THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE:

AN EVOLUTIONARY ANALYSIS OF
JEWISH INVOLVEMENT IN
TWENTIETH-CENTURY
INTELLECTUAL AND POLITICAL
MOVEMENTS

KEVIN MACDONALD

DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH
LONG BEACH, CA 90840
(562) 985-8183

© 1998, 2002 by Kevin MacDonald. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

ISBN: 0-7596-7221-0

1stBooks - rev. 5/23/02

Preface to the First Paperback
Edition

The Culture of Critique (hereafter, CofC) was originally published in 1998 by Praeger Publishers, an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. The thesis of the book is a difficult one indeed—difficult not only because it is difficult to establish, but also because it challenges many fundamental assumptions about our contemporary intellectual and political existence.

CofC describes how Jewish intellectuals initiated and advanced a number of important intellectual and political movements during the 20th century. I argue that these movements are attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would neutralize or end anti-Semitism and enhance the prospects for Jewish group continuity either in an overt or in a semi-cryptic manner. Several of these Jewish movements (e.g., the shift in immigration policy favoring non-European peoples) have attempted to weaken the power of their perceived competitors—the European peoples who early in the 20th century had assumed a dominant position not only in their traditional homelands in Europe, but also in the United States, Canada, and Australia. At a theoretical level, these movements are viewed as the outcome of conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in the construction of culture and in various public policy issues. Ultimately, these movements are viewed as the expression of a group evolutionary strategy by Jews in their competition for social, political and cultural dominance with non-Jews.

Here I attempt to answer some typical criticisms that have been leveled against CofC. (See also my website: www.csulb.edu/~kmacd). I also discuss issues raised by several books that have appeared since the publication of CofC.

There have been complaints that I am viewing Judaism in a monolithic manner. This is definitely not the case. Rather, in each movement that I discuss, my methodology has been:

(1.) Find influential movements dominated by Jews, with no implication that all or most Jews are involved in these movements and no restrictions on what the movements are. For example, I touch on Jewish neo-conservatism which is a departure in some ways from the other movements I discuss. In general, relatively few Jews were involved in most of these movements and significant numbers of Jews may have been unaware of their existence. Even Jewish leftist radicalism—surely the most widespread and influential Jewish sub-culture of the 20th century—may have been a minority movement within Jewish communities in the United States and other Western societies for most periods. As a result, when I criticize these movements I am not necessarily criticizing most Jews. Nevertheless, these movements were influential and they were Jewishly motivated.

(2.) Determine whether the Jewish participants in those movements identified as Jews AND thought of their involvement in the movement as advancing specific Jewish interests. Involvement may be unconscious or involve self-deception, but for the most part it was quite easy and straightforward to find evidence for these propositions. If I thought that self-deception was important (as in the case of many Jewish radicals), I provided evidence that in fact they did identify as Jews and were deeply concerned about Jewish issues despite surface appearances to the contrary. (See also Ch. 1 of CofC.)

(3.) Try to gauge the influence of these movements on gentile society. Keep in mind that the influence of an intellectual or political movement dominated by Jews is independent of the percentage of the Jewish community that is involved in the movement or supports the movement.

(4.) Try to show how non-Jews responded to these movements—for example, were they a source of anti-Semitism?

Several of the movements I discuss have been very influential in the social sciences. However, I do not argue that there are no Jews who do good social science, and in fact I provide a list of prominent Jewish social scientists who in my opinion do not meet the conditions outlined under (2) above (see Ch. 2 of CofC). If there was evidence that these social scientists identified as Jews and had a Jewish agenda in doing social science (definitely not in the case of most of those listed, but possibly true in the case of Richard Herrnstein—see below), then they would have been candidates for inclusion in the book. The people I cite as contributing to evolutionary/biological perspectives are indeed ethnically Jewish, but for most of them I have no idea whether they either identity as Jews or if they have a Jewish agenda in pursuing their research simply because there is no evidence to be found in their work or elsewhere. If there is evidence that a prominent evolutionary biologist identifies as a Jew and views his work in sociobiology or evolutionary psychology as advancing Jewish agendas, then he or she should have been in CofC as an example of the phenomenon under study rather than as simply a scientist working in the area of evolutionary studies.

Interestingly, in the case of one of those I mention, Richard J. Herrnstein, Alan Ryan (1994, 11) writes, “Herrnstein essentially wants the world in which clever Jewish kids or their equivalent make their way out of their humble backgrounds and end up running Goldman Sachs or the Harvard physics department.” This is a stance that is typical, I suppose, of neo-conservatism, a Jewish movement I discuss in several places, and it is the sort of thing that, if true, would suggest that Herrnstein did perceive the issues discussed in The Bell Curve as affecting Jewish interests in a way that Charles Murray, his co-author, did not. (Ryan contrasts Murray’s and Herrnstein’s world views: “Murray wants the Midwest in which he grew up—a world in which the local mechanic didn’t care two cents whether he was or wasn’t brighter than the local math teacher.”) Similarly, 20th-century theoretical physics does not qualify as a Jewish intellectual movement precisely because it was good science and there are no signs of ethnic involvement in its creation: Jewish identification and pursuit of Jewish interests were not important to the content of the theories or to the conduct of the intellectual movement. Yet Jews have been heavily overrepresented among the ranks of theoretical physicists.

This conclusion remains true even though Einstein, the leading figure among Jewish physicists, was a strongly motivated Zionist (Fölsing 1997, 494–505), opposed assimilation as a contemptible form of “mimicry” (p. 490), preferred to mix with other Jews whom he referred to as his “tribal companions” (p. 489), embraced the uncritical support for the Bolshevik regime in Russia typical of so many Jews during the 1920s and 1930s, including persistent apology for the Moscow show trials in the 1930s (pp. 644–5), and switched from a high-minded pacifism during World War I, when Jewish interests were not at stake, to advocating the building of atomic bombs to defeat Hitler. From his teenage years he disliked the Germans and in later life criticized Jewish colleagues for converting to Christianity and acting like Prussians. He especially disliked Prussians, who were the elite ethnic group in Germany. Reviewing his life at age 73, Einstein declared his ethnic affiliation in no uncertain terms: “My relationship with Jewry had become my strongest human tie once I achieved complete clarity about our precarious position among the nations” (in Fölsing 1997, 488). According to Fölsing, Einstein had begun developing this clarity from an early age, but did not acknowledge it until much later, a form of self-deception: “As a young man with bourgeois-liberal views and a belief in enlightenment, he had refused to acknowledge [his Jewish identity]” (in Fölsing 1997, 488).

In other words, the issues of the ethnic identification and even ethnic activism on the part of people like Einstein are entirely separate from the issue of whether such people viewed the content of the theories themselves as furthering ethnic interests, and, in the case of Einstein, there is no evidence that he did so. The same cannot be said for Freud, the New York Intellectuals, the Boasians, and the Frankfurt School, in which “scientific” theories were fashioned and deployed to advance ethnic group interests. This ideological purpose becomes clear when the unscientific nature of these movements is understood. Much of the discussion in CofC documented the intellectual dishonesty, the lack of empirical rigor, the obvious political and ethnic motivation, the expulsion of dissenters, the collusion among co-ethnics to dominate intellectual discourse, and the general lack of scientific spirit that pervaded them. In my view, the scientific weakness of these movements is evidence of their group-strategic function.

CofC was not reviewed widely. Indeed, only three reviews have appeared in mainstream publications, including a brief review by Kevin Hannan (2000) in Nationalities Papers. Hannan’s review mostly describes the book, but he summarizes his impressions by noting, “[MacDonald’s] iconoclastic evaluation of psychoanalysis, Marxism, multiculturalism, and certain schools of thought in the social sciences will not generate great enthusiasm for his work in academe, yet this book is well written and has much to offer the reader interested in ethnicity and ethnic conflict.” The other reviews have raised several important issues that bear discussion. Frank Salter’s (2000) review in Human Ethology Bulletin discussed some of the controversy surrounding my work, particularly an acrimonious session at the 2000 conference of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society where I was accused of anti-Semitism by several participants. For me the only issue is whether I have been honest in my treatment of sources and whether my conclusions meet the usual standards of scholarly research in the social sciences. Salter notes that I based my research on mainstream sources and that the assertions that have infuriated some colleagues

are not only true but truisms to those acquainted with the diverse literatures involved. Apart from the political sensitivity of the subject, much of the problem facing MacDonald is that his knowledge is often too far ahead of his detractors to allow easy communication; there are not enough shared premises for constructive dialog. Unfortunately the knowledge gap is closing slowly because some of his most hostile critics, including colleagues who make serious ad hominem accusations, have not bothered to read MacDonald’s books.

Salter also notes that those, such as John Tooby and Steven Pinker, who have denigrated my competence as a researcher in the media, have failed to provide anything approaching a scholarly critique or refutation of my work. Sadly, this continues. While there have been a number of ringing denunciations of my work in public forums, there have been no serious scholarly reviews by these critics, although they have not retracted their scathing denunciations of my work.

Paul Gottfried (2000) raised several interesting issues in his review in Chronicles, the paleo-conservative intellectual journal. (I replied to Gottfried’s review and Gottfried penned a rejoinder; see Chronicles, September, 2000, pp. 4–5). Gottfried questions my views on the role of Jewish organizations and intellectuals with strong Jewish identifications as agents of change in the cultural transformations that have occurred in Western societies over the last 50 years. In general, my position is that Jewish intellectual and political movements were a necessary condition for these changes, not a sufficient condition, as Gottfried supposes. In the case of the reversal in U.S. immigration policy, there simply were no other pressure groups that were pushing for liberalized, multi-racial immigration during the period under consideration (up to the enactment of the watershed immigration bill of 1965). Nor were there any other groups or intellectual movements besides the ones mentioned in CofC that were developing images of the U.S. as a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society rather than a European civilization. Gottfried attributes the sea change in immigration to “a general cultural change that beset Western societies and was pushed by the managerial state.” I agree that multi-ethnic immigration resulted from a general cultural shift, but we still must develop theories for the origin of this shift.

A revealing development regarding Jewish attitudes toward immigration is an article by Stephen Steinlight (2001), former Director of National Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Jewish Committee (AJCommittee) and presently a Senior Fellow with the AJCommittee. Steinlight recommends altering “the traditional policy line [of the organized Jewish community] affirming generous—really, unlimited—immigration and open borders,” even though for “many decent, progressive Jewish folk merely asking such fundamental questions is tantamount to heresy, and meddling with them is to conjure the devil.” Steinlight believes that present immigration policy no longer serves Jewish interests because the new immigrants are less likely to be sympathetic to Israel and because they are more likely to view Jews as the wealthiest and most powerful group in the U.S.—and thus a potential enemy—rather than as victims of the Holocaust. He is particularly worried about the consequences of Islamic fundamentalism among Muslim immigrants, especially for Israel, and he condemns the “savage hatred for America and American values” among the fundamentalists. Steinlight is implicitly agreeing with an important thesis of my trilogy on Judaism: Throughout history Jews have tended to prosper in individualistic European societies and have suffered in non-Western societies, most notably in Muslim cultures where there are strong ingroup-outgroup sensibilities (e.g., MacDonald 1998a, Ch. 2; the only exceptions to this generalization have been when Jews have constituted an intermediary group between an alien elite and oppressed native populations in Muslim societies.) Steinlight’s fears of the effects of a Balkanized America on Judaism are indeed well-grounded.

Steinlight is exclusively concerned with Jewish interests—an example of Jewish moral particularism which is a general feature of Jewish culture (see below). Indeed, his animosity toward the restrictionism of 1924–1965 shines through clearly. This “pause” in immigration is perceived as a moral catastrophe. He describes it as “evil, xenophobic, anti-Semitic,” “vilely discriminatory,” a “vast moral failure,” a “monstrous policy.” Jewish interests are his only consideration, while the vast majority of pre-1965 Americans are described as a “thoughtless mob” because they advocate a complete moratorium on immigration.

It seems fair to state that there is a communal Jewish memory about the period of immigration restriction as the high point of American anti-Jewish attitudes. Non-Jews have a difficult time fathoming Jewish communal memory. For strongly identified Jews, the “vilely discriminatory” actions of immigration restrictionists are part of the lachrymose history of the Jewish people. Immigration restriction from 1924–1965 is in the same category as the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., the marauding Crusaders of the Middle Ages, the horrors of the Inquisition, the evil of the Russian Czar, and the rationally incomprehensible calamity of Nazism. These events are not just images drawn from the dustbin of history. They are deeply felt images and potent motivators of contemporary behavior. As Michael Walzer (1994, 4) noted, “I was taught Jewish history as a long tale of exile and persecution—Holocaust history read backwards.” From this perspective, the immigration restriction of 1924–1965 is an important part of the Holocaust because it prevented the emigration of Jews who ultimately died in the Holocaust—a point that Steinlight dwells on at length.

And as Walter Benjamin (1968, 262) notes, “Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice . . . are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.” This is important because whatever one’s attitudes about the costs and benefits of immigration, a principal motivation for encouraging massive non-European immigration on the part of the organized Jewish community has involved a deeply felt animosity toward the people and culture responsible for the immigration restriction of 1924–1965. (As indicated in Ch. 7, another motivation has been to lessen the power of the European-derived majority of the U.S. in order to prevent the development of an ethnically homogenous anti-Jewish movement.) This deeply held animosity exists despite the fact that the liberated grandchildren have been extraordinarily prosperous in the country whose recent past is the focus of such venom. The welfare of the United States and certainly the welfare of European-Americans have not been a relevant consideration for Jewish attitudes on immigration. Indeed, as indicated in Chapter 7, it’s easy to find statements of Jewish activists deploring the very idea that immigration should serve the interests of the United States. And that is why the organized Jewish community did not settle for a token victory by merely eliminating the ethnically based quotas that resulted in an ethnic status quo in which Europeans retained their ethnic and cultural predominance. As indicated in Chapter 7, immediately after the passage of the 1965 law, activists strove mightily to increase dramatically the numbers of non-European immigrants, a pattern that continues to the present.

And, finally, that is why support for open immigration spans the Jewish political spectrum, from the far left to the neo-conservative right. Scott McConnell, former editorial page editor and columnist for the New York Post, commented on the intense commitment to open immigration among Jewish neoconservatives (see also Ch. 7):¹

Read some of Norman Podhoretz’s writing, particularly his recent book—the only polemics against anyone right of center are directed against immigration restrictionists. Several years ago I was at a party talking to Norman, and Abe Rosenthal came over, and Norman introduced us with the words “Scott is very solid on the all issues, except immigration.” The very first words out of his mouth. This was when we were ostensibly on very good terms, and I held a job which required important people to talk to me. There is a complicated history between the neo-cons and National Review [NR], which John O’Sullivan could tell better than I, but it involved neo-con attacks on NR using language that equated modern day immigration restrictionism with the effort to send Jews back to Nazi death camps, a tone so vicious that [it] was really strange among ostensible Reaganite allies in 1995. . . . The Forward, a neo-connish Jewish weekly, used to run articles trying to link FAIR, an immigration restriction group headed by former [Colorado governor] Richard Lamm, with neo-nazism, using . . . crude smear techniques . . . . None of my neo-con friends (at a time when all my friends were Jewish neo-cons) thought there was anything wrong with this. . . . Read the Weekly Standard, read Ben Wattenberg. Read the [Podhoretzes]. Or don’t. But if you were engaged on the issue, you couldn’t help but being struck by this, particularly because it came as such a shock. One doesn’t like to name names, because no one on the right wants to get on the bad side of the neo-cons, but I can think of one young scholar, who writes very temperately on immigration-related issues and who trained under a leading neo-con academic. He told me he was just amazed at the neo-cons’ attachment to high immigration—it seemed to go against every principle of valuing balance and order in a society, and being aware of social vulnerabilities, that they seemed to advocate. Perhaps it’s worth some time, writing a lengthy article on all this, on how the American right lost its way after the Cold War. [Emphasis in text]

THE DECLINE OF ETHNIC CONSCIOUSNESS AMONG
EUROPEAN-DERIVED PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES

Fundamental to the transformation of the United States as a result of massive non-European immigration was the decline of ethnic consciousness among European peoples. It is fascinating to contrast the immigration debates of the 1920s with those of the 1950s and 1960s. The restrictionists of the 1920s unabashedly asserted the right of European-derived peoples to the land they had conquered and settled. There were many assertions of ethnic interest—that the people who colonized and created the political and economic culture of the country had a right to maintain it as their possession. This sort of morally self-assured nativism (even the word itself now has a pathological ring to it) can be seen in the statement of Representative William N. Vaile of Colorado, a prominent restrictionist, quoted in Chapter 7 of CofC.

By the 1940s and certainly by the 1960s it was impossible to make such assertions without being deemed not only a racist but an intellectual Neanderthal. Indeed, Bendersky (2000) shows that such rhetoric was increasingly impossible in the 1930s. One can see the shift in the career of racial theorist Lothrop Stoddard, author of books such as The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy and numerous articles for the popular media, such as Collier’s, Forum, and The Saturday Evening Post. Stoddard viewed Jews as highly intelligent and as racially different from Europeans. He also believed that Jews were critical to the success of Bolshevism. However, he stopped referring to Jews completely in his lectures to the Army War College in the late 1930s. The Boasian revolution in anthropology had triumphed, and theorists who believed that race was important for explaining human behavior became fringe figures. Stoddard himself went from being a popular and influential writer to being viewed as a security risk as the Roosevelt administration prepared the country for war with National Socialist Germany.

Another marker of the change in attitude toward Jews was the response to Charles Lindbergh’s remarks in Des Moines, Iowa on the eve of U.S. entry into World War II. Lindbergh’s advocacy of non-intervention was shaped not only by his horror at the destructiveness of modern warfare—what he viewed as the suicide of European culture, but also by his belief that a second European war would be suicidal for the White race. In an article published in the popular media in 1939 shortly after the outbreak of World War II, he stated that it was a war “among a dominant people for power, blind, insatiable, suicidal. Western nations are again at war, a war likely to be more prostrating than any in the past, a war in which the White race is bound to lose, and the others bound to gain, a war which may easily lead our civilization through more Dark Ages if it survives at all” (Lindbergh 1939, 65).

In order to maintain their dominance over other races, Lindbergh believed that whites should join together to fend off the teeming legions of non-whites who were the real long-term threat. Lindbergh was not a Nordicist. He took a long-term view that Russia would be a white bulwark against the Chinese in the East. He advocated a racial alliance among Whites based “on a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood; on an English fleet, a German air force, a French army, [and] an American nation” (p. 66). However, the Soviet Union under Communism was abhorrent: “I tell you that I would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with England, or even with Germany with all of her faults, than with the cruelty, the godlessness, and the barbarism that exist in Soviet Russia. An alliance between the United States and Russia should be opposed by every American, by every Christian, and by every humanitarian in this country” (in Berg 1999, 422). Lindbergh clearly viewed the atrocities perpetrated by the Soviet Union to be worse than those of Nazi Germany.

Lindbergh’s famous speech of September 11, 1941 stated that Jews were one of the principal forces attempting to lead the U.S. into the war, along with the Roosevelt administration and the British. Lindbergh noted that Jewish reaction to Nazi Germany was understandable given persecution “sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race.” He stated that the Jews’ “greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government.” And, most controversially, he stated, “I am saying that the leaders of both the British and Jewish races, for reasons which are understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war” (in Berg 1999, 427).

Lindbergh’s speech was greeted with a torrent of abuse and hatred unparalleled for a mainstream public figure in American history. Overnight Lindbergh went from cultural hero to moral pariah. Jewish influence on the media and government would be difficult to measure then as it is now, but it was certainly considerable and a common concern of anti-Jewish sentiment of the time. In a booklet published in 1936, the editors of Fortune magazine concluded that the main sources of Jewish influence on the media were their control of the two major radio networks and the Hollywood movie studios (Editors of Fortune 1936). They suggested that “at the very most, half the opinion-making and taste-influencing paraphernalia in America is in Jewish hands” (p. 62)—a rather remarkable figure considering that Jews constituted approximately 2–3% of the population and most of the Jewish population were first or second generation immigrants. A short list of Jewish ownership or management of the major media during this period would include the New York Times (the most influential newspaper, owned by the Sulzberger family), the New York Post (George Backer), the Washington Post (Eugene Meyer), Philadelphia Inquirer (M. L. Annenberg), Philadelphia Record and Camden Courier-Post (J. David Stern), Newark Star-Ledger (S. I. Newhouse), Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Paul Block), CBS (the dominant radio network, owned by William Paley), NBC (headed by David Sarnoff), all of the major Hollywood movie studios, Random House (the most important book publisher, owned by Bennett Cerf), and a dominant position in popular music.² Walter Winchell, who had an audience of tens of millions and was tied with Bob Hope for the highest rated program on radio, believed that opposition to intervention “was unconscionable, a form of treason” (Gabler 1995, 294). Winchell, “the standard bearer for interventionism,” was Jewish. He had close ties during this period to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which provided him with information on the activities of isolationists and Nazi sympathizers which he used in his broadcasts and newspaper columns (Gabler 1995, 294–298)

There is no question that the movie industry did indeed propagandize against Germany and in favor of intervention. In May, 1940, the Warner Brothers studio wired Roosevelt that “personally we would like to do all in our power within the motion picture industry and by use of the talking screen to show the American people the worthiness of the cause for which the free peoples of Europe are making such tremendous sacrifices” (in Gabler 1988, 343). Later in 1940 Joseph P. Kennedy lectured the Hollywood movie elite that they should stop promoting the war and stop making anti-Nazi movies or risk a rise in anti-Semitism. Immediately prior to Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech, Senator Gerald Nye asserted that foreign-born owners of the Hollywood studies had “violent animosities toward certain causes abroad” (Gabler 1988, 344–345). Representatives of the movie industry, realizing that they had the support of the Roosevelt administration, aggressively defended making “America conscious of the national peril.”³

Harvard historian William Langer stated in a lecture to the U.S. Army War College that the rising dislike of Nazi Germany in the U.S. was due to “Jewish influence” in the media:

You have to face the fact that some of our most important American newspapers are Jewish-controlled, and I suppose if I were a Jew I would feel about Nazi Germany as most Jews feel and it would be most inevitable that the coloring of the news takes on that tinge. As I read the New York Times, for example, it is perfectly clear that every little upset that occurs (and after all, many upsets occur in a country of 70 million people) is given a great deal of prominence. The other part of it is soft-pedaled or put off with a sneer. So that in a rather subtle way, the picture you get is that there is no good in the Germans whatever. (In Bendersky 2000, 273)

It is also interesting that the Chicago Tribune was “circumspect on the Jewish question” despite the personal sentiments of Robert McCormick, the Tribune’s non-Jewish publisher, that Jews were an important reason behind America’s anti-German policy (Bendersky 2000, 284). This suggests that concern with Jewish power—quite possibly concern about negative influences on advertising revenue (see Editors of Fortune 1936, 57), was an issue for McCormick. On balance, it would seem reasonable to agree with Lindbergh that Jewish influence in the media was significant during this period. Of course, this is not to say that Jews dominated the media at this time or that other influences were not important.

It is also noteworthy that U.S. military officers often worried that Roosevelt was influenced to be anti-German by his Jewish advisors, Samuel I. Rosenman, Felix Frankfurter, and Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (Bendersky 2000, 274), and they worried that Jewish interests and the British would push the U.S. into a war with Germany. Both Frankfurter and Morgenthau were strongly identified Jews and effective advocates of Jewish interests within the Roosevelt Administration. Morgenthau actively promoted Zionism and the welfare of Jewish refugees (e.g., Bendersky 2000, 333ff, 354ff). Both supported U.S. involvement in the war against Germany, and Morgenthau became well-known as an advocate of extremely harsh treatment of the Germans during and after World War II.

Moreover, there is no question that Jews were able to have a great deal of influence on specific issues during this period. For example, Zionist organizations exerted enormous pressure on the government (e.g., Bendersky 2000, 325). During World War II they engaged in “loud diplomacy” (p. 326), organizing thousands of rallies, dinners with celebrity speakers (including prominent roles for sympathetic non-Jews), letter campaigns, meetings, lobbying, threats to newspapers for publishing unfavorable items, insertion of propaganda as news items in newspapers, giving money to politicians and non-Jewish celebrities like Will Rogers in return for their support. By 1944, “thousands of non-Jewish associations would pass pro-Zionist resolutions” (p. 326). In 1944 both Republican and Democratic platforms included strong pro-Zionist planks even though the creation of a Jewish state was strongly opposed by the Departments of State and War (p. 328).

Nevertheless, whatever the level of Jewish influence on the media during this period, commentators generally focused on denouncing the seeming implication in Lindbergh’s speech that Jewish interests were “not American.” I suppose that Lindbergh’s statement could have been amended by a public-relations minded editor without distorting Lindbergh’s intentions to read something like, “Jewish interests are not the same as the interests of most other Americans,” or “Jewish interests are not the same as those of the country as a whole.” However, I rather doubt that this alteration would have assuaged the outpouring of hatred that ensued. The simple facts that the vast majority of U.S. Jews were indeed in favor of intervention and that Jews did have a significant effect on public attitudes and public policy had become irrelevant. As Lindbergh himself said, the choice was “whether or not you are going to let your country go into a completely disastrous war for lack of courage to name the groups leading that country to war—at the risk of being called ‘anti-Semitic’ simply by naming them” (as paraphrased by Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1980, 224; italics in text). America had entered into an era when it had become morally unacceptable to discuss Jewish interests at all.

We are still in that era.⁴

It is instructive to review in some detail the “Niagara of invective” experienced by Lindbergh (Berg 1999, 428). He was denounced by virtually all the leading media, by Democrats and Republicans, Protestants and Catholics, and, of course, Jewish groups. Many accused him of being a Nazi, including the Presidential Secretary who compared Lindbergh’s speech to Nazi rhetoric. Reinhold Niebuhr, the prominent Protestant leader (see below), called on Lindbergh’s organization, America First, to “divorce itself from the stand taken by Lindbergh and clean its ranks of those who would incite to racial and religious strife in this country” (in Berg 1999, 428). America First released a statement that neither Lindbergh nor the organization were anti-Semitic.

The reaction of Lindbergh’s wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, is particularly interesting because it illustrates the power of moral revulsion combined with hypocrisy that had enveloped any public discussion of Jewish interests.

September 11, 1941:

Then [he gave] his speech—throwing me into black gloom. He names the ‘war agitators’—chiefly the British, the Jews, and the Administration. He does it truthfully, moderately, and with no bitterness or rancor—but I hate to have him touch the Jews at all. For I dread the reaction on him. No one else mentions this subject out loud (though many seethe bitterly and intolerantly underneath). C. [Charles], as usual, must bear the brunt of being frank and open. What he is saying in public is not intolerant or inciting or bitter and it is just what he says in private, while the other soft-spoken cautious people who say terrible things in private would never dare be as frank in public as he. They do not want to pay the price. And the price will be terrible. Headlines will flame “Lindbergh attacks Jews.” He will be branded anti-Semitic, Nazi, Führer-seeking, etc. I can hardly bear it. For he is a moderate. . . .

September 13, 1941:

He is attacked on all sides—Administration, pressure groups, and Jews, as now openly a Nazi, following Nazi doctrine.

September 14, 1941:

I cannot explain my revulsion of feeling by logic. Is it my lack of courage to face the problem? Is it my lack of vision and seeing the thing through? Or is my intuition founded on something profound and valid?

I do not know and am only very disturbed, which is upsetting for him. I have the greatest faith in him as a person—in his integrity, his courage, and his essential goodness, fairness, and kindness—his nobility really. . . . How then explain my profound feeling of grief about what he is doing? If what he said is the truth (and I am inclined to think it is), why was it wrong to state it? He was naming the groups that were pro-war. No one minds his naming the British or the Administration. But to name “Jew” is un-American—even if it is done without hate or even criticism. Why?

Because it is segregating them as a group, setting the ground for anti-Semitism. . . .

I say that I would prefer to see this country at war than shaken by violent anti-Semitism. (Because it seems to me that the kind of person the human being is turned into when the instinct of Jew-baiting is let loose is worse than the kind of person he becomes on the battlefield.)

September 15, 1941:

The storm is beginning to blow up hard. America First is in a turmoil. . . . He is universally condemned by all moderates. . . . The Jews demand a retraction. . . . I sense that this is the beginning of a fight and consequent loneliness and isolation that we have not known before. . . . For I am really much more attached to the worldly things than he is, mind more giving up friends, popularity, etc., mind much more criticism and coldness and loneliness.

September 18, 1941:

Will I be able to shop in New York at all now? I am always stared at—but now to be stared at with hate, to walk through aisles of hate!⁵ (A. M. Lindbergh 1980, 220–230; italics in text)

Several issues stand out in these comments. Anne Morrow Lindbergh is horrified at having to walk through “aisles of hate,” horrified at having to give up her friends, horrified at being a pariah where once she was idolized as the wife of the most popular man in the country. While she accepts the truth of what her husband said and its good intentions, she thinks it better left unsaid and does not dwell on the unfairness of the charges against her husband, in particular with calling him a Nazi. Truth is no defense if it leads to morally unacceptable actions, and slander and smear tactics are warranted and understandable if the goals are morally praiseworthy. She supposes that even a disastrous war that might kill hundreds of thousands of Americans (and, as her husband believed, might result in the destruction of European culture and the white race) is preferable to the possibility of an outbreak of violent anti-Semitism. The moral demeanor of Americans is more important than their survival as a nation or people. And all of this because Lindbergh simply stated that Jews had interests as a group that differed from those of other Americans. Their lesson learned, American politicians presumably realized that even rational, intelligent, and humane discussions of Jewish interests were beyond the boundaries of appropriate discussion. Jews had no interests as Jews that could be said to conflict with the interests of any other group of Americans.

By the time of Lindbergh’s speech, Jews not only had a prominent position in the U.S. media, they had seized the intellectual and moral high ground via their control of the intellectual and political movements discussed in CofC. Not only were Jewish interests beyond the bounds of civilized political discussion, assertions of European ethnic interest became impermissible as well. Such assertions conflicted with the Boasian dogma that genetic differences between peoples were trivial and irrelevant; they conflicted with the Marxist belief in the equality of all peoples and the Marxist belief that nationalism and assertions of ethnic interests were reactionary; such assertions were deemed a sure sign of psychopathology within the frameworks of psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School; and they would soon be regarded as the babblings of country bumpkins by the New York Intellectuals and by the neo-conservatives who spouted variants of all of these ideologies from the most prestigious academic and media institutions in the society. There may indeed have been other forces that relegated a nativist mindset to the political and intellectual fringe—Gottfried (2000) points a finger at liberal Protestantism and the rise of the managerial state, but it is impossible to understand the effectiveness of either of these influences in the absence of the Jewish movements I describe.

The rise of a de-ethnicized non-Jewish managerial elite that rejects traditional cultural institutions—as exemplified by former President Bill Clinton and now Senator Hillary Clinton—and interwoven with a critical mass of ethnically conscious Jews and other ethnic minorities is an enormously important fact of our current political life. My claim that Jewish intellectual and political activities were a necessary condition for the rise of such an elite, while obviously difficult to verify conclusively (as any other causal hypothesis would be) is also compatible with the work of others, most notably D. A. Hollinger’s (1996) Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-20th-Century American Intellectual History and Carl Degler’s (1991) In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought.

The rise of such a de-ethnicized elite is hardly an inevitable consequence of modernization or any other force of which I am aware. Such de-ethnicized managerial elites are unique to European and European-derived societies. Such elites are not found elsewhere in the world, including highly developed nations such as Japan and Israel or the undeveloped nations of Africa and elsewhere. Moreover, the cultural shifts under consideration have also occurred in traditionally Catholic countries like France and Italy, where Protestantism has not been a factor. France in particular has been very open to non-European immigration and its intellectual life has been deeply influenced by the movements discussed in CofC. Conversely, there are many examples where Protestantism has peacefully co-existed with or even rationalized nationalism and ethnocentrism.

Developing theories of why Western cultures provide such fertile ground for the theories and movements discussed in CofC is a very useful area for research. It is instructive to look at the way Europeans in the U.S. saw themselves a century ago.⁶ Americans of European descent thought of themselves as part of a cultural and ethnic heritage extending backward in time to the founding of the country. The Anglo-Saxon heritage of the British Isles was at the center of this self-conception, but Americans of German and Scandinavian descent also viewed themselves as part of this ethnic and cultural heritage. They had a great deal of pride in their accomplishments. They had conquered a vast territory and had achieved a high degree of economic progress. They saw themselves as having created a civilization with a strong moral fabric—a country of farmers and small businessmen who had developed into a world economic power. They believed that their civilization was a product of their own unique ingenuity and skills, and they believed that it would not survive if other peoples were allowed to play too large a role in it. They saw themselves as exhibiting positive personality traits such as courage in the face of adversity, self-reliance, inventiveness, originality, and fair play—the very virtues that allowed them to conquer the wilderness and turn it into an advanced civilization.

Americans at the turn of the 19th century looked out on the world and saw their own society as superior to others. They saw themselves and other European societies as reaping the rewards of political and economic freedom while the rest of the world suffered as it had from time immemorial—the despotism of Asia, the barbarity and primitivism of Africa, and the economic and political backwardness of Russia and Eastern Europe.

They saw themselves as Christian, and they thought of Christianity as an essential part of the social fabric and their way of life. Christianity was seen as basic to the moral foundations of the society, and any threat to Christianity was seen as a threat to the society as a whole. When these people looked back on their own childhood, they saw “a simple, secure world of commonly accepted values and behavior” (Bendersky 2000, 6)—a world of cultural and ethnic homogeneity. They had a strong sense of family pride and regional identification: They had deep roots in the areas in which they grew up. They did not think of the U.S. as a Marxist hell of war between the social classes. Instead they thought of it as a world of harmony between the social classes in which people at the top of society earned their positions but felt a certain sense of social obligation to the lower social classes.

The early part of the 20th century was also the high water mark of Darwinism in the social sciences. It was common at that time to think that there were important differences between the races—that races differed in intelligence and in moral qualities. Not only did races differ, but they were in competition with each other for supremacy. As described in Separation and Its Discontents (MacDonald 1998a), such ideas were part of the furniture of intellectual life—commonplace among Jews as well as non-Jews.

That world has vanished. The rise of Jewish power and the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the real topics of CofC. The war to disestablish the specifically European nature of the U.S. was fought on several fronts. The main thrusts of Jewish activism against European ethnic and cultural hegemony have focused on three critical power centers in the United States: The academic world of information in the social sciences and humanities, the political world where public policy on immigration and other ethnic issues is decided, and the mass media where “ways of seeing” are presented to the public. The first two are the focus of CofC.

At the intellectual level, Jewish intellectuals led the battle against the idea that races even exist and against the idea that there are differences in intelligence or cultural level between the races that are rooted in biology. They also spearheaded defining America as a set of abstract principles rather than an ethnocultural civilization. At the level of politics, Jewish organizations spearheaded the drive to open up immigration to all of the peoples of the world. Jewish organizations also played a key role in furthering the interests of other racial and ethnic minorities, and they led the legal and legislative effort to remove Christianity from public places.

The first bastion of the old American culture to fall was elite academic institutions and especially the Ivy League universities. The transformation of the faculty in the social sciences and humanities was well underway in the 1950s, and by the early 1960s it was largely complete. The new elite was very different from the old elite it displaced. The difference was that the old Protestant elite was not at war with the country it dominated. The old Protestant elite was wealthier and better educated than the public at large, but they approached life on basically the same terms. They saw themselves as Christians and as Europeans, and they didn’t see the need for radically changing the society.

Things are very different now. Since the 1960s a hostile, adversary elite has emerged to dominate intellectual and political debate. It is an elite that almost instinctively loathes the traditional institutions of European-American culture: its religion, its customs, its manners, and its sexual attitudes. In the words of one commentator, “today’s elite loathes the nation it rules” (Gerlernter 1997). Good examples are Stephen Steinlight’s comments on the immigration restriction of 1924–1965 (see above) and Joseph Bendersky’s The “Jewish Threat” , published by Basic Books (2000). Bendersky paints a vanished world of proud and confident Europeans self-consciously intent on retaining control of the U.S. The author’s sense of intellectual and moral superiority and his contempt for his northern European subjects ooze from every page. The book is a triumphalist history written by a member of a group that won the intellectual and political wars of the 20th century.

This “hostile elite” is fundamentally a Jewish-dominated elite whose origins and main lines of influence are described in CofC. The emergence of this hostile elite is an aspect of ethnic competition between Jews and non-Jews and its effect will be a long-term decline in the hegemony of European peoples in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.

Although European peoples are less prone to ethnocentrism and more prone to moral universalism and individualism (see below), they did not surrender their impending cultural and demographic eclipse without a fight. There is no evidence for internal WASP self-destruction, but a great deal of evidence that their active resistance was overcome by the movements I discuss in CofC. For example, Bendersky’s (2000) recent The “Jewish Threat” shows strong resistance to the decline of European hegemony among U.S. Army officers in the period from World War I to well into the Cold War era and shows that similar attitudes were widespread among the public at that time. But their resistance was nullified by the decline of the intellectual basis of European ethnic hegemony and by political events, such as the immigration law of 1965, which they were unable to control. In the end, the 1965 law passed because it was advertised as nothing more than a moral gesture that would have no long-term impact on the ethnic balance of the U.S. However, to its activist supporters, including the Jewish organizations who were critical to its passage, immigration reform was what it had always been: a mechanism to alter the ethnic balance of the United States (see Ch. 7).

The fact that the Jewish intellectuals and political operatives described in CofC did not lose their national/ethnic loyalties shows that there was no general trend to de-ethnicization. The broad trends toward de-ethnicization somehow occurred among the Europeans but spared the Jews who by all accounts continue to strongly support their ethnic homeland, Israel, and continue to have a strong sense of peoplehood—propped up now by high-profile programs encouraging Jews to marry other Jews. My account would benefit from discussing the acceptance of Jews by the Protestant establishment after World War II. However, what I have seen thus far suggests Jewish involvement in the dramatic changes in Protestant sensibilities as well. Recently I have become aware of John Murray Cuddihy’s (1978) book, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste. The chapter on Reinhold Niebuhr is particularly interesting in thinking about how to account for the acceptance of Jews and Judaism by the WASP establishment after W.W.II. Cuddihy focuses on the elevation of Judaism to the status of one of the “big three” U.S. religions, to the point that a rabbi officiates at the presidential inauguration even though Jews constitute approximately 2–3% of the population. Cuddihy argues that this religious surface served as a protective coloring and led to a sort of crypto-Judaism in which Jewish ethnic identities were submerged in order to make them appear civilized to the goyim. As part of this contract, Niebuhr acknowledged “the stubborn will of the Jews to live as a peculiar people”—an acknowledgement by an important Protestant leader that the Jews could remain a people with a surface veneer of religion.

Both sides gave up something in this bargain. The Jews’ posturing as a religion left them open to large-scale defection via intermarriage to the extent that they took seriously the idea that Judaism was akin to Protestantism, and to some extent this did occur. But recently, Jews have been mending the fences. There is an upsurge in more traditional forms of Judaism and an open rejection of intermarriage even among the most liberal wings of Judaism. Recent guidelines for Reform Judaism emphasize traditional practices of conversion, such as circumcision, that are likely to minimize converts, and proselytism is explicitly rejected.⁷ It would appear that Conservative religious forms of Judaism will be the rule in the Diaspora and there will be a self-conscious ethnic aspect to Jewish religiosity.

What the Protestants gave up was far more important because I think it has been a contributing factor in the more or less irreversible ethnic changes in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Western world. Judaism became unconditionally accepted as a modern religion even while retaining a commitment to its ethnic core. It conformed outwardly to the religious norms of the U.S., but it also continued to energetically pursue its ethnic interests, especially with regard to issues where there is a substantial consensus among Jews: support for Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties (Goldberg 1996, 5). What is remarkable is that a wealthy, powerful, and highly talented ethnic group was able to pursue its interests without those interests ever being the subject of open political discussion by mainstream political figures, for at least the last 60 years—since Lindbergh’s ill-fated Des Moines speech of 1941.

I suppose that Niebuhr thought that he was only giving up the prospect of converting Jews, but the implicit downgrading of the ethnic character of Judaism provided an invaluable tool in furthering Jewish ethnic aims in the U.S. The downgrading of the ethnic aspect of Judaism essentially allowed Jews to win the ethnic war without anyone even being able to acknowledge that it was an ethnic war. For example, during the immigration debates of the 1940s–1960s Jews were described by themselves and others as “people of the Jewish faith.” They were simply another religion in an officially pluralistic religious society, and part of Jewish posturing was a claim to a unique universalistic moral-religious vision that could only be achieved by enacting legislation that in fact furthered their particularist ethnic aims. The universalistic moral-religious vision promoted by Jewish activists really amounted to taking the Protestants at their own word—by insisting that every last shred of ethnic identity among Protestants be given up while Jews were implicitly allowed to keep theirs if they only promised to behave civilly.

The evidence provided by Cuddihy suggests that Niebuhr was socialized by the Jewish milieu of New York into taking the positions that he did—that his position as a major Protestant spokesperson was facilitated by alliances he formed with Jews and because his writings fit well with the Jewish milieu of New York intellectual circles. Niebuhr’s behavior is therefore more an indication of Jewish power and the ability of Jews to recruit gentiles sympathetic to their causes than an indication of Protestant self-destruction. One cannot underestimate the importance of Jewish power in intellectual circles in New York at the time of Niebuhr’s pronouncements (see CofC, passim). For example, Leslie Fiedler (1948, 873) noted that “the writer drawn to New York from the provinces feels . . . the Rube, attempts to conform; and the almost parody of Jewishness achieved by the gentile writer in New York is a strange and crucial testimony of our time.”⁸

THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF EUROPEAN
INDIVIDUALISM

Although there is much evidence that Europeans presented a spirited defense of their cultural and ethnic hegemony in the early- to mid-20th century, their rapid decline raises the question: What cultural or ethnic characteristics of Europeans made them susceptible to the intellectual and political movements described in CofC? The discussion in CofC focused mainly on a proposed nexus of individualism, relative lack of ethnocentrism, and concomitant moral universalism—all features that are entirely foreign to Judaism. In several places in all three of my books on Judaism I develop the view that Europeans are relatively less ethnocentric than other peoples and relatively more prone to individualism as opposed to the ethnocentric collectivist social structures historically far more characteristic of other human groups, including—relevant to this discussion—Jewish groups. I update and extend these ideas here.

The basic idea is that European groups are highly vulnerable to invasion by strongly collectivist, ethnocentric groups because individualists have less powerful defenses against such groups. The competitive advantage of cohesive, cooperating groups is obvious and is a theme that recurs throughout my trilogy on Judaism. This scenario implies that European peoples are more prone to individualism. Individualist cultures show little emotional attachment to ingroups. Personal goals are paramount, and socialization emphasizes the importance of self-reliance, independence, individual responsibility, and “finding yourself” (Triandis 1991, 82). Individualists have more positive attitudes toward strangers and outgroup members and are more likely to behave in a pro-social, altruistic manner to strangers. People in individualist cultures are less aware of ingroup/outgroup boundaries and thus do not have highly negative attitudes toward outgroup members. They often disagree with ingroup policy, show little emotional commitment or loyalty to ingroups, and do not have a sense of common fate with other ingroup members. Opposition to outgroups occurs in individualist societies, but the opposition is more “rational” in the sense that there is less of a tendency to suppose that all of the outgroup members are culpable. Individualists form mild attachments to many groups, while collectivists have an intense attachment and identification to a few ingroups (Triandis 1990, 61). Individualists are therefore relatively ill-prepared for between-group competition so characteristic of the history of Judaism.

Historically Judaism has been far more ethnocentric and collectivist than typical Western societies. I make this argument in Separation and Its Discontents (MacDonald 1998a; Ch. 1) and especially in A People That Shall Dwell Alone (MacDonald 1994; Ch. 8), where I suggest that over the course of their recent evolution, Europeans were less subjected to between-group natural selection than Jews and other Middle Eastern populations. This was originally proposed by Fritz Lenz (1931, 657) who suggested that, because of the harsh environment of the Ice Age, the Nordic peoples evolved in small groups and have a tendency toward social isolation rather than cohesive groups. This perspective would not imply that Northern Europeans lack collectivist mechanisms for group competition, but only that these mechanisms are relatively less elaborated and/or require a higher level of group conflict to trigger their expression.

This perspective is consistent with ecological theory. Under ecologically adverse circumstances, adaptations are directed more at coping with the adverse physical environment than at competing with other groups (Southwood 1977, 1981), and in such an environment, there would be less pressure for selection for extended kinship networks and highly collectivist groups. Evolutionary conceptualizations of ethnocentrism emphasize the utility of ethnocentrism in group competition. Ethnocentrism would thus be of no importance at all in combating the physical environment, and such an environment would not support large groups.

European groups are part of what Burton et al. (1996) term the North Eurasian and Circumpolar culture area.⁹ This culture area derives from hunter-gatherers adapted to cold, ecologically adverse climates. In such climates there is pressure for male provisioning of the family and a tendency toward monogamy because the ecology did not support either polygyny or large groups for an evolutionarily significant period. These cultures are characterized by bilateral kinship relationships which recognize both the male and female lines, suggesting a more equal contribution for each sex as would be expected under conditions of monogamy. There is also less emphasis on extended kinship relationships and marriage tends to be exogamous (i.e., outside the kinship group). As discussed below, all of these characteristics are opposite those found among Jews.

The historical evidence shows that Europeans, and especially Northwest Europeans, were relatively quick to abandon extended kinship networks and collectivist social structures when their interests were protected with the rise of strong centralized governments. There is indeed a general tendency throughout the world for a decline in extended kinship networks with the rise of central authority (Alexander 1979; Goldschmidt & Kunkel 1971; Stone 1977). But in the case of Northwest Europe this tendency quickly gave rise long before the industrial revolution to the unique Western European “simple household” type. The simple household type is based on a single married couple and their children. It contrasts with the joint family structure typical of the rest of Eurasia in which the household consists of two or more related couples, typically brothers and their wives and other members of the extended family (Hajnal 1983). (An example of the joint household would be the families of the patriarchs described in the Old Testament; see MacDonald 1994, Ch. 3) Before the industrial revolution, the simple household system was characterized by methods of keeping unmarried young people occupied as servants. It was not just the children of the poor and landless who became servants, but even large, successful farmers sent their children to be servants elsewhere. In the 17th and 18th centuries individuals often took in servants early in their marriage, before their own children could help out, and then passed their children to others when the children were older and there was more than enough help (Stone 1977).

This suggests a deeply ingrained cultural practice which resulted in a high level of non-kinship based reciprocity. The practice also bespeaks a relative lack of ethnocentrism because people are taking in non-relatives as household members whereas in the rest of Eurasia people tend to surround themselves with biological relatives. Simply put, genetic relatedness was less important in Europe and especially in the Nordic areas of Europe. The unique feature of the simple household system was the high percentage of non-relatives. Unlike the rest of Eurasia, the pre-industrial societies of northwestern Europe were not organized around extended kinship relationships, and it is easy to see that they are pre-adapted to the industrial revolution and modern world generally.¹⁰

This simple household system is a fundamental feature of individualist culture. The individualist family was able to pursue its interests freed from the obligations and constraints of extended kinship relationships and free of the suffocating collectivism of the social structures typical of so much of the rest of the world. Monogamous marriage based on individual consent and conjugal affection quickly replaced marriage based on kinship and family strategizing. (See Chs. 4 and 8 for a discussion of the greater proneness of Western Europeans to monogamy and to marriage based on companionship and affection rather than polygyny and collectivist mechanisms of social control and family strategizing.)

This relatively greater proneness to forming a simple household type may well be ethnically based. During the pre-industrial era, this household system was found only within Nordic Europe: The simple household type is based on a single married couple and their children and characterized Scandinavia (except Finland), British Isles, Low Countries, German-speaking areas, and northern France. Within France, the simple household occurred in areas inhabited by the Germanic peoples who lived northeast of “the eternal line” running from Saint Malo on the English Channel coast to Geneva in French-speaking Switzerland (Ladurie 1986). This area developed large scale agriculture capable of feeding the growing towns and cities, and did so prior to the agricultural revolution of the 18th century. It was supported by a large array of skilled craftsmen in the towns, and a large class of medium-sized ploughmen who “owned horses, copper bowls, glass goblets and often shoes; their children had fat cheeks and broad shoulders, and their babies wore tiny shoes. None of these children had the swollen bellies of the rachitics of the Third World” (Ladurie 1986, 340). The northeast became the center of French industrialization and world trade.

The northeast also differed from the southwest in literacy rates. In the early 19th century, while literacy rates for France as a whole were approximately 50%, the rate in the northeast was close to 100%, and differences occurred at least from the 17th century. Moreover, there was a pronounced difference in stature, with the northeasterners being taller by almost 2 centimeters in an 18th century sample of military recruits. Ladurie notes that the difference in the entire population was probably larger because the army would not accept many of the shorter men from the southwest. In addition, Laslett (1983) and other family historians have noted that the trend toward the economically independent nuclear family was more prominent in the north, while there was a tendency toward joint families as one moves to the south and east.

These findings are compatible with the interpretation that ethnic differences are a contributing factor to the geographical variation in family forms within Europe. The findings suggest that the Germanic peoples had a greater biological tendency toward a suite of traits that predisposed them to individualism—including a greater tendency toward the simple household because of natural selection occurring in a prolonged resource-limited period of their evolution in the north of Europe. Similar tendencies toward exogamy, monogamy, individualism, and relative de-emphasis on the extended family were also characteristic of Roman civilization (MacDonald 1990), again suggesting an ethnic tendency that pervades Western cultures generally.

Current data indicate that around 80% of European genes are derived from people who settled in Europe 30–40,000 years ago and therefore persisted through the Ice Ages (Sykes 2001). This is sufficient time for the adverse ecology of the north to have had a powerful shaping influence on European psychological and cultural tendencies. These European groups were less attracted to extended kinship groups, so that when the context altered with the rise of powerful central governments able to guarantee individual interests, the simple household structure quickly became dominant. This simple family structure was adopted relatively easily because Europeans already had relatively powerful psychological predispositions toward the simple family resulting from its prolonged evolutionary history in the north of Europe.

Although these differences within the Western European system are important, they do not belie the general difference between Western Europe and the rest of Eurasia. Although the trend toward simple households occurred first in the northwest of Europe, they spread relatively quickly among all the Western European countries.

The establishment of the simple household freed from enmeshment in the wider kinship community was then followed in short order by all the other markers of Western modernization: limited governments in which individuals have rights against the state, capitalist economic enterprise based on individual economic rights, moral universalism, and science as individualist truth seeking. Individualist societies develop republican political institutions and institutions of scientific inquiry that assume that groups are maximally permeable and highly subject to defection when individual needs are not met.

Recent research by evolutionary economists provides fascinating insight on the differences between individualistic cultures versus collectivist cultures. An important aspect of this research is to model the evolution of cooperation among individualistic peoples. Fehr and Gächter (2002) found that people will altruistically punish defectors in a “one-shot” game—a game in which participants only interact once and are thus not influenced by the reputations of the people with whom they are interacting. This situation therefore models an individualistic culture because participants are strangers with no kinship ties. The surprising finding was that subjects who made high levels of public goods donations tended to punish people who did not even though they did not receive any benefit from doing so. Moreover, the punished individuals changed their ways and donated more in future games even though they knew that the participants in later rounds were not the same as in previous rounds. Fehr and Gächter suggest that people from individualistic cultures have an evolved negative emotional reaction to free riding that results in their punishing such people even at a cost to themselves—hence the term “altruistic punishment.” Essentially Fehr and Gächter provide a model of the evolution of cooperation among individualistic peoples. Their results are most applicable to individualistic groups because such groups are not based on extended kinship relationships and are therefore much more prone to defection. In general, high levels of altruistic punishment are more likely to be found among individualistic, hunter-gather societies than in kinship based societies based on the extended family. Their results are least applicable to groups such as Jewish groups or other highly collectivist groups which in traditional societies were based on extended kinship relationships, known kinship linkages, and repeated interactions among members. In such situations, actors know the people with whom they are cooperating and anticipate future cooperation because they are enmeshed in extended kinship networks, or, as in the case of Jews, they are in the same group.

Similarly, in the ultimatum game, one subject (the ‘proposer’) is assigned a sum of money equal to two days’ wages and required to propose an offer to a second person (the ‘respondent’). The respondent may then accept the offer or reject the offer, and if the offer is rejected neither player wins anything. As in the previously described public goods game, the game is intended to model economic interactions between strangers, so players are anonymous. Henrich et al. (2001) found that two variables, payoffs to cooperation and the extent of market exchange, predicted offers and rejections in the game. Societies with an emphasis on cooperation and on market exchange had the highest offers—results interpreted as reflecting the fact that they have extensive experience of the principle of cooperation and sharing with strangers. These are individualistic societies. On the other hand, subjects from societies where all interactions are among family members made low offers in the ultimatum game and contributed low amounts to public goods in similarly anonymous conditions.

Europeans are thus exactly the sort of groups modeled by Fehr and Gächter and Henrich et al: They are groups with high levels of cooperation with strangers rather than with extended family members, and they are prone to market relations and individualism. On the other hand, Jewish culture derives from the Middle Old World culture area characterized by extended kinship networks and the extended family. Such cultures are prone to ingroup-outgroup relationships in which cooperation involves repeated interactions with ingroup members and the ingroup is composed of extended family members.

This suggests the fascinating possibility that the key for a group intending to turn Europeans against themselves is to trigger their strong tendency toward altruistic punishment by convincing them of the evil of their own people. Because Europeans are individualists at heart, they readily rise up in moral anger against their own people once they are seen as free riders and therefore morally blameworthy—a manifestation of their much stronger tendency toward altruistic punishment deriving from their evolutionary past as hunter gatherers. In making judgments of altruistic punishment, relative genetic distance is irrelevant. Free-riders are seen as strangers in a market situation; i.e., they have no familial or tribal connection with the altruistic punisher.

Thus the current altruistic punishment so characteristic of contemporary Western civilization: Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment. For Westerners, morality is individualistic—violations of communal norms by free-riders are punished by altruistic aggression.

On the other hand, group strategies deriving from collectivist cultures, such as the Jews, are immune to such a maneuver because kinship and group ties come first. Morality is particularistic—whatever is good for the group. There is no tradition of altruistic punishment because the evolutionary history of these groups centers around cooperation of close kin, not strangers (see below).

