{"id":110779,"date":"2016-12-25T23:59:49","date_gmt":"2016-12-26T07:59:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=110779"},"modified":"2016-12-25T23:59:49","modified_gmt":"2016-12-26T07:59:49","slug":"good-goyim-and-bad-jews-getting-clear-on-jews-and-the-alt-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=110779","title":{"rendered":"Good Goyim and Bad Jews: Getting Clear on Jews and the Alt Right"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ari Ben Canaan writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Jamie Kirchick\u2019s recent attack <\/a>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<\/em> so underinformed, confused, and hysterical, I should like to take the opportunity afforded to me by Kirchick\u2019s article to bring some clarity to two issues particularly salient to the question of Jewish relations to the Alt Right.<\/p>\n

First, Kirchick\u2019s 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 \u2018nebulous collective\u2019, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

And indeed, MacDonald\u2019s 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\u2019s position, or whether he has simply neglected to mention it because doing so would detract from the polemical panache <\/em>of his unabashed hit-piece; in either case, Taylor\u2019s position is one that anyone who wishes to think seriously about the relation of Jews to the Alt Right must take into account.<\/p>\n

Second, Kirchick\u2019s analysis of the question whether or not Jews are White is fraught with historical myopia. Kirchick suggests \u2013 wrongly, as anyone who listens carefully to our podcast will appreciate \u2013 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 \u2013 a unique race distinct from that of Europeans.<\/p>\n

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<\/sup> century, including Theodor Herzl and Leon Pinsker \u2013 the former who, in a controversially Spencerian publication entitled The Jewish State<\/em>, proclaimed that \u2018Jews are a people \u2013 one people\u2019; and the latter who, in his classic essay \u201cAuto-Emancipation\u201d, made the MacDonaldite proclamation that \u201cthe essence of the [Jewish] problem \u2026 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.\u201d Herzl and Pinsker, in sharing these sentiments, were not \u2018self-hating\u2019 entryists into antisemitic movements, but proud Jews, educated in their own people\u2019s history and determined to create for their people a better future. Were Kirchick more versed in his own people\u2019s history, he might appreciate that The Jewish Alternative<\/em>\u2019s view on Jewish identity stems from a proud and successful tradition of Jewish nationalism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ari Ben Canaan writes: Jamie Kirchick\u2019s 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, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42720,605],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alt-right","category-anti-semitism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110779"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110780,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110779\/revisions\/110780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}