The antisemitic perspective is that if something bad happened and some Jews wanted it to happen, then obviously the Jews did it.
Example: the US disastrously invaded Iraq. Bibi had made a speech for it. Some of the top officials of the Bush admin were Jewish. Therefore, the Jews made the US invade Iraq.
The fact that there were prominent Jews on the other side of the issue, like Arik Sharon, doesn't matter. The fact that there were plenty of top goyish apparatchiks like Rumsfeld and Cheney involved doesn't matter. It happened, it was bad, some Jews wanted it, therefore, they did it.
This worldview has certain advantages-it allows one to avoid cognitive dissonance, for instance. And the position of passive victim to whom things just happen because others take advantage of his goodness and naivete is very tempting. Incidentally, it also justifies anything you might want to do in the future-compared to the evils done to you by THEM throughout history, anything you do is just minor and righteous payback.
We’ve always contained multitudes, perhaps united by an underlying sense of dissatisfaction with the existing order coupled with a desire to make an impact.
TLDR: Any political, cultural or social movement not explicitly antisemitic will find a disporotionate number of Jews (and even some that are antisemitic if the Jews involved don't know they are Jewish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Csan%C3%A1d_Szegedi)
A very interesting meander down left-wing political memory lane. My only puzzlement was with your comment that the Frankfurt School was opposed to the student protests in the Sixties. Marcuse's last work, "An Essay on Liberation," was in essence a celebration of the left-wing, hippy, counter-cultural protest movement as our last best hope for revolutionary change, now that the workers had turned up their noses at the project. Marcuse came to Brandeis at the end of every academic year to deliver yet another farewell address to the standing-room only crowds of students who doted on his every word. We adored Marcuse whose "Eros and Civilization" and "One-Dimenional Man" were obligatory reading for everyone who opposed the War and wanted to create a better world.
Out of respect for Marcuse, many of us tried to read the writings of his fellow travelers from the Frankfurt School, but apart from Walter Benjamin, none of them turned out to be readable. The notion, recently promoted by Daniel Greenfield and several other conservative writers, that this little introverted group of leftist intellectuals engineered the take-down of Western culture is really quite funny. I can't imagine them even agreeing on the topping for a take-out pizza for lunch.
Marcuse appealed to us because he offered a colorful alternative, anchored in Schiller and German Romanticism, to the tedious, drably dogmatic, cynical, and amoral Marxist/Leninist ideology that animated the Stalinist left in the USSR and its followers in the States. Sadly, it's not the legacy of the Frankfurt School but that of the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Black Power thugs that wormed its way into heartland of academia, media and American institutions.
Thanks for sharing those memories! I wrote that the Frankfurt School "largely" opposed the student protests of the 1960s. You're right that Marcuse was a notable exception, but the standard line was to oppose political activism in favor of cultural analysis. Consider the notorious Busenattentat ("breast action"). From https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/critical-theory-and-the-newest-left:
"Adorno 'rejected the idea that radical intellectuals had a duty to serve as cheerleaders for…revolutionary students.' When he refused to support what he called the students’ uncompromising 'actionism'—Adorno’s word for the students’ nihilistic desire to act without need of justification—his own lectures and reputation became a target. He was shouted down, badgered, and defamed. In one incident, Adorno called the police to clear student occupiers of the Institute. The hostility to Adorno came to a head the next year when students disrupted a lecture course to demand that Adorno engage in ritual self-criticism for his call to the police, and female students bared their breasts to him, ostensibly in an effort to expose his bourgeois prudery. The course had to be cancelled. Adorno died of a heart attack a few months later, at the age of 65."
It's striking how similar these tactics were to the "From the River to the Sea" campus occupations almost 60 years later. Plus ça change....
What a sad, broken-hearted ending to Adorno's academic career. Hounded to death by the shrieking harpies with their Busenattentat. During his reminiscences in the afterlife I can imagine him regretting the missed opportunity to photograph his assailants and put together an ugly commemorative calendar featuring the fair maidens of the deranged, rabid Left.
This is a good essay but, logically speaking, it doesn’t automatically refute the idea that *some* Jews, afflicted with Hitler phobia or fear of anti-Semitism (and rightly so!), haven’t attempted to influence the culture and/or policies such that it makes the West safer for Jews.