The best strategy for a collectivist group like the Jews for destroying Europeans therefore is to convince the Europeans of their own moral bankruptcy. A major theme of CofC is that this is exactly what Jewish intellectual movements have done. They have presented Judaism as morally superior to European civilization and European civilization as morally bankrupt and the proper target of altruistic punishment. The consequence is that once Europeans are convinced of their own moral depravity, they will destroy their own people in a fit of altruistic punishment. The general dismantling of the culture of the West and eventually its demise as anything resembling an ethnic entity will occur as a result of a moral onslaught triggering a paroxysm of altruistic punishment. And thus the intense effort among Jewish intellectuals to continue the ideology of the moral superiority of Judaism and its role as undeserving historical victim while at the same time continuing the onslaught on the moral legitimacy of the West.

Individualist societies are therefore an ideal environment for Judaism as a highly collectivist, group-oriented strategy. Indeed, a major theme of Chapter 5 is that the Frankfurt School of Social Research advocated radical individualism among non-Jews while at the same time retaining their own powerful group allegiance to Judaism. Jews benefit from open, individualistic societies in which barriers to upward mobility are removed, in which people are viewed as individuals rather than as members of groups, in which intellectual discourse is not prescribed by institutions like the Catholic Church that are not dominated by Jews, and in which mechanisms of altruistic punishment may be exploited to divide the European majority. This is also why, apart from periods in which Jews served as middlemen between alien elites and native populations, Middle Eastern societies were much more efficient than Western individualistic societies at keeping Jews in a powerless position where they did not pose a competitive threat (see MacDonald 1998a, Ch. 2).

THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF JEWISH
COLLECTIVISM AND ETHNOCENTRISM

Jews originate in the Middle Old World cultural area¹¹ and retain several of the key cultural features of their ancestral population. The Middle Old World culture group is characterized by extended kinship groups based on relatedness through the male line (patrilineal) rather than the bilateral relationships characteristic of Europeans. These male-dominated groups functioned as military units to protect herds, and between-group conflict is a much more important component of their evolutionary history. There is a great deal of pressure to form larger groups in order to increase military strength, and this is done partly by acquiring extra women through bridewealth.¹² (Bridewealth involves the transfer of resources in return for marriage rights to a female, as in the marriages of Abraham and Isaac recounted in the Old Testament.) As a result, polygyny rather than the monogamy characteristic of European culture is the norm. Another contrast is that traditional Jewish groups were basically extended families with high levels of endogamy (i.e., marriage within the kinship group) and consanguineous marriage (i.e., marriage to blood relatives), including the uncle-niece marriage sanctioned in the Old Testament. This is exactly the opposite of Western European tendencies toward exogamy. (See MacDonald 1994, Chs. 3 and 8 for a discussion of Jewish tendencies toward polygyny, endogamy, and consanguineous marriage.) Table 1 contrasts European and Jewish cultural characteristics.¹³

Whereas individualist cultures are biased toward separation from the wider group, individuals in collectivist societies have a strong sense of group identity and group boundaries based on genetic relatedness as a result of the greater importance of group conflict during their evolutionary history. Middle Eastern societies are characterized by anthropologists as “segmentary societies” organized into relatively impermeable, kinship-based groups (e.g., Coon 1958, 153; Eickelman 1981, 157–174). Group boundaries are often reinforced through external markers such as hair style or clothing, as Jews have often done throughout their history. Different groups settle in different areas where they retain their homogeneity alongside other homogeneous groups. Consider Carleton Coon’s (1958) description of Middle Eastern society:

Table 1: Contrasts Between European and Jewish Cultural Forms.

European Cultural Origins
Jewish Cultural Origins

Evolutionary History
Northern Hunter-Gatherers
Middle Old World Pastoralists
(Herders)

Kinship System
Bilateral;
Weakly Patricentric
Unilineal;
Strongly Patricentric

Family System
Simple Household;
Extended Family; Joint
Household;

Marriage Practices
Exogamous

Monogamous
Endogamous,
Consanguineous;
Polygynous

Marriage Psychology
Companionate;
Based on Mutual Consent and
Affection
Utilitarian; Based on Family
Strategizing and Control of
Kinship Group

Position of Women
Relatively High
Relatively Low

Social Structure
Individualistic;
Republican;
Democratic;
Collectivistic;
Authoritarian;
Charismatic Leaders

Ethnocentrism
Relatively Low
Relatively High; “Hyper-
ethnocentrism

Xenophobia
Relatively Low
Relatively High; “Hyper-
xenophobia

Socialization
Stresses Independence, Self-
Reliance
Stresses Ingroup Identification,
Obligations to Kinship Group

Intellectual Stance
Reason;
Science
Dogmatism; Submission to
Ingroup Authority and
Charismatic Leaders

Moral Stance
Moral Universalism: Morality
is Independent of Group
Affiliation
Moral Particularism;
Ingroup/Outgroup Morality;
“Good is what is good for the
Jews”

There the ideal was to emphasize not the uniformity of the citizens of a country as a whole but a uniformity within each special segment, and the greatest possible contrast between segments. The members of each ethnic unit feel the need to identify themselves by some configuration of symbols. If by virtue of their history they possess some racial peculiarity, this they will enhance by special haircuts and the like; in any case they will wear distinctive garments and behave in a distinctive fashion. (Coon 1958, 153)

Between-group conflict often lurked just beneath the surface of these societies. For example, Dumont (1982, 223) describes the increase in anti-Semitism in Turkey in the late 19th century consequent to increased resource competition. In many towns, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in a sort of superficial harmony, and even lived in the same areas, “but the slightest spark sufficed to ignite the fuse” (p. 222).

Jews are at the extreme of this Middle Eastern tendency toward hyper-collectivism and hyper-ethnocentrism—a phenomenon that goes a long way toward explaining the chronic hostilities in the area. I give many examples of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism in my trilogy and have suggested in several places that Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism is biologically based (MacDonald 1994, Ch. 8; 1998a, Ch. 1). It was noted above that individualist European cultures tend to be more open to strangers than collectivist cultures such as Judaism. In this regard, it is interesting that developmental psychologists have found unusually intense fear reactions among Israeli infants in response to strangers, while the opposite pattern is found for infants from North Germany.¹⁴ The Israeli infants were much more likely to become “inconsolably upset” in reaction to strangers, whereas the North German infants had relatively minor reactions to strangers. The Israeli babies therefore tended to have an unusual degree of stranger anxiety, while the North German babies were the opposite—findings that fit with the hypothesis that Europeans and Jews are on opposite ends of scales of xenophobia and ethnocentrism.

I provide many examples of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism in my trilogy on Judaism. Recently, I have been much impressed with the theme of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism in the writings of Israel Shahak, most notably his co-authored Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999). In their examination of current Jewish fundamentalists and their influence in Israel, Shahak and Mezvinsky argue that present-day fundamentalists attempt to re-create the life of Jewish communities before the Enlightenment (i.e., prior to about 1750). During this period the great majority of Jews believed in Cabbala—Jewish mysticism. Influential Jewish scholars like Gershom Scholem ignored the obvious racialist, exclusivist material in the Cabbala by using words like “men”, “human beings”, and “cosmic” to suggest the Cabbala has a universalist message. The actual text says salvation is only for Jews, while non-Jews have “Satanic souls” (p. 58).

The ethnocentrism apparent in such statements was not only the norm in traditional Jewish society, but remains a powerful current of contemporary Jewish fundamentalism, with important implications for Israeli politics. For example, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, describing the difference between Jews and non-Jews:

We do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather we have a case of . . . a totally different species. . . . The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world . . . The difference of the inner quality [of the body], . . . is so great that the bodies would be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is an halachic¹⁵ difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to the bodies of Jews] ‘their bodies are in vain’. . . . An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness. (In Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999, 59–60)

This claim of Jewish uniqueness echoes Holocaust activist Elie Wiesel’s (1985, 153) claim that “everything about us is different.” Jews are “ontologically” exceptional.

The Gush Emunim and other Jewish fundamentalist sects described by Shahak and Mezvinsky are thus part of a long mainstream Jewish tradition which considers Jews and non-Jews as completely different species, with Jews absolutely superior to non-Jews and subject to a radically different moral code. Moral universalism is thus antithetical to the Jewish tradition.

Within Israel, these Jewish fundamentalist groups are not tiny fringe groups, mere relics of traditional Jewish culture. They are widely respected by the Israeli public and by many Jews in the Diaspora. They have a great deal of influence on the government, especially the Likud governments and the recent government of national unity headed by Ariel Sharon. The members of Gush Emunim constitute a significant percentage of the elite units of the Israeli army, and, as expected on the hypothesis that they are extremely ethnocentric, they are much more willing to treat the Palestinians in a savage and brutal manner than are other Israeli soldiers. All together, the religious parties make up about 25% of the Israeli electorate (Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999, 8)—a percentage that is sure to increase because of their high fertility and because intensified troubles with the Palestinians tend to make other Israelis more sympathetic to their cause. Given the fractionated state of Israeli politics and the increasing numbers of the religious groups, it is unlikely that future governments can be formed without their participation. Peace in the Middle East therefore appears unlikely absent the complete capitulation of the Palestinians.

The point here is not so much about the fundamentalists in contemporary Israel but that traditional Jewish communities were intensely ethnocentric and collectivist—a major theme of all three of my books on Judaism. A thread throughout CofC is that Jewish intellectuals and political activists strongly identified as Jews and saw their work as furthering specific Jewish agendas. Their advocacy of intellectual and political causes, although often expressed in the language of moral universalism, was actually moral particularism in disguise.

Given that ethnocentrism continues to pervade all segments of the Jewish community, the advocacy of the de-ethnicization of Europeans—a common sentiment in the movements I discuss in CofC—is best seen as a strategic move against peoples regarded as historical enemies. In Chapter 8 of CofC, I called attention to a long list of similar double standards, especially with regard to the policies pursued by Israel versus the policies Jewish organizations have pursued in the U.S. As noted throughout CofC, Jewish advocates addressing Western audiences have promoted policies that satisfy Jewish (particularist) interests in terms of the morally universalist language that is a central feature of Western moral and intellectual discourse. These policies include church-state separation, attitudes toward multi-culturalism, and immigration policies favoring the dominant ethnic groups. This double standard is fairly pervasive.¹⁶

A principal theme of CofC is that Jewish organizations played a decisive role in opposing the idea that the United States ought to be a European nation. Nevertheless, these organizations have been strong supporters of Israel as a nation of the Jewish people. Consider, for example, a press release of May 28, 1999 by the ADL:

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today lauded the passage of sweeping changes in Germany’s immigration law, saying the easing of the nation’s once rigorous naturalization requirements “will provide a climate for diversity and acceptance. It is encouraging to see pluralism taking root in a society that, despite its strong democracy, had for decades maintained an unyielding policy of citizenship by blood or descent only,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “The easing of immigration requirements is especially significant in light of Germany’s history of the Holocaust and persecution of Jews and other minority groups. The new law will provide a climate for diversity and acceptance in a nation with an onerous legacy of xenophobia, where the concept of ‘us versus them’ will be replaced by a principle of citizenship for all.”¹⁷

There is no mention of analogous laws in place in Israel restricting immigration to Jews and the long-standing policy of rejecting the possibility of repatriation for Palestinian refugees wishing to return to Israel or the occupied territories. The prospective change in the “us versus them” attitude alleged to be characteristic of Germany is applauded, while the “us versus them” attitude characteristic of Israel and Jewish culture throughout history is unmentioned. Recently, the Israeli Ministry of Interior ruled that new immigrants who have converted to Judaism will no longer be able to bring non-Jewish family members into the country. The decision is expected to cut by half the number of eligible immigrants to Israel.¹⁸ Nevertheless, Jewish organizations continue to be strong proponents of multi-ethnic immigration to the United States.¹⁹ This pervasive double standard was noticed by writer Vincent Sheean in his observations of Zionists in Palestine in 1930: “how idealism goes hand in hand with the most terrific cynicism; . . . how they are Fascists in their own affairs, with regard to Palestine, and internationalists in everything else.”²⁰

My view is that Judaism must be conceived primarily as an ethnic rather than a religious group. Recent statements by prominent Jewish figures show that an ethnic conceptualization of Judaism fits with the self-images of many Jews. Speaking to a largely Jewish audience, Benjamin Netanyahu, prominent Likud Party member and until recently prime minister of Israel, stated, “If Israel had not come into existence after World War II then I am certain the Jewish race wouldn’t have survived. . . . I stand before you and say you must strengthen your commitment to Israel. You must become leaders and stand up as Jews. We must be proud of our past to be confident of our future.”²¹ Charles Bronfman, a main sponsor of the $210 million “Birthright Israel” project which attempts to deepen the commitment of American Jews, expresses a similar sentiment: “You can live a perfectly decent life not being Jewish, but I think you’re losing a lot—losing the kind of feeling you have when you know [that] throughout the world there are people who somehow or other have the same kind of DNA that you have.”²² (Bronfman is co-chairman of the Seagram company and brother of Edgar Bronfman, Sr., president of the World Jewish Congress.) Such sentiments would be unthinkable coming from European-American leaders. European-Americans making such assertions of racial pride would quickly be labeled haters and extremists.

A revealing comment by AJCommittee official Stephen Steinlight (2001) illustrates the profound ethnic nationalism that has pervaded the socialization of American Jews continuing into the present:

I’ll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months for 10 formative years during my childhood and adolescence I attended Jewish summer camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting its colors, sang a foreign national anthem, learned a foreign language, learned foreign folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the true homeland. Emigration to Israel was considered the highest virtue, and, like many other Jewish teens of my generation, I spent two summers working in Israel on a collective farm while I contemplated that possibility. More tacitly and subconsciously, I was taught the superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us. We were taught to view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people from whom sudden gusts of hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive, intelligent, and moral than ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson of our dark history is that we could rely on no one. . . . [I]t must be admitted that the essence of the process of my nationalist training was to inculcate the belief that the primary division in the world was between “us” and “them.” Of course we also saluted the American and Canadian flags and sang those anthems, usually with real feeling, but it was clear where our primary loyalty was meant to reside.²³

Assertions of Jewish ethnicity are well-founded. Scientific studies supporting the genetic cohesiveness of Jewish groups continue to appear, most notably Hammer et al. (2000). Based on Y-chromosome data, Hammer et al. conclude that 1 in 200 matings within Jewish communities were with non-Jews over a 2000 year period.

In general, the contemporary organized Jewish community is characterized by high levels of Jewish identification and ethnocentrism. Jewish activist organizations like the ADL and the AJCommittee are not creations of the fundamentalist and Orthodox, but represent the broad Jewish community, including non-religious Jews and Reform Jews. In general, the more actively people are involved in the Jewish community, the more committed they are to preventing intermarriage and retaining Jewish ethnic cohesion. And despite a considerable level of intermarriage among less committed Jews, the leadership of the Jewish community in the U.S. is not now made up of the offspring of intermarried people to any significant extent.

Jewish ethnocentrism is ultimately simple traditional human ethnocentrism, although it is certainly among the more extreme varieties. But what is so fascinating is the cloak of intellectual support for Jewish ethnocentrism, the complexity and intellectual sophistication of the rationalizations for it—some of which are reviewed in Separation and Its Discontents (Chs. 6–8), and the rather awesome hypocrisy of it, given Jewish opposition to ethnocentrism among Europeans.

JEWISH INVOLVEMENT IN COMMUNISM AND THE
RADICAL LEFT

Beat them, Red Fighters, clobber them to death, if it is the last thing you do! Right away! This minute! Now! . . . Slaughter them, Red Army Fighters, Stamp harder on the rising lids of their rancid coffins! (Isaac Babel, described by Cynthia Ozick (2001, 3) as “an acutely conscious Jew,” propagandizing for the Bolshevik Revolution; in Ozick 2001, 4)

Another recent development related to the issues raised in CofC was the publication of The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Courtois et al. 1999). Reading this book has caused me to expand on some of the ideas in Chapter 3 of CofC. I didn’t emphasize enough the truly horrific nature of the Soviet regime, nor did I place sufficient emphasis on the consequences of Jewish involvement in the rise and maintenance of Communism.

The Soviet government killed over 20 million of its own citizens, the vast majority in the first 25 years of its existence during the height of Jewish power. It was a “state against its people” (Werth 1999), mounting murderous campaigns of collective punishment (usually involving deportation or forced starvation) against a great many ethnic groups, including Great Russian peasants, Ukrainians, Cossacks, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, Moldavians, Kalmyks, Karachai, Balkars, Ingush, Greeks, Bulgars, Crimean Armenians, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Khemshins as groups (Courtois 1999, 10; Werth 1999, 219ff). Although individual Jews were caught up in the Bolshevik violence, Jews were not targeted as a group.²⁴

In CofC (Ch. 3), I noted that Jews were prominently involved in the Bolshevik Revolution and formed an elite group in the Soviet Union well into the post-World War II-era. It is interesting that many of the non-Jewish Bolsheviks were members of non-Russian ethnic groups or, as noted in CofC, were married to Jewish women. It was a common perception during the early stages of the Soviet Union that the government was dominated by “a small knot of foreigners” (Szajkowski 1977, 55). Stalin, Beria, and Ordzhonikidze were Georgians; Dzerzhinsky, the ruthless head of the Checka (Secret Police) during the 1920s, was a Pole with strong pro-Jewish attitudes. The original Cheka was made up largely of non-Russians, and the Russians in the Cheka tended to be sadistic psychopaths and criminals (Werth 1999, 62; Wolin & Slusser 1957, 6)—people who are unlikely to have any allegiance to or identification with their people.

The Bolshevik revolution therefore had a pronounced ethnic angle: To a very great extent, Jews and other non-Russians ruled over the Russian people, with disastrous consequences for the Russians and other ethnic groups that were not able to become part of the power structure. For example, when Stalin decided to deport the Chechens, he placed an Ossetian—a group from which he himself was partly derived and an historic enemy of the Chechens—in charge of the deportation. Ossetians and Georgians, Stalin’s own ancestral groups, were allowed to expand at the expense of other ethnic groups.

While Stalin favored the Georgians, Jews had their own ethnic scores to settle. It seems likely that at least some of the Bolshevik mass murder and terror was motivated by revenge against peoples that had historically been anti-Jewish. Several historians have suggested that Jews joined the security forces in such large numbers in order to get revenge for their treatment under the Czars (Rapoport 1990, 31; Baron 1975, 170). For example, the Cossacks served the Czar as a military police force, and they used their power against Jewish communities during the conflicts between the government and the Jews. After the Revolution, the Cossacks were deported to Siberia for refusing to join the collective farms. During the 1930s, the person in charge of the deportations was an ethnic Jew, Lazar Kaganovich, nicknamed the “wolf of the Kremlin” because of his penchant for violence. In his drive against the peasants, Kaganovich took “an almost perverse joy in being able to dictate to the Cossacks. He recalled too vividly what he and his family had experienced at the hands of these people. . . . Now they would all pay—men, women, children. It didn’t matter who. They became one and the same. That was the key to [Kaganovich’s] being. He would never forgive and he would never forget” (Kahan 1987, 164). Similarly, Jews were placed in charge of security in the Ukraine, which had a long history of anti-Semitism (Lindemann 1997, 443) and became a scene of mass murder in the 1930s.

In Cof C (Ch. 3), I noted that Jews were very prominently involved in the Soviet secret police and that they played similar roles in Communist Poland and Hungary. In addition to many lower ranking security personnel, prominent Jews included Matvei Berman and Naftali Frenkel, who developed the slave labor system which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. (The construction of a canal between the Baltic and the White Sea claimed many thousands of lives. The six overseers of the project were Jews: Firin, Berman, Frenkel, Kogan, Rappoport, Zhuk.) Other Jews who were prominent in carrying out the Red Terror included Genrik Yagoda (head of the secret police), Aron Soltz, Lev Inzhir (chief accountant of the Gulag Archipelago), M. I. Gay (head of a special secret police department), A. A. Slutsky and his deputy Boris Berman (in charge of terror abroad), K. V. Pauker (secret police Chief of Operations), and Lazar Kaganovich (most powerful government official behind Stalin during the 1930s and prominently involved in the mass murders that took place during that period) (Rapoport 1990, 44–50). In general, Jews were not only prominent in the leadership of the Bolsheviks, but they “abounded at the lower levels of the party machinery—especially, in the Cheka, and its successors the GPU, the OGPU and the NKVD” (Schapiro 1961, 165). The special role of Jews in the Bolshevik government was not lost on Russians: “For the most prominent and colourful figure after Lenin was Trotsky, in Petrograd the dominant and hated figure was Zinoviev, while anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with, and possibly shot by, a Jewish investigator” (Schapiro 1961, 165). Beginning in 1917 it was common for Russians to associate Jews with the revolution (Werth 1999, 86). Even after the German invasion in 1941, it was common for many Russians to hope for German victory to rid the country of “Jews and Bolsheviks”—until the brutality of the invaders became apparent (Werth 1999, 215).

The discussion of Jewish power in the Soviet Union in CofC notes that in stark contrast to the campaigns of mass murder against other peoples, Stalin’s efforts against a relative handful of high-ranking Jewish Communists during the purges of the 1930s were very cautious and involved a great deal of deception intended to downplay the Jewish identity of the victims. Jewish power during this period is also indicated by the fact that the Soviet government established a Jewish autonomous region (Birobidzhan) in 1934, at least partly to curry favor with foreign Jewish organizations (Gitelman 1988). During the 1920s and throughout the 1930s the Soviet Union accepted aid for Soviet Jews from foreign Jewish organizations, especially the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee which was funded by wealthy American Jews (Warburg, Schiff, Kuhn, Loeb, Lehman, Marshall). Another revealing incident occurred when Stalin ordered the murder of two Jewish leaders of the international socialist movement, Henryk Ehrlich and Victor Alter. These murders created an international incident, and there were protests by leftists around the world (Rapoport 1990, 68). The furor did not die down until the Soviets established a Jewish organization, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), dedicated to winning the favor of American Jews. American Jewish leaders, such as Nahum Goldmann of the World Jewish Congress and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress), helped quell the uproar over the incident and shore up positive views of the Soviet Union among American Jews. They, along with a wide range of American Jewish radicals, warmly greeted JAC representatives in New York during World War II.

Again, the contrast is striking. The Soviet government killed millions of Ukrainian and Russian peasants during the 1920s and 1930s, executed hundreds of thousands of people who were purged from their positions in the party and throughout the economy, imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people in appalling conditions that produced incredibly high mortality and without any meaningful due process, drafted hundreds of thousands of people into forced labor with enormous loss of life, and ordered the collective punishment and deportation of Cossacks and other ethnic groups, resulting in mass murder of these groups. At the same time, actions against a handful of Jewish Communists were taken cautiously and performed with reassurances that the government still had very positive views of Jews and Judaism.

A major theme of Chapter 3 of CofC is that in general Jewish leftists, including supporters of Bolshevism, continued to identify as Jews and that Jewish support for these causes waxed or waned depending on their congruence with specific Jewish issues. However, I should have emphasized more just how much specifically Jewish issues mattered, that indeed Jewish involvement with Bolshevism is perhaps the most egregious example of Jewish moral particularism in all of history. The horrific consequences of Bolshevism for millions of non-Jewish Soviet citizens do not seem to have been an issue for Jewish leftists—a pattern that continues into the present. In CofC, I noted that Ilya Ehrenberg’s silence about Soviet brutalities involving the murder of millions of its citizens during the 1930s may have been motivated largely by his view that the Soviet Union was a bulwark against fascism (Rubenstein 1996, 143–145). This moral blindspot was quite common. During the 1930s, when millions of Soviet citizens were being murdered by the Soviet government, the Communist Party USA took great pains to appeal to specific Jewish interests, including opposing antiSemitism, supporting Zionism, and advocating the importance of maintaining Jewish cultural traditions. During this period, “the American radical movement glorified the development of Jewish life in the Soviet Union. . . . The Soviet Union was living proof that under socialism the Jewish question could be solved” (Kann 1981, 152–153). Communism was perceived as “good for Jews.” Radical Jews—a substantial percentage of the entire Jewish community at that time—saw the world through Jewish lenses.

A fascinating example of an American Jewish radical who extolled the virtues of the Soviet Union is Joe Rapoport (Kann 1981, 20–42, 109–125)— mentioned briefly in CofC, but his example bears a deeper examination. Rapoport joined a Jewish detachment of the Red Army that was fighting the Ukrainian nationalists in the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Like many other Jews, he chose the Red Army because it opposed the anti-Jewish actions of the Ukrainian nationalists. Like the vast majority of Russian Jews, he greeted the revolution because it improved the lives of the Jews.

After emigrating to the U.S., Rapoport visited the Ukraine in November of 1934, less then one year after the famine created by Soviet government actions that killed 4 million Ukrainian peasants (Werth 1999, 159ff ). The peasants had resisted being forced to join collective farms and were aided by local Ukrainian authorities. The response of the central government was to arrest farmers and confiscate all grain, including reserves to be used for next year’s harvest. Since they had no food, the peasants attempted to leave for the cities but were prevented from doing so by the government. The peasants starved by the millions. Parents abandoned starving children before starving themselves; cannibalism was rampant; remaining workers were tortured to force them to hand over any remaining food. Methods of torture included the ‘cold’ method where the victim was stripped bare and left out in the cold, stark naked. Sometimes whole brigades of collective workers were treated in this fashion. In the ‘hot’ method, the feet and the bottom of the skirt of female workers were doused with gasoline and then set alight. The flames were put out, and the process was repeated (Werth 1999, 166). During the period when the famine claimed a total of 6 million lives throughout the country, the government exported eighteen million hundredweight of grain in order to obtain money for industrialization.

These horrors are unmentioned by Rapoport in his account of his 1934 visit. Instead, he paints a very positive portrait of life in the Ukraine under the Soviets. Life is good for the Jews. He is pleased that Yiddish culture is accepted not only by Jews but by non-Jews as well, a clear indication of the privileged status of Judaism in the Soviet Union during this period. (For example, he recounts an incident in which a Ukrainian worker read a story in Yiddish to the other workers, Jews and non-Jews alike.) Young Jews were taking advantage of new opportunities not only in Yiddish culture but “in the economy, in the government, in participation in the general life of the country” (Kann 1981, 120). Older Jews complained that the government was anti-religious, and young Jews complained that Leon Trotsky, “the national pride of the Jewish people,” had been removed. But the message to American radicals was upbeat: “It was sufficient to learn that the Jewish young people were in higher positions and embraced the Soviet system” (Kann 1981, 122). Rapoport sees the world through Jewish-only eyes. The massive suffering in which a total of nearly 20 million Soviet citizens had already died because of government actions is irrelevant. When he looks back on his life as an American Jewish radical, his only ambivalence and regrets are about supporting Soviet actions he saw as not in the Jewish interest, such as the non-aggression pact with Germany and failure to consistently support Israel.

Rapoport was thus an exemplar of the many defenders of Communism in the U.S. media and intellectual circles (see below and Ch. 3). A prominent example of malfeasance by the media was the New York Times, owned by a Jewish family and much on the mind of those concerned about Jewish media influence (see above). During the 1930s, while it was highlighting German persecution of Jews and pushing for intervention into World War II against Germany, the Times completely whitewashed the horrors of Soviet rule, including the Ukrainian famine, even though the story was covered extensively by the Hearst newspapers and even though the leadership of the Times had been informed on numerous occasions that its correspondent was painting a false picture of Stalin’s actions.²⁵

Peter Novick’s recent book, The Holocaust in American Life, contributes to scholarship on the involvement of Jews in the radical left during the 20th century. He shows that Jewish organizations in the U.S. were well aware of Jewish involvement in Communism, but they argued that only a minority of Jews were involved and downplayed the fact that a majority of Communists were Jews, that an even greater majority of Communist leaders were Jews, that the great majority of those called up by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940s and 1950s were Jews, and that most of those prosecuted for spying for the Soviet Union were Jews (see also Chapter 3 of CofC and MacDonald 1998a, 200–201).

Indeed, the proposal that leftist radicalism represented a minority of the American Jewish community is far from obvious. In fact, the immigrant Jewish community in the U.S. from 1886 to 1920 can best be described as “one big radical debating society” (Cohn 1958, 621). Long after this period, leftist sympathies were widespread in the AJCongress—by far the largest organization of American Jews, and Communist-oriented groups were affiliated with the AJCongress until being reluctantly purged during the McCarthy era (Svonkin 1997, 132, 166). Recently no less a figure than Representative Samuel Dickstein, discussed in Chapter 7 as a strong Congressional proponent of immigration and certainly a prominent and mainstream figure in the Jewish community, was revealed as a Soviet spy (Weinstein & Vassiliev 1999).

Novick notes that Jewish organizations made sure that Hollywood movies did not show any Communist characters with Jewish names. Newspapers and magazines such as Time and Life, which were at that time controlled by non-Jews, agreed not to publish letters on the Jewishness of American Communists at the behest of a staff member of the AJCommittee (Novick 1999, 95).

Novick also notes that Jewish Communists often used the Holocaust as a rhetorical device at a time when mainstream Jewish organizations were trying to keep a low profile. This fits well with the material in CofC indicating a strong Jewish identification among the vast majority of Jewish Communists. Invocations of the Holocaust “became the dominant argument, at least in Jewish circles, for opposition to Cold War mobilization” (Novick 1999, 93). Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, often invoked the Holocaust in rationalizing their actions. Julius testified that the USSR “contributed a major share in destroying the Hitler beast who killed 6,000,000 of my co-religionists” (p. 94). Public demonstrations of support for the Rosenbergs often invoked the Holocaust.

Although Bendersky (2000) presents an apologetic account in which Jewish involvement in radical leftism is seen as nothing more than the paranoia of racist military officers, he shows that U.S. military intelligence had confirmation of the linkage from multiple independent sources, including information on financial support of revolutionary activity provided by wealthy Jews like Jacob Schiff and the Warburg family. These sources included not only its own agents, but also the British government and the U.S. State Department Division of Russian Affairs. These sources asserted that Jews dominated the Bolshevik governments of the Soviet Union and Hungary and that Jews in other countries were sympathetic to Bolshevism. Similarly, Szajkowski (1977) shows that the view that Jews dominated the Bolshevik government was very widespread among Russians and foreigners in the Soviet Union, including American and British military and diplomatic personnel and administrators of relief agencies. He also shows that sympathy for the Bolshevik government was the norm within the Eastern European immigrant Jewish community in the U.S. in the period from 1918–1920, but that the older German-Jewish establishment (whose numbers were dwarfed by the more recent immigrants from Eastern Europe) opposed Bolshevism during this period.

While the Jewish Holocaust has become a moral touchstone and premier cultural icon in Western societies, the Jewish blind spot about the horrors of Bolshevism continues into the present time. Jewish media figures who were blacklisted because of Communist affiliations in the 1940s are now heroes, honored by the film industry, praised in newspapers, their work exhibited in museums.²⁶ For example, an event commemorating the blacklist was held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in October 1997. Organized by the four guilds—the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), Directors Guild of America (DGA), Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and Writers Guild of America, west (WGAw), the event honored the lives and careers of the blacklisted writers and condemned the guilds’ lack of response fifty years earlier.²⁷ At the same time, the Writers Guild of America has been restoring dozens of credits to movies written by screenwriters who wrote under pseudonyms or used fronts while blacklisted. Movies on the topic paint a picture of innocent Jewish idealists hounded by a ruthless, oppressive government, and critics like Bernheimer (1998, 163–166) clearly approve this assessment. In the same vein, the 1983 movie Daniel, based on a novel by E. L. Doctorow and directed by Sydney Lumet, portrayed the conviction of the Rosenbergs as “a matter of political expediency. The persecution is presented as a nightmarish vision of Jewish victimization, senseless and brutal” (Bernheimer 1998, 178).

A nostalgic and exculpatory attitude toward the Jewish Old Left is apparent in recent accounts of the children of “red diaper babies,” including those who have come to reject their leftist commitments. For example, Ronald Radosh’s (2001a) Commies describes the all-encompassing world of Jewish radicalism of his youth. His father belonged to a classic Communist Party front organization called the Trade Union Unity League. Radosh was a dutiful son, throwing himself fervently into every cause that bore the party’s stamp of approval, attending a party-inspired summer camp and a New York City red-diaper high school (known as “the Little Red Schoolhouse for little Reds”), and participating in youth festivals modeled on Soviet extravaganzas. It says a lot about the Jewish milieu of the Party that a common joke was: “What Jewish holidays do you celebrate?” “Paul Robeson’s birthday and May Day.” Radosh only questioned the leftist faith when he was rejected and blackballed by his leftist comrades for publishing a book that established the guilt of Julius Rosenberg. Radosh shows that academic departments of history remain a bastion of apologia for the far left. Many academic historians shunned Radosh because of his findings, including Eric Foner, another Red Diaper Baby, who was a president of the American Historical Association. Radosh writes of the “reflexive hatred of the American system” that pervades the left. It was indeed a “reflexive hatred”—a hatred that, as discussed in CofC, was due far more to their strong Jewish identifications than to anything objectively wrong with American society. Nevertheless, despite his reservations about the leftism of his past, he presents the motivations of Jewish communists as idealistic even as they provided “the ideological arguments meant to rationalize Soviet crimes and gain the support by Americans for Soviet foreign policy” (Radosh 2001b).

Despite the massive evidence for a very large Jewish involvement in these movements, there are no apologies from Jewish organizations and very few mea culpas from Jewish intellectuals. If anything, the opposite is true, given the idealization of blacklisted writers and the continuing tendency to portray U.S. Communists as idealists who were crushed by repressive McCarthyism. Because many Communist societies eventually developed anti-Jewish movements, Jewish organizations portray Jews as victims of Communism, not as critical to its rise to power, as deeply involved in the murderous reign of terror unleashed by these regimes, and as apologists for the Soviet Union in the West. Forgotten in this history are the millions of deaths, the forced labor, the quieting of all dissent that occurred during the height of Jewish power in the Soviet Union. Remembered are the anti-Jewish trends of late Communism.

The 20th century in Europe and the Western world, like the 15th century in Spain, was a Jewish century because Jews and Jewish organizations were intimately and decisively involved in all of the important events. If I am correct in asserting that Jewish participation was a necessary condition for the Bolshevik Revolution and its murderous aftermath, one could also argue that Jews thereby had a massive influence on later events. The following is an “alternative history”; i.e., a history of what might have happened if certain events had not happened. For example, alternative historian Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War makes a plausible case that if England had not entered World War I, Germany would have defeated France and Russia and would have become the dominant power in Europe. The Czar’s government may well have collapsed, but the changes would have led to a constitutional government instead of the Bolshevik regime. Hitler would not have come to power because Germans would have already achieved their national aspirations. World War II would not have happened, and there would have been no Cold War.

But of course these things did happen. In the same way, one can then also ask what might have happened in the absence of Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik Revolution. The argument would go as follows:

(1) Given that World War I did occur and that the Czar’s government was drastically weakened, it seems reasonable that there would have been major changes in Russia. However, without Jewish involvement, the changes in Russia would have resulted in a constitutional monarchy, a representative republic, or even a nationalist military junta that enjoyed broad popular support among the Great Russian majority instead of a dictatorship dominated by ethnic outsiders, especially Jews and “jewified non-Jews,” to use Lindemann’s (1997) term. It would not have been an explicitly Marxist revolution, and therefore it would not have had a blueprint for a society that sanctioned war against its own people and their traditional culture. The ideology of the Bolshevik revolution sanctioned the elimination of whole classes of people, and indeed mass murder has been a characteristic of communism wherever it has come to power (Courtois et al. 1999). These massacres were made all the easier because the Revolution was led by ethnic outsiders with little or no sympathy for the Russians or other peoples who suffered the most.

(2) Conservatives throughout Europe and the United States believed that Jews were responsible for Communism and the Bolshevik Revolution (Bendersky 2000; Mayer 1988; Nolte 1965; Szajkowski 1974). The Jewish role in leftist political movements was a common source of anti-Jewish attitudes, not only among the National Socialists in Germany, but among a great many non-Jewish intellectuals and political figures. Indeed, in the years following World War I, British, French, and U.S. political leaders, including Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Lord Balfour, believed in Jewish responsibility, and such attitudes were common in the military and diplomatic establishments in these countries (e.g., Szajkowski 1974, 166ff; see also above and Ch. 3). For example, writing in 1920, Winston Churchill typified the perception that Jews were behind what he termed a “world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization.” The role of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution “is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others.” Churchill noted the predominance of Jews among Bolshevik leaders (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Litvinoff, Krassin, Radek) and among those responsible for “the system of [state] terrorism.” Churchill also noted that Jews were prominent in revolutionary movements in Hungary, in Germany, and in the United States. The identification of Jews with revolutionary radicalism became a major concern of the military and political leaders throughout Western Europe and the United States (Bendersky 2000; Szajkowski 1974). Moreover, as noted above, the deep involvement of Jews in Bolshevism was privately acknowledged within Jewish activist organizations. Lucien Wolf, a fixture in the Anglo-Jewish establishment, noted that, “I know the political history of the Jews in Europe and the part played by Jews in Bolshevism much too well not to realise the danger that we run in pretending that they always did hold aloof from revolution. There would have been no progress in Europe without revolution and I have often written and lectured—and I shall do so again—in praise of the Jews who have helped the good work” (in Szajkowski 1974, 172).

(3) In Germany, the identification of Jews and Bolshevism was common in the middle classes and was a critical part of the National Socialist view of the world. For middle-class Germans, “the experience of the Bolshevik revolution in Germany was so immediate, so close to home, and so disquieting, and statistics seemed to prove the overwhelming participation of Jewish ringleaders so irrefutably,” that even many liberals believed in Jewish responsibility (Nolte 1965, 331). Hitler was also well aware of the predominance of Jews in the short-lived revolutions in Hungary and in the German province of Bavaria in 1919. He had experienced the Jewish involvement in the Bavarian revolution personally, and this may well have been a decisive moment in the development of his anti-Jewish ideas (Lindemann 2000, 90).

Jewish involvement in the horrors of Communism was therefore an important ingredient in Hitler’s desire to destroy the USSR and in the anti-Jewish actions of the German National Socialist government. Ernst Nolte and several other historians have argued that the Jewish role in the Bolshevik Revolution was an important cause of the Holocaust. Hitler and the National Socialists certainly believed that Jews were critical to the success of the Bolshevik Revolution. They compared the Soviet Union to a man with a Slavic body and a Jewish-Bolshevik brain (Nolte 1965, 357–358). They attributed the mass murders of Communism—”the most radical form of Jewish genocide ever known”—to the Jewish-Bolshevik brain (Nolte 1965, 393). The National Socialists were well aware that the Soviet government committed mass murder against its enemies and believed that it was intent on promoting a world revolution in which many more millions of people would be murdered. As early as 1918 a prominent Jewish Bolshevik, Grigory Zinoviev, spoke publicly about the need to eliminate ten million Russians—an underestimate by half, as it turned out. Seizing upon this background, Hitler wrote,

Now begins the last great revolution. By wrestling political power for himself, the Jew casts off the few remaining shreds of disguise he still wears. The democratic plebeian Jew turns into the blood Jew and the tyrant of peoples. In a few years he will try to exterminate the national pillars of intelligence and, by robbing the peoples of their natural spiritual leadership, will make them ripe for the slavish lot of a permanent subjugation.

The most terrible example of this is Russia. (In Nolte 1965, 406)

This line of reasoning does not imply that there were no other critical factors. If World War I had not occurred and if the Czar hadn’t entered that war, then the Czar could have stayed in power much longer. Russia might have been transformed gradually into a modern Western state rather than be subjected to the horrors of Communism. In the same way, Hitler may not have come to power if there had been no Great Depression or if Germany had won World War I. Such events also would have altered things enormously.

(4) The victory over National Socialism then set the stage for the tremendous increase in Jewish power in the post-World War II Western world. This new-found power facilitated the establishment of Israel, the transformation of the United States and other Western nations in the direction of multi-racial, multicultural societies via large-scale non-white immigration, and the consequent decline in European demographic and cultural pre-eminence. The critical details of these and other consequences of Jewish rise to international elite status and power are described in CofC.

FROM THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE TO THE CULTURE
OF THE HOLOCAUST

While CofC describes the “culture of critique” dominated by Jewish intellectual and political movements, perhaps insufficient attention was given to the critical elements of the new culture that has replaced the traditional European cultural forms that dominated a century ago. Central to the new culture is the elevation of Jewish experiences of suffering during World War II, collectively referred to as “the Holocaust”, to the level of the pivotal historico-cultural icon in Western societies. Since the publication of CofC, two books have appeared on the political and cultural functions of the Holocaust in contemporary life—Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life, and Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry. Novick’s book, the more scholarly of the two, notes that the Holocaust has assumed a preeminent status as a symbol of the consequences of ethnic conflict. He argues that the importance of the Holocaust is not a spontaneous phenomenon but stems from highly focused, well-funded efforts of Jewish organizations and individual Jews with access to the major media:

We are not just “the people of the book,” but the people of the Hollywood film and the television miniseries, of the magazine article and the newspaper column, of the comic book and the academic symposium. When a high level of concern with the Holocaust became widespread in American Jewry, it was, given the important role that Jews play in American media and opinion-making elites, not only natural, but virtually inevitable that it would spread throughout the culture at large. (Novick 1999, 12)

The Holocaust was originally promoted to rally support for Israel following the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars: “Jewish organizations . . . [portrayed] Israel’s difficulties as stemming from the world’s having forgotten the Holocaust. The Holocaust framework allowed one to put aside as irrelevant any legitimate ground for criticizing Israel, to avoid even considering the possibility that the rights and wrongs were complex” (Novick 1999, 155). As the threat to Israel subsided, the Holocaust was promoted as the main source of Jewish identity and in the effort to combat assimilation and intermarriage among Jews. During this period, the Holocaust was also promoted among gentiles as an antidote to antiSemitism. In recent years this has involved a large scale educational effort (including mandated courses in the public schools of several states) spearheaded by Jewish organizations and staffed by thousands of Holocaust professionals aimed at conveying the lesson that “tolerance and diversity [are] good; hate [is] bad, the overall rubric [being] ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ “ (pp. 258–259). The Holocaust has thus become an instrument of Jewish ethnic interests not only as a symbol intended to create moral revulsion at violence directed at minority ethnic groups—prototypically the Jews, but also as an instrument to silence opponents of high levels of multi-ethnic immigration into Western societies. As described in CofC, promoting high levels of multi-ethnic immigration has been a goal of Jewish groups since the late 19th century.

Jewish Holocaust activists insisted on the “incomprehensibility and inexplicability of the Holocaust” (Novick 1999, 178)—an attempt to remove all rational discussion of its causes and to prevent comparisons to numerous other examples of ethnic violence. “Even many observant Jews are often willing to discuss the founding myths of Judaism naturalistically—subject them to rational, scholarly analysis. But they’re unwilling to adopt this mode of thought when it comes to the ‘inexplicable mystery’ of the Holocaust, where rational analysis is seen as inappropriate or sacrilegious” (p. 200). Holocaust activist Elie Wiesel “sees the Holocaust as ‘equal to the revelation at Sinai’ in its religious significance; attempts to ‘desanctify’ or ‘demystify’ the Holocaust are, he says, a subtle form of anti-Semitism” (p. 201).

Because the Holocaust is regarded as a unique, unknowable event, Jewish organizations and Israeli diplomats cooperated to block the U.S. Congress from commemorating the Armenian genocide. “Since Jews recognized the Holocaust’s uniqueness—that it was ‘incomparable,’ beyond any analogy—they had no occasion to compete with others; there could be no contest over the incontestable” (p. 195). Abe Foxman, head of the ADL, noted that the Holocaust is “not simply one example of genocide but a near successful attempt on the life of God’s chosen children and, thus, on God himself” (p. 199)—a comment that illustrates well the intimate connection between Holocaust promotion and the more extreme forms of Jewish ethnocentrism at the highest levels of the organized Jewish community.

A result was that American Jews were able to define themselves “as the quintessential victim” (Novick 1999, 194). As an expression of this tendency, Holocaust activist Simon Wiesenthal compiled a calendar showing when, where and by whom Jews were persecuted on every day of the year. Holocaust consciousness was the ultimate expression of a victim mentality. The Holocaust came to symbolize the natural and inevitable terminus of anti-Semitism. “There is no such thing as overreaction to an anti-Semitic incident, no such thing as exaggerating the omnipresent danger. Anyone who scoffed at the idea that there were dangerous portents in American society hadn’t learned ‘the lesson of the Holocaust’ “ (p. 178).

While Jews are portrayed as the quintessential victim in Holocaust iconography, the vast majority of non-Jews are portrayed as potential or actual anti-Semites. “Righteous Gentiles” are acknowledged, but the criteria are strict. They must have risked their lives, and often the lives of the members of their families as well, to save a Jew. “Righteous Gentiles” must display “self-sacrificing heroism of the highest and rarest order” (Novick 1999, 180). Such people are extremely rare, and any Jew who discusses “Righteous Gentiles” for any other reason comes under heavy criticism. The point is to shore up the fortress mentality of Jews—”promoting a wary suspicion of gentiles” (p. 180). A prominent Jewish feminist exemplifies this attitude: “Every conscious Jew longs to ask her or his non-Jewish friends, ‘would you hide me?’—and suppresses the question for fear of hearing the sounds of silence” (p. 181).

Consciousness of the Holocaust is very high among Jews. A 1998 survey found that “remembrance of the Holocaust” was listed as “extremely important” or “very important” to Jewish identity—far more often than anything else, such as synagogue attendance and travel to Israel. Indeed, Jewish identity is far more important than American identity for many American Jews: “In recent years it has become not just permissible but in some circles laudable for American Jews to assert the primacy of Jewish over American loyalty” (Novick 1999, 34). (See, e.g., the comments by AJCommittee official Stephen Steinlight above.)

However, consciousness of the Holocaust is not confined to Jews but has become institutionalized as an American cultural icon. Besides the many Holocaust memorial museums that dot the country and the mushrooming of mandated courses about the Holocaust in public schools, a growing number of colleges and universities now have endowed chairs in Holocaust Studies. “Considering all the Holocaust institutions of one kind or another in the United States, there are by now thousands of full-time Holocaust professionals dedicated to keeping its memory alive” (Novick 1999, 277).

This effort has been very successful. In a 1990 survey, a substantial majority agreed that the Holocaust “was the worst tragedy in history” (Novick 1999, 232; italics in text). Recently, the main thrust of the Holocaust as cultural icon is the ratification of multiculturalism. Between 80 and 90 percent of those surveyed agreed that the need to protect the rights of minorities, and not “going along with everybody else” were lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust. Respondents agreed in similar proportions that “it is important that people keep hearing about the Holocaust so that it will not happen again.” The effort has perhaps been even more effective in Germany where “critical discussion of Jews . . . is virtually impossible. Whether conservative or liberal, a contemporary German intellectual who says anything outside a narrowly defined spectrum of codified pieties about Jews, the Holocaust, and its postwar effects on German society runs the risk of professional and social suicide” (Anderson 2001). Discussions of the work of Jewish intellectuals have come to dominate German intellectual life to the almost complete exclusion of non-Jewish Germans. Many of these intellectuals are the subjects of CofC, including Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, and Sigmund Freud. “Shoah business” “has become a staple of contemporary German cultural and political life. Germans thrive on debates about the Holocaust and their ongoing responsibility to preserve its memory, campaigning to erect a gigantic memorial to the Jewish dead in the historic center of Berlin, or flocking to hear the American scholar Daniel Goldhagen’s crude and unhistorical diatribes against the German national character” (Anderson 2001). Scholars have lost all sense of normal standards of intellectual criticism and have come to identify more or less completely with the Jewish victims of Nazism.

For example, Holocaust poet Paul Celan has become a central cultural figure, superceding all other 20th-century poets. His works are now beyond rational criticism, to the point that they have become enveloped in a sort of stultifying mysticism: “Frankly, I find troubling the sacred, untouchable aura that surrounds Celan’s name in Germany; troubling also the way in which his name functions like a trump card in intellectual discussions, closing off debate and excluding other subjects” (Anderson 2001). Jewish writers like Kafka are seen as intellectual giants who are above criticism; discussions of Kafka’s work focus on his Jewish identity and are imbued by consciousness of the Holocaust despite the fact that he died in 1924. Even minor Jewish writers are elevated to the highest levels of the literary canon while Germans like Thomas Mann are discussed mainly because they held views on Jews that have become unacceptable in polite society. In the U.S., German scholars are constrained to teach only the works of Germans of Jewish background, their courses dwelling on persecution, and genocide.

Indeed, it is not too far fetched to suppose that German culture as the culture of Germans has disappeared entirely, replaced by the culture of the Holocaust. The Holocaust has not only become a quasi-religion capable of eradicating the remnants of German culture, Jews have become sanctified as a people. As Amos Elon noted in describing the German response to a new Jewish museum in Berlin, “With so much hyperbole, so many undoubtedly sincere expressions of guilt and regret, and of admiration for all things Jewish, one could not help feeling that fifty years after the Holocaust, the new republic was, in effect, beatifying the German Jews” (Elon 2001).

Like Novick, Finkelstein (2000) takes a functionalist view of “the Holocaust Industry,” arguing that it serves as a vehicle for obtaining money for Jewish organizations from European governments and corporations, and for justifying the policies of Israel and U.S. support for Israeli policy (p. 8). Finkelstein also argues that embracing the Holocaust allows the wealthiest and most powerful group in the U.S. to claim victim status. The ideology of the Holocaust states that it is unique and inexplicable—as also noted by Novick. But Finkelstein also emphasizes how the Holocaust Industry promotes the idea that anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior stem completely from irrational loathing by non-Jews and have nothing to do with conflicts of interest. For example, Elie Wiesel: “For two thousand years . . . we were always threatened. . . . For what? For no reason” (in Finkelstein 2000, 53). (By contrast, the basic premise of my book, Separation and Its Discontents [MacDonald 1998a] is precisely that anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior throughout history are firmly rooted in conflicts of interest). Finkelstein quotes Boas Evron, an Israeli writer, approvingly: “Holocaust awareness” is “an official, propagandistic indoctrination, a churning out of slogans and a false view of the world, the real aim of which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the present” (p. 41).

Finkelstein notes the role of the media in supporting the Holocaust Industry, quoting Elie Wiesel, “When I want to feel better, I turn to the Israeli items in The New York Times” (p. 8). The New York Times, which is owned by the Sulzberger family (see below), “serves as the main promotional vehicle of the Holocaust Industry. It is primarily responsible for advancing the careers of Jerzy Kosinski, Daniel Goldhagen, and Elie Wiesel. For frequency of coverage, the Holocaust places a close second to the daily weather report. Typically, The New York Times Index 1999 listed fully 273 entries for the Holocaust. By comparison, the whole of Africa rated 32 entries” (Finkelstein 2001). Besides a receptive media, the Holocaust Industry takes advantage of its power over the U.S. government to apply pressure to foreign governments, particularly the governments of Eastern Europe (pp. 133ff).

In a poignant allusion to the pervasive double standard of contemporary Jewish ethical attitudes (and reflecting a similar ethical double standard that pervades Jewish religious writing throughout history), Finkelstein describes a January 2000 Holocaust education conference attended by representatives of 50 countries, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel. The conference declared that the international community had a “solemn responsibility” to oppose genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, and xenophobia. A reporter afterward asked Barak about the Palestinian refugees. “On principle, Barak replied, he was against even one refugee coming to Israel: ‘We cannot accept moral, legal, or other responsibility for refugees’ “ (p. 137).

JEWS AND THE MEDIA: SHAPING “WAYS OF SEEING”

I noted above that Jewish movements opposing European domination of the U.S. focused on three critical areas of power: The academic world of information in the social sciences and humanities, the political world where public policy on immigration and other ethnic issues are decided, and the mass media where “ways of seeing” are presented to the public. CofC focused on the first two of these sources of power, but little attention was given to the mass media except where it served to promote Jewish intellectual or political movements, as in the case of psychoanalysis. This lack of attention to the cultural influence of the mass media is a major gap. The following represents only a partial and preliminary discussion.

By all accounts, ethnic Jews have a powerful influence in the American media—far larger than any other identifiable group. The extent of Jewish ownership and influence on the popular media in the United States is remarkable given the relatively small proportion of the population that is Jewish.²⁸ In a survey performed in the 1980s, 60 percent of a representative sample of the movie elite were of Jewish background (Powers et al. 1996, 79n13). Michael Medved (1996, 37) notes that “it makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture. Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names. This prominent Jewish role is obvious to anyone who follows news reports from Tinsel Town or even bothers to read the credits on major movies or television shows.” Media ownership is always in flux, but the following is a reasonably accurate portrait of current media ownership in the United States by ethnic Jews:

The largest media company in the world was recently formed by the merger of America On Line and Time Warner. Gerald M. Levin, formerly the head of Time Warner, is the Chief Executive Officer of the new corporation. AOL-Time Warner has holdings in television (e.g., Home Box Office, CNN, Turner Broadcasting), music (Warner Music), movies (Warner Brothers Studio, Castle Rock Entertainment, and New Line Cinema), and publishing (Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Fortune).

The second largest media company is the Walt Disney Company, headed by Michael Eisner. Disney has holdings in movies (Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, under Walt Disney Studios, includes Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Caravan Pictures, Miramax Films); television (Capital Cities/ABC [owner of the ABC television network], Walt Disney Television, Touchstone Television, Buena Vista Television, ESPN, Lifetime, A&E Television networks) and cable networks with more than 100 million subscribers; radio (ABC Radio Network with over 3,400 affiliates and ownership of 26 stations in major cities); publishing (seven daily newspapers, Fairchild Publications [ Women’s Wear Daily], and the Diversified Publishing Group).

The third largest media company is Viacom, Inc., headed by Sumner Redstone, who is also Jewish. Viacom has holdings in movies (Paramount Pictures); broadcasting (the CBS TV network; MTV [a particular focus of criticism by cultural conservatives], VH-1, Nickelodeon, Showtime, the National Network, Black Entertainment Television, 13 television stations; programming for the three television networks); publishing (Simon & Schuster, Scribner, The Free Press, and Pocket Books), video rentals (Blockbuster); it is also involved in satellite broadcasting, theme parks, and video games.

Another major media player is Edgar Bronfman, Jr., the son of Edgar Bronfman, Sr., president of the World Jewish Congress and heir to the Seagram distillery fortune. Until its merger with Vivendi, a French Company, in December 2000, Bronfman headed Universal Studios, a major movie production company, and the Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company (including Polygram, Interscope Records, Island/Def Jam, Motown, Geffen/DGC Records). After the merger, Bronfman became the Executive Vice-Chairman of the new company, Vivendi Universal, and the Bronfman family and related entities became the largest shareholders in the company.²⁹ Edgar Bronfman, Sr. is on the Board of Directors of the new company. Recently Edgar Bronfman resigned his position with Vivendi, and Vivendi merged with Barry Diller’s USA Network. Diller, a prominent presence in Hollywood and mentor to many powerful Hollywood figures (Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg), will run the new company’s media enterprises.

