Kevin Barrett & Kevin MacDonald on “Extreme Hyper-Ethnocentrism of Jews (Re: Gaza)

 

[In this video Kevin Barrett talks with Dr Kevin MacDonald, and says:

“Evolutionary psychology scholar Kevin MacDonald discusses his new article ‘The Extreme Hyper-Ethnocentrism of Jews on Display in Israeli Attitudes Toward the Gaza War’ In it, he writes:

‘At least until the Gaza war, Jews have successfully depicted themselves as moral paragons and as champions of the downtrodden in the contemporary West…

This Jewish pose of moral superiority is a dangerous delusion, and we must be realistic what the future holds as Whites continue to lose political power in all Western countries. When the gloves come off, there is no limit to what Jews in power may do if their present power throughout the West continues to increase.

The ubiquitous multicultural propaganda of ethnic groups living in harmony throughout the West will quickly be transformed into a war of revenge for putative historical grievances that Jews harbor against the West, from the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans to the events of World War II.
This same revenge was fatal to many millions of Russians and Ukrainians. It’s the fate of the Palestinians that we are seeing unfold before our eyes.”

– KATANA]

TRANSCRIPT
(Words: 6,713 – 45:51 mins)

Kevin Barrett: Welcome Droopsy Hot Radio, broadcasting live from the [word unclear], the rooftop studio here in beautiful Stadia, Morocco. I’m Kevin Barrett, bringing on the most controversial, interesting, thoughtful, and often well informed guests that you’ll ever see in audio and video. And we are, of course, broadcasting live in video now here on Revolution Radio. Where you can find the ultimate in the free speech experience. No de-platforming, no censorship, nothing like that here at Revolution Radio.

Please support Revolution Radio however you can go to that website and figure out how. You can support me Kevin Barrett, at Kevin Barrett dot Substack.com. You can also check out my column over at the Unz’s Review at unzreview.com dot, and you can go to truthjihad.com to find even more rubrics. And I do still edit over at Veterans Today.

All right, let’s see what we can get going with here we have an interesting lineup today as usual. In the second hour, Fadi Lama comes on with an incredible new book which I finally got a chance to read. It’s called Why the West Can’t Win. And it’s a very good read. It goes into all of the reasons for the rise of the money power bankster dictatorship in the Western world, and the reasons that that dictatorship or that attempt to create a one world order based on the power of usury is, in fact, doomed! He provides strong empirical evidence for that.

Doctor Fadi Lama is a PhD in engineering, mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and he is also at, what does he have, other engineering degrees from other institutions! He’ll come on in the second hour.

The first hour, Doctor Kevin MacDonald just put out a great new piece called The Extreme Hyper Ethnocentrism of Jews on Display in Israeli Attitude Towards the Gaza War. And that’s what we’re going to talk about in the first hour, if we can find Kevin MacDonald. There we go.

Hello, Kevin. I can hear you now.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, I don’t know what happened. Turned all the way up. It never had not worked before. I don’t understand it. I don’t get it.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, well, I mean, it’s always conceivable that some of the usual suspects are sabotaging us, but it’s also quite possible that something else is going on. But I don’t know what it would be.

So let’s talk about your new article. I was just introducing it on the Extreme Hyper Ethnocentrism of jews on Display in Israeli Attitude Towards the Gaza War. And the striking things about your article, I guess, are the pretty serious warning about the fate of Gaza could be the fate of other countries and of the West. A lot of people, of course, would think that’s exaggerated. I’m not so sure.

So maybe you can elaborate on that. Why is the genocidal mania that’s overtaken Israel is related to jewish ethnocentrism and how that’s actually a threat to the West as well?

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, well, I think every time jews have had, you know, absolute power, as they did in the Soviet Union for 20, 30 years there, and they have exercised it brutally against their enemies. And I’m concerned that we’ll see that again.

Now, you see, and you see it, you know, look at the Old Testament. I mean, all the injunctions for all the desires for genocide of these people who are their enemies. And all the jewish religious writing saying basically that gentiles are another species, they’re below us, they’re basically animals and that sort of thing.

And then you see that rhetoric regarding the Palestinians, and you will see that regarding Europeans. Because if and when we lose power, we haven’t lost power yet, obviously.

But I’m just concerned about the future because clearly the jewish establishment is desiring more and more immigration. So all the Western European countries, United States, Canada, Australia, they will all be minority White countries at some point. White people may not have enough power, political power, to really resist what is going on. And I just fear that jewish ethics is entirely self centered! For the interests of the group, nothing more! And completely the opposite of western ethics, which is universalist. You know, Kant’s categorical imperative.

Basically, you do what anybody else could do in that situation, you’d be okay with it.

So it’s like that sort of western universalism, which is unique in the world, really. Other cultures tend to be very ethocentric and they privileged their own group. But the West has this long liberal tradition really stemming from the Enlightenment, but in a way going earlier than that. And I trace it back to evolutionary roots in my book on Western Individualism. But that’s the basic idea that the West is tied to universalism. And there’s this sense that we should be universalist. It’s the moral thing to do, that we should basically take care of other people and see their point of view and all that.

Jewish ethics isn’t completely foreign! You know, it’s like you don’t care about what they think. The more Orthodox you get, and the Orthodox have taken over Israel. And I like today I get this email from Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, and he’s been in Israel. He comes back to this message and basically he says:

“What happened on October 7 was anti-semitism.”
 
And you always see this by the jewish apologists that there is no context to what happened on October 7. There’s nothing about the blockade that’s been going on since 2003, nothing about all the oppressive policies that Israel’s engaged in over the years.

And what Israel’s doing is absolutely destroying Gaza! It’ll never really come back for years and years, if ever.

Kevin Barrett: Let me just question the idea that the West is so much more universalist and completely non-ethnocentric.
I mean, I think there’s some truths you’re talking about.

Kevin MacDonald: I don’t say it’s completely non-ethnocentric. Okay. But there certainly can be ethnocentric, but it’s relatively less than other cultures. And again, if you look at Joseph Heinrich’s book as well on Individuals in the West. He talks about how unique Western culture is. He talks about western universalism. And that’s exactly the big point of my book.

We are different. And it’s a problem now because western universalism, it’s hard to oppose these movements, these jewish intellectual movements and political movements, because they’re always phrased in universal terms. They’re always phrased in moral terms. And Westerners are suckers for that!

I mean, they want to be good people. Westerners don’t rely on kinship. They rely on being a good person in the group, having a good reputation.

And right now, Western culture is completely determined by these often jewish elites in the media and the academic world and so on.

So what needs to be a good person is to be totally accepting of immigration and your culture is nothing special, and let them come in and don’t worry about anything in the future.

But in-group out, group conflict, based on ethnicity has been going on forever, and it’s not going to stop now!

So I’m pessimistic about the future because I don’t see any big force in the West trying to turn back this tide. It’s just not going to happen.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, I actually, over time, I’ve become more sympathetic to your viewpoint. You know, when we first started having these discussions on my radio show, I don’t know, ten years ago or something, I was still, you know, kind of holding you at arm’s length and saying, but this and that.

Over time, I’ve realized that there’s a lot more truth to what you’re saying and a lot more of a good scholarly basis to your work than maybe I had realized, probably, than a lot of other people realized, too.

Let me say, however, I still think that when we talk about Western universalism, the way it manifests itself and often has in going back a ways in the history, is actually not much better, maybe even worse, than the kind of traditional tribalism of a lot of other traditional people.

That is, if you look at the way Americans behaved in Vietnam, with Korea, with Vietnam, with Indonesia in 1965, and all of these other “Holocaust”, quote, unquote, “the American Holocaust” that Chomsky and Wolczak wrote about in their book on Western terrorism, where they came up with about 60 million people murdered by US military and CIA interventions since World War Two.

The ugly American who goes to these places and murders millions of people to try to impose the American way and American hegemony on these cultures. He thinks he’s universalist, and he uses universalist propaganda in his media back home to get the people to imagine that they’re doing something universalist and non-ethnocentric. But there’s nobody more ethnocentric than an arrogant universalist who thinks that his way is the universal way!

And so I kind of question whether this so-called universalism has made Westerners so kind and nice and gentle. You know, when you take those 60 million people that the US murdered since World War Two, then you add another 30 million or so with a post 9/11 era, it seems to me that these kind general universalists are actually a lot more murderous than the tribalists.
Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, the Western culture has always been very militarized and very expansive and also been very inventive and prone to adventurism.

I mean, the Indo-European legacy in Western culture is basically that. And the West has been extremely successful, unlike other cultures when they had been able, … You look at around the world, cultures that have been successful have expanded. They have dominated other peoples and all that.

But the West, you know, there’s these two traditions in the West. One is that Indo-European militarized version, and that is still there to some extent. But you also have now, especially since 1965. I mean, before that, it was anti-communism, and they were very concerned, correctly so.

I mean, the Soviet Union was a dangerous foe, and they were opposing communism, I get it. But especially since 9/11 we’ve had these wars basically for Israel, and we have a new elite in the country. It’s a very aggressive leap. They want to maintain western hegemony desperately. That’s why we’re fighting in Ukraine, and we’re upping the ante now. They’re allowing Ukraine to target Russia. And so, yeah, that’s a part of our reality.

But you think about say, slavery. You know, we, Western conquest in America, then they brought in slaves from Africa and all that.

But, yeah, it was also, Western culture is the only culture that ended it for moral reasons. And this northern European culture of radical individualism. And they condemn slavery in the 19th century, especially the British started there, and they ended slavery in 1831. They abolished the slave trade in 1808 or something like that. And, it’s no other culture. I mean, you look around the world, slavery was endemic to just about every culture in the world.

So Western culture is now being singled out for things that other cultures have done throughout history.

But, yeah, there’s some ethnocentrism there, and it’s just relatively submerged. It’s easily overcome. I mean, you can make, they did this experiment where they had college students come in and they gave them a bunch of questions or pictures, photos, and they said:

“Well, your responses were racist, anti-semitic”
 
Or something like that. Boy, when they showed them, when they went through it again, the people responded much more slowly. They don’t want to feel they’re a bad person! And we see that over and over again, especially among women. Women want to fit into the group. They want to be nice people! And now the culture is totally anti-Western, anti-White, anti-European.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, the culture has certainly gone to extremes lately. Speaking of the tribalism and stuff, I have a good anecdote for you. I’m living in Morocco now, and I’ve had some, let’s say, difficulties working with the local zoning authorities and construction guys, putting up a little room on the top of the house to house a library.

So it’s been quite frustrating. And I talked to a couple of in-laws, a couple of friends, and they talked. They said:

“You know, if you want to get any construction done or any repairs done in Morocco, it’s hopeless! It’s crazy! These people, they’ll eat your lunch, they’ll steal you blind and stuff, and they’ll do a terrible job.”

And so I said:

“Well, so how did you guys get your excellent houses built?”
 
And they both said:

“Well, my cousin!”

Kevin MacDonald: Exactly!

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. Each of them had hired a cousin one of them had, had to fire the first guy he hired who wasn’t a cousin and bring in his cousin who just happened to show up at the right point.

And you know, that’s, I think, a kind of a common thing around the world. Doesn’t mean that there’s no use of universal dimension to the culture here or in other places where they still have these kinship ties. But it is different from the United States and also Europe today. And these cultural differences are real and you should be allowed to talk about them.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, that’s the problem with the third world, is in kinship. If you a job or something like that, you’re expected to., … Well, you expect kin to help you out, you know, as long as you’re related. It’s all about kinship. African cultures are like that. Extremely so!

It happens in Europe, but much less. That’s the thing about Europe. You have these high trust cultures where your reputation group is not dependent on being a relative. It’s dependent on, are you trustworthy, can I do business with you? That sort of thing.

And so you don’t have to rely on your cousin to build your house. And you don’t expect the person to cheat you, that sort of thing. That’s why Western culture has been so successful.

But that’s the problem. It hasn’t stopped in other parts of the world. It’s absolutely hardwired in those cultures. The Middle East, but also Africa. You know, China has always been that way, actually tribal and all that, collectivists. But they seem to be able to square the circle. But there’s a lot of corruption, but they clamp down on it, and the central government, to some extent at least, really does not want that. And they get it about trust.
Kevin Barrett: There are these ideologies, whether universalist or nationalist, that seem to play a role in kind of overcoming the tribalism.

And in fact, in Islamic history, the success of the religion of Islam and the legal system and the weights and measures and the injunctions to fair trade with everybody, not just your relatives, that played a big role in the bringing together of tribal peoples into a super tribe, or a huge world straddling kind of empire where people could trust each other. You could travel from one end of the earth to the other and not be robbed.

So, and I think with China, the ideologies of communism and now kind of Confucian nationalism play that kind of a role.

And then that leaves the question of could the West be saved by some sort of return to the religious roots that actually produced the great works of the West and produced this universalism that seems to have fallen upon hard times now as the West enters its decadent phase.

I just attended a conference in Croatia with Doctor E. Michael Jones and a bunch of Catholics. I was one of the two token Muslims there. And those folks are hoping for a revival of Catholicism to revive the West. I’m a bit skeptical, but I do think that these kinds of religions or greater religious like ideologies are really the only thing that can get people to sacrifice for something bigger than themselves and overcome these pitfalls of tribalism and human nature. But I know you’re not an advocate of that, so why not?

Kevin MacDonald: Well, I’m not religious myself. I just can’t see any evidence for it, you know, sort of scientific. And my basic paradigm is evolution and evolutionary biology, and I just don’t see room for that.

But I can see, I do think that religion is good. I mean you think about the Reconquista in Spain. They were very religious, and they treated the Muslims and threw them out. And European Christianity served Europe well for a very long time. Once you got to the 19th century and science and then, you know, militant Marxism and everything, you know, some of it is jewish, but I think a lot of it isn’t. It’s just the changes in intellectual, the scientific perspective sort of militates against that. And I don’t know!

