The Jewish Edge

Adults with post-secondary degrees (global) according to Pew:
Jews 61%
Christians 20%
Unaff 16%
Buddhists 12%
Hindus 10%
Muslims 8%

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The Jewish Alternative: A Manifesto

Reactionary Jew posts:

A third goal of ours is to change the paradigm of US-Israel foreign relations. This means working towards weakening or reforming international globalist institutions like the UN, which by their very nature tend to act against the national interests of both whites and Jews. Moreover, we’re in favor of an Israel more generally independent: we oppose US military aid to Israel, which is little more than a diplomatic thumbscrew used by the US to dictate Israeli domestic and regional woes, and easily replaceable from within Israel’s budget. We’re skeptical of traditional neoconservative foreign policy in the Middle East, which has done little but prove itself to be dangerous, expensive, and ineffective. At the end of the day, we want Israel to become a normal country like any other: with a free hand to act in the region as it sees fit, unfettered by endless condemnation from a self-righteous international community, and no longer a fulcrum of Western foreign policy dealing with a tense internal perpetual entanglement. We want to see Jews move to the state of Israel in the highest numbers possible, along with the annexation of Gaza and the West Bank.

Where do we disagree? Ari Ben Canaan is a secular Zionist who drinks eggnog with his porkchops on Hanukkah; Reactionary Jew is an Halachically-observant Orthodox Zionist; Joshua Seidel is somewhere in between. Of the three, Josh could be said to be the furthest left of all of us, and closer to the so-called “alt lite” than either of the other two. Whereas RJ sees Jewish identity as fundamentally rooted in an understanding of traditional religion, Ari sees Jewish identity only as a matter of common heritage, ancestry, and history. RJ and Ari believe Jews should, ideally, live in Israel; whereas Josh believes that Jews can have a permanent place in the West. We believe that these diversities of opinion are (((our greatest strength))), and hope to develop both our agreements and disagreements as we continue to publish and podcast.

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James Kirchick: ‘SHONDA: The Jews Begging to Join the Alt-Right: Talk about self-hating. Meet the American Jews lining up to shout ‘Seig Heil’ and ‘Hail, Donald.’’

Jamie Kirchick writes for The Daily Beast:

“We insist on joining the club that refuses to have us as members” might as well be the mantra of some aspiring Jewish adherents of the racist “alt-right.”

There are only two honorable forms of argument – to challenges facts or logic. To hurl slurs such as “racist” shows that you are bereft of honorable argument and that you personally are bereft of honor.

Jews don’t need to aspire to be part of the Alt Right. They either are or are not a member of this school of thought. No hierarchy can deny them membership. Becoming Alt Right is not like converting to Orthodox Judaism where you have to have a beit din (Jewish law court) approve your membership.

The intellectual godfather of the Alt Right is a Jew — Paul Gottfried, who was a mentor to Richard Spencer.

Views that are now described as “Alt Right”, such as that race is real and that race is the foundation of identity, were considered commonsense and were almost universally held throughout the West prior to the 1960s on both sides of the political spectrum.

A nebulous collective of internet trolls, neoreactionaries, and outright white supremacists, the alt-right has drawn widespread fascination in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, which it helped propel. Contemptuous of mainstream conservativism and explicitly embracing white identity politics, alt-righters are in many ways the mirror image of the racial minority and “woke” liberal activists they gleefully antagonize. This likeness is implicitly acknowledged by the alt-right’s use of the term “identitarian,” a designation that seeks to politicize whiteness.

There are no white supremacists. That’s just name-calling. Nobody on the Alt Right thinks that whites are superior at everything. Superiority has nothing to do with identity. When you prefer that your own group survives, that’s not supremacist.

According to traditional Judaism, the Jews are God’s Chosen People. You could argue that is supremacist, but most every group sees itself as playing a special role in the universe. You could call that supremacist but I don’t think it is the most accurate term for this attitude. Every individual tends to see himself as the center of the universe. Big deal.