Other major television companies owned by Jews include New World Entertainment (owned by Ronald Perelman who also owns Revlon cosmetics), and DreamWorks SKG (owned by film director Steven Spielberg, former Disney Pictures chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, and recording industry mogul David Geffen). DreamWorks SKG produces movies, animated films, television programs, and recorded music. Spielberg is also a Jewish ethnic activist. After making Schindler’s List, Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Foundation with the aid of a grant from the U.S. Congress. He also helped fund Professor Deborah Lipstadt’s defense against a libel suit brought by British military historian and Holocaust revisionist David Irving.

In the world of print media, the Newhouse media empire owns 26 daily newspapers, including several large and important ones, such as the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Newark Star-Ledger, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Newhouse Broadcasting, consisting of 12 television broadcasting stations and 87 cable-TV systems, including some of the country’s largest cable networks; the Sunday supplement Parade, with a circulation of more than 22 million copies per week; some two dozen major magazines, including the New Yorker, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Bride’s, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, Self, House & Garden, and all the other magazines of the wholly owned Conde Nast group.

The newsmagazine, U.S. News & World Report, with a weekly circulation of 2.3 million, is owned and published by Mortimer B. Zuckerman. Zuckerman also owns New York’s tabloid newspaper, the Daily News, the sixth-largest paper in the country, and is the former owner of the Atlantic Monthly. Zuckerman is a Jewish ethnic activist. Recently he was named head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella organization for major Jewish organizations in the U.S.³⁰ Zuckerman’s column in U.S. News and World Report regularly defends Israel and has helped to rejuvenate the America-Israeli Friendship League, of which he is president.³¹

Another Jewish activist with a prominent position in the U.S. media is Martin Peretz, owner of The New Republic (TNR) since 1974. Throughout his career Peretz has been devoted to Jewish causes, particularly Israel. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, he told Henry Kissinger that his “dovishness stopped at the delicatessen door,” and many among his staff feared that all issues would be decided on the basis of what was “good for the Jews” (Alterman 1992, 185, 186). Indeed, one editor was instructed to obtain material from the Israeli embassy for use in TNR editorials. “It is not enough to say that TNR’s owner is merely obsessed with Israel; he says so himself. But more importantly, Peretz is obsessed with Israel’s critics, Israel’s would-be critics, and people who never heard of Israel, but might one day know someone who might someday become a critic” (Alterman 1992, 195).

The Wall Street Journal is the largest-circulation daily newspaper in the U.S. It is owned by Dow Jones & Company, Inc., a New York corporation that also publishes 24 other daily newspapers and the weekly financial paper Barron’s. The chairman and CEO of Dow Jones is Peter R. Kann. Kann also holds the posts of chairman and publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

The Sulzberger family owns the New York Times Co., which owns 33 other newspapers, including the Boston Globe. It also owns twelve magazines (including McCall’s and Family Circle, each with a circulation of more than 5 million), seven radio and TV broadcasting stations; a cable-TV system; and three book publishing companies. The New York Times News Service transmits news stories, features, and photographs from the New York Times by wire to 506 other newspapers, news agencies, and magazines.

Jewish ownership of the New York Times is particularly interesting because it has been the most influential newspaper in the U.S. since the start of the 20th century. As noted in a recent book on the Sulzberger family (Tifft & Jones 1999), even at that time, there were several Jewish-owned newspapers, including the New York World (controlled by Joseph Pulitzer), the Chicago Times-Herald and Evening Post (controlled by H. H. Kohlsaat), and the New York Post (controlled by the family of Jacob Schiff). In 1896 Adolph Ochs purchased the New York Times with the critical backing of several Jewish businessmen, including Isidor Straus (co-owner of Macy’s department stores) and Jacob Schiff (a successful investment banker who was also a Jewish ethnic activist). “Schiff and other prominent Jews like . . . Straus had made it clear they wanted Adolph to succeed because they believed he ‘could be of great service to the Jews generally’ “ (Tifft & Jones 1999, 37–38). Ochs’s father-in-law was the influential Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, president of the AJCongress and the World Jewish Congress and the founder of Reform Judaism in the United States.

There are some exceptions to this pattern of media ownership, but even in such cases ethnic Jews have a major managerial role.³² For example, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owns Fox Television Network, 20th Century Fox Films, Fox 2000, and the New York Post. Barry Diller launched the Fox Television Network, and presently Peter Chernin is president and CEO of Fox Group, which includes all of News Corporation’s film, television, and publishing operations in the United States. Murdoch is deeply philosemitic and deeply committed to Israel, at least partly from a close relationship he developed early in his career with Leonard Goldenson, who founded the American Broadcasting Company. (Goldenson was a major figure in New York’s Jewish establishment and an outspoken supporter of Israel.) Murdoch’s publications have taken a strongly pro-Israel line, including The Weekly Standard, the premier neoconservative magazine, edited by William Kristol.

Murdoch . . . as publisher and editor-in-chief of the New York Post, had a large Jewish constituency, as he did to a lesser degree with New York magazine and The Village Voice. Not only had the pre-Murdoch Post readership been heavily Jewish, so, too, were the present Post advertisers. Most of Murdoch’s closest friends and business advisers were wealthy, influential New York Jews intensely active in pro-Israel causes. And he himself still retained a strong independent sympathy for Israel, a personal identification with the Jewish state that went back to his Oxford days. (Kiernan 1986, 261)

Murdoch also developed close relationships with several other prominent Jewish figures in the New York establishment, including attorney Howard Squadron, who was president of the AJCongress and head of the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, and investment banker Stanley Schuman.

Another exception is NBC which is owned by General Electric. However, the President of NBC is Andrew Lack and the President of NBC News is Neal Shapiro, both of whom are Jewish. In addition, the Bertelsmann publishing group is a Germany-based company that is the largest publisher of trade books in the world and also owns magazines, newspapers, and music. Most of Bertelsmann’s influence is outside the United States, although it recently purchased the Random House Publishing Company.

Even granting the exceptions, it is clear that Jews enjoy a very powerful position in U.S. media, a position that is far more powerful than any other racial/ethnic group. The phenomenal concentration of media power in Jewish hands becomes all the more extraordinary when one notes that Jews constitute approximately 2.5% of the U.S. population. If the Jewish percentage of the American media elite is estimated at 59% (Lichter et al. 1983, 55)—probably an underestimate at the present time, the degree of disproportionate representation may be calculated as greater than 2000%. The likelihood that such an extraordinary disparity could arise by chance is virtually nil. Ben Stein, noting that about 60% of the top positions in Hollywood are held by Jews, says “Do Jews run Hollywood? You bet they do—and what of it?”³³ Does Jewish ownership and control of the media have any effect on the product? Here I attempt to show that the attitudes and opinions favored by the media are those generally held by the wider Jewish community, and that the media tends to provide positive images of Jews and negative images of traditional American and Christian culture.

As many academics have pointed out, the media have become more and more important in creating culture (e.g., Powers et al. 1996, 2). Before the 20th century, the main creators of culture were the religious, military, and business institutions. In the course of the 20th century these institutions became less important while the media have increased in importance (for an account of this transformation in the military, see Bendersky 2000). And there is little doubt that the media attempt to shape the attitudes and opinions of the audience (Powers et al. 1996, 2–3). Part of the continuing culture of critique is that the media elite tend to be very critical of Western culture. Western civilization is portrayed as a failing, dying culture, but at worst it is presented as sick and evil compared to other cultures (Powers et al. 1996, 211). These views were common in Hollywood long before the cultural revolution of the 1960s, but they were not often expressed in the media because of the influence of non-Jewish cultural conservatives.

Perhaps the most important issue Jews and Jewish organizations have championed is cultural pluralism—the idea that the United States ought not to be ethnically and culturally homogeneous. As described in CofC, Jewish organizations and Jewish intellectual movements have championed cultural pluralism in many ways, especially as powerful and effective advocates of an open immigration policy. The media have supported this perspective by portraying cultural pluralism almost exclusively in positive terms—that cultural pluralism is easily achieved and is morally superior to a homogeneous Christian culture made up mainly of white non-Jews. Characters who oppose cultural pluralism are portrayed as stupid and bigoted (Lichter et al. 1994, 251), the classic being the Archie Bunker character in Norman Lear’s All in the Family television series. Departures from racial and ethnic harmony are portrayed as entirely the result of white racism (Powers et al. 1996, 173).

Since Jews have a decisive influence on television and movies, it is not surprising that Jews are portrayed positively in the movies. There have been a great many explicitly Jewish movies and television shows with recognizable Jewish themes. Hollywood has an important role in promoting “the Holocaust Industry,” with movies like Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and the four-part television miniseries Holocaust (1978), written by Gerald Green, directed by Marvin Chomsky, and produced by Herbert Brodkin and Robert Berger. Both of these films were lavishly promoted by Jewish groups. The promotion for Holocaust in 1978 was remarkable (Novick 1999, 210). The ADL distributed ten million copies of its sixteen-page tabloid The Record for this purpose. Jewish organizations pressured major newspapers to serialize a novel based on the script and to publish special inserts on the Holocaust. The Chicago Sun-Times distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of its insert to local schools. The AJCommittee, in cooperation with NBC, distributed millions of copies of a study guide for viewers; teachers’ magazines carried other teaching material tied to the program so that teachers could easily discuss the program in class. Jewish organizations worked with the National Council of Churches to prepare other promotional and educational materials, and they organized advance viewings for religious leaders. The day the series began was designated “Holocaust Sunday”; various activities were scheduled in cities across the country; the National Conference of Christians and Jews distributed yellow stars to be worn on that day. Study guides for Jewish children depicted the Holocaust as the result of Christian anti-Semitism. The material given to Jewish children also condemned Jews who did not have a strong Jewish identity. This massive promotion succeeded in many of its goals. These included the introduction of Holocaust education programs in many states and municipalities, beginning the process that led to the National Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a major upsurge of support for Israel.

In general, television portrays Jewish issues “with respect, relative depth, affection and good intentions, and the Jewish characters who appear in these shows have, without any doubt, been Jewish—often depicted as deeply involved in their Judaism” (Pearl & Pearl 1999, 5). For example, All in the Family (and its sequel, Archie Bunker’s Place) not only managed to portray working class Europeans as stupid and bigoted, it portrayed Jewish themes very positively. By the end of its 12-year run, even archenemy Archie Bunker had raised a Jewish child in his home, befriended a black Jew (implication: Judaism has no ethnic connotations), gone into business with a Jewish partner, enrolled as a member of a synagogue, praised his close friend at a Jewish funeral, hosted a Sabbath dinner, participated in a bat mitzvah ceremony, and joined a group to fight synagogue vandalism. These shows, produced by liberal political activist Norman Lear, thus exemplify the general trend for television to portray non-Jews as participating in Jewish ritual, and “respecting, enjoying, and learning from it. Their frequent presence and active involvement underscores the message that these things are a normal part of American life” (Pearl & Pearl 1999, 16). Jewish rituals are portrayed as “pleasant and ennobling, and they bestow strength, harmony, fulfillment, and sense of identity upon those who observe them” (p. 62).

Television presents images of Jewish issues that conform to the views of mainstream Jewish organizations. Television “invariably depicts anti-Semitism as an ugly, abhorrent trait that must be fought at every turn” (p. 103). It is seen as metaphysical and beyond analysis. There is never any rational explanation for anti-Semitism; anti-Semitism is portrayed as an absolute, irrational evil. Positive, well-liked, non-Jewish characters, such as Mary Tyler Moore, often lead the fight against anti-Semitism—a pattern reminiscent of that noted in CofC in which non-Jews become high-profile spokespersons for Jewish dominated movements. There is also the implication that anti-Semitism is a proper concern of the entire community.

Regarding Israel, “on the whole, popular TV has conveyed the fact that Israel is the Jewish homeland with a strong emotional pull upon Diaspora Jews, that it lives in perpetual danger surrounded by foes, and that as a result of the constant and vital fight for its survival, it often takes extraordinary (sometimes rogue) measures in the fields of security and intelligence” (Pearl & Pearl 1999, 173). Non-Jews are portrayed as having deep admiration and respect for Israel, its heroism and achievements. Israel is seen as a haven for Holocaust survivors, and Christians are sometimes portrayed as having an obligation to Israel because of the Holocaust.

In the movies, a common theme is Jews coming to the rescue of non-Jews, as in Independence Day, where Jeff Goldblum plays a “brainy Jew” who rescues the world, and in Ordinary People, where Judd Hirsch plays a Jewish psychiatrist who rescues an uptight WASP family (Bernheimer 1998, 125–126). The movie Addams Family Values, discussed in CofC (Ch. 1, Note 4) is another example of this genre. Bernheimer (1998, 162) notes that “in many films, the Jew is the moral exemplar who uplifts and edifies a gentile, serving as a humanizing influence by embodying culturally ingrained values.” As discussed in CofC, this “Jews to the Rescue” theme also characterizes psychoanalysis and Jewish leftist radicalism: Psychoanalytic Jews save non-Jews from their neuroses, and radical Jews save the world from the evils of capitalism.

On the other hand, Christianity is typically portrayed as evil, even going so far as depicting Christians as psychopaths. Michael Medved describes Hollywood’s cumulative attacks in recent years on the traditional American family, patriotism, and traditional sexual mores—the Hollywood version of the culture of critique. But the most obvious focus of attack is on the Christian religion:

In the ongoing war on traditional values, the assault on organized faith represents the front to which the entertainment industry has most clearly committed itself. On no other issue do the perspectives of the show business elites and those of the public at large differ more dramatically. Time and again, the producers have gone out of their way to affront the religious sensibilities of ordinary Americans. (Medved 1992/1993, 50)³⁴

Medved fails to find even one film made since the mid-1970s where Christianity is portrayed positively apart from a few films where it is portrayed as an historical relic—a museum piece. Examples where Christianity is portrayed negatively abound. For example, in the film Monsignor (1982), a Catholic priest commits every imaginable sin, including the seduction of a glamorous nun and then is involved in her death. In Agnes of God (1985), a disturbed young nun gives birth in a convent, murders her baby, and then flushes the tiny, bloody corpse down the toilet. There are also many subtle anti-Christian scenes in Hollywood films, such as when the director Rob Reiner repeatedly focuses on the tiny gold crosses worn by Kathy Bates, the sadistic villain in Misery.

Another media tendency is to portray small towns as filled with bigots and anti-Semites. Media commentator Ben Stein records the hostility of the media toward rural America:

The typical Hollywood writer . . . is of an ethnic background from a large Eastern city—usually from Brooklyn [i.e., they have a Jewish background]. He grew up being taught that people in small towns hated him, were different from him, and were out to get him [i.e., small town people are anti-Semites]. As a result, when he gets the chance, he attacks the small town on television or the movies. . . .

The television shows and movies are not telling it “like it is”; instead they are giving us the point of view of a small and extremely powerful section of the American intellectual community—those who write for the mass visual media. . . . What is happening, as a consequence, is something unusual and remarkable. A national culture is making war upon a way of life that is still powerfully attractive and widely practiced in the same country. . . . Feelings of affection for small towns run deep in America, and small-town life is treasured by millions of people. But in the mass culture of the country, a hatred for the small town is spewed out on television screens and movie screens every day. . . . Television and the movies are America’s folk culture, and they have nothing but contempt for the way of life of a very large part of the folk. . . . People are told that their culture is, at its root, sick, violent, and depraved, and this message gives them little confidence in the future of that culture. It also leads them to feel ashamed of their country and to believe that if their society is in decline, it deserves to be. (Stein 1976, 22)

This is a good example of social identity processes so important in both Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews and non-Jewish attitudes toward Jews: Outgroups are portrayed negatively and ingroups are portrayed positively (see CofC passim and MacDonald 1998a, Ch. 1).

Influence on the media undoubtedly has a major influence on how Israel is portrayed—a major theme of Finkelstein’s (2000) The Holocaust Industry. Ari Shavit, an Israeli columnist, described his feelings on the killings of a hundred civilians in a military skirmish in southern Lebanon in 1996, “We killed them out of a certain naive hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own.”³⁵ The election of Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister of Israel provides another study in contrast. There was a huge difference in the media reaction to Sharon and the response to the situation in Austria when Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party won enough seats in parliament to have a role in the Austrian government. Several countries, including Israel, recalled their ambassadors in response to the election of Haider. Politicians around the world condemned Austria and announced that they would not tolerate Haider’s participation in any Austrian government. Trade embargoes against Austria were threatened. The cause of these actions was that Haider had said that there had been many decent people fighting on the German side during World War II, including some in the SS. He had also said that some of Hitler’s economic policies in the 1930s had made good sense. And he had called for a cutoff of immigration into Austria. Haider apologized for these statements, but the electoral success of his party resulted in the ostracism of Austria and a continuous barrage of alarmist media attacks against him personally.

Contrast this with the treatment of Ariel Sharon’s election as prime minister of Israel in 2001. Sharon was Israel’s Minister of Defense in September 1982 during the slaughter of 700–2000 Palestinians, including women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps just outside Beirut, Lebanon. New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman saw “groups of young men in their twenties and thirties who had been lined up against walls, tied by their hands and feet, and then mowed down gangland style.”³⁶ Radio communications among Israeli military commanders were monitored in which they talked about carrying out “purging operations” in the refugee camps. While the actual killing was done by Lebanese Christians supported by Israel, the Israeli army kept the camps sealed for two days while the slaughter went on. The Kahan Commission, an Israeli commission formed to investigate the incident, concluded that Sharon was indirectly responsible for the massacre, and it went on to say that Sharon bears personal responsibility.³⁷

The reaction to the election of Sharon in the U.S. media has been subdued to say the least. No trade embargoes were threatened, no ambassadors were recalled. The Los Angeles Times dutifully printed a column in which Sharon was portrayed as having “learned from his mistakes.”³⁸ In June, 2001, Sharon was indicted as a war criminal in Belgium on the basis of affidavits provided by survivors of the slaughter. It is also noteworthy that Rehavam Zeevi, a close associate of Sharon and Israel’s Minister of Tourism as well as a member of the powerful Security Cabinet until his assassination in October, 2001, described Palestinians as “lice” and advocated the expulsion of Palestinians from Israeli controlled areas. Zeevi said Palestinians were living illegally in Israel and “We should get rid of the ones who are not Israeli citizens the same way you get rid of lice. We have to stop this cancer from spreading within us.”³⁹

Another indication of the very large Jewish influence on the U.S. media is the very large difference between coverage of the Mideast conflict in the U.S. and other parts of the world. Eric Alterman, writer for The Nation, notes that “in most of the world, it is the Palestinian narrative of a dispossessed people that dominates. In the United States, however, the narrative that dominates is Israel’s: a democracy under constant siege.” (“Intractable Foes, Warring Narratives”; www.msnbc.com/news/730905.asp; March 28, 2002). A critical source of support for Israel is the army of professional pundits “who can be counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification.” Alterman lists approximately 60 prominent media personalities in this camp (including a long list of Jewish writers: William Safire, A. M. Rosenthal, Charles Krauthammer, Martin Peretz, Daniel Pipes, Andrea Peyser, Dick Morris, Lawrence Kaplan, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Mortimer Zuckerman, David Gelertner, John Podhoretz, Mona Charen, Yossi Klein Halevi, Sidney Zion, Norman Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg, Jeff Jacoby, Seth Lipsky, Irving Kristol, Ben Wattenberg, Lawrence Kudlow, Alan Dershowitz, David Horowitz, Jacob Heilbrun, Uri Dan, Paul Greenberg). These writers have access to virtually all of the major media in the United States.

This contrasts with a much smaller group of 5 columnists “likely to be reflexively anti-Israel and/or pro-Palestinian regardless of circumstance.” These include Patrick Buchanan, Christopher Hitchens, Edward Said, Alexander Cockburn, and Robert Novak. Three of these columnists are associated with the far left journal, The Nation (Cockburn, Hitchens, Said), and only Novak is presently affiliated with a major media organization (The Washington Post). Following the attack of September 11, Novak wrote that “Unlike Nazi Germany’s and Imperial Japan’s drive for a new world order, . . . the hatred toward the U.S. by the terrorists is an extension of its hatred of Israel rather than world dominion” (New York Post, Sept. 13, 2001). Norman Podhoretz responded, expressing his “disgust” at “one of the most shamefully perverse statements that has been made in the last few days.” “Not even the bloodiest attack on American soil in our history could distract Novak from his animus against Israel and his solicitude for the Muslims whose hatred of us he blames on our relations with the Jewish state (New York Post, Sept. 14, 2001). As of this writing (April 2002), I rather doubt that any rational observer would deny that Muslim animus toward the U.S. is linked to U.S. support for Israel.

Alterman points to another small group classified as “columnists likely to criticize both Israel and the Palestinians, but view themselves to be critically supporters of Israel, and ultimately would support Israeli security over Palestinian rights.” This group includes the editorial Boards of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Another columnist who should be included in the intermediate category is Michael Lind, who noted the following in a column in Newsweek International (April 3, 2002): “What passes in the United States as an evenhanded stance is perceived, not only in the Middle East but in Europe and throughout the world, as unquestioning American support of bully tactics by Israel. . . . For more than a decade, U.S. policy toward Israel has been shaped as much by domestic politics as by grand strategy: the pro-Israel lobby is the most powerful one in Washington. This support for Israel—no matter what its policies—has given license to Israel’s hard right to employ savage means of oppression against the Palestinians, and even against their own Arab citizens. While it is rarely noted in the American media, Israel has now occupied Palestinian lands for 35 years, denying 3 million people rights, and ruling over them with brutality.” There can be little doubt that the U.S. media is dominated by a pro-Israeli perspective ultimately deriving from Jewish influence on the media. What is perhaps most interesting is the long list of non-Jews who are in the first category—those who support Israel reflexively and without qualification. These include George Will, William Bennett, Andrew Sullivan, Allan Keyes, Brit Hume, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Barone, Ann Coulter, Linda Chavez, and Rush Limbaugh. The fact that reflexive support for Israel is not characteristic of non-Jews in other societies with less Jewish influence on the media strongly suggests that unconditional support for Israel is a critical litmus test of acceptability by the major media in the U.S.—that prospective pundits “earn their stripes” by showing their devotion to Israel (and, one might infer, other Jewish issues, such as immigration; none of these pundits is a critic of massive non-European immigration into Western societies, and several are noted for their strong support of this policy). After all, reflexive, uncritical support for anything is rare enough for any issue, and we know that the media in other countries are not so one-sided. So it seems difficult to explain the huge tilt toward Israel as the result of individual attitudes in the absence of some enormous selective factor. And there is the obvious suggestion that while the Jews on this list must be seen as ethnic actors, the non-Jews are certainly making an excellent career move in taking the positions they do. This litmus test for prospective opinion makers is further supported by the fact that Joe Sobran was fired from National Review because he argued that U.S. foreign policy should not be dictated by what’s best for Israel—a position that resulted in Norman Podhoretz labeling him an “anti-Semite” (see Buckley 1992; Podhoretz, 1986).

JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS AND CENSORSHIP OF
THE INTERNET

In CofC (Ch. 8) I wrote, “one may expect that as ethnic conflict continues to escalate in the United States, increasingly desperate attempts will be made to prop up the ideology of multiculturalism . . . with the erection of police state controls on nonconforming thought and behavior.” As noted above, there has been a shift from “the culture of critique” to what one might term “the culture of the Holocaust” as Jews have moved from outsiders to the consummate insiders in American life. Coinciding with their status as an established elite, Jewish organizations are now in the forefront of movements to censor thought crimes.⁴⁰

The Internet is a major gap in control of the major media, but Jewish organizations have taken the lead in attempting to censor the Internet. The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) distributes a compact disc titled “Digital Hate 2001” that lists over 3000 “hate sites on the Internet.” Both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ADL have attempted to pressure Internet service providers (ISP’s) like AOL and popular websites like Yahoo into restricting subscriber access to disapproved websites. Recently Yahoo removed 39 Internet clubs originally identified as “hate sites” by the SWC.⁴¹ Internet auction sites have been subjected to protests for selling Nazi memorabilia.⁴² Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com have come under fire for selling Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The ADL also published a report, Poisoning the Web: Hatred Online, and has urged the U.S. Congress to initiate a “comprehensive study of the magnitude and impact of hate on the Internet.”⁴³

Online services in the U.S. are also under pressure from foreign governments, including France, Germany, Austria, and Canada, where there are no constitutional guarantees of free speech. For example, a judge in France ruled that Yahoo was violating French law by delivering Nazi material to people in France via the company’s online auctions, even though the service is based in the United States. Yahoo was acting illegally, the judge said, even though the company has created a separate French site that, unlike the broader Yahoo service, follows French law. The company was ordered to use filtering technology to block politically sensitive material from appearing on computers in France or face fines equivalent to $13,000 a day. In Germany, a court found that German law applies even to foreigners who post content on the Web in other countries—so long as that content can be accessed by people inside Germany. In this case, the court ruled that an Australian citizen who posted Holocaust revisionist material on his Australian website could be jailed in Germany. Theoretically it would be possible for Germany to demand that this person be extradited from Australia so that he could stand trial for his crime.⁴⁴

Jewish organizations have been strong advocates of laws in European countries that criminalize the distribution of anti-Jewish material. For example, the ADL pressured the German government to arrest a U.S. citizen who distributed anti-Jewish materials. Gary Lauck was arrested in Denmark and extradited to Germany on the warrant of a Hamburg prosecutor. He was sentenced to four years in jail, served his sentence, and was deported.⁴⁵

This sort of government-imposed censorship is effective in countries like France and Germany, but is not likely to succeed in the United States with its strong tradition of constitutionally protected free speech. As a result, the major focus of the Jewish effort to censor the Internet in the United States has been to pressure private companies like AOL and Yahoo to use software that blocks access to sites that are disapproved by Jewish organizations. The ADL developed voluntary filter software (ADL HateFilter) that allows users to screen out certain websites. However, while AOL—the largest ISP by far—has proved to be compliant in setting standards in line with ADL guidelines, the ADL notes that other ISP’s, such as Earthlink, have not cooperated with the ADL, and independent web hosting sites have sprung up to serve websites rejected by AOL.⁴⁶

The ADL and the SWC have an uphill road because the Internet has long been touted as a haven for free speech by the high-tech community. One senses a certain frustration in the conclusion of a recent ADL report on the Internet:

Combating online extremism presents enormous technological and legal difficulties . . . . Even if it were electronically feasible to keep sites off the Internet, the international nature of the medium makes legal regulation virtually impossible. And in the United States, the First Amendment guarantees the right of freedom of speech regardless of what form that speech takes. As a result, governments, corporations and people of goodwill continue to look for alternative ways to address the problem.⁴⁷

Clearly Jewish organizations are making every effort to censor anti-Jewish writing on the Internet. They are far from reaching their goal of removing anti-Jewish material from the Internet, but in the long run the very high political stakes involved ensure that great effort will be expended. I suspect that in the U.S., if pressuring existing ISP’s by organizations like the ADL and the SWC fails, these companies may become targets of buyouts by Jewish-owned media companies who will then quietly remove access to anti-Jewish websites. AOL has just recently merged with Time Warner, a Jewish-controlled media company, and it had already merged with Compuserve, a large, nation-wide ISP. As indicated above, AOL-Time Warner has complied with pressures exerted by Jewish activist organizations to restrict expressions of political opinion on the Internet.

I suppose that the only option for prohibited websites will be to develop their own Internet service providers. These providers—perhaps subsidized or relatively expensive—would then fill the niche of serving people who are already committed to ethnic activism among non-Jewish Europeans and other forms of politically incorrect expression. The situation would be similar to the current situation in the broadcast and print media. All of the mainstream media are effectively censored, but small publications that essentially preach to the converted can exist if not flourish.

But such publications reach a miniscule percentage of the population. They are basically ignored by the mainstream media, and they mainly preach to the choir. The same will likely happen to the Internet: The sites will still be there, but they will be out of sight and out of mind for the vast majority of Internet users. The effective censorship of the Internet by large corporations does not violate the First Amendment because the government is not involved and any policy can be justified as a business decision not to offend existing or potential customers.

THE QUESTION OF BIAS

I have several times been called an “anti-Semite” for the tone of some of my writings, both in CofC and my comments on various Internet discussion lists. To be perfectly frank, I did not have a general animus for organized Jewry when I got into this project. I was a sort of ex-radical turned moderate Republican fan of George Will. Before even looking at Judaism I applied the same evolutionary perspective to the ancient Spartans and then to the imposition of monogamy by the Catholic Church during the middle ages (see MacDonald 1988a, 1995b). There are quite a few statements in my books that attempt to soften the tone and deflect charges of anti-Jewish bias. The first page of my first book on Judaism, A People that Shall Dwell Alone (MacDonald 1994), clearly states that the traits I ascribe to Judaism (self-interest, ethnocentrism, and competition for resources and reproductive success) are by no means restricted to Jews. I also write about the extraordinary Jewish IQ and about Jewish accomplishments (e.g., Nobel prizes) in that book. In the second book, Separation and Its Discontents (MacDonald 1998a), I discuss the tendency for anti-Semites to exaggerate their complaints, to develop fantastic and unverifiable theories of Jewish behavior, to exaggerate the extent of Jewish cohesion and unanimity, to claim that all Jews share stereotypically Jewish traits or attitudes, especially in cases where in fact Jews are over-represented among people having certain attitudes (e.g., political radicalism during most of the 20th century). And I describe the tendency of some anti-Semites to develop grand conspiracy theories in which all historical events of major or imagined importance, from the French Revolution to the Tri-lateral Commission are linked together in one grand plot and blamed on the Jews. All of this is hardly surprising on the basis of what we know about the psychology of ethnic conflict. But that doesn’t detract in the least from supposing that real conflicts of interest are at the heart of all of the important historical examples of anti-Semitism. Most of this is in the first chapter of Separation and Its Discontents—front and center as it were, just as my other disclaimers are in the first chapter of A People that Shall Dwell Alone.

It must be kept in mind that group evolutionary strategies are not benign, at least in general and especially in the case of Judaism, which has often been very powerful and has had such extraordinary effects on the history of the West. I think there is a noticeable shift in my tone from the first book to the third simply because (I’d like to think) I knew a lot more and had read a lot more. People often say after reading the first book that they think I really admire Jews, but they are unlikely to say that about the last two and especially about CofC. That is because by the time I wrote CofC I had changed greatly from the person who wrote the first book. The first book is really only a documentation of theoretically interesting aspects of group evolutionary strategies using Judaism as a case study (how Jews solved the free-rider problem, how they managed to erect and enforce barriers between themselves and other peoples, the genetic cohesion of Judaism, how some groups of Jews came to have such high IQ’s, how Judaism developed in antiquity). Resource competition and other conflicts of interest with other groups are more or less an afterthought, but these issues move to the foreground in Separation and Its Discontents, and in CofC I look exclusively at the 20th century in the West. Jews have indeed made positive contributions to Western culture in the last 200 years. But whatever one might think are the unique and irreplaceable Jewish contributions to the post-Enlightenment world, it is naïve to suppose they were intended for the purpose of benefiting humanity solely or even primarily. In any case I am hard pressed to think of any area of modern Western government and social organization (certainly) and business, science, and technology (very probably) that would not have developed without Jewish input, although in some cases perhaps not quite as quickly. In general, positive impacts of Jews have been quantitative rather than qualitative. They have accelerated some developments, for example in finance and some areas of science, rather than made them possible.

On the other hand, I am persuaded that Jews have also had some important negative influences. I am morally certain that Jewish involvement in the radical left in the early to middle part of the last century was a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for many of the horrific events in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. (About this, of course, one can disagree. I am simply saying that I find the evidence compelling.) But the main point is that I came to see Jewish groups as competitors with the European majority of the U.S., as powerful facilitators of the enormous changes that have been unleashed in this country, particularly via the successful advocacy of massive non-European immigration into the U.S. I found that I was being transformed in this process from a semi-conservative academic who had little or no identification with his own people into an ethnically conscious person—exactly as predicted by the theory of social identity processes that forms the basis of my theory of anti-Semitism (see MacDonald 1998a). In fact, if one wants to date when I dared cross the line into what some see as proof that I am an “anti-Semite,” the best guess would probably be when I started reading on the involvement of all the powerful Jewish organizations in advocating massive non-European immigration. My awareness began with my reading a short section in a standard history of American Jews well after the first book was published. The other influences that I attributed to Jewish activities were either benign (psychoanalysis?) or reversible—even radical leftism, so they didn’t much bother me. I could perhaps even ignore the towering hypocrisy of Jewish ethnocentrism coinciding as it does with Jewish activism against the ethnocentrism of non-Jewish Europeans. But the long-term effects of immigration will be essentially irreversible barring some enormous cataclysm.

I started to realize that my interests are quite different from prototypical Jewish interests. There need to be legitimate ways of talking about people who oppose policies recommended by the various Jewish establishments without simply being tarred as “anti-Semites.” Immigration is only one example where there are legitimate conflicts of interest. As I write this (November, 2001), we are bogged down in a war with no realizable endgame largely because of influence of the Jewish community over one area of our foreign policy and because of how effectively any mention of the role of Israel in creating friction between the U.S. and the Arab world—indeed the entire Muslim world—is muzzled simply by the cry of anti-Semitism. And at home we have entered into an incalculably dangerous experiment in creating a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society in which the intellectual elite has developed the idea that the formerly dominant European majority has a moral obligation to allow itself to be eclipsed demographically and culturally—the result, at least at its inception and to a considerable degree thereafter, of the influence of Jewish interest groups on immigration policy and the influence of Jewish intellectual movements on our intellectual and cultural life generally. As noted above, the rise of Jewish power and the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the real topics of CofC.

I agree that there is bias in the social sciences and I certainly don’t exempt myself from this tendency. It is perhaps true that by the time I finished CofC I should have stated my attitudes in the first chapter. Instead, they are placed in the last chapter of CofC—rather forthrightly I think. In a sense putting them at the end was appropriate because my attitudes about Jewish issues marked a cumulative, gradual change from a very different world view.

It is annoying that such disclaimers rarely appear in writing by strongly identified Jews even when they see their work as advancing Jewish interests. A major theme of the CofC is that Jewish social scientists with a strong Jewish identity have seen their work as advancing Jewish interests. It is always amazing to me that media figures like the Kristols and Podhoretzes and foreign policy experts like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle do not feel an obligation to precede their remarks on issues affected by their solicitude for Israel by saying, “you should be wary of what I say because I have a vested ethnic interest in advancing the interests of Israel.” But the same thing goes for vast areas of anthropology (the Boasian school and racial differences research), history (e.g., obviously apologetic accounts of the history and causes of anti-Semitism or the role of Jews in the establishment of Bolshevism), psychology (the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis), and contemporary issues (immigration, church-state relations). The point of CofC that really galls people is the idea that we should simply acknowledge this bias in (some) Jewish researchers as we do in others. There are a great many books on how Darwin and Galton were influenced by the general atmosphere of Victorian England, but writing of a Jewish bias immediately results in charges of “anti-Semitism.” But the deeper point is that, whatever my motivations and biases, I would like to suppose that my work on Judaism at least meets the criteria of good social science, even if I have come to the point of seeing my subjects in a less than flattering light. In the end, does it really matter if my motivation at this point is less than pristine? Isn’t the only question whether I am right?

CONCLUSION

CofC is really an attempt to understand the 20th century as a Jewish century—a century in which Jews and Jewish organizations were deeply involved in all the pivotal events. From the Jewish viewpoint it has been a period of great progress, though punctuated by one of its darkest tragedies. In the late 19th century the great bulk of the Jewish population lived in Eastern Europe, with many Jews mired in poverty and all surrounded by hostile populations and unsympathetic governments. A century later, Israel is firmly established in the Middle East, and Jews have become the wealthiest and most powerful group in the United States and have achieved elite status in other Western countries. The critical Jewish role in radical leftism has been sanitized, while Jewish victimization by the Nazis has achieved the status of a moral touchstone and is a prime weapon in the push for large-scale non-European immigration, multi-culturalism and advancing other Jewish causes. Opponents have been relegated to the fringe of intellectual and political discourse and there are powerful movements afoot that would silence them entirely.

The profound idealization, the missionary zeal, and the moral fervor that surround the veneration of figures like Celan, Kafka, Adorno, and Freud characterize all of the Jewish intellectual movements discussed in CofC (see Ch. 6 for a summary). That these figures are now avidly embraced by the vast majority of non-Jewish intellectuals as well shows that the Western intellectual world has become Judaized—that Jewish attitudes and interests, Jewish likes and dislikes, now constitute the culture of the West, internalized by Jews and non-Jews alike. The Judaization of the West is nowhere more obvious than in the veneration of the Holocaust as the central moral icon of the entire civilization. These developments constitute a profound transformation from the tradition of critical and scientific individualism that had formed the Western tradition since the Enlightenment. More importantly, because of the deep-seated Jewish hostility toward traditional Western culture, the Judaization of the West means that the peoples who created the culture and traditions of the West have been made to feel deeply ashamed of their own history—surely the prelude to their demise as a culture and as a people.

The present Judaized cultural imperium in the West is maintained by a pervasive thought control propagated by the mass media and extending to self-censorship by academics, politicians, and others well aware of the dire personal and professional consequences of crossing the boundaries of acceptable thought and speech about Jews and Jewish issues. It is maintained by zealously promulgated, self-serving, and essentially false theories of the nature and history of Judaism and the nature and causes of anti-Semitism.

None of this should be surprising. Jewish populations have always had enormous effects on the societies where they reside because of two qualities that are central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy: High intelligence (including the usefulness of intelligence in attaining wealth) and the ability to cooperate in highly organized, cohesive groups (MacDonald 1994). This has led repeatedly to Jews becoming an elite and powerful group in societies where they reside in sufficient numbers—as much in the 20th-century United States and the Soviet Union as in 15th-century Spain or Alexandria in the ancient world. History often repeats itself after all. Indeed, recent data indicate that Jewish per capita income in the United States is almost double that of non-Jews, a bigger difference than the black-white income gap. Although Jews make up less than 3 percent of the population, they constitute more than a quarter of the people on the Forbes magazine list of the richest four hundred Americans. A remarkable 87 percent of college-age Jews are currently enrolled in institutions of higher education, as compared with 40 percent for the population as a whole (Thernstrom & Thernstrom 1997). Jews are indeed an elite group in American society (see also Chapter 8).

My perception is that the Jewish community in the U.S. is moving aggressively ahead, ignoring the huge disruptions Jewish organizations have caused in the West (now mainly via successful advocacy of massive non-European immigration) and in the Islamic world (via the treatment of Palestinians by Israel). Whatever the justification for such beliefs, U.S. support for Israel is by all accounts an emotionally compelling issue in the Arab world. A true test of Jewish power in the United States will be whether support for Israel is maintained even in the face of the enormous costs that have already been paid by the U.S. in terms of loss of life, economic disruption, hatred and distrust throughout the Muslim world, and loss of civil liberties at home. As of this writing, while Jewish organizations are bracing for a backlash against Jews in the U.S. and while there is considerable concern among Jews about the Bush Administration’s pressure on Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians in order to placate the Muslim world (e.g., Rosenblatt 2001), all signs point to no basic changes in the political culture of the United States vis-à-vis Israel as a result of the events of 9-11-01.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I acknowledge the critical comments of Patrick O’Brien and James C. Russell in the preparation of this preface.

Preface

This book is the third and final volume developing an evolutionary perspective on Judaism. The first book, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (MacDonald 1994; herafter PTSDA) presented a theory of Judaism within an evolutionary framework, and the second book, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of AntiSemitism (MacDonald 1998a; hereafter SAID) presented an evolutionary theory of anit-Semitism. Ethnic conflict is a recurrent theme throughout the first two volumes, and that theme again takes center stage in this work. However, whereas in the previous works ethnic conflict consisted mainly of recounting the oftentimes bloody dynamics of Jewish-gentile conflict over the broad expanse of historical time, the focus here is much more narrow. The emphasis shifts to a single century and to several very influential intellectual and political movements that have been spearheaded by people who strongly identified as Jews and who viewed their involvement in these movements as serving Jewish interests. Particular attention will be paid to the Boasian school of anthropology, psychoanalysis, leftist political ideology and behavior, the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and the New York Intellectuals. In addition, I will describe Jewish efforts to shape U.S. Immigration policy in opposition to the interests of the peoples of non-Jewish European descent, particularly the peoples of Northern and Western Europe.

An important thesis is that all of these movements may be seen as attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would end anti-Semitism and provide for Jewish group continuity either in an overt or in a semi-cryptic manner. At a theoretical level, these movements are viewed as the outcome of the fact that Jews and gentiles have different interests in the construction of culture and in various public policy issues (e.g., immigration policy).

This project has obviously been quite wide-ranging and I have profited a great deal from the comments of a number of scholars in the areas of evolutionary biology, psychology, and history, including Hiram Caton, Paul Gottfried, John Hartung, Ralph Raico, J. Philippe Rushton, Frank Salter, Glayde Whitney, and David Sloan Wilson. Regrettably, there are others who have made helpful comments but whose names cannot appear here. I also wish to thank Melissa E. Keller for her encouragement in this project and for her help in preparation of the manuscript and for his role in the publication of this volume. And finally, I thank James Sabin, Director, Academic Research and Development at Greenwood Publishing, who has seen this very difficult project through to its conclusion.

1

Jews and the Radical Critique of Gentile
Culture: Introduction and Theory

For 1,500 years Jewish society had been designed to produce intellectuals… Jewish society was geared to support them… Rich merchants married sages’ daughters; …Quite suddenly, around the year 1800, this ancient and highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals began to shift its output. Instead of pouring all its products into the closed circuit of rabbinical studies, …it unleashed a significant and ever-growing proportion of them into secular life. This was an event of shattering importance in world history. (A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson 1988, 340-341)

An important theme of Separation and Its Discontents (hereafter SAID) was the manipulation of ideology in the service of rationalizing specific forms of Judaism, interpreting history, and combating anti-Semitism. The present volume is in many ways an extension of these phenomena. However, the intellectual movements and political activity discussed in this volume have typically occurred in the wider intellectual and political world and have not been designed to rationalize specific forms of Judaism. Rather, they may be characterized in the broadest sense as efforts at cultural criticism and at times as attempts to influence the wider culture of the society in a manner that conforms to specific Jewish interests.

There is no implication here of a unified Jewish “conspiracy” to undermine gentile culture, as portrayed in the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Since the Enlightenment, Judaism has never been a unified, monolithic movement, and there has clearly been a great deal of disagreement among Jews as to how to protect themselves and attain their interests during this period. The movements discussed in this volume (Boasian anthropology, political radicalism, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and the New York Intellectuals) were advanced by relatively few individuals whose views may not have been known or understood by the majority of the Jewish community. The argument is that Jews dominated these intellectual movements, that a strong sense of Jewish identity was characteristic of the great majority of these individuals, and that these individuals were pursuing a Jewish agenda in and participating in these movements.

Thus there is no implication that Judaism constitutes a unified movement or that all segments of the Jewish community participated in these movements. Jews may constitute a predominant or necessary element in radical political movements or movements in the social sciences, and Jewish identification may be highly compatible with or even facilitate these movements without most Jews being involved in these movements. As a result, the question of the overall effects of Jewish influences on gentile culture is independent of the question of whether most or all Jews supported the movements to alter gentile culture.

This distinction is important because on the one hand anti-Semites have often implicitly or explicitly assumed that Jewish involvement in radical political movements was part of an overarching Jewish strategy that also included wealthy Jewish capitalists, as well as Jewish involvement in the media, the academy, and other areas of public life. On the other hand, Jews attempting to defuse the antiSemitism resulting from the fact that Jews have played a predominant role in many radical political movements have often pointed to the fact that only a minority of Jews are involved and that gentiles are also involved in the movements. Thus, for example, the standard response of the American Jewish Committee (hereafter AJCommittee) during the 1930s and 1940s to the predominance of Jews in radical political movements was to emphasize that most Jews were not radicals. Nevertheless, during this same period the AJCommittee undertook efforts to combat radicalism in the Jewish community (e.g., Cohen 1972).⁴⁸ The AJCommittee was implicitly recognizing that statements that only a minority of Jews are radicals may indeed have been true but were irrelevant to whether (1) Jewish identification is compatible with or facilitates involvement in radical political movements, (2) Jews constitute a predominant or necessary element in radical political movements, or (3) influences on gentile society resulting from Jewish predominance in radical movements (or the other Jewish intellectual movements reviewed in this volume) may be conceptualized as a consequence of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy.

Similarly, the fact that most Jews prior to the 1930s were not Zionists, at least overtly, surely does not imply that Jewish identification was irrelevant to Zionism, or that Jews did not in fact constitute a predominant influence on Zionism, or that Zionism did not have effects on gentile societies, or that some gentiles did not become ardent Zionists. Political radicalism has been one choice among many available to Jews in the post-Enlightenment world, and there is no implication here that Judaism constitutes a monolithic unified group in the post-Enlightenment world. That Jews have been more likely than gentiles to choose radical political alternatives and that Jews have been a predominant influence in some radical political movements are therefore facts highly relevant to the present project.

That some gentiles were involved in these movements is not surprising either. At a theoretical level, my thinking is based once again on an evolutionary interpretation of social identity theory (see SAID, Ch. 1). Gentiles may be attracted to the political and intellectual movements that attract Jews and for many of the same reasons, that is, reasons related to social identification and ingroup-outgroup competition. For example, African American intellectuals have often been attracted to leftist intellectual movements and environmentalist explanations of racial group differences in IQ at least partly as a reaction to their perceptions of white animosity and the consequent implications of genetic inferiority. In the same way, I argue that anti-Semitism has been a motivating force for many Jewish intellectuals. Recall the motivating role of self-esteem as a theoretical primitive in social identity theory. A great many people who, for whatever reason, feel victimized by a particular sociopolitical system are attracted to movements that criticize the system, blame others for their problems, and generally vindicate their own positive perceptions of themselves and their ingroup as well as their negative perceptions of outgroups. In each of the intellectual and political movements I review, Jewish identification and a concern to combat anti-Semitism were clearly involved.

Moreover, once Jews have attained intellectual predominance, it is not surprising that gentiles would be attracted to Jewish intellectuals as members of a socially dominant and prestigious group and as dispensers of valued resources. Such a perspective fits well with an evolutionary perspective on group dynamics: Gentiles negotiating the intellectual status hierarchy would be attracted to the characteristics of the most dominant members of the hierarchy, especially if they viewed the hierarchy as permeable. Writer William Barrett, a gentile editor of Partisan Review, describes his “awe and admiration” of the New York Intellectuals (a group of predominantly Jewish intellectuals discussed in Chapter 6) early in his career. “They were beings invested in my eyes with a strange and mysterious glamour” (in Cooney 1986, 227). Partisan Review was a flagship journal of this very influential intellectual movement and had a decisive influence on success or failure in the literary world. Leslie Fiedler (1948, 872, 873), himself a New York Intellectual, described a whole generation of American Jewish writers (including Delmore Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, Karl Shapiro, Isaac Rosenfeld, Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, and H. J. Kaplan) as “typically urban, second-generation Jews.” The works of these writers appeared regularly in Partisan Review, and Fiedler goes on to say that “the writer drawn to New York from the provinces feels…the Rube, attempts to conform; and the almost parody of Jewishness achieved by the gentile writer in New York is a strange and crucial testimony of our time.”

Almost one-half of Kadushin’s (1974, 23) sample of elite post-World War II American intellectuals was Jewish. The sample was based on the most frequent contributors to leading intellectual journals, followed by interviews in which the intellectuals “voted” for another intellectual they considered most influential in their thinking. Over 40 percent of the Jews in the sample received six or more votes as being most influential, compared to only 15 percent of non-Jews (p. 32). It is therefore not surprising that Joseph Epstein (1997) finds that during the 1950s and early 1960s being Jewish was “honorific” among intellectuals generally. Gentile intellectuals “scoured their genealog[ies] for Jewish ancestors” (Epstein 1997, 7). By 1968 Walter Kerr could write, “what has happened since World War II is that the American sensibility has become part Jewish, perhaps as much Jewish as it is anything else… The literate American mind has come in some measure to think Jewishly. It has been taught to, and it was ready to. After the entertainers and novelists came the Jewish critics, politicians, theologians. Critics and politicians and theologians are by profession molders; they form ways of seeing.” In my personal experience, this honorific status of Jewish intellectuals remains common among my colleagues and is apparent, for example, in Hollinger’s (1996, 4) recent work on the “transformation of the ethnoreligious demography of American academic life by Jews” in the period from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Finally, a major theme is that gentiles have often been actively recruited to the movements discussed here and given highly visible roles within these movements in order to lessen the appearance that the movements are indeed Jewish-dominated or aimed only at narrow Jewish sectarian interests. From the standpoint of social identity theory, such a strategy aims at making gentiles perceive the intellectual or political movement as permeable to non-Jews and as satisfying gentile interests. As indicated in SAID (Chs. 5, 6), the rhetoric of universalism and the recruitment of gentiles as advocates of Jewish interests have been recurrent themes in combating anti-Semitism in both the ancient and modern world.

It is also important to keep in mind that the effectiveness and historical importance of Jewish involvement in the movements discussed in this volume were undoubtedly far out of proportion to the actual number of Jews involved. For example, even though in particular historical eras Jews may have been only a numerical minority within radical political or intellectual movements, they may well have been a necessary condition for the effectiveness and historical importance of these movements. Jews who became radicals retained their high IQ, their ambitiousness, their persistence, their work ethic, and their ability to organize and participate in cohesive, highly committed groups (see PTSDA, Ch. 7). As Lindemann (1997, 429) notes about Jewish Bolsheviks, “citing the absolute numbers of Jews, or their percentage of the whole, fails to recognize certain key if intangible factors: the assertiveness and often dazzling verbal skills of Jewish Bolsheviks, their energy, and their strength of conviction.” Jews tend to be far above average on these traits, and these traits have been central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy throughout history.

Writing of American Jewish radicals, Sorin (1985, 121-122) notes particularly their hard work and dedication, their desire to make a mark on the world, and their desire to rise in the world, engage in personal promotion, and achieve public acclaim—all traits that lead to upward mobility in any walk of life. These activists therefore became a more powerful, effective force than similarly proletarianized groups of gentiles. “A Jewish proletariat, conscious of its class interest and its cultural identity, grew, and with it grew activism and organization” (Sorin 1985, 35). Sorin (1985, 28) accepts the claim that half the revolutionaries in Russia in 1903 were Jews and notes that Jewish labor militancy as calculated by number of strikes and lost work time was three times that of any other working class in Europe between 1895 and 1904 (p. 35). Within leftist circles, Jews were viewed as the vanguard of the movement. Once this critical mass of Jews had become radicalized, it is not surprising that there would be important repercussions throughout Europe and North America. In addition to being radicals, these Jews were a very talented, intelligent and committed group of people. Similarly, Hollinger (1996, 19) notes that Jews were more influential in the decline of a homogeneous Protestant Christian culture in the United States than Catholics because of their greater wealth, social standing, and technical skill in the intellectual arena.

A major theme, therefore, is that the Jews who originated and dominated the movements considered in this volume were characterized by intelligence, persistence, and the ability to be part of cohesive, cooperative, and highly focused groups. These groups may therefore be conceptualized as secular versions of historical Jewish groups not only because of the high levels of Jewish identity characteristic of group members, but also because these groups retained the essential characteristics of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. Because of these characteristics, these groups were extraordinarily effective in achieving their aims. Collectively, the case studies discussed here provide yet another indication that highly disciplined, cooperative groups are able to outcompete individualist strategies. Indeed, an important thread in the following chapters is that Jewish intellectuals have formed highly cohesive groups whose influence to a great extent derives from the solidarity and cohesiveness of the group. Intellectual activity is like any other human endeavor: Cohesive groups outcompete individualist strategies. The fundamental truth of this axiom has been central to the success of Judaism throughout its history whether in business alliances and trading monopolies or in the intellectual and political movements discussed here (see especially PTSDA, Ch. 5).

Another major theme of this volume is that Jewish intellectuals have developed intellectual movements that have subjected the institutions of gentile society to radical forms of criticism. The converse of this is that gentile-dominated societies have often developed hegemonic ideologies intended to explain and rationalize the current institutions of society. This presumably has been the case for the major religions of the world, and more recently, ideologies such as communism, fascism, and liberal democracy appear to perform a similar function. Judaism, because of its position as a minority group strategy committed to its own worldview, has tended to adopt ideologies in which the institutions and ideologies of the surrounding society are viewed negatively.

Such a result follows directly from social identity theory. Particularly striking are the negative views of gentiles apparent in Jewish religious writings. The Law of Cleanness regards gentiles and their land as intrinsically unclean. Gentiles are typically likened to beasts capable of the worst debaucheries, as in the writings of Maimonides where heathen women are suspected of whoredom and heathen men of bestiality (The Code of Maimonides, Book V: The Book of Holiness, XXII, 142). Jews conceptualize themselves as descendants of Jacob, represented in Genesis as smooth-skinned, delicate, and contemplative. Gentiles are represented by Esau, Jacob’s twin brother, the opposite of Jacob—hirsute, coarse, and brutal. Whereas Esau lives as a hunter and warrior, Jacob lives by intelligence and guile and is the proper master of Esau who has been commanded by God to serve Jacob. Lindemann (1997, 5) shows that these stereotypes remain salient to Jews in contemporary times.

Judaism may come to be viewed as subversive when Jews attempt to inculcate negative perceptions of gentile culture among gentiles. The association of Judaism with subversive ideologies has a long history. Noting the association between Jews and subversive ideas in Muslim countries, Lewis (1984, 104) states that the theme of Jewish subversion is also familiar in “other times and places.” Johnson (1988, 214-215) finds that beginning in the Middle Ages converted Jews, especially those forced to convert, were “a critical, questing, disturbing element within the intelligentsia… [Thus] the claim that they were intellectually subversive had an element of truth.” The title of a recent book on Jewish art in the Middle Ages expresses this theme well: Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature (M. M. Epstein 1997). Epstein comments that “One can sense the anger Jews of the late Middle Ages must have felt when they called for the destruction of Christendom” (p. 115).

In the ancient world through the Middle Ages negative views of gentile institutions were relatively confined to internal consumption within the Jewish community. However, beginning with the Converso turmoil in fifteenth-century Spain these negative views often appeared in the most prestigious intellectual circles and in the mass media. These views generally subjected the institutions of gentile society to radical criticism or they led to the development of intellectual structures that rationalized Jewish identification in a postreligious intellectual environment.

Faur (1992, 31ff) shows that Conversos in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain were vastly overrepresented among the humanist thinkers who opposed the corporate nature of Spanish society centered around Christianity. In describing the general thrust of these writers, Faur (1992, 31) notes that “Although the strategy varied—from the creation of highly sophisticated literary works to the writing of scholarly and philosophical compositions—the goal was one: to present ideas and methodologies that would displace the values and institutions of the ‘old Christian.’… The urgency of reviewing the values and institutions of Christian Spain became more evident with the first massacre of conversos perpetrated by the old Christians in Toledo, in 1449.” Similarly, Castro (1954, 557-558) notes that works of “violent social criticism” and “antisocial rancor,” including especially social satire, were originated during the fifteenth century by Converso writers.

