill thousands of American civilians with biological weapons. But never fear: Dustin Hoffman—the Jew now cast as action hero—and his brilliant black sidekick heroically foil the plot. A particularly common device in these movies, reflecting the Jewish-liberal obsession with uncovering WASP evil, is to have an apparent good guy revealed as a villain. Thus handsome, courtly John Voigt, as Tom Cruise’s mentor and friend in Mission Impossible, turns out to be a cold-hearted murderer. Then there are the innumerable made-for-TV movies, most of them written by Jewish women, in which a normal-appearing husband becomes a pathological monster. Indeed, if any character in a drama or suspense movie nowadays seems upright and strong, or is an older authority figure, or is tall, regular-featured, and fair, you can be sure that before long he will be revealed as a devil. Yet this ongoing, ethnic-specific, assault on the white or WASP man, like so many other appalling things in our nihilist society, is never even remarked upon, let alone protested, not even by conservatives (conservatives are only offended by entertainments that are patently pornographic or anti-religious). Imagine how Jews or blacks would react if one big-budget movie after another featured an obvious Jewish or black proxy as a caricature of absolute evil.
The pop-kulturkampf against manhood, against authority, and against the Anglo-Protestant ethos, are all part of the same campaign, largely led and inspired by liberal Jews.
The above discussion, brief and unsatisfactory as it has been, illustrates once again our theme of inclusion leading to destruction. Eastern European Jews, with their discontented, irrepressible temperament, were admitted as equals into a culture that had been formed by Anglo-Saxons and other northern European-origin people, with their pacific, self-controlled temperament. The former outsiders then proceeded to make their own sensibility the center of the culture, while diminishing and demonizing the Anglo-Saxon.
Hoist by their own petard
As they work to dismantle America’s majority culture through mass immigration, diversity, the subversion of mainstream values, and the mainstreaming of countercultural values, those Jews who are waging the Kulturkampt have failed to realize that they are cutting off the civilization they are sitting on. Leftist Jews in particular are dumbfounded when the anti-Westernism they have been promoting recoils back upon themselves. Michael Lerner, for example, has repeatedly portrayed America as an evil oppressor nation—a “social system whose current distribution of wealth and power is based on the stealing of land from the American Indians, the enslavement of Blacks, the degradation of women, and the systematic exploitation of many generations of immigrants,” as he put it in a typical diatribe in his journal Tikkun. Yet elsewhere Lerner has expressed horror at the fact that nonwhite multiculturalists see the Jews as part of this oppressive white system. Blinded by his anti-majority passion, Lerner cannot understand that in contemporary America, where Jews (for their numbers) are the most wealthy and powerful group, nonwhites are hardly likely to see the Jews as an “oppressed” minority like themselves. [“Six Days Shalt Thou Work,” Michael Lerner, Tikkun, Nov/Dec 1993, p. 35.]
Similarly, Professor Susannah Heschel, writing in Tikkun, was shocked that among liberal Germans who are friendly to Jews, there is a broad acceptance of anti-Semitic ideas. It seems that these contemporary Germans view the Old Testament as the fulminating source of contemporary injustices, including Nazism, since the Jewish Bible condones authoritarianism, exclusion, racism, and genocide. But Heschel has it all wrong. She assumes that leftist Germans are asserting anti-Jewish ideas, when in fact they are only repeating the generic anti-Westernism that has been disseminated so effectively by progressive Jews such as Heschel herself. Since Germans have been taught to see the West as hegemonic, warlike, and racist, isn’t it only natural that they would also view one of primary sources of the West—the Hebrew Bible—in exactly the same terms?
While the absence of self-awareness among Jewish leftists is only laughable, the blindness of the mainstream Jewish community is a serious matter. In their tireless campaign for mass immigration and cultural diversity—motivated by conscious or unconscious hostility to the white Christian majority—Jews are helping destroy the very way of life that made a happy Jewish existence in this country possible. Despite some anti-Jewish prejudice and social exclusions in the early twentieth century, Jews found in America a stable environment where they were protected, where they prospered, and where they felt fully comfortable for the first time in two thousand years. That environment was a white society with a Christian religion and an Anglo-Saxon code of conduct. As America becomes nonwhite and non-Western, will that code, and those protections, endure? As Alan Mittleman argues,
The breakdown of a common culture and the drift toward multiculturalism, which Jews support, pose real hazards for American Jews, because they weaken the citizenship on which Jewish participation in modern society is based…. If people revert to more primordial forms of belonging, civil society will dissolve and American Jews might find themselves in what the prophet Ezekiel called a midbar hammim, a wilderness of the peoples. This would be a nightmarish denouement. [Alan L. Mittleman, “Jews in Multicultural America,” First Things, December 1996, p. 17.]
One notable feature of this coming “wilderness of peoples,” in which Jews will lose all security, is the black racialism that is rising as the dominant white culture declines. In the lawless Third-World America of the coming century, do Jews think they will be able to count on Dominicans and Chinese and Arabs and Mexicans to protect them from black anti-Semites?
Another prospect emerging from the wilderness of peoples will be an upsurge of anti-Semitism among marginalized whites, many of whom will blame the Jews (not without cause) for the ruin of white civilization. Having acted all along on the ludicrous and hostile assumption that the white American majority is a potential neo-Nazi force that must be dispossessed, Jews will hardly be in a position to complain about real anti-Semitism when it appears among whites who have actually been dispossessed.
In failing to consider these possibilities, pro-immigration Jews are as unthinking as pro-immigration blacks. Both blacks and Jews support a policy that is leading to the end of white America, even though that will remove from power the only group that has a cultural bond or moral obligation to them. In the case of both blacks and Jews, a combination of ethnic élan, anti-majority resentment, and old-fashioned will to power are blinding them to their true, long-range interests.
