Luke Ford

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.

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 19^th 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.