A prime example is The Celestina (first edition dating from 1499) by Fernando de Rojas, who wrote “with all the anguish, pessimism, and nihilism of a converso who has lost the religion of his fathers but has been unable to integrate himself within the compass of Christian belief. Rojas subjected the Castilian society of his time to “a corrosive analysis, destroying with a spirit that has been called ‘destructive’ all the traditional values and mental schemes of the new intolerant system. Beginning with literature and proceeding to religion, passing through all the ‘values’ of institutionalized caste-ism—honor, valor, love—everything is perversely pulverized” (Rodríguez-Puértolas 1976, 127).

This association of Jews with subversive ideologies continued during and after the Enlightenment as Jews were able to participate in public intellectual debate in Western Europe. Paul Johnson (1988, 291-292), writing of Baruch Spinoza, terms him “the first major example of the sheer destructive power of Jewish rationalism once it escaped the restraints of the traditional community.” Similarly, Heinrich Heine is “both the prototype and the archetype of a new figure in European literature: the Jewish radical man of letters, using his skill, reputation and popularity to undermine the intellectual confidence of the established order” (Johnson 1988, 345).

This “sheer destructive power” of the Jewish intellect was an important aspect of the pre-National Socialist era in Germany. As indicated in SAID (Chs. 2, 5), a prominent feature of anti-Semitism among the Social Conservatives and racial anti-Semites in Germany from 1870 to 1933 was their belief that Jews were instrumental in developing ideas that subverted traditional German attitudes and beliefs. Jews were vastly overrepresented as editors and writers during the 1920s in Germany, and “a more general cause of increased anti-Semitism was the very strong and unfortunate propensity of dissident Jews to attack national institutions and customs in both socialist and non-socialist publications” (Gordon 1984, 51).⁴⁹ This “media violence” directed at German culture by Jewish writers such as Kurt Tucholsky—who “wore his subversive heart on his sleeve” (Pulzer 1979, 97)—was publicized widely by the anti-Semitic press (Johnson 1988, 476-477).

Jews were not simply overrepresented among radical journalists, intellectuals, and “producers of culture” in Weimar Germany, they essentially created these movements. “They violently attacked everything about German society. They despised the military, the judiciary, and the middle class in general” (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 85). Massing (1949, 84) notes the perception of the anti-Semite Adolf Stoecker of Jewish “lack of reverence for the Christian-conservative world.”

Anti-Semitism among university professors during the Weimar period was partially fueled by the perception that “the Jew represented the critical or ‘negative’ aspects of modern thought, the acids of analysis and skepticism that helped to dissolve the moral certainties, patriotic commitment, and social cohesion of modern states” (Ringer 1983, 7). Reflecting this perception, National Socialist propaganda during the period claimed that Jews attempted to undermine the social cohesion of gentile society while remaining committed to a highly cohesive group themselves—an intellectual double standard in which the basis of social cohesion among gentiles was subjected to intense criticism while the Jews “would retain their international cohesiveness, blood ties, and spiritual unity” (Aschheim 1985, 239). Viewed from this perspective, an important goal of Jewish intellectual effort may be understood as attempting to undermine cohesive gentile group strategies while continuing to engage in their own highly cohesive group strategy. This issue reemerges in the discussion of Jewish involvement in radical political movements and the Frankfurt School of Social Research in Chapters 3 and 5.

This phenomenon was not restricted to Germany. Gilson (1962, 31-32), in discussing his Jewish professors at the turn of the century in France, states:

The doctrines of these university professors were really quite different from one another. Even the personal philosophy of Levy-Bruhl did not coincide exactly with that of Durkheim, while Frederic Rauh was going his own way… The only element common to their doctrines is a negative one, but nonetheless real and very active in its own order. One might describe it as a radical defiance of all that which is social conceived as a constraint from which to be liberated. Spinoza and Brunschvieg achieved this liberation through metaphysics. Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl through science and sociology, Bergson through intuition.

Jews have also been at the forefront of the adversarial culture in the United States, England, and France since the mid-1960s, especially as defenders of the adversary culture in the media and the academic world (Ginsberg 1993, 125ff; Rothman & Isenberg 1974a, 66-67).⁵⁰ Stein (1979, 28; see also Lichter et al. 1994; Powers et al. 1996) shows that his sample of predominantly Jewish writers and producers of television shows in the 1970s had very negative attitudes toward what they viewed as a gentile-dominated cultural establishment, although their most negative comments were elicited in informal conversation rather than during formal interviews. Television portrayals of gentile establishment figures in business and the military tended to be very negative. For example, “the writers clearly thought of military men as clean-shaven, blond, and of completely WASP background. In the minds of a few of the people I interviewed, these blond officers were always a hair’s breadth away from becoming National Socialists. They were thought of as part of an Aryan ruling class that actually or potentially repressed those of different ethnic backgrounds” (pp. 55-56).

Indeed, Glazer and Moynihan (1963/1970) credit the emergence of the adversary culture in the United States as a triumph of the New York Jewish cultural-political perspective. Jewish writers and visual artists (including E. L. Doctorow, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller,⁵¹ Frederick Wiseman, and Norman Lear) were disproportionately involved in attempts to portray American society as “sick” (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 120). A common technique of cultural subversion “involves an attack upon genuine inequities or irrationalities. Since all societies abound in both, there is never an absence of targets. However, the attack is generally not directed at the particular inequity or irrationality per se. Rather, such inequities or irrationalities are used as a means for achieving a larger purpose: the general weakening of the social order itself” (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 120).

In this volume I will concentrate on Jewish involvement in movements opposed to evolutionary, biological, and genetic findings in the social sciences, radical political ideology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and the New York Intellectuals. These movements are not specifically Jewish in the sense that they are not intended to rationalize specific aspects of Judaism such as cultural and genetic separatism. A major point will be that Jews were vastly overrepresented in these movements, that a strong sense of Jewish identity characterized the great majority of these individuals, and that all involved alienation from and rejection of gentile culture.

The discussion therefore reflects Sorkin’s (1985, 102) description of nineteenth-century German-Jewish intellectuals as constituting an “invisible community of acculturating German Jews who perpetuated distinct cultural forms within the majority culture.” The Jewish cultural contribution to the wider gentile culture was therefore accomplished from a highly particularistic perspective in which Jewish group identity continued to be of paramount importance despite its “invisibility.” Even Berthold Auerbach (b. 1812), the exemplar of the assimilated Jewish intellectual, “manipulate[d] elements of the majority culture in a way peculiar to the German-Jewish minority” (Sorkin 1985, 107). Auerbach became a model, for secular Jewish intellectuals, of the assimilated Jew who did not renounce his Judaism. For the most part, these secular Jewish intellectuals socialized exclusively with other secular Jews and viewed their contribution to German culture as a secular form of Judaism—thus the “invisible community” of strongly identified Jewish intellectuals. This cultural manipulation in the service of group interests was a common theme of anti-Semitic writings. Thus, Heinrich Heine’s critique of German culture was viewed as directed at the pursuit of power for his group at the expense of the cohesiveness of gentile society (see Mosse 1970, 52).

In several of the movements discussed in the following chapters it is of considerable importance that their propagators have attempted to clothe their rhetoric in the garb of science—the modern arbiter of truth and intellectual respectability. As White (1966, 2) notes with respect to the Boasian school of anthropology, the aura of science is deceptive: “They would make it appear and would have everyone believe that their choice of premises and goals has been determined by scientific considerations. This is definitely not the case… They are obviously sincere. Their sincerity and group loyalty tend, however, to persuade and consequently to deceive.” The comment is an excellent illustration of Robert Trivers’s (1985) evolutionary theory of self-deception: The best deceivers are those who are self-deceived. At times the deception becomes conscious. Charles Liebman (1973, 213) describes his unselfconscious acceptance of universalist ideologies (behaviorism and liberalism) in his work as a social scientist and suggests that he was engaged in self-deception regarding the role of Jewish identification in his beliefs: “As a behaviorist (and a liberal) I can testify to having been quite unselfconscious about my academic methodology, but I suspect that this would have to be the case. Otherwise I would be defeating the very universalism I espouse.”

CONCEPTUALIZING THE JEWISH RADICAL CRITICISM
OF GENTILE SOCIETY

The foregoing has documented a general tendency for Jewish intellectuals in a variety of periods to be involved with social criticism, and I have hinted at an analysis in terms of social identity theory. More formally, two quite different types of reasons explain why Jews might be expected to advocate ideologies and political movements aimed at undermining the existing gentile social order.

First, such ideologies and movements may be directed at benefiting Jews economically or socially. Clearly one of the themes of post-Enlightenment Judaism has been the rapid upward mobility of Jews and attempts by gentile power structures to limit Jewish access to power and social status. Given this rather conspicuous reality, practical reasons of economic and political self-interest would result in Jews being attracted to movements that criticized the gentile power structure or even advocated overthrowing it entirely.

Thus the czarist government of Russia enforced restrictions on Jews mainly out of fear that Jews would overwhelm gentile Russians in free economic competition (Lindemann 1991; SAID, Ch. 2). These czarist restrictions on Jews were a prominent rallying point for Jews around the world, and it is not at all unreasonable to suppose that Jewish participation in radical movements in Russia was motivated by perceived Jewish interest in overthrowing the czarist regime. Indeed, Arthur Liebman (1979, 29ff) notes that Jewish political radicalism in czarist Russia must be understood as resulting from economic restrictions on Jews that were enforced by the government in the context of considerable Jewish poverty and a very rapid Jewish demographic increase. Similarly, well into the 1930s the Jewish socialist labor movement in the United States aimed at bettering the working conditions of its predominantly Jewish membership (Liebman 1979, 267).

Another practical goal of Jewish political and intellectual movements has been to combat anti-Semitism. For example, Jewish attraction to socialism in many countries in the 1930s was motivated partly by communist opposition to fascism and anti-Semitism (Lipset 1988, 383; Marcus 1983). The general association between anti-Semitism and conservative political views has often been advanced as an explanation for Jewish involvement with the left, including the leftist tendencies of many wealthy Jews (e.g., Lipset 1988, 375ff). Combating anti-Semitism also became a prime goal of Jewish radicals in the United States after Jews had predominantly moved into the middle class (Levin 1977, 211). Rising anti-Semitism and consequent restrictions on Jewish upward mobility during the 1930s also resulted in an attraction of Jews to the left (Liebman 1979, 420ff, 507).

It will be apparent in Chapter 2 that the cultural determinism of the Boasian school of anthropology functioned to combat anti-Semitism by combating racialist thinking and eugenic programs advocated mainly by gentiles. Psychoanalysis (Ch. 4) and the Frankfurt School (Ch. 5) have also been instrumental in developing and propagating theories of anti-Semitism which attribute anti-Semitism to irrational projections of gentiles. In the case of the Frankfurt School, the theory also functioned to pathologize gentile group allegiances as a symptom of a psychiatric disorder while ignoring Jewish group cohesion.

Second, Jewish involvement in social criticism may be influenced by social identity processes independent of any practical goal such as ending antiSemitism. Research in social identity processes finds a tendency for displacement of ingroup views away from outgroup norms (Hogg & Abrams 1988). In the case of Jewish-gentile contact, these outgroup norms would paradigmatically represent the consensus views of the gentile society. Moreover, individuals who identify themselves as Jews would be expected to develop negative attributions regarding the outgroup, and for Jews the most salient outgroup is the gentile power structure and indeed the gentile-dominated social structure generally.

Jewish ingroup status vis-à-vis the gentile world as an outgroup would be expected to lead to a generalized negative conceptualization of the gentile outgroup and a tendency to overemphasize the negative aspects of gentile society and social structure. From the social identity perspective, the Jewish tendency to subvert the social order is thus expected to extend beyond developing ideologies and social programs that satisfy specific Jewish economic and social interests and extend to a general devaluation and critique of gentile culture—”the sheer destructive power of Jewish rationalism once it escaped the restraints of the traditional community” (Johnson 1988, 291-292).

The social identity perspective also predicts that such negative attributions are especially likely if the gentile power structure is anti-Semitic or perceived to be anti-Semitic. A basic finding of social identity research is that groups attempt to subvert negative social categorizations imposed by another group (Hogg & Abrams 1988). Social identity processes would therefore be intensified by Jewish perceptions that gentile culture was hostile to Jews and that Jews had often been persecuted by gentiles. Thus Feldman (1993, 43) finds very robust tendencies toward heightened Jewish identification and rejection of gentile culture consequent to anti-Semitism at the very beginnings of Judaism in the ancient world and throughout Jewish history. In Lord George Bentnick: A Political Biography (1852, 489), the nineteenth-century racial theorist Benjamin Disraeli, who had a very strong Jewish identity despite being a baptized Christian, stated that “persecution… although unjust may have reduced the modern Jews to a state almost justifying malignant vengeance. They may have become so odious and so hostile to mankind as to merit for their present conduct, no matter how occasioned, the obloquy and ill-treatment of the communities in which they dwell and with which they are scarcely permitted to mingle.” The result, according to Disraeli, is that Jews would perceive gentile society in extremely negative terms and may attempt to overthrow the existing social order:

But existing society has chosen to persecute this race which should furnish its choice allies, and what have been the consequences?

They may be traced in the last outbreak of the destructive principle in Europe. An insurrection takes place against tradition and aristocracy, against religion and property…⁵² The people of God co-operate with atheists; the most skillful accumulators of property ally themselves with communists; the peculiar and chosen race touch the hand of all the scum and low castes of Europe! And all this because they wish to destroy that ungrateful Christendom which owes to them even its name, and whose tyranny they can no longer endure. (Disraeli 1852, 498-499)⁵³

Indeed, Theodore Herzl espoused socialism in the 1890s as a Jewish response to continuing anti-Semitism, not because of its political goal of economic leveling, but because it would destroy the anti-Semitic gentile power structure: “From outcasts of society they [Jews] will become enemies of society. Ah, they are not protected in their civic honor, they are permitted to be insulted, scorned and on occasion also a bit plundered and maimed—what prevents them from going over to the side of anarchy?” Jews “no longer have a stake in the state. They will join the revolutionary parties, supplying or sharpening their weapons. They want to turn the Jews over to the mob—good, they themselves will go over to the people. Beware, they are at their limit; do not go too far” (in Kornberg 1993, 122).

Similarly, Sammons (1979, 263) describes the basis of the mutual attraction between Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx by noting that “they were not reformers, but haters, and this was very likely their most fundamental bond with one another.” The suggestion, consistent with social identity theory, is that a fundamental motivation of Jewish intellectuals involved in social criticism has simply been hatred of the gentile-dominated power structure perceived as anti-Semitic. This deep antipathy toward the non-Jewish world can also be seen in sociologist and New York Intellectual Michael Walzer’s (1994, 6-7) comment on the “pathologies of Jewish life,” particularly “the sense that ‘all the world is against us,’ the resulting fear, resentment, and hatred of the goy, the secret dreams of reversal and triumph.” Such “secret dreams of reversal and triumph” are a theme of the treatment of Jewish radicals in Chapter 3 and Freud and the psychoanalytic movement discussed in Chapter 4.

Indeed, intense hatred of perceived enemies appears to be an important psychological characteristic of Jews. It is remarkable that Schatz (1991, 113) finds that while all Polish communists in the interwar period hated their enemies, Jewish communists had more perceived enemies and hated them more intensely. As described more fully in Chapter 3, these communist groups were actually highly cohesive ingroups entirely analogous to traditional Jewish groups in their structure and psychological orientation. The proposal that Jewish communists had more intensely negative feelings toward their enemies is highly compatible with the material in PTSDA (Ch. 8) and SAID (Ch. 1) indicating that Jews may be viewed as having hypertrophied social identity systems and an exaggerated proneness toward collectivist social structures. The greater intensity of Jewish hatred toward outgroups and perceived enemies may be simply an affective manifestation of these tendencies. Indeed, in PTSDA (Ch. 7) I reviewed evidence indicating that Jews were highly compartmentalized in their emotional lives—prone to alterations between positive social interactions (paradigmatically directed toward members of a perceived ingroup) and intense interpersonal hostility (paradigma-tically directed toward members of a perceived outgroup).

Social identity theory also predicts that Jewish intellectual activity will be directed at developing ideologies that affirm their own social identity in the face of the social categories developed by anti-Semites. Historically this has been a common theme in Jewish religious apologia (see SAID, Ch. 7), but it also occurs among Jewish secular writers. Castro (1954, 558) describes attempts by New Christian intellectuals to “defend the Hebrew lineage” from anti-Semitic slurs during the period of the Inquisition. The Converso bishop of Burgos stated, “Do not think you can insult me by calling my forefathers Jews. They are, to be sure, and I am glad that it is so; for if great age is nobility, who can go back so far?” The Jew, descended from the Maccabees and the Levites, is “noble by birth.” Castro (1954, 559) also notes that a theme of the New Christian literature of the period was that of “esteem for socially inferior man marginally situated in society.” The category in which Jews see themselves is regarded in a positive light.

Interestingly, the Converso humanist ideology stressed individual merit in opposition to the corporate nature of gentile Christian society (Faur 1992, 35).⁵⁴ Reflecting the salience of Jewish-gentile group conflict during the period, Old Christians viewed individual merit as deriving from religious affiliation (i.e., group identity) rather than from individual effort: “In the sixteenth century the scale of values became ever more unbalanced, resulting in the concept that it was more important to establish who the person was rather than evaluate his capacity for work or thought” (Castro 1971, 581; italics in text). The ideology of individual merit as the basis of value promoted by the Converso intellectuals may thus be seen as an instance of combating categories of social identity in which one is devalued.⁵⁵

The other side of the coin is that Jews have often reacted quite negatively to Jewish writers who portray Jewish characters as having negative or disapproved traits. For example, Philip Roth has been extensively criticized by Jews and Jewish organizations for portraying such characters, or at least for portraying such characters in America, where his work could be read by anti-Semites (see Roth 1963). While the ostensible reason for this concern was the possibility that such portrayals might lead to anti-Semitism, Roth (1963, 452) suggests also that “what is really objected to, what is immediately painful… is its direct effect upon certain Jews. ‘You have hurt a lot of people’s feelings because you have revealed something they are ashamed of.’” The implication of Roth’s critics is that the ingroup should be portrayed in positive terms; and indeed, the most common type of Jewish literary activity has portrayed Jews as having positive traits (Alter 1965, 72). The quote also reflects the discussion of Jewish self-deception in SAID (Ch. 8): The shame resulting from awareness of actual Jewish behavior is only half-conscious, and any challenge to this self-deception results in a great deal of psychological conflict.

The importance of social identity processes in Jewish intellectual activity was recognized some time ago by Thorstein Veblen (1934). Veblen described the preeminence of Jewish scholars and scientists in Europe and noted their tendency to be iconoclasts. He noted that the Enlightenment had destroyed the ability of Jewish intellectuals to find comfort in the identity provided by religion, but they do not therefore simply accept uncritically the intellectual structures of gentile society. By engaging in iconoclasm, Veblen suggests, Jews are in fact subjecting to criticism the basic social categorization system of the gentile world—a categorization system with which the gentile, but not the Jew, is comfortable. The Jew “is not… invested with the gentile’s peculiar heritage of conventional preconceptions which have stood over, by inertia of habit, out of the gentile past, which go, on the one hand, to make the safe and sane gentile conservative and complacent, and which conduce also, on the other hand, to blur the safe and sane gentile’s intellectual vision, and to leave him intellectually sessile” (Veblen 1934, 229).⁵⁶

Indeed, Jewish social scientists have at least sometimes been aware of these linkages: Peter Gay (1987, 137) quotes the following from a 1926 letter written by Sigmund Freud, whose antipathy to Western culture is described in Chapter 4: “Because I was a Jew, I found myself free from many prejudices which limited others in the employment of their intellects, and as a Jew I was prepared to go into opposition and to do without the agreement of the ‘compact majority.’” In a later letter, Freud stated that to accept psychoanalysis “called for a certain measure of readiness to accept a situation of solitary opposition—a situation with which nobody is more familiar than a Jew” (in Gay 1987, 146).⁵⁷

There is a sense of alienation vis-à-vis the surrounding society. The Jewish intellectual, in the words of New York Intellectual and political radical Irving Howe, tends “to feel at some distance from society; to assume, almost as a birthright, a critical stance toward received dogmas, to recognize oneself as not quite at home in the world” (1978, 106).

From Solomon Maimon to Normon Podhoretz, from Rachel Varnhagen to Cynthia Ozick, from Marx and Lassalle to Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel, from Herzl and Freud to Harold Laski and Lionel Trilling, from Moses Mendelssohn to J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, and Reich I and II (Wilhelm and Charles), one dominating structure of an identical predicament and a shared fate imposes itself upon the consciousness and behavior of the Jewish intellectual in Galut [exile]: with the advent of Jewish Emancipation, when ghetto walls crumble and the shtetlach [small Jewish towns] begin to dissolve, Jewry—like some wide-eyed anthropologist—enters upon a strange world, to explore a strange people observing a strange halakah (code). They examine this world in dismay, with wonder, anger, and punitive objectivity. This wonder, this anger, and the vindictive objectivity of the marginal nonmember are recidivist; they continue unabated into our own time because Jewish Emancipation continues into our own time. (Cuddihy 1974, 68)

Although intellectual criticism resulting from social identity processes need not be functional in attaining any concrete goal of Judaism, this body of theory is highly compatible with supposing that Jewish intellectual activity may be directed at influencing social categorization processes in a manner that benefits Jews. Evidence will be provided in later chapters that Jewish intellectual movements have advocated universalist ideologies for the entire society in which the Jew-gentile social category is reduced in salience and is of no theoretical importance. Thus, for example, within a Marxist analysis social conflict is theorized to result solely from economically based conflict between social classes in which resource competition between ethnic groups is irrelevant. Social identity research predicts that the acceptance of such a theory would lessen anti-Semitism because within the universalist ideology the Jew-gentile social categorization is not salient.

Finally, there is good reason to suppose that minority perspectives are able to have a strong influence on the attitudes of the majority (e.g., Pérez & Mugny 1990). Social identity research indicates that a minority viewpoint, especially when possessing a high degree of internal consistency, is able to have an impact

because it introduces the possibility of an alternative to the taken-for-granted, unquestioned, consensual majority perspective. Suddenly people can discern cracks in the façade of majority consensus. New issues, problems, and questions arise which demand attention. The status quo is no longer passively accepted as an immutable and stable entity which is the sole legitimate arbiter of the nature of things. People are free to change their beliefs, views, customs, and so forth. And where do they turn? One direction is to the active minority. It (by definition and design) furnishes a conceptually coherent and elegantly simple resolution of the very issues which, due to its activities, now plague the public consciousness. In the language of ‘ideology’…, active minorities seek to replace the dominant ideology with a new one.” (Hogg & Abrams 1988, 181)

A critical component of minority group influence is intellectual consistency (Moscovici 1976), and an important theme in the following will be that Jewish-dominated intellectual movements have had a high degree of internal group cohesion and have often been typified by high levels of ingroup-outgroup thinking—a traditional aspect of Judaism. However, because these movements were intended to appeal to gentiles, they were forced to minimize any overt indication that Jewish group identity or Jewish group interests were important to the participants.

Such a result is also highly compatible with social identity theory: The extent to which individuals are willing to be influenced depends on their willingness to accept the social category from which the divergent opinion derives. For Jews intent on influencing the wider society, overt Jewish group identity and overtly stated Jewish interests could only detract from the ability of these movements to influence their intended targets. As a result, Jewish involvement in these movements was often actively concealed, and the intellectual structures themselves were phrased in universalist terms to minimize the importance of the social category of Jew-gentile.

Moreover, since one’s willingness to accept influence depends on one’s willingness to identify with the stereotypical qualities of an ingroup, the movements not only were conceptualized in universalist terms, rather than Jewish particularist terms; they were also depicted as motivated only by the highest moral and ethical standards. As Cuddihy (1974, 66n) notes, Jewish intellectuals developed a sense that Judaism had a “mission to the West” in which corrupt Western civilization would be confronted by a specifically Jewish sense of morality. To a considerable extent these movements constitute concrete examples of the ancient and recurrent Jewish self-conceptualization as a “light of the nations,” reviewed extensively in SAID (Ch. 7). This rhetoric of moral condemnation of the outgroup thus represents a secular version of the central pose of post-Enlightenment Jewish intellectuals that Judaism represents a moral beacon to the rest of humanity. But to exert their influence, they were forced to deny the importance of specifically Jewish identity and interests at the heart of the movement.

The high degree of internal group cohesion characteristic of the movements considered in this volume was accompanied by the development of theories that not only possessed a great deal of internal intellectual consistency but also, as in the case of psychoanalysis and radical political theory, could take the form of hermeneutic systems able to accommodate any and all events into their interpretive schemas. And although these movements sought the veneer of science, they inevitably controverted the fundamental principles of science as an individualistic inquiry into the nature of reality (see Ch. 6). Although the extent to which these intellectual and political movements influenced gentile society cannot be assessed with certainty, the material presented in the following chapters is highly compatible with supposing that Jewish-dominated intellectual movements were a critical factor (necessary condition) for the triumph of the intellectual left in late twentieth-century Western societies.

No evolutionist should be surprised at the implicit theory in all this, namely, that intellectual activities of all types may at bottom involve ethnic warfare, any more than one should be surprised at the fact that political and religious ideologies typically reflect the interests of those holding them. The truly doubtful proposition for an evolutionist is whether real social science as a disinterested attempt to understand human behavior is at all possible.

This does not imply that all strongly identified Jewish social scientists participated in the movements discussed in the following chapters. It implies only that Jewish identification and perceived Jewish interests were a powerful motivating force among those who led these movements and among many of their followers. These scientist-activists had very strong Jewish identities. They were very concerned with anti-Semitism and self-consciously developed theories aimed at showing that Jewish behavior was irrelevant to anti-Semitism while at same time (in the case of psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School) showing that gentile ethnocentrism and participation in cohesive anti-Semitic movements were indications of psychopathology.

Collectively, these movements have called into question the fundamental moral, political, cultural, and economic foundations of Western society. It will be apparent that these movements have also served various Jewish interests quite well. It will also become apparent, however, that these movements have often conflicted with the cultural and ultimately genetic interests of important sectors of the non-Jewish, European-derived peoples of late-twentieth-century European and North American societies.

2

The Boasian School of Anthropology and
the Decline of Darwinism in the Social
Sciences

If… we were to treat Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa as utopia, not as ethnography, then we would understand it better and save a lot of pointless debate. (Robin Fox 1989, 3)

Several writers have commented on the “radical changes” that occurred in the goals and methods of the social sciences consequent to the entry of Jews to these fields (Liebman 1973, 213; see also Degler 1991; Hollinger 1996; Horowitz 1993, 75; Rothman & Lichter 1982). Degler (1991, 188ff) notes that the shift away from Darwinism as the fundamental paradigm of the social sciences resulted from an ideological shift rather than from the emergence of any new empirical data. He also notes that Jewish intellectuals have been instrumental in the decline of Darwinism and other biological perspectives in American social science since the 1930s (p. 200). The opposition of Jewish intellectuals to Darwinism has long been noticed (Lenz 1931, 674; see also comments of John Maynard Smith in Lewin [1992, 43]).⁵⁸

In sociology, the advent of Jewish intellectuals in the pre-World War II period resulted in “a level of politicization unknown to sociology’s founding fathers. It is not only that the names of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim replaced those of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, but also that the sense of America as a consensual experience gave way to a sense of America as a series of conflicting definitions” (Horowitz 1993, 75). In the post-World War II period, sociology “became populated by Jews to such a degree that jokes abounded: one did not need the synagogue, the minyan [i.e., the minimum number of Jews required for a communal religious service] was to be found in sociology departments; or, one did not need a sociology of Jewish life, since the two had become synonymous” (Horowitz 1993, 77). Indeed, the ethnic conflict within American sociology parallels to a remarkable degree the ethnic conflict in American anthropology that is a theme of this chapter. Here the conflict was played out between leftist Jewish social scientists and an old-line, empirically oriented Protestant establishment that was eventually eclipsed:

American sociology has struggled with the contrary claims of those afflicted with physics envy and researchers… more engaged in the dilemmas of society. In that struggle, midwestern Protestant mandarins of positivist science often came into conflict with East Coast Jews who in turn wrestled with their own Marxist commitments; great quantitative researchers from abroad, like Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia, sought to disrupt the complacency of native bean counters. (Sennett 1995, 43)

This chapter will emphasize the ethnopolitical agenda of Franz Boas, but it is worth mentioning the work of Franco-Jewish structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss because he appears to be similarly motivated, although the French structuralist movement as a whole cannot be viewed as a Jewish intellectual movement. Lévi-Strauss interacted extensively with Boas and acknowledged his influence (Dosse 1997 I, 15, 16). In turn, Lévi-Strauss was very influential in France, Dosse (1997 I, xxi) describing him as “the common father” of Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. He had a strong Jewish identity and a deep concern with anti-Semitism (Cuddihy 1974, 151ff). In response to an assertion that he was “the very picture of a Jewish intellectual,” Lévi-Strauss stated,

[C]ertain mental attitudes are perhaps more common among Jews than elsewhere… Attitudes that come from the profound feeling of belonging to a national community, all the while knowing that in the midst of this community there are people—fewer and fewer of them I admit—who reject you. One keeps one’s sensitivity attuned, accompanied by the irrational feeling that in all circumstances one has to do a bit more than other people to disarm potential critics. (Lévi-Strauss & Eribon 1991, 155-156)

Like many Jewish intellectuals discussed here, Lévi-Strauss’s writings were aimed at enshrining cultural differences and subverting the universalism of the West, a position that validates the position of Judaism as a non-assimilating group. Like Boas, Lévi-Strauss rejected biological and evolutionary theories. He theorized that cultures, like languages, were arbitrary collections of symbols with no natural relationships to their referents. Lévi-Strauss rejected Western modernization theory in favor of the idea that there were no superior societies. The role of the anthropologist was to be a “natural subversive or convinced opponent of traditional usage” (in Cuddihy 1974, 155) in Western societies, while respecting and even romanticizing the virtues of non-Western societies (see Dosse 1997 II, 30). Western universalism and ideas of human rights were viewed as masks for ethnocentrism, colonialism, and genocide:

Levi-Strauss’s most significant works were all published during the breakup of the French colonial empire and contributed enormously to the way it was understood by intellectuals… [H]is elegant writings worked an aesthetic transformation on his readers, who were subtly made to feel ashamed to be Europeans… [H]e evoked the beauty, dignity, and irreducible strangeness of Third World cultures that were simply trying to preserve their difference… [H]is writings would soon feed the suspicion among the new left… that all the universal ideas to which Europe claimed allegiance—reason, science, progress, liberal democracy—were culturally specific weapons fashioned to rob the non-European Other of his difference. (Lilla 1998, 37)

Degler (1991, 61) emphasizes the role of Franz Boas in the anti-Darwinian transformation of American social science: “Boas’ influence upon American social scientists in matters of race can hardly be exaggerated.” Boas engaged in a “life-long assault on the idea that race was a primary source of the differences to be found in the mental or social capabilities of human groups. He accomplished his mission largely through his ceaseless, almost relentless articulation of the concept of culture” (p. 61). “Boas, almost single-handedly, developed in America the concept of culture, which, like a powerful solvent, would in time expunge race from the literature of social science” (p. 71).

Boas did not arrive at the position from a disinterested, scientific inquiry into a vexed if controversial question… There is no doubt that he had a deep interest in collecting evidence and designing arguments that would rebut or refute an ideological outlook—racism—which he considered restrictive upon individuals and undesirable for society… there is a persistent interest in pressing his social values upon the profession and the public. (Degler 1991, 82-83)

As Frank (1997, 731) points out, “The preponderance of Jewish intellectuals in the early years of Boasian anthropology and the Jewish identities of anthropologists in subsequent generations has been downplayed in standard histories of the discipline.” Jewish identifications and the pursuit of perceived Jewish interests, particularly in advocating an ideology of cultural pluralism as a model for Western societies, has been the “invisible subject” of American anthropology—invisible because the ethnic identifications and ethnic interests of its advocates have been masked by a language of science in which such identifications and interests were publicly illegitimate.

Boas was reared in a “Jewish-liberal” family in which the revolutionary ideals of 1848 remained influential.⁵⁹ He developed a “left-liberal posture which… is at once scientific and political” (Stocking 1968, 149). Boas married within his ethnic group (Frank 1997, 733) and was intensely concerned with antiSemitism from an early period in his life (White 1966, 16). Alfred Kroeber (1943, 8) recounted a story “which [Boas] is said to have revealed confidentially but which cannot be vouched for,… that on hearing an anti-Semitic insult in a public cafe, he threw the speaker out of doors, and was challenged. Next morning his adversary offered to apologize; but Boas insisted that the duel be gone through with. Apocryphal or not, the tale absolutely fits the character of the man as we know him in America.” In a comment that says much about Boas’s Jewish identification as well as his view of gentiles, Boas stated in response to a question regarding how he could have professional dealings with anti-Semites such as Charles Davenport, “If we Jews had to choose to work only with Gentiles certified to be a hundred percent free of anti-Semitism, who could we ever really work with?” (in Sorin 1997, 632n9). Moreover, as has been common among Jewish intellectuals in several historical eras, Boas was deeply alienated from and hostile toward gentile culture, particularly the cultural ideal of the Prussian aristocracy (Degler 1991, 200; Stocking 1968, 150). When Margaret Mead wanted to persuade Boas to let her pursue her research in the South Sea islands, “She hit upon a sure way of getting him to change his mind. ‘I knew there was one thing that mattered more to Boas than the direction taken by anthropological research. This was that he should behave like a liberal, democratic, modern man, not like a Prussian autocrat.’ The ploy worked because she had indeed uncovered the heart of his personal values” (Degler 1991, 73).

I conclude that Boas had a strong Jewish identification and that he was deeply concerned about anti-Semitism. On the basis of the following, it is reasonable to suppose that his concern with anti-Semitism was a major influence in the development of American anthropology.

Indeed, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that ethnic conflict played a major role in the development of American anthropology. Boas’s views conflicted with the then prevalent idea that cultures had evolved in a series of developmental stages labeled savagery, barbarism, and civilization. The stages were associated with racial differences, and modern European culture (and most especially, I suppose, the hated Prussian aristocracy) was at the highest level of this gradation. Wolf (1990, 168) describes the attack of the Boasians as calling into question “the moral and political monopoly of a [gentile] elite which had justified its rule with the claim that their superior virtue was the outcome of the evolutionary process.” Boas’s theories were also meant to counter the racialist theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (see SAID, Ch. 5) and American eugenicists like Madison Grant, whose book, The Passing of the Great Race (1921, 17), was highly critical of Boas’s research on environmental influences on skull size. The result was that “in message and purpose, [Boas’s anthropology] was an explicitly antiracist science” (Frank 1997, 741).

Grant characterized Jewish immigrants as ruthlessly self-interested whereas American Nordics were committing racial suicide and allowing themselves to be “elbowed out” of their own land (1921, 16, 91). Grant also believed Jews were engaged in a campaign to discredit racial research:

It is well-nigh impossible to publish in the American newspapers any reflection upon certain religions or races which are hysterically sensitive even when mentioned by name… Abroad, conditions are fully as bad, and we have the authority of one of the most eminent anthropologists in France that the collection of anthropological measurements and data among French recruits at the outbreak of the Great War was prevented by Jewish influence, which aimed to suppress any suggestion of racial differentiation in France. (1921, xxxi-xxxii)

An important technique of the Boasian school was to cast doubt on general theories of human evolution, such as those implying developmental sequences, by emphasizing the vast diversity and chaotic minutiae of human behavior, as well as the relativism of standards of cultural evaluation. The Boasians argued that general theories of cultural evolution must await a detailed cataloguing of cultural diversity, but in fact no general theories emerged from this body of research in the ensuing half century of its dominance of the profession (Stocking 1968, 210). Because of its rejection of fundamental scientific activities such as generalization and classification, Boasian anthropology may thus be characterized more as an anti-theory than a theory of human culture (White 1966, 15). Boas also opposed research on human genetics—what Derek Freeman (1991, 198) terms his “obscurantist antipathy to genetics.”

Boas and his students were intensely concerned with pushing an ideological agenda within the American anthropological profession (Degler 1991; Freeman 1991; Torrey 1992). Boas and his associates had a sense of group identity, a commitment to a common viewpoint, and an agenda to dominate the institutional structure of anthropology (Stocking 1968, 279-280). They were a compact group with a clear intellectual and political agenda rather than individualist seekers of disinterested truth. The defeat of the Darwinians “had not happened without considerable exhortation of ‘every mother’s son’ standing for the ‘Right.’ Nor had it been accomplished without some rather strong pressure applied both to staunch friends and to the ‘weaker brethren’—often by the sheer force of Boas’s personality” (Stocking 1968, 286).

By 1915 the Boasians controlled the American Anthropological Association and held a two-thirds majority on its Executive Board (Stocking 1968, 285). In 1919 Boas could state that “most of the anthropological work done at the present time in the United States” was done by his students at Columbia (in Stocking 1968, 296). By 1926 every major department of anthropology was headed by Boas’s students, the majority of whom were Jewish. His protégé Melville Herskovits (1953, 23) noted that the four decades of the tenure of [Boas’s] professorship at Columbia gave a continuity to his teaching that permitted him to develop students who eventually made up the greater part of the significant professional core of American anthropologists, and who came to man and direct most of the major departments of anthropology in the United States. In their turn, they trained the students who…have continued the tradition in which their teachers were trained.

According to Leslie White (1966, 26), Boas’s most influential students were Ruth Benedict, Alexander Goldenweiser, Melville Herskovits, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead, Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, and Leslie Spier. All of this “small, compact group of scholars… gathered about their leader” (White 1966, 26) were Jews with the exception of Kroeber, Benedict, and Mead. Frank (1997, 732) also mentions several other prominent first-generation Jewish students of Boas (Alexander Lesser, Ruth Bunzel, Gene [Regina] Weltfish, Esther Schiff Goldfrank, and Ruth Landes). Sapir’s family fled the pogroms in Russia for New York, where Yiddish was his first language. Although not religious, he took an increasing interest in Jewish topics early in his career and later became engaged in Jewish activism, particularly in establishing a prominent center for Jewish learning in Lithuania (Frank 1997, 735). Ruth Landes’s background also shows the ethnic nexus of the Boasian movement. Her family was prominent in the Jewish leftist subculture of Brooklyn, and she was introduced to Boas by Alexander Goldenweiser, a close friend of her father and another of Boas’s prominent students.

In contrast to the ideological and political basis of Boas’s motivation, Kroeber’s militant environmentalism and defense of the culture concept was “entirely theoretical and professional” (Degler 1991, 90). Neither his private nor his public writings reflect the attention to public policy questions regarding blacks or the general question of race in American life that are so conspicuous in Boas’s professional correspondence and publications. Kroeber rejected race as an analytical category as forthrightly and thoroughly as Boas, but he reached that position primarily through theory rather than ideology. Kroeber argued that “our business is to promote anthropology rather than to wage battles on behalf of tolerance in other fields” (in Stocking 1968, 286).⁶⁰

Ashley Montagu was another influential student of Boas (see Shipman 1994, 159ff). Montagu, whose original name was Israel Ehrenberg, was a highly visible crusader in the battle against the idea of racial differences in mental capacities. He was also highly conscious of being Jewish, stating on one occasion that “if you are brought up a Jew, you know that all non-Jews are anti-Semitic… I think it is a good working hypothesis” (in Shipman, 1994, 166). Montagu asserted that race is a socially constructed myth. Humans are innately cooperative (but not innately aggressive) and there is a universal brotherhood among humans—a highly problematic idea for many in the wake of World War II. Mention also should be made of Otto Klineberg, a professor of psychology at Columbia. Klineberg was “tireless” and “ingenious” in his arguments against the reality of racial differences. He came under the influence of Boas at Columbia and dedicated his 1935 book Race Differences to him. Klineberg “made it his business to do for psychology what his friend and colleague at Columbia [Boas] had done for anthropology: to rid his discipline of racial explanations for human social differences” (Degler 1991, 179).

It is interesting in this regard that the members of the Boasian school who achieved the greatest public renown were two gentiles, Benedict and Mead.⁶¹ As in several other prominent historical cases (see Chs. 3, 4; SAID, Ch. 6), gentiles became the publicly visible spokespersons for a movement dominated by Jews. Indeed, like Freud, Boas recruited gentiles into his movement out of concern “that his Jewishness would make his science appear partisan and thus compromised” (Efron 1994, 180).

Boas devised Margaret Mead’s classic study on adolescence in Samoa with an eye to its usefulness in the nature-nurture debate raging at the time (Freeman 1983, 60-61, 75). The result of this research was Coming of Age in Samoa—a book that revolutionized American anthropology in the direction of radical environmentalism. Its success stemmed ultimately from its promotion by Boas’s students in departments of anthropology at prominent American universities (Freeman 1991). This work and Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture were also widely influential among other social scientists, psychiatrists, and the public at large, so that “by the middle of the twentieth century, it was a commonplace for educated Americans to refer to human differences in cultural terms, and to say that ‘modern science has shown that all human races are equal’” (Stocking 1968, 306).

Boas rarely cited works of people outside his group except to disparage them, whereas, as with Mead’s and Benedict’s work, he strenuously promoted and cited the work of people within the ingroup. The Boasian school of anthropology thus came to resemble in a microcosm key features of Judaism as a highly collectivist group evolutionary strategy: a high level of ingroup identification, exclusionary policies, and cohesiveness in pursuit of common interests.

Boasian anthropology, at least during Boas’s lifetime, also resembled traditional Judaism in another critical manner: It was highly authoritarian and intolerant of dissent. As in the case of Freud (see Ch. 4), Boas was a patriarchal father figure, strongly supporting those who agreed with him and excluding those who did not: Alfred Kroeber regarded Boas as “a true patriarch” who “functioned as a powerful father figure, cherishing and supporting those with whom he identified in the degree that he felt they were genuinely identifying with him, but, as regards others, aloof and probably fundamentally indifferent, coldly hostile if the occasion demanded it” (in Stocking 1968, 305-306). “Boas has all the attributes of the head of a cult, a revered charismatic teacher and master, ‘literally worshipped’ by disciples whose ‘permanent loyalty’ has been ‘effectively established’” (White 1966, 25-26).

As in the case of Freud, in the eyes of his disciples virtually everything Boas did was of monumental importance and justified placing him among the intellectual giants of all time. Like Freud, Boas did not tolerate theoretical or ideological differences with his students. Individuals who disagreed with the leader or had personality clashes with him, such as Clark Wissler and Ralph Linton, were simply excluded from the movement. White (1966, 26-27) represents the exclusion of Wissler and Linton as having ethnic overtones. Both were gentiles. White (1966, 26-27) also suggests that George A. Dorsey’s status as a gentile was relevant to his exclusion from the Boas group despite Dorsey’s intensive efforts to be a member. Kroeber (1956, 26) describes how George A. Dorsey, “an American-born gentile and a Ph.D. from Harvard, tried to gain admittance to the select group but failed.” As an aspect of this authoritarianism, Boas was instrumental in completely suppressing evolutionary theory in anthropology (Freeman 1990, 197).

Boas was the quintessential skeptic and an ardent defender of methodological rigor when it came to theories of cultural evolution and genetic influences on individual differences, yet “the burden of proof rested lightly upon Boas’s own shoulders” (White 1966, 12). Although Boas (like Freud; see Ch. 4) made his conjectures in a very dogmatic manner, his “historical reconstructions are inferences, guesses, and unsupported assertions [ranging] from the possible to the preposterous. Almost none is verifiable” (White 1966, 13). An unrelenting foe of generalization and theory construction, Boas nevertheless completely accepted the “absolute generalization at which [Margaret] Mead had arrived after probing for a few months into adolescent behavior on Samoa,” even though Mead’s results were contrary to previous research in the area (Freeman 1983, 291). Moreover, Boas uncritically allowed Ruth Benedict to distort his own data on the Kwakiutl (see Torrey 1992, 83).

The entire enterprise may thus be characterized as a highly authoritarian political movement centered around a charismatic leader. The results were extraordinarily successful: “The profession as a whole was united within a single national organization of academically oriented anthropologists. By and large, they shared a common understanding of the fundamental significance of the historically conditioned variety of human cultures in the determination of human behavior” (Stocking 1968, 296). Research on racial differences ceased, and the profession completely excluded eugenicists and racial theorists like Madison Grant and Charles Davenport.

By the mid-1930s the Boasian view of the cultural determination of human behavior had a strong influence on social scientists generally (Stocking 1968, 300). The followers of Boas also eventually became some of the most influential academic supporters of psychoanalysis (Harris 1968, 431). Marvin Harris (1968, 431) notes that psychoanalysis was adopted by the Boasian school because of its utility as a critique of Euro-American culture, and, indeed, as we shall see in later chapters, psychoanalysis is an ideal vehicle of cultural critique. In the hands of the Boasian school, psychoanalysis was completely stripped of its evolutionary associations and there was a much greater accommodation to the importance of cultural variables (Harris 1968, 433).⁶²

Cultural critique was also an important aspect of the Boasian school. Stocking (1989, 215-216) shows that several prominent Boasians, including Robert Lowie and Edward Sapir, were involved in the cultural criticism of the 1920s which centered around the perception of American culture as overly homogeneous, hypocritical, and emotionally and esthetically repressive (especially with regard to sexuality). Central to this program was creating ethnographies of idyllic cultures that were free of the negatively perceived traits that were attributed to Western culture. Among these Boasians, cultural criticism crystallized as an ideology of “romantic primitivism” in which certain non-Western cultures epitomized the approved characteristics Western societies should emulate.

Cultural criticism was a central feature of the two most prominent Boasian ethnographies, Coming of Age in Samoa and Patterns of Culture. These works are not only erroneous but systematically misrepresent key issues related to evolutionary perspectives on human behavior. For example, Benedict’s Zuni were described as being free of war, homicide, and concern with accumulation of wealth. Children were not disciplined. Sex was casual, with little concern for virginity, sexual possessiveness, or paternity confidence. Contemporary Western societies are, of course, the opposite of these idyllic paradises, and Benedict suggests that we should study such cultures in order “to pass judgment on the dominant traits of our own civilization” (Benedict 1934, 249). Mead’s similar portrayal of the Samoans ignored her own evidence contrary to her thesis (Orans 1996, 155). Negatively perceived behaviors of Mead’s Samoans, such as rape and concern for virginity, were attributed to Western influence (Stocking 1989, 245).

Both of these ethnographic accounts have been subjected to devastating criticisms. The picture of these societies that has emerged is far more compatible with evolutionary expectations than the societies depicted by Benedict and Mead (see Caton 1990; Freeman 1983; Orans 1996; Stocking 1989). In the controversy surrounding Mead’s work, some defenders of Mead have pointed to possible negative political implications of the demythologization of her work (see, e.g., the summary in Caton 1990, 226-227). The highly politicized context of the questions raised by this research thus continues unabated.

Indeed, one consequence of the triumph of the Boasians was that there was almost no research on warfare and violence among the peoples studied by anthropologists (Keegan 1993, 90-94). Warfare and warriors were ignored, and cultures were conceived as consisting of myth-makers and gift-givers. (Orans [1996, 120] shows that Mead systematically ignored cases of rape, violence, revolution, and competition in her account of Samoa.) Only five articles on the anthropology of war appeared during the 1950s. Revealingly, when Harry Turney-High published his volume Primitive Warfare in 1949 documenting the universality of warfare and its oftentimes awesome savagery, the book was completely ignored by the anthropological profession—another example of the exclusionary tactics used against dissenters among the Boasians and characteristic of the other intellectual movements reviewed in this volume as well. Turney-High’s massive data on non-Western peoples conflicted with the image of them favored by a highly politicized profession whose members simply excluded these data entirely from intellectual discourse. The result was a “pacified past” (Keeley 1996, 163ff) and an “attitude of self-reproach” (p. 179) in which the behavior of primitive peoples was bowdlerized while the behavior of European peoples was not only excoriated as uniquely evil but also as responsible for all extant examples of warfare among primitive peoples. From this perspective, it is only the fundamental inadequacy of European culture that prevents an idyllic world free from between-group conflict.

The reality, of course, is far different. Warfare was and remains a recurrent phenomenon among prestate societies. Surveys indicate over 90 percent of societies engage in warfare, the great majority engaging in military activities at least once per year (Keeley 1996, 27-32). Moreover, “whenever modern humans appear on the scene, definitive evidence of homicidal violence becomes more common, given a sufficient number of burials (Keeley 1996, 37). Because of its frequency and the seriousness of its consequences, primitive warfare was more deadly than civilized warfare. Most adult males in primitive and prehistoric societies engaged in warfare and “saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime” (Keeley, 1996, 174).

BEYOND BOAS: RECENT EXAMPLES OF JEWISH
POLITICAL AGENDAS INFLUENCING SOCIAL SCIENCE
RESEARCH

Jewish influence on the social sciences has extended far beyond Boas and the American Anthropological Association. Hollinger (1996, 4) notes “the transformation of the ethnoreligious demography of American academic life by Jews” in the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, as well as the Jewish influence on trends toward the secularization of American society and in advancing an ideal of cosmopolitanism (p. 11). As early as the early 1940s, this transformation resulted in “a secular, increasingly Jewish, decidedly left-of-center intelligentsia based largely but not exclusively in the disciplinary communities of philosophy and the social sciences” (Hollinger 1996, 160). By 1968, Jews constituted 20 percent of the faculty of elite American colleges and universities and constituted 30 percent of the “most liberal” faculty. At this time, Jews, representing less than 3 percent of the population, constituted 25 percent of the social science faculty at elite universities and 40 percent of liberal faculty who published most (see Rothman & Lichter 1982, 103). Jewish academics were also far more likely to support “progressive” or communist parties from the 1930s to the 1950s. In 1948 30 percent of Jewish faculty voted for the Progressive Party, compared to less than 5 percent for gentile faculty (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 103).

Boas, who was a socialist, is a good example of the leftist bent of Jewish social scientists, and many of his followers were political radicals (Torrey 1992, 57).⁶³ Similar associations are apparent in the psychoanalytic movement and the Frankfurt School of Social Research (see Chs. 4, 5) as well as among several critics of sociobiology mentioned in this chapter (e.g., Jerry Hirsch, R. C. Lewontin, and Steven Rose). The attraction of Jewish intellectuals to the left is a general phenomenon and has typically co-occurred with a strong Jewish identity and sense of pursuing specifically Jewish interests (see Ch. 3).

Stephen Jay Gould and Leon Kamin are good examples of these trends. Gould’s (1992) perspective on social influences on evolutionary theory was mentioned in SAID (Ch. 5), and Gould himself would appear to be a prime example of this conflation of personal and ethnopolitical interests in the construction of science. Gould has been an ardent, highly publicized opponent of evolutionary approaches to human behavior. Like many of the other prominent critics of sociobiology (e.g., J. Hirsch, L. Kamin, R. C. Lewontin, and S. Rose; see Myers 1990), Gould is Jewish, and Michael Ruse (1989, 203) notes that a very prominent theme of Gould’s (1981/1996a) The Mismeasure of Man was how hereditarian views on intelligence had been used by “Teutonic supremacists” to discriminate against Jews early in the century. Gould’s views on the IQ debates of the 1920s and their link to the immigration issue and eventually the Holocaust bear scrutiny. They illustrate how skill as a propagandist and ethnic activist can be combined with a highly visible and prestigious academic position to have a major influence on public attitudes in an area of research with great implications for public policy.

Ruse points out that Gould’s book was very passionately written and was “widely criticized” by historians of psychology, suggesting that Gould had allowed his feelings about anti-Semitism to color his scientific writings on genetic influences on individual differences in intelligence.

Ruse goes on as follows:

It does not seem to me entirely implausible to suggest that Gould’s passion against human sociobiology was linked to the fear that it was yet another tool which could be used for anti-semitic purposes. I did ask Gould about this once… He did not entirely repudiate the idea, but inclined to think that the opposition stemmed more from Marxism, and as it so contingently happens, most American Marxists are from Eastern European Jewish families. Perhaps both factors were involved. (Ruse 1989, 203)

Gould’s comments highlight the fact that the role of Jewish academics in opposing Darwinian approaches to human behavior has often co-occurred with a strong commitment to a leftist political agenda. Indeed, Gould has acknowledged that his theory of evolution as punctuated equilibria was attractive to him as a Marxist because it posited periodic revolutionary upheavals in evolution rather than conservative, gradualist change. Gould learned his Marxism “at his Daddy’s knee” (see Gould 1996a, 39), indicating that he grew up as part of the Jewish-Marxist subculture discussed in Chapter 3. In a recent article Gould (1996c) reminisces fondly about the Forward, a politically radical but also ethnically conscious Yiddish newspaper (see Ch. 3), stating that he recalls that many of his relatives bought the newspaper daily. As Arthur Hertzberg (1989, 211-212) notes, “Those who read the Forward knew that the commitment of Jews to remain Jewish was beyond question and discussion.”

Although Gould’s family did not practice Jewish religious rituals, his family “embraced Jewish culture” (Mahler 1996). A common ingredient in Jewish culture is a sense of the historical prevalence of anti-Semitism (see SAID, Ch. 6), and Gould’s sense of the historical oppression of Jews comes out in his recent review of The Bell Curve (Gould, 1994b), where he rejects Herrnstein and Murray’s (1994) vision of a socially cohesive society where everyone has a valued role to play: “They [Herrnstein and Murray] have forgotten about the town Jew and the dwellers on the other side of the tracks in many of these idyllic villages.” Clearly Gould is blaming historical Western societies for failing to include Jews in their social structures of hierarchic harmony and social cohesiveness. In Chapter 8, I will return to the issue of the incompatibility of Judaism with this quintessential Western form of social structure.

Kamin and Gould have quite similar backgrounds in the leftist Jewish subculture described more fully in Chapter 3, and they share with many American Jews a strong personal animosity to the immigration legislation of the 1920s (see Ch. 7). Kamin, the son of an immigrant rabbi from Poland, acknowledges that “the experience growing up Jewish in a small and predominantly Christian town strongly sensitized him to the power of the social environment in shaping personality” (Fancher 1985, 201)—a comment that also suggests that Kamin grew up with a strong Jewish identity. While at Harvard, Kamin joined the Communist Party and became the New England editor of the party’s newspaper. After resigning from the party, he became a target of Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee Hearings in 1953. Kamin was charged and acquitted on technical grounds of charges of criminal contempt of Congress for failing to answer all the questions of the subcommittee. Fancher describes Kamin’s work on IQ as having “little pretense to ‘objectivity’” (p. 212), and suggests a link between Kamin’s background and his position on IQ: “No doubt reflecting that his own middle-European family [and, I suppose, other Jews] could have been excluded by the restrictive immigration laws, Kamin concluded that an arrogant and unfounded assumption of IQ heritability had helped produce an unjust social policy in the 1920s” (p. 208).