Thanks, but I'm not attempting to refute that notion. For example, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded in the wake of Leo Frank's lynching to make American culture and policies safer for Jews. Its mission statement remains "To stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all." It's not a conspiracy theory to say that the ADL has a pro-Jewish agenda. Nor is it out of bounds to criticize the ADL on various grounds--as many people have done, both from the left and the right.
I'm refuting the notion that leftism is intrinsically Jewish, or that Judaism is intrinsically leftist, despite the existence and influence of leftist Jews. Likewise, MAGA isn't intrinsically Jewish, and Judaism isn't intrinsically MAGA, despite the existence and influence of MAGA Jews. Yes, there are more leftist than MAGA Jews, which poses an interesting sociological question. But there are still many right-wing Jews, who can often lay a greater claim to authentic Jewish tradition. Why, then, for antisemites, is the communist Karl Marx more representative of Judaism than the conservative Benjamin Disraeli?
That's probably true, though Disraeli was hugely influential in Britain. Interestingly, Lord Balfour (of Balfour Declaration fame) supported the Zionists in part because he saw them as “guardians of a continuity of religious and racial tradition that made the unassimilated Jew a great conservative force in world politics." He also said that he liked Jewish history "from a Tory point of view for its length." So Jews were historically associated with conservatism, at least in certain British circles, which encouraged early support for Zionism.
I thought your article made excellent points and I understand your point about it not being about debunking conspiracy theories. To answer your question at the end: If Jews are disproportionately geared towards leftism (perhaps less so now than in the past), “cultural Marxism”, etc., then that will raise the ire of some right wingers if it has the appearance of serving their group interests, as opposed to being nothing more than Cofnas’ default hypothesis (i.e., swimming with the gentile intellectual tide). The right wingers believe that Jews have set and/or influenced those trends, as might be expected given their disproportionate media and/or academic influence, coupled with their high IQ. This could be wrong, of course, but it’s not totally far-fetched. And it doesn’t require a conspiracy—it just requires enough influential Jews sharing/spreading these views.
Ironically, the notion that groups must have proportionate outcomes is typically associated with the left. Jews are also disproportionately represented in the medical profession, but this does not make medicine intrinsically Jewish. I don’t object to “noticing” demographic imbalances. But there are more plausible explanations than anti-Gentile animus for why many Jews are on the left, as I explore in this article.
I agree that even if certain medical theories were disproportionately favored by Jewish scientists/doctors that wouldn’t make those theories wrong or lacking in objectivity; therefore, it would be wrong to call medicine “intrinsically Jewish”. But a more realistic scenario is that the social sciences/politics/media could be influenced in a pro-Jewish direction by Jews qua Jews if they see the advantages of being proactive (as opposed to merely reactive) regarding their defense when living among hostile gentiles in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
I know what you're driving at, but my objections to this thesis include:
- There's no unanimity among Jews as to what a "pro-Jewish" direction for social sciences/politics/media entails. The false image of a Jewish liberal consensus relies on removing Orthodox Jews, non-Ashkenazi Jews, and Russian-speaking Jews (among others) from the picture.
- Ethnocentric Jews tend to be conservative across the board, while liberal Jews tend to be liberal across the board (as demonstrated by intermarriage rates), which goes against the theory that Jews advocate ethnocentrism for themselves and universalism for everyone else.
- While many Jews advocate for broadly liberal positions like freedom of religion and equality before the law, the liberal tradition itself is hardly a Jewish invention. Anglo Protestants should take the credit (or blame) for John Locke, John Stuart Mill, James Madison, and the rest.
<There's no unanimity among Jews as to what a "pro-Jewish" direction for social sciences/politics/media entails.>
I agree. But you can have significant overlap of ideological views such that it becomes widespread and influential (e.g., communist Jews and anti-communist Jews were in opposition to each other but against discrimination, segregation, etc.) Also, it doesn’t have to be explicitly “pro-Jewish”; it merely has to reflect the values widely held by Jews regarding opposition to discrimination (aka support for the totalitarian civil rights regime), Christian nationalism, nativism, etc.