But I do think if you look at America, religious Conservatives are, you know, mainstay in the Republican Party. You know, I don’t agree with all their substantive things.

I mean, they seem obsessed with abortion. But they’re good on average.

But then you look at the mainstream religions and they’re all into this stuff, and it’s pretty much universal, the Southern Baptist. I mean, the officialdom there. For example, James Edwards is a good guy who’s in Tennessee, political, successful guy. He’s been basically shunned by these people.

And I grew up Catholic and Catholic Church, as far as I can see, the pope is a communist. I mean, he’s way on the Left.

Kevin Barrett: Well, he did just say something about how there’s too much faggotry these day!

Kevin MacDonald: Too much what?

Kevin Barrett: He used to use the slur, the anti-homosexual slur. He said there was too much faggotry in the Church. [chuckling]

Kevin MacDonald: And then he profusely apologized.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah.

Kevin MacDonald: I mean, it is true. But he’s been all in favor of immigration and all that.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, yeah. That’s why this made such a big splash was its the first thing this pope has ever done that wasn’t politically correct and woke!

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, exactly!

Kevin Barrett: But, Kevin, don’t you think, though, that the issue here is really that these, you know what’s left of Christianity in the West is mostly just sort of fronting for the real religion of the West, which is secular, progressive, materialist humanisms and that that real religion which has underline all of these kinds of liberal tendencies that you and I both are skeptical about, that actual religion, which involves something overcoming the normal human condition in a kind of pretty extreme submission to something greater than the self and to transcendent values, which is very foreign, of course, to the secular outlook, but also to the kind of these namby pamby liberal religions that we’re talking about today as not being solutions. I agree they’re not. But I think I’ve heard arguments, including from some recent radio show guests, that real religion actually might be the solution.

But the only way it’s ever going to come back is when the civilization collapses and people are fighting for survival in red and tooth and claw.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, I mean, this, you know, Western culture has been expansive that we’ve said, and it’s also with capitalism, it’s greedy, materialism, and we want things, and as all humans do. Everybody would be rich than poor, I guess.

Kevin Barrett: Kevin, if you could hold your phone a little stiller, that would be better because we’re getting a lot of, …

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, it’s what the Western culture is now ugly! You know, I’m rooting for Russia in the Ukraine war because to me, Western culture is completely bankrupt! You know, it’s gone, completely woke.

And if Ukraine would win, you’d have more mass immigration, there would be, religion would take a dive ultimately, and Ukraine would just become another vassal of the West, where traditional Ukrainian culture would be condemned, as there already. There’s a long, fraught history with jews and Ukrainians.

But anyway, you know, that’s the problem. The West is completely corrupt as far as I can see, and it’s not getting any better. In a sense, it is, as you say, I mean, secular humanism, greed, wanting material things and that sort of thing. That’s what we want.

Kevin Barrett: And how about what’s the role of this jewish ethnocentrism that you just wrote about in this new article in The Decline of the West and even a threat of some kind of global tyranny. We know that the mythology of jewish religion involves, as you wrote in the article, kind of these messianic millenarian expectations that the jews will one day triumph over the goyim or all the non-jewish peoples and basically enslave them and rule the earth.

And we do see that jews have become the most powerful ethnic group in the world probably, by taking over the US Empire. And now they’re completely out of control in their own ethno-state over an occupied Palestine and ready to tear down the Islamic world’s oldest and greatest architectural monument, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and put up a blood sacrifice temple and start sacrificing pink heifers to symbolize this new era in which jews rule the world. And their mythology tells them that every jew will have, I forget how many thousands of goyim slaves.
Now, of course, that all sounds pretty exaggerated and it sounds like a pipe dream, but the role that jews are playing in this process does seem outsized and rather dangerous and destructive, does it not?

Kevin MacDonald: It is very destructive and dangerous. And we see that Israel is continuing this offensive in the south of Gaza now, despite the fact that all these nations, I mean, it’s hard to, I can’t think of any country that’s gung-ho in favor of what Israel’s doing, but they’re just thumbing their nose at it. They don’t care! Your international criminal court, what was the arrest, Netanyahu and all that, it doesn’t matter. They are in the driver’s seat and they know they have America completely in their hands! And that’s the reality. And they will use America as long as they can.

And, yeah, they are in the driver’s seat right now, but we’re not at the end game yet. But, yeah, jewish power is really on display here! I mean, you think of all the European countries, America, the Biden administration even, is condemning what they’re doing. Then they say they’re going to withhold weapons and they don’t really do that.

But anyway, it’s amazing what the power that they have.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. And it’s kind of just over the top sadistic cruelty in their approach to people of Gaza.

Kevin MacDonald: Oh, yeah!

Kevin Barrett: It’s making ethnocentrism look bad. People like you, Kevin, you’re kind of a White, pro-ethnocentric guy. People like Louis Farrakhan a black, pro-ethnocentric guy. And there are various people who are defending various kinds of ethnocentrism. But what Israel is doing right now is really an embarrassment to ethnocentrism, wouldn’t you say?

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, I mean, this is extreme ethnocentrism! And it’s what I call hyper-ethnocentrism. And what I would advocate is universal nationalism, that everybody be in their own country and stay there. And that you’d have a sort of ethnic nationalism as a basis of a country.

But, you know, that’s a long way off now, given what’s happened in the West. We used to be, you look at movies here, culture from the 1950s, and it’s a White country and proudly. So the same way with the Western European countries. But now it’s just not there. I don’t see how to get it back without a cataclysm.

And I think the Left wants a cataclysm because they have purged the military and all that, and they are in charge of legal system, as you can see in the Trump verdict, and we’ll see.

But I think we’re headed for a cataclysm or else the West just goes down with a whimper.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, well, my second hour guest today on this radio show is Fadi Lama, who wrote Why the West Can’t Win. And his analysis is that Western central bankers have presided over this expanding Western empire, of course, expanded during the colonial period, and now he thinks they’re going all out for a kind of a global takeover. And he thinks it’s going to fail. And that this nationalist alliance of multipolar nationalist forces led by Iran, Russia and China is likely to prevail over the Western banksters.

So if that’s the case, then the world that you want to see, which would be a world of multipolar sovereign nation states where each people is relatively unto itself and free to be itself, and then to deal with other peoples, hopefully in a reasonable manner, unlike what the Israelis are doing right now, that world is coming. But at what cost to the Euro-American countries that are losing the struggle, is the question.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, absolutely! I’m happy to see this other bloc forming. And Western globalism really means Western hegemony and control over the rest of the world via the economics, the banks and all that.

So, yeah, that’s why I favor Russia in the war. And I look favorably on Russia’s ties with Iran and China. And if you’re a country like Iran or Russia or China, you have to know what’s going on in the West. You know that you have this Western elite that really wants to control everything. And this globalist phenomenon is backed by a US military, and it’s not going away.
And that’s why Ukraine is seen as an existential issue for both sides. Russia and United States and Western Europe, I think. They see that if the West does not prevail in Ukraine, that Russia will really take off.

And I noticed in Georgia, the country of Georgia, they had this law, they just enacted the law, I guess, that prevents these foreign NGO’s from, … They have to register and say how much of the money is coming from the West. And they have to disclose all their sources. Well, this is a big source of the Western power. That’s why Putin clamped down on that. The West is where the money is.

So all these NGO’s, they go in there and they propagandise for pro-Western stuff and immigration and all this Leftist stuff and color revolution.

Kevin Barrett: Don’t forget that. What they want to LGBTQ, all that kind of thing.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, exactly! It’s going to happen in Ukraine, if Ukraine wins and Russia loses. This is existential! But that’s the danger here, that both sides here see it as existential. Well, then you’re heading for a World War, nuclear war, a disaster for humanity!

I mean, I don’t see how this ends now. Biden just allowing Ukraine to strike targets in Russia with American missiles? I mean, this is really serious!

Kevin Barrett: That was supposed to be a red line, wasn’t it?

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, that was a red line and not anymore.

And so they keep erasing these lines:

“Oh, we won’t give them this, won’t give them that!”
 
And they give it to them eventually. And because they do not want to lose this! They realize that sanctions have not worked because of the alliances, really, Iran and China and other countries. India is favorable to them to some extent anyway. And Brazil, other countries like that they just look at where the power is and where it’s going to go.

But yeah, they understand that the West is [word unclear] about destroying all their cultures and really all their peoples. And one hodge-podge of humanity. And I just think that would be a disaster!

Kevin Barrett: What do you think is the reason that the Western elites are choosing such a seemingly wrong headed strategy from their own point of view? In terms of both, they’re watering down their own cultures and harming their own cultures and their own military capacity through all sorts of policies. The various woke policies and so on.

And then rather than a sort of a sensible policy of trying to sort of contain, say, China and then make nice with Russia and Iran while you try to contain China, and then if you ever have to shift a little bit and contain Russia, then you make nice with China a little bit. That kind of sensible strategic policy which characterized the US during the Cold War, to a certain extent, they’ve thrown that away and now they’re trying to go to war against Russia, China and Iran all at once driving them into each other’s arms, even as they tear apart their own societies.

It’s almost as if they have some kind of death wish and they want to go down in flames. How do you explain that?

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, I’m wondering, … But part of it is, I think, jewish hatred towards the West. You know, they think in terms of what happened in the Middle Ages, they think in terms of the destruction of the temple by the Romans. The pogroms in Russia in the 19th century, as they see them, and of course, in the Holocaust.

And it’s like Western culture is to them is absolutely the real [word unclear]. And these people, it’s always the extremists that end up dominating what direction the jewish community goes in.

And right now, the extreme ethocentrism is on display! And to some extent, most of it went to Israel. But they’re an awful lot in the United States. And jewish power in the United States, you see now, like, for example, pro-Palestinian protests on universities, they’re getting arrested and all that they would never do that for Black Lives Matter in the same way.
And so they’re really clamping down. And anyone who supports the Palestinians, they’re going to have a hard time getting a job on Wall Street or in the media and all that.

So, yeah, they have the power right now, and they are using it.

Kevin Barrett: And that will provoke a reaction. And we’ve seen throughout history that when jewish communities went too far in their sharp practices towards the majority societies, they suddenly faced a big backlash.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah.

Kevin Barrett: And I’m wondering if some of these students are going to suddenly go from being Left-wing, woke pro-Palestine multiculturalists to saying:

“You know, I think Kevin MacDonald actually might have a point about the jews.”
 
Kevin MacDonald: Yeah. Yeah, I think that jews have always felt that they can manage, you know, Muslim immigration, Palestinian immigration, all that they had enough power to manage it.

And right now they do. I mean, they’re clamping down these protests. But they do see there’s some in Congress now who are pro-Palestinian. And so this policy of letting Muslims come into Europe, say, has backfired for the jews to some extent, a great extent. And you see all these articles about how jews are saying:

“Muslims are our allies!”

And the [chuckling] question is what are their allies against?

And of course, they’re allies against the White majority.

But now that’s breaking down. And so many of the immigrants into Europe are Muslim and they really don’t like to choose and they don’t, …

Kevin Barrett: Quick question. Yeah. I think you’re right that a lot of the Muslim immigrants in Europe are the ones who are supporting the pro-Palestine protests and things like that. But do you think there’s any kind of qualitative difference or meaningful difference between so-called Muslim immigrants in Europe and, let’s say, sub-Saharan Africans from non-Muslim backgrounds, whether Christian, animist or secular, what have you.

That is, I found this whole emphasis on the Muslim identity and the Islamic religion to be very deceptive, given that the kinds of problems that immigrants have created in these societies are actually problems that you’re going to see more from the less religious, the more secular elements, whether they’re sub-Saharan African from Christian backgrounds, or whether they’re northern African from Muslim backgrounds. It’s not the religious people that you have to worry about. It’s the non-religious ones

Kevin MacDonald: Well, I don’t know. I think Muslim religion certainly is a big unifying, motivating factor for Muslims.

But you talk about sub-Saharan Africa, you know, they’re really talking about a low IQ, criminality prone population that will never really contribute anything to any functioning society.

Kevin Barrett: Wait a minute! I played basketball with a bunch of guys from both northern Africa and sub-Saharan Africa when I went to the University of Paris. And there were some very sharp college students from sub-Saharan Africa were playing on that basketball team, actually. So I don’t over generalize to that extent.

Kevin MacDonald: Well, there may be some, and there are, but you look at overall the average, and that’s critical, actually! And we see black culture has basically failed in this country despite the fact that there are some intelligent ones. Just look at it and it’s an academic disaster! And I just don’t see it.

They’ve tried to improve black academic achievement for decades now, since the sixties, with no success, really. And it’s getting worse. I think there’s actually selection now for that the people having children, … You know, these black women who are going to college and assuming all these high level positions, they’re not having children, very many children at least. Whereas the ghetto moms are having a lot of kids, relatively.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. Well, hasn’t the breakdown of the black family is the biggest reason for all of this.

Kevin MacDonald: It’s a huge factor. Yeah, that was an effect of the 1960s. You look at the charts, because I used to teach child psychology every semester I look at these charts in my textbook, and they would be in the 1950s, very strong family structure.

And then all of a sudden in the sixties, everybody went south! But blacks much more than anybody else. They were sort of unleashed, you might say, from the social control. We couldn’t just get on welfare so easily. And those single mothers were not really supported that much. You had to have a man around. But not anymore. It hasn’t been that way for a long time! And it’s not changing.

Kevin Barrett: Religion, again, getting back to that topic, plays a role in this, in that the religious cultures typically put a strong emphasis on these kinds of family values and taboos on sexuality outside of reproductive marriage.

