See part one here.
The Alt-Right and Israel
This is where it gets to be completely bewildering. In fact, from a personal stand point, this is what drew me in to trying to understand these people. It is on Israel that they diverge completely from the vast majority of good people in the US who supported Donald Trump, may well be American patriots and nationalists but have no part in racist nationalism. This group of people, far far larger than the tiny Alt-Right, I can identify with and understand. They were the ones falsely maligned and slandered by the media trying to put all Trump supporters into an Alt-Right, white supremacist box.
In another paradox, they deeply admire us in Israel for establishing what they consider to be the “ethno-nationalist state” they so want to live in. They don’t really understand our 20% Arab minority (and that minority’s Islamic majority) or the ethnic diversity within Judaism. And the Alt-Right seems to stick to learning about Israel from either mainstream left and far-left sources like Ha’aretz and the New York Times or (even worse) outright Jew and Israel hating sites like Monodweiss, Electronic Intifada and individuals like Peter Beinart. If you ask them whether they believe the New York Times reports accurately on White nationalism or subjects they care about, they’ll tell you of course not. Then they’ll show you an article about Israel copied from Ha’aretz by the New York Times and scream at you that it is gospel truth.
Back to Nathan Cofnas’s refutation of the Culture of Critique, we come to an analysis of Jewish influence on top intellectuals. What ever you want to say about this disproportionate representation of Jews in an arbitrary list of top intellectuals, blind, lockstep support for Israel and fervent Zionism certainly isn’t a common theme. So what Jewish interests are this diverse group of Jews pushing?
Freud and Psychoanalysis
The 15 Jews among the top 21 intellectuals were (1) Daniel Bell, (2) Chomsky, (3) Irving Howe, (4) Norman Mailer, (5) Robert Silvers, (6) Susan Sontag, (7) Lionel Trilling, (8) Hannah Arendt, (9) Saul Bellow, (10) Paul Goodman, (11) Richard Hofstadter (Jewish father), (12) Irving Kristol, (13) Herbert Marcuse, (14) Norman Podhoretz, and (15) David Riesman. A closer look shows that only two or three of these cases support MacDonald’s thesis, and several are clear counterexamples. First off, five of these intellectuals are, by MacDonald’s criteria, unambiguously anti-Israel and therefore opposed to Jewish interests. Chomsky was (and still is) arguably the world’s leading critic of Israel. Mailer tended to sympathize with the Palestinians (Theodoracopulos 2015). When Sontag accepted the Jerusalem Prize in 2001, she used the occasion to condemn Israel (Cockburn 2001). Marcuse (who will be discussed in more detail below) advocated the return of Arab refugees to Israel, ending Jewish control of the country (Marcuse 2005:181). Arendt was the student, promoter, and lover (in a romantic sense) of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger. She was best known for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt 1963), in which she argued that Israeli laws were comparable to the Nazi Nuremberg laws and that holocaust-orchestrator Eichmann had been given a “show trial” and was not a particularly bad person (just that he was prompted to do bad things by circumstances beyond his control—though she faults him for not being brave enough to protest). In 1948, Arendt (along with Einstein, Sidney Hook, and 24 other prominent Jews) signed a letter to the New York Times which described the political party of Menachem Begin as “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties” (Shatz 2004:65).
Another intellectual on the list, Saul Bellow, was a conservative who opposed feminism, multiculturalism, and political correctness. Bellow urged Allan Bloom, another Jewish academic at the University of Chicago, to write The Closing of the American Mind (Bloom 1987), one of the most influential pro-traditionalist academic books in the past few decades (Ahmed and Grossman 2007).
The next part looks at what is most certainly a foundational part of the Cultural Marxist radical far-left ideology that has overrun the west. What the Alt-Right believe, according to their prophet Kevin MacDonald, is that the entire thing was designed by Jews as an evolutionary strategy to increase the number of Jews in the world. The problem, again and again, is that the far-left, cultural marxists, globalists… call them whatever (and yes there are Globalist Jews) do not like the idea of a Jewish State of Israel (which is the only goal of Zionism).
The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory
Chapter 5 of The Culture of Critique is titled “The Frankfurt School of Social Research and the Pathologization of Gentile Group Allegiances.” It focuses on the alleged hypocrisy of members of the Frankfurt School in advocating for collectivism among Jews in both Israel and the diaspora, and pathologizing any feelings of group allegiance in white gentiles ….
The main problem with MacDonald’s argument is that he interprets criticism of nationalism in gentile groups to indicate approval of Jewish nationalism as long as the latter is not explicitly condemned. He never cites positive evidence that representatives of the Frankfurt School approved of Jewish nationalism, and he ignores evidence that they in fact disapproved of it. Leaving aside the question of the scholarly merits of the Frankfurt School or The Authoritarian Personality, there is no positive evidence that members of the Frankfurt School were hypocrites who condemned collectivism in gentiles and promoted it for Jews.