Needless to say, these guys aren’t exactly fans of the Jews. One of alt-right’s leading voices, Kevin MacDonald, has written entire books positing that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy” aimed at undermining white, Christian civilization.

There are many different attitudes towards Jews on the Alt Right. According to Kevin MacDonald, every form of life has an evolutionary group strategy that seeks to survive and thrive in the brutal struggle for scarce resources that is life.

Life is sometimes love and sometimes war.

Like all forms of life, Judaism’s purpose is to survive and that usually means competing with other groups, including Christians, and in the competition for survival, many strategies are used. All groups use many different strategies for survival, and all groups seek, at times, to undermine their opponents in the struggle for scarce resources.

The alt-right’s embrace of anti-Semitism might also have something to do with the increasing influence of Spencer, who has effectively become leader of the alt-right.

There is no leader of the Alt Right. Richard Spencer is not some rabid indiscriminate hater of Jews. He recognizes that different groups have different interests and just as Torah wants Jews to have their own homeland without giving citizenship to non-Jews, he wants the same sort of deal for his people.

The sub-head on Kirchick’s piece reads: “Talk about self-hating. Meet the American Jews lining up to shout ‘Seig Heil’ and ‘Hail, Donald.’”

Yet his article never shows how any of the Alt Right Jews are self-hating or lining up to shout “Seig Heil.” Jamie Kirchick just makes things up. So convinced that he is on the side of righteousness, he has no moral compunction about lying.

But none of this seems to faze denizens of “The Jewish Alternative,” a newly launched website and podcast purporting to represent “The Voice of Dissident Jewry.” The alt-right, they say, is the only force willing to protect western civilization—and, by implication, Jews—from the hordes of Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists, and campus totalitarians trying to destroy it.

There are plenty of things in the Alt Right that faze Alt Right Jews, Jamie just can’t bring himself to listen.

The Alt Right, in general, regards traitorous whites as the primary threat to Western civilization, not Muslims, not blacks and not Jews.

Joshua Seidel, one of the site’s proprietors and an occasional Twitter antagonist of mine, related in an interview that he went through a “pretty typical progression” in his politics. Starting out as a leftist in college, he became a “neocon after 9/11” before winding up where he is today as a wannabe member of the alt-right (or, “alt-light” as he puts it, acknowledging that he’s not as extreme as some of the movement’s more vocal spokesmen, who take pleasure in photoshopping Jewish journalists—including yours truly—into gas chambers).

I fail to see a big moral difference between photoshopping people such as Jamie Kirchick into gas chambers and lying about people and movements as Kirchick does in his columns. From my point of view, Kirchick’s lies are far more odious than gas chamber memes because one is obviously a taunt while the other purports to be sober analysis.

The problem is that, while Seidel desperately wants to join the alt-right club, the feelings aren’t exactly reciprocal.
In August, Seidel wrote a piece for the Forward, a Jewish newspaper, entitled, “I’m a Jew, and I’m a Member of the Alt-Right.” Seidel’s self-profession of alt-right membership brought to mind Margaret Thatcher’s imperishable observation about being a lady: “If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”

For while the alt-right is an amorphous movement without any official membership roll, there do seem to be some ground rules, one of which is Jews Need Not Apply. “Alt-Right is explicitly white and jews are not white,” an individual known by the handle EthnoSwede wrote in the comments beneath Seidel’s article, which the Forward eventually disabled once they started to resemble a sewer more befitting Breitbart.com. “You’re not welcome.” Another commenter noted that there “is no such thing as a Jewish ‘alt-righter’” as the movement “is centered around the fundamental truth that Jews have been a cancer upon European civilization since the classical era.” A blunter message was delivered by one Alan S. Nackbarr: “Since you’re versed in the alt-right I assume you’re going to put yourself in the oven?”

Anyone who has converted to Orthodox Judaism (either literally as a gentile joining the tribe or figuratively as a non-Orthodox Jew becoming Orthodox) knows what it is like to join a suspicious insular group. I have no complaints about Jewish suspicions of converts and I have no complaints about the Alt Right’s suspicions of Jews. If I am upset by such things, then I am denying reality.