And so when that breaks down, then you get a breakdown of the culture and you have a lot of unwed mothers, etcetera. Once again, my argument is that religion is an indispensable part of civilized humanity, that giving it up for transcendent value is really necessary overall. There might be a few people who can do okay without that. But for the culture as a whole, it needs that. It needs to be infused with a traditional way of doing that.

Kevin MacDonald: You’re probably right. I think that’s a reasonable thing to say. I think most people seem to need religion for social support and moral compass and sort of meaning to their lives and all that. I agree.

Kevin Barrett: Wow! Just like I won an argument with Doctor E. Michael Jones last week. Actually, won an argument with Kevin MacDonald! Again, not too many people can say that. [chuckling]

All right, we only have a couple, couple of minutes left here. Well, you know, Kevin, we’re with two minutes left.

What can be done to stop this butchery in Gaza?

Kevin MacDonald: I just don’t know. Because the Israelis have free reign and they don’t care what anybody else thinks. And the Right militants, settlers, aggressive ones, they’re in charge. And they don’t care what anybody else thinks.

And I think they do think that over time it’ll blow over. They’ll do something for the Palestinians, or they’ll let them emigrate or something. The West will give in. Jordan, these other countries will give in, and they’ll let them come in. And they’ll just get rid of them!

And then Israeli settlers will set their sights on Jordan, and then they’ll set their sight., … You know, I believe they’re an expansive culture. And Gaza is just part of it. They want that land, and I think there will be jewish settlements back in the Gaza. You know, there were until 2000, was it three or something? When the Israeli army withdrew and all that, to great controversy, at which point they became an open air prison.

But yeah, it’s a very expansive, aggressive group, always has been. And we’ll see where it ends. And I think that maybe the rest of the world may start stand up to them at some point.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, well, I think it’s definitely at or even past the point that that needs to start happening.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, I’d say so!

Kevin Barrett: If they really think that we’re going to just roll over and forget all this. Come on, guys. You know, the Nakba* of 1947, 1948 has not been forgotten!

[* The Nakba (Arabic: النَّكْبَة an-Nakba, lit. ’the catastrophe’) is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations. The term is used to describe the events of the 1948 Palestine war as well as the ongoing persecution and displacement of Palestinians by Israel. As a whole, it covers the fracturing of Palestinian society and the long-running rejection of the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Source: Wikipedia]

And today’s people are telling stories about what happened to their grandparents and great grandparents and they’re keeping that memory alive. And so what’s happening in Gaza now, that memory is going to be kept alive forever and it’s going to come back to bite the perpetrators.

Well, thank you so much, Kevin MacDonald. It’s always great to talk with you. A true original thinker and a fearless thinker! Keep up the good work.

Take care.

Kevin MacDonald: Thank you. Bye.

Kevin Barrett: That’s Kevin MacDonald, a fellow academic heretic from the University of Wisconsin. That’s where he went as well as where I got chased out of for talking about 9/11 in the way that certain folks didn’t like.

All right, we’ll be back in the next hour, God willing, with Fati Lama talking about why the West can’t win!

https://katana17.com/

Boas might even go so far as to fudge his data or inflate their significance in order to support his political attitudes

 If . . . we were to treat Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa as utopia, not as ethnography, then we would understand it better and save a lot of pointless debate.

— Robin Fox, 1989, p. 3 

Several writers have commented on the “radical changes” that occurred in the goals and methods of the social sciences consequent to the entry of Jews to these fields (C. Liebman, 1973, p. 213; see also Degler, 1991; Hollinger, 1996; I. L. Horowitz, 1993, p. 75; Rothman & Lichter, 1982/1996). Degler (1991, pp. 187ff) notes that the shift away from Darwinism as the fundamental paradigm of the social sciences resulted from an ideological shift rather than from the emergence of any new empirical data:

As we have seen in regard to the shift in outlook among anthropologists and sociologists, professional or scientific attitudes were not the full explanation. One needs to look beyond professionalism and standard science; for the change in outlook was too fundamental, too radical to be accounted for on those grounds alone. After all, we are not dealing here with a long-held, well-substantiated theory (that is, race) which new and conclusive evidence had unambiguously disproved and overturned. Rather we see essentially the substitution of one unproved (though strongly held) assumption by another. (p. 187)

Degler (1991, p. 200) also notes that Jewish intellectuals have been instrumental in the decline of Darwinism and other biological perspectives in American social science since the 1930s. The opposition of Jewish intellectuals to Darwinism has long been noticed (e.g., Lenz, 1931, p. 674; see also the comments of John Maynard Smith in Lewin, 1992, p. 43).33

In sociology, the advent of Jewish intellectuals in the pre-World War II period resulted in “a level of politicization unknown to sociology’s founding fathers. It is not only that the names of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim replaced those of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, but also that the sense of America as a consensual experience gave way to a sense of America as a series of conflicting definitions” (I. L. Horowitz, 1993, p. 75). In the post-World War II period, sociology “became populated by Jews to such a degree that jokes abounded: one did not need the synagogue, the minyan [i.e., the minimum number of Jews required for a communal religious service] was to be found in sociology departments; or, one did not need a sociology of Jewish life, since the two had become synonymous” (p. 77). Indeed, the ethnic conflict within American sociology parallels to a remarkable degree the ethnic conflict in American anthropology, a theme of this chapter. Here the conflict was played out between leftist Jewish social scientists and an old-line, empirically oriented Protestant establishment that was eventually eclipsed:

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

This chapter will emphasize the ethnopolitical agenda of Franz Boas, but it is worth mentioning the work of Franco-Jewish structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss because he appears to have been similarly motivated, although the French structuralist movement as a whole cannot be viewed as a Jewish intellectual movement. Lévi-Strauss interacted extensively with Boas and acknowledged his influence (Dosse, 1997 I, pp. 15, 16). In turn, Lévi-Strauss was very influential in France, Dosse (p. xxi) describing him as “the common father” of Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. He had a strong Jewish identity and a deep concern with anti-Semitism (Cuddihy, 1974, pp. 151ff). In response to an assertion that he was “the very picture of a Jewish intellectual,” Lévi-Strauss stated,

[C]ertain mental attitudes are perhaps more common among Jews than elsewhere. . . . Attitudes that come from the profound feeling of belonging to a national community, all the while knowing that in the midst of this community there are people—fewer and fewer of them, I admit—who reject you. One keeps one’s sensitivity attuned, accompanied by the irrational feeling that in all circumstances one has to do a bit more than other people to disarm potential critics. (Lévi-Strauss & Eribon, 1991, pp. 155–156)

Like many Jewish intellectuals discussed here, Lévi-Strauss’s writings were aimed at enshrining cultural differences and subverting the universalist Western approaches to science, a position that validates the position of Judaism as a non-assimilating group. Like Boas, Lévi-Strauss rejected biological and evolutionary theories. He theorized that cultures, like languages, were arbitrary collections of symbols with no natural relationships to their referents. Lévi-Strauss rejected Western modernization theory in favor of the idea that there were no superior societies. The role of the anthropologist was to be a “natural subversive or convinced opponent of traditional usage” (in Cuddihy, 1974, p. 155) in Western societies, while respecting and even romanticizing the virtues of non-Western societies (see Dosse, 1997 II, p. 30). Western universalism and ideas of human rights were viewed as masks for ethnocentrism, colonialism, and genocide:

Lévi-Strauss’s most significant works were all published during the breakup of the French colonial empire and contributed enormously to the way it was understood by intellectuals. . . . [H]is elegant writings worked an aesthetic transformation on his readers, who were subtly made to feel ashamed to be Europeans. . . . [H]e evoked the beauty, dignity, and irreducible strangeness of Third World cultures that were simply trying to preserve their difference. . . . [H]is writings would soon feed the suspicion among the new left . . . that all the universal ideas to which Europe claimed allegiance—reason, science, progress, liberal democracy—were culturally specific weapons fashioned to rob the non-European Other of his difference. (Lilla, 1998)

(...)

The Guru Phenomenon in Boasian Anthropology. A theme in later chapters is that Jewish intellectual and political movements tend to center around guru-like charismatic figures who are slavishly admired by their followers. This phenomenon has strong roots in Jewish history and can still be seen today among Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish leaders such as Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, “a towering charismatic figure in the Jewish world” (Keinon, 2020). Twenty-six years after Schneerson’s death in 1994, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz wrote, “For Hasidic movements . . . the death of any Rebbe is a disaster, almost like the death of a father. Because of the particularly close bond that existed between the Rebbe and his hassidim, that trauma was multiplied many times” (in Keinon). The following is an account of a service at a synagogue in Galicia in 1903:

There were no benches, and several thousand Jews were standing closely packed together, swaying in prayer like the corn in the wind. When the rabbi appeared the service began. Everybody tried to get as close to him as possible. The rabbi led the prayers in a thin, weeping voice. It seemed to arouse a sort of ecstasy in the listeners. They closed their eyes, violently swaying. The loud praying sounded like a gale. Anyone seeing these Jews in prayer would have concluded that they were the most religious people on earth. (Ruppin, 1971, p. 69) 

At the end of the service, those closest to the rabbi were intensely eager to eat any food touched by him, and the fish bones were preserved by his followers as relics. Another account notes that “devotees hoping to catch a spark from this holy fire run to receive him” (R. Mahler, 1985, p. 8).

Boasian anthropology, at least during Boas’s lifetime, was highly authoritarian and intolerant of dissent, and it was centered around a charismatic figure who served as an unquestioned leader. As in the case of Freud (see Ch. 5), Boas was a patriarchal father figure, strongly supporting those who agreed with him and excluding those who did not. Alfred Kroeber regarded Boas as “a true patriarch” who “functioned as a powerful father figure, cherishing and supporting those with whom he identified in the degree that he felt they were genuinely identifying with him, but, as regards others, aloof and probably fundamentally indifferent, coldly hostile if the occasion demanded it” (in Stocking, 1968, pp. 305–306). “Boas has all the attributes of the head of a cult, a revered charismatic teacher and master, ‘literally worshipped’ by disciples whose ‘permanent loyalty’ has been ‘effectively established’” (L. White, 1966, pp. 25–26).As in the case of Freud, in the eyes of his disciples, virtually everything Boas did was of monumental importance and justified, placing him among the intellectual giants of all time. Like Freud, Boas did not tolerate theoretical or ideological differences with his students. Individuals who disagreed with the leader or had personality clashes with him, such as Clark Wissler and Ralph Linton, were simply excluded from the movement. Paul Radin, mentioned above as an influential member of the core group of Boas’s students, claimed that Boas was a “powerful figure who did not tolerate theoretical or ideological differences in his students” (in Darnell, 2001, p. 35). Essentially, he made a generation of students an extension of himself and his ideas. 

L. White (1966, pp. 26–27) represents the exclusion of Wissler and Linton as having ethnic overtones, as both were gentiles. Wissler was a member of the Galton Society (founded by eugenicist scientist Charles Davenport and Nordicist writer Madison Grant), which promoted eugenics and accepted the theory that there is a gradation of cultures from lower forms to higher forms, with Western civilization at the top (Gershenhorn, 2004, p. 23), so his exclusion is not surprising. However, White (pp. 26–27) also suggests that George A. Dorsey’s status as a gentile was relevant to his exclusion from the Boas group despite Dorsey’s intensive efforts to be a member. Kroeber (1956, p. 26) notes that Dorsey, “an American-born gentile and a Ph.D. from Harvard, tried to gain admittance to the select group but failed.” (It should be noted that the very idea of a “select group” in a supposedly scientific enterprise contradicts the entire idea of a science; see Ch. 7). As an aspect of this exclusionary authoritarianism, Boas was instrumental in completely suppressing evolutionary theory in anthropology (D. Freeman, 1990, p. 197). Group solidarity within the Boasians has also drawn this comment from anthropologist Regna Darnell (2001, p. 35): they “shared a heady sense of solidarity, viewing themselves as rewriting the history of anthropology, creating a professionally respectable and scientifically rigorous discipline whose practitioners were loyal to a common enterprise”—a testament to a sense of group commitment that is antithetical to scientific research (see Ch. 7). 

Boas as Pseudoscientist. Boas was the quintessential skeptic and an ardent defender of methodological rigor when it came to theories of cultural evolution and genetic influences on individual differences, yet “the burden of proof rested lightly upon Boas’s own shoulders” (L. White, 1966, p. 12). Although Boas (like Freud; see Ch. 5) made his conjectures in a very dogmatic manner, his “historical reconstructions are inferences, guesses, and unsupported assertions [ranging] from the possible to the preposterous. Almost none is verifiable” (p. 13). An unrelenting foe of generalization and theory construction (such as the cultural gradation theory that previously dominated anthropology), Boas nevertheless completely accepted the “absolute generalization at which [Margaret] Mead had arrived after probing for a few months into adolescent behavior on Samoa,” even though Mead’s results were contrary to previous research in the area (D. Freeman, 1983, p. 291). Moreover, Boas uncritically allowed Ruth Benedict to distort his own data on the Kwakiutl (see Torrey, 1992, p. 83).

This suggests that Boas might even go so far as to fudge his data or inflate their significance in order to support his political attitudes. Boas’s famous study purporting to show that skull shape changed as a result of immigration from Europe to America was a very effective propaganda weapon in the cause of the anti-racialists and against those who wanted to restrict immigration. As noted in Chapter 1, Boas was greatly motivated by the immigration issue. Indeed, it was likely intended as propaganda and has been highly successful in that regard, having been “cited innumerable times by writers of textbooks and anyone wishing to make the point that the cranium is plastic” (Sparks & Jantz, 2003, p. 334). Boas was far more concerned with showing that the cranial measurements of Eastern European Jews had altered toward the American (i.e., northwest European) type than showing similar results among Italians, writing in 1909, “The composition of the Italian types in the schools proved to be so complex that no safe inference could be drawn in regard to the stability of the type” (in Sparks & Jantz, p. 334). Quite possibly this emphasis on showing the malleability of Jewish skulls reflected Boas’s ethnic affinity to this group as well as the fact that Eastern European Jews were seen as particularly unassimilable at the time (see Ch. 8). 

