David Hollinger: ‘Rich, Powerful, and Smart: Jewish Overrepresentation Should Be Explained Instead of Avoided or Mystified’ (2004)

Hollinger writes as if breaking a taboo. He frames the essay as a brave departure from a field that looks away. The opening does the work: a distinguished historian privately suspects the answer is genetic. The reader feels the chill. Hollinger then offers his own answer, which turns out to be the safest available account.
The argument runs on environmental terrain. Diaspora conditions selected for literacy, calculation, abstraction, mobility. These are the skills modernity rewards. Jews entered the modern era already trained for it. The same framework explains the Bolsheviks, the Nobel laureates, the financiers.
The structure is cultural transmission across generations. No biology. No selection effect on heritable traits. No engagement with the work that motivates the distinguished historian’s private suspicion. Hollinger wants to neutralize the genetic question by not engaging it.
That move has costs. The skills he names, calculation, abstraction, language fluency, are the very traits cognitive ability research treats as substantially heritable. If Jewish communities passed these traits along for forty generations through assortative mating within a literate marriage market, the historical and biological accounts converge rather than compete. Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending make this argument explicit two years after Hollinger writes. He could have anticipated it. He chooses not to.
The “same principles of causation” line is his strongest move and the one he does not follow through on. He says we should use the same toolkit for under- and overrepresentation. Fine. The toolkit used to explain Black underrepresentation includes claims about ancestral conditions, about the heritability of the trait, about the persistence of group differences across environments. Apply that toolkit symmetrically and you reach conclusions Hollinger shows no interest in reaching. Method symmetry requires following the explanation wherever it leads. He prefers a one-sided symmetry.
The Bolshevik passage is the bravest section. He names Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Yagoda. He notes the Jewish overrepresentation among the makers of the Revolution and the staffers of the early Soviet state. For 2004 in the Jewish Quarterly Review, this is unusual. Slezkine’s book had just appeared. Hollinger uses it.
But his account treats Bolshevism as a rational career path for ambitious literate outsiders plus a universalist ideology that promised to abolish blood and soil. That is part of the story. The other part, which Slezkine handles with more candor than Hollinger, is that the Pale produced ethnic resentment, and the Revolution gave that resentment institutional expression. Universalist socialism worked among many of its Jewish adherents as a vehicle for tribal grievance against the Christian peasantries that had penned them in. The early Soviet state, among other things, settled old accounts. Hollinger’s framework cannot say this. His skills-and-opportunities account keeps the analysis on safer ground.
The most useful conceptual move comes near the end, when Hollinger separates communal Jewry from descendants of the Diaspora. The expansion lets Jewish studies claim Oppenheimer, Lippmann, Merton, Kuhn, Rand, Albright. He frames the move as methodological honesty: these people were shaped by the conditions, and so the conditions are part of their story.
The move also performs coalition work. It lets Jewish intellectuals talk about Jewish achievement in fields where the achievers did not affiliate. It folds atheist physicists, Cold War liberals, Hollywood moguls, and Republican Secretaries of State into a category that flatters the descent group. The booster reading and the bigot reading both stay on the table. Hollinger wants to escape the booster-bigot trap, but his analytical expansion gives the booster reading a wider field to operate on.
Academic essentialism rarely announces itself directly. It works through framing: which questions count as serious, which sources count as authoritative, which conclusions count as decent. Hollinger frames the essay as anti-essentialist. The framing presents environmental explanation as the brave alternative to mystification. But environmental explanation is the field’s preferred resting place. Mystification is not the alternative he suppresses. The genetic account is. He argues against the wrong opponent.
Alliance Theory points the same direction. The essay does coalition work for a formation of Jewish American liberal academics who want the freedom to discuss Jewish overrepresentation candidly without conceding any ground to the antisemitic right or to the cognitive ability literature. The piece supplies a vocabulary that lets that group hold the topic at the center of its inquiry while keeping the conclusions safe.
Hollinger picks the right target. The avoidance is a problem. The mystification is a problem. His own account replaces them with a more refined avoidance. The questions worth asking after Hollinger are the ones his framework rules out: how much of the Jewish achievement pattern survives controls for cognitive ability, how much of cognitive ability is heritable in the relevant range, what happens to the explanation when Diaspora conditions end and the achievement pattern persists into the third and fourth American generations. Klingenstein’s institutional history, Novick on the consensus school, and Slezkine’s portrait of the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia all bear on these questions. Hollinger gestures toward the territory and stops at the border.
Hollinger uses Coleman Silk to illustrate that family-level cultural capital, not skin color, accounts for educational and professional achievement. The framing flatters the environmental account. But Roth’s novel cuts the other way too. Silk’s success rests on inheriting from a Black family that already had what most Black families did not have: rabbinical-like learning in the father, social solidarity, literacy across generations, commercial experience. Roth uses that family precisely because it is unusual. Hollinger reads the unusual family as evidence that conditions, not biology, do the work. The reading is plausible. It is also the reading that lets him keep the analysis on the side of the question he prefers.