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