…. “The irony (hypocrisy?) is that Fromm and the other members of the Frankfurt School, as individuals who strongly identified with a highly collectivist group (Judaism), advocated radical individualism for the society as a whole” (1988a:142). Here is what Fromm said about Israel: “The claim of the Jews to the land of Israel cannot be a realistic political claim. If all nations would suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers lived two thousand years ago, this world would be a madhouse” (Woolfson 1980:13). As mentioned earlier, Marcuse, one of the principal leaders of the school, is on record advocating exactly the same policies for Israel as he advocated for majority-white-gentile countries. Marcuse suggested that Arabs who were displaced when Israel was created should return, even though “such a return would quickly transform the Jewish majority into a minority.” Marcuse explained:
[I]t is precisely the policy aiming at a permanent majority which is self-defeating. . . . To be sure, Israel would be able to sustain a Jewish majority by means of an aggressive immigration policy. . . . [L]asting protection for the Jewish people cannot be found in the creation of a self-enclosed, isolated, fear-stricken majority, but only in the coexistence of Jews and Arabs as citizens with equal rights and liberties (Marcuse 2005:181).
Again, by MacDonald’s own standards, this makes Marcuse anti-Israel and opposed to Jewish interests.
Communism. A monumentally bad idea no matter who thought of it and the countless millions who helped implement it and the even greater numbers it murdered. But of course, once again, this is the fault of the Jews.
Communism
One Jewish radical who is conspicuous for not being labeled an ethnic activist in The Culture of Critique is the most influential of them all: Karl Marx. Marx not only rejected his Jewish heritage, he went out of his way to express and promote viciously anti-Semitic views. In private correspondence, he smeared his socialist rival Ferdinand Lassalle (another Jew) with extremely anti-Semitic slurs and described Lassalle’s physical appearance, mannerisms, and habits as exemplifying unflattering Jewish characteristics (Gilman 1984:37). (The target of these obloquies, who was a major figure in his time, also held anti-Jewish views. In Lassalle’s words: “I do not like the Jews at all. I even detest them in general. . . . I have no contact with them”; Gilman 1984:37.) Most notorious is Marx’s 1844 essay, On the Jewish Question, which contains the famous lines: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. . . . An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible” (Marx 2010:170).
On Bolshevism.
MacDonald (1998a:80) cites Pipes’s (1993:112) suggestion that Jewish overrepresentation among Bolsheviks requires no special explanation because Jews were overrepresented in many fields—science, business, art, and so on. MacDonald rejects this idea with the following argument:
[E]ven assuming that these ethnically Jewish communists did not identify as Jews, such an argument fails to explain why such “de-ethnicized” Jews (as well as Jewish businessmen, artists, writers and scientists) should have typically been overrepresented in leftist movements and underrepresented in nationalist, populist, and other types of rightist political movements: Even if nationalist movements are anti-Semitic, as has often been the case, anti-Semitism should be irrelevant if these individuals are indeed completely deethnicized as Pipes proposes. Jewish prominence in occupations requiring high intelligence is no argument for understanding their very prominent role in communist and other leftist movements and their relative underrepresentation in nationalist movements.
This response to Pipes seems unconvincing. First, anti-Semitic nationalist movements generally targeted Jews regardless of their self-identity. Jews who identified as “Russian” or “Polish” would still have been discouraged, if not outright prohibited, from joining these movements as equal participants. Second, even “de-ethnicized” Jews might find it difficult to accept anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews due simply to their close contact with Jewish family and former friends.
It gets better: MacDonald seems to be saying that because Jews were not members of nationalist movements that were inherently antisemitic, i.e. no Jewish members of the NAZI Party, Jews were acting always against nationalist movements. I guess not too many blacks were up for joining the KKK either.
For MacDonald, having a strong Jewish identity appears to be the only reason not to support anti-Semitic movements. As he says:
Even the most highly assimilated Jewish communists working in urban areas with non-Jews were upset by the Soviet-German nonaggression pact but were relieved when the German-Soviet war finally broke out . . .—a clear indication that Jewish personal identity remained quite close to the surface (1988a:62).
….
Again, he interprets any objection to anti-Semitism—even silent opposition—as evidence that Jews are uniquely ethnocentric.
Another plank of the Alt-Right’s religious belief is that Jews as a group advocate for open borders everywhere except Israel where we build walls and deport illegals. It is only evidence that Jews exist on many sides of any political argument. As usual, any supporting documentation on Israel provided by MacDonald comes from Ha’aretz or other far-left Jewish publications.