Kamin (1974a,b) and Gould (1981/1996a) have been in the forefront of spreading disinformation about the role of IQ testing in the immigration debates of the 1920s. Snyderman and Herrnstein (1983; see also Samelson 1982) show that Kamin and Gould misrepresented H. H. Goddard’s (1917) study of the IQ of Jewish immigrants as indicating that “83 percent of the Jews, 80 percent of the Hungarians, 79 percent of the Italians, and 87 percent of the Russians were ‘feeble-minded’” (Kamin 1974, 16). As Snyderman and Herrnstein (1983, 987) note, “The ‘fact’ that is most often cited as evidence of IQ’s nativistic bias was not based on IQ scores, not taken even by its discoverer as accurately representative of immigrants or as a clean measure of inherited abilities, and it used a test that was known at the time to exaggerate feeblemindedness in adult populations of all sorts.” Indeed, Goddard (1917, 270) noted that “we have no data on this point, but indirectly we may argue that it is far more probable that their condition is due to environment than it is due to heredity,” and he cited his own work indicating that immigrants accounted for only 4.5 percent of inmates in institutions for the feebleminded.

Degler (1991, 39) finds that Gould engaged in a “single minded pursuit” of Goddard (p. 40), presenting a false picture of Goddard as a “rigid hereditarian or elitist.” Gould ignored Goddard’s doubts and qualifications as well as his statements on the importance of the environment. There can be little doubt that Gould was engaging in scholarly fraud in this endeavor: Degler (1991, 354n16) notes that Gould quoted Goddard just prior to the following passage and was thus aware that Goddard was far from rigid in his beliefs on the nature of feeblemindedness: “Even now we are far from believing the case [on whether feeblemindedness is a unitary character] settled. The problem is too deep to be thus easily disposed of.” Nevertheless, Gould chose to ignore the passage. Gould also ignored Degler’s comments in his 1996 revision of The Mismeasure of Man described more fully below.

Moreover, Kamin and Gould present a highly exaggerated and largely false account of the general attitudes of the testing community on the subject of ethnic group differences in intelligence as well as the role of IQ testing in the congressional debates of the period (Degler 1991, 52; Samelson 1975, 473; Snyderman & Herrnstein 1983)—the latter point confirmed in my own reading of the debates. Indeed, IQ testing was never mentioned in either the House Majority Report or the Minority Report. (The Minority Report was written and signed by the two Jewish congressmen, Representatives Dickstein and Sabath, who led the battle against restrictionism.) Contrary to Gould’s (1981, 232) claim that “Congressional debates leading to passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 continually invoke the army [IQ] test data,” Snyderman and Herrnstein (1983, 994) note that “there is no mention of intelligence testing in the Act; test results on immigrants appear only briefly in the committee hearings and are then largely ignored or criticized, and they are brought up only once in over 600 pages of congressional floor debate, where they are subjected to further criticism without rejoinder. None of the major contemporary figures in testing… were called to testify, nor were their writings inserted into the legislative record” (Snyderman & Herrnstein 1983, 994). Also, as Samelson (1975) points out, the drive to restrict immigration originated long before IQ testing came into existence, and restriction was favored by a variety of groups, including organized labor, for reasons other than those related to race and IQ, including especially the fairness of maintaining the ethnic status quo in the United States (see Ch. 7).

Samelson (1975) describes several other areas of Kamin’s scholarly malfeasance, most notably his defamatory discussions of Goddard,⁶⁴ Lewis M. Terman, and Robert M. Yerkes in which these pioneers of mental testing are portrayed as allowing political beliefs to color their data. Terman, for example, found that Asians were not inferior to Caucasians, results he reasonably interpreted as indicating the inadequacy of cultural explanations; these findings are compatible with contemporary data (Lynn 1987; Rushton 1995). Jews were also overrepresented in Terman’s study of gifted children, a result that was trumpeted in the Jewish press at the time (e.g., The American Hebrew, July 13, 1923, p. 177) and is compatible with contemporary data (PTSDA, Ch. 7). Both findings are contrary to the theory of Nordic superiority.

Kamin (1974a, 27) also concluded that “the use of the 1890 census had only one purpose, acknowledged by the bill’s supporters. The ‘New Immigration’ had begun after 1890, and the law was designed to exclude the biologically inferior… peoples of southeastern Europe.” This is a very tendentious interpretation of the motives of the restrictionists. As discussed in Chapter 7, the 1890 census of the foreign born was used because the percentages of foreign born ethnic groups in 1890 approximated the proportions of these groups in the general population as of 1920. The principle argument of the restrictionists was that use of the 1890 census was fair to all ethnic groups.

This false picture of the 1920s debates was then used by Gould, Kamin, and others to argue that the “overtly racist immigration act” of 1924 (Kamin 1982, 98) was passed because of racist bias emanating from the IQ-testing community and that this law was a primary cause of the death of Jews in the Holocaust. Thus Kamin (1974, 27) concluded that “the law, for which the science of mental testing may claim substantial credit, resulted in the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of victims of the Nazi biological theorists. The victims were denied admission to the United States because the ‘German quota’ was filled.” Kamin’s portrayal of early-twentieth-century intelligence testing became received wisdom, appearing repeatedly in newspapers, popular magazines, court decisions, and occasionally even scholarly publications. My own introduction to Kamin’s ideas came from reading a popular textbook on developmental psychology I was using in my teaching.

Similarly, Gould proposes a link between hereditarian views on IQ and the 1924 U.S. immigration law that restricted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe and biased immigration in favor of the peoples of Northwestern Europe. The 1924 immigration law is then linked to the Holocaust: The quotas…slowed immigration from southern and eastern

Europe to a trickle. Throughout the 1930s, Jewish refugees, anticipating the holocaust, sought to emigrate, but were not admitted. The legal quotas, and continuing eugenical propaganda, barred them even in years when inflated quotas for western and northern European nations were not filled. Chase (1977) has estimated that the quotas barred up to 6 million southern, central, and eastern Europeans between 1924 and the outbreak of World War II (assuming that immigration had continued at its pre-1924 rate). We know what happened to many who wished to leave but had nowhere to go. The paths to destruction are often indirect, but ideas can be agents as sure as guns and bombs. (Gould 1981, 233; see also Gould 1998)

Indeed, although there is no evidence that IQ testing or eugenic theories had anything more than a trivial influence on the 1924 immigration law, there is evidence that the law was perceived by Jews as directed against them (see Ch. 7). Moreover, concerns about Jews and their ultimate effect on American society may well have been a motive of some of the gentiles favoring immigration restriction, including, among the intellectuals, Madison Grant and Charles Davenport.

Because of his desire to counteract the publicity given to The Bell Curve (see Gould 1996a, 31), Gould reissued The Mismeasure of Man in 1996 with a new introduction in which he states, “May I end up next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the devil’s mouth at the center of hell if I ever fail to present my most honest assessment and best judgment of the evidence for empirical truth” (p. 39). Despite this (rather self-consciously defensive) pledge of scholarly objectivity, Gould took no steps to deal with the objections of his critics—exactly the type of behavior one expects in a propagandist rather than a scholar (see Rushton 1997). The Snyderman and Herrnstein article, Samelson’s work, and Degler’s (1991) book are not cited at all, and Gould does not retract his statement that IQ testing was a prominent feature of the congressional immigration debates of the 1920s.

Perhaps most egregiously of all, Gould makes the amazing argument that he will continue to ignore all recent scholarship on IQ in favor of the older “classical” research because of the “transient and ephemeral” nature of contemporary scholarship (1996a, 22). The argument is that there is no progress in IQ research but only a recurrence of the same bad arguments—a comment that I doubt Gould would apply to any other area of science. Thus Gould continues to denigrate studies linking brain size with IQ despite a great deal of contrary research both prior to and especially since his 1981 edition (see summary below). Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging to get a more accurate measure of brain size, modern research thus vindicates the discoveries of nineteenth-century pioneers like Paul Broca, Francis Galton, and Samuel George Morton who are systematically defamed by Gould. However, as Rushton (1997) notes, Gould’s revised edition apparently omitted his 1981 discussion of Arthur Jensen’s research on the brain size/IQ correlation because of his realization that the contemporary data are unequivocal in their support of a moderate (r >.40) association. Instead, in the 1996 edition Gould reprints his approval of a 1971 review of the literature that concluded that there was no relationship. Gould’s revision thus ignores 25 years of research, including Van Valen’s (1974) paper on which Jensen’s ideas were based.

In his revision, Gould also does not discuss an article by J. S. Michael (1988) that shows that, contrary to Gould’s claim, Samuel George Morton did not fudge his data on race differences in skull size, intentionally or otherwise. Moreover, although Morton’s research “was conducted with integrity” (Michael 1988, 253), it included an error that actually favored a non-Caucasian group—an error that Gould failed to mention while at the same time Gould himself made systematic errors and used arbitrarily chosen procedures in his calculations. And Gould did so in a manner that favored his own hypothesis that there are no racial differences in cranial capacity.

Gould also failed to revise his defamation of H. H. Goddard in which he claimed that Goddard had doctored photographs of the famous Kallikak family to make them look mentally retarded and menacing. (In his study, Goddard had compared the Kallikaks, who were the descendants of a tavern maid and an upstanding citizen, with the descendants of the same man and his wife.) A subsequent study by Glenn and Ellis (1988) appearing well before the revised edition concluded, however, that these photographs are judged as appearing “kind.” To put it charitably, Gould’s presuppositions about the malicious intentions of IQ researchers results in his overattributing bias to others.

Finally, in the 1996 revision Gould failed to rebut arguments against his claim that g (i.e., general intelligence) was nothing more than a statistical artifact (see, e.g., Carroll 1995; Hunt 1995; Jensen & Weng 1994). This is noteworthy because in his introduction to the 1996 edition, Gould is clearly apologetic about his lack of expertise as a historian of science or as a psychologist, but he does claim to be an expert in factor analysis. His failure to mount a defense against his scholarly critics is therefore another example of his intellectual dishonesty in the service of his ethnopolitical agenda. As the review of the 1996 edition by Rushton (1997) indicates, a great many other errors of commission and omission abound in Mismeasure of Man, all having to do with politically sensitive issues involving racial differences and sex differences in cognitive abilities .

Gould has also strongly opposed the idea that there is progress in evolution, quite possibly because of his belief that such ideas among German evolutionists contributed to the rise of National Socialism (See Robert Richards’s comments in Lewin 1992, 143). As recounted by Lewin (1992, 144), Gould acknowledges an ideological influence on his beliefs but reiterates his belief that the trends toward greater intelligence and larger brain size are not important in the overall scheme of evolution. (The idea that advances in complexity are important to evolution continues to draw a great deal of support [Bonner 1988; Russell 1983, 1989; E. O. Wilson {see Miele 1998, 83}]). However, Gould acknowledges that there is a deeper issue at stake than whether all animal groups show this tendency. At the basis of this perspective is Gould’s assertion that human consciousness, intelligence, and the general trend toward larger brain size in human evolution are mere accidents and did not contribute to Darwinian fitness or to the solution of adaptive problems in ancestral environments (see Lewin 1992, 145-146).⁶⁵ His perspective is thus meant to be a skirmish in the nature-nurture debate over intelligence.⁶⁶

In addition, Dennett’s (1993, 1995) devastating analysis of the rhetorical devices used by Gould in his war against adaptationism leaves little doubt regarding the fundamental intellectual dishonesty of Gould’s writings. Dennett implies that a non-scientific agenda motivates Gould but stops short of attempting to analyze the reasons for this agenda. Gould (1993, 317) himself recounts an incident in which the British biologist Arthur Cain, referring to Gould and Lewontin’s (1979) famous anti-adaptationist paper “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme,” accused him of having “betrayed the norms of science and intellectual decency by denying something that we knew to be true (adaptationism) because he so disliked the political implications of an argument (sociobiology) based upon it.”

The verdict must be that Gould has indeed forfeited his membership in the “ancient and universal company of scholars” and will spend his afterlife in the devil’s mouth at the center of hell. However, it is noteworthy that despite the widespread belief that Gould has a highly politicized agenda and is dishonest and self-serving as a scholar, the prominent evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith (1995, 46) notes that “he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with… All this would not matter were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory.” Similarly, Steven Pinker (1997), a prominent linguist and a major figure in the evolutionary psychology movement, labels Gould’s ideas on adaptationism “misguided” and “uninformed.” He also takes Gould to task for failing to properly cite the widely known work of G. C. Williams and Donald Symons in which these authors have proposed non-adaptive explanations for some human behaviors while nevertheless adopting an adaptationist perspective on human behavior generally. Gould has thus dishonestly taken credit for others’ ideas while utilizing them in a wholly inappropriate manner to discredit the adaptationist program generally.

In an article entitled “Homo deceptus: Never trust Stephen Jay Gould,” journalist Robert Wright (1996), author of The Moral Animal (Basic Books, 1994), makes the same charge in a debate over a flagrantly dishonest interpretation by Gould (1996b) of the evolutionary psychology of sex differences. Wright notes that Gould “has convinced the public he is not merely a great writer, but a great theorist of evolution. Yet among top-flight evolutionary biologists, Gould is considered a pest—not just a lightweight but an actively muddled man who has warped the public’s understanding of Darwinism.” A false picture perhaps, but one that is not without its usefulness in satisfying political and, I suppose, ethnic agendas.

Another prominent biologist, John Alcock (1997), provides an extended and, I think, accurate analysis of several aspects of Gould’s rhetorical style: demonstrations of erudition—foreign phrases, poetry—irrelevant to the intellectual arguments but widely regarded even by his critics; branding the opposition with denigrating labels, such as “pop science,” “pop psychology,” “cardboard Darwinism,” or “fundamentalist Darwinians” (similarly, Pinker [1997, 55] decries Gould’s hyperbolic rhetoric, including his description of the ideas of evolutionary psychology as “‘fatuous,’ ‘pathetic,’ and ‘egregiously simplistic’ and his use of some twenty-five synonyms for ‘fanatical’ “); oversimplifying his opponents’ positions in order to set up straw-man arguments, the classic being labeling his opponents as “genetic determinists”; protecting his own position by making illusory concessions to give the appearance of fair-mindedness in the attempt to restrict debate; claiming the moral high ground; ignoring relevant data known to all in the scientific community; proposing nonadaptationist alternatives without attempting to test them and ignoring data supporting adaptationist interpretations; arguing that proximate explanations (i.e., explanations of how a trait works at the neurophysiological level) render ultimate explanations (i.e., the adaptive function of the trait) unnecessary.

The comments of Maynard Smith, Wright, and Alcock highlight the important issue that despite the scholarly community’s widespread recognition of Gould’s intellectual dishonesty, Gould has been highly publicized as a public spokesperson on issues related to evolution and intelligence. As Alcock (1997) notes, Gould, as a widely published Harvard professor, makes it respectable to be an anti-adaptationist, and I have noticed this effect not only among the educated public but also among many academics outside the biological sciences. He has had access to highly prestigious intellectual forums, including a regular column in Natural History and, along with Richard C. Lewontin (another scholar-activist whose works are discussed here), he is often featured as a book reviewer in the New York Review of Books (NYRB). The NYRB has long been a bastion of the intellectual left. In Chapter 4, I discuss the role of the NYRB in promulgating psychoanalysis, and in Chapter 6 the NYRB is listed among the journals of the New York Intellectuals, a predominantly Jewish coterie that dominated intellectual discourse in the post-World War II era. The point here is that Gould’s career of intellectual dishonesty has not existed in a vacuum but has been part and parcel of a wide-ranging movement that has dominated the most prestigious intellectual arenas in the United States and the West—a movement that is here conceptualized as a facet of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy.

On a more personal level, I clearly recall that one of my first noteworthy experiences in graduate school in the behavioral sciences was being exposed to the great “instinct” debate between the German ethologists Konrad Lorenz and Iranäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt versus several predominantly Jewish American developmental psychobiologists (D. S. Lehrman, J. S. Rosenblatt, T. C. Schnierla, H. Moltz, G. Gottleib, and E. Tobach). Lorenz’s connections to National Socialism (see Lerner 1992, 59ff) were a barely concealed aspect of this debate, and I remember feeling that I was witnessing some sort of ethnic warfare rather than a dispassionate scientific debate of the evidence. Indeed, the intense, extra-scientific passions these issues raised in some participants were openly admitted toward the end of this extraordinary conflict. In his 1970 contribution, Lehrman stated:

I should not point out irrational, emotion-laden elements in Lorenz’s reaction to criticism without acknowledging that, when I look over my 1953 critique of his theory, I perceive elements of hostility to which my target would have been bound to react. My critique does not now read to me like an analysis of a scientific problem, with an evaluation of the contribution of a particular point of view, but rather like an assault upon a theoretical point of view, the writer of which assault was not interested in pointing out what positive contributions that point of view had made.

More recently, as the debate has shifted away from opposing human ethology toward attacks on human sociobiology, several of these developmental psychobiologists have also become prominent critics of sociobiology (see Myers 1990, 225).

This is not, of course, to deny the very important contributions of these developmental psychobiologists and their emphasis on the role of the environment in behavioral development—a tradition that remains influential within developmental psychology in the writings of several theorists, including Alan Fogel, Richard Lerner, Arnold Sameroff, and Esther Thelen. Moreover, it must be recognized that several Jews have been important contributors to evolutionary thinking as it applies to humans as well as human behavioral genetics, including Daniel G. Freedman, Richard Herrnstein, Seymour Itzkoff, Irwin Silverman, Nancy Segal, Lionel Tiger, and Glenn Weisfeld. Of course, non-Jews have been counted among the critics of evolutionary-biological thinking. Nevertheless, the entire episode clearly indicates that there are often important human interests that involve Jewish identity and that influence scientific debate. The suggestion here is that one consequence of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy has been to skew these debates in a manner that has impeded progress in the biological and social sciences.

Richard Lerner (1992) in his Final Solutions: Biology, Prejudice, and Genocide is perhaps the most egregious example of a scientist motivated to discredit evolutionary-biological thinking because of putative links with antiSemitism. (Barry Mehler, a protégé of Jerry Hirsch, is also explicit in making these linkages, but he is far less prominent academically and functions mainly as a publicist for these views in leftist intellectual media. See Mehler [1984a,b]. Mehler graduated from Yeshiva University and organized a program, “The Jewish Experience in America 1880 to 1975,” at Washington University in St. Louis, suggesting a strong Jewish identification.) Lerner is a prominent developmental psychologist, and his volume indicates an intense personal involvement directed at combating anti-Semitism by influencing theory in the behavioral sciences. Prior to discussing the explicit links between Lerner’s theoretical perspective and his attempt to combat anti-Semitism, I will describe his theory and illustrate the type of strained thinking with which he has attempted to discredit the application of evolutionary thinking to human behavior.

Central to this program is Lerner’s rejection of biological determinism in favor of a dynamic, contextualist approach to human development. Lerner also rejects environmental determinism, but there is little discussion of the latter view because environmental determinism is “perhaps less often socially pernicious” (p. xx). In this regard, Lerner is surely wrong. A theory that there is no human nature would imply that humans could easily be programmed to accept all manner of exploitation, including slavery. From a radical environmentalist perspective, it should not matter how societies are constructed, since people should be able to learn to accept any type of social structure. Women could easily be programmed to accept rape, and ethnic groups could be programmed to accept their own domination by other ethnic groups. The view that radical environmentalism is not socially pernicious also ignores the fact that the communist government of the Soviet Union murdered millions of its citizens and later engaged in officially sponsored anti-Semitism while committed to an ideology of radical environmentalism.⁶⁷

Lerner’s dynamic contextualism pays lip service to biological influences while actually rendering them inconsequential and unanalyzable. This theory has strong roots in the developmental psychobiological tradition described above, and there are numerous references to these writers. The dynamic contextualist perspective conceptualizes development as a dialectical interaction between organism and environment. Biological influences are viewed as a reality, but they are ultimately unanalyzable, since they are viewed as being inextricably fused with environmental influences. The most notable conclusion is that any attempt to study genetic variation as an independently analyzable influence on individual differences (the program of the science of quantitative behavior genetics) is rejected. Many of the critics of sociobiology have also been strong opponents of behavior genetic research (e.g., S. J. Gould, J. Hirsch, L. Kamin, R. C. Lewontin, and S. Rose). For a particularly egregious example embodying practically every possible misunderstanding of basic behavior genetic concepts, see Gould (1998).

It bears mentioning that dynamic contextualism and its emphasis on the dialectical interaction between organism and environment bear more than a passing resemblance to Marxism. The foreword of Lerner’s book was written by R. C. Lewontin, the Harvard population biologist who has engaged in a high-profile attempt to fuse science, leftist politics, and opposition to evolutionary and biological theorizing about human behavior (e.g., Levins & Lewontin 1985; see Wilson 1994). Lewontin (with Steven Rose and Leon Kamin) was the first author of Not in Our Genes (1984)—a book that begins with a statement of the authors’ commitment to socialism (p. ix) and, among a great many other intellectual sins, continues the disinformation regarding the role of IQ testing in the immigration debates of the 1920s and its putative links to the Holocaust (p. 27). Indeed, E. O. Wilson (1994, 344), whose synthetic volume Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Wilson 1975) inaugurated the field of sociobiology, notes that “without Lewontin, the [sociobiology] controversy would not have been so intense or attracted such widespread attention.” In his foreword to Lerner’s book, Lewontin states that developmental contextualism is “the alternative to biological and cultural determinism. It is the statement of the developmental contextual view that is the important central point of Final Solutions, and it is the full elaboration of that point of view that is a pressing program for social theory. Nowhere has this world view been put more succinctly than in Marx’s third Thesis on Feurbach” (p. ix). Lewontin goes on to quote a passage from Marx that does indeed express something like the fundamental idea of developmental contextualism. Gould (1987, 153) has also endorsed a Marxist dialectical perspective in the social sciences.

Lerner devotes much of his book to showing that dynamic contextualism, because of its emphasis on plasticity, provides a politically acceptable perspective on racial and sexual differences, as well as promising a hope for ending anti-Semitism. This type of messianic, redemptionist attempt to develop a universalist theoretical framework within which Jewish-gentile group differences are submerged in importance is a common feature of other predominantly Jewish movements in the twentieth century, including radical political theories and psychoanalysis (see Chs. 3, 4). The common theme is that these ideologies have been consistently promoted by individuals who, like Lerner, are self-consciously pursuing a Jewish ethnic and political agenda. (Recall also Gould’s tendency to seize the moral high ground.) However, the ideologies are advocated because of their universalist promise to lead humanity to a higher level of morality—a level of morality in which there is continuity of Jewish group identity but an eradication of anti-Semitism. As such, dynamic contextualism can be seen as one of many post-Enlightenment attempts to reconcile Judaism with the modern world.

There is no question that Lerner strongly believes in the moral imperative of his position, but his moral crusade has led him well beyond science in his attempts to discredit biological theories in the interests of combating antiSemitism.⁶⁸ Lerner coauthored an article in the journal Human Development (Lerner & von Eye 1992) directed at combating the influence of biological thinking in research on human development. My edited volume (Sociobiological Perspectives on Human Development, MacDonald 1988b) is prominently cited as an example of an evolutionary approach deriving from E. O. Wilson’s work and as a point of view that has “found support and application” (p. 13). As their example of how this point of view has been supported and applied, Lerner and von Eye cite the work of J. Philippe Rushton on racial differences in r/K reproductive styles. The implication would appear to be that my edited volume was somehow a basis of Rushton’s work. This is inaccurate, since (1) the volume never mentioned Negroid-Caucasian differences in intelligence or any other phenotype, and (2) the book was published after Rushton had already published his work on the r/K theory of racial differences. However, the association between this book and Rushton is highly effective in producing a negative evaluation of the book because of Rushton’s current persona non grata status as a theorist of racial differences (see Gross 1990).

The next section of the Lerner and von Eye article is entitled “Genetic Determinism as Sociobiology’s Key to Interdisciplinary Integration.” Implicit in this juxtaposition is the implication that the authors in my edited volume accept the thesis of genetic determinism, and indeed, at the end of the section Lerner and von Eye lump my edited volume together with the work of a number of other sociobiological writers who are said to believe that anatomy is destiny, that environmental influences are fictional, and that “the social world does not interact with humans’ genes” (p. 18).

Scholars connected to evolutionary perspectives on human behavior or behavior genetics have commonly been branded genetic determinists in this highly politicized literature. Such accusations are a staple of Gouldian rhetoric and are a major theme of Lewontin et al.’s (1984) overtly political Not in Our Genes. I rather doubt that any of the writers discussed in this section of Lerner and von Eye’s paper can accurately be described as genetic determinists (see the reply to Lerner & von Eye’s article by Burgess & Molenaar [1993]). Indeed, Degler (1991, 310) accurately summarizes recent evolutionary thinking in the social sciences as characterized by “a full recognition of the power and influence of environment on culture.” However, I would like to stress here that this is a completely inaccurate characterization of my writings and it is difficult to suppose that Lerner was unaware of this. Two of my contributions to the edited volume are greatly concerned with environmental and cultural influences on behavior and the underdetermination of behavior by the genes. In particular, my theoretical perspective, as described in Chapter 1 of the edited volume (MacDonald 1988b), takes a strong position supporting the importance of developmental plasticity and affirming the importance of contextual influences on human development. And in both of these sections of my paper I cite Richard Lerner’s work. However, Lerner and von Eye are seemingly careful to avoid actually describing what I have written. Instead, their strategy is that of innuendo and guilt by association: By placing my edited book at the end of a section devoted to writers who are supposedly genetic determinists, they manage to imply that all of the writers in the volume are genetic determinists. Unfortunately, such innuendo is typical in attacks on evolutionary perspectives on human behavior.

The point here is that there is every reason to suppose that a major impetus for these attacks is an attempt to combat anti-Semitism. Lerner begins his preface to Final Solutions: Biology, Prejudice, and Genocide with an emotionally wrenching portrait of his childhood surrounded by stories of Nazi atrocities. “As a Jewish boy growing up in Brooklyn in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s I could not escape Hitler. He, Nazis, the Gestapo, Auschwitz were everywhere” (p. xv). Lerner re-creates a conversation with his grandmother describing the fate of some of his relatives at the hands of the Nazis. He asks why the Nazis hated the Jews, and his grandmother responds by saying, “Just because.” Lerner states, “In the time that has passed since that afternoon in my grandmother’s apartment I have learned—and increasingly so as the years go by—how deeply I was affected by these early lessons about Nazi genocide. I now understand that much of my life has been shaped by my attempts to go beyond the answer of ‘Just because’” (p. xvii).

Lerner states that he chose to study developmental psychology because the nature-nurture issue is central to this field and therefore central to his attempt to combat anti-Semitism. Lerner thus apparently actually chose his career in an effort to advance Jewish interests in the social sciences. In the preface, Lerner cites as intellectual influences virtually the entire list of predominantly Jewish developmental psychobiologists and anti-sociobiologists mentioned above, including Gottleib, Gould, Kamin, Lewontin, Rose, Schneirla (who was not Jewish), and Tobach. As is common among Jewish historians (see SAID, Ch. 7), Lerner dedicates the book to his family, “To all my relatives… Your lives will not be forgotten” (p. xxii). Clearly there is no pretense that this book is a dispassionate scientific endeavor to develop a theory of behavioral development or to come to grips with ethnically based social conflict.

The central message of Lerner’s book is that there is a possible causal chain linking Darwinism to an ideology of genetic determinism, to the legitimization of the status quo as a biological imperative, to negatively evaluating individuals with “inferior” genotypes, to eugenics, and finally to destruction of those with inferior genes. This story line is said to have been played out in several historical instances, including the massacres of Native Americans and the Ottoman genocide of Armenians, and most particularly in the Holocaust. It is nowhere mentioned that an ideology of genetic determinism is hardly a necessary condition for genocide, since there are a great many historical examples of genocide in societies where Darwin was unknown, including the annihilation of the Amorites and Midianites by the Israelites described in the Tanakh (see PTSDA, Ch. 3)—examples that are ignored by Lerner. Nor is there evidence that, for example, the Ottoman Turks were acquainted with Darwin or had views, scientific or otherwise, about the genetic determination of behavior.

Lerner’s agenda is to discredit evolutionary thinking because of its association with Nazism. The logic is as follows (Lerner 1992, 17-19): Although Lerner acknowledges that genetic determinists need not be “racists” and that they may even have “enlightened” political views, he states that genetic determinism is an ideology that can be used to give scientific credence to their viewpoint: “The doctrine of biological determinism exists ready for co-optation by proponents of such a political movement” (p. 17). Sociobiology, as the most recent incarnation of the scientific justification of genetic determinism, must be intellectually discredited: “Contemporary sociobiologists are certainly not neo-Nazis. They do not in any way advocate genocide and may not even espouse conservative political views. Nevertheless, the correspondence between their ideas (especially regarding women) and those of the Nazi theorists is more than striking” (p. 20).

Lerner correctly describes Nazi ideology as essentially an ideology of group impermeability, “the belief that the world… may be divided unequivocally into two major groups: an ingroup comprising those possessing the best features of human existence, and an outgroup comprising the worst features of human existence. There can be no crossing-over between these groups, because blood, or genes, divides them” (p. 17). Similarly, Lewontin, in his foreword to Lerner’s book, states that “whatever the generating forces that keep nationalism alive… they must, in the end, assert the unchanging and unchangeable nature of social identity… Exploiters and exploited alike share in the consciousness of a cultural and biological heritage that marks out indelible group boundaries that transcend human historical development” (p. viii).

Lerner and Lewontin condemn sociobiology because they suppose that sociobiology could be used to justify such a result. However, the evolutionary theory of social identity processes developed in SAID (Ch. 1) as the basis of the theory of anti-Semitism implies just the opposite: Although humans appear to be biologically predisposed toward ingroup-outgroup conflict, there is no reason whatever to suppose that group membership or group permeability itself is genetically determined; that is, there is no reason to suppose that there is a genetic imperative that societies must be organized around impermeable groups, and indeed, prototypical Western societies have not been organized in this manner. Social identity research indicates that hostility toward outgroups occurs even in randomly composed groups and even in the absence of between-group competition. The outstanding feature of Judaism has been that it has steadfastly raised barriers between Jews as an ingroup and the surrounding society as an outgroup. But, though it is reasonable to suppose that Jews are genetically more prone to ethnocentrism than Western peoples (see PTSDA, Ch. 8; SAID, Ch. 1), the erection of cultural barriers between Jews and gentiles is a critical aspect of Judaism as a culture.

Moreover, a salient point here is that there is no appreciation in either Lerner or Lewontin of the great extent to which Jews have themselves created impermeable groups in which genetic blood lines were of the highest importance, in which there were hierarchies of racial purity, and in which genetic and cultural assimilation were viewed as anathema (see PTSDA, passim). Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy has resulted in societies torn apart by internal conflict between impermeable, competing ethnic groups (see SAID, Chs. 2-5). Nevertheless, Jewish cultural practices are at least a necessary condition for the group impermeability that has been so central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. It is thus a supreme irony that Lewontin and Lerner should be attempting to combat anti-Semitism by saying that ethnic identification and the permeability of groups are not genetically determined.

There are good reasons to suppose that group permeability is not genetically determined, and the evidence reviewed in PTSDA indicates that Jews have been exquisitely aware of this since the origins of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. At times Jewish groups have endeavored to foster an illusion of group permeability in order to minimize anti-Semitism (see SAID, Ch. 6). Although Jews may well be genetically predisposed to form impermeable ethnic groups and resist genetic and cultural assimilation, there is little reason to suppose that this is genetically determined. Indeed, the evidence reviewed in PTSDA (Chs. 7, 8) indicates the central importance of several cultural and environmental factors for the success of Judaism as a relatively impermeable group evolutionary strategy: intensive socialization for a Jewish ingroup identity and group allegiance, the great variety of mechanisms of separation (clothes, language, hair styles, etc.), and the cultural invention of the hereditary priestly and levitical classes. Moreover, the removal of intensive cultural separatism characteristic of Judaism in traditional societies has resulted in a long term decline of Diaspora Judaism. As a result, in the contemporary Western world Jewish groups often go to great lengths to discourage intermarriage and to develop greater Jewish consciousness and commitment among Jews. This attempt to reestablish the cultural supports for Jewish identification and non-assmilation often involves the suggestion of a return to Jewish religious belief and ritual as the only way to stave off the long-term assimilative pressures of contemporary Western societies (see SAID, Ch. 9).

CONCLUSION

A common thread of this chapter has been that scientific skepticism and what one might term “scientific obscurantism” have been useful tools in combating scientific theories one dislikes for deeper reasons. Thus, the Boasian demand for the highest standards of proof for generalizations about culture and for establishing a role for genetic variation in the development of individual differences coincided with the acceptance of an “anti-theory” of culture that was fundamentally in opposition to attempts to develop classifications and generalizations in the field.⁶⁹ Similarly, the dynamic-contextualist theoretical perspective, though rejecting behavioral genetics and evolutionary theorizing about human development as failing to meet scientific standards of proof, has proposed a theory of development in which the relation between genes and environment is an extremely complex and ultimately unanalyzable fusion. Moreover, a major theme of Chapter 5 is that the radical skepticism of the Frankfurt School of Social Research was self-consciously directed at deconstructing universalist, assimilatory theories of society as a homogeneous, harmonious whole.

Scientific skepticism regarding politically sensitive issues has also been a powerful trend in the writings of S. J. Gould (see, e.g., Gould 1987, passim; Gould 1991, 13). Carl Degler (1991, 322) says of Gould that “an opponent of sociobiology like Gould does indeed emphasize that interaction [between biology and environment], but at the same time, he persistently resists investigations of the role of each of the interacting elements.” Jensen (1982, 124) states of Gould’s work on intelligence testing, “I believe that he has succeeded brilliantly in obfuscating all the important open questions that actually concern today’s scientists.” This type of intellectual work is aimed at precluding the development of general theories of human behavior in which genetic variation plays an independently analyzable causative role in producing adaptive behavior.

We have seen how R. C. Lewontin has linked theories of behavioral development with Marxist political ideology. As do Lerner and Gould, Lewontin advocates theories proposing that nature consists of extremely complex dialectical interactions between organism and environment. Lewontin rejects reductionistic scientific methods, such as quantitative behavioral genetics or the use of analysis of variance procedures, because they inevitably oversimplify real processes in their use of averages (Segersträle 1986). The result is a hyper-purism that settles for nothing less than absolute certainty and absolutely correct methodology, epistemology, and ontology. In developmental psychology such a program would ultimately lead to rejection of all generalizations, including those relating to the average effects of environments. Because each individual has a unique set of genes and is constantly developing in a unique and constantly changing environment, God himself would probably have difficulty providing a deterministic account of individual development, and in any case such an account must necessarily, like a Boasian theory of culture, be deferred long into the future.

By adopting this philosophy of science, Lewontin is able to discredit attempts by scientists to develop theories and generalizations and thus, in the name of scientific rigor, avoid the possibility of any politically unacceptable scientific findings. Segersträle notes that, while using this theory as a weapon against biological views in the social sciences, Lewontin’s own empirical research in population biology has remained firmly within the reductionistic tradition.

Gould and Lewontin’s (1979) critique of adaptationism may also be viewed as an exemplar of the skeptical thrust of Jewish intellectual activity. Acknowledging the existence of adaptations, the argument effectively problematizes the status of any putative adaptation. Gould (e.g., 1994a) then goes from the possibility that any putative adaptation may simply be a “spandrel” that, like the architectural form from which its name derives, results from structural constraints imposed by true adaptations, to the remarkable suggestion that the human mind be viewed as a collection of such nonfunctional spandrels. As noted above, Gould’s larger agenda is to convince his audience that the human brain has not evolved to solve adaptive problems—a view anthropologist Vincent Sarich (1995) has termed “behavioral creationism.” (For mainstream views on adaptationism, see Boyd & Richerson 1985, 282; Dennett 1995; Hull 1988, 424-426; Williams 1985.) Indeed, fascination with the slippery rhetoric of the Gould and Lewontin “spandrels” article has resulted in an entire volume of essays dedicated to dissecting the writing style of this essay (Selzer 1993; see especially Fahnestock 1993; see also Joseph Carroll’s [1995, 449ff] comments on the deceptiveness of Lewontin’s rhetorical style).

Scientific skepticism is a powerful approach, since a very basic feature of science is an openness to criticism and a requirement that arguments be supported with evidence. As E. O. Wilson (1994, 345) notes, “By adopting a narrow criterion of publishable research, Lewontin freed himself to pursue a political agenda unencumbered by science. He adopted the relativist view that accepted truth, unless based on ineluctable fact, is no more than a reflection of dominant ideology and political power.”⁷⁰ Similar themes with similar motivations characterize the ideologies of the Frankfurt School and postmodernism discussed in Chapter 5.

Nevertheless, Lewontin (1994a, 34) portrays his ideologically inspired efforts as deriving from a concern for scientific rigor: “We demand certain canons of evidence and argument that are formal and without reference to empirical content… the logic of statistical inference; the power of replicating experiments; the distinction between observations and causal claims.” The result is a thoroughgoing skepticism; for example, all theories of the origins of the sexual division of labor are said to be “speculative” (Lewontin 1994a, 34). Similarly, Gould rejects all accounts of the empirical data in the area of intelligence testing but provides no alternatives. As Jensen (1982, 131) notes, “Gould offers no alternative ideas to account for all of these well-established observations. His mission in this area appears entirely nihilistic.” Similarly, Buss et al. (1998) note that whereas the adaptationist perspective in psychology has resulted in a rich body of theoretical predictions and in numerous confirmatory empirical studies, Gould’s ideas of spandrels and exaptations (a term variously used by Gould, but perhaps most often referring to mechanisms that have new biological functions that are not the ones that caused the original selection of the mechanism) has resulted in no theoretical predictions and no empirical research. Again, the mission seems to be what one might term nihilistic anti-science.

As with Boas, Lewontin holds biologically oriented research on humans to an extremely rigorous standard but is remarkably lenient in the standards required to prove biology has very little influence. Lewontin claims, for example, that “nearly all the biology of gender is bad science” (Lewontin 1994a, 34), but on the following page he states as an obvious truth that “the human being is the nexus of a large number of weakly acting causes.” And Lewontin states without argument or reference that “no one has ever found a correlation between cognitive ability and brain size” (p. 34). At this writing there have been at least 26 published studies on 39 independent samples showing a correlation of approximately 0.20 between head circumference and IQ (see Wickett et al. 1994); there have also been at least 6 published studies showing a correlation of approximately 0.40 between brain size and IQ using the more accurate technique of magnetic resonance imaging to directly scan the brain (Andreasen et al. 1993; Egan et al. 1994; Harvey et al. 1994; Raz et al. 1993; Wickett et al. 1994; Willerman et al. 1991). Given this body of findings, it is at least misleading to make such a statement, although Lewontin (see Lewontin 1994b) would presumably argue that none of these studies reach acceptable levels of scientific proof.

Franz Boas would be proud.

3

Jews and the Left

I could never understand what Judaism had to do with Marxism, and why questioning the latter was tantamount to being disloyal to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. (Ralph de Toledano [1996, 50] discussing his experiences with Eastern European Jewish intellectuals)

Socialism, for many immigrant Jews, was not merely politics or an idea, it was an encompassing culture, a style of perceiving and judging through which to structure their lives. (Irving Howe 1982, 9)

The association between Jews and the political left has been widely noticed and commented on beginning in the nineteenth century. “Whatever their situation… in almost every country about which we have information, a segment of the Jewish community played a very vital role in movements designed to undermine the existing order” (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 110).

On the surface at least, Jewish involvement in radical political activity may seem surprising. Marxism, at least as envisaged by Marx, is the very antithesis of Judaism. Marxism is an exemplar of a universalist ideology in which ethnic and nationalist barriers within the society and indeed between societies are eventually removed in the interests of social harmony and a sense of communal interest. Moreover, Marx himself, though born of two ethnically Jewish parents, has been viewed by many as an anti-Semite.⁷¹ His critique of Judaism (On the Jewish Question [Marx 1843/1975]) conceptualized Judaism as fundamentally concerned with egoistic money seeking; it had achieved world domination by making both man and nature into salable objects. Marx viewed Judaism as an abstract principle of human greed that would end in the communist society of the future. However, Marx argued against the idea that Jews must give up their Jewishness to be German citizens, and he envisioned that Judaism, freed from the principle of greed, would continue to exist in the transformed society after the revolution (Katz 1986, 113).

Whatever Marx’s views on the subject, a critical question in the following is whether acceptance of radical, universalist ideologies and participation in radical, universalist movements are compatible with Jewish identification. Does the adoption of such an ideology essentially remove one from the Jewish community and its traditional commitment to separatism and Jewish nationhood? Or, to rephrase this question in terms of my perspective, could the advocacy of radical, universalist ideologies and actions be compatible with continued participation in Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy?

Notice that this question is different from the question of whether Jews as a group can be adequately characterized as advocating radical political solutions for gentile societies. There is no implication that Judaism constitutes a unified movement or that all segments of the Jewish community have the same beliefs or attitudes toward the gentile community (see Ch. 1). Jews may constitute a predominant or necessary element in radical political movements and Jewish identification may be highly compatible with or even facilitate involvement in radical political movements without most Jews being involved in these movements and even if Jews are a numerical minority within the movement.

RADICALISM AND JEWISH IDENTIFICATION

The hypothesis that Jewish radicalism is compatible with Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy implies that radical Jews continue to identify as Jews. There is little doubt that the vast majority of the Jews who advocated leftist causes beginning in the late nineteenth century were strongly self-identified as Jews and saw no conflict between Judaism and radicalism (Marcus 1983, 280ff; Levin 1977, 65, 1988, I, 4-5; Mishkinsky 1968, 290, 291; Rothman & Lichter 1982, 92-93; Sorin 1985, passim). Indeed, the largest Jewish radical movements in both Russia and Poland were the Jewish Bunds which had an exclusively Jewish membership and a very clear program of pursuing specifically Jewish interests. The proletarianism of the Polish Bund was really part of an attempt to preserve their national identity as Jews (Marcus 1983, 282). Fraternity with the non-Jewish working class was intended to facilitate their specifically Jewish aims, and a similar statement can be made for the Russian Jewish Bund (Liebman 1979, 111ff). Since the Bunds comprised by far the majority of the Jewish radical movement in these areas, the vast majority of Jews participating in radical movements in this period were strongly identified as Jews.

Moreover, many Jewish members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union appear to have been intent on establishing a form of secular Judaism rather than ending Jewish group continuity. The postrevolutionary Soviet government and the Jewish socialist movements struggled over the issue of the preservation of national identity (Levin 1988; Pinkus 1988). Despite an official ideology in which nationalism and ethnic separatism were viewed as reactionary, the Soviet government was forced to come to grips with the reality of very strong ethnic and national identifications within the Soviet Union. As a result, a Jewish Section of the Communist Party (Evsektsiya) was created. This section “fought hard against the Zionist-Socialist Parties, against democratic Jewish communities, against the Jewish faith and against Hebrew culture. It had, however, succeeded in shaping a secular life pattern based on Yiddish as the recognized national language of the Jewish nationality; in fighting for Jewish national survival in the 1920s; and in working in the 1930s to slow down the assimilatory process of the Sovietization of Jewish language and culture” (Pinkus 1988, 62).⁷²

The result of these efforts was the development of a state-sponsored separatist Yiddish subculture, including Yiddish schools and even Yiddish soviets. This separatist culture was very aggressively sponsored by the Evsektsiya. Reluctant Jewish parents were forced “by terror” to send their children to these culturally separatist schools rather than schools where the children would not have to relearn their subjects in the Russian language in order to pass entrance examinations (Gitelman 1991, 12). The themes of the prominent and officially honored Soviet Jewish writers in the 1930s also bespeak the importance of ethnic identity: “The thrust of their prose, poetry and drama boiled down to one idea—the limitations on their rights under tsarism and the flowering of once-oppressed Jews under the sun of the Lenin-Stalin constitution” (Vaksberg 1994, 115).

Further, beginning in 1942 and extending into the post-war period, the government-sponsored Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) served to promote Jewish cultural and political interests (including an attempt to establish a Jewish republic in the Crimea) until it was dissolved by the government amid charges of Jewish nationalism, resistance to assimilation, and Zionist sympathies in 1948 (Kostyrchenko 1995, 30ff; Vaksberg 1994, 112ff). The leaders of the JAC strongly identified as Jews. The following comments of JAC leader Itsik Fefer on his attitudes during the war indicate a powerful sense of Jewish peoplehood extending backward in historical time:

I spoke that I love my people. But who doesn’t love one’s own people?… My interests in regard to the Crimea and Birobidzhan [an area of the Soviet Union designated for Jewish settlement] had been dictated by this. It seemed to me that only Stalin could rectify that historical injustice which had been created by the Roman emperors. It seemed to me that only the Soviet government could rectify this injustice, by creating a Jewish nation. (In Kostyrchenko 1995, 39)

Despite their complete lack of identification with Judaism as a religion and despite their battles against some of the more salient signs of Jewish group separatism, membership in the Soviet Communist Party by these Jewish activists was not incompatible with developing mechanisms designed to ensure Jewish group continuity as a secular entity. In the event, apart from the offspring of interethnic marriages, very few Jews lost their Jewish identity during the entire Soviet era (Gitelman 1991, 5),⁷³ and the post-World War II years saw a powerful strengthening of Jewish culture and Zionism in the Soviet Union. Beginning with the dissolution of the JAC, the Soviet government initiated a campaign of repression against all manifestations of Jewish nationalism and Jewish culture, including closing Jewish theaters and museums and disbanding Jewish writers unions.

The issue of the Jewish identification of Bolsheviks who were Jews by birth is complex. Pipes (1993, 102-104) asserts that Bolsheviks of Jewish background in the czarist period did not identify as Jews, although they were perceived by gentiles as acting on behalf of Jewish interests and were subjected to antiSemitism. For example, Leon Trotsky, the second most important Bolshevik behind Lenin, took great pains to avoid the appearance that he had any Jewish identity or that he had any interest in Jewish issues at all.⁷⁴

It is difficult to believe that these radicals were wholly without a Jewish identity, given that they were regarded as Jews by others and were the target of anti-Semites. In general, anti-Semitism increases Jewish identification (SAID, Ch. 6). However, it is possible that in these cases Jewish identity was largely externally imposed. For example, the conflict in the 1920s between Stalin and the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Solkolnikov (all of whom were ethnic Jews), had strong overtones of a Jewish-gentile group conflict: “The obvious ‘alienness’ allegedly uniting an entire bloc of candidates was a glaring circumstance” (Vaksberg 1994, 19; see also Ginsberg 1993, 53; Lindemann 1997, 452; Pinkus 1988, 85-86; Rapoport 1990, 38; Rothman & Lichter 1982, 94). For all of the participants, the Jewish or gentile backgrounds of their adversaries was highly salient, and indeed Sidney Hook (1949, 464) notes that non-Jewish Stalinists used anti-Semitic arguments against the Trotskyists. Vaksberg quotes Vyacheslav Molotov (Minister of Foreign Affairs and the second most prominent Soviet leader) as saying that Stalin passed over Kamenev because he wanted a non-Jew to head the government. Moreover, the internationalism of the Jewish bloc compared to the nationalism implicit in the Stalinist position (Lindemann 1997, 450) is more congruent with Jewish interests and certainly reflects a common theme of Jewish attitudes in post-Enlightenment societies generally. Throughout this period into the 1930s “for the Kremlin and the Lubyanka [the Russian secret police] it was not religion but blood that determined Jewishness” (Vaksberg 1994, 64). Indeed, the secret police used ethnic outsiders (e.g., Jews in the traditionally anti-Semitic Ukraine) as agents because they would have less sympathy with the natives (Lindemann 1997, 443)—a policy that makes excellent evolutionary sense.

Jewish ethnic background was thus important not only to gentiles but was subjectively important to Jews as well. When the secret police wanted to investigate a Jewish agent, they recruited a “pure Jewish maiden” to develop an intimate relationship with him—implicitly assuming that the operation would work better if the relationship was intraethnic (Vaksberg 1994, 44n). Similarly, there has been a pronounced tendency for leftist Jews to idolize other Jews such as Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg rather than leftist gentiles, as in Poland (Schatz 1991, 62, 89), even though some scholars have serious doubts about the Jewish identifications of these two revolutionaries. Indeed, Hook (1949, 465) finds a perception among leftists that there was an ethnic basis for the attraction of Jewish intellectuals to Trotsky. In the words of one, “It is not by accident that three quarters of the Trotskyist leaders are Jews.”

There is, then, considerable evidence that Jewish Bolsheviks generally retained at least a residual Jewish identity. In some cases this Jewish identity may indeed have been “reactive” (i.e., resulting from others’ perceptions). For example, Rosa Luxemburg may have had a reactive Jewish identity, since she was perceived as a Jew despite the fact that she “was the most critical of her own people, descending at times to merciless abuse of other Jews” (Shepherd 1993, 118). Nevertheless, Luxemburg’s only important sexual relationship was with a Jew, and she continued to maintain ties to her family. Lindemann (1997, 178) comments that the conflict between Luxemburg’s revolutionary left and the social-democratic reformists in Germany had overtones of German-Jewish ethnic conflict, given the large percentage and high visibility of Jews among the former. By World War I “Luxemburg’s dwindling friendships within the party had become more exclusively Jewish, whereas her contempt for the (mostly non-Jewish) leaders of the party became more open and vitriolic. Her references to the leadership were often laced with characteristically Jewish phrases: The leaders of the Party were ‘shabbesgoyim of the bourgeoisie.’ For many right-wing Germans, Luxemburg became the most detested of all revolutionaries, the personification of the destructive Jewish alien” (p. 402). Given these findings, the possibilities that Luxemburg was in fact a crypto-Jew or that she was engaged in self-deception regarding her Jewish identity—the latter a common enough occurrence among Jewish radicals (see below)—seem to be at least as likely as supposing that she did not identify as a Jew at all.

In terms of social identity theory, anti-Semitism would make it difficult to adopt the identity of the surrounding culture. Traditional Jewish separatist practices combined with economic competition tend to result in anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism in turn makes Jewish assimilation more difficult because it becomes more difficult for Jews to accept a non-Jewish identity. Thus in the interwar period in Poland Jewish cultural assimilation increased substantially; by 1939 one half of Jewish high school students called Polish their native language. However, the continuation of traditional Jewish culture among a substantial proportion of Jews and its correlative anti-Semitism resulted in a barrier for Jews in adopting a Polish identification (Schatz 1991, 34-35).

From the standpoint of gentiles, however, anti-Semitic reactions to individuals like Luxemburg and other outwardly assimilating Jews may be viewed as resulting from an attempt to prevent deception by erring on the side of exaggerating the extent to which people who are ethnically Jews identify as Jews and are consciously attempting to advance specifically Jewish interests (see SAID, Ch. 1). Such perceptions of secular Jews and Jews who converted to Christianity have been a common feature of anti-Semitism in the post-Enlightenment world, and indeed, such Jews often maintained informal social and business networks that resulted in marriages with other baptized Jews and Jewish families who had not changed their surface religion (see SAID, Chs. 5, 6).⁷⁵

I suggest that it is not possible to conclusively establish the Jewish identification or lack of it of ethnically Jewish Bolsheviks prior to the Revolution and in the postrevolutionary period when ethnic Jews had a great deal of power in the Soviet Union. Several factors favor our supposing that Jewish identification occurred in a substantial percentage of ethnic Jews: (1) People were classified as Jews depending on their ethnic background at least partly because of residual anti-Semitism; this would tend to impose a Jewish identity on these individuals and make it difficult to assume an exclusive identity as a member of a larger, more inclusive political group. (2) Many Jewish Bolsheviks, such as those in Evsektsiya and the JAC, aggressively sought to establish a secular Jewish subculture. (3) Very few Jews on the left envisioned a postrevolutionary society without a continuation of Judaism as a group; indeed, the predominant ideology among Jewish leftists was that postrevolutionary society would end anti-Semitism because it would end class conflict and the peculiar Jewish occupational profile. (4) The behavior of American communists shows that Jewish identity and the primacy of Jewish interests over communist interests were commonplace among individuals who were ethnically Jewish communists (see below). (5) The existence of Jewish crypsis in other times and places combined with the possibility that self-deception, identificatory flexibility, and identificatory ambivalence are important components of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy (see SAID, Ch. 8).

This last possibility is particularly interesting and will be elaborated below. The best evidence that individuals have really ceased to have a Jewish identity is if they choose a political option that they perceive as clearly not in the interests of Jews as a group. In the absence of a clearly perceived conflict with Jewish interests, it remains possible that different political choices among ethnic Jews are only differences in tactics for how best to achieve Jewish interests. In the case of the Jewish members of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) reviewed below, the best evidence that ethnically Jewish members continued to have a Jewish identity is that in general their support for the CPUSA waxed and waned depending on whether Soviet policies were perceived as violating specific Jewish interests, such as support for Israel or opposition to Nazi Germany.

Jewish identification is a complex area where surface declarations may be deceptive. Indeed, Jews may not consciously know how strongly they identify with Judaism. Silberman (1985, 184), for example, notes that around the time of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, many Jews could identify with the statement of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel that “I had not known how Jewish I was” (in Silberman 1985, 184; emphasis in text). Silberman comments: “This was the response, not of some newcomer to Judaism or casual devotee but of the man whom many, myself included, consider the greatest Jewish spiritual leader of our time.” Many others made the same surprising discovery about themselves: Arthur Hertzberg (1979, 210) wrote, “The immediate reaction of American Jewry to the crisis was far more intense and widespread than anyone could have foreseen. Many Jews would never have believed that grave danger to Israel could dominate their thoughts and emotions to the exclusion of everything else.”

Consider the case of Polina Zhemchuzhina, the wife of Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (Premier of the USSR during the 1930s) and a prominent revolutionary who joined the Communist Party in 1918. (Among other accomplishments, she was a member of the Party Central Committee.) When Golda Meir visited the Soviet Union in 1948, Zhemchuzhina repeatedly uttered the phrase “Ich bin a Yiddishe tochter” (I am a daughter of the Jewish people) when Meir asked how she spoke Yiddish so well (Rubenstein 1996, 262). “She parted from the [Israeli delegation] with tears in her eyes, saying ‘I wish all will go well for you there and then it will be good for all the Jews’” (Rubenstein 1996, 262). Vaksberg (1994, 192) describes her as “an iron Stalinist, but her fanaticism did not keep her from being a “good Jewish daughter.”