Based on their reanalysis of Boas’s data, physical anthropologists Corey Sparks and Richard Jantz (2002) do not accuse Boas of scientific fraud, but they do find that his data do not show any significant environmental effects on cranial form as a result of immigration. Moreover, Boas made inflated claims about the results: very minor changes in cranial index were described as changes of “type” so that Boas was claiming that within one generation immigrants developed the long-headed type characteristic of northwest Europeans (Sparks & Jantz, 2003, p. 334). As Sparks and Jantz (2003) note, several modern studies show that cranial shape is under strong genetic influence, including a study showing that, while both American Blacks and Whites have altered their cranial measurements over the last 150 years, these changes have occurred in parallel and have not resulted in convergence. Their reanalysis of Boas’s data indicated that no more than one percent of the variation between groups could be ascribed to the environmental effects of immigration, with the remainder due to variation between ethnic groups. 

Sparks and Jantz (2003, p. 335) also claim that Boas may well have been motivated by a desire to end racialist views in anthropology:

While Boas [like Herskovits] never stated explicitly that he had based any conclusions on anything but the data themselves, it is obvious that he had a personal agenda in the displacement of the eugenics movement in the United States. In order to do this, any differences observed between European- and U.S.-born individuals will be used to its fullest extent to prove his point.

Conclusion

The entire Boasian enterprise may thus be characterized as a highly authoritarian political movement centered around a charismatic leader. The results were extraordinarily successful: “The profession as a whole was united within a single national organization of academically oriented anthropologists. By and large, they shared a common understanding of the fundamental significance of the historically conditioned variety of human cultures in the determination of human behavior” (Stocking, 1968, p. 296). Research on racial differences ceased, and the profession completely excluded eugenicists and racial theorists like Madison Grant and Charles Davenport.

By the mid-1930s the Boasian view of the cultural determination of human behavior had a strong influence on social scientists generally (Stocking, 1968, p. 300). The followers of Boas also eventually became some of the most influential academic supporters of another Jewish-dominated movement, psychoanalysis (see Ch. 5). Marvin Harris (1968, p. 431) notes that psychoanalysis was adopted by the Boasian school because of its utility as a critique of Euro-American culture, and, indeed, as we shall see in later chapters, psychoanalysis is an ideal vehicle of cultural critique. In the hands of the Boasian school, psychoanalysis was completely stripped of its evolutionary associations, and there was a much greater accommodation to the importance of cultural variables (p. 433).35

Cultural critique was also an important aspect of the Boasian school. Stocking (1989, pp. 215–216) shows that several prominent Boasians, including Robert Lowie and Edward Sapir, were involved in the cultural criticism of the 1920s, which centered around the perception of American culture as overly homogeneous, hypocritical, and emotionally and aesthetically repressive (especially with regard to sexuality). Central to this program was creating ethnographies of idyllic cultures that were free of the negatively perceived traits that were attributed to Western culture. Among these Boasians, cultural criticism crystallized as an ideology of “romantic primitivism” in which certain non-Western cultures epitomized the approved characteristics Western societies should emulate.

Cultural criticism was a central feature of the two most well-known Boasian ethnographies, Coming of Age in Samoa and Patterns of Culture. These works are not only offered as critiques of Western civilization, but often systematically misrepresent key issues related to evolutionary perspectives on human behavior. For example, Benedict’s Zuni were described as being free of war, homicide, and concern with accumulation of wealth. Children were not disciplined. Sex was casual, with little concern for virginity, sexual possessiveness, or paternity confidence. Contemporary Western societies are, of course, the opposite of these idyllic paradises, and Benedict suggests that we should study such cultures in order “to pass judgment on the dominant traits of our own civilization” (Benedict, 1934, p. 179). Mead’s similar portrayal of the Samoans ignored her own evidence contrary to her thesis (Orans, 1996, p. 155). Negatively perceived behaviors of Mead’s Samoans, such as rape and concern for virginity, were attributed to Western influence (Stocking, 1989, p. 245).

Both of these ethnographic accounts have been subjected to devastating criticisms. The picture of these societies that has emerged is far more compatible with evolutionary expectations than the societies depicted by Benedict and Mead (see Caton, 1990; D. Freeman, 1983; Orans, 1996; Stocking, 1989). In the controversy surrounding Mead’s work, some defenders of Mead have pointed to possible negative political implications of the demythologization of her work (see, e.g., the summary in Caton, pp. 226–227). 

Indeed, one consequence of the triumph of the Boasians was that there was almost no research on warfare and violence among the peoples studied by anthropologists (Keegan, 1993, pp. 90–94). Warfare and warriors were ignored, and cultures were perceived as consisting merely of myth-makers and gift-givers. (Orans, 1996, p. 120 shows that Mead systematically ignored cases of competition, violence, rape, and revolution in her account of Samoa.) Only five articles on the anthropology of warfare appeared during the 1950s. Revealingly, when Harry Holbert Turney-High published his volume Primitive War in 1949 documenting the universality of warfare and its oftentimes awesome savagery, the book was completely ignored by the anthropological profession—another example of the exclusionary tactics used against dissenters among the Boasians and characteristic of the other intellectual movements reviewed in this volume as well. Turney-High’s massive data on non-Western peoples conflicted with the image of them favored by a highly politicized profession whose members simply excluded these data entirely from intellectual discourse. The result was a “pacified past” (Keeley, 1996, pp. 163ff) and an “attitude of self-reproach” (p. 179) in which the behavior of primitive peoples was bowdlerized while the behavior of European peoples was not only excoriated as uniquely evil but also as responsible for all extant examples of warfare among primitive peoples. From this perspective, it is only the fundamental inadequacy of European culture that prevents an idyllic world free from between-group conflict. Of course, these trends have been exacerbated in recent decades far beyond anything envisioned by Benedict or Mead.The reality, of course, is far different. Warfare was and remains a recurrent phenomenon among pre-state societies; indeed, evolutionary biologist Richard Alexander (1979) and others have argued that warfare was a critical force in human evolution, selecting for greater intelligence and a suite of other human characteristics. Surveys indicate over 90 percent of societies engage in warfare, the great majority engaging in military activities at least once per year (Keeley, 1996, pp. 27–32). Moreover, “whenever modern humans appear on the scene, definitive evidence of homicidal violence becomes more common, given a sufficient sample of burials” (p. 37). Because of its frequency and the seriousness of its consequences, primitive warfare was more deadly than civilized warfare. Most adult males in primitive and prehistoric societies engaged in warfare and “saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime” (p. 174).

The Culture of Critique

An Evolutionary Analysis of JewishInvolvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements

Kevin MacDonald

Derrida deconstructed

 Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)

It is immensely ironic that this onslaught against Western universalism effectively rationalizes minority group ethnocentrism while undercutting the intellectual basis of ethnocentrism. Intellectually one wonders how one could be a postmodernist and a committed Jew at the same time. Intellectual consistency would seem to require that all personal identifications be subjected to the same deconstructing logic, unless, of course, personal identity itself involves deep ambiguities, deception, and self-deception. This in fact appears to be the case for Jacques Derrida, the premier philosopher of deconstruction, whose philosophy shows the deep connections between the intellectual agendas of postmodernism and the Frankfurt School.115 Derrida had a complex and ambiguous Jewish identity despite being “a leftist Parisian intellectual, a secularist and an atheist” (Caputo, 1997, p. xxiii). Derrida was born into a Sephardic Jewish family that immigrated to Algeria from Spain in the nineteenth century. His family were thus crypto-Jews who retained their religious-ethnic identity for four hundred years in Spain during the period of the Inquisition.Derrida (1993a, p. 81) identifies himself as a crypto-Jew: “Marranos that we are, Marranos in any case whether we want to be or not, whether we know it or not”—perhaps a confession of the complexity, ambivalence, and self-deception often involved in post-Enlightenment forms of Jewish identity. In his notebooks, Derrida (1993b, p. 70) writes of the centrality that Jewish issues have held in his writing: “Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about.” In the same passage (pp. 72–730), he writes that he has always taken,

the most careful account, in anamnesis, of the fact that in my family and among the Algerian Jews, one scarcely ever said “circumcision” but “baptism,” not Bar Mitzvah but “communion,” with the consequences of softening, dulling, through fearful acculturation, that I’ve always suffered from more or less consciously.

This is an allusion to the continuation of crypto-Jewish practices among the Algerian Jews and a clear indication that Jewish identification and the need to hide it have remained psychologically salient to Derrida. Significantly, he (1993b, p. 73) identifies his mother as Esther, the biblical heroine who “had not made known her people nor her kindred” (Est. 2:10) and who was an inspiration to generations of crypto-Jews. Derrida was deeply attached to his mother and stated as she neared death, “I can be sure that you will not understand much of what you will nonetheless have dictated to me, inspired me with, asked of me, ordered from me.” Like his mother (who spoke of baptism and communion rather than circumcision and bar mitzvah), Derrida thus has an inward Jewish identity while outwardly assimilating to the French Catholic culture of Algeria. For Derrida (p. 170), however, there are indications of ambivalence for both identities: “I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts” (see also Caputo, 1997, p. 304).

Derrida’s experience with anti-Semitism during World War II in Algeria was traumatic and inevitably resulted in a deep consciousness of his own Jewishness. Derrida (1993b, p. 58) was expelled from school at age thirteen under the Vichy government because of the numerus clausus, a self-described “little black and very Arab Jew who understood nothing about it, to whom no one ever gave the slightest reason, neither his parents nor his friends.”

The persecutions, which were unlike those of Europe, were all the same unleashed in the absence of any German occupier. . . . It is an experience that leaves nothing intact, an atmosphere that one goes on breathing forever. Jewish children expulsed from school. The principal’s office: You are going to go home, your parents will explain. Then the Allies landed, it was the period of the so-called two-headed government (de Gaulle-Giraud): racial laws maintained for almost six months, under a “free” French government. Friends who no longer knew you, insults, the Jewish high school with its expulsed teachers and never a whisper of protest from their colleagues. . . . From that moment, I felt—how to put it?—just as out-of-place in a closed Jewish community as I did on the other side (we called them “the Catholics”). In France, the suffering subsided. I naively thought that anti-Semitism had disappeared. . . . But during adolescence, it was the tragedy, it was present in everything else. . . . Paradoxical effect, perhaps, of this brutalization: a desire for integration in the non-Jewish community, a fascinated but painful and suspicious desire, nervously vigilant, an exhausting aptitude to detect signs of racism, in its most discreet configurations or its noisiest disavowals. (Derrida, 1995b, pp. 120–121; emphasis original)

Bennington (1993, p. 326) proposes that the expulsion from school and its aftermath were, 

no doubt . . . the years during which the singular character of J.D.’s “belonging” to Judaism is imprinted on him: wound, certainly, painful and practiced sensitivity to antisemitism and any racism, “raw” response to xenophobia, but also impatience with gregarious identification, with the militancy of belonging in general, even if it is Jewish. . . . I believe that this difficulty with belonging, one would almost say of identification, affects the whole of J.D.’s oeuvre, and it seems to me that “the deconstruction of the proper” is the very thought of this, its thinking affection.

Indeed, Derrida says as much. He (1993b, p. 289) recalls just before his bar mitzvah (which he again notes was termed “communion” by the Algerian Jewish community), when the Vichy government expelled him from school and withdrew his citizenship:

I became the outside, try as they might to come close to me they’ll never touch me again. . . . I did my “communion” by fleeing the prison of all languages, the sacred one they tried to lock me up in without opening me to it [i.e., Hebrew], the secular [i.e., French] they made clear would never be mine.

As with many Jews seeking a semi-cryptic pose in a largely non-Jewish environment, Derrida (1995b, p. 344) altered his name to Jacques:

By choosing what was in some way, to be sure, a semi-pseudonym but also very French, Christian, simple, I must have erased more things than I could say in a few words (one would have to analyze the conditions in which a certain community—the Jewish community in Algeria—in the ’30s sometimes chose American names.

Changing his name is thus a form of crypsis as practiced by the Algerian Jewish community, a way of outwardly conforming to the French, Christian culture while secretly remaining Jewish.

Derrida’s Jewish political agenda is identical to that of the Frankfurt School:

The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and native tongue. . . . The idea is to disarm the bombs . . . of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants, . . . all of whom . . . are wholly other. Contrary to the claims of Derrida’s more careless critics, the passion of deconstruction is deeply political, for deconstruction is a relentless, if sometimes indirect, discourse on democracy, on a democracy to come. Derrida’s democracy is a radically pluralistic polity that resists the terror of an organic, ethnic, spiritual unity, of the natural, native bonds of the nation (natus, natio), which grind to dust everything that is not a kin of the ruling kind and genus (Geschlecht). He dreams of a nation without nationalist or nativist closure, of a community without identity, of a non-identical community that cannot say I or we, for, after all, the very idea of a community is to fortify (munis, muneris) ourselves in common against the other. His work is driven by a sense of the consummate danger of an identitarian community, of the spirit of the “we” of “Christian Europe,” or of a “Christian politics,” lethal compounds that spell death for Arabs and Jews, for Africans and Asians, for anything other. The heaving and sighing of this Christian European spirit is a lethal air for Jews and Arabs, for all les juifs [i.e., Jews as prototypical others], even if they go back to father Abraham, a way of gassing them according to both the letter and the spirit. (Caputo, 1997, pp. 231–232)

Derrida sees undeconstructed architecture as reinforcing a sense of community which sees its architecture as its natural environment that closes the community off against “the other.” Vitale (2010, pp. 217–218) comments on Derrida’s views on architecture:

I would like to explain that deconstruction of architecture implies rather the deconstruction of the political and that it can be put into effect only through the actual deconstruction of the architectural structure which the Western tradition of the political has embodied itself into.