<The false image of a Jewish liberal consensus relies on removing Orthodox Jews, non-Ashkenazi Jews, and Russian-speaking Jews (among others) from the picture.>
You can simultaneously acknowledge there is no consensus among Jews and still acknowledge that Jews were/are influential. This would be similar to acknowledging the Jewish lobby regarding Israel while also acknowledging Jewish anti-Zionists, etc.
<Ethnocentric Jews tend to be conservative across the board,…>
Culturally, yes, but I read somewhere that the majority still vote Democrat. (I could be wrong.)
<while liberal Jews tend to be liberal across the board (as demonstrated by intermarriage rates), which goes against the theory that Jews advocate ethnocentrism for themselves and universalism for everyone else.>
As a Mischling, I have to agree as far as secular Jews go. But that doesn’t mean they don’t think (or didn’t think) in terms of Jewish safety and proactive means to secure it. This can be expressed as “liberal values” and diehard support for the Democrats. One Jewish family member, who perceived his white gentile suburban neighbors as Republicans said that black people should be imported into their neighborhoods to punish them (he also said that the USSR had good healthcare); another defended Alger Hiss’ innocence. Also, Orthodox Jews are explicit evidence for ethnocentrism in spite of many secular Jews marrying out.
<While many Jews advocate for broadly liberal positions like freedom of religion and equality before the law, the liberal tradition itself is hardly a Jewish invention. Anglo Protestants should take the credit (or blame) for John Locke, John Stuart Mill, James Madison, and the rest.>
I agree. But the point is that they disproportionately push these ideas (whether bad or good) and specific ideas like Freudianism (when it was in vogue), Gouldism (still in vogue), Boasianism (still in vogue?), Frankfurt School/wokeism (still in vogue), etc. But it’s also true many Jews oppose these ideas. In some cases they just want to check excesses. Some of these excesses are bad for Jews. The following article sounds like it could have been written by Kevin MacDonald if he were a troll and you will instantly see it.
The antisemitic perspective is that if something bad happened and some Jews wanted it to happen, then obviously the Jews did it.
Example: the US disastrously invaded Iraq. Bibi had made a speech for it. Some of the top officials of the Bush admin were Jewish. Therefore, the Jews made the US invade Iraq.
The fact that there were prominent Jews on the other side of the issue, like Arik Sharon, doesn't matter. The fact that there were plenty of top goyish apparatchiks like Rumsfeld and Cheney involved doesn't matter. It happened, it was bad, some Jews wanted it, therefore, they did it.
This worldview has certain advantages-it allows one to avoid cognitive dissonance, for instance. And the position of passive victim to whom things just happen because others take advantage of his goodness and naivete is very tempting. Incidentally, it also justifies anything you might want to do in the future-compared to the evils done to you by THEM throughout history, anything you do is just minor and righteous payback.
We’ve always contained multitudes, perhaps united by an underlying sense of dissatisfaction with the existing order coupled with a desire to make an impact.
TLDR: Any political, cultural or social movement not explicitly antisemitic will find a disporotionate number of Jews (and even some that are antisemitic if the Jews involved don't know they are Jewish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Csan%C3%A1d_Szegedi)
A very interesting meander down left-wing political memory lane. My only puzzlement was with your comment that the Frankfurt School was opposed to the student protests in the Sixties. Marcuse's last work, "An Essay on Liberation," was in essence a celebration of the left-wing, hippy, counter-cultural protest movement as our last best hope for revolutionary change, now that the workers had turned up their noses at the project. Marcuse came to Brandeis at the end of every academic year to deliver yet another farewell address to the standing-room only crowds of students who doted on his every word. We adored Marcuse whose "Eros and Civilization" and "One-Dimenional Man" were obligatory reading for everyone who opposed the War and wanted to create a better world.
Out of respect for Marcuse, many of us tried to read the writings of his fellow travelers from the Frankfurt School, but apart from Walter Benjamin, none of them turned out to be readable. The notion, recently promoted by Daniel Greenfield and several other conservative writers, that this little introverted group of leftist intellectuals engineered the take-down of Western culture is really quite funny. I can't imagine them even agreeing on the topping for a take-out pizza for lunch.
