Sustaining The Jewish Journal Of Los Angeles

Posted on December 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

The Jewish Journal seemed to me like the most hysterically anti-Trump of all Jewish publications (almost of which were hysterically anti-Trump). Given that Trump got about a third of Jewish votes, why would anyone on the Right support the Jewish Journal?

There is no better time of the year than Chanukah, the festival of lights, to honor the beacon that high-quality, community journalism shines on our community and our world.

As a community-based nonprofit, the Jewish Journal relies on your generous support to shed light on the complex issues facing our world, particularly at this time of great uncertainty.

You come to the Jewish Journal, time and time again, to read independent reporting from Los Angeles, Washington, New York and Jerusalem, as well as wide-ranging and civil Jewish opinion.

The need for a publication like the Journal to provide perspectives from across the political ideological spectrum – but rooted in Jewish community and values – is now more important than ever.

Help sustain the flame of the Jewish Journal burning brightly in our community and beyond for this generation and the next.

Posted in Jewish Journal | Comments Off on Sustaining The Jewish Journal Of Los Angeles

Forward: Inauguration ‘Deploraball’ Split Over Anti-Semitic Donald Trump Backers in ‘Alt-Right’

Posted on December 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

Trump-supporting ethno-nationalists and civic nationalists keep fighting with each other while the Left must cheer the personal destruction.

The Forward has devoted more articles and more resources to the Alt Right than any other Jewish publication. They’ve done a ton of solid reporting in addition to the hand-wringing.

Tabletmag.com, however, has had the most thoughtful pieces on the Alt Right, including this one on Paul Gottfried.

Forward:

But the planned gathering has revealed a deep schism within the ranks of a movement known as the alt-right: pitting those embracing white nationalism or outright racism against those seeking a more credible platform for hard-right conservatives.

The party will be held at the National Press Club in Washington the night before Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20, when many official inauguration events are taking place.

Organizers say the Deploraball is a cocktail party for Trump supporters from all ethnic backgrounds and no incendiary or discriminatory actions will be allowed. Organizers call themselves “Trumpists” and say they have sold 1,000 tickets ranging in price from $99 to $2,500. But after an online battle between star guests, Deploraball organizers offered ticket holders refunds “in light of recent events.”

One of the original organizers of the ball, alt-right social media personality Tim Treadstone who is commonly referred to by his online persona “Baked Alaska,” has been disinvited after tweeting several anti-Semitic comments, setting off angry exchanges among members of the alt-right on Twitter.

Another featured guest at the party, Mike Cernovich, has condemned Treadstone for appearing anti-Semitic and homophobic.

“The lines are drawn and the fracture is more or less complete,” he said.

Cernovich, an architect of viral Internet trends promoting rumors of Clinton’s supposed ill health that have been credited with helping push Trump to victory with the support of the alt-right, said he has rejected the alt-right’s descent into white nationalism.

The alt-right movement, which came to the fore during the presidential campaign, is a loose grouping that rejects mainstream politics and includes neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-Semites. It had previously been more widely embraced by libertarians and the far-right fringe: people more opposed to the concept of political correctness than to racial or other diversity…

Treadstone said the main difference between himself and the so-called new right, including Cernovich and Yiannopoulos, is the explicit support of white nationalism.

“If you don’t support white advocacy, you cannot be alt-right and that’s where a lot of people are running into a problem,” he told Reuters.

Cernovich, who says Treadstone is increasingly fixated on Jewish conspiracy theory, said the branch of former alt-righters he belongs to are more inclusive and are primarily focused on populism, nationalism and the rejection of “victim culture and identity politics.”

The group also has no clear leader, unlike with white nationalist alt-right, which looks to Spencer, he said.

Giesea described “Trumpism” as a new breed of Republicanism and said it was still a work-in-progress. “We’re in the process of constructing it, and it’s messy,” he said.

Posted in Alt Right, Anti-Semitism | Comments Off on Forward: Inauguration ‘Deploraball’ Split Over Anti-Semitic Donald Trump Backers in ‘Alt-Right’

Salon: ‘Faced with Donald Trump and David Friedman, Jews must resist the toxic allure of tribalism’

Posted on December 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

The essence of Judaism and of Jewish identity is tribalism. Jews are a tribe. They are an extended family partly in-bed (to use Steve Sailer’s definition of a race).

As a convert to Orthodox Judaism, let me tell you that Jewish life largely runs on genetic relatedness. A typical Jew, when he meets with fellow Jews, has a sense of a connection that goes back thousands of years.

The more genetically related people are, the more likely they are to get along. Genetic relatedness is not the only thing that bonds people, but it is a powerful force, probably the most powerful.