The tradition that is itself based on the link which strengthens the identity—of the individual and the community—to a supposed original space, to the stability of the frontiers separating it from the otherness in general, from what is therefore conceived of, simultaneously or alternately, as external, foreign, stranger or strange. . . .

In the Western tradition the (individual and collective) identity is thought of as an internal, permanent, stable space, autonomous and independent from the other in general, which is represented as external, stranger and, thus, is experienced as a possible threat. 

To do space for the other, to give a place for that relation is the task of deconstruction of the political. The achievement of this task necessarily requires deconstruction of the architecture which provides such axiomatics with a concrete and durable form, with a form imposing itself upon our experience as if it were our natural environment.

Derrida’s analysis is the diametric opposite to Richard Wagner’s (1850/1869/2022, pp. 13, 16) analysis of music in which he proposes that the musical works of Jews cannot resonate with the German spirit and cannot,

rise, even by accident, to the ardor of a higher, heartfelt expression. . . . The true poet, no matter in what branch of art, still gains his stimulus from nothing but a faithful, loving contemplation of instinctive life, of that life that only greets his sight among the Folk.

Thus architecture as an art form should resonate with the spirit of the people living in the area and reflect their natural tendencies—an evolutionary aesthetics in which architecture springs naturally from the biological tendencies of the people. Derrida’s deconstruction of architecture opposes any attempt for architecture to create a natural environment; it is thus aimed at creating an environment that would weaken the sense of a natural community because such a community might erect barriers between itself and “the other.” 

Derrida published a pamphlet advocating immigration of non-Europeans into France (see Lilla, 1998). As with the Frankfurt School, the radical skepticism of the deconstructionist movement is in the service of preventing the development of hegemonic, universalist ideologies and other foundations of gentile group allegiance in the name of the tout autre, i.e., the “wholly other.” Caputo ascribes Derrida’s motivation for his deconstruction of Hegel to the latter’s conceptualization of Judaism as morally and spiritually inferior to Christianity because of its legalism and tribalistic exclusivism, whereas Christianity is the religion of love and assimilation, a product of the Greek, not the Jewish, spirit. These Hegelian interpretations are remarkably congruent with Christian self-conceptualizations and Christian conceptions of Judaism originating in antiquity (see SAID, Ch. 3), and such a conceptualization fits well with the evolutionary analysis of Judaism developed in PTSDA. Reinterpretations and refutations of Hegel were common among nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals (see SAID, Ch. 6), and we have seen that in Negative Dialectics Adorno was concerned with refuting the Hegelian idea of universal history for similar reasons.

Hegel’s searing, hateful portrait of the Jew . . . seem[s] to haunt all of Derrida’s work; . . . by presenting in the most loyal and literal way just what Hegel says, Derrida shows . . . that Hegel’s denunciations of the Jew’s castrated heart is a heartless, hateful castration of the other. (Caputo, 1997, pp. 234, 243)

As with the Frankfurt School, Derrida posits that the messianic future is unknown because to say otherwise would lead to the possibility of imposed uniformity, “a systematic whole with infinite warrant” (Caputo, 1997, p. 246), a triumphal and dangerous truth in which Jews as exemplars of the tout autre would necessarily suffer. The human condition is conceptualized as “a blindness that cannot be remedied, a radical, structural condition in virtue of which everyone is blind from birth” (p. 313).

As with the Frankfurt School, the exemplars of otherness have a priori moral value.

In deconstruction love is extricated from the polemic against the Jews by being rethought in terms of the other, of les juifs. . . . If this organic Hegelian Christian-European community is defined as making a common (com) defense (munis) against the other, Derrida advances the idea of laying down his arms, rendre les armes, surrendering to the other. (Caputo, 1997, p. 248)

From this perspective, acknowledging the possibility of truth is dangerous because of the possibility that truth could be used against the other. The best strategy, therefore, is to open up “a salutary competition among interpretations, a certain salutary radical hermeneuticizing, in which we dream with passion of something unforeseeable and impossible” (Caputo, 1997, p. 277). To the conflicting views of differing religions and ideologies, Derrida,

opposes a community, if it is one, of the blind[;] . . . of the blind leading the blind. Blindness makes for good communities, provided we all admit that we do not see, that in the crucial matters we are all stone blind and without privileged access, adrift in the same boat without a lighthouse to show the other shore. (Caputo, 1997, pp. 313–314)

Such a world is safe for Judaism, the prototypical other, and provides no warrant for the universalizing tendencies of Western civilization (Caputo, 1997, p. 335)—one might term deconstruction as de-Hellenization or de-Westernization. Minority group ethnic consciousness is thus validated not in the sense that it is known to be based on some sort of psychological truth, but in the sense that it can’t be proved untrue. On the other hand, the cultural and ethnic interests of majorities are “hermeneuticized” and thus rendered impotent—impotent because they cannot serve as the basis for a mass ethnic movement that would conflict with the interests of other groups.

Ironically from the standpoint of the theory of Judaism developed here, Derrida (who has thought a great deal about his own circumcision in his “Circumfession,” 1993b) realizes that circumcision, which he likens to a shibboleth because of its usefulness as a mechanism of ingroup demarcation (i.e., as a mark of Jewish exclusiveness and “otherness”), is a two-edged sword. Commenting on the work of Holocaust poet Paul Celan, Derrida (1994, pp. 67–68, emphasis original) states:

[T]he mark of a covenant or alliance, it also intervenes, it interdicts, it signifies the sentence of exclusion, of discrimination, indeed of extermination. One may, thanks to the shibboleth, recognize and be recognized by one’s own, for better and for worse, in the cleaving of partaking: on the one hand, for the sake of the partaking and the ring of the covenant, but also, on the other hand, for the purpose of denying the other, of denying him passage or life. . . . Because of the shibboleth and exactly to the extent that one may make use of it, one may see it turned against oneself: then it is the circumcised who are proscribed or held at the border, excluded from the community, put to death, or reduced to ashes.

Despite the dangers of circumcision as a two-edged sword, Derrida (1994, p. 68) concludes that “there must be circumcision,” a conclusion that Caputo (1997, p. 252) interprets as an assertion of an irreducible and undeniable human demand “for a differentiating mark, for a mark of difference.” Derrida thus subscribes to the inevitability (possibly innateness) of group demarcations, but, amazingly and apologetically, he manages to conceptualize circumcision not as a sign of tribal exclusivism, but as “the cut that opens the space for the incoming of the tout autre” (Caputo, p. 250)—a remarkable move because, as we have seen, Derrida seems quite aware that circumcision results in separatism, the erection of ingroup-outgroup barriers, and the possibility of between-group conflict and even extermination. But in Derrida’s gloss, “spiritually we are all Jews, all called and chosen to welcome the other” (Caputo, p. 262), so that Judaism turns out to be a universalist ideology where marks of separatism are interpreted as openness to the other. In Derrida’s view, “if circumcision is Jewish it is only in the sense that all poets are Jews. . . . Everyone ought to have a circumcised heart; this ought to form a universal religion” (Caputo, p. 262). Similarly, in a discussion of James Joyce, Derrida contrasts Joyce and Hegel (as prototypical Western thinkers) who “close the circle of the same” with “Abrahamic [i.e., Jewish] circumcision, which cuts the cord of the same in order to be open to the other, circumcision as saying yes . . . to the other” (Caputo, p. 257). Thus in the end, Derrida develops yet another in the age-old conceptualizations of Judaism as a morally superior group, while ideologies of sameness and universality that might underlie ideologies of social homogeneity and group consciousness among European gentiles are deconstructed and rendered as morally inferior.

[←115] I noted briefly the anti-Western ideology of Claude Lévi-Strauss in Chapter 2. It is interesting that Derrida “deconstructed” Lévi-Strauss by accusing him of reactivating Rousseau’s romantic views of non-Western cultures and thereby making a whole series of essentialist assumptions that are not warranted within the framework of Derrida’s radical skepticism. “In response to Lévi-Strauss’s criticisms of philosophers of consciousness, Derrida answered that none of them . . . would have been as naive as Lévi-Strauss had been to conclude so hastily in favor of the innocence and original goodness of the Nambikwara [an African tribe]. Derrida saw Lévi-Strauss’s ostensibly ethnocentric-free viewpoint as a reverse ethnocentrism with ethnic-political positions accusing the West of being initially responsible, through writing, for the death of innocent speech” (Dosse, 1997 II, p. 30). These comments are symptomatic of the changes inaugurated by postmodernism into the current intellectual zeitgeist. While the earlier critiques of the West by the Boasians and the structuralists romanticized non-Western cultures and vilified the West, the more recent trend is to express a pervasive skepticism regarding knowledge of any kind, motivated, I suppose, by the reasons outlined in this chapter and Chapter 7.

Culture of Critique

An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements

Kevin MacDonald

The Culture of Critique - Preface to the 2025 Edition

The Culture of Critique (hereafter CofC) was originally published in 1998 by Praeger, an academic publisher. The thesis of the book is a difficult one indeed—difficult not only because it is difficult to establish, but also because it challenges many fundamental assumptions about our contemporary intellectual and political existence.

CofC describes how Jewish intellectuals initiated and advanced a number of important intellectual and political movements during the twentieth century. I argue that these movements are attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would neutralize or end anti-Semitism and enhance the prospects for Jewish group continuity and upward mobility either in an overt or in a semi-cryptic manner. Several of these Jewish movements (e.g., Jewish activism promoting the shift in immigration policy favoring non-European peoples) have attempted to weaken the power of their perceived competitors—the European peoples who early in the twentieth century had assumed a dominant position not only in their traditional homelands in Europe, but also in the United States and the wider Anglosphere. At a theoretical level, these movements are viewed as the outcome of conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in the construction of culture and in various public policy issues. Ultimately, these movements are viewed as the expression of a group evolutionary strategy by Jews in their competition for social, political, and cultural dominance with non-Jews.

Here I attempt to answer some typical criticisms that have been leveled against CofC.1 I also discuss issues raised by several books that have appeared since the publication of CofC.

There have been criticisms that I am viewing Judaism as a monolithic entity. This is definitely not the case. Rather, with all the movements that I discuss, my methodology has been as follows:

(1) Find influential movements dominated by Jews, with no implication that all or most Jews are involved in these movements and no restrictions on what the movements are. For example, I touch on Jewish neoconservatism (Ch. 4), which is a departure in some ways from the other movements I discuss. In general, relatively few Jews were involved in most of these movements, and significant numbers of Jews may have been unaware of their existence. Even Jewish leftist radicalism—surely the most widespread and influential Jewish subculture of the twentieth century—may have been a minority movement within Jewish communities in the United States and other Western societies for most periods. As a result, when I criticize these movements, I am not necessarily criticizing most Jews. Nevertheless, these movements were influential, and they were Jewishly motivated.

(2) Determine whether the Jewish participants in these movements both identified as Jews and thought of their involvement in the movement as advancing specific Jewish interests. Motivations for involvement may be unconscious or involve self-deception, but for the most part it was quite easy and straightforward to find evidence for both these propositions. If I thought that self-deception was important (as in the case of many Jewish radicals), I provided evidence that in fact they did identify as Jews and were deeply concerned about Jewish issues, despite surface appearances to the contrary.

Thus it does not stand or fall on whether Jews in a particular movement constitute more than their percentage of the population as a whole, whether Jews in general are ethnocentric, the rate of Jewish intermarriage, or whether most Jews were even aware of particular movements—criticisms that have been leveled at CofC by Nathan Cofnas.2 The focus is on describing the Jewish identities of the main figures of influential movements and their concern with specific Jewish issues, such as combating anti-Semitism, as well as the dynamics of these movements—ethnic networking, centering around charismatic figures, connections with prestigious universities and media, involvement of the organized Jewish community, and non-Jews who participated in the movements and their motivations.(3) Attempt to gauge the influence of these movements on gentile society. Keep in mind that the influence of an intellectual or political movement dominated by Jews is independent of the percentage of the Jewish community that is involved in or supports the movement.

(4) Try to show how non-Jews responded to these movements—for example, were they a source of anti-Semitism?