Marcuse appealed to us because he offered a colorful alternative, anchored in Schiller and German Romanticism, to the tedious, drably dogmatic, cynical, and amoral Marxist/Leninist ideology that animated the Stalinist left in the USSR and its followers in the States. Sadly, it's not the legacy of the Frankfurt School but that of the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Black Power thugs that wormed its way into heartland of academia, media and American institutions.
Thanks for sharing those memories! I wrote that the Frankfurt School "largely" opposed the student protests of the 1960s. You're right that Marcuse was a notable exception, but the standard line was to oppose political activism in favor of cultural analysis. Consider the notorious Busenattentat ("breast action"). From https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/critical-theory-and-the-newest-left:
"Adorno 'rejected the idea that radical intellectuals had a duty to serve as cheerleaders for…revolutionary students.' When he refused to support what he called the students’ uncompromising 'actionism'—Adorno’s word for the students’ nihilistic desire to act without need of justification—his own lectures and reputation became a target. He was shouted down, badgered, and defamed. In one incident, Adorno called the police to clear student occupiers of the Institute. The hostility to Adorno came to a head the next year when students disrupted a lecture course to demand that Adorno engage in ritual self-criticism for his call to the police, and female students bared their breasts to him, ostensibly in an effort to expose his bourgeois prudery. The course had to be cancelled. Adorno died of a heart attack a few months later, at the age of 65."
It's striking how similar these tactics were to the "From the River to the Sea" campus occupations almost 60 years later. Plus ça change....
What a sad, broken-hearted ending to Adorno's academic career. Hounded to death by the shrieking harpies with their Busenattentat. During his reminiscences in the afterlife I can imagine him regretting the missed opportunity to photograph his assailants and put together an ugly commemorative calendar featuring the fair maidens of the deranged, rabid Left.
This is a good essay but, logically speaking, it doesn’t automatically refute the idea that *some* Jews, afflicted with Hitler phobia or fear of anti-Semitism (and rightly so!), haven’t attempted to influence the culture and/or policies such that it makes the West safer for Jews.
Thanks, but I'm not attempting to refute that notion. For example, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded in the wake of Leo Frank's lynching to make American culture and policies safer for Jews. Its mission statement remains "To stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all." It's not a conspiracy theory to say that the ADL has a pro-Jewish agenda. Nor is it out of bounds to criticize the ADL on various grounds--as many people have done, both from the left and the right.
I'm refuting the notion that leftism is intrinsically Jewish, or that Judaism is intrinsically leftist, despite the existence and influence of leftist Jews. Likewise, MAGA isn't intrinsically Jewish, and Judaism isn't intrinsically MAGA, despite the existence and influence of MAGA Jews. Yes, there are more leftist than MAGA Jews, which poses an interesting sociological question. But there are still many right-wing Jews, who can often lay a greater claim to authentic Jewish tradition. Why, then, for antisemites, is the communist Karl Marx more representative of Judaism than the conservative Benjamin Disraeli?
Why, then, for antisemites, is the communist Karl Marx more representative of Judaism than the conservative Benjamin Disraeli?
They have never heard of Disraeli, but they have heard of Marx. Occam's Razor at work.
That's probably true, though Disraeli was hugely influential in Britain. Interestingly, Lord Balfour (of Balfour Declaration fame) supported the Zionists in part because he saw them as “guardians of a continuity of religious and racial tradition that made the unassimilated Jew a great conservative force in world politics." He also said that he liked Jewish history "from a Tory point of view for its length." So Jews were historically associated with conservatism, at least in certain British circles, which encouraged early support for Zionism.
I thought your article made excellent points and I understand your point about it not being about debunking conspiracy theories. To answer your question at the end: If Jews are disproportionately geared towards leftism (perhaps less so now than in the past), “cultural Marxism”, etc., then that will raise the ire of some right wingers if it has the appearance of serving their group interests, as opposed to being nothing more than Cofnas’ default hypothesis (i.e., swimming with the gentile intellectual tide). The right wingers believe that Jews have set and/or influenced those trends, as might be expected given their disproportionate media and/or academic influence, coupled with their high IQ. This could be wrong, of course, but it’s not totally far-fetched. And it doesn’t require a conspiracy—it just requires enough influential Jews sharing/spreading these views.