Consider also the case of Ilya Ehrenburg, the prominent Soviet journalist and anti-fascist propagandist for the Soviet Union whose life is described in a book whose title, Tangled Loyalties (Rubenstein 1996), illustrates the complexities of Jewish identity in the Soviet Union. Ehrenburg was a loyal Stalinist, supporting the Soviet line on Zionism and refusing to condemn Soviet anti-Jewish actions (Rubenstein 1996). Nevertheless, Ehrenburg held Zionist views, maintained Jewish associational patterns, believed in the uniqueness of the Jewish people, and was deeply concerned about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Ehrenburg was an organizing member of the JAC, which advocated Jewish cultural revival and greater contact with Jews abroad. A writer friend described him as “first of all a Jew… Ehrenburg had rejected his origins with all his being, disguised himself in the West, smoking Dutch tobacco and making his travel plans at Cook’s… But he did not erase the Jew” (p. 204). “Ehrenburg never denied his Jewish origins and near the end of his life often repeated the defiant conviction that he would consider himself a Jew ‘as long as there was a single anti-Semite left on earth’” (Rubenstein 1996, 13). In a famous article, he cited a statement that “blood exists in two forms; the blood that flows inside the veins and the blood that flows out of the veins… Why do I say, ‘We Jews?’ Because of blood” (p. 259). Indeed, his intense loyalty to Stalin’s regime and his silence about Soviet brutalities involving the murder of millions of its citizens during the 1930s may have been motivated largely by his view that the Soviet Union was a bulwark against fascism (pp. 143-145). “No transgression angered him more than anti-Semitism” (p. 313).

A powerful residual Jewish identity in a prominent Bolshevik can also be seen in the following comment on the reaction of ethnic Jews to the emergence of Israel:

It seemed that all Jews, regardless of age, profession, or social status, felt responsible for the distant little state that had become a symbol of national revival. Even the Soviet Jews who had seemed irrevocably assimilated were now under the spell of the Middle Eastern miracle. Yekaterina Davidovna (Golda Gorbman) was a fanatic Bolshevik and internationalist and wife of Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, and in her youth she had been excommunicated as an unbeliever; but now she struck her relatives dumb by saying, “Now at last we have our motherland, too.” (Kostyrchenko 1995, 102)

The point is that the Jewish identity of even a highly assimilated Jew, and even one who has subjectively rejected a Jewish identity, may surface at times of crisis to the group or when Jewish identification conflicts with any other identity that a Jew might have, including identification as a political radical. As expected on the basis of social identity theory, Elazar (1980) notes that in times of perceived threat to Judaism, there is a great increase in group identification among even “very marginal” Jews, as during the Yom Kippur War. As a result, assertions regarding Jewish identification that fail to take account of perceived threats to Judaism may seriously underestimate the extent of Jewish commitment. Surface declarations of a lack of Jewish identity may be highly misleading.⁷⁶ And as we shall see, there is good evidence for widespread self-deception about Jewish identity among Jewish radicals.

Moreover, there is good evidence that both in the czarist period and in the postrevolutionary period, Jewish Bolsheviks perceived their activities as entirely congruent with Jewish interests. The revolution ended the officially anti-Semitic czarist government and although popular anti-Semitism continued in the postrevolutionary period, the government officially outlawed anti-Semitism. Jews were highly overrepresented in positions of economic and political power as well as cultural influence at least into the 1940s. It was also a government that aggressively attempted to destroy all vestiges of Christianity as a socially unifying force within the Soviet Union while at the same time it established a secular Jewish subculture so that Judaism would not lose its group continuity or its unifying mechanisms such as the Yiddish language.

It is doubtful, therefore, that Soviet Jewish Bolsheviks ever had to choose between a Jewish identity and a Bolshevik identity, at least in the prerevolutionary period and into the 1930s. Given this congruence of what one might term “identificatory self-interest,” it is quite possible that individual Jewish Bolsheviks would deny or ignore their Jewish identities—perhaps aided by mechanisms of self-deception—while they nevertheless may well have retained a Jewish identity that would have surfaced only if a clear conflict between Jewish interests and communist policies occurred.

COMMUNISM AND JEWISH IDENTIFICATION IN
POLAND

Schatz’s (1991) work on the group of Jewish communists who came to power in Poland after World War II (termed by Schatz “the generation”) is important because it sheds light on the identificatory processes of an entire generation of communist Jews in Eastern Europe. Unlike the situation in the Soviet Union where the predominantly Jewish faction led by Trotsky was defeated, it is possible to trace the activities and identifications of a Jewish communist elite who actually obtained political power and held it for a significant period.

The great majority of this group were socialized in very traditional Jewish families

whose inner life, customs and folklore”, religious traditions, leisure time, contacts between generations, and ways of socializing were, despite variations, essentially permeated by traditional Jewish values and norms of conduct… The core of cultural heritage was handed down to them through formal religious education and practice, through holiday celebrations, tales, and songs, through the stories told by parents and grandparents, through listening to discussions among their elders… The result was a deep core of their identity, values, norms, and attitudes with which they entered the rebellious period of their youth and adulthood. This core was to be transformed in the processes of acculturation, secularization, and radicalization sometimes even to the point of explicit denial. However, it was through this deep layer that all later perceptions were filtered. (Schatz 1991, 37-38; my emphasis)

Note the implication that self-deceptive processes were at work here: Members of the generation denied the effects of a pervasive socialization experience that colored all of their subsequent perceptions, so that in a very real sense, they did not know how Jewish they were. Most of these individuals spoke Yiddish in their daily lives and had only a poor command of Polish even after joining the party (p. 54). They socialized entirely with other Jews whom they met in the Jewish world of work, neighborhood, and Jewish social and political organizations. After they became communists, they dated and married among themselves and their social gatherings were conducted in Yiddish (p. 116). As is the case for all of the Jewish intellectual and political movements discussed in this volume, their mentors and principle influences were other ethnic Jews, including especially Luxemburg and Trotsky (pp. 62, 89), and when they recalled personal heroes, they were mostly Jews whose exploits achieved semi-mythical proportions (p. 112).

Jews who joined the communist movement did not first reject their ethnic identity, and there were many who “cherished Jewish culture… [and] dreamed of a society in which Jews would be equal as Jews” (p. 48). Indeed, it was common for individuals to combine a strong Jewish identity with Marxism as well as various combinations of Zionism and Bundism. Moreover, the attraction of Polish Jews to communism was greatly facilitated by their knowledge that Jews had attained high-level positions of power and influence in the Soviet Union and that the Soviet government had established a system of Jewish education and culture (p. 60). In both the Soviet Union and Poland, communism was seen as opposing anti-Semitism. In marked contrast, during the 1930s the Polish government developed policies in which Jews were excluded from public-sector employment, quotas were placed on Jewish representation in universities and the professions, and government-organized boycotts of Jewish businesses and artisans were staged (Hagen 1996). Clearly, Jews perceived communism as good for Jews: It was a movement that did not threaten Jewish group continuity, and it held the promise of power and influence for Jews and the end of state-sponsored anti-Semitism.

At one end of the spectrum of Jewish identification were communists who began their career in the Bund or in Zionist organizations, spoke Yiddish, and worked entirely within a Jewish milieu. Jewish and communist identities were completely sincere, without ambivalence or perceived conflict between these two sources of identity. At the other end of the spectrum of Jewish identification, some Jewish communists may have intended to establish a de-ethnicized state without Jewish group continuity, although the evidence for this is less than compelling. In the prewar period even the most “de-ethnicized” Jews only outwardly assimilated by dressing like gentiles, taking gentile-sounding names (suggesting deception), and learning their languages. They attempted to recruit gentiles into the movement but did not assimilate or attempt to assimilate into Polish culture; they retained traditional Jewish “disdainful and supercilious attitudes” toward what, as Marxists, they viewed as a “retarded” Polish peasant culture (p. 119). 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 (p. 121)—a clear indication that Jewish personal identity remained quite close to the surface. The Communist Party of Poland (KPP) also retained a sense of promoting specifically Jewish interests rather than blind allegiance to the Soviet Union. Indeed, Schatz (p. 102) suggests that Stalin dissolved the KPP in 1938 because of the presence of Trotskyists within the KPP and because the Soviet leadership expected the KPP to be opposed to the alliance with Nazi Germany.

In SAID (Ch. 8) it was noted that identificatory ambivalence has been a consistent feature of Judaism since the Enlightenment. It is interesting that Polish Jewish activists showed a great deal of identificatory ambivalence stemming ultimately from the contradiction between “the belief in some kind of Jewish collective existence and, at the same time, a rejection of such an ethnic communion, as it was thought incompatible with class divisions and harmful to the general political struggle; striving to maintain a specific kind of Jewish culture and, at the same time, a view of this as a mere ethnic form of the communist message, instrumental in incorporating Jews into the Polish Socialist community; and maintaining separate Jewish institutions while at the same time desiring to eliminate Jewish separateness as such” (p. 234). It will be apparent in the following that the Jews, including Jewish communists at the highest levels of the government, continued as a cohesive, identifiable group. However, although they themselves appear not to have noticed the Jewish collective nature of their experience (p. 240), it was observable to others—a clear example of self-deception also evident in the case of American Jewish leftists, as noted below.

These Jewish communists were also engaged in elaborate rationalizations and self-deceptions related to the role of the communist movement in Poland, so that one cannot take the lack of evidence for overt Jewish ethnic identity as strong evidence of a lack of a Jewish identity. “Cognitive and emotional anomalies—unfree, mutilated, and distorted thoughts and emotions—became the price for retaining their beliefs unchanged… Adjusting their experiences to their beliefs was achieved through mechanisms of interpreting, suppressing, justifying, or explaining away” (p. 191). “As much as they were able to skillfully apply their critical thinking to penetrative analyses of the sociopolitical system they rejected, as much were they blocked when it came to applying the same rules of critical analysis to the system they regarded as the future of all mankind” (p. 192).

This combination of self-deceptive rationalization as well as considerable evidence of a Jewish identity can be seen in the comments of Jacub Berman, one of the most prominent leaders of the postwar era. (All three communist leaders who dominated Poland between 1948 and 1956, Berman, Boleslaw Bierut, and Hilary Minc, were Jews.) Regarding the purges and murders of thousands of communists, including many Jews, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Berman states:

I tried as best I could to explain what was happening; to clarify the background, the situations full of conflict and internal contradictions in which Stalin had probably found himself and which forced him to act as he did; and to exaggerate the mistakes of the opposition, which assumed grotesque proportions in the subsequent charges against them and were further blown up by Soviet propaganda. You had to have a great deal of endurance and dedication to the cause then in order to accept what was happening despite all the distortions, injuries and torments. (In Toranska 1987, 207)

As to his Jewish identity, Berman responded as follows when asked about his plans after the war:

I didn’t have any particular plans. But I was aware of the fact that as a Jew I either shouldn’t or wouldn’t be able to fill any of the highest posts. Besides, I didn’t mind not being in the front ranks: not because I’m particularly humble by nature, but because it’s not at all the case that you have to project yourself into a position of prominence in order to wield real power. The important thing to me was to exert my influence, leave my stamp on the complicated government formation, which was being created, but without projecting myself. Naturally, this required a certain agility. (In Toranska 1987, 237)

Clearly Berman identifies himself as a Jew and is well aware that others perceive him as a Jew and that therefore he must deceptively lower his public profile. Berman also notes that he was under suspicion as a Jew during the Soviet anti-”Cosmopolite” campaign beginning in the late 1940s. His brother, an activist in the Central Committee of Polish Jews (the organization for establishing a secular Jewish culture in communist Poland), emigrated to Israel in 1950 to avoid the consequences of the Soviet-inspired anti-Semitic policies in Poland. Berman comments that he did not follow his brother to Israel even though his brother strongly urged him to do so: “I was, of course, interested in what was going on in Israel, especially since I was quite familiar with the people there” (in Toranska 1987, 322). Obviously, Berman’s brother viewed Berman not as a non-Jew but, rather, as a Jew who should emigrate to Israel because of incipient anti-Semitism. The close ties of family and friendship between a very high official in the Polish communist government and an activist in the organization promoting Jewish secular culture in Poland also strongly suggest that there was no perceived incompatibility with identifications as a Jew and as a communist even among the most assimilated Polish communists of the period.

While Jewish members saw the KPP as beneficial to Jewish interests, the party was perceived by gentile Poles even before the war as “pro-Soviet, anti-patriotic, and ethnically ‘not truly Polish’” (Schatz 1991, 82). This perception of lack of patriotism was the main source of popular hostility to the KPP (Schatz 1991, 91).

On the one hand, for much of its existence the KPP had been at war not only with the Polish State, but with its entire body politic, including the legal opposition parties of the Left. On the other hand, in the eyes of the great majority of Poles, the KPP was a foreign, subversive agency of Moscow, bent on the destruction of Poland’s hard-won independence and the incorporation of Poland into the Soviet Union. Labeled a “Soviet agency” or the “Jew-Commune,” it was viewed as a dangerous and fundamentally un-Polish conspiracy dedicated to undermining national sovereignty and restoring, in a new guise, Russian domination. (Coutouvidis & Reynolds 1986, 115)

The KPP backed the Soviet Union in the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920 and in the Soviet invasion of 1939. It also accepted the 1939 border with the USSR and was relatively unconcerned with the Soviet massacre of Polish prisoners of war during World War II, whereas the Polish government in exile in London held nationalist views of these matters. The Soviet army and its Polish allies “led by cold-blooded political calculation, military necessities, or both” allowed the uprising of the Home Army, faithful to the noncommunist Polish government-in-exile, to be defeated by the Germans resulting in 200,000 dead, thus wiping out “the cream of the anti- and noncommunist activist elite” (Schatz 1991, 188). The Soviets also arrested surviving non-communist resistance leaders immediately after the war.

Moreover, as was the case with the CPUSA, actual Jewish leadership and involvement in Polish Communism was much greater than surface appearances; ethnic Poles were recruited and promoted to high positions in order to lessen the perception that the KPP was a Jewish movement (Schatz 1991, 97). This attempt to deceptively lower the Jewish profile of the communist movement was also apparent in the ZPP. (The ZPP refers to the Union of Polish Patriots—an Orwellian-named communist front organization created by the Soviet Union to occupy Poland after the war.) Apart from members of the generation whose political loyalties could be counted on and who formed the leadership core of the group, Jews were often discouraged from joining the movement out of fear that the movement would appear too Jewish. However, Jews who could physically pass as Poles were allowed to join and were encouraged to state they were ethnic Poles and to change their names to Polish-sounding names. “Not everyone was approached [to engage in deception], and some were spared such proposals because nothing could be done with them: they just looked too Jewish” (Schatz 1991, 185).

When this group came to power after the war, they advanced Soviet political, economic, and cultural interests in Poland while aggressively pursuing specifically Jewish interests, including the destruction of the nationalist political opposition whose openly expressed anti-Semitism derived at least partly from the fact that Jews were perceived as favoring Soviet domination.⁷⁷ The purge of Wladyslaw Gomulka’s group shortly after the war resulted in the promotion of Jews and the complete banning of anti-Semitism. Moreover, the general opposition between the Jewish-dominated Polish communist government supported by the Soviets and the nationalist, anti-Semitic underground helped forge the allegiance of the great majority of the Jewish population to the communist government while the great majority of non-Jewish Poles favored the anti-Soviet parties (Schatz 1991, 204-205). The result was widespread antiSemitism: By the summer of 1947, approximately 1,500 Jews had been killed in incidents at 155 localities. In the words of Cardinal Hlond in 1946 commenting on an incident in which 41 Jews were killed, the pogrom was “due to the Jews who today occupy leading positions in Poland’s government and endeavor to introduce a governmental structure that the majority of the Poles do not wish to have” (in Schatz 1991, 107).

The Jewish-dominated communist government actively sought to revive and perpetuate Jewish life in Poland (Schatz 1991, 208) so that, as in the case of the Soviet Union, there was no expectation that Judaism would wither away under a communist regime. Jewish activists had an “ethnopolitical vision” in which Jewish secular culture would continue in Poland with the cooperation and approval of the government (Schatz 1991, 230). Thus while the government campaigned actively against the political and cultural power of the Catholic Church, collective Jewish life flourished in the postwar period. Yiddish and Hebrew language schools and publications were established, as well as a great variety of cultural and social welfare organizations for Jews. A substantial percentage of the Jewish population was employed in Jewish economic cooperatives.

Moreover, the Jewish-dominated government regarded the Jewish population, many of whom had not previously been communists, as “a reservoir that could be trusted and enlisted in its efforts to rebuild the country. Although not old, ‘tested’ comrades, they were not rooted in the social networks of the anti-communist society, they were outsiders with regard to its historically shaped traditions, without connections to the Catholic Church, and hated by those who hated the regime.⁷⁸ Thus they could be depended on and used to fill the required positions” (Schatz 1991, 212-213).

Jewish ethnic background was particularly important in recruiting for the internal security service: The generation of Jewish communists realized that their power derived entirely from the Soviet Union and that they would have to resort to coercion in order to control a fundamentally hostile noncommunist society (p. 262). The core members of the security service came from the Jewish communists who had been communists before the establishment of the Polish communist government, but these were joined by other Jews sympathetic to the government and alienated from the wider society. This in turn reinforced the popular image of Jews as servants of foreign interests and enemies of ethnic Poles (Schatz 1991, 225).

Jewish members of the internal security force often appear to have been motivated by personal rage and a desire for revenge related to their Jewish identity:

Their families had been murdered and the anti-Communist underground was, in their perception, a continuation of essentially the same anti-Semitic and anti-Communist tradition. They hated those who had collaborated with the Nazis and those who opposed the new order with almost the same intensity and knew that as Communists, or as both Communists and Jews, they were hated at least in the same way. In their eyes, the enemy was essentially the same. The old evil deeds had to be punished and new ones prevented and a merciless struggle was necessary before a better world could be built. (Schatz 1991, 226)

As in the case of post-World War II Hungary (see below), Poland became polarized between a predominantly Jewish ruling and administrative class supported by the rest of the Jewish population and by Soviet military power, arrayed against the great majority of the native gentile population. The situation was exactly analogous to the many instances in traditional societies where Jews formed a middle layer between an alien ruling elite, in this case the Soviets, and the gentile native population (see PTSDA, Ch. 5). However, this intermediary role made the former outsiders into an elite group in Poland, and the former champions of social justice went to great lengths to protect their own personal prerogatives, including a great deal of rationalization and self-deception (p. 261). Indeed, when a defector’s accounts of the elite’s lavish lifestyle (e.g., Boleslaw Bierut had four villas and the use of five others [Toranska 1987, 28]), their corruption, as well as their role as Soviet agents became known in 1954, there were shock waves throughout the lower levels of the party (p. 266). Clearly, the sense of moral superiority and the altruistic motivations of this group were entirely in their own self-deceptions.

Although attempts were made to place a Polish face on what was in reality a Jewish-dominated government, such attempts were limited by the lack of trustworthy Poles able to fill positions in the Communist Party, government administration, the military and the internal security forces. Jews who had severed formal ties with the Jewish community, or who had changed their names to Polish-sounding names, or who could pass as Poles because of their physical appearance or lack of a Jewish accent were favored in promotions (p. 214). Whatever the subjective personal identities of the individuals recruited into these government positions, the recruiters were clearly acting on the perceived ethnic background of the individual as a cue to dependability, and the result was that the situation resembled the many instances in traditional societies where Jews and crypto-Jews developed economic and political networks of coreligionists: “Besides a group of influential politicians, too small to be called a category, there were the soldiers; the apparatchiks and the administrators; the intellectuals and ideologists; the policemen; the diplomats; and finally, the activists in the Jewish sector. There also existed the mass of common people—clerks, craftsmen, and workers—whose common denominator with the others was a shared ideological vision, a past history, and the essentially similar mode of ethnic aspiration” (p. 226).

It is revealing that when Jewish economic and political domination gradually decreased in the mid- to late-1950s, many of these individuals began working in the Jewish economic cooperatives, and Jews purged from the internal security service were aided by Jewish organizations funded ultimately by American Jews. There can be little doubt of their continuing Jewish identity and the continuation of Jewish economic and cultural separatism. Indeed, after the collapse of the communist regime in Poland, “numerous Jews, some of them children and grandchildren of former communists, came ‘out of the closet’” (Anti-Semitism Worldwide 1994, 115), openly adopting a Jewish identity and reinforcing the idea that many Jewish communists were in fact crypto-Jews.

When the anti-Zionist-anti-Semitic movement in the Soviet Union filtered down to Poland following the Soviet policy change toward Israel in the late 1940s, there was another crisis of identity resulting from the belief that antiSemitism and communism were incompatible. One response was to engage in “ethnic self-abnegation” by making statements denying the existence of a Jewish identity; another advised Jews to adopt a low profile. Because of the very strong identification with the system among Jews, the general tendency was to rationalize even their own persecution during the period when Jews were gradually being purged from important positions: “Even when the methods grew surprisingly painful and harsh, when the goal of forcing one to admit uncommitted crimes and to frame others became clear, and when the perception of being unjustly treated by methods that contradicted communist ethos came forth, the basic ideological convictions stayed untouched. Thus the holy madness triumphed, even in the prison cells” (p. 260). In the end, an important ingredient in the anti-Jewish campaign of the 1960s was the assertion that the communist Jews of the generation opposed the Soviet Union’s Mideast policy favoring the Arabs.

As with Jewish groups throughout the ages (see PTSDA, Ch. 3), the anti-Jewish purges did not result in their abandoning their group commitment even when it resulted in unjust persecutions. Instead, it resulted in increased commitment, “unswerving ideological discipline, and obedience to the point of self-deception… They regarded the party as the collective personification of the progressive forces of history and, regarding themselves as its servants, expressed a specific kind of teleological-deductive dogmatism, revolutionary haughtiness, and moral ambiguity” (pp. 260-261). Indeed, there is some indication that group cohesiveness increased as the fortunes of the generation declined (p. 301). As their position was gradually eroded by a nascent anti-Semitic Polish nationalism, they became ever more conscious of their “groupness.” After their final defeat they quickly lost any Polish identity they might have had and quickly assumed overtly Jewish identities, especially in Israel, the destination of most Polish Jews. They came to see their former anti-Zionism as a mistake and became now strong supporters of Israel (p. 314).

In conclusion, Schatz’s treatment shows that the generation of Jewish communists and their ethnically Jewish supporters must be considered as an historic Jewish group. The evidence indicates that this group pursued specifically Jewish interests, including especially their interest in securing Jewish group continuity in Poland while at the same time attempting to destroy institutions like the Catholic Church and other manifestations of Polish nationalism that promoted social cohesion among Poles. The communist government also combated antiSemitism, and it promoted Jewish economic and political interests. While the extent of subjective Jewish identity among this group undoubtedly varied, the evidence indicates submerged and self-deceptive levels of Jewish identity even among the most assimilated of them. The entire episode illustrates the complexity of Jewish identification, and it exemplifies the importance of self-deception and rationalization as central aspects of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy (see SAID, Chs. 7, 8). There was massive self-deception and rationalization regarding the role of the Jewish-dominated government and its Jewish supporters in eliminating gentile nationalist elites, of its role in opposing Polish national culture and the Catholic Church while building up a secular Jewish culture, of its role as the agent of Soviet domination of Poland, and of its own economic success while administering an economy that harnessed the economy of Poland to meet Soviet interests and demanded hardship and sacrifices from the rest of the people.

RADICALISM AND JEWISH IDENTIFICATION IN THE
UNITED STATES AND ENGLAND

From the origins of the movement in the late nineteenth century, a strong sense of Jewish identification also characterized American Jewish radicals (e.g., the Union of Hebrew Trades and the Jewish Socialist Federation; see Levin 1977; Liebman 1979). In Sorin’s (1985) study of Jewish radicals who immigrated to the United States early in the twentieth century, only 7 percent were hostile to any form of Jewish separatism. Over 70 percent “were imbued with positive Jewish consciousness. The great majority were significantly caught up in a web of overlapping institutions, affiliations, and Jewish social formations” (p. 119). Moreover, “at the very most” 26 of 95 radicals were in Sorin’s “hostile, ambivalent, or assimilationist” categories, but “in some if not all of the cases, these were persons struggling, often creatively, to synthesize new identities” (p. 115). A major theme of this chapter is that a great many avowedly “de-racinated” Jewish radicals had self-deceptive images of their lack of Jewish identification.

The following comment about a very prominent American Jewish radical, Emma Goldman, illustrates the general trend:

The pages of the magazine Mother Earth that Emma Goldman edited from 1906 to 1917 are filled with Yiddish stories, tales from the Talmud, and translations of Morris Rosenfeld’s poetry. Moreover, her commitment to anarchism did not divert her from speaking and writing, openly and frequently, about the particular burdens Jews faced in a world in which antisemitism was a living enemy. Apparently, Emma Goldman’s faith in anarchism, with its emphasis on universalism, did not result from and was not dependent on a casting off of Jewish identity. (Sorin 1985, 8; italics in text)

Twentieth-century American Jewish radicalism was a specifically Jewish subculture, or “contraculture” to use Arthur Liebman’s (1979, 37) term. The American Jewish left never removed itself from the wider Jewish community, and, indeed, membership of Jews in the movement fluctuated depending on whether these movements clashed with specifically Jewish interests.⁷⁹

Fundamentally, the Jewish Old Left, including the unions, the leftist press, and the leftist fraternal orders (which were often associated with a synagogue [Liebman 1979, 284]), were part of the wider Jewish community, and when the Jewish working class declined, specifically Jewish concerns and identity gained increasing prominence as the importance of radical political beliefs declined. This tendency for Jewish members of leftist organizations to concern themselves with specifically Jewish affairs increased after 1930 primarily because of recurring gaps between specific Jewish interests and universalist leftist causes at that time. This phenomenon occurred within the entire spectrum of leftist organizations, including organizations such as the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, whose membership also included gentiles (Liebman 1979, 267ff).

Jewish separatism in leftist movements was facilitated by a very traditional aspect of Jewish separatism—the use of an ingroup language. Yiddish eventually became highly valued for its unifying effect on the Jewish labor movement and its ability to cement ties to the wider Jewish community (Levin 1977, 210; Liebman 1979, 259-260). “The landsmanshaften [Jewish social clubs], the Yiddish press and theatre, East Side socialist cafés, literary societies and fereyns, which were so much a part of Jewish socialist culture, created an unmistakable Jewish milieu, which the shop, union, or Socialist party could not possibly duplicate. Even the class enemy—the Jewish employer—spoke Yiddish” (Levin 1977, 210).

Indeed, the socialist educational program of the Workman’s Circle (the largest Jewish labor fraternal order in the early twentieth century) failed at first (prior to 1916) because of the absence of Yiddish and Jewish content: “Even radical Jewish parents wanted their children to learn Yiddish and know something about their people” (Liebman 1979, 292). These schools succeeded when they began including a Jewish curriculum with a stress on Jewish peoplehood. They persisted through the 1940s as Jewish schools with a socialist ideology which stressed the idea that a concern for social justice was the key to Jewish survival in the modern world. Clearly, socialism and liberal politics had become a form of secular Judaism. The organization had been transformed over its history “from a radical labor fraternal order with Jewish members into a Jewish fraternal order with liberal sentiments and a socialist heritage” (Liebman 1979, 295).

Similarly, the communist-oriented Jewish subculture, including organizations such as the International Workers Order (IWO), included Yiddish-speaking sections. One such section, the Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order (JPFO), was an affiliate of the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress) and was listed as a subversive organization by the U.S. Attorney General. The JPFO had 50,000 members and was the financial and organizational “bulwark” of the CPUSA after World War II; it also provided critical funding for the Daily Worker and the Morning Freiheit (Svonkin 1997, 166). Consistent with the present emphasis on the compatibility of communism-radicalism and Jewish identity, it funded children’s educational programs that promulgated a strong relationship between Jewish identity and radical concerns. The IWO Yiddish schools and summer camps, which continued into the 1960s, stressed Jewish culture and even reinterpreted Marxism not as a theory of class struggle but as a theory of struggle for Jewish freedom from oppression. Although the AJCongress eventually severed its ties with the JPFO during the cold war period and stated that communism was a threat, it was “at best a reluctant and unenthusiastic participant” (Svonkin 1997, 132) in the Jewish effort to develop a public image of anti-communism—a position reflecting the sympathies of many among its predominantly second- and third-generation Eastern European immigrant membership.

David Horowitz (1997, 42) describes the world of his parents who had joined a “shul” run by the CPUSA in which Jewish holidays were given a political interpretation. Psychologically these people might as well have been in eighteenth-century Poland:

What my parents had done in joining the Communist Party and moving to Sunnyside was to return to the ghetto. There was the same shared private language, the same hermetically sealed universe, the same dual posturing revealing one face to the outer world and another to the tribe. More importantly, there was the same conviction of being marked for persecution and specially ordained, the sense of moral superiority toward the stronger and more numerous goyim outside. And there was the same fear of expulsion for heretical thoughts, which was the fear that riveted the chosen to the faith.

A strong sense of Jewish peoplehood was also characteristic of the leftist Yiddish press. Thus a letter writer to the radical Jewish Daily Forward complained that his nonreligious parents were upset because he wanted to marry a non-Jew. “He wrote to the Forward on the presumption that he would find sympathy, only to discover that the socialist and freethinking editors of the paper insisted… that it was imperative that he marry a Jew and that he continue to identify with the Jewish community… [T]hose who read the Forward knew that the commitment of Jews to remain Jewish was beyond question and discussion” (Hertzberg 1989, 211-212). The Forward had the largest circulation of any Jewish periodical in the world into the 1930s and maintained close ties to the Socialist Party.

Werner Cohn (1958, 621) describes the general milieu of the immigrant Jewish community from 1886 to 1920 as “one big radical debating society”:

By 1886 the Jewish community in New York had become conspicuous for its support of the third-party (United Labor) candidacy of Henry George, the theoretician of the Single Tax. From then on Jewish districts in New York and elsewhere were famous for their radical voting habits. The Lower East Side repeatedly picked as its congressman Meyer London, the only New York Socialist ever to be elected to Congress. And many Socialists went to the State Assembly in Albany from Jewish districts. In the 1917 mayoralty campaign in New York City, the Socialist and anti-war candidacy of Morris Hillquit was supported by the most authoritative voices of the Jewish Lower East Side: The United Hebrew Trades, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and most importantly, the very popular Yiddish Daily Forward. This was the period in which extreme radicals—like Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman—were giants in the Jewish community, and when almost all the Jewish giants—among them Abraham Cahan, Morris Hillquit, and the young Morris R. Cohen—were radicals. Even Samuel Gompers, when speaking before Jewish audiences, felt it necessary to use radical phrases.

In addition, The Freiheit, which was an unofficial organ of the Communist Party from the 1920s to the 1950s, “stood at the center of Yiddish proletarian institutions and subculture… [which offered] identity, meaning, friendship, and understanding” (Liebman 1979, 349-350). The newspaper lost considerable support in the Jewish community in 1929 when it took the Communist Party position in opposition to Zionism, and by the 1950s it essentially had to choose between satisfying its Jewish soul or its status as a communist organ. Choosing the former, by the late 1960s it was justifying not returning the Israeli-occupied territories in opposition to the line of the CPUSA.

The relationship of Jews and the CPUSA is particularly interesting because the party often adopted anti-Jewish positions, especially because of its close association with the Soviet Union. Beginning in the late 1920s Jews played a very prominent role in the CPUSA (Klehr 1978, 37ff). Merely citing percentages of Jewish leaders does not adequately indicate the extent of Jewish influence, however, because it fails to take account of the personal characteristics of Jewish radicals as a talented, educated and ambitious group (see pp. 5, 95-96), but also because efforts were made to recruit gentiles as “window dressing” to conceal the extent of Jewish dominance (Klehr 1978, 40; Rothman & Lichter 1982, 99). Lyons (1982, 81) quotes a gentile Communist who said that many working-class gentiles felt that they were recruited in order to “diversify the Party’s ethnic composition.” The informant recounts his experience as a gentile representative at a communist-sponsored youth conference:

It became increasingly apparent to most participants that virtually all of the speakers were Jewish New Yorkers. Speakers with thick New York accents would identify themselves as “the delegate from the Lower East Side” or “the comrade from Brownsville.” Finally the national leadership called a recess to discuss what was becoming an embarrassment. How could a supposedly national student organization be so totally dominated by New York Jews? Finally, they resolved to intervene and remedy the situation by asking the New York caucus to give “out-of-towners” a chance to speak. The convention was held in Wisconsin.

Klehr (1978, 40) estimates that from 1921 to 1961, Jews constituted 33.5 percent of the Central Committee members, and the representation of Jews was often above 40 percent (Klehr 1978, 46). Jews were the only native-born ethnic group from which the party was able to recruit. Glazer (1969, 129) states that at least half of the CPUSA membership of around 50,000 were Jews into the 1950s and that the rate of turnover was very high; thus perhaps ten times that number of individuals were involved in the party and there were “an equal or larger number who were Socialists of one kind or another.” Writing of the 1920s, Buhle (1980, 89) notes that “most of those favorable to the party and the Freiheit simply did not join—no more than a few thousand out of a following of a hundred times that large.”

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, exemplify the powerful sense of Jewish identification among many Jews on the left. Svonkin (1997, 158) shows that they viewed themselves as Jewish martyrs. Like many other Jewish leftists, they perceived a strong link between Judaism and their communist sympathies. Their prison correspondence, in the words of one reviewer, was filled with a “continual display of Judaism and Jewishness,” including the comment that “in a couple of days, the Passover celebration of our people’s search for freedom will be here. This cultural heritage has an added meaning for us, who are imprisoned away from each other and our loved ones by the modern Pharaohs” (pp. 158-159). (Embarrassed by the self-perceptions of the Rosenbergs as Jewish martyrs, the Anti-Defamation League [ADL] interpreted Julius Rosenberg’s professions of Jewishness as an attempt to obtain “every possible shred of advantage from the faith that he had repudiated” [Svonkin 1997, 159]—another example of the many revisionist attempts, some recounted in this chapter, to render incompatible Jewish identification and political radicalism and thus completely obscure an important chapter of Jewish history.)

As in the case of the Soviet Union in the early years, the CPUSA had separate sections for different ethnic groups, including a Yiddish-speaking Jewish Federation.⁸⁰ When these were abolished in 1925 in the interests of developing a party that would appeal to native Americans (who tended to have a low level of ethnic consciousness), there was a mass exodus of Jews from the party, and many of those who remained continued to participate in an unofficial Yiddish subculture within the party.

In the following years Jewish support for the CPUSA rose and fell depending on party support for specific Jewish issues. During the 1930s the CPUSA changed its position and took great pains to appeal to specific Jewish interests, including a primary focus against anti-Semitism, supporting Zionism and eventually Israel, and advocating the importance of maintaining Jewish cultural traditions. As in Poland during this period, “The American radical movement glorified the development of Jewish life in the Soviet Union… The Soviet Union was living proof that under socialism the Jewish question could be solved” (Kann 1981, 152-153). Communism was thus perceived as “good for Jews.” Despite temporary problems caused by the Soviet-German nonaggression pact of 1939, the result was an end to the CPUSA’s isolation from the Jewish community during World War II and the immediate postwar years.

Interestingly, the Jews who remained within the party during the period of the nonaggression pact faced a difficult conflict between divided loyalties, indicating that Jewish identity was still important to these individuals. The nonaggression pact provoked a great deal of rationalization on the part of Jewish CPUSA members, often involving an attempt to interpret the Soviet Union’s actions as actually benefiting Jewish interests—clearly an indication that these individuals had not given up their Jewish identities.⁸¹ Others continued to be members but silently opposed the party’s line because of their Jewish loyalties. Of great concern for all of these individuals was that the nonaggression pact was destroying their relationship with the wider Jewish community.

At the time of the creation of Israel in 1948, part of the CPUSA’s appeal to Jews was due to its support for Israel at a time when Truman was waffling on the issue. In 1946 the CPUSA even adopted a resolution advocating the continuation of the Jewish people as an ethnic entity within socialist societies. Arthur Liebman describes CPUSA members during the period as being elated because of the congruity of their Jewish interests and membership in the party. Feelings of commonality with the wider Jewish community were expressed, and there was an enhanced feeling of Jewishness resulting from interactions with other Jews within the CPUSA: During the postwar period “Communist Jews were expected and encouraged to be Jews, to relate to Jews, and to think of the Jewish people and the Jewish culture in a positive light. At the same time, non-Communist Jews, with some notable exceptions [in the non-communist Jewish left]… accepted their Jewish credentials and agreed to work with them in an all-Jewish context” (Liebman 1979, 514). As has happened so often in Jewish history, this upsurge in Jewish self-identity was facilitated by the persecution of Jews, in this case the Holocaust.

This period of easy compatibility of Jewish interests with CPUSA interests evaporated after 1948, especially because of the altered Soviet position on Israel and revelations of state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Many Jews abandoned the CPUSA as a result. Once again, those who remained in the CPUSA tended to rationalize Soviet anti-Semitism in a way that allowed them to maintain their Jewish identification. Some viewed the persecutions as an aberration and the result of individual pathology rather than the fault of the communist system itself. Or the West was blamed as being indirectly responsible. Moreover, the reasons for remaining in the CPUSA appear to have typically involved a desire to remain in the self-contained Yiddish communist subculture. Liebman (1979, 522) describes an individual who finally resigned when the evidence on Soviet anti-Semitism became overwhelming: “In 1958, after more than 25 years with the Communist party, this leader resigned and developed a strong Jewish identity which encompassed a fierce loyalty to Israel.” Alternatively, Jewish CPUSA members simply failed to adopt the Soviet party line, as occurred on the issue of support for Israel during the 1967 and 1973 wars. Eventually, there was virtually a complete severing of Jews from the CPUSA.

Lyons’s (1982, 180) description of a Jewish-Communist club in Philadelphia reveals the ambivalence and self-deception that occurred when Jewish interests clashed with communist sympathies:

The club… faced rising tension over Jewishness, especially as it related to Israel. In the mid-sixties conflict erupted over the club’s decision to criticize Soviet treatment of Jews. Some orthodox pro-Soviet club members resigned; others disagreed but stayed. Meanwhile the club continued to change, becoming less Marxist and more Zionist. During the 1967 Middle East War, “we got dogmatic, for one week,” as Ben Green, a club leader, puts it. They allowed no discussion on the merits of supporting Israel, but simply raised funds to show their full support. Nevertheless, several members insist that the club is not Zionist and engages in “critical support” of Israel.

As in the case of Poland, there is every reason to suppose that American Jewish Communists regarded the USSR as generally satisfying Jewish interests at least until well into the post-World War II era. Beginning in the 1920s the CPUSA was financially supported by the Soviet Union, adhered closely to its positions, and engaged in a successful espionage effort against the United States on behalf of the Soviet Union, including stealing atomic secrets (Klehr, Haynes & Firsov 1995).⁸² In the 1930s Jews “constituted a substantial majority of known members of the Soviet underground in the United States” and almost half of the individuals prosecuted under the Smith Act of 1947 (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 100).

Although all party functionaries may not have known the details of the special relationship with the Soviet Union, ‘special work’ [i.e., espionage] was part and parcel of the Communist mission in the United States, and this was well known and discussed openly in the CPUSA’s Political Bureau… [I]t was these ordinary Communists whose lives demonstrate that some rank-and-file members were willing to serve the USSR by spying on their own country. There but for the grace of not being asked went other American Communists. The CPUSA showered hosannas on the USSR as the promised land. In Communist propaganda the survival of the Soviet Union as the one bright, shining star of humankind was a constant refrain, as in the 1934 American Communist poem that described the Soviet Union as “a heaven… brought to earth in Russia.” (Klehr et al. 1995, 324)

Klehr et al. (1995, 325) suggest that the CPUSA had important effects on U.S. history. Without excusing the excesses of the anti-communist movement, they note that “the peculiar and particular edge to American anticommunism cannot be severed from the CPUSA’s allegiance to the Soviet Union; the belief that American communists were disloyal is what made the communist issue so powerful and at times poisonous.”

Communists lied to and deceived the New Dealers with whom they were allied. Those liberals who believed the denials then denounced as mudslingers those anti-Communists who complained of concealed Communist activity. Furious at denials of what they knew to be true, anti-Communists then suspected that those who denied the Communist presence were themselves dishonest. The Communists’ duplicity poisoned normal political relationships and contributed to the harshness of the anti-Communist reaction of the late 1940s and 1950s. (Klehr et al. 1995, 106)

The liberal defense of communism during the Cold War era also raises issues related to this volume. Nicholas von Hoffman (1996) notes the role of the liberal defenders of communism during this period, such as the editors of The New Republic and Harvard historian Richard Hofstadter (1965) who attributed the contemporary concern with communist infiltration of the U.S. government to the “paranoid style of American politics.” (Rothman and Lichter [1982, 105] include The New Republic as among a group of liberal and radical publications with a large presence of Jewish writers and editors.) The official liberal version was that American Communists were sui generis and unconnected to the Soviet Union, so there was no domestic communist threat. The liberals had seized the intellectual and moral high ground during this period. Supporters of McCarthy were viewed as intellectual and cultural primitives: “In the ongoing kulturkampf dividing the society, the elites of Hollywood, Cambridge and liberal thank-tankery had little sympathy for bow-legged men with their American Legion caps and their fat wives, their yapping about Yalta and the Katyn Forest. Catholic and kitsch, looking out of their picture windows at their flock of pink plastic flamingos, the lower middles and their foreign policy anguish were too infra dig to be taken seriously” (von Hoffman 1996, C2).

However, besides poisoning the atmosphere of domestic politics, communist espionage had effects on foreign policy as well:

It is difficult to overstate the importance of Soviet atomic espionage in shaping the history of the Cold War. World War II had ended with Americans confident that the atomic bomb gave them a monopoly on the ultimate weapon, a monopoly expected to last ten to twenty years. The Soviet explosion of a nuclear bomb in 1949 destroyed this sense of physical security. America had fought in two world wars without suffering serious civilian deaths or destruction. Now it faced an enemy led by a ruthless dictator who could wipe out any American city with a single bomb.

Had the American nuclear monopoly lasted longer, Stalin might have refused to allow North Korean Communists to launch the Korean War, or the Chinese Communists might have hesitated to intervene in the war. Had the American nuclear monopoly lasted until Stalin’s death, the restraint on Soviet aggressiveness might have alleviated the most dangerous years of the Cold War. (Klehr et al. 1995, 106)

The Jewish “contraculture” continued to sustain a radical, specifically Jewish subculture into the 1950s—long after the great majority of Jews were no longer in the working class (Liebman 1979, 206, 289ff). The fundamentally Jewish institutions and families that constituted the Old Left then fed into the New Left (Liebman 1979, 536ff). The original impetus of the 1960s student protest movement “almost necessarily began with the scions of the relatively well-to-do, liberal-to-left, disproportionately Jewish intelligentsia—the largest pool of those ideologically disposed to sympathize with radical student action in the population” (Lipset 1971, 83; see also Glazer 1969). Flacks (1967, 64) found that 45 percent of students involved in a protest at the University of Chicago were Jewish, but his original sample was “‘adjusted’ to obtain better balance” (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 82). Jews constituted 80 percent of the students signing a petition to end ROTC at Harvard and 30-50 percent of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—the central organization of student radicals. Adelson (1972) found that 90 percent of his sample of radical students at the University of Michigan were Jewish, and it would appear that a similar rate of participation is likely to have occurred at other schools, such as Wisconsin and Minnesota.⁸³ Braungart (1979) found that 43 percent of the SDS membership in his sample of ten universities had at least one Jewish parent and an additional 20 percent had no religious affiliation. The latter are most likely to be predominantly Jewish: Rothman and Lichter (1982, 82) found that the “overwhelming majority” of the radical students who claimed that their parents were atheists had Jewish backgrounds.

Jews also tended to be the most publicized leaders of campus protests (Sachar 1992, 804). Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Rennie Davis achieved national fame as members of the “Chicago Seven” group convicted of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Cuddihy (1974, 193ff) notes the overtly ethnic subplot of the trial, particularly the infighting between defendant Abbie Hoffman and Judge Julius Hoffman, the former representing the children of the Eastern European immigrant generation that tended toward political radicalism, and the latter representing the older, more assimilated German-Jewish establishment. During the trial Abbie Hoffman ridiculed Judge Hoffman in Yiddish as “Shande fur de Goyim” (disgrace for the gentiles)—translated by Abbie Hoffman as “Front man for the WASP power elite.” Clearly Hoffman and Rubin (who spent time on a Kibbutz in Israel) had strong Jewish identifications and antipathy to the white Protestant establishment. Cuddihy (1974, 191-192) also credits the origins of the Yippie movement to the activities of the underground journalist Paul Krassner (publisher of The Realist, a “daring, scatological, curiously apolitical” journal of “irreverent satire and impolite reportage”) and the countercultural sensibility of comedian Lenny Bruce.

As a group, radical students came from relatively well-to-do families, whereas conservative students tended to come from less affluent families (Gottfried 1993, 53).⁸⁴ The movement was therefore initiated and led by an elite, but it was not aimed at advancing the interests of the unionized lower middle class. Indeed, the New Left regarded the working class as “fat, contented, and conservative, and their trade unions reflected them” (Glazer 1969, 123).

Moreover, although mild forms of Jewish anti-Semitism and rebellion against parental hypocrisy did occur among Jewish New Left radicals, the predominant pattern was a continuity with parental ideology (Flacks 1967; Glazer 1969, 12; Lipset 1988, 393; Rothman & Lichter 1982, 82). (Similarly, during the Weimar period the Frankfurt School radicals rejected their parents’ commercial values but did not personally reject their family. Indeed, their families tended to provide moral and financial support for them in their radical political activities [Cuddihy 1974, 154].) Many of these “red diaper babies” came from “families which around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is. Many Jewish parents live in the lily-white suburbs, go to Miami Beach in the winter, belong to expensive country clubs, arrange Bar Mitzvahs costing thousands of dollars—all the while espousing a left-liberal ideology” (Lipset 1988, 393). As indicated above, Glazer (1969) estimates that approximately 1 million Jews were members of the CPUSA or were socialists prior to 1950. The result was that among Jews there was “a substantial reservoir of present-day parents for whose children to be radical is not something shocking and strange but may well be seen as a means of fulfilling the best drives of their parents” (Glazer 1969, 129).

Moreover, the “American Jewish establishment never really distanced itself from these young Jews” (Hertzberg 1989, 369). Indeed, establishment Jewish organizations, including the AJCongress, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (a lay Reform group), and the Synagogue Council of America (Winston 1978), were prominent early opponents of the war in Vietnam. The anti-war attitudes of official Jewish organizations may have resulted in some anti-Semitism. President Lyndon Johnson was reported to be “disturbed by the lack of support for the Vietnam war in the American Jewish community at a time when he is taking new steps to aid Israel” (in Winston 1978, 198), and the ADL took steps to deal with an anti-Jewish backlash they expected to occur as a result of Jews tending to be hawks on military matters related to Israel and doves on military matters related to Vietnam (Winston 1978).

As with the Old Left, many of the Jewish New Left strongly identified as Jews (Liebman 1979, 536ff). Chanukah services were held and the “Hatikvah” (the Israeli national anthem) was sung during an important sit-in at Berkeley (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 81). The New Left lost Jewish members when it advocated positions incompatible with specific Jewish interests (especially regarding Israel) and attracted members when its positions coincided with these interests (Liebman 1979, 527ff). Leaders often spent time at Kibbutzim in Israel, and there is some indication that New Leftists consciously attempted to minimize the more overt signs of Jewish identity and to minimize discussion of issues on which Jewish and non-Jewish New Leftists would disagree, particularly Israel. Eventually the incompatibility of Jewish interests and the New Left resulted in most Jews abandoning the New Left, with many going to Israel to join kibbutzim, becoming involved in more traditional Jewish religious observances, or becoming involved in leftist organizations with a specifically Jewish identity. After the 1967 Six-Day War, the most important issue for the Jewish New Left was Israel, but the movement also worked on behalf of Soviet Jews and demanded Jewish studies programs at universities (Shapiro 1992, 225). As SDS activist, Jay Rosenberg, wrote, “From this point on I shall join no movement that does not accept and support my people’s struggle. If I must choose between the Jewish cause and a ‘progressive’ anti-Israel SDS, I shall choose the Jewish cause. If barricades are erected, I will fight as a Jew” (in Sachar 1992, 808).

Jews were also a critical component of the public acceptance of the New Left. Jews were overrepresented among radicals and their supporters in the media, the university, and the wider intellectual community, and Jewish leftist social scientists were instrumental in conducting research that portrayed student radicalism in a positive light (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 104). However, in their recent review of the literature on the New Left, Rothman and Lichter (1996, ix, xiii) note a continuing tendency to ignore the role of Jews in the movement and that when the Jewish role is mentioned, it is attributed to Jewish idealism or other positively valued traits. Cuddihy (1974, 194n) notes that the media almost completely ignored the Jewish infighting that occurred during the Chicago Seven trial. He also describes several evaluations of the trial written by Jews in the media (New York Times, New York Post, Village Voice) that excused the behavior of the defendants and praised their radical Jewish lawyer, William Kunstler.

Finally, a similar ebb and flow of Jewish attraction to communism depending on its convergence with specifically Jewish interests occurred also in England. During the 1930s the Communist Party appealed to Jews partly because it was the only political movement that was stridently anti-fascist. There was no conflict at all between a strong Jewish ethnic identity and being a member of the Communist Party: “Communist sympathy among Jews of that generation had about it some of the qualities of a group identification, a means, perhaps, of ethnic self-assertion” (Alderman 1992, 317-318). In the post-World War II period, virtually all the successful communist political candidates represented Jewish wards. However, Jewish support for communism declined with the revelation of Stalin’s anti-Semitism, and many Jews left the Communist Party after the Middle East crisis of 1967 when the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with Israel (Alderman 1983, 162).

The conclusion must be that Jewish identity was generally perceived to be highly compatible with radical politics. When radical politics came in conflict with specific Jewish interests, Jews eventually ceased being radical, although there were often instances of ambivalence and rationalization.

SOCIAL IDENTITY PROCESSES, PERCEIVED JEWISH
GROUP INTERESTS, AND JEWISH RADICALISM

One view of Jewish radicalism emphasizes the moral basis of Judaism. This is yet another example of the attempt to portray Judaism as a universalist, morally superior movement—the “light of the nations” theme that has repeatedly emerged as an aspect of Jewish self-identity since antiquity and especially since the Enlightenment (SAID, Ch. 7). Thus Fuchs (1956, 190-191) suggests that the Jewish involvement in liberal causes stems from the unique moral nature of Judaism in inculcating charity towards the poor and needy. Involvement in these causes is viewed as simply an extension of traditional Jewish religious practices. Similarly, Hertzberg (1985, 22) writes of “the echo of a unique moral sensibility, a willingness to act in disregard of economic interest when the cause seems just.”

As indicated in PTSDA (Chs. 5, 6), there is every indication that traditional Jewish concern for the poor and needy was confined within Jewish groups, and in fact Jews have often served oppressive ruling elites in traditional societies and in post-World War II Eastern Europe.⁸⁵ Ginsberg (1993, 140) describes these putative humanistic motivations as “a bit fanciful,” and notes that in different contexts (notably in the postrevolutionary Soviet Union) Jews have organized “ruthless agencies of coercion and terror,” including especially a very prominent involvement in the Soviet secret police from the postrevolutionary period into the 1930s (see also Baron 1975, 170; Lincoln 1989; Rapoport 1990, 30-31). Similarly, we have seen that Jews were very prominent in the domestic security forces in Poland (see Schatz 1991, 223-228) and Hungary (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 89).

Pipes (1993, 112) theorizes that although it is “undeniable” that Jews were overrepresented in the Bolshevik party and the early Soviet government as well as communist revolutionary activities in Hungary, Germany, and Austria in the period from 1918 to 1923, Jews were also overrepresented in a variety of other areas, including business, art, literature, and science. As a result, Pipes argues that their disproportionate representation in communist political movements should not be an issue. Pipes couples this argument with the assertion that Jewish Bolsheviks did not identify as Jews—an issue that, as we have seen, is questionable at best.

However, even 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:⁸⁶ 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.

Social identity theory provides a quite different perspective on Jewish radicalism. It stresses that perceived Jewish group interests are fundamental to Jewish political behavior, and that these perceived group interests are importantly influenced by social identity processes. If indeed radical politics resulted in a strong sense of identification with a Jewish ingroup, then Jewish involvement in these movements would be associated with very negative and exaggerated conceptions of the wider gentile society, and particularly the most powerful elements of that society, as an outgroup. In conformity with this expectation, Liebman (1979, 26) uses the term “contraculture” to describe the American Jewish left because “conflict with or antagonism toward society is a central feature of this subculture and… many of its values and cultural patterns are contradictions of those existing in the surrounding society.” For example, the New Left was fundamentally involved in radical social criticism in which all elements that contributed to the cohesive social fabric of mid-century America were regarded as oppressive and in need of radical alteration.

The emphasis here on social identity processes is compatible with Jewish radicalism serving particular perceived Jewish group interests. Anti-Semitism and Jewish economic interests were undoubtedly important motivating factors for Jewish leftism in czarist Russia. Jewish leaders in Western societies, many of whom were wealthy capitalists, proudly acknowledged Jewish overrepresentation in the Russian revolutionary movement; they also provided financial and political support for these movements by, for example, attempting to influence U.S. foreign policy (Szajkowski 1967). Representative of this attitude is financier Jacob Schiff’s statement that “the claim that among the ranks of those who in Russia are seeking to undermine governmental authority there are a considerable number of Jews may perhaps be true. In fact, it would be rather surprising if some of those so terribly afflicted by persecution and exceptional laws should not at last have turned against their merciless oppressors” (in Szajkowski 1967, 10).

Indeed, at the risk of oversimplification, one might note that anti-Semitism and economic adversity combined with the Jewish demographic explosion in Eastern Europe were of critical importance for producing the sheer numbers of disaffected Jewish radicals and therefore the ultimate influence of Jewish radicalism in Europe and its spillover into the United States. Jewish populations in Eastern Europe had the highest rate of natural increase of any European population in the nineteenth century, with a natural increase of 120,000 per year in the 1880s and an overall increase within the Russian Empire from 1 to 6 million in the course of the nineteenth century (Alderman 1992, 112; Frankel 1981, 103; Lindemann 1991, 28-29, 133-135). Despite the emigration of close to 2 million Jews to the United States and elsewhere, many Eastern European Jews were impoverished at least in part because of czarist anti-Jewish policies that prevented Jewish upward mobility.

As a result, a great many Jews were attracted to radical political solutions that would transform the economic and political basis of society and would also be consistent with the continuity of Judaism. Within Russian Jewish communities, the acceptance of radical political ideology often coexisted with messianic forms of Zionism as well as intense commitment to Jewish nationalism and religious and cultural separatism, and many individuals held various and often rapidly changing combinations of these ideas (see Frankel 1981).