Several of the movements I discuss have been very influential in the social sciences. However, I do not argue that there are no Jews who do good social science, and in fact I provide a list of prominent Jewish social scientists who in my opinion do not meet the conditions outlined under (2) above (see Ch. 2). If there was evidence that these social scientists identified as Jews and had a Jewish agenda in doing social science (definitely not for most of those listed, but possibly true in the case of Richard J. Herrnstein—see below), then they would have been candidates for inclusion in the book. The people I cite as contributing to evolutionary or biological perspectives are indeed ethnically Jewish, but for most of them I have no idea whether they either have a strong Jewish identity or if they have a Jewish agenda in pursuing their research simply because there is no evidence to be found in their work or elsewhere. If there is evidence that a prominent evolutionary biologist identifies as a Jew and views his work in sociobiology or evolutionary psychology as advancing his perception of Jewish interests, then he or she could have been in CofC as an example of the phenomenon under study rather than as simply a scientist working in the area of evolutionary studies.Interestingly, in the case of one of those I mention, Richard J. Herrnstein, Alan Ryan (1994) writes, “Herrnstein essentially wants the world in which clever Jewish kids or their equivalent make their way out of their humble backgrounds and end up running Goldman Sachs or the Harvard physics department.” This is a stance that is typical, I suppose, of neoconservatism, a Jewish intellectual and political movement I discuss in Chapter 4, and it is the sort of thing that, if true, would suggest that Herrnstein did perceive the issues discussed in The Bell Curve as affecting Jewish interests in a way that Charles Murray, his co-author, did not. (Ryan contrasts Murray’s and Herrnstein’s worldviews: “Murray wants the Midwest in which he grew up—a world in which the local mechanic didn’t care two cents whether he was or wasn’t brighter than the local math teacher.”) Similarly, twentieth-century theoretical physics does not qualify as a Jewish intellectual movement precisely because there are no signs that Jewish identification and pursuit of Jewish interests were important to the content of the theories or to the conduct of the intellectual movement. Yet Jews have been heavily overrepresented among the ranks of theoretical physicists.This conclusion remains true even though Albert Einstein, a leading figure among theoretical physicists, was a strongly motivated Zionist (Fölsing, 1993/1997, pp. 494–505), opposed assimilation as a contemptible form of “mimicry” (p. 490), preferred to mix with other Jews whom he referred to as his “tribal companions” (p. 489), embraced the uncritical support for the Bolshevik regime in Russia that was entirely mainstream in the American Jewish community during the 1920s and 1930s, including persistent apology for the Moscow show trials in the 1930s (pp. 644–645), and switched from a high-minded pacifism during World War I to advocating for the development of atomic bombs to defeat Hitler. From his teenage years he disliked the Germans and in later life criticized Jewish colleagues for converting to Christianity and acting like Prussians. He especially disliked Prussians, who were the elite ethnic group in Germany. Reviewing his life at age seventy-three, Einstein declared his ethnic affiliation in no uncertain terms: “My relationship with Jewry had become my strongest human tie once I achieved complete clarity about our precarious position among the nations” (in p. 488). According to Fölsing (p. 488), Einstein had begun developing this clarity from an early age, but did not acknowledge it until much later, a form of self-deception: “As a young man with bourgeois-liberal views and a belief in enlightenment, he had refused to acknowledge [his Jewish identity].”In other words, the issues of the ethnic identification and even ethnic activism on the part of people like Einstein are entirely separate from the issue of whether such people viewed the content of the theories themselves as furthering Jewish ethnic interests, and, in the case of Einstein, there is no evidence that he did so. The same cannot be said for Jewish movements covered here in which “scientific” theories were fashioned and deployed to advance ethnic group interests. This ideological purpose becomes clear when the unscientific nature of these movements is understood. Much of the discussion in CofC documented the intellectual dishonesty, the lack of empirical rigor, the obvious political and ethnic motivation, the expulsion of dissenters, the collusion among co-ethnics to dominate intellectual and academic discourse, and the general lack of scientific spirit that pervaded them. In my view, the scientific weakness of these movements is evidence of their group-strategic function.

Frank Salter’s (2000) review in Human Ethology Bulletin discussed some of the controversy surrounding my work, particularly an acrimonious session at the 2000 conference of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society where I was accused of anti-Semitism by several participants. For me the only issue is whether I have been honest in my treatment of sources and whether my conclusions meet the usual standards of scholarly research in the social sciences. Salter notes that I based my research on mainstream sources and that the assertions that have infuriated some colleagues,

are not only true but truisms to those acquainted with the diverse literatures involved. Apart from the political sensitivity of the subject, much of the problem facing MacDonald is that his knowledge is often too far ahead of his detractors to allow easy communication; there are not enough shared premises for constructive dialog. Unfortunately the knowledge gap is closing slowly because some of his most hostile critics, including colleagues who make serious ad hominem accusations, have not bothered to read MacDonald’s books.

Salter also notes that those, such as John Tooby and Steven Pinker, who have denigrated my competence as a scholar in the media, have failed to provide anything approaching a scholarly critique or refutation of my work.

For twenty years there were no academic critiques of CofC despite its being published by an academic publisher. Then, beginning in 2018, Nathan Cofnas published several critiques in academic journals.3 With the exception of Philosophia, an Israeli philosophy journal, those journals did not allow me to reply, but I wrote lengthy responses and posted them on my website. My reply to Cofnas was published by Philosophia (MacDonald, 2022b), but as I noted in recounting this episode, this “resulted almost immediately in hostile comments from Jewish academic activists, calls for retraction, and condemnation of the journal’s editor for allowing such a horrifying breach of academic sensibilities to happen” (MacDonald, 2022a). The editor of the journal was eventually replaced and the article retracted after a back-and-forth with three new reviewers.

Why Are Jews So Influential?

Jewish populations have always had enormous effects on the societies in which they reside because of several qualities that are central to the Jewish group evolutionary strategy and likely have been under genetic selection in Ashkenazi Jewish groups. First and foremost, Jews are ethnocentric and able to cooperate in highly organized, cohesive, and effective groups. Also important is high intelligence, including the usefulness of intelligence in attaining wealth, prominence in the media, and eminence in the academic world and the legal profession. I will also discuss two other qualities that have received less attention, psychological intensity and aggressiveness, and finally mention the Jewish guru phenomenon.

The background traits of ethnocentrism, intelligence and wealth, psychological intensity, aggressiveness, and strong charismatic leadership result in Jews being able to produce formidable, effective groups—groups able to have powerful, transformative effects on the peoples they live among. In the post-Enlightenment world, these traits influence the academic world and the world of popular and elite media, thus amplifying Jewish effectiveness compared with traditional societies. However, even before the Enlightenment Jews have repeatedly become an elite and powerful group in societies in which they reside in sufficient numbers.

It is remarkable that Jews, usually as a tiny minority, have been central to a long list of historical events. Jews were much on the mind of the Church Fathers in the fourth century during the formative years of Christian dominance in the West. Indeed, I have proposed that the powerful anti-Jewish attitudes and legislation of the fourth-century Church must be understood as a defensive reaction against Jewish economic power and enslavement of non-Jews (see Separation and Its Discontents, hereafter SAID, MacDonald, 1998/2004a, Ch. 3). Jews who had nominally converted to Christianity but maintained their ethnic ties in marriage and commerce were the focus of the 250-year Inquisition in Spain, Portugal, and the Spanish colonies in the New World. Fundamentally, the Inquisition should be seen as a defensive reaction to the economic and political domination of these “New Christians” (see SAID, Ch. 4). 

Nineteenth-century critics of Jews typically complained about Jewish influence in the media and Jewish wealth that often made traditional Western aristocratic elites subservient to them, and, as Richard Wagner famously did, they complained about Jewish influence on culture (MacDonald, 2023c). Jews have also been central to all the important events of the twentieth century. Jews were a necessary component of the Bolshevik revolution that created the Soviet Union and willing participants of horrendous mass murders of its early decades; they remained an elite group in the Soviet Union until well after World War II (Ch. 3). They were a central focus of National Socialism in Germany, in part because of the Jewish role in Bolshevism but also because of their influence in the media and culture in general. Jews have been prime movers of the post-1965 cultural and multicultural/multiethnic revolution in the United States and the West generally, including the encouragement of massive non-White immigration to countries of European origin (see Ch. 8). In the contemporary world, organized American Jewish lobbying groups and deeply committed neoconservative Jews in the George W. Bush administration and the media had a critical role in fomenting wars that benefit Israel (Ch. 4), and neoconservative Jews in the Biden administration encouraged the all-out support for Ukraine against Russia and for Israel against Hamas. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is leading the campaign to dilute the First Amendment in order to expunge social media of ideas they don’t like, particularly on X (Twitter), and Jewish billionaires are blacklisting students and withholding funds from universities if they don’t express enthusiastic support for Israel (MacDonald, 2023e). Indeed, I would say that we are once again witnessing an incredible display of Jewish power in the United States.

How can such a tiny minority have such huge effects on the history of the West? Part of the story is the individualism of Westerners. In Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition (hereafter Individualism, MacDonald, 2019a), I develop the view that Europeans are relatively less ethnocentric than other peoples and relatively more prone to individualism, as opposed to the ethnocentric, kinship-based, collectivist social structures which are historically far more characteristic of other human groups, including—relevant to this discussion—Jewish groups (see also Henrich, 2020). 

Individualist cultures show relatively little emotional attachment to ingroups. Personal goals are paramount, and socialization emphasizes the importance of self-reliance, independence, individual responsibility, and “finding yourself” (Triandis, 1991, p. 82). Individualists have more positive attitudes toward strangers and outgroup members and are more likely to behave in a pro-social, altruistic manner to strangers. People in individualist cultures are less aware of ingroup-outgroup boundaries and thus are less likely to have negative attitudes toward outgroup members. They often disagree with ingroup policy, show little emotional commitment or loyalty to ingroups, and do not have a sense of common fate with other ingroup members. Opposition to outgroups occurs in individualist societies, but the opposition is more “rational” in the sense that there is less of a tendency to suppose that all of the outgroup members are culpable. Individualists form mild attachments to many groups, while collectivists have an intense attachment to and identification with a few ingroups (Triandis, 1990, p. 61). We tend to see people as individuals, as in the ideology of colorblind meritocracy so common among mainstream conservatives. 

Western individualism is unique among the cultures of the world and is largely responsible for the success of the West (Henrich, 2020; Individualism). Whereas other cultures are based on extended families and strong kinship relations (e.g., clan-based cultures), Western cultures deemphasize kinship as the basis of society. Rather than one’s status in a kinship group, individual reputation as being honest and trustworthy is paramount. This leads to lower levels of corruption which plague kinship-based cultures where one’s first duty is to help relatives. Individualists are more prone to trust non-relatives based on their reputation, resulting in the high-trust cultures of the West.

But in the contemporary world, individualism’s weaknesses have become apparent. All societies must have something that holds them together, even the individualist culture of the West. The problem is that the social glue of Western societies is membership in a moral community rather than a kinship group. In the traditional West, the moral community was defined by Christian religious authority. In prehistoric Europe, people who rejected the moral strictures of the community were expelled from the community (a certain death sentence); in historic times, such individuals were ostracized and subjected to other penalties. However, with the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to traditional Christian authority, the moral community of the West has been fashioned by a media and academic culture that is hostile to the people and culture of the West—with disastrous consequences. People who violate the established norms of political correctness, such as being proud of their White identity and believing that Whites have legitimate interests in opposing their demographic replacement and disempowerment, are shunned by friends and family, and they may well lose their jobs. And, as discussed below, Jewish organizations are leading the campaign to establish legal penalties for speech that contravenes the boundaries of political correctness as defined by these organizations.

Background Traits for Jewish Influence

Ethnocentrism. Elsewhere I have argued that Jewish ethnocentrism can be traced back to their Middle Eastern origins (see A People That Shall Dwell Alone, hereafter PTSDA, MacDonald, 1994/2002b). Traditional Jewish culture has a number of features identifying Jews with the ancestral cultures of the area. The most important of these is that Jews and other Middle Eastern cultures evolved under circumstances that favored large groups dominated by males (Burton et al., 1996). These groups were basically extended families with high levels of endogamy (i.e., marriage within the kinship group) and consanguineous marriage (i.e., marriage to blood relatives), including the uncle-niece marriage sanctioned in the Old Testament. These features are exactly the opposite of Western European tendencies.

Whereas Western societies tend toward individualism, the basic Jewish cultural form is collectivism, in which there is a strong sense of group identity and group boundaries, and moral particularism represented by the phrase “Is it good for the Jews.” In Jewish religious writings, non-Jews had no moral standing and could be exploited at will as long as doing so didn’t harm the entire group. Middle Eastern societies are characterized by anthropologists as “segmentary societies” organized into relatively impermeable, kinship-based groups. Group boundaries are often reinforced through external markers such as hairstyle or clothing, as Jews have often done throughout their history. Different groups settle in different areas where they retain their homogeneity alongside other homogeneous groups, as illustrated by the following account from Carleton Coon (1951, p. 153):

There the ideal was to emphasize not the uniformity of the citizens of a country as a whole but a uniformity within each special segment, and the greatest possible contrast between segments. The members of each ethnic unit feel the need to identify themselves by some configuration of symbols. If by virtue of their history they possess some racial peculiarity, this they will enhance by special haircuts and the like; in any case they will wear distinctive garments and behave in a distinctive fashion. 

Jews are at the extreme of this Middle Eastern tendency toward collectivism and ethnocentrism. I give many examples of Jewish ethnocentrism in my trilogy on Judaism—perhaps most notably the ethnic networking that is so important to CofC—and have argued in several places that Jewish ethnocentrism is biologically based (see MacDonald, 2001; SAID, Ch. 1).

A good start for thinking about Jewish ethnocentrism is the work of Israel Shahak (1994), most notably his co-authored Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (Shahak & Mezvinsky, 1999). Present-day fundamentalists attempt to re-create the life of Jewish communities before the Enlightenment (i.e., prior to about 1750). During this period the great majority of Jews believed in the Kabbala—the Jewish mystical tradition. Influential Jewish scholars like Gershom Scholem ignored the obvious racialist and exclusivist material in the Kabbalistic literature by using words like “men,” “human beings,” and “cosmic” to suggest the Kabbala has a universalist message. The actual texts say salvation is only for Jews, while non-Jews have “Satanic souls” (Shahak & Mezvinsky, 1999, p. 58). 