A person with few if any Jewish genes is going to have a tough time of connecting in Jewish life. As far as I know, I have no Jewish ancestors, and though I have managed to connect in Jewish life according to my merits, I recognize the challenge all round of bonding with people who have different genes from me.

Salon essay:

My late mother was a shiksa — tall, strawberry blonde and Midwestern — and that’s often enough for other Jews to disown and dismiss me: “Oh, so you’re not actually Jewish.” No matter that my father sought refuge from Soviet anti-Semitism, first in Israel and then in America, or that his immediate family fled the Nazi invasion on cattle trains leaving Odessa. Never mind that my mother insisted on sending me to crunchy Jewish summer camp every year, and prepared a beautiful seder. Forget that it was my father, not my mother, who talked me out of a bat mitzvah ceremony.

The sad irony is that what matters to far too many of my fellow Jews is the “purity” of my blood. I cannot be married or buried as a Jew in Israel, for example, because those institutions are under the control of an Orthodox rabbinate to whom I’m irrelevant, at best. My only option to avoid discrimination is a full-blown conversion to Orthodox Judaism. Other options, including Reform Judaism, agnosticism and even atheism, are reserved for purebreds.

Posted in Judaism | Comments Off on Salon: ‘Faced with Donald Trump and David Friedman, Jews must resist the toxic allure of tribalism’

The Male Need To Rank

Posted on December 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

An anonymous commenter observes at Steve Sailer’s site:

I make up a lot of music playlists on Youtube, and my stats say men are about twice as interested in music than women, no matter what type of music it is. Even when the musician is gay, more men are still willing to listen to him than women. On average, men are more fanatical about their hobbies than women, and they like to delve more deeply.

Someone once said that this trait comes from the male sense of hierarchy, and that when a man walks into a room, he’ll rank all women by looks and all the men by pecking order, and this is an instinctive reflex. If he’s an artist himself, he immediately asks, ‘Is this guy better than me or is he worse?’ If he doesn’t create himself but is still interested in music, he immediately starts scanning the entire field and ranking all the talent. If he likes literature, he has to rank all the writers by importance, and this is one reason why women complain that all the literary critics are male.

Men are such compulsive rankers than of course they have to lay down the law about why certain books are more important than others. It practically kills them not to. They’ll thrash around like dying fish if you tell them everything is only subjective opinion. They think it’s an outrage if you don’t clearly establish who is great and why. Men think society doesn’t work right unless you establish clear hierarchies of brains and talent, and thus indicate what you need to pay attention to and what deserves to be ignored, and I can’t quarrel with that. It’s plain to me that the trait has both a genetic basis and a Darwinian advantage, because it helped primitive human society advance into the modern era and pass on the gains of each new generation, building on top of the previous one.

Posted in Sex | Comments Off on The Male Need To Rank

Jews Should Be Fighting the Far Left, Not the ‘Alt-Right’

Posted on December 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

Joshua Seidel writes for the Forward:

Liberal Journalists have had a tough couple of months. Liberal Jewish journalists? Even tougher. Nothing seemed to work this year. Trump was the worst person ever to run for President, they said. The mainstream media and Hollywood pulled out all the stops. Celebrity videos, polemics by noted thinkers like George Takei and Lena Dunham, CNN panelists; they all tried to tell us Trump hates women, Jews, Black people, and the Constitution.

To no avail.

Perhaps nothing stings so much as “defections” from trusted minority groups. Some in the Jewish community are engaged in furious reprisals against fellow Jews who dared support the “Orange Fuhrer”. Ivanka Trump was harassed on an airplane, Jared Kushner’s Judaism was questioned. I knew my turn was coming, and indeed, enter Jamie Kirchick (not really a “liberal”, but very anti-Trump) and his recent Daily Beast piece, “The Jews Begging to Join the Alt-Right”, targeting myself and fellow contributors to our website “The Jewish Alternative”.

Despite Kirchick’s title, the “alt right” doesn’t constitute something one can “join”. There’s no organized alt-right political party, no organization that can lay complete claim to the title. There’s just people, who have come to their political conclusions in the same manner that Kirchick has. Some of them hate Jews. My fellow contributors and I are Jewish, and therefore, they hate us. It’s really that simple. We may share some political positions with these anti-Semites, we may agree on some issues, but we are not the same thing, not in the same “group”, and never will be. Kirchick’s semantic games, repeated so many times by the media (all alt-right are Nazis, alt-right supports Trump, therefore Trump = Nazi) failed to influence the election or shut yours truly up.

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off on Jews Should Be Fighting the Far Left, Not the ‘Alt-Right’