Jews are welcome to attend VDARE events, American Renaissance events and National Policy Institute events. At such things, they will often meet people with negative views of Jews, just as a convert to Orthodox Judaism will often meet Orthodox Jews with negative views of converts. The stronger your in-group identity, be it Jewish or white nationalist, the more likely you will have suspicion of outsiders.

Just as Jews generally support the existence of the Jewish state but not necessarily every action that Israelis take, so too Jews can support the Alt Right without supporting every member of the Alt Right and everything done in the name of the Alt Right. This concept is not complicated.

There are many thoughtful MSM article on the Alt Right (such as Tabletmag’s profile of Paul Gottfried and the Mother Jones profile of Richard Spencer as well as the work of David Weigel at the Washington Post) but Jamie Kirchick has yet to produce one. He may not be capable of honesty.

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Good Goyim and Bad Jews: Getting Clear on Jews and the Alt Right

Ari Ben Canaan writes:

Jamie Kirchick’s recent attack against this website, my collaborators and our audience is, unfortunately, a typical example of the attitudes of many Jews toward the Alt Right: underinformed, confused, and at times hysterical. It is also, unsurprisingly, rather antagonistic and polemical. But because Jewish attitudes toward the Alt Right are so underinformed, confused, and hysterical, I should like to take the opportunity afforded to me by Kirchick’s article to bring some clarity to two issues particularly salient to the question of Jewish relations to the Alt Right.

First, Kirchick’s thought on the Alt Right seems to waver between characterizing the nascent movement as a loose collection of more-or-less inchoate ideologies, and as a sort of political party that publishes manifestos and pronounces precisely-formulated doctrines. In one paragraph, Kirchick describes the Alt Right as nothing more than a ‘nebulous collective’, but goes on in the next to suggest that, because prominent Alt-Right author Kevin MacDonald is critical of the historical role played by Jews in the European Diaspora, Jews have no place in the Alt Right. But it is not clear why Kirchick thinks that MacDonald’s voice on the matter is authoritative: since, as Kirchick admits, the Alt Right is a rather nebulous group, there is no reason to think that MacDonald is any sort of officially-sanctioned doctrinaire rather than simply one influential voice among others.

And indeed, MacDonald’s position on the status of Jews in the Alt Right is far from the only one commonly held among the Alt Right. Jared Taylor, long one of the intellectual pillars of the movement, takes the view that any Jew can be a member of the Alt Right so long as he earnestly considers himself a part of European civilization. It is not clear to me whether Kirchick is unfamiliar with Taylor’s position, or whether he has simply neglected to mention it because doing so would detract from the polemical panache of his unabashed hit-piece; in either case, Taylor’s position is one that anyone who wishes to think seriously about the relation of Jews to the Alt Right must take into account.

Second, Kirchick’s analysis of the question whether or not Jews are White is fraught with historical myopia. Kirchick suggests – wrongly, as anyone who listens carefully to our podcast will appreciate – that both I and my co-author Reactionary Jew are in agreement that Jews are not White, and should not identify themselves as such. For this, he thinks we owe an intellectual debt to prominent Alt Right activist Richard Spencer, who thinks that Jews, after all, are Jews – a unique race distinct from that of Europeans.

However, our views on the question of Jewish race and identity are informed far less by Spencer than by the famous Zionists of the late 19th century, including Theodor Herzl and Leon Pinsker – the former who, in a controversially Spencerian publication entitled The Jewish State, proclaimed that ‘Jews are a people – one people’; and the latter who, in his classic essay “Auto-Emancipation”, made the MacDonaldite proclamation that “the essence of the [Jewish] problem … lies in the fact that, in the nations among whom the Jews reside, they form a distinctive element which cannot be assimilated [or] readily digested by any nation.” Herzl and Pinsker, in sharing these sentiments, were not ‘self-hating’ entryists into antisemitic movements, but proud Jews, educated in their own people’s history and determined to create for their people a better future. Were Kirchick more versed in his own people’s history, he might appreciate that The Jewish Alternative’s view on Jewish identity stems from a proud and successful tradition of Jewish nationalism.