The ethnocentrism apparent in such statements was not only the norm in traditional Jewish society, but remains a powerful current of contemporary Jewish fundamentalism, with important implications for Israeli politics. For example, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, describing the difference between Jews and non-Jews:

We do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather we have a case of . . . a totally different species. . . . The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world. . . . The difference of the inner quality [of the body] . . . is so great that the bodies would be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is an halachic difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to the bodies of Jews]: “their bodies are in vain.” . . . An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness. (Shahak & Mezvinsky, 1999, pp. 59–60)These people and secular ethnonationalists, who have basically the same ideas, are firmly in charge in Israel, leading to a long series of protests by liberal Jews in Israel and the U.S. There are many more examples, but in the interest of brevity I’ll leave it at that. Even a prominent Israel apologist like Thomas Friedman (2023) of The New York Times wrote that the present government is a “far-right coalition of Jewish supremacists and ultra-Orthodox Jews.” But the Israel Lobby still dominates Congress and the Executive branch, so there won’t be any changes soon. According to Mitchell Plitnick (2023) writing for Mondoweiss:

When Rep. Jayapal called Israel a racist state in July, Democrats and Republicans leaped on her in a political feeding frenzy. They fell over each other to cash in on the defense of Israel, a state whose racism is not just obvious but a point of pride for many in its government. They immediately and overwhelmingly passed a resolution stating that “the State of Israel is not a racist or apartheid state.” Jayapal, of course, voted with the majority. The nine who voted against were all progressives who are atop the list of AIPAC’s most hated. It breezed through the Senate by unanimous consent.

Similar overwhelming support for Israel in the Gaza war passed in the House of Representatives and was unanimous in the Senate. Republicans and conservatives generally are especially supportive of Israel.

It’s the same with conservative media. Though I am not entirely sure why this is, it is probably partly because a significant portion of their audiences are Evangelical Protestants who think Israel’s success will inaugurate the Second Coming of Jesus and the end times. It may also be their desire to gain legitimacy in a cultural environment that is completely dominated by the left which accuses anyone to the right of Mitt Romney of being a raving Nazi.

Ethnocentrism is responsive to particular environmental triggers, what evolutionists term “facultative mechanisms,” that is, mechanisms that can be triggered by external circumstances such as perceived threat. The phenomena of a feeling of permanent threat and a siege mentality have been noted by many authors as typical of Jewish culture throughout history (PTSDA, Ch. 7).

A permanent sense of imminent threat appears to be common among Jews. Writing on the clinical profile of Jewish families, E. J. Rosen and Weltman (1982, p. 671) note:

Jews have traditionally believed that they are God’s “chosen people.” In Jewish folklore, this notion of “chosenness” has had a double meaning: Although God may have chosen the Jews, they have undergone great travail; their status means that suffering is a basic part of life. A well-known Yiddish saying, “Shver zu zein a yid” (“It’s tough to be a Jew”), while often accompanied by a resigned sigh, may even reinforce the notion of superiority by virtue of the burden of oppression and suggests that one wears the burden of that suffering with pride. 

Zborowski and Herzog (1952, p. 153) note that the homes of wealthy Jews in traditional Eastern European shtetl communities sometimes had secret passages for use in times of anti-Semitic pogroms, and that their existence was “part of the imagery of the children who played around them, just as the half-effaced memory was part of every Jew’s mental equipment.”

A good example is how American Jews reacted to the 1967 war. Silberman (1985, p. 184) notes that around the time of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, many Jews could identify with the statement of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel that “I had not known how Jewish I was.” Silberman comments that “This was the response, not of some newcomer to Judaism or casual devotee but of the man whom many, myself included, consider the greatest Jewish spiritual leader of our time.” Many others made the same surprising discovery about themselves: Arthur Hertzberg (1979, p. 210) wrote:

The immediate reaction of American Jewry to the crisis was far more intense and widespread than anyone could have foreseen. Many Jews would never have believed that grave danger to Israel could dominate their thoughts and emotions to the exclusion of everything else. 

The Israel-Hamas war of 2023–present is no exception. As Chana Hughes (2023) reports:

Our lives have changed forever. We have had to change not just the way we think of Israel but how we think of Britain. The past month has exposed an ugly underside. We once thought we lived in a tolerant society. Now we are asking: ‘Can we safely share our Jewishness here?’, and ‘do we belong?’

As Jews we are familiar with tragedy, threat and betrayal. ‘Always make sure you have your passport in date’, my mother used to tell me. Fortunately, today we are still very far from escape. But the recent rise in anti-Semitism makes us feel like we have moved another step closer.

In the darkest times, however, is when the embers of the Jewish spirit burn brightest. Amidst the tragic loss of life and bloodshed, there are revolutions starting. There is a revolution of Jewish identity and unity.

Although security threats are at their highest, the synagogues have never been fuller. ‘We’ve not seen our synagogue this full since the Pittsburg shooting’, noticed a friend, with a sad laugh. Charities distribute thousands of shabbat candles every Friday, WhatsApp groups encourage psalms to be recited around the clock and hundreds of women gather each week to bake ceremonial challa bread and pray. One local barber, for the first time ever, vowed to close his shop on Shabbat as a sign of solidarity. Members of the community vow to support his business in return.

‘I have never felt my Jewishness the way I do right now’, said a lady, at the kosher butcher, buying chicken soup: ‘Ironically just when we’re under attack.’ Another ex-colleague reached out to me. She had never embraced her Jewish heritage before but now she feels she has to ‘pick a side’. She feels the pain of being vilified and misunderstood but feels that it is worth it. . . .

Pressure builds daily as Israel loses global sympathy and the bloody conflict unfolds. Friends in Israel feel supported there and weirdly they feel safer, even when they run into their bomb shelters. Their sense of connection makes them feel alive. The Jewish community’s unity now feels even stronger in contrast to the splintered in-fighting about Israel’s judicial reform that was rampant prior to the attack. This month, these differences have been put on hold. Faith and togetherness are our community’s protection against threat and we have to cling to them with all our might.

There is also an outpouring of Jewish financial support for Israel in response to the war (Silow-Carroll, 2023). While there are still organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and Mondoweiss that have long condemned Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, they definitely do not represent the vast majority of the power and money of the Jewish community in America.

As the examples from Israel’s wars show, Jewish ethnocentrism is often manipulated by Jewish authorities attempting to inculcate a stronger sense of group identification—for example, the messages of ever-increasing threat of anti-Semitism promulgated by the ADL—accompanied by highly successful pleas for donations.Bar-Tal and Antebi (1992, p. 643) note: 

[N]ot surprisingly, Siege Mentality is related to Ethnocentrism. The belief that the world has negative intentions towards the group indicates its evil, malice, and aggressiveness. In this context, the group not only feels victimized and self-righteous, but also superior to the out-group. 

Intelligence (and Wealth). The vast majority of American Jews are Ashkenazi Jews. This is a very intelligent group, with an average IQ of approximately 111 with a particular strength in verbal IQ (Lynn, 2011). Since verbal IQ is the best predictor of occupational success and upward mobility in contemporary societies, it is not surprising that Jews are an elite group in the United States. Intelligence, as well as the other traits discussed here, were likely under genetic selection in traditional Ashkenazi societies because scholars were given marriages to the daughters of wealthy Jews, as well as good business opportunities (PTSDA, Ch. 7). Wealth and reproductive success were strongly linked at least prior to the nineteenth century.Nevertheless, because of the demographic differences between Jews and White Americans, there are many more White Americans at any level of IQ required for upward mobility and leadership positions in American society (MacDonald, 2022a). For example, at IQ of 140, there are five times as many White Americans as Jews. Contrary to Cofnas (2021), IQ is thus an insufficient explanation for Jewish influence.

Intelligence and ethnic networking are important for academic success, and in Chapter 2 I show that Jews and Jewish organizations led the intellectual effort to deny the importance of racial and ethnic differences in human affairs and to pathologize any sense of White identity or White interests (see also Chs. 5, 8). The Jewish role in creating the intellectual context of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 relied on the success of the Boasian movement in anthropology in shaping academic views on race by dominating the American Anthropological Association since the 1920s. This theoretical perspective subverted the strong sense of race and racial interests that were prominent trends in academia and the mainstream media during that period. Science is the lingua franca of the West, so the prestige of the Boasians was critical for their success.Intelligence is also linked to wealth. Based on past results, Jews are probably around 35 percent of the wealthiest Americans, and in a democracy, that translates into a well-funded infrastructure of Jewish causes—such as neoconservative think tanks, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, and the ADL—and political parties; the Democratic Party is basically funded by wealthy Jews, and the Republican Jewish Coalition probably provides 40 percent of Republican donations aimed at supporting Israel and moving the party to the left on social issues. ADL (2022) assets in 2021 were listed at $238,000,000, with $62,000,000 in contributions. The national ADL, like the ACLU, the SPLC, the NAACP, and other so-called civil rights groups, is now merely a tax-exempt cadre of the Democratic Party and is active on behalf of anti-White Critical Race Theory, the transgender revolution, and opposition to any talk about the Great Replacement, claiming that the very idea of a Great Replacement is racist and anti-Semitic (T. Moore, 2021)—while stating that Israel must retain its Jewish majority by controlling immigration and preventing Palestinians on the West Bank from voting. 

Intelligence is also evident in Jewish activism. Jewish activism is like a full court press in basketball: intense pressure from every possible angle. But in addition to the intensity, Jewish efforts are very well organized, well-funded, and backed up by sophisticated, scholarly intellectual rationales. 

Intelligence and organization are also apparent in Jewish lobbying on behalf of Israel. Over thirty years ago a U.S. Defense Department official, noted that, “On all kinds of foreign policy issues the American people just don’t make their voices heard. Jewish groups are the exceptions. They are prepared, superbly briefed. They have their act together. It is hard for bureaucrats not to respond” (Findley, 1989, p. 164). At the time there was concern that the State Department had remained a bastion of old school WASPs. This is not a problem any longer, with neoconservative Jews Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, and Wendy Sherman firmly in charge of State, during the Biden administration.

Conscientiousness and Emotional Intensity. In my 1994 book on Judaism, I highlighted two personality traits of Jews, conscientiousness and emotional intensity (PTSDA, Ch. 7). Both are heritable and quite likely under selection in traditional Jewish communities. Conscientiousness, which involves attention to detail, neatness, orderliness, striving for achievement, persistence toward goals in the face of difficulty, and the ability to focus attention and delay gratification, is, along with IQ, linked to upward mobility. Social conscientiousness appears to be a sort of “don’t let down the group” trait, originally proposed by Darwin (1871) as the basis of group allegiance. Individuals high on this trait would be expected to feel intense guilt for having failed to fulfill their obligations to the group. Moreover, given the importance of conformity to group norms for Judaism, it would be expected that individuals who were low on this trait would be disproportionately inclined to abandon Judaism, while successful Jews who were the pillars of the community and thus epitomized the group ethic of Judaism would be disproportionately likely to be high on group conformity—and also likely to be reproductively successful in traditional societies. The result is that there would be strong selection pressures toward high levels of social conscientiousness within the Jewish community.

Conscientiousness was strongly emphasized in Jewish socialization. Thus, a child reared in a traditional Jewish home would have been socialized to continually monitor his/her behavior to ensure compliance with a vast number of restrictions—the numerous commandments of Ashkenazi religious writing. These are exactly the sorts of environmental influences expected to strengthen the conscientiousness system, what I call “system-specific environmental influences” (MacDonald, 2005a).

Jews also tend to be high on the personality trait of affect intensity; i.e., they are prone to intense emotional experience of both positive and negative emotions (Larsen & Diener, 1992). Individuals high on affect intensity have more complex social networks and more complex lives, including multiple and even conflicting goals. They are prone to fast and frequent mood changes and lead varied and variable emotional lives. Clinically, affect intensity is related to cyclothymia (i.e., alternate periods of elation and depression), bipolar affective disorder (i.e., manic depressive psychosis), neurotic symptoms, and somatic complaints (nervousness, feeling uneasy, shortness of breath).

The common perception of Jewish and non-Jewish psychiatric workers from the late nineteenth century until at least the end of the 1920s was that, compared to gentiles, Ashkenazi Jews (and especially male Jews), had relatively sensitive, highly reactive nervous systems, thus making them more prone to the diagnoses of hysteria, manic depression, neurasthenia (Gershon & Liebowitz, 1975; Gilman, 1993 pp. 92ff), and depression, in men only (Levav et al., 1997). Gershon and Liebowitz note that 45 percent of 22 patients had bipolar affective disorder—about the same as in an Iraqi population—compared to 19 percent in a study of northern European populations. Within Israel, they cite an Israeli study (in Hebrew) that found that affective disorders were “much more prevalent” among Ashkenazi Jews than Sephardic Jews (Kalman et al., 1970). Additionally, a “preliminary” study found significantly more patients with affective psychoses and fewer with schizophrenia than among non-Jews (Cooklin et al., 1983). A study from 2000 found that in a sample of Israelis with bipolar disorder, the manic phase was “much more common in Israeli bipolar patients” than European and American populations: 55 percent of the patients have illnesses characterized primarily by manias, 28 percent have approximately equal numbers of manias and depressions, and 17 percent suffer predominantly from depressions, but with no difference between Ashkenazi and Sephardic populations (Osher et al., 2000, p. 187).

I emphasize here that affect intensity is also linked to creativity and the manic phase of bipolar affective disorder which seems to be more common among Jews and a more robust component of manic-depressive illness among Jews (D. M. Tucker et al., 1990). During episodes of mania the person has a grandiose self-image (“I am brilliant and can save the world if only people would listen to me”), goal-directed activity such as obsessively working on a project all night, excessive involvement in pleasurable activity like buying sprees and sexual gratification, and racing thoughts which the manic person thinks are brilliant. The depressive part is just the opposite. 