Ironically, the notion that groups must have proportionate outcomes is typically associated with the left. Jews are also disproportionately represented in the medical profession, but this does not make medicine intrinsically Jewish. I don’t object to “noticing” demographic imbalances. But there are more plausible explanations than anti-Gentile animus for why many Jews are on the left, as I explore in this article.
I agree that even if certain medical theories were disproportionately favored by Jewish scientists/doctors that wouldn’t make those theories wrong or lacking in objectivity; therefore, it would be wrong to call medicine “intrinsically Jewish”. But a more realistic scenario is that the social sciences/politics/media could be influenced in a pro-Jewish direction by Jews qua Jews if they see the advantages of being proactive (as opposed to merely reactive) regarding their defense when living among hostile gentiles in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
I know what you're driving at, but my objections to this thesis include:
- There's no unanimity among Jews as to what a "pro-Jewish" direction for social sciences/politics/media entails. The false image of a Jewish liberal consensus relies on removing Orthodox Jews, non-Ashkenazi Jews, and Russian-speaking Jews (among others) from the picture.
- Ethnocentric Jews tend to be conservative across the board, while liberal Jews tend to be liberal across the board (as demonstrated by intermarriage rates), which goes against the theory that Jews advocate ethnocentrism for themselves and universalism for everyone else.
- While many Jews advocate for broadly liberal positions like freedom of religion and equality before the law, the liberal tradition itself is hardly a Jewish invention. Anglo Protestants should take the credit (or blame) for John Locke, John Stuart Mill, James Madison, and the rest.
<There's no unanimity among Jews as to what a "pro-Jewish" direction for social sciences/politics/media entails.>
I agree. But you can have significant overlap of ideological views such that it becomes widespread and influential (e.g., communist Jews and anti-communist Jews were in opposition to each other but against discrimination, segregation, etc.) Also, it doesn’t have to be explicitly “pro-Jewish”; it merely has to reflect the values widely held by Jews regarding opposition to discrimination (aka support for the totalitarian civil rights regime), Christian nationalism, nativism, etc.
<The false image of a Jewish liberal consensus relies on removing Orthodox Jews, non-Ashkenazi Jews, and Russian-speaking Jews (among others) from the picture.>
You can simultaneously acknowledge there is no consensus among Jews and still acknowledge that Jews were/are influential. This would be similar to acknowledging the Jewish lobby regarding Israel while also acknowledging Jewish anti-Zionists, etc.
<Ethnocentric Jews tend to be conservative across the board,…>
Culturally, yes, but I read somewhere that the majority still vote Democrat. (I could be wrong.)
<while liberal Jews tend to be liberal across the board (as demonstrated by intermarriage rates), which goes against the theory that Jews advocate ethnocentrism for themselves and universalism for everyone else.>
As a Mischling, I have to agree as far as secular Jews go. But that doesn’t mean they don’t think (or didn’t think) in terms of Jewish safety and proactive means to secure it. This can be expressed as “liberal values” and diehard support for the Democrats. One Jewish family member, who perceived his white gentile suburban neighbors as Republicans said that black people should be imported into their neighborhoods to punish them (he also said that the USSR had good healthcare); another defended Alger Hiss’ innocence. Also, Orthodox Jews are explicit evidence for ethnocentrism in spite of many secular Jews marrying out.
<While many Jews advocate for broadly liberal positions like freedom of religion and equality before the law, the liberal tradition itself is hardly a Jewish invention. Anglo Protestants should take the credit (or blame) for John Locke, John Stuart Mill, James Madison, and the rest.>
I agree. But the point is that they disproportionately push these ideas (whether bad or good) and specific ideas like Freudianism (when it was in vogue), Gouldism (still in vogue), Boasianism (still in vogue?), Frankfurt School/wokeism (still in vogue), etc. But it’s also true many Jews oppose these ideas. In some cases they just want to check excesses. Some of these excesses are bad for Jews. The following article sounds like it could have been written by Kevin MacDonald if he were a troll and you will instantly see it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/futureofjewish/p/as-a-lifelong-jewish-democrat-it?r=b5zww&utm_medium=ios