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Interview: Richard and Nina Spencer about threats and media campaigns

From FreeWestMedia:

In this interview with German journalist Manuel Ochsenreiter, Richard and Nina Spencer speak freely about the recent death threats and smears directed against them. Richard is credited with coining the term ‘alt-right’.

Mrs. and Mr. Spencer, the last few weeks were quite rough for both of you: a targeted campaign in traditional and social media is being directed against your family, addresses thought to belong to you were published on the Internet, and you face harassments and threats of physical violence. The apparent reason for this campaign was the fact that Richard Spencer became well known as one of the leaders of the so-called “alt-right” within the last number of months during the US election campaign because of some provocative and controversial public events. Can you comment on this?

Richard Spencer: I have been a political commentator in various capacities for over a decade. Currently, I am often described as one of the leaders of the alt-right: an umbrella kind of movement in the U.S., which unites a number of anti-establishment currents and which is seeking the way out of the profound cultural, political, and even philosophical crisis in the West. My focus is challenging soulless, consumerist globalization: forging a positive identity for various peoples of European descent by reasserting their cultural and historic roots domestically and opposing interventionist wars abroad. This recent and unprecedented spike in media attention is, in part, the result of Hillary Clinton’s August campaign speech, in which she attempted to link Donald Trump to the alt-right movement by explicitly naming it in order to undermine her opponent. Whereas Trump’s election was a formidable slap in the face of the globally-oriented establishment, Trump is not alt-right. In a way, he represents an older America-first vision, which, while positive, does not question the foundations of the aforementioned crisis in the U.S., Europe, and beyond. Nonetheless, establishment media have been adamant to undermine Trump even after his victory by focusing on our movement to the point of deliberate misrepresentation by using all the usual descriptive keywords that such character assassination typically employs. This occurred despite the fact that I have always emphasized the necessity to discard the ideologies of the 20th century. The media campaign led to an ongoing mob-like attack that goes far beyond me as a political activist and commentator.

What do threats and harassment entail?

Richard Spencer: The last few weeks have involved a full spectrum of threats and harassment: text and social-media messages advocating physical harm, publication of several addresses thought to belong to the Spencer family in different U.S. states (I can only guess how many innocent people may be affected by this illegal act), invasion of privacy of various family members and friends of the extended family, and even quantifiable harm to the businesses and livelihood of those, who are removed by 2–3 degrees of separation from me, do not share my politics and have never even met me! A few centuries ago, these spiritual descendants of the Puritans would have been running around with pitch forks and torches looking for witches. Some threats even made it into the national media: prominent journalist Michael Hirsh was asked to resign from a major U.S. publication Politico for publishing—on social media—two addresses thought to belong to me and inviting people with baseball bats to pay me a visit.

Nina Spencer is currently under attack by some media sources but also by well-known as well as anonymous internet activists. Almost all the attacks are defamatory in content, concerning your Russian family background. Do you find it strange that self-declared “anti-racism fighters,” “social justice warriors,” and “human-rights activists” are conducting these campaigns?

Nina Spencer: This is one of the most noteworthy and ironic aspects of the current witch hunt. In fact, a business associate of one extended Spencer family member—who has never even met Richard and does not share his views—is having his/her business threatened. This associate is openly gay, and is being harassed by a so-called “human rights” organization that claims to support LGBT causes as one of their key focal points. As for Russophobia, this is one accepted form of discrimination in the Western establishment. Do a mental exercise, in which you replace headlines about Russians with another ethnic, religious, and other group, and you would likely blush. In terms of harassing me, specifically, “anti-racist” keyboard warriors employ all the usual negative stereotypes, starting from the one about mail-order brides from Eastern Europe. My ethnic background—the fact that I am 1/4 Southern European (Georgian) is also questioned, not to mention mocking my appearance. If I didn’t see that these comments were coming from “human rights” activists, I just might have to take them for the strongest proponents of the ideology they claim to oppose.

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