This week has a double parasha — Nitzavim and Vayelech. The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult“), Susan Sontag (see Terry Castle’s hilarious 2005 article “Desperately Seeking Susan“), and Leo Strauss (see the unintentionally hilarious 2003 article “What Leo Strauss Was Up To” by two true believers, William Kristol and Steven Lenzer).
Kristol, who seems like a non-wacko on TV, and Lenzer wrote in the normally level-headed Public Interest about how only Strauss possessed the secret decoder ring to understand what the great philosophers of the past actually meant.
* I’ve been fired/ejected 109 times but it was never my fault. An effective meme for critics of Jews.
* What kind of people are looting in FL right now?
* Sivan Zakai writes: “It is not enough for contemporary American-Jewish children to know that white supremacy and neo-Nazism are gaining traction in the United States, yet these are the very bits of information that kids are most likely to pick up on their own. Kids will need help to understand the context around this information: Who are white supremacists? How and why are racial minorities, Jews and others their targets? Most important, kids need to understand what is being done to counter hateful speech and actions, and who is and can be involved in this work, including the children themselves.”
The One Thing Jews Should Be Doing To Combat White Supremacy
What did you feel when you heard the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, chant, “Jews will not replace us?” Fear, of course. Bewilderment, perhaps anger. But I bet a lot of Jews felt another emotion, which they’re less likely to articulate in public: snobbery. “Replace you? Where, behind the counter at Wendy’s? We’re successful, industrious, upper-middle class. You’re the dregs of society. Replace you? Don’t kid yourselves. When it comes to America’s class hierarchy, we replaced you and your kind long ago.”
Today’s anti-Semitism isn’t like the anti-Semitism of 100 or even 50 years ago. Overwhelmingly, it comes not from society’s winners but from its losers. Jews no longer press their noses against the gates of restrictive country clubs, Ivy League universities or white shoe law firms. Jews no longer yearn to be accepted by America’s elite WASP families. We already are. The man who currently occupies the White House watched with satisfaction as his eldest daughter became an Orthodox Jew. The woman he defeated watched happily as her daughter got married under a chuppah.
Today’s anti-Semitism emanates less from society’s elites than from the people who feel victimized by them. This doesn’t mean the new anti-Semitism isn’t dangerous. It doesn’t mean Jews shouldn’t respond with outrage and mobilization. But it does mean that, if only to protect ourselves, we must combat the economic and cultural dysfunction that is contributing to neo-Nazism’s rise.
Alt Jews gaining influence. Natanyahus son down with the cause https://t.co/2D0Q1SC2qS
— AltRabbi (@AltRabinowitz) September 10, 2017
Jews also have rules about contamination but I’ve never heard of us beating people up over them.
Christian boy beaten to death by classmates for 'drinking from same glass as a Muslim' https://t.co/THqS7ZMRot
— The Independent (@Independent) September 9, 2017
That somebody as seemingly hard-headed as Greenspan should have spent much of his adult life in the Rand cult is striking.
My reader continues:
Jews, unfortunately, are also likely to have a persecution complex (I know that nearly every one of them — including me — that I’ve ever met has one to some degree). And in most cases they have them for historically valid reasons — our persecutions have been regular and consistent. Sadly, however, this means that any discussion of the role that Jews have played in the history of the past three centuries is often seen as an attack. If Jews are seen as too influential, the theory goes, it will bring the hammer down like some cosmic game of whack-a-mole.
The obvious question then is whether being shielded from objective analysis in the media is good for the Jews. Unfortunately, getting yourself deemed above criticism is the surest way to lower one’s performance.
For Americans as a whole, understanding Jewish tendencies is both more complicated and, perhaps at this point in history, more important than understanding those of any other ethnic group.
In their 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene, the prominent social scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University, pointed out:
“During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.” [pp 26-27]
The last thing, however, that non-Jews are allowed to do in the U.S. is to objectively discuss the kind of psychological and sociological patterns that help explain why the quality of Jewish political and social decision-making has, on average, not always been as strong as their IQs, work ethic, argumentative skills, interest in public affairs, and self-confidence in their own judgment might suggest. The first President Bush understood this, but the second didn’t seem to have learned this lesson before the Iraq Attaq (although he seems to have learned a little in the aftermath, with Feith gone, Wolfowitz kicked upstairs, and Perle out of fashion).
What are some of these common self-debilitating Jewish tendencies? Off the top of my head, I’d suggest:
– Utopianism: Bombing Iraq into an America-loving democracy is only the latest disastrous project
– Cult-Worship- of- the-All-Knowing-Scholar-Sageism: Marxism, Freudianism, Randism, Straussianism, etc.
– Ethnocentric nostalgiaism: vividly seen in the current immigration debate, where Ellis Island-worship is substituted for facts and logic
– Be-Like-Meism: e.g., the common suggestion by Jewish pundits that all Mexican illegal immigrants have to do is act like the Jewish immigrants of 1906 and everything will turn out fine. Well, swell …
– Pseudo ethnic Humilityism: few Jews actually believe that Mexicans are just like Jews — they think Jews are much smarter — but they don’t want anybody else to notice that Jews are smarter so they advocate immigration policies that depend for their success upon Mexicans being just as smart as Jews. That this immigration policy is obviously bad for the country is less important than keeping up the charade that nobody mentions in the press that Jews are smarter than everybody else on average.
– Rube Goldbergism: overly complicated plans and analyses with too many moving parts to work reliably (e.g., the neocon plans for fixing the Middle East through invasion)
– Is-It-Good-for-the-Jewsism: I am a huge fan of enlightened self-interest, so I don’t object to this on principle
– Rube Goldbergian Is-It-Good-for-the-Jewsism: This could also be called He-Who-Says-A-Must-Say-B-C-D-E-Q-W-and-Zism. Jewish intellectuals have a tendency that on any topic related to Jews, they tend to think baroquely many steps down the line. Thus, the full panoply of the subjects that have been assumed to be bad-for-the-Jews and therefore ruled out of discussion in polite society is breathtakingly broad — for example, IQ has been driven out of the media in large part because it is feared that mentioning that Jews have higher average IQs would lead, many steps down the line, to pogroms.
– Missing-Piece-of-the-Puzzleism: One obvious problem with this tendency is that you can’t make a Rube Goldberg analysis work in the real world if you’ve banned the use of crucial moving parts, such as IQ
– Pay-No-Attention-to-that-Man-Behind-the-Curtainism: The biggest unmentionable, as the Mearsheimer-Walt brouhaha demonstrated once again, is also one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle for understanding how the modern world works: the influence of Jews.
– Enemy Nostalgiaism: Difficulty identifying current and future enemies because of emotional obsession with past enemies: e.g., the obsession with “The Passion of the Christ” combined with the inability to identify growing Latin American populism as a future threat due to immigration, etc.
– Faux Sabraism: as Francis Fukuyama pointed out to Charles Krauthammer, American neocon thinking about Iraq was motivated less by hardheaded is-it-good-for-Israel analysis — Sharon’s government was only modestly enthusiastic about the Iraq Attaq — than by What-Would-the-Israelis-Do emotions. Armchair warriors like Douglas Feith are particular susceptible to this kind of Let’s Pretend thinking..
Ironically, Jewish writers themselves are obsessed with Jewish influence, even in fields where Jews have virtually no influence, such as soccer.