Hypocrisy is when a person or group espouses values but applies them inconsistently. In order to attribute hypocrisy to people, it is necessary to identify the inconsistency in those people. MacDonald says that American Jews support multiculturalism, then cites a survey suggesting that many Israeli Jews advocate policies that are inconsistent with multicultural values. To justify the charge of hypocrisy it is necessary to find individual Jews advocating multiculturalism for the US and opposing it in Israel. Such Jews may exist, but there is no evidence that this is the norm. MacDonald treats the positions espoused by one Jew or group of Jews as a statement on behalf of the Jewish community and concludes that Jews are hypocrites because different Jews advocate policies that are mutually inconsistent. An alternative interpretation of the data is that Jews vary to some extent in their views among individuals and groups, in a way typical of other ethnicities.
Furthermore, the claim that immigration to Israel is restricted to Jews—even nominal Jews—was and is false. Since 1970, Israel will give automatic citizenship to anyone with one Jewish grandparent and their non-Jewish spouse and children (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2013). Hundreds of thousands of gentiles were granted Israeli citizenship because of this policy (Felter 2009). (An exact estimate is difficult to give since Israelis with no Jewish ancestors, or only a distant one, may identify as Jewish in surveys.)
They just can’t understand that Orthodox Jews in the US tended to vote Trump and Republican and have done for a long time and that non religious Jews are having a hard time even replacing themselves, let alone replacing whites!
At the end of The Culture of Critique, MacDonald asks what the ultimate consequences of Jewish-instituted liberal policies are likely to be in America. He suggests: “An important consequence—and one likely to have been an underlying motivating factor in the countercultural revolution—may well be to facilitate the continued genetic distinctiveness of the Jewish gene pool in the United States” (1988a:318). It is difficult to square this claim with the fact that Reform and unaffiliated Jews—the ones who participated in these liberal/multicultural movements—have an intermarriage rate of 50% and 69%, respectively (Pew Research Center 2013:37). (This may be an underestimate of intermarriage rates since Reform converts were counted as Jewish in Pew’s survey.) In fact, it is only those Jews who, as a group, were much less involved in national politics—the orthodox—who have low intermarriage rates and high fertility. MacDonald states that Jewish activists have increasingly started to see traditional Judaism as a better means of preserving group continuity. “Reform Judaism is becoming steadily more conservative, and there is a major effort within all segments of the Jewish community to prevent intermarriage. . . .” But contemporary Reform Judaism defines “intermarriage” as marriage between someone who identifies as a Jew and someone who identifies as a non-Jew. They care nothing for ethnic purity, and MacDonald never provides any evidence to the contrary.
It totally sucks to be Alt-Right when you find so many bright Jews fighting AGAINST the far-left, Globalist agenda (yes, I said it again). Remember: the default hypothesis is Cofnas’s central point that Jews are just over-represented in all academic and intellectual pursuits (something nobody is disputing). It is only the motivation of all these Jews, collectively, that is being challenged here.
In recent years, Jews have continued to produce examples favoring the default hypothesis. The most high-profile opponent of liberal activism in social science is, without question,Jonathan Haidt (see Duarte et al. 2015), who is Jewish. The most high-profile advocate of incorporating Darwinism into the social sciences is another Jew, Steven Pinker (e.g., Pinker 2002). The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)—the most prominent organization that defends free speech on campus, primarily the speech of conservatives—was founded by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate, both Jewish. There is reason to believe that Jews played a significant role in Donald Trump’s election and, specifically, in his anti-immigration policies (Dolsten 2017). The term “paleoconservative,” referring to a pro-white, pro-Western-tradition political doctrine, was coined by Herbert Marcuse’s PhD student Paul Gottfried, who is Jewish. Gottfried was also the first person to publicly use the term “alternative right” to refer to a race-conscious conservatism that opposes immigration and multiculturalism (Siegel 2016). The only major white nationalist organization that is not anti-Semitic is American Renaissance. Out of the 10 invited speakers at the first American Renaissance conference in 1994, four were Jewish (American Renaissance 2017).
The conclusion then is pretty simple:
This paper attempts to give MacDonald’s theories a fair hearing. It focuses on the argument of The Culture of Critique. This book builds on the previous two, so the whole trilogy stands or falls on its merits. It has also been the most influential of the three books. It defends a radical, interesting hypothesis, and the topic it addresses (Jewish overrepresentation in intellectual movements) is worthy of study in any case. The conclusion, however, will be that the argument of The Culture of Critique is built on misrepresented sources and cherry-picked facts. The evidence actually favors a simpler explanation of Jewish overrepresentation in intellectual movements involving Jewish high intelligence and geographic distribution.
In many ways the task of debunking this kind of Jew hating material is akin to the Herculean task of cleaning the Augean Stables. We face the same kind of task debunking the Israel hating material we see all the time in the news too. It is as if the Russian Czarist forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was never debunked or (more likely) these people still must cling to their belief that their own inadequacies are not responsible for their station in life. They must have a scapegoat, the Jew, to blame.