How to oppose the Jewish agenda without anti-Semitism
Even though Jews will ultimately benefit from a politics of white self-defense, such a politics necessarily means opposing the current Jewish agenda and power structure, and therefore will inevitably provoke false charges of anti-Semitism. However, it also involves the possibility of sparking real anti-Semitism. To prevent that from happening, we must provide a moral framework in which to place this issue, a framework that applies not just to Jews but to all groups and all human beings.
The classical philosophers taught the virtue of sophrosyne, or temperance, by which the respective parts of man’s being or of society restrain themselves to their proper tasks and function harmoniously within the whole. In terms of minority-majority relations, this was the situation that obtained in America in the pre-Sixties period, when minorities happily accepted the fact that they were minorities and deferred to the majority culture. But in the post-War period, culminating in the Sixties, American Jews came into their own. Jewish writers and intellectuals were celebrated as exemplary Americans, their ideas and obsessions no longer seen so much as Jewish as simply American. Jewishness lost its otherness and was planted at the center of American politics and culture. Jews became fully “comfortable” in America for the first time, free to “be themselves.” While there were positive aspects to this development, the down side was that the Jews became too comfortable, and fell into the egoism and arrogance to which all human nature is subject. Judge Bazelon’s winking request to his law clerks to come up with a “writ of rachmones” in place of U.S. Constitutional law is an example of such arrogance. Of course, in Allan Dershowitz’s view, not having to worry about what the goyim think is the mark of first-class Jewish citizenship. Yet, as we can see in Bazelon’s case, the practical result of being free of that worry was that the Jews began to treat their own ideas and sensibility—the Jewish sense of righteousness, the extravagant Jewish concern for the underdog, and the age-old Jewish resentment against the white Christian majority—as the model for all society. Thus a tiny minority began to act as though it were the majority, subject to no law outside itself. In this manner, a polity governed by sophrosyne was replaced by a polity governed by chutzpah.
The problem is not the Jewish sensibility. The Jewish sensibility has its own integrity and its own value as a minority perspective within Western civilization. The problem is that the Jews, in the absence of healthy majority resistance, have virtually made their sensibility the ruling sensibility of America. The problem is not Jews or Jewish characteristics or Jewish culture or even “Jewish influence.” The problem is the excess of Jewish influence which has manifested simultaneously with, and has been a principal contributing factor to, the spiritual collapse of America’s former majority culture.
What is needed, then, is not an attack on Jews but rather a counterforce to excessive Jewish influence. Just as a child becomes spoiled if its parents automatically yield to its whims, so a minority group becomes spoiled if it faces no counterforce from the larger society. Jews face no such counterforce, being literally the only group in America about whom nothing critical can be safely said. (Note added in 2013: While this statement was true up to ten or twenty years ago. it no longer is true, because with the ever-increasing abasement of white America before blacks, nothing critical may be safely said anymore of blacks.) When Ben Wattenberg effuses dithyrambically about America’s becoming a Universal Nation; when Julian Simon brags about getting tears in his eyes when he tells people about America’s new immigrant groups; when Abe Rosenthal calls for ticker tape parades for illegal aliens and declares his solidarity with illegal aliens against the Border Patrol; or when Allan Dershowitz, after attacking as “awful men” and “bigots” the honorable men who sought to preserve America’s historic Anglo-Protestant culture and identity and insists on the right of Jews to maintain a collective Jewish culture and identity, we need to understand that Wattenberg, Simon, Rosenthal, and Dershowitz are not simply putting forth false and harmful sentiments—they are putting forth prototypical Jewish sentiments, and anointing them as the governing principles of America. To seek to transform America into a Messianic project, to identify with the Other (whoever the Other may be) at the expense of the native majority, to deny to the native majority its ethnic identity while indulging in one’s own ethnic identity—this is not just a bad agenda, it is a Jewish agenda, and it is entirely moral for citizens of a free country to criticize it as such. Just as it is not racist to oppose a Hispanic or black or Asian agenda that weakens America, so it is not anti-Semitic to oppose a Jewish agenda that weakens America.
The moral and civilized solution to the Jewish problem is the same as it is for all minority and immigrant groups. Minorities must realize that they are minorities. Immigrants must realize they are not running things. There used to be a majoritarian force of resistance against immigrants, telling them they had to defer to the rules of the majority culture if they wanted to be accepted as full members in it. But with the advent of mass nonwhite immigration and other cultural upheavals, that opposing force has been taken away. Now even brand-new immigrants are openly contemptuous of America. Their American-raised children are worse. Immigrant college students deny there is such a thing as an American culture to which they owe deference. The same loss of deference is seen among some Catholic immigration advocates, who openly seek to use mass immigration to turn America into a Catholic country. The same has been true of blacks, who instead of having to pay deference to the standards of white majority, now have whites pay endless deference to them—with the resulting unleashing of an exaggerated sense of black entitlement, of immorality, violence, racialist juries, and all the rest of it. And the same is true of Jews, who, no longer facing any resistance from the majority, feel that their sentiments, their extravagant humanitarianism, their contempt for authority, deference, and restraint, and most of all their animus against the white gentile culture, must be the model for all society.
There is no question here of an enforced conformity. People in this country are free to identify with America’s historic culture to whatever degree they like. Jews and other minorities have the right to maintain their ethnic identity and promote their ethnic interests. But if they choose to do so, then they should also accept the proper consequence of that choice—which is that their sentiments and policy preferences will be seen as those of a minority, not as authoritative for the country as a whole. If America is to be restored as a nation, we must put to an end the pious fraud we have practiced since the 1960s, of simultaneously granting ethnic minorities the right to assert their distinct identity, and the right to speak for America as a whole, in which capacity they have stripped America of its identity.
Auster’s “Our Borders, Ourselves.”