Religious fanaticism and messianic expectations have been a typical Jewish response to anti-Semitic persecutions throughout history (e.g., Scholem 1971; PTSDA, Ch. 3). Indeed, one might propose that messianic forms of political radicalism may be viewed as secular forms of this Jewish response to persecution, different from traditional forms only in that they also promise a utopian future for gentiles as well. The overall picture is reminiscent of the situation in the late Ottoman Empire, where by the mid-eighteenth century until the intervention of the European powers in the twentieth century there was “an unmistakable picture of grinding poverty, ignorance, and insecurity” (Lewis 1984, 164) in the context of high levels of anti-Semitism that effectively prevented Jewish upward mobility. These phenomena were accompanied by the prevalence of mysticism and a high-fertility, low-investment parenting style among Jews. In the long run the community became too poor to provide for the education of most children, with the result that most were illiterate and pursued occupations requiring only limited intelligence and training.

However, when presented with opportunities for upward social mobility, the strategy quickly changes to a low-fertility, high-investment reproductive strategy. In nineteenth-century Germany, for example, the Jews were the first group to enter the demographic transition and take advantage of opportunities for upward social mobility by having fewer children (e.g., Goldstein 1981; Knode 1974). At the same time, poor Jews in Eastern Europe with no hope of upward mobility married earlier than their Western European counterparts, who delayed marriage in order to be financially better prepared (Efron 1994, 77). And the resurgence of Ottoman Jews in the nineteenth century resulting from patronage and protection from Western European Jews brought with it a flowering of a highly literate culture, including secular schools based on Western models (see Shaw 1991, 143ff, 175-176). Similarly, when the oppressed Eastern European Jews emigrated to the United States, they developed a high-investment, low-fertility culture that took advantage of opportunities for upward mobility. The suggestion is that the overall pattern of the Jewish response to lack of opportunity for upward mobility and anti-Semitism is to facultatively adopt a low-investment, high-fertility style of reproduction combined at the ideological level with various forms of messianism, including, in the modern era, radical political ideology.

Ultimately this population explosion in the context of poverty and politically imposed restrictions on Jews was responsible for the generally destabilizing effects of Jewish radicalism on Russia up to the revolution. These conditions also had spill-over effects in Germany, where the negative attitudes toward the immigrant Ostjuden contributed to the anti-Semitism of the period (Aschheim 1982). In the United States, the point of this chapter is that a high level of inertia characterized the radical political beliefs held by a great many Jewish immigrants and their descendants in the sense that radical political beliefs persisted even in the absence of oppressive economic and political conditions. In Sorin’s (1985, 46) study of immigrant Jewish radical activists in America, over half had been involved in radical politics in Europe before emigrating, and for those immigrating after 1900, the percentage rose to 69 percent. Glazer (1961, 21) notes that the biographies of almost all radical leaders show that they first came in contact with radical political ideas in Europe. The persistence of these beliefs influenced the general political sensibility of the Jewish community and had a destabilizing effect on American society, ranging from the paranoia of the McCarthy era to the triumph of the 1960s countercultural revolution.

The immigration of Eastern European Jews into England after 1880 had a similarly transformative effect on the political attitudes of British Jewry in the direction of socialism, trade-unionism, and Zionism, often combined with religious orthodoxy and devotion to a highly separatist traditional lifestyle (Alderman 1983, 47ff). “Far more significant than the handful of publicity-seeking Jewish socialists, both in Russia and England, who organized ham-sandwich picnics on the fast of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, were the mass of working-class Jews who experienced no inner conflict when they repaired to the synagogue for religious services three times each day, and then used the same premises to discuss socialist principles and organize industrial stoppages” (Alderman 1983, 54).⁸⁷ As in the United States, the immigrant Eastern European Jews demographically swamped the previously existing Jewish community, and the older community reacted to this influx with considerable trepidation because of the possibility of increased anti-Semitism. And as in the United States, attempts were made by the established Jewish community to misrepresent the prevalence of radical political ideas among the immigrants (Alderman 1983, 60; SAID, Ch. 8).

Nevertheless, economic interests are not the whole story. While the origin of widespread political radicalism among Jews can be characterized as a typical Jewish response to the political and economic adversity of late-nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, radical political ideology became dissociated from the usual demographic variables not long after arrival in the United States, and it is this phenomenon that requires another type of explanation. For the most part, American Jews had far less reason than other ethnic groups to wish for an overthrow of capitalism because they tended to be relatively economically privileged. Surveys from the 1960s and 1970s indicated that middle-class Jews were more radical than working-class Jews—a pattern opposite to that of non-Jewish radical students (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 117, 219;⁸⁸ Levey 1996, 375⁸⁹). Lower percentages of Jews than members of other religions believed that supporting a Democratic candidate would further their economic interests, but Jews nevertheless tended overwhelmingly to vote Democratic (Liebman 1973, 136-137).

The gap between economic interests and political ideology dates at least from the 1920s (Liebman 1979, 290ff). Indeed, for the entire period from 1921 to 1961, Jews on the Central Committee of the CPUSA were much more likely to have middle-class, professional backgrounds and tended to have more education than their gentile colleagues (Klehr 1978, 42ff). They were also much more likely to have joined prior to the economic difficulties of the Great Depression. Further, as indicated above, New Left radical students came disproportionately from highly educated and affluent families (see also Liebman 1973, 210).

Even successful Jewish capitalists have tended to adopt political beliefs to the left of the beliefs of their gentile counterparts. For example, German-Jewish capitalists in the nineteenth century “tended to take up positions distinctly to the ‘left’ of their Gentile peers and thus to place themselves in isolation from them” (Mosse 1989, 225). Although as a group they tended to be to the right of the Jewish population as a whole, a few even supported the Social Democratic Party and its socialist program. Among the plausible reasons for this state of affairs suggested by Mosse is that anti-Semitism tended to be associated with the German Right. Consistent with social identity theory, Jewish capitalists did not identify with groups that perceived them negatively and identified with groups that opposed an outgroup perceived as hostile. Social identity processes and their influence on perception of ethnic (group) interests rather than economic self-interest appears to be paramount here.

The association between Jews and liberal political attitudes is therefore independent of the usual demographic associations. In a passage that shows that Jewish cultural and ethnic estrangement supersedes economic interests in explaining Jewish political behavior, Silberman (1985, 347-348) comments on the attraction of Jews to “the Democratic party… with its traditional hospitality to non-WASP ethnic groups… A distinguished economist who strongly disagreed with [presidential candidate Walter] Mondale’s economic policies voted for him nonetheless. ‘I watched the conventions on television,’ he explained, ‘and the Republicans did not look like my kind of people.’ That same reaction led many Jews to vote for Carter in 1980 despite their dislike of him; ‘I’d rather live in a country governed by the faces I saw at the Democratic convention than by those I saw at the Republican convention,’ a well-known author told me.”

The suggestion is that in general Jewish political motivation is influenced by non-economic issues related to perceived Jewish group interests, the latter influenced by social identity processes. Similarly in the politically charged area of cultural attitudes, Silberman (1985, 350) notes “American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief—one firmly rooted in history—that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of American Jews to endorse ‘gay rights’ and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called ‘social’ issues.” A perceived Jewish group interest in cultural pluralism transcends negative personal attitudes regarding the behavior in question.

Silberman’s comment that Jewish attitudes are “firmly rooted in history” is particularly relevant: A consistent tendency has been for Jews to be persecuted as a minority group within a culturally or ethnically homogeneous society. A discussion of the political, religious, and cultural pluralism as a very rational motivation for American Jews will be highlighted in Chapter 7, which discusses Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy. The point here is that the perceived Jewish group interest in developing a pluralistic society is of far more importance than mere economic self-interest in determining Jewish political behavior. Similarly Earl Raab (1996, 44) explains Jewish political behavior in terms of security issues related in part to a long memory of the Republican Party as linked to Christian fundamentalism and its history of being “resolutely nativist and anti-immigrant.” The pattern of supporting the Democratic Party is therefore an aspect of ethnic conflict between Jews and sectors of the European-derived Caucasian population in the United States, not economic issues. Indeed, economic issues appear to have no relevance at all, since support for the Democratic Party among Jews does not differ by social status (Raab 1996, 45).

Nevertheless, there is evidence that recent Jewish voting behavior increasingly separates the traditional economic left-liberalism from issues related to cultural pluralism, immigration, and church-state separation. Recent polls and data on Jewish voting patterns indicate that Jews continue to view the right wing of the Republican Party as “a threat to American cosmopolitanism” because it is perceived as advocating a homogeneous Christian culture and is opposed to immigration (Beinart 1997, 25). However, Jewish voters were more supportive of conservative fiscal policies and less supportive of government attempts to redistribute wealth than either African Americans or other white Americans. Recent Jewish political behavior is thus self-interested both economically and in its opposition to the ethnic interests of white Americans to develop an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society.

In addition to the pursuit of specific group interests, however, social identity processes appear to make an independent contribution to explaining Jewish political behavior. Social identity processes appear to be necessary for explaining why the Jewish labor movement was far more radical than the rest of the American labor movement. In a passage that indicates Jewish radicals’ profound sense of Jewish identity and separatism as well as complete antipathy to the entire gentile social order, Levin (1977, 213) notes that “their socialist ideas… created a gulf between themselves and other American workers who were not interested in radical changes in the social order. Although Jewish trade unions joined the AFL, they never felt ideologically at home there, for the AFL did not seek a radical transformation of society, nor was it internationalist in outlook.” We have also noted that the New Left completely abandoned the aims and interests of the lower middle working class once that group had essentially achieved its social aims with the success of the trade union movement.

Again, there is the strong suggestion that social criticism and feelings of cultural estrangement among Jews have deep psychological roots that reach far beyond particular economic or political interests. As indicated in Chapter 1, one critical psychological component appears to involve a very deep antipathy to the entire gentile-dominated social order, which is viewed as anti-Semitic—the desire for “malignant vengeance” that Disraeli asserted made many Jews “odious and so hostile to mankind.” Recall Lipset’s (1988, 393) description of the many Jewish “families which around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is.” These families clearly perceive themselves as separate from the wider culture of the United States; they also view conservative forces as attempting to maintain this malignant culture. As in the case of traditional Judaism vis-à-vis gentile society, the traditional culture of the United States—and particularly the political basis of cultural conservatism that has historically been associated with anti-Semitism—is perceived as a manifestation of a negatively evaluated outgroup.

This antipathy toward gentile-dominated society was often accompanied by a powerful desire to avenge the evils of the old social order. For many Jewish New Leftists “the revolution promises to avenge the sufferings and to right the wrongs which have, for so long, been inflicted on Jews with the permission or encouragement, or even at the command of, the authorities in prerevolutionary societies” (Cohen 1980, 208). Interviews with New Left Jewish radicals revealed that many had destructive fantasies in which the revolution would result in “humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors” (Cohen 1980, 208) combined with the belief in their own omnipotence and their ability to create a nonoppressive social order—findings that are reminiscent of the motivating role of revenge for anti-Semitism among the Jewish-dominated security forces in communist Poland discussed above. These findings are also entirely consistent with my experience among Jewish New Left activists at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s (see note 13).

The social identity perspective predicts that generalized negative attributions of the outgroup would be accompanied by positive attributions regarding the Jewish ingroup. Both Jewish communists in Poland and Jewish New Left radicals had a powerful feeling of cultural superiority that was continuous with traditional Jewish conceptions of the superiority of their ingroup (Cohen 1980, 212; Schatz 1991, 119). Jewish self-conceptualizations of their activity in developing an adversarial culture in the United States tended to emphasize either the Jew as the historical victim of gentile anti-Semitism or the Jew as moral hero, but “in both cases the portrait is the obverse of that of the anti-Semite. Jews lack warts. Their motives are pure, their idealism genuine” (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 112). Studies of Jewish radicals by Jewish social scientists have tended to gratuitously attribute Jewish radicalism to a “free choice of a gifted minority” (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 118) when economic explanations failed—yet another example where Jewish group status appears to affect social science research in a manner that serves Jewish group interests.

Moreover, a universalist utopian ideology such as Marxism is an ideal vehicle for serving Jewish attempts to develop a positive self-identity while still retaining their positive identity as Jews and their negative evaluation of gentile power structures. First, the utopian nature of radical ideology in contrast to existing gentile-dominated social systems (which are inevitably less than perfect) facilitates development of a positive identity for the ingroup. Radical ideology thus facilitates positive group identity and a sense of moral rectitude because of its advocacy of universalist ethical principles. Psychologists have found that a sense of moral rectitude is an important component of self-esteem (e.g., Harter 1983), and self-esteem has been proposed as a motivating factor in social identity processes (SAID, Ch. 1).

As was also true of psychoanalysis, leftist political movements developed redemptive-messianic overtones highly conducive to ingroup pride and loyalty. Members of the Russian Jewish Bund and their progeny in the United States had intense personal pride and a powerful sense that they were “part of a moral and political vanguard for great historical change. They had a mission that inspired them and people who believed in them” (Liebman 1979, 133).

This sense of ingroup pride and messianic fervor is undoubtedly a critical ingredient of Judaism in all historical eras. As Schatz (1991, 105) notes in his description of the underground Jewish communist revolutionaries in Poland during the interwar period, “The movement was… part of a worldwide, international struggle for nothing less than the fundamental change of the very foundations of human society. The joint effect of this situation was a specific sense of revolutionary loneliness and mission, an intense cohesion, a feeling of brotherhood, and a readiness for personal sacrifice on the altar of struggle.” What distinguished Jewish communists from other communists was not only their desire for a postrevolutionary world without anti-Semitism, but also their “distinct [emotional] intensity with roots in messianic longings” (Schatz 1991, 140). As one respondent said, “I believed in Stalin and in the party as my father believed in the Messiah” (in Schatz 1991, 140).

Reflecting traditional Jewish social structure, these Jewish radical groups were hierarchical and highly authoritarian, and they developed their own private language (Schatz 1991, 109-112). As in traditional Judaism, continuing study and self-education were viewed as very important features of the movement: “To study was a point of honor and an obligation” (p. 117). The discussions replicated the traditional methods of Torah study: memorization of long passages of text combined with analysis and interpretation carried out in an atmosphere of intense intellectual competition quite analogous to the traditional pilpul. In the words of a novice to these discussions, “We behaved like yeshiva bukhers [students] and they [the more experienced intellectual mentors] like rabbis” (p. 139).

As expected on the basis of social identity theory, there was also a high level of ingroup-outgroup thinking characterized by a lofty sense of moral rectitude among the ingroup combined with an implacable hostility and rejection of the outgroup. In the period after World War II, for example, the Polish-Jewish communists viewed the new economic plan “in truly mystical terms. [It was] a scientifically conceived, infallible scheme that would totally restructure societal relations and prepare the country for socialism” (Schatz 1991, 249). The economic difficulties that befell the population merely resulted in transferring their hopes to the future, while at the same time they developed “an uncompromising attitude toward those who might not be willing to accept the hardships of the present and a merciless hostility toward those perceived as the enemy. Thus the burning will to produce general harmony and happiness was married to distrust and suspiciousness regarding its objects and a hatred toward its actual, potential, or imagined opponents” (p. 250).

Clearly, to be a communist revolutionary was to develop an intense commitment to a cohesive authoritarian group that valued intellectual accomplishments and exhibited intense hatred against enemies and outgroups while having very positive feelings toward an ingroup viewed as morally and intellectually superior. These groups operated as embattled minorities that viewed the surrounding society as hostile and threatening. Being a member of such a group required a great deal of personal sacrifice and even altruism. All these attributes can be found as defining features of more traditional Jewish groups.

Further evidence of the importance of social identity processes may be found in Charles Liebman’s (1973, 153ff) suggestion that leftist universalist ideology allows Jews to subvert traditional social categorizations in which Jews are viewed in negative terms. The adoption of such ideologies by Jews is an attempt to overcome Jewish feelings of alienation “from the roots and the traditions of [gentile] society” (p. 153). “The Jew continues his search for an ethic or ethos which is not only universal or capable of universality, but which provides a cutting edge against the older traditions of the society, a search whose intensity is compounded and reinforced by the Gentile’s treatment of the Jew” (Liebman 1973, 157). Such attempts at subverting negative social categorizations imposed by an outgroup are a central aspect of social identity theory (Hogg & Abrams 1988; see SAID, Ch. 1).

The universalist ideology thus functions as a secular form of Judaism. Sectarian forms of Judaism are rejected as “a survival strategy” (Liebman 1973, 157) because of their tendency to produce anti-Semitism, their lack of intellectual appeal in the post-Enlightenment world, and their ineffectiveness in appealing to gentiles and thereby altering the gentile social world in a manner that furthers Jewish group interests. Indeed, while the universalist ideology is formally congruent with Enlightenment ideals, the retention of traditional Jewish separatism and patterns of association among those espousing the ideology suggest an element of deception or self-deception:

Jews prefer to get together with other Jews to promote ostensibly non-Jewish enterprises (which assist Jewish acceptance), and then to pretend the whole matter has nothing to do with being Jewish. But this type of activity is most prevalent among Jews who are the most estranged from their own traditions and hence most concerned with finding a value that supports Jewish acceptance without overtly destroying Jewish group ties. (Liebman 1973, 159)

The universalist ideology therefore allows Jews to escape their alienation or estrangement from gentile society while nevertheless allowing for the retention of a strong Jewish identity. Institutions that promote group ties among gentiles (such as nationalism and traditional gentile religious associations) are actively opposed and subverted, while the structural integrity of Jewish separatism is maintained. A consistent thread of radical theorizing since Marx has been a fear that nationalism could serve as a social cement that would result in a compromise between the social classes and result in a highly unified social order based on hierarchical but harmonious relationships between existing social classes. This is only this type of highly cohesive gentile social organization that is fundamentally at odds with Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy (see Chs. 5, 7, 8). Both the Old Left and the New Left, as noted, actively attempted to subvert the cohesiveness of gentile social structure, including especially the modus vivendi achieved between business and labor by the 1960s. And we have seen that the Jewish-dominated Polish communist government campaigned actively against Polish nationalism, and they campaigned against the political and cultural power of the Catholic Church, the main force of social cohesion in traditional Polish society.

Finally, as emphasized by Rothman and Lichter (1982, 119), Marxism is particularly attractive as the basis for an ideology that subverts the negative social categorizations of the gentile outgroup because within such an ideology the Jewish-gentile categorization becomes less salient while Jewish group cohesion and separatism may nevertheless persist: “By adopting variants of Marxist ideology, Jews deny the reality of cultural or religious differences between Jews and Christians. These differences become ‘epiphenomenal,’ compared to the more fundamental opposition of workers and capitalists. Thus Jews and non-Jews are really brothers under the skin. Even when not adopting a Marxist position, many Jews have tended toward radical environmentalist positions which serve a similar function” (p. 119).⁹⁰

Such a strategy makes excellent sense from the standpoint of social identity theory: A consistent finding in research on intergroup contact is that making the social categories that define groups less salient would lessen intergroup differentiation and would facilitate positive social interactions between members from different groups (Brewer & Miller 1984; Doise & Sinclair 1973; Miller, Brewer & Edwards 1985). At the extreme, acceptance of a universalist ideology by gentiles would result in gentiles not perceiving Jews as in a different social category at all, while nonetheless Jews would be able to maintain a strong personal identity as Jews.

These features of Jewish radicalism together constitute a very compelling analysis of the role of social identity processes in this phenomenon. The last mechanism is particularly interesting as an analysis of both the tendency for Jewish political overrepresentation in radical causes and the Jewish tendency to adopt radical environmentalist ideologies noted as a common characteristic of Jewish social scientists in Chapter 2. The analysis implies that the Jews involved in these intellectual movements are engaged in a subtle process of deception of gentiles (and, perhaps, self-deception), and that these movements essentially function as a form of crypto-Judaism.

In the language of social identity theory, an ideology is created in which the social categorization of Jew-gentile is minimized in importance, and there are no negative attributions regarding Jewish group membership. The importance of ethnic group membership is minimized as a social category, and, because of its lack of importance, ethnic self-interest among gentiles is analyzed as fundamentally misguided because it does not recognize the priority of class conflict between gentiles. Jews can remain Jews because being a Jew is no longer important. At the same time, traditional institutions of social cohesiveness within gentile society are subverted and gentile society itself is viewed as permeated by conflicts of interest between social classes rather than by commonalities of interest and feelings of social solidarity among different social classes.

Rothman and Lichter (p. 119ff) support their argument by noting that the adoption of universalist ideologies is a common technique among minority groups in a wide range of cultures around the world. Despite the veneer of universalism, these movements are most definitely not assimilationist, and in fact Rothman and Lichter view assimilation, defined as complete absorption and loss of minority group identity, as an alternative to the adoption of universalist political movements. Universalist ideologies may be smoke screens that actually facilitate the continued existence of group strategies while promoting the denial of their importance by ingroup and outgroup members alike. Judaism as a cohesive, ethnically based group strategy is able to continue to exist but in a cryptic or semi-cryptic state.

Corroborating this perspective, Levin (1977, 105) states, “Marx’s analysis [of Judaism as a caste] gave socialist thinkers an easy way out—to ignore or minimize the Jewish problem.” In Poland, the Jewish-dominated Communist Party decried worker and peasant participation in anti-Semitic pogroms during the 1930s because such individuals were not acting on behalf of their class interests (Schatz 1991, 99), an interpretation in which ethnic conflicts result from capitalism and will end after the communist revolution. One reason little antiSemitism existed within the Social Democratic movement in late-nineteenth-century Germany was that Marxist theory explained all social phenomena; Social Democrats “did not need anti-Semitism, another all-embracing theory, to explain the events of their lives” (Dawidowicz 1975, 42). The Social Democrats (and Marx) never analyzed Judaism as a nation or as an ethnic group but as a religious and economic community (Pulzer 1964, 269).

In theory, therefore, anti-Semitism and other ethnic conflicts would disappear with the advent of a socialist society. It is possible that such an interpretation actually served to lower anti-Semitism in some cases. Levy (1975, 190) suggests that anti-Semitism was minimized among the gentile working-class constituency of the German Social Democrats by the activities of party leaders and socialist theoreticians who framed the political and economic problems of this group in terms of class conflict rather than Jewish-gentile conflict and actively opposed any cooperation with anti-Semitic parties.

Trotsky and other Jews in the Russian Socialist Democratic Labor Party considered themselves as representing the Jewish proletariat within the wider socialist movement (see note 4), but they were opposed to the separatist, nationalist program of the Russian Jewish Bund. Arthur Liebman (1979, 122-123) suggests that these assimilationist socialists consciously conceptualized a postrevolutionary society in which Judaism would exist, but with a lessened social salience: “For them, the ultimate solution of the Jewish problem would be an internationalist socialist society that paid no heed to distinctions between Jews and non-Jews. To hasten the establishment of such a society, it became necessary, in the view of these assimilationist socialists, for Jews to consider ethnic and religious distinctions between them and non-Jews as irrelevant.”

Similarly, after the revolution, “Having abandoned their own origins and identity, yet not finding, or sharing, or being fully admitted to Russian life (except in the world of the party), the Jewish Bolsheviks found their ideological home in revolutionary universalism. They dreamt of a classless and stateless society supported by Marxist faith and doctrine that transcended the particularities and burdens of Jewish existence” (Levin 1988, 49). These individuals, along with many highly nationalist ex-Bundists, ended up administrating programs related to Jewish national life in the Soviet Union. Apparently, although they rejected the radical Jewish separatism of either the Bundists or the Zionists, they envisioned the continuity of secular Jewish national life in the Soviet Union (e.g., Levin 1988, 52).

This belief in the invisibility of Judaism in a socialist society can also be found among American Jewish radicals. American Jewish socialists of the 1890s, for example, envisioned a society in which race played no part (Rogoff 1930, 115), apparently a proposal in which Jews and non-Jews would remain in their separate spheres in a class-based workers movement. In the event, even this level of assimilation was not attained; these organizers worked in a completely Jewish milieu and retained strong ties with the Jewish community. “Their actions continued to be at variance with their ideology. The more deeply they moved into the field of organizing Jewish workers, the more loudly they insisted on their socialist universalism” (Liebman 1979, 256-257).

The gap between rhetoric and reality strongly suggests the importance of deception and self-deception in these phenomena. Indeed, these socialist labor organizers never abandoned their universalistic rhetoric, but actively resisted incorporating their unions into the wider American labor movement even after the decline of Yiddish among their members left them without any excuses for failing to do so. Within the unions they engaged in ethnic politics aimed at keeping their own ethnic group in power (Liebman 1979, 270ff), actions obviously at odds with socialist rhetoric. In the end, the attachment of many of these individuals to socialism declined and was replaced by a strong sense of Jewish ethnicity and peoplehood (Liebman 1979, 270).

The result was that the veneer or universalism covered up a continued separatism of radical Jewish intellectuals and political organizers:

[Gentile intellectuals] really are not totally accepted into even the secularist humanist liberal company of their quondam Jewish friends. Jews continue to insist in indirect and often inexplicable ways on their own uniqueness. Jewish universalism in relations between Jews and non-Jews has an empty ring… Still, we have the anomaly of Jewish secularists and atheists writing their own prayer books. We find Jewish political reformers breaking with their local parties which stress an ethnic style of politics, and ostensibly pressing for universal political goals—while organizing their own political clubs which are so Jewish in style and manner that non-Jews often feel unwelcome. (Liebman 1973, 158)

Universalism may thus be viewed as a mechanism for Jewish continuity via crypsis or semi-crypsis. The Jewish radical is invisible to the gentile as a Jew and thereby avoids anti-Semitism while at the same time covertly retains his or her Jewish identity. Lyons (1982, 73) finds that “most Jewish Communists wear their Jewishness very casually but experience it deeply. It is not a religious or even an institutional Jewishness for most; nevertheless, it is rooted in a subculture of identity, style, language, and social network… In fact, this second-generation Jewishness was antiethnic and yet the height of ethnicity. The emperor believed that he was clothed in transethnic, American garb, but Gentiles saw the nuances and details of his naked ethnicity.”

These remarks indicate an element of crypsis—a self-deceptive disjunction between private and public personas—”a dual posturing revealing one face to the outer world and another to the tribe” (Horowitz 1997, 42). But this pose has a cost. As Albert Memmi (1966, 236), notes, “The Jew-of-the-Left must pay for this protection by his modesty and anonymity, his apparent lack of concern for all that relates to his own people… Like the poor man who enters a middle-class family, they demand that he at least have the good taste to make himself invisible.” Because of the nature of their own ideology, Jews on the left were forced to deemphasize specifically Jewish issues, such as the Holocaust and Israel, despite their strong identification as Jews (Wisse 1987). It is precisely this feature of the Jewish leftist intellectual movements that are most repellent to ethnically committed Jews (see, e.g., Wisse 1987).

Ethnic identification was often unconscious, suggesting self-deception. Lyons (1982, 74) finds that among his sample of Jewish American communists,

evidence of the importance of ethnicity in general and Jewishness in particular permeates the available record. Many Communists, for example, state that they could never have married a spouse who was not a leftist. When Jews were asked if they could have married Gentiles, many hesitated, surprised by the question, and found it difficult to answer. Upon reflection, many concluded that they had always taken marriage to someone Jewish for granted. The alternative was never really considered, particularly among Jewish men.

Moreover, there were conscious attempts at deception directed at making Jewish involvement in radical political movements invisible by placing an American face on what was in reality largely a Jewish movement (Liebman 1979, 527ff). Both the Socialist Party and the CPUSA took pains to have gentiles prominently displayed as leaders, and the CPUSA actively encouraged Jewish members to take gentile-sounding names. (This phenomenon also occurred in Poland [see above] and the Soviet Union [see p. 97].) Despite representing over half the membership in both the Socialist Party and the CPUSA during some periods, neither party ever had Jews as presidential candidates and no Jew held the top position in the CPUSA after 1929. Gentiles were brought from long distances and given highly visible staff positions in Jewish-dominated socialist organizations in New York. Jewish domination of these organizations not uncommonly led gentiles to leave when they realized their role as window dressing in a fundamentally Jewish organization.

Liebman (1979, 561) notes that New Left radicals often took pains to ignore Jewish issues entirely. The New Left deemphasized ethnicity and religion in its ideology while emphasizing social categories and political issues such as the Vietnam War and discrimination against blacks which were very divisive for white gentiles but for which Jewish identity was irrelevant; moreover, these issues did not threaten Jewish middle-class interests, especially Zionism. Jewish identity, though salient to the participants, was publicly submerged. And as noted above, when the New Left began adopting positions incompatible with Jewish interests, Jews tended to sever their ties with the movement.

In a remarkable illustration of the perceived invisibility of the group dynamics of Jewish involvement in radical political movements, Liebman (1979, 167) describes 1960s student activists as completely unaware that their actions could lead to anti-Semitism because Jews were overrepresented among the activists. (Liebman shows that in fact other Jews were concerned that their actions would lead to anti-Semitism.) From their own perspective, they were successfully engaging in crypsis: They supposed that their Jewishness was completely invisible to the outside world while at the same time it retained a great deal of subjective salience to themselves. At a theoretical level, this is a classic case of self-deception, considered in SAID (Ch. 8) as an essential feature of Jewish religious ideology and reactions to anti-Semitism.

In the event, the deception appears to have generally failed, if not for the New Left, at least for the Old Left. There was a general lack of rapport between Jewish radical intellectuals and non-Jewish intellectuals within Old Left radical organizations (C. Liebman 1973, 158-159). Some gentile intellectuals found the movement attractive because of its Jewish dominance, but for the most part the essentially Jewish milieu was a barrier (Liebman 1979, 530ff). The Jewish commitment of these radicals, their desire to remain within a Jewish milieu, and their negative attitudes toward Christian gentile culture prevented them from being effective recruiters among the gentile working class. As David Horowitz’s communist father wrote while on a trip through Colorado in the 1930s, “I have feelings… that I’m in a foreign land. And it strikes me that unless we learn the people of this country so thoroughly so that we won’t feel that way, we won’t get anywhere. I’m afraid that most of us aren’t really ‘patriotic,’ I mean at bottom deeply fond of the country and people.” Similarly, former communist Sidney Hook (1987, 188) noted, “it was as if they had no roots in, or knowledge of, the American society they wanted to transform.” A similar situation occurred in Poland, where the efforts of even the most “de-ethnicized” Jewish communists were inhibited by the traditional Jewish attitudes of superiority toward and estrangement from traditional Polish culture (Schatz 1991, 119).

And once in the party, many non-Jews were repelled by its highly intellectual atmosphere and dropped out. As expected on the basis of social identity theory on the hypothesis that radicalism was fundamentally a form of secular Judaism, there are indications of an anti-gentile atmosphere within these organizations: “There was also present among Jewish intellectuals and leftists a mixture of hostility and superiority toward Gentiles” (Liebman 1979, 534). There was also an ethnic divide between Jewish and black Communist Party workers resulting at least partly from “a missionary and patronizing attitude” of the Jewish organizers (Lyons 1982, 80).

Encounters between Blacks and Jews always seemed to involve Jews reaching out and “helping” Blacks, “teaching” them, “guiding” them. Many Black intellectuals ended their flirtation with the Communist Party bitter not only at the communists but at Jews they felt had treated them condescendingly. “How can the average public school Negro be expected to understand the exigencies of the capitalist system as it applies to both Jew and Gentile in America…since both groups act strangely like Hitlerian Aryans…when it comes to colored folks?” asked Langston Hughes, bitter after a feud with Jewish communists. (Kaufman 1997, 110)

This sense of condescending superiority of Jewish radicals in the civil rights movement has been identified as a source of the current upsurge of anti-Semitism among African Americans.

CONCLUSION

It is of some interest to attempt to understand the ultimate fate of Judaism in situations where society became organized according to a politically radical universalist ideology. In the Soviet Union, individual Jews “played an important and sometimes decisive part in the leadership of the three main socialist parties,” including the Bolsheviks (Pinkus 1988, 42; see also Rothman & Lichter 1982; Shapiro 1961). Jews “dominated” Lenin’s first Politburo (Rapoport 1990, 30). (Lenin himself had a Jewish maternal grandfather [Volkogonov 1995] and is reported to have said that “an intelligent Russian is almost always a Jew or someone with Jewish blood in his veins” [in Pipes 1990, 352].) Jews made up a greater percentage of other Russian revolutionary parties than they did the Bolsheviks (Lindemann 1997, 425ff). Indeed, there is some evidence for a Jewish-gentile schism between the Bolsheviks and the more internationally minded Mensheviks, whose ranks included a much larger percentage of Jews. (Recall also the internationalism of the Jewish Bolsheviks; see above.) Nevertheless, Jews were prominently represented as leaders of the Bolsheviks and within the Bolshevik movement “citing the absolute numbers of Jews, or their percentage of the whole, fails to recognize certain key if intangible factors: the assertiveness and often dazzling verbal skills of Jewish Bolsheviks, their energy, and their strength of conviction” (p. 429). Jewish Bolsheviks were also more highly educated than non-Jewish Bolsheviks and more likely to be polylingual. (As noted in Chapter 1, American Jewish radicals were highly intelligent, hard working, dedicated and upwardly mobile—traits that undoubtedly contributed to the success of their organizations.) Four of the top seven leaders were ethnic Jews (not counting Lenin, who, as Lindemann notes, was one-fourth Jewish and therefore Jewish enough to have come under suspicion in Nazi Germany; Lenin was widely regarded as a Jew), as were approximately one-third of the top fifty.

Moreover, Lindemann points out that several of the top gentiles in the Bolshevik movement, including Lenin, might be termed “jewified non-Jews”—a term, freed of its ugly connotations, [that] might be used to underline an often overlooked point: Even in Russia there were some non-Jews, whether Bolsheviks or not, who respected Jews, praised them abundantly, imitated them, cared about their welfare, and established intimate friendships or romantic liaisons with them” (p. 433). For example, Lenin “openly and repeatedly praised the role of the Jews in the revolutionary movement; he was one of the most adamant and consistent in the party in his denunciations of pogroms and anti-Semitism more generally. After the revolution, he backed away from his earlier resistance to Jewish nationalism, accepting that under Soviet rule Jewish nationality might be legitimate. On his death bed, Lenin spoke fondly of the Jewish Menshevik Julius Martov, for whom he had always retained a special personal affection in spite of their fierce ideological differences.”

Citing Paul Johnson’s (1988) important work, Lindemann notes Trotsky’s “paramount” role in planning and leading the Bolshevik uprising and his role as a “brilliant military leader” in establishing the Red Army as a military force (p. 448). Moreover, many of Trotsky’s personality traits are stereotypically Jewish:

If one accepts that anti-Semitism was most potently driven by anxiety and fear, as distinguished from contempt, then the extent to which Trotsky became a source of preoccupation with anti-Semites is significant. Here, too, Johnson’s words are suggestive: He writes of Trotsky’s “demonic power”—the same term, revealingly, used repeatedly by others in referring to Zinoviev’s oratory or Uritsky’s ruthlessness.⁹¹ Trotsky’s boundless self-confidence, his notorious arrogance, and sense of superiority were other traits often associated with Jews. Fantasies there were about Trotsky and other Bolsheviks, but there were also realities around which the fantasies grew. (p. 448)

Vaksberg (1994) has a particularly interesting presentation. He notes, for example, that in a photomontage of the Bolshevik leaders taken in 1920, 22 of the 61 leaders were Jews, “and the picture did not include Kaganovich, Pyatniksky, Goloshchekin, and many others who were part of the ruling circle, and whose presence on that album page would have raised the percentage of Jews even higher” (p. 20). In addition to the very large overrepresentation of Jews at these levels, there were “a plethora of Jewish wives” among the non-Jewish leaders (p. 49), which must have heightened the Jewish atmosphere of the top levels of the government, given that everyone, especially Stalin, appears to have been quite conscious of ethnicity. (Stalin himself went to great lengths to discourage the marriage of his daughter to a Jew and disapproved of other Jewish-gentile marriages [Vaksberg 1994, 139].) For their part, anti-Semites accused Jews of having “implanted those of their own category as wives and husbands for influential figures and officials” (in Kostyrchenko 1995, 272; italics in text). This point fits well with Lindemann’s description of gentile Bolsheviks as “jewified non-Jews.”

Among gentile Russians there was a widespread perception that “whereas everybody else had lost from the Revolution, the Jews, and they alone, had benefited from it” (Pipes 1993, 101), as indicated, for example, by official Soviet government efforts against anti-Semitism. As in the case of post-World War II Poland, Jews were considered trustworthy supporters of the regime because of the very great change in their status brought about by the revolution (Vaksberg 1994, 60). As a result, the immediate postrevolutionary period was characterized by intense anti-Semitism, including the numerous pogroms carried out by the White Army. However, Stalin “decided to destroy the ‘myth’ of the decisive role of the Jews in the planning, organization, and realization of the revolution” and to emphasize the role of Russians (Vaksberg 1994, 82). Just as do contemporary Jewish apologists, Stalin had an interest in deemphasizing the role of Jews in the revolution, but for different reasons.

Jews were highly overrepresented among the political and cultural elite in the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s (Ginsberg 1993, 53; Horowitz 1993, 83; Pipes 1993, 112) and, indeed, into the 1950s era of the purges of Jews from the economic and cultural elite (Kostyrchenko 1995).⁹² I interpret Vaksberg’s (1994) thesis regarding Stalin as implying that Stalin was an anti-Semite from very early on, but that because of the powerful presence of Jews at the top reaches of the government and other areas of Soviet society as well as the need to appeal to Western governments, his efforts to remove Jews from top levels of government developed only slowly, and he was forced to engage in considerable deception. Thus Stalin mixed his measures against Jews with overt expressions of philoSemitism and often included a few non-Jews to mask the anti-Jewish intent. For example, just prior to a series of trials in which 11 of the 16 defendants were Jewish, there was a widely publicized trial of two non-Jews on charges of antiSemitism (p. 77). In the trials of the Jews, no mention was made of Jewish ethnic background and, with one exception, the defendants were referred to only by their (non-Jewish sounding) party pseudonyms rather than their Jewish names. Stalin continued to give honors and awards to Jewish artists during the 1930s even while he was removing the top Jewish political leaders and replacing them with gentiles (see also Rubenstein 1996, 272).

The campaign to remove Jews from administrative positions in the cultural establishment began as early as 1942, again accompanied by prizes and awards to prominent Jewish scientists and artists to deflect charges of anti-Semitism. Full-blown state-sponsored anti-Semitism emerged in the post-World War II era, complete with quotas on Jewish admission to universities that were harsher than in czarist times. However, it was not merely Stalin’s personal anti-Semitism that was involved; rather, anti-Semitism was motivated by very traditional concerns about Jews relating to economic and cultural domination and loyalty. Kostyrchenko (1995) shows that ethnic Russians seeking to dislodge Jews from dominant positions among the Soviet elite were an important source of pressure on Stalin. Purges of disproportionately Jewish elites were made in the areas of journalism, the arts, academic departments of history, pedagogy, philosophy, economics, medicine and psychiatry, and scientific research institutes in all areas of the natural sciences. There were also widespread purges of Jews at the top levels of management and engineering throughout the economy. Jewish intellectuals were characterized as “rootless cosmopolitans” who lacked sympathy with Russian national culture, and they were regarded as disloyal because of their open enthusiasm for Israel and their close ties to American Jews.

Jews were also highly overrepresented as leaders among the other communist governments in Eastern Europe as well as in communist revolutionary movements in Germany and Austria from 1918 to 1923. In the short-lived communist government in Hungary in 1919, 95 percent of the leading figures of Bela Kun’s government were Jews (Pipes 1993, 112). This government energetically liquidated predominantly gentile counterrevolutionaries and the ensuing struggle led by Admiral Horthy eventuated in the execution of most of the Jewish leadership of the communist government—a struggle with clear anti-Semitic overtones. Moreover, Jewish agents in the service of the Soviet Union featured prominently in Western communist parties: “Even within the various and often violently contending factions of the nascent communist parties of the West, ‘foreign Jews, taking orders from Moscow’ became a hot issue. It remained mostly taboo in socialist ranks to refer openly to Moscow’s agents as Jewish, but the implication was often that such foreign Jews were destroying western socialism” (Lindemann 1997, 435-436).

Jews thus achieved leading positions in these societies in the early stages, but in the long run, anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and other Eastern European communist societies became a well-known phenomenon and an important political cause among American Jews (Sachar 1992; Woocher 1986). As we have seen, Stalin gradually diminished the power of Jews in the Soviet Union, and anti-Semitism was an important factor in the decline of Jews in leadership positions in Eastern European communist governments.

The cases of Hungary and Poland are particularly interesting. Given the role of Jewish communists in postwar Poland, it is not surprising that an anti-Semitic movement developed and eventually toppled the generation from power (see Schatz 1991, 264ff). After Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization speech of 1956 the party split into a Jewish and anti-Jewish section, with the anti-Jewish section complaining of too many Jews in top positions. In the words of a leader of the anti-Jewish faction, the preponderance of Jews “makes people hate Jews and mistrust the party. The Jews estrange people from the party and from the Soviet Union; national feelings have been offended, and it is the duty of the party to adjust to the demands so that Poles, not Jews, hold the top positions in Poland” (in Schatz 1991, 268). Khrushchev himself supported a new policy with his remark that “you have already too many Abramoviches” (in Schatz 1991, 272). Even this first stage in the anti-Jewish purges was accompanied by anti-Semitic incidents among the public at large, as well as demands that Jewish communists who had changed their names to lower their profile in the party reveal themselves. As a result of these changes over half of Polish Jews responded by emigrating to Israel between 1956 and 1959.

Anti-Semitism increased dramatically toward the end of the 1960s. Jews were gradually downgraded in status and Jewish communists were blamed for Poland’s misfortunes. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion circulated widely among party activists, students, and army personnel. The security force, which had been dominated by Jews and directed toward suppressing Polish nationalism, was now dominated by Poles who viewed Jews “as a group in need of close and constant surveillance” (p. 290). Jews were removed from important positions in the government, the military, and the media. Elaborate files were maintained on Jews, including the crypto-Jews who had changed their names and adopted non-Jewish external identities. As the Jews had done earlier, the anti-Jewish group developed networks that promoted their own people throughout the government and the media. Jews now became dissidents and defectors where before they had dominated the state forces of Orthodoxy.

The “earthquake” finally erupted in 1968 with an anti-Semitic campaign consequent to outpourings of joy among Jews over Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. Israel’s victory occurred despite Soviet bloc support of the Arabs, and President Gomulka condemned the Jewish “fifth column” in the country. Extensive purges of Jews swept the country and secular Jewish life (e.g., Yiddish magazines and Jewish schools and day camps) was essentially dissolved. This hatred toward Jews clearly resulted from the role Jews played in postwar Poland. As one intellectual described it, Poland’s problems resulted essentially from ethnic conflict between Poles and Jews in which the Jews were supported by the Russians. The problems were due to “the arrival in our country… of certain politicians dressed in officer’s uniforms, who later presumed that only they—the Zambrowskis, the Radkiewiczes, the Bermans—had the right to leadership, a monopoly over deciding what was right for the Polish nation.” The solution would come when the “abnormal ethnic composition” of society was corrected (in Schatz 1991, 306, 307). The remaining Jews “both as a collective and as individuals… were singled out, slandered, ostracized, degraded, threatened, and intimidated with breathtaking intensity and… malignance” (p. 308). Most left Poland for Israel, and all were forced to renounce their Polish citizenship. They left behind only a few thousand mostly aged Jews.

The case of Hungary is entirely analogous to Poland both in the origins of the triumph of communist Jews and in their eventual defeat by an anti-Semitic movement. Despite evidence that Stalin was an anti-Semite, he installed Jewish communists as leaders of his effort to dominate Hungary after World War II. The government was “completely dominated” by Jews (Rothman and Lichter 1982, 89), a common perception among the Hungarian people (see Irving 1981, 47ff). “The wags of Budapest explained the presence of a lone gentile in the party leadership on the grounds that a ‘goy’ was needed to turn on the lights on Saturday” (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 89). The Hungarian Communist Party, with the backing of the Red Army, tortured, imprisoned, and executed opposition political leaders and other dissidents and effectively harnessed Hungary’s economy in the service of the Soviet Union. They thus created a situation similar to that in Poland: Jews were installed by their Russian masters as the ideal middle stratum between an exploitative alien ruling elite and a subject native population. Jews were seen as having engineered the communist revolution and as having benefited most from the revolution. Jews constituted nearly all of the party’s elite, held the top positions in the security police, and dominated managerial positions throughout the economy. Not only were Jewish Communist Party functionaries and economic managers economically dominant, they also appear to have had fairly unrestricted access to gentile females working under them—partly as a result of the poverty to which the vast majority of the population had descended, and partly because of specific government policies designed to undermine traditional sexual mores by, for example, paying women to have illegitimate children (see Irving 1981, 111). The domination of the Hungarian communist Jewish bureaucracy thus appears to have had overtones of sexual and reproductive domination of gentiles in which Jewish males were able to have disproportionate sexual access to gentile females.

As an indication of the gulf between ruler and ruled in Hungary, a student commented: “Take Hungary: Who was the enemy? For Rákosi [the Jewish leader of the Hungarian Communist Party] and his gang the enemy was us, the Hungarian people. They believed that Hungarians were innately fascist. This was the attitude of the Jewish communists, the Moscow group. They had nothing but contempt for the people” (in Irving 1981, 146). The comment illustrates a theme of the loyalty issue discussed in SAID (Ch. 2): Jewish disloyalty to the people among whom they have lived is often exacerbated by anti-Semitism, which itself is linked to the other common sources of anti-Semitism. Moreover, ethnicity continued to be a prominent factor in the post-revolutionary period despite its theoretical unimportance. When Jewish functionaries wanted to penalize a farmer who failed to meet his quota, gypsies were sent to strip the farmer’s property because other townspeople would not cooperate in the destruction of one of their own (Irving 1981, 132). Here the party functionaries were taking advantage of the same principle Stalin and other alien rulers have recognized when they used Jews as an exploitative stratum between themselves and a subject native population: Foreign ethnics are relatively willing to exploit other groups. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Hungarian uprising of 1956 included elements of a traditional anti-Semitic pogrom, as indicated by anti-Jewish attitudes among the refugees of the period. In this regard, the uprising was not unlike many anti-Semitic pogroms that occurred in traditional societies when the power of the alien ruling elite who supported the Jews diminished (see SAID, Ch. 2; PTSDA, Ch. 5).

As with all experiments in living, leftist universalist ideology and political structure may not achieve the results desired by their Jewish proponents.⁹³ On the basis of the data presented here, the eventual failure of political radicalism to guarantee Jewish interests has been a prime factor in Jews’ abandoning radical movements or attempting to combine radicalism with an overt Jewish identity and commitment to Jewish interests. In the long run, it would appear that ideologies of universalism in the presence of continued group cohesion and identity may not be an effective mechanism for combating anti-Semitism.

In retrospect, Jewish advocacy of highly collectivist social structure represented by socialism and communism has been a poor strategy for Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. Judaism and bureaucratic, statist socialism are not obviously incompatible, and we have seen that Jews were able to develop a predominant political and cultural position in socialist societies, as they have in more individualistic societies. However, the highly authoritarian, collectivist structure of these societies also results in the highly efficient institutionalization of anti-Semitism in the event that Jewish predominance within the society, despite a great deal of crypsis, comes to be viewed negatively.

Moreover, the tendency for such societies to develop a political monoculture implies that Judaism can survive only by engaging in semi-crypsis. As Horowitz (1993, 86) notes, “Jewish life is diminished when the creative opposition of the sacred and the secular, or the church and the state, are seen as having to yield to a higher set of political values. Jews suffer, their numbers decline, and immigration becomes a survival solution when the state demands integration into a national mainstream, a religious universal defined by a state religion or a near-state religion.” In the long run, radical individualism among gentiles and the fragmentation of gentile culture offer a superior environment for Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, and this is indeed an important direction of current Jewish intellectual and political activity (see Chs. 5-7).

In this regard it is interesting that many neoconservative Jewish intellectuals in the contemporary United States have rejected corporate, statist ideologies as a direct consequence of the recognition that these ideologies have resulted in corporate, state-sponsored anti-Semitism. Indeed, the beginnings of the neoconservative movement can be traced to the Moscow Trials of the 1930s in which many of the old Jewish Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, were convicted of treason. The result was the development of the New York Intellectuals as an anti-Stalinist leftist movement, parts of which gradually evolved into neoconservatism (see Ch. 6). The neoconservative movement has been fervently anti-communist and has opposed ethnic quotas and affirmative action policies in the United States—policies that would clearly preclude free competition between Jews and gentiles. Part of the attraction neoconservatism held for Jewish intellectuals was its compatibility with support for Israel at a time when Third World countries supported by most American leftists were strongly anti-Zionist (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 105). Many neoconservative intellectuals had previously been ardent leftists, and the split between these previous allies resulted in an intense internecine feud.

Similarly, there was a trend towards a libertarian and individualist perspective by Converso intellectuals consequent to corporate, state-sponsored anti-Semitism during the period of the Inquisition. Castro (1971, 327ff) emphasizes the libertarian, anarchist, individualistic, and anti-corporate strand of Converso thought, and attributes it to the fact that the Conversos were being oppressed by an anti-libertarian, corporate state. These intellectuals, oppressed by the purity of blood laws and the Inquisition itself, argued that “God did not distinguish between one Christian and another” (Castro 1971, 333).

When an experiment in ideology and political structure fails, another experiment is launched. Since the Enlightenment, Judaism has not been a unified, monolithic movement. Judaism is a series of experiments in living, and since the Enlightenment there have been a variety of Jewish experiments in living. There has clearly been a great deal of disagreement among Jews as how best to attain their interests during this period, and certainly the interests of Jewish radicals conflicted at times with the interests of wealthy Jews (often their Jewish employers [Levin 1977, 210]). The voluntary nature of Jewish association since the Enlightenment has resulted in relative fractionation of Judaism, with individual Jews drawn to different “experiments in Jewish living.” In this sense, Jewish radicalism must be viewed as one of several solutions to the problem of developing a viable Judaism in the post-Enlightenment period, along with Zionism, neo-Orthodoxy, Conservative Judaism, Reform Judaism, neoconservatism, and Judaism as a civil religion. In the following chapter we shall see that psychoanalysis has played a similar role among a large number of Jewish intellectuals.

4

Jewish Involvement in the Psychoanalytic
Movement

The familiar caricature of the bearded and monocled Freudian analyst probing his reclining patient for memories of toilet training gone awry and parentally directed lust is now an anachronism, as is the professional practice of that mostly empty and confabulatory art. How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted—on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments, and in the face of chronic failures of therapeutic intervention in all of the major classes of mental illness (schizophrenia, mania and depression)—is something that sociologists of science and popular culture have yet to fully explain. (Paul Churchland 1995, 181)

The thesis of this chapter is that it is impossible to understand psychoanalysis as a “science,” or more properly as a political movement, without taking into account the role of Judaism. Sigmund Freud is a prime example of a Jewish social scientist whose writings were influenced by his Jewish identity and his negative attributions regarding gentile culture as the source of anti-Semitism.

The discussion of Jewish involvement in the psychoanalytic movement was until recently, “as though by tacit agreement, beyond the pale” (Yerushalmi 1991, 98). Nevertheless, the Jewish involvement in psychoanalysis—the “Jewish science”—has been apparent to those inside and outside the movement since its inception:

History made psychoanalysis a “Jewish science.” It continued to be attacked as such. It was destroyed in Germany, Italy, and Austria and exiled to the four winds, as such. It continues even now to be perceived as such by enemies and friends alike. Of course there are by now distinguished analysts who are not Jews… But the vanguard of the movement over the last fifty years has remained predominantly Jewish as it was from the beginning. (Yerushalmi 1991, 98)

In addition to constituting the core of the leadership and the intellectual vanguard of the movement, Jews have also constituted the majority of the movement’s members. In 1906 all 17 members of the movement were Jewish, and they strongly identified as Jews (Klein 1981). In a 1971 study, Henry, Sims and Spray found that 62.1 percent of their sample of American psychoanalysts identified themselves as having a Jewish cultural affinity, compared with only 16.7 percent indicating a Protestant affinity and 2.6 percent a Catholic affinity. An additional 18.6 percent indicated no cultural affinity, a percentage considerably higher than the other categories of mental health professional and suggesting that the percentage of psychoanalysts with a Jewish background was even higher than 62 percent (Henry, Sims & Spray 1971, 27).⁹⁴

We have seen that a common component of Jewish intellectual activity since the Enlightenment has been to criticize gentile culture. Freud’s ideas have often been labeled as subversive. Indeed, “[Freud] was convinced that it was in the very nature of psychoanalytic doctrine to appear shocking and subversive. On board ship to America he did not feel that he was bringing that country a new panacea. With his typically dry wit he told his traveling companions, ‘We are bringing them the plague’” (Mannoni 1971, 168).

Peter Gay labels Freud’s work generally as “subversive” (1987, 140), his sexual ideology in particular as “deeply subversive for his time” (p. 148), and he describes his Totem and Taboo as containing “subversive conjectures” (p. 327) in its analysis of culture. “While the implications of Darwin’s views were threatening and unsettling, they were not quite so directly abrasive, not quite so unrespectable, as Freud’s views on infantile sexuality, the ubiquity of perversions, and the dynamic power of unconscious urges” (Gay 1987, 144).

There was a general perception among many anti-Semites that Jewish intellectuals were subverting German culture in the period prior to 1933 (SAID, Ch. 2), and psychoanalysis was one aspect of this concern. A great deal of hostility to psychoanalysis centered around the perceived threat of psychoanalysis to Christian sexual ethics, including the acceptance of masturbation and premarital sex (Kurzweil 1989, 18). Psychoanalysis became a target of gentiles decrying the Jewish subversion of culture—”the decadent influence of Judaism,” as one writer termed it (see Klein 1981, 144). In 1928 Carl Christian Clemen, a professor of ethnology at the University of Bonn, reacted strongly to The Future of an Illusion, Freud’s analysis of religious belief in terms of infantile needs. Clemen decried the psychoanalytic tendency to find sex everywhere, a tendency he attributed to the Jewish composition of the movement: “One could explain this by the particular circles from which its advocates and perhaps, too, the patients it treats, principally hail” (in Gay 1988, 537). Freud’s books were burned in the May 1933 book burnings in Germany, and when the Nazis entered Vienna in 1938, they ordered Freud to leave and abolished the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.

In the United States, by the second decade of the twentieth century Freud was firmly associated with the movement for sexual freedom and social reform, and had become the target of social conservatives (Torrey 1992, 16ff).⁹⁵ As late as 1956 a psychiatrist writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry complained, “Is it possible that we are developing the equivalent of a secular church, supported by government monies, staffed by a genital-level apostolate unwittingly dispensing a broth of existential atheism, hedonism, and other dubious religio-philosophical ingredients?” (Johnson 1956, 40).

