Unchosen is the journalist Julie Burchill’s account of how she — a bright and bratty working-class girl from Bristol — fell in love with the Jewish race. It’s an exhilarating and exasperating mix of the utterly brilliant and the totally bonkers.
Poor Julie — she thought that her teenage dream of marrying a Jewish man had come true when she married me back in the 1980s. Yes, she got her Jew, but the -ish bit was missing. My family and I earn a chapter in her book called ‘Meet the Perverts’ and all I can say is: Oy vey! You think you’re a smart and funny man to be married to — and then you read an ex-wife’s memoir and you wonder: was I that boring?
Today Julie describes her self as a philo-Semite — that is, an admirer or lover of the Jews. But as her book makes clear, there are plenty of Jews Julie doesn’t love: me, David Baddiel, the journalist Anne Karpf, the actress Miriam Margolyes, her local lesbian rabbi, Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah and millions of Jews around the world who have ever criticised Israel. Her love is blind, deaf and dumb to such an obvious contradiction.
When I was married to Julie she was not only a philo-Semite but a Stalinist who regarded the working-class as the chosen people. Nowadays she’s a Stalinist philo-Semite; anyone who doesn’t toe the party line of uncritical support for Israel is branded a ‘self-loathing Jew’.
Julie’s love affair with Judaism began as a teenager in Bristol when she discovered the horrors of the Holocaust. (Funny; the horrors of Stalinism never bothered her.) So why does she love Jews? She says it’s not for the usual cute reasons: the humour, the food, the feeling for family etc. No, Julie loves the hard stuff: religion, Israel and Zionism.
But most of all she loves those big Jewish brains. Time and time again, she argues that anti-Semitism, criticism of Israel, war in the Middle East, you name it, are all rooted in one simple fact: the Jews are so much smarter than everyone on the planet. And this produces Jew-envy on a global scale.
One of the admirable things about her book is that she comes out and says what so many other pro-Jewish historians — like Paul Johnson and Simon Schama — only hint at deep in the subtext of their works. They would never be so intellectually crass as actually to say that the Jews are superior to anyone else. Julie, on the other hand, is happy to shout it out from the synagogue rooftop: the Jews are smarter, more successful and better than the rest of you lot, so suck it up, gentile losers! …
But you can’t simply dismiss Julie as a Zionist nutjob — despite the fact that numerous times in her book she practically comes out and says: ‘I’m a Zionist nutjob, so sue me!’ She has some fair points about how white liberal leftists have turned a blind eye to the sexism, homophobia and violence of Islam in the name of multicultural tolerance. And let’s give her credit: Julie was making these points back in the 1980s, when it was a brave thing to do. …
Steve Sailer comments: “And then there’s the bred-in earnestness of American columnists, while London columnists gleefully prided themselves on being hacks looking for the Next Big Thing to ride for awhile.”
From Sailer’s comments section:
* …[P]hilosemitism is erzats nationalism for naturally nationalistic people who realize that European/white nationalism has become too disreputable. And with jews it can’t be, because holocaust.
* Cosmo Landesman is the kind of “literary journalist” we in the States can only dream of having: a (sort-of) leftist who is completely unmoved by any PC idiocies, and who, without warning, with frankness but without boasting, often alludes to his personal hedonism in print, e.g. “I recently had sex with a woman who writes for the Guardian and…”
* Democrats and Republicans suffer when they nominate non-white candidates, even in extremely diverse California. The worst performing Republican in California this year was an Asian Indian, the worst performing Democrat was a Hispanic. The second worst performing democrat was an Asian.
* I really would like to see a consistent figure for Jewish IQ. I’ve seen figures all over the place for them, ranging from 107 to even as high as 120. So what is it?
I’d also like to see a figure for these Haridi Jews as regards IQ. Be interesting to see if they score as high as regular Ashkenazim.
But ok, Jews (and Asians) are smarter. We’ve established that.
My question now is “So What?” Seems to me that when you have a conflict of interests, it’s just another day, just another fight, just another walk in the hobbesian jungle.
Intelligence is a useful tool, but as far as I know, no higher power has parted the heavens and looked down as a gigantic head and said “Thou shall always heel to the smarter, for I have given them dominion over the earth, and all that is in it.”
Seems to me that you could take a page from the Oakland Raiders (amusingly I think Al Davis was Jewish) and say “Just win baby.”
China… is another country, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about them. I mean there are obvious things like our trade imbalance and immigration, but at this point these are side issues in the story of China. If they are the country that is going to be the linchpin of the 21st century, then I don’t see any way anyone derails that. Well except the Chinese of course.
But as far as this country? Seems to me it is more a matter of saying “Meet me at the fifty. I’m going to kick your ass, no I’m not being talked out of it, it’s the same as it ever was, my tribe against yours.”
* ‘Jews uber alles’ is just amusing?
So, the Nazis were right about the master race but wrong about which one.
* The key to this, as Landesman hints in the first sentence, is that Julie Burchill is working class. I never knew a working class Englishman who did not think that Jews are amazingly intelligent and I never knew a middle class one who did, possibly because different standards of intelligence are in operation. To a clever pusher of allegedly lowly birth like the young Burchill, a Jewish marriage spells instant insiderdom, an alternative path to advancement, and a whole network of people with the same enemies as her own.