Many people may be high on emotionality but not meet the criteria for psychopathology. It’s easy to see that people moderately high on positive emotionality—hypomanic or normal but close to the manic range—would be high achievers; they would work persistently toward goals, and they would be very self-confident and have high self-esteem. Such people gravitate to leadership positions in whatever organization they are in, and it’s easy to see that they might become gurus, establishing a devoted following, like charismatic rabbis in traditional Jewish communities—Jewish gurus like Freud, Boas, Trotsky, et al. discussed in the following chapters.For example, Albert Lindemann (1997, p. 448) notes that many of Trotsky’s personality traits are stereotypically Jewish:

If one accepts that anti-Semitism was most potently driven by anxiety and fear, as distinguished from contempt, then the extent to which Trotsky became a source of preoccupation for anti-Semites is significant. Here, too, [Paul] Johnson’s words are suggestive: He writes of Trotsky’s “demonic power” [in A History of the Jews, 1987]—the same term, revealingly, used repeatedly by others in referring to Zinoviev’s oratory or Uritsky’s ruthlessness [Zinoviev and Uritsky were two other prominent early Bolsheviks]. Trotsky’s boundless self-confidence, his notorious arrogance, and sense of superiority were other traits often associated with Jews. Fantasies there were about Trotsky and other Bolsheviks, but there were also realities around which the fantasies grew.

This emotional intensity extends to Jewish academics writing about Jewish history. Lindemann (1997, p. 12) writes:

[E]specially in popular history, a strong tendency exists to favor an emotionally laden description and narrative, especially of colorful, dramatic, or violent episodes, over explanation that employs calm analysis or a searching attention to historical context. Pogroms, famous anti-Semitic affairs, and the description of the ideas of anti-Semitic authors and agitators are described with moral fervor, rhetorical flair, and considerable attention to the details of murder, arson, and rape. Background, context, and motives are often slighted or dealt with in a remarkably thin and tendentious fashion.

Lindemann comments on the impassioned, moralistic rhetoric and simplistic analyses to be found in Robert Wistrich’s Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred and in the writings of Holocaust historians Lucy Dawidowicz and Daniel J. Goldhagen. “In order to write ‘genuine’ German history, [Dawidowicz] seems to think, hatred and resentment rather than sympathy or love constitute the appropriate state of mind. She makes precious little effort to understand the motivations of nineteenth-century nationalistic Germans. They are simply contemptible ‘other people.’” He describes Howard Morley Sachar’s chapter on Romanian anti-Semitism as “a tirade, without the slightest effort at balance” (Lindemann, 1997, p. 509).Affect intensity influences the tone and intensity of Jewish activism. Among Jews there is a critical mass that is intensely committed to Jewish causes—a sort of 24/7, “pull out all the stops” commitment that produces instant, massive responses on Jewish issues. Jewish activism has a relentless, never-say-die quality. This intensity goes hand in hand with the “slippery slope” style of arguing: Jewish activism is an intense response because even the most trivial manifestation of anti-Jewish attitudes or behavior is seen as inevitably leading to mass murder of Jews if allowed to continue.

Ashkenazi Jews Are Aggressive. Much of the previous is also about Jewish aggressiveness. Jews have always behaved aggressively toward those they have lived among, and they have been perceived as aggressive by their critics. Aggressive behavior by Jews can be found in the ancient world. Bachrach suggests that the Jews were so wealthy, powerful, and aggressive that until around the middle of the fifth century the Roman government viewed a strong anti-Jewish policy as not politically viable, even though it was continually being pressured in this direction by the Church (Bachrach, 1985). The rather limited anti-Jewish actions of the government during the 150 years following the Edict of Toleration of 313 are interpreted “as attempts to protect Christians from a vigorous, powerful, and often aggressive Jewish gens” (p. 408). The Jews themselves were perceived by the emperors, the government, and the Church fathers as “an aggressive, well-organized, wealthy, and powerful minority” (p. 408). Particularly revealing are the suggestion that the solvency of the municipalities depended on Jews paying their taxes and the fear that offending the Jews could set off widespread and costly revolts, such as the one led by Patricius in 351.E. Horowitz (1998, p. 5) recounts the historiography surrounding Jewish violence and aggressiveness, noting, for example, what a nineteenth-century British historian Rev. George Williams had written: 

[The Jews] had followed the Persians from Galilee, to gratify their vengeance by the massacre of the believers, and the demolition of their most sacred churches. They were amply gutted with blood. In a few days 90,000 Christians of both sexes, and of all ages and conditions, fell victims to their indiscriminating hatred.

Commenting on this assertion, E. Horowitz (1998, p. 5–6) notes: 

As we shall see, Jewish contemporaries of Williams described the events of 614 rather similarly. A century later, however, in the years following the Holocaust, memories of Jews gratifying their vengeance and giving vent to their “indiscriminating hatred” began to fade, being displaced increasingly by the Sartrean Jew, “passionately hostile to violence” [a reference Jean Paul Sartre’s philo-Semitic Anti-Semite and Jew]. This was especially true in works dealing with the Holocaust itself. In The Informed Heart (1960), Bruno Bettelheim wondered aloud whether the Nazi notion “that millions of Jews . . . would submit to extermination did not also result from seeing how much degradation they would accept without fighting back.” . . . [Historians] present a monolithic view of a mythic Jewish past in which abhorrence of violence was deeply ingrained in the Jewish self-image. . . . Yet a reexamination of the record of Jewish religious violence against Christians and the external manifestations of their religion during the millennium after the Christianization of the Roman empire under Constantine . . . would reveal patterns of behavior very much at variance with the alleged historic self-image of the Jews “as a people abhorring violence in any form.”

Being aggressive and “pushy” is part of the stereotype of Jews in Western societies, and the behavior of Israeli West Bank settlers—who routinely attack Palestinians with impunity (Bergman & Mazzetti, 2024)—and Israel itself in ethnically cleansing and murdering at least 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza in the war that began on October 7th, 2023 and expanding their territory in Syria after the fall of the Assad regime also fits the stereotype. In early twentieth-century America, the sociologist Edward A. Ross (1914) commented on a greater tendency among Jewish immigrants to maximize their advantage in all transactions, ranging from Jewish students badgering teachers for higher grades to poor Jews attempting to get more than the usual charitable allotment. For Ross (p. 144–145), while not involving physical violence, “No other immigrants are so noisy, pushing and disdainful of the rights of others as the Hebrews,” and:

The authorities complain that the East European Hebrews feel no reverence for law as such and are willing to break any ordinance they find in their way. . . . The insurance companies scan a Jewish fire risk more closely than any other. [During this period, arson aimed at collecting insurance payouts was often termed “Jewish lightening.”] Credit men say the Jewish merchant is often “slippery” and will “fail” in order to get rid of his debts. For lying the immigrant has a very bad reputation. In the North End of Boston “the readiness of the Jews to commit perjury has passed into a proverb.”

Ross (1914, p. 150) also reported:

[Immigration officials had] become very sore over the incessant fire of false accusations to which they are subjected by the Jewish press and societies. United States senators complain that during the close of the struggle over the immigration bill they were overwhelmed with a torrent of crooked statistics and misrepresentations by the Hebrews fighting the literacy test.

Jews were unique as an American immigrant group in their hostility toward American Christian culture and in their energetic, aggressive efforts to change that culture. From the perspective of Henry Ford’s The International Jew, the United States had imported around 3.5 million mainly Yiddish-speaking, intensely ethnocentric Jewish immigrants over the previous forty years. In that very short period and long prior to achieving anything like the power they obtained after World War II and the 1960s counter-cultural revolution, Jews had had enormous effects on American society, particularly in their attempts to remove expressions of Christianity from public life beginning with an attempt in 1899–1900 to remove the word “Christian” from the Virginia Bill of Rights. Ford (1920) stated in his outlet, The Dearborn Independent: “The Jews’ determination to wipe out of public life every sign of the predominant Christian character of the US is the only active form of religious intolerance in the country today.”

However, the epitome of Jewish aggression is their long crusade as a tiny minority to alter the ethnic balance of the U.S. in order to prevent the sort of mass movement that occurred in Germany in the 1930s (see Ch. 8).

Charges of anti-Semitism and guilt over the Holocaust are not the only instruments of Jewish aggressiveness. Jewish groups intimidate their enemies by a variety of means. People who oppose policies on Israel advocated by Jewish activist organizations have been fired and blacklisted from their jobs, harassed with letters, subjected to intrusive surveillance, and threatened with death. Although there is a great deal of self-censorship in the media on Israel as a result of the major role of Jews in the ownership and production of the media, gaps in this armor are aggressively closed. Paul Findley (1989, p. 296) noted over thirty years ago that there are “threats to editors and advertising departments, orchestrated boycotts, slanders, campaigns of character assassination, and personal vendettas”—a phenomenon that, as noted above, is ongoing.

Incidentally, not all Jewish groups have behaved as aggressively toward the surrounding society as have the Ashkenazi groups that make up the great bulk of American Jewry. For example, a community of Syrian Jews called the SY (pronounced “ess-why”) arrived in New York around the same time as the huge influx of Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews). The SY have become wealthy, but they haven’t entered into the power centers of American society. They eschew higher education and have no role in the elite media. They are not involved in the legal profession, politics, or academic departments of the social sciences or humanities. Although they tend to be hawkish on matters related to Israel, they have not been involved in creating the edifice that is the Israel Lobby. One gets the impression that they want to make money and stay under the radar by not making waves—the antithesis of the aggressive posture of the Ostjuden. This is probably how they survived for centuries in the Middle East. In fact, Jews in traditional societies often hid their wealth and controlled the behavior of other Jews so as not to arouse hostility from the surrounding peoples (SAID, Ch. 6). In other words, unlike the Ashkenazim, they have not developed an adversarial, competitive stance toward the people and culture of America. One can’t imagine them developing a lobby that would harness the power of the United States on behalf of a foreign government, nor can one imagine them becoming a hostile elite, as Ashkenazi Jews became in the Soviet Union (MacDonald, 2005b). They have shown no tendencies toward developing a culture of critique that subjected Western culture to what John Murray Cuddihy (1974, p. 68) termed “punitive objectivity” and “the vindictive objectivity of the marginal nonmember.” Unlike their Ashkenazi brethren, they had no impact on Western societies in the twentieth century. In this regard, they are much more like the Overseas Chinese than their Jewish brothers from Eastern Europe. To understand the origins and the power of the Israel Lobby, one has to understand the Ostjuden—the fons et origo of the two most potent and aggressive twentieth-century Jewish movements: political radicalism and Zionism. It is not that the Ostjuden are particularly ethnocentric compared to other Jews. They are, if anything, less ethnocentric than the SYs with their hyperxenophobia and obsession with blood purity (Chafets, 2007). Indeed, it is obvious that the Ostjuden could never have been so successful in creating the Israel Lobby or in altering the culture and demography of the West had they remained as a hermetically sealed community, shut off from the power centers of the society.

Finally, I have proposed that the most radical, most ethnocentric Jews tend to provide the direction for the entire Jewish community in the long run (MacDonald, 2003b). This has happened once again in contemporary Israel and is supported enthusiastically by the mainstream Jewish community in the U.S. as epitomized by the ADL, the American Israel Public Affairs Council, etc. For example, “With its overwhelming victory in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Israel more than doubled the amount of land it controlled, seizing new territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem.” Israel could have used this land to bargain for a future Palestinian state, but “the acquisition of the territories animated a religious political movement—Gush Emunim, or ‘Bloc of the Faithful’—that was determined to settle the newly conquered lands” (Bergman & Mazzetti, 2024).

Settling newly conquered land reflects the attitudes of many prominent Zionists and Israelis. Theodor Herzl (1960, p. 711), the founder of Zionism, maintained that the area of the Jewish state stretches: “From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.” This reflects God’s covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15: 18–20 and Joshua 1: 3–4: “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” The flexibility of the ultimate aims of Zionism can also be seen in this 1956 comment by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister:

The acceptance of partition [of the Palestinian Mandate] does not commit us to renounce Transjordan [i.e., the modern state of Jordan]; one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today. But the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them. (in Chomsky, 1999, p. 161) 

Ben-Gurion’s vision of “the boundaries of Zionist aspirations” included southern Lebanon, southern Syria, all of Jordan, and the Sinai, much of which has already been achieved (in Chomsky, 1999, p. 161). Or consider Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s statement that the borders of Israel “are where Jews live, not where there is a line on the map” (p. 50).

These views are common among the more extreme Zionists today—especially the fundamentalists and the settler movement, and notably Gush Emunim—who now set the tone in Israel. Indeed, in the opinion of Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky (1999, p. 73), “It is not unreasonable to assume that Gush Emunim, if it possessed the power and control, would use nuclear weapons in warfare to attempt to achieve its purpose.”

Conclusion. The current situation in the United States is the result of an awesome deployment of Jewish power and influence. One must contemplate the fact that American Jews have managed to maintain unquestioned support for Israel since the 1967 war despite Israel’s seizing land and engaging in a brutal occupation of the Palestinians in the occupied territories—an apartheid occupation that will most likely end with expulsion or complete subjugation and degradation of the Palestinians. During this same period Jewish organizations in America have been a principal force—in my view the main force—for erecting a state dedicated to suppressing ethnic identification among European-derived peoples, for encouraging massive multi-ethnic immigration into the U.S., and for erecting a legal system and cultural ideology that is obsessively sensitive to the complaints and interests of ethnic minorities (the culture of the Holocaust). All this is done without a whisper of double standards in the aboveground media.The American Jewish community is well organized and lavishly funded. It has achieved a great deal of power, and it has been successful in achieving its interests. One of the great myths often promulgated by Jewish apologists is that Jews have no consensus and therefore cannot wield any real power. Yet there is in fact 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, and abortion rights. 

Nevertheless, while civil liberties were championed by Jewish organizations during the anti-communist wave of the 1950s—when sympathy with communism was mainstream within the American Jewish community at a time when many Jewish communists were being hauled before Congressional committees and universities sometimes required loyalty oaths (MacDonald, 2019b)—Jewish organizations like the ADL are now prominently involved in censoring speech, especially on social media. Jewish consensus changes depending on Jewish interests. As always, interests trump principles.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. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find any significant area where public policy conflicts with the attitudes of mainstream Jewish organizations.

Kevin MacDonald