Although he rejected religion, Freud himself had a very strong Jewish identity. In a 1931 letter he described himself as “a fanatical Jew,” and on another occasion he wrote that he found “the attraction of Judaism and of Jews so irresistible, many dark emotional powers, all the mightier the less they let themselves be grasped in words, as well as the clear consciousness of inner identity, the secrecy of the same mental construction” (in Gay 1988, 601). On another occasion he wrote of “strange secret longings” related to his Jewish identity (in Gay 1988, 601). At least by 1930 Freud also became strongly sympathetic with Zionism. His son Ernest was also a Zionist, and none of Freud’s children converted to Christianity or married gentiles.

As expected by social identity theory, Freud’s strong sense of Jewish identity involved a deep estrangement from gentiles. Yerushalmi (1991, 39) notes “We find in Freud a sense of otherness vis-à-vis non-Jews which cannot be explained merely as a reaction to anti-Semitism. Though anti-Semitism would periodically reinforce or modify it, this feeling seems to have been primal, inherited from his family and early milieu, and it remained with him throughout his life.” In a revealing comment, Freud stated “I have often felt as though I inherited all the obstinacy and all the passions of our ancestors when they defended their temple, as though I could throw away my life with joy for a great moment” (in Gay 1988, 604). His identity as a Jew was thus associated with a self-concept in which he selflessly does battle with the enemies of the group, dying in an act of heroic altruism defending group interests—a mirror-image Jewish version of the grand finale of Wagner’s Nibelungenlied that was an ingredient in Nazi ideology (see SAID, Ch. 5). In terms of social identity theory, Freud thus had a very powerful sense of group membership and a sense of duty to work altruistically for the interests of the group.

Gay (1988, 601) interprets Freud as having the belief that his identity as a Jew was the result of his phylogenetic heritage. As Yerushalmi (1991, 30) notes, his psycho-Lamarckianism was “neither casual nor circumstantial.” Freud grasped what Yerushalmi (1991, 31) terms the “subjective dimension” of Larmarckianism, that is, the feeling of a powerful tie to the Jewish past as shaped by Jewish culture, the feeling that one can not escape being a Jew, and “that often what one feels most deeply and obscurely is a trilling wire in the blood.” In the following passage from Moses and Monotheism, the Jews are proposed to have fashioned themselves to become a morally and intellectually superior people:

The preference which through two thousand years the Jews have given to spiritual endeavour has, of course, had its effect; it has helped to build a dike against brutality and the inclination to violence which are usually found where athletic development becomes the ideal of the people. The harmonious development of spiritual and bodily activity, as achieved by the Greeks, was denied to the Jews. In this conflict their decision was at least made in favour of what is culturally the more important. (Freud 1939, 147)

Freud’s sense of Jewish superiority can also be seen in a diary entry by Joseph Wortis based on an interview with Freud in 1935: Freud commented that he viewed gentiles as prone to “ruthless egoism,” whereas Jews had a superior family and intellectual life. Wortis then asked Freud if he viewed Jews as a superior people. Freud replied: “I think nowadays they are… When one thinks that 10 or 12 of the Nobel winners are Jews, and when one thinks of their other great achievements in the sciences and in the arts, one has every reason to think them superior” (in Cuddihy 1974, 36).

Further, Freud viewed these differences as unchangeable. In a 1933 letter Freud decried the upsurge in anti-Semitism: “My judgment of human nature, especially the Christian-Aryan variety, has had little reason to change” (in Yerushalmi 1991, 48). Nor, in Freud’s opinion, would the Jewish character change. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud (1939, 51n), referring to the concern with racial purity apparent in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah (see PTSDA, Ch. 2), stated, “It is historically certain that the Jewish type was finally fixed as a result of the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth century before Christ.” “Freud was thoroughly convinced that once the Jewish character was created in ancient times it had remained constant, immutable, its quintessential qualities indelible” (Yerushalmi 1991, 52).

The obvious racialism and the clear statement of Jewish ethical, spiritual, and intellectual superiority contained in Freud’s last work, Moses and Monotheism, must be seen not as an aberration of Freud’s thinking but as central to his attitudes, if not his published work, dating from a much earlier period. In SAID (Ch. 5) I noted that prior to the rise of Nazism an important set of Jewish intellectuals had a strong racial sense of Jewish peoplehood and felt racial estrangement from gentiles; they also made statements that can only be interpreted as indicating a sense of Jewish racial superiority. The psychoanalytic movement was an important example of these tendencies. It was characterized by ideas of Jewish intellectual superiority, racial consciousness, national pride, and Jewish solidarity (see Klein 1981, 143). Freud and his colleagues felt a sense of “racial kinship” with their Jewish colleagues and a “racial strangeness” to others (Klein 1981, 142; see also Gilman 1993, 12ff). Commenting on Ernest Jones, one of his disciples, Freud wrote “The racial mixture in our band is very interesting to me. He [Jones] is a Celt and hence not quite accessible to us, the Teuton [C. G. Jung] and the Mediterranean man [himself as a Jew]” (in Gay 1988, 186).

Freud and other early psychoanalysts frequently distinguished themselves as Jews on the basis of race and referred to non-Jews as Aryans, instead of as Germans or Christians (Klein 1981, 142). He wrote to C. G. Jung that Ernest Jones gave him a feeling of “racial strangeness” (Klein 1981, 142). During the 1920s Jones was viewed as a gentile outsider even by the other members of the secret Committee of Freud’s loyalists and even though he had married a Jewish woman. “In the eyes of all of [the Jewish members of the committee], Jones was a Gentile… [T]he others always seized every opportunity to make him aware that he could never belong. His fantasy of penetrating the inner circle by creating the Committee was an illusion, because he would forever be an unattractive little man with his ferret face pressed imploringly against the glass” (Grosskurth 1991, 137).

Early in their relationship Freud also had suspicions about Jung, the result of “worries about Jung’s inherited Christian and even anti-Jewish biases, indeed his very ability as a non-Jew to fully understand and accept psychoanalysis itself” (Yerushalmi 1991, 42). Before their rupture, Freud described Jung as a “strong independent personality, as a Teuton” (in Gay 1988, 201). After Jung was made head of the International Psychoanalytic Association, a colleague of Freud’s was concerned because “taken as a race,” Jung and his gentile colleagues were “completely different from us Viennese” (in Gay 1988, 219). In 1908 Freud wrote a letter to the psychoanalyst Karl Abraham in which Abraham is described as keen while Jung is described as having a great deal of élan—a description that, as Yerushalmi (1991, 43) notes, indicates a tendency to stereotype individuals on the basis of group membership (the intellectually sharp Jew and the energetic Aryan). Whereas Jung was inherently suspect because of his genetic background, Abraham, was not. Freud, after delicately inquiring about whether Abraham was a Jew, wrote that it was easier for Abraham to understand psychoanalysis because he had a racial kinship [ Rassenverwandschaft] to Freud (Yerushalmi 1991, 42).

Freud’s powerful racial sense of ingroup-outgroup barriers between Jews and gentiles may also be seen in the personal dynamics of the psychoanalytic movement. We have seen that Jews were numerically dominant within psychoanalysis, especially in the early stages when all the members were Jews. “The fact that these were Jews was certainly not accidental. I also think that in a profound though unacknowledged sense Freud wanted it that way” (Yerushalmi 1991, 41). As in other forms of Judaism, there was a sense of being an ingroup within a specifically Jewish milieu. “Whatever the reasons—historical, sociological—group bonds did provide a warm shelter from the outside world. In social relations with other Jews, informality and familiarity formed a kind of inner security, a ‘we-feeling,’ illustrated even by the selection of jokes and stories recounted within the group” (Grollman 1965, 41). Also adding to the Jewish milieu of the movement was the fact that Freud was idolized by Jews generally. Freud himself noted in his letters that “from all sides and places, the Jews have enthusiastically seized me for themselves.” “He was embarrassed by the way they treated him as if he were ‘a God-fearing Chief Rabbi,’ or ‘a national hero,’” and by the way they viewed his work as “genuinely Jewish” (in Klein 1981, 85; see also Gay 1988, 599).

As in the case of several Jewish movements and political activities reviewed in Chapters 2 and 3 (see also SAID, Ch. 6), Freud took great pains to ensure that a gentile, Jung, would be the head of his psychoanalytic movement—a move that infuriated his Jewish colleagues in Vienna, but one that was clearly intended to deemphasize the very large overrepresentation of Jews in the movement during this period. To persuade his Jewish colleagues of the need for Jung to head the society, he argued, “Most of you are Jews, and therefore you are incompetent to win friends for the new teaching. Jews must be content with the modest role of preparing the ground. It is absolutely essential that I should form ties in the world of science” (in Gay 1988, 218). As Yerushalmi (1991, 41) notes, “To put it very crudely, Freud needed a goy, and not just any goy but one of genuine intellectual stature and influence.” Later, when the movement was reconstituted after World War I, another gentile, the sycophantic and submissive Ernest Jones, became president of the International Psychoanalytic Association.

Interestingly, although recent scholarship is unanimous that Freud had an intense Jewish identity, Freud took pains to conceal this identity from others because of a concern that his psychoanalytic movement would be viewed as a specifically Jewish movement and thus be the focus of anti-Semitism. Whereas his private correspondence is filled with a strong sense of Jewish ethnic identity, his public statements and writings exhibited a “generally guarded, distanced tone” (Yerushalmi 1991, 42), indicating an effort at deception. Freud also attempted to downplay in public the extent to which Judaism pervaded his family environment while growing up, his religious education, and his knowledge of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Jewish religious traditions (Goodnick 1993; Rice 1990; Yerushalmi 1991, 61ff).⁹⁶

Deception is also indicated by the evidence that Freud felt that one reason psychoanalysis needed highly visible gentiles was because he viewed psychoanalysis as subverting gentile culture. After publishing Little Hans in 1908, he wrote to Karl Abraham that the book would create an uproar: “German ideals threatened again! Our Aryan comrades are really completely indispensable to us, otherwise psychoanalysis would succumb to anti-Semitism” (in Yerushalmi 1991, 43).

Social identity theory emphasizes the importance of positive attributions regarding the ingroup and negative attributions regarding the outgroup. Freud’s strong sense of Jewish identity was accompanied by feelings of intellectual superiority to gentiles (Klein 1981, 61). In an early letter to his future wife, Freud stated “In the future, for the remainder of my apprenticeship in the hospital, I think I shall try to live more like the gentiles—modestly, learning and practicing the usual things and not striving after discoveries or delving too deep” (in Yerushalmi 1991, 39). Freud used the word goyim to refer to gentiles in this passage, and Yerushalmi comments, “The hand is the hand of Sigmund; the voice is the voice of Jakob [Freud’s religiously observant father]” (p. 39). It is the voice of separation and estrangement.

An attitude of Jewish superiority to gentiles not only characterized Freud but pervaded the entire movement. Ernest Jones (1959, 211) mentioned “the Jewish belief, which they often impose on other people too, concerning the superiority of their intellectual powers.” As in the case of radical intellectual circles dominated by Jews (see Ch. 3), “The feeling of Jewish superiority alienated many non-Jews within the movement and encouraged many outside the movement to dismiss as hypocritical the humanitarian claims of the psychoanalysts” (Klein 1981, 143)—a comment suggesting self-deception among psychoanalysts regarding their motives.

Freud’s estrangement from gentiles also involved positive views of Judaism and negative views of gentile culture, the latter viewed as something to be conquered in the interest of leading humanity to a higher moral level and ending anti-Semitism. Freud had a sense of “Jewish moral superiority to the injustices of an intolerant, inhumane—indeed, anti-Semitic—society” (Klein 1981, 86). Freud “supported those in the Jewish society [B’nai B’rith] who urged Jews to regard themselves as mankind’s champions of democratic and fraternal ideals” (Klein 1981, 86). He wrote of his messianic hope to achieve the “integration of Jews and anti-Semites on the soil of [psychoanalysis]” (in Gay 1988, 231), a quote clearly indicating that psychoanalysis was viewed by its founder as a mechanism for ending anti-Semitism.

[Freud] was proud of his enemies—the persecuting Roman Catholic Church, the hypocritical bourgeoisie, the obtuse psychiatric establishment, the materialistic Americans—so proud, indeed, that they grew in his mind into potent specters far more malevolent and far less divided than they were in reality. He likened himself to Hannibal, to Ahasuerus, to Joseph, to Moses, all men with historic missions, potent adversaries, and difficult fates. (Gay 1988, 604)

This comment is an excellent example of the consequences of a strong sense of social identity: Freud’s powerful sense of Jewish group identity resulted in negative stereotypical thinking regarding the gentile outgroup. Gentile society, and particularly the most salient institutions of gentile culture, were viewed stereotypically as evil. These institutions were not only viewed negatively, but the accentuation effect (see SAID, Ch. 1) came into play and resulted in a general attribution of homogeneity to the outgroup, so that these institutions are seen as much less divided than they actually were.

Consider also Sulloway’s (1979b) description of the genesis of Freud’s self-concept as a hero dating from his childhood and inculcated by his family. Attesting to the intensity of Freud’s Jewish identification and his self-concept as a Jewish hero, all of Freud’s childhood heroes were related to Judaism: Hannibal, the Semitic combatant against Rome; Cromwell, who allowed the Jews to enter England; and Napoleon, who gave Jews civil rights. Early on he described himself as a “conquistador” rather than as a man of science.

This type of messianic thought was common in fin de siècle Vienna among Jewish intellectuals who were attempting to bring about a “supranational, supraethnic world” (Klein 1981, 29), a characterization that, as seen in Chapter 3, would also apply to Jewish involvement in radical political movements. These intellectuals “frequently expressed their humanitarianism in terms of their renewed Jewish self-conception… [They had] a shared belief that Jews were responsible for the fate of humanity in the twentieth century” (p. 31).

Many early proponents viewed psychoanalysis as a redemptive messianic movement that would end anti-Semitism by freeing the world of neuroses produced by sexually repressive Western civilization. Klein shows that some of Freud’s closest associates had a very clearly articulated conception of psychoanalysis as a Jewish mission to the gentiles—what one might view as a uniquely modern version of the ancient “light of the nations” theme of Jewish religious thought very common among intellectual apologists of Reform Judaism during the same period.

Thus for Otto Rank, who developed a close father-son relationship with Freud, Jews were uniquely qualified to cure neurosis and act as the healers of humanity (Klein 1981, 129). Developing a variant of the perspective Freud used in Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents, Rank argued that whereas other human cultures had repressed their primitive sexuality in the ascent to civilization, “Jews possessed special creative powers since they had been able to maintain a direct relation to ‘nature,’ to primitive sexuality” (Klein 1981, 129).⁹⁷ Within this perspective, anti-Semitism results from the denial of sexuality, and the role of the Jewish mission of psychoanalysis was to end antiSemitism by freeing humanity of its sexual repressions. A theoretical basis for this perspective was provided by Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in which aggression was linked with the frustration of drives.

Klein shows that this conceptualization of psychoanalysis as a redemptive “light of the nations” was common among other Jewish intimates of Freud. Thus Fritz Wittels advocated complete freedom of sexual expression and wrote “Some of us believed that psychoanalysis would change the surface of the earth… [and introduce] a golden age in which there would be no room for neuroses any more. We felt like great men… Some people have a mission in life” (in Klein 1981, 138-139). Jews were viewed as having the responsibility to lead the gentiles toward truth and nobility of behavior. “The tendency to place the Jew and the non-Jew in a relationship of fundamental opposition imbued even the expressions of redemption with an adversary quality” (Klein 1981, 142). Gentile culture was something to be conquered in battle by the morally superior, redemptive Jew: “The spirit of the Jews will conquer the world” (Wittels; in Klein 1981, 142). Coincident with Wittels’s belief in the mission of psychoanalysis was a positive Jewish self-identity; he described the convert Jew as characterized by the “psychological disability of hypocrisy” (Klein 1981, 139).

The cure for the aggression characteristic of anti-Semitism was therefore believed to lie in freeing gentiles from their sexual repressions. Although Freud himself eventually developed the idea of a death instinct to explain aggression, a consistent theme of the Freudian critique of Western culture, as exemplified for example by Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich, has been that the liberation of sexual repressions would lead to lowered aggression and usher in an era of universal love.

It is therefore of interest that when Jung and Alfred Adler were expelled from the movement for heresy, the issue that appears to have been most important to Freud was their rejection of the interrelated ideas of the sexual etiology of neurosis, the Oedipal complex, and childhood sexuality.⁹⁸ Sexual repression in Western societies during this period was highly salient and undeniable. Freud’s theory may thus be viewed as an invention whose utility in the assault on Western culture derived from the intuitive plausibility of supposing that the suppression of sexual urges would result in major changes in behavior that could possibly have psychotherapeutic effects. Moreover, the Oedipal complex idea proved to be critical to Freud’s thesis for the centrality of sexual repression in Totem and Taboo—what Gay (1988, 329) terms some of Freud’s “most subversive conjectures” and discussed in more detail below.

This belief in the curative powers of sexual freedom coincided with a leftist political agenda common to the vast majority of Jewish intellectuals of the period and reviewed throughout this book. This leftist political agenda proved to be a recurrent theme throughout the history of psychoanalysis. Support of radical and Marxist ideals was common among Freud’s early followers, and leftist attitudes were common in later years among psychoanalysts (Hale 1995, 31; Kurzweil 1989, 36, 46-47, 284; Torrey 1992, 33, 93ff, 122-123), as well as in Freudian inspired offshoots such as Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich (see below) and Alfred Adler. (Kurzweil [1989, 287] terms Adler the leader of “far left” psychoanalysis, noting that Adler wanted to immediately politicize teachers as radicals rather than wait for the perfection of psychoanalysis to do so.) The apex of the association between Marxism and psychoanalysis came in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, where all the top psychoanalysts were Bolsheviks, Trotsky supporters, and among the most powerful political figures in the country (see Chamberlain 1995). (Trotsky himself was an ardent enthusiast of psychoanalysis.) This group organized a government-sponsored State Psychoanalytical Institute and developed a program of “pedology” aimed at producing the “new Soviet man” on the basis of psychoanalytic principles applied to the education of children. The program, which encouraged sexual precocity in children, was put into practice in state-run schools.

There is also evidence that Freud conceptualized himself as a leader in a war on gentile culture. We have seen that Freud had a great deal of hostility to Western culture, especially the Catholic Church and its ally, the Austrian Habsburg monarchy (Gay 1988; McGrath 1974; Rothman & Isenberg 1974a).⁹⁹ In a remarkable passage from the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud, in attempting to understand why he has been unable to set foot in Rome, proposes that he has been retracing the footsteps of Hannibal, the Semitic leader of Carthage against Rome during the Punic wars.

Hannibal… had been the favourite hero of my later school days… And when in the higher classes I began to understand for the first time what it meant to belong to an alien race… the figure of the semitic general rose still higher in my esteem. To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organisation of the Catholic Church. (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams; in Rothman & Isenberg 1974a, 64)

The passage clearly indicates that Freud was self-identified as a member of “an alien race” at war with Rome and its daughter institution, the Catholic Church, a central institution of Western culture. Gay (1988, 132) states, “A charged and ambivalent symbol, Rome stood for Freud’s most potent concealed erotic, and only slightly less concealed aggressive wishes.”¹⁰⁰ Rome was “a supreme prize and incomprehensible menace” (Gay 1988, 132). Freud himself described this “Hannibal fantasy” as “one of the driving forces of [my] mental life” (in McGrath 1974, 35).

A strong connection exists between anti-Semitism and Freud’s hostility to Rome. Freud’s conscious identification with Hannibal occurred following an anti-Semitic incident involving his father in which his father behaved passively. Freud’s response to the incident was to visualize “the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had… a place in my phantasies” (in McGrath 1974, 35). “Rome was the center of Christian civilization. To conquer Rome would certainly be to avenge his father and his people” (Rothman & Isenberg 1974a, 62). Cuddihy (1974, 54) makes the same point: “Like Hamilcar’s son Hannibal, he will storm Rome seeking vengeance. He will control his anger, as his father had done, but he will use it to probe relentlessly beneath the beautiful surface of the diaspora to the murderous rage and lust coiled beneath its so-called civilities.”

Rothman and Isenberg (1974) convincingly argue that Freud actually viewed the Interpretation of Dreams as a victory against the Catholic Church and that he viewed Totem and Taboo as a successful attempt to analyze the Christian religion in terms of defense mechanisms and primitive drives. Regarding Totem and Taboo, Freud told a colleague that it would “serve to make a sharp division between us and all Aryan religiosity” (in Rothman & Isenberg 1974, 63; see also Gay 1988, 326). They also suggest that Freud consciously attempted to conceal his subversive motivation: A central aspect of Freud’s theory of dreams is that rebellion against a powerful authority must often be carried on with deception: “According to the strength… of the censorship, [the authority-defying individual] finds himself compelled… to speak in allusions… or he must conceal his objection beneath some apparently innocent disguise” (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams; in Rothman & Isenberg 1974a, 64).

The bizarre argument of Freud’s (1939) Moses and Monotheism is quite clearly an attempt to show the moral superiority of Judaism compared to Christianity. Freud’s hostility to the Catholic Church is apparent in this work: “The Catholic Church, which so far has been the implacable enemy of all freedom of thought and has resolutely opposed any idea of this world being governed by advance towards the recognition of truth!” (p. 67). Freud also reiterates his conviction that religion is nothing more than neurotic symptomatology—a view first developed in his Totem and Taboo (1912).

All religions may be symptoms of neurosis, but Freud clearly believed that Judaism is an ethically and intellectually superior form of neurosis: According to Freud, the Jewish religion “formed their [the Jews’] character for good through the disdaining of magic and mysticism and encouraging them to progress in spirituality and sublimations. The people, happy in their conviction of possessing the truth, overcome by the consciousness of being the chosen, came to value highly all intellectual and ethical achievements” (Freud 1939, 109). In contrast, “The Christian religion did not keep to the lofty heights of spirituality to which the Jewish religion had soared” (Freud 1939, 112). Freud argues that in Judaism the repressed memory of killing the Mosaic father figure lifts Judaism to a very high ethical level, whereas in Christianity the unrepressed memory of killing a father figure eventually results in a reversion to Egyptian paganism. Indeed, Freud’s formulation of Judaism might even be termed reactionary, since it retains the traditional idea of Jews as a chosen people (Yerushalmi 1991, 34).

Freud’s psychoanalytic reinterpretation may be viewed as an attempt to reinterpret Judaism in a “scientific” manner: the creation of a secular, “scientific” Jewish theology. The only substantial difference from the traditional account is that Moses replaces God as the central figure of Jewish history. In this regard, it is interesting that from an early period Freud strongly identified with Moses (Klein 1981, 94; Rice 1990, 123ff), suggesting an identification in which he viewed himself as a leader who would guide his people through a dangerous time. Given Freud’s intense identification with Moses, the following passage from Moses and Monotheism, ostensibly referring to the ancient prophets who followed Moses, may be taken to apply to Freud himself: “Monotheism had failed to take root in Egypt. The same thing might have happened in Israel after the people had thrown off the inconvenient and pretentious religion imposed on them. From the mass of the Jewish people, however, there arose again and again men who lent new colour to the fading tradition, renewed the admonishments and demands of Moses, and did not rest until the lost cause was once more regained” (pp. 141-142). Moses and Monotheism also links monotheism with the superiority of Jewish ethics, but nowhere does Freud make clear how an ideology of monotheism could possibly result in a higher sense of ethics. As indicated in PTSDA (Chapter 3), Jewish monotheism is closely linked to ethnocentrism and fear of exogamy. Also, as indicated in PTSDA (Ch. 6), Jewish ethics is fundamentally a tribalistic ethics in which there are major differences in how individuals are treated depending on whether or not they are Jews.

As I have noted, perceived anti-Semitism would be expected to exacerbate the tendency to subject gentile culture to radical criticism. There is excellent evidence that Freud was intensely concerned with anti-Semitism, perhaps dating from the anti-Semitic incident involving his father (e.g., Rice 1990; Rothman & Isenberg 1974a,b; Yerushalmi 1991). Indeed, as expected on the basis of social identity theory, Gay (1987, 138) notes that Freud’s Jewish identity was most intense “when times were hardest for Jews.”

Freud’s theory of anti-Semitism in Moses and Monotheism (Freud 1939, 114-117) contains several assertions that anti-Semitism is fundamentally a pathological gentile reaction to Jewish ethical superiority. Freud dismisses several surface causes of anti-Semitism, although he gives some credence to the view that anti-Semitism is caused by Jewish defiance of oppression (obviously a cause in which Judaism is portrayed in a positive light).

But Moses and Monotheism traces the deeper causes of anti-Semitism to the unconscious: “The jealousy which the Jews evoked in other peoples by maintaining that they were the first-born, favourite child of God the Father has not yet been overcome by those others, just as if the latter had given credence to the assumption” (p. 116). Further, the Jewish ceremony of circumcision is said to remind gentiles of “the dreaded castration idea and of things in their primeval past which they would fain forget” (p. 116). And finally, anti-Semitism is said to result from the fact that many Christians have become Christians only recently as the result of forced conversion from even more barbarically polytheistic folk religions than Christianity itself is. Because of the violence of their forced conversions, these barbarians “have not yet overcome their grudge against the new religion which was forced upon them, and they have projected it on to the source from which Christianity came to them [i.e., the Jews]” (p. 117).

A more self-serving, far-fetched theory of anti-Semitism is difficult to imagine.¹⁰¹ The general scholarly community has tended to regard Moses and Monotheism as “recklessly fanciful” (McGrath 1991, 27), but this is certainly not the case for Freud’s other works. In this regard, it is interesting to note that Freud’s highly influential (and equally speculative) Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents present the view that the repression of sex, so apparent as an aspect of Western culture during Freud’s life, is the source of art, love, and even civilization itself. However, neurosis and unhappiness are the price to be paid for these traits because neurosis and unhappiness are the inevitable result of repressing sexual urges.

As Herbert Marcuse (1974, 17) writes concerning this aspect of Freud’s thought: “The notion that a non-repressive civilization is impossible is a cornerstone of Freudian theory. However, his theory contains elements that break through this rationalization; they shatter the predominant tradition of Western thought and even suggest its reversal. His work is characterized by an uncompromising insistence on showing the repressive content of the highest values and achievements of culture.”

Western culture has been placed on the couch, and the role of psychoanalysis is to help the patient adjust somewhat to a sick, psychopathology-inducing society: “While psychoanalytic theory recognizes that the sickness of the individual is ultimately caused and sustained by the sickness of his civilization, psychoanalytic therapy aims at curing the individual so that he can continue to function as part of a sick civilization without surrendering to it altogether” (Marcuse 1974, 245).

As was the case with some of Freud’s close associates described above, Freud viewed himself as a sexual reformer against this most Western of cultural practices, the suppression of sexuality. Freud wrote in 1915: “Sexual morality—as society, in its extreme form, the American, defines it—seems to me very contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life” (in Gay 1988, 143). As Gay (1988, 149) notes, it was an ideology which “was deeply subversive for his time.”

THE SCIENTIFIC STATUS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

He [Nathan of Gaza] was an outstanding example of a highly imaginative and dangerous Jewish archetype which was to become of world importance when the Jewish intellect became secularized.¹⁰² He could construct a system of explanations and predictions of phenomena which was both highly plausible and at the same time sufficiently imprecise and flexible to accommodate new—and often highly inconvenient—events when they occurred. And he had the gift of presenting his protean-type theory… with tremendous conviction and aplomb. Marx and Freud were to exploit a similar capacity. (A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson 1988, 267-268)

There is a long history of well-argued claims that psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience. Even ignoring the long-standing objections of experimentally inclined researchers in mainstream psychology, there is a distinguished pedigree of highly critical accounts of psychoanalysis that began appearing in the 1970s by scholars such as Henri Ellenberger (1970), Frank Sulloway (1979a), Adolph Grünbaum(1984), Frank Cioffi (1969, 1970, 1972), Hans Eysenck (1990), Malcolm Macmillan (1991), E. Fuller Torrey (1992), and perhaps most famously, Frederick Crews (1993; Crews et al. 1995). The following passages sum up this tradition of scholarship:

Should we therefore conclude that psychoanalysis is a science? My evaluation shows that at none of the different stages through which it evolved was Freud’s theory one from which adequate explanations could be generated. From the beginning, much of what passed as theory was found to be description, and poor description at that… In every one of the later key developmental theses, Freud assumed what had to be explained…

None of his followers, including his revisionist critics who are themselves psychoanalysts, have probed any deeper than did Freud into the assumptions underlying their practise, particularly the assumptions underlying “the basic method”—free association. None question whether those assumptions hold in the therapeutic situation; none has attempted to break out of the circle. (Macmillan 1991, 610-612)

What passes today for Freud bashing is simply the long-postponed exposure of Freudian ideas to the same standards of noncontradiction, clarity, testability, cogency, and parsimonious explanatory power that prevail in empirical discourse at large. Step by step, we are learning that Freud has been the most overrated figure in the entire history of science and medicine—one who wrought immense harm through the propagation of false etiologies, mistaken diagnoses, and fruitless lines of inquiry. Still the legend dies hard, and those who challenge it continue to be greeted like rabid dogs. (Crews et al. 1995, 298-

299)

Even those within the psychoanalytic camp have often noted the lack of scientific rigor of the early psychoanalysts, and indeed, lack of scientific rigor is a continuing concern even in psychoanalytic circles (e.g., Cooper 1990; Michaels 1988; Orgel 1990; Reiser 1989). Gay (1988, 235), who clearly regards psychoanalysis as a science, states of the first-generation psychoanalysts that they “fearlessly interpreted one another’s dreams; fell on the others’ slips of the tongue or pen; freely, much too freely, employed diagnostic terms like ‘paranoid’ and ‘homosexual’ to characterize their associates and indeed themselves. They all practiced in their circle the kind of wild analysis they decried in outsiders as tactless, unscientific, and counterproductive.”

Gay (1988, 543) calls Civilization and Its Discontents “one of [Freud’s] most influential writings.” It now seems apparent that the theory Freud developed in Civilization and Its Discontents and his earlier work, Totem and Taboo, rests on a number of extremely naive, prescientific conceptualizations of human sexual behavior and its relation to culture. It is noteworthy that in arriving at his views Freud was forced to summarily reject Edward Westermarck’s theory of incest, which is the basis of modern scientific theories of incest (see MacDonald 1986).

However, by means of these speculative leaps, Freud managed to diagnose Western culture as essentially neurotic while apparently, on the basis of the argument in Moses and Monotheism, holding the view that Judaism represents the epitome of mental health and moral and intellectual superiority. Freud appears to have been well aware that his highly subversive conjectures in Totem and Taboo were entirely speculative. When the book was called a “just so” story by a British anthropologist in 1920, Freud was “amused” and stated only that his critic “was deficient in phantasy” (Gay 1988, 327), apparently a concession that the work was fanciful. Freud stated, “It would be nonsensical to strive for exactitude with this material, as it would be unreasonable to demand certainty” (in Gay 1988, 330). Similarly, Freud described Civilization and Its Discontents as “an essentially dilettantish foundation” on which “rises a thinly tapered analytic investigation” (in Gay 1988, 543).

Peter Gay terms Freud’s proposal of the Lamarckian inheritance of guilt, which runs through these works, as “sheer extravagance, piled upon the earlier extravagance of the claim that the primal murder had been an historic event.” However, even this assessment fails to get at the incredible rejection of the scientific spirit apparent in these writings. It was more than extravagance. Freud was accepting a genetic theory, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which had, at least by the time Civilization and Its Discontents reaffirmed the doctrine, been completely rejected by the scientific community. This was a selfconsciously speculative theory, but Freud’s speculations clearly had an agenda. Rather than provide speculations that reaffirmed the moral and intellectual basis of the culture of his day, his speculations were an integral part of his war on gentile culture—so much so that he viewed Totem and Taboo as a victory over Rome and the Catholic Church.

Similarly, Freud’s Future of an Illusion is a strong attack on religion in the name of science. Freud himself acknowledged that the scientific content was weak, stating, “the analytic content of the work is very thin” (in Gay 1988, 524). Gay (1988, 537) finds that it “fell short of his self-imposed standards,” which, as we have already seen, were hardly averse to speculation in the service of a political agenda. Again, however, Freud engages in scientific speculation in the service of an agenda of subverting the institutions of gentile society. This type of posturing was typical of Freud. For example, Crews (1993, 57) notes that Freud advanced his theory that Dostoevsky was not an epileptic but a hysteric suffering from having witnessed a primal scene “with a typically guileful show of tentativeness; but then, just as typically, he goes on to treat it as firmly settled.” Dostoevsky was in fact an epileptic.

The theory of the Oedipal complex, childhood sexuality, and the sexual etiology of the neuroses—the three central doctrines that underlie Freud’s radical critique of gentile culture—play absolutely no role in contemporary mainstream developmental psychology. From the standpoint of evolutionary theory, the idea that children would have a specifically sexual attraction to their opposite sex parent is highly implausible, since such an incestuous relationship would result in inbreeding depression and be more likely to result in disorders caused by recessive genes (see MacDonald 1986). The proposal that boys desire to kill their fathers conflicts with the general importance of paternal provisioning of resources in understanding the evolution of the family (MacDonald 1988a; 1992): Boys who had succeeded in killing their fathers and having sex with their mothers would not only be left with genetically inferior offspring, but also be deprived of paternal support and protection. Modern developmental studies indicate that many fathers and sons have very close, reciprocated affectional relationships beginning in infancy, and the normative pattern is for mothers and sons to have very intimate and affectionate, but decidedly nonsexual, relationships.

The continued life of these concepts in psychoanalytic circles is testimony to the continuing unscientific nature of the entire enterprise. Indeed, Kurzweil (1989, 89) notes “In the beginning, the Freudians tried to ‘prove’ the universality of the Oedipus complex; later on, they took it for granted. Ultimately, they no longer spelled out the reasons for the pervasiveness of childhood sexuality and its consequences in the cultural monographs: they all accepted it.”¹⁰³ What started out as a speculation in need of empirical support ended up as a fundamental a priori assumption.

Research inspired by these basic Freudian tenets ceased long ago and in a sense never started: Fundamentally, psychoanalysis has not inspired any significant research on these three basic Freudian constructs. Interestingly, there is evidence that Freud fraudulently portrayed the data underlying these concepts. Esterson (1992, 25ff; see also Crews 1994) convincingly argues that Freud’s patients did not volunteer any information on seduction or primal scenes at all. The seduction stories that provide the empirical basis of the Oedipal complex were a construction by Freud, who then interpreted his patients’ distress on hearing his constructions as proof of the theory. Freud then engaged in deception to obscure the fact that his patients’ stories were reconstructions and interpretations based on an a priori theory. Freud also retroactively changed the identity of the fancied seducers from nonfamily members (such as servants) because the Oedipal story required fathers. Esterson provides numerous other examples of deception (and self-deception) and notes that they were typically couched in Freud’s brilliant and highly convincing rhetorical style. Both Esterson (1992) and Lakoff and Coyne (1993, 83-86) show that Freud’s famous analysis of the teenage Dora (in which her rejection of the pedophilic sexual advances of an older married man is attributed to hysteria and sexual repression) was based entirely on preconceived ideas and circular reasoning in which the patient’s negative emotional response to the psychoanalytic hypothesis is construed as evidence for the hypothesis. Freud engaged in similar deceptive reconstructions in an earlier phase of his theory construction when he believed that seductions had actually occurred (Powell & Boer 1994). It was a methodology that could produce any desired result.

A particularly egregious tendency is to interpret patient resistance and distress as an indication of the truth of psychoanalytic claims. Of course, patients were not the only ones who resisted psychoanalysis, and all other forms of resistance were similarly an indication of the truth of psychoanalysis. As Freud himself noted, “I am met with hostility and live in such isolation that one must suppose I had discovered the greatest truths” (in Bonaparte, Freud & Kris 1957, 163). As we shall see, resistance to psychoanalytic “truth” on the part of patients, deviating psychoanalysts, and even entire cultures was viewed as a sure sign of the truth of psychoanalysis and the pathology of those who resisted.

Because of this reconstructive, interpretive manner of theory construction, the authority of the psychoanalyst became the only criterion of the truth of psychoanalytic claims—a situation that leads quite naturally to the expectation that the movement, in order to be successful, would necessarily be highly authoritarian. As indicated below, the movement was authoritarian from the beginning and has remained so throughout its history.

Notice that the interpretive, hermeneutic basis of theory construction in psychoanalysis is formally identical to the procedures of Talmudic and Midrashic commentaries on scripture (Hartung 1995; see PTSDA, Ch. 7). Psychoanalysts have tended to suppose that consistency with observable facts is an adequate criterion for a scientifically acceptable causal explanation. Psychoanalysts “inhabit a kind of scientific preschool in which no one divulges the grown-up secret that successful causal explanation must be differential, establishing the superiority of a given hypothesis to all of its extant rivals” (Crews 1994, 40; italics in text). As indicated in Chapter 6, the development of consensual theories consistent with observable reality but without any scientific content is a hallmark of twentieth-century Jewish intellectual movements.

Any theorist on the contemporary scientific scene who proposed that children are normally sexually attracted to their opposite sex parent would be ostracized for providing a psychological basis for supposing that children would seek such contact. A glaring mistake that persists throughout Freud’s writings is the systematic conflation of sexual desire and love (see MacDonald 1986): “From the very first, in psychoanalysis, it has seemed better to speak of these love impulses as sexual impulses” (in Wittels 1924, 141)—a comment that suggests the self-conscious nature of this conflation as well as indicates the casual manner in which psychoanalysts have framed their hypotheses. Indeed, Freud conflated all types of pleasure as fundamentally different manifestations of an underlying and unitary but infinitely transformable sexual pleasure, including the oral gratification resulting from breast feeding, anal gratification resulting from defecation, sexual gratification, and love. Contemporary researchers have often proposed that affectional ties between parents and children are developmentally important and that children actively seek these ties. However, modern theory and data, and certainly an evolutionary approach, provide absolutely no support for identifying affectional ties with sexual desire or with supposing that affectional ties are sublimated or redirected sexual desire. Modern approaches support instead a discrete systems perspective in which sexual desire and affection (and other sources of pleasure) involve quite separate, independent systems. From an evolutionary perspective, the powerful affectional (love) relationships between spouses and between parents and children function as a source of social cohesiveness whose ultimate purpose is to provide a high level of support for children (see MacDonald 1992).

This conflation between sexual desire and love is also apparent in many of Freud’s psychoanalytic successors, including Norman O. Brown, Wilhelm Reich, and Herbert Marcuse, whose works are reviewed below. The common thread of these writings is that if society could somehow rid itself of sexual repressions, human relations could be based on love and affection. This is an extremely naive and socially destructive viewpoint, given the current research in the field. Psychoanalytic assertions to the contrary were never any more than speculations in the service of waging a war on gentile culture.

In his insightful ruminations on Freud, Cuddihy (1974, 71) traces Freud’s views in this matter to the fact that for Jews, marriage was completely utilitarian (see PTSDA, Ch. 7). A disciple of Freud, Theodore Reik stated that the older generation of Jews held the conviction that “love is to be found only in novels and plays.” “Love or romance had no place in the Judengasse [Jewish quarter].” Love was therefore viewed by Freud as an invention of the alien gentile culture and thus morally suspect. Its true hypocritical nature as a veneer for and really only a sublimation of the sexual instinct would be unmasked by psychoanalysis. As described more fully below, it was a devastating analysis—an analysis with important consequences for the social fabric of Western societies in the late twentieth century.

Finally, another general mistake, and one that illustrates the political nature of Freud’s entire agenda, is that sexual urges are viewed as having a powerful biological basis (the id), while traits such as responsibility, dependability, orderliness, guilt, and delay of gratification (i.e., the conscientiousness system of personality theory) are imposed by a repressive, pathology-inducing society. In a comment indicating the usefulness of these psychoanalytic notions in the war on gentile culture, James Q. Wilson (1993a, 104) correctly states that the belief that conscience “is the result of repression is a useful thing to believe if you would like to free yourself of the constraints of conscience—conscience becomes a ‘hang-up’ that prevents you from ‘realizing yourself.’” It fact, conscientiousness is a critical biological system which has been under intensive eugenic selection within the Jewish community (see PTSDA, Ch. 7). An evolutionary perspective implies, rather, that both systems have a powerful biological basis and both serve critical adaptive functions (MacDonald 1995a, 1998c). No animal and certainly no human has ever been able to be devoted entirely to self-gratification, and there is no reason whatever to suppose that our biology would solely be directed toward obtaining immediate gratification and pleasure. In the real world, achieving evolutionary goals demands that attention be paid to details, careful plans be made, and gratification be deferred.

The continued life of these notions within the psychoanalytic community testifies to the vitality of psychoanalysis as a political movement. The continued self-imposed separation of psychoanalysis from the mainstream science of developmental psychology, as indicated by separate organizations, separate journals, and a largely nonoverlapping membership, is a further indication that the fundamental structure of psychoanalysis as a closed intellectual movement continues into the present era. Indeed, the self-segregation of psychoanalysis conforms well to the traditional structure of Judaism vis-à-vis gentile society: There is the development of parallel universes of discourse on human psychology—two incompatible worldviews quite analogous to the differences in religious discourse that have separated Jews from their gentile neighbors over the ages.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AS A POLITICAL MOVEMENT

While Darwin was satisfied with revising his work after further reflection and absorbing palpable hits by rational critics, while he trusted the passage of time and the weight of his argumentation, Freud orchestrated his wooing of the public mind through a loyal cadre of adherents, founded periodicals and wrote popularizations that would spread the authorized word, dominated international congresses of analysis until he felt too frail to attend them and after that through surrogates like his daughter Anna. (Gay 1987, 145)

Scholars have recognized that this self-consciously oppositional, subversive stance characteristic of psychoanalysis was maintained by methods that are completely contrary to the scientific spirit. The really incredible thing about the history of psychoanalysis is that Freud should be the object of such intense adulatory emotions 60 years after his death and 100 years after the birth of psychoanalysis—another indication that the entire subject must carry us well beyond science into the realm of politics and religion. What Grosskurth (1991, 219) says about herself is the only important scientific question: “I am fascinated by the fact that thousands of people continue to idealize and defend [Freud] without really knowing anything about him as a person.” It is the continuation of this movement and the veneration of its founder, not the pseudoscientific content of the theory, that are of interest.

I have already noted the self-consciously speculative nature of these subversive doctrines, but another important aspect of this phenomenon is the structure of the movement and the manner in which dissent was handled within the movement. Psychoanalysis “conducted itself less like a scientific-medical enterprise than like a politburo bent on snuffing out deviationism” (Crews 1994, 38). It is not surprising, therefore, that observers such as Sulloway (1979b) have described the “cultlike” aura of religion that has permeated psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has often been compared to a religion by outsiders as well as by insiders. Gay (1988, 175) notes the “persistent charge that Freud had founded a secular religion.” Although Gay disputes the charge, he also uses words such as “movement” (p. 180 and passim), “conversion” (p. 184), and “the Cause” (p. 201) in describing psychoanalysis; and he uses “strayed disciple” (p. 485) to describe a defector (Otto Rank) and “recruit” (p. 540) to describe Princess Marie Bonaparte. Similarly, Yerushalmi (1991, 41) speaks of Freud as bestowing on Jung “the mantle of apostolic succession.” And I can’t help noting that the staunch Freud disciple Fritz Wittels (1924, 138) reports that during the period when Freud and Jung were close, Freud often said of Jung, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”

Wittels (1924) also decried the “suppression of free criticism within the Society… Freud is treated as a demigod, or even as a god. No criticism of his utterances is permitted.” Wittels tells us that Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie is “the psychoanalyst’s Bible. This is no mere figure of speech. The faithful disciples regard one another’s books as of no account. They recognize no authority but Freud’s; they rarely read or quote one another. When they quote it is from the Master, that they may give the pure milk of the word” (pp. 142-143). Freud “had little desire that [his] associates should be persons of strong individuality, and that they should be critical and ambitious collaborators. The realm of psychoanalysis was his idea and his will, and he welcomed anyone who accepted his views” (p. 134).

The authoritarianism of the movement repelled some. The influential Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler left the movement in 1911, telling Freud that “this ‘who is not for us is against us,’ this ‘all or nothing,’ is necessary for religious communities and useful for political parties. I can therefore understand the principle as such, but for science I consider it harmful” (in Gay 1987, 144-145).

Other independent thinkers were simply expelled. There were emotionally charged, highly politicized scenes when Adler and Jung were expelled from the movement. As indicated above, both individuals had developed perspectives that clashed with those aspects of psychoanalytic orthodoxy that were crucial to developing a radical critique of Western culture, and the result was a bitter schism. In the case of Adler, some members in the movement and Adler himself made attempts to minimize the differences with Freudian orthodoxy by, for example, viewing Adler’s ideas as extensions of Freud rather than as contradictions, “But Freud was not interested in such forced compromises” (Gay 1988, 222). Indeed, Jung stated in 1925 that Freud’s attitude toward him was “the bitterness of the person who is entirely misunderstood, and his manners always seemed to say: ‘If they do not understand, they must be stamped into hell’” (in Ellenberger 1970, 462). After Jung’s schism with Freud, Jung stated: “I criticize in Freudian psychology a certain narrowness and bias and, in ‘Freudians,’ a certain unfree, sectarian spirit of intolerance and fanaticism” (in Gay 1988, 238).

The defections-expulsions of Jung and Adler were an early indication of the inability to tolerate any form of dissent from fundamental doctrines. Otto Rank defected in the mid-1920s, and again the problem was disagreement with the importance of a fundamental Freudian doctrine, the Oedipal complex. This defection was accompanied by a great deal of character assassination, often consisting of attempts to show that Rank’s behavior was an indication of psychopathology.

Most recently Jeffrey Masson has been expelled from the movement because he questioned the Freudian doctrine that patients’ reports of sexual abuse were fantasies. As with the other dissenters, such a view entails a radical critique of Freud, since it entails the rejection of the Oedipal complex. As with Talmudic discussions, one could question Freud, but the questioning had to be done “within a certain framework and within the guild. Stepping outside of the framework, being willing to question the very foundations of psychoanalysis, is unthinkable for most analysts” (Masson 1990, 211). Masson’s expulsion was characterized not by scientific debate about the accuracy of his claims but by a Stalinist show trial complete with character assassination.

In the history of psychoanalysis, character assassination typically involves analyzing scientific disagreement as an indication of neurosis. Freud himself “never tired of repeating the now notorious contention that the opposition to psychoanalysis stemmed from ‘resistances’” arising from emotional sources (Esterson 1992, 216). For example, Freud attributed Jung’s defection to “strong neurotic and egotistic motives” (in Gay 1988, 481).¹⁰⁴ Gay (1988, 481) comments, “These ventures into character assassination are instances of the kind of aggressive analysis that psychoanalysts, Freud in the vanguard, at once deplored and practiced. This… was the way that analysts thought about others, and about themselves.” The practice was “endemic among analysts, a common professional deformation” (Gay 1988, 481). One might also note the similarity of these phenomena to the Soviet practice of committing dissenters to mental hospitals. This tradition lives on. Frederick Crews’s (1993, 293) recent critique of psychoanalysis has been portrayed by psychoanalysts as “composed in a state of bitter anger by a malcontent with a vicious disposition.” Crews’s behavior was explained in terms of botched transferences and Oedipal complexes gone awry.

Perhaps the most astonishing case is Otto Rank’s letter of 1924 in which he attributes his heretical actions to his own neurotic unconscious conflicts, promises to see things “more objectively after the removal of my affective resistance,” and notes that Freud “found my explanations satisfactory and has forgiven me personally” (Grosskurth 1991, 166). In this matter “Freud seems to have acted as the Grand Inquisitor, and Rank’s groveling ‘confession’ could have served as a model for the Russian show trials of the 1930s” (Grosskurth 1991, 167). Freud viewed the entire episode as a success; Rank had been cured of his neurosis “just as if he had gone through a proper analysis” (in Grosskurth 1991, 168). Clearly, we are dealing with no ordinary science here, but rather with a religious-political movement in which psychoanalysis is a form of thought control and an instrument of domination and interpersonal aggression.

The apex of this authoritarian aspect of the movement was the creation of “a tight, small organization of loyalists” whose main task was to prevent departures from orthodoxy (Gay 1988, 229-230). Freud accepted the idea with enthusiasm. “What took hold of my imagination immediately, is your [Ernest Jones’s] idea of a secret council composed of the best and most trustworthy among our men to take care of the further development of [psychoanalysis] and defend the cause against personalities and accidents when I am no more… [The committee would] make living and dying easier for me… [T]his committee had to be strictly secret” (Freud, in Gay 1988, 230; italics in text).¹⁰⁵

The workings of the Committee have been extensively documented by Grosskurth (1991, 15; italics in text) who notes that “By insisting the Committee must be absolutely secret, Freud enshrined the principle of confidentiality. The various psychoanalytic societies that emerged from the Committee were like Communist cells, in which the members vowed eternal obedience to their leader. Psychoanalysis became institutionalized by the founding of journals and the training of candidates; in short an extraordinarily effective political entity.”

There were repeated admonitions for the Committee to present a “united front” against all opposition, for “maintaining control over the whole organization,” for “keeping the troops in line,” and for “reporting to the commander” (Grosskurth 1991, 97). This is not the workings of a scientific organization, but rather of an authoritarian religious-political and quasi-military movement—something resembling the Spanish Inquisition or Stalinism far more than anything resembling what we usually think of as science.

The authoritarian nature of the psychoanalytic movement is exemplified by the personalities of the members of the Committee, all of whom appear to have had extremely submissive personalities and absolute devotion to Freud. Indeed, the members appear to have self-consciously viewed themselves as loyal sons to Freud the father figure (complete with sibling rivalry as the “brothers” jockeyed for position as the “father’s” favorite), while Freud viewed his close followers as his children, with power to interfere in their personal lives (Grosskurth 1991, 123; Hale 1995, 29). To the loyalists, the truth of psychoanalysis was far less important than their psychological need to be appreciated by Freud (Deutsch 1940).

These relationships went far beyond mere loyalty, however. “[Ernest] Jones had grasped the fact that to be a friend of Freud’s meant being a sycophant. It meant opening oneself completely to him, to be willing to pour out all one’s confidences to him” (Grosskurth 1991, 48). “Jones believed that to disagree with Freud (the father) was tantamount to patricide (father murder),” so that when Sandor Ferenczi disagreed with Freud on the reality of childhood sexual abuse, Jones called him a “homicidal maniac” (Masson 1990, 152).

Regarding Ferenczi, Grosskurth (1991) notes, “The thought of a disagreement with Freud was unbearable” (p. 141), “There were occasions when he [Ferenczi] rebelled against his dependency, but always he returned repentant and submissive” (pp. 54-55). The situation was similar for Kurt Eissler, the closest confidant of Anna Freud’s inner circle in the 1960s: “What he felt for Freud seemed to border on worship” (Masson 1990, 121). “He held one thing sacred, and hence beyond criticism: Freud” (Masson 1990, 122). It was common among the disciples to imitate Freud’s personal mannerisms, and even among analysts who did not know Freud personally there were “intense feelings, fantasies, transferences, identifications” (Hale 1995, 30).

This authoritarian aspect of the movement continued long after the dissolution of the secret Committee and long after Freud’s death. Anna Freud received a ring from her father and kept a “special group” around her whose existence was not public knowledge (Masson 1990, 113). “Psychoanalysis always was, from the moment Freud found disciples, a semisecret society. This secrecy has never disappeared” (Masson 1990, 209).

The tendency to stifle dissent has continued in psychoanalysis long after the well-documented tendencies of the founding father and his disciples (Orgel 1990). “Psychoanalysis demanded loyalty that could not be questioned, the blind acceptance of unexamined ‘wisdom.’”

“Success as a psychoanalyst meant being a team player and not questioning the work of other analysts on one’s team” (Masson 1990, 209, 70). Intellectual dissent was stifled with statements by superiors that doubters had a further need for analysis or simply by removing dissenters from training programs.

Further evidence for the essentially political character of psychoanalysis is the unique role of disciples able to trace themselves back to Freud in a direct line of descent. “The idea of being a chosen disciple, privileged to have direct contact with the master, has survived and is continued in the procedures of many of the training programs of the institutes” (Arlow & Brenner 1988, 5; see also Masson 1990, 55, 123). “The intensely filial relationships to Freud of the first generation were gradually replaced by highly emotional relationships to a fantasied Freud, still the primal founder, but also to organizations, to peers, to superiors in the institute hierarchy—above all—to the training analyst, the training analyst’s analyst, and, if possible, back to Freud and his circle became a determinant of psychoanalytic prestige” (Hale 1995, 32).

Unlike in a real science, in psychoanalysis there is a continuing role for what one might term the sacred texts of the movement, Freud’s writings, both in teaching and in the current psychoanalytic literature. Studies of Hysteria and The Interpretation of Dreams are almost 100 years old but remain standard texts in psychoanalytic training programs. There is a “recurrent appearance in the analytic literature of articles redoing, extending, deepening, and modifying Freud’s early case histories” (Arlow & Brenner 1988, 5). Indeed, it is remarkable to simply scan psychoanalytic journal articles and find that a large number of references are to Freud’s work performed well over 60 years ago. The 1997 volume of Psychoanalytic Quarterly had 77 references to Freud in 24 articles. Only five articles had no references to Freud, and of these, one had no references at all. (In keeping with psychoanalytic tradition, there were no empirical studies.) There thus appears to be a continuing tendency noted by Wittels (1924, 143) long ago: “The faithful disciples regard one another’s books as of no account. They recognize no authority but Freud’s; they rarely read or quote one another. When they quote it is from the Master, that they may give the pure milk of the word.”

The continued use of Freud’s texts in instruction and the continuing references to Freud’s work are simply not conceivable in a real science. In this regard, although Darwin is venerated for his scientific work as the founder of the modern science of evolutionary biology, studies in evolutionary biology only infrequently refer to Darwin’s writings because the field has moved so far beyond his work. On the Origin of Species and Darwin’s other works are important texts in the history of science, but they are not used for current instruction. Moreover, central features of Darwin’s account, such as his views on inheritance, have been completely rejected by modern workers. With Freud, however, there is continuing fealty to the master, at least within an important subset of the movement.

One rationalization for the authoritarian character of the movement was that it was necessary because of the irrational hostility psychoanalysis aroused in the scientific and lay communities (e.g., Gay 1987). However, Sulloway (1979a, 448; see also Ellenberger 1970, 418-420; Esterson 1992, 172-173; Kiell 1988) finds the supposedly hostile reception of Freud’s theories to be “one of the most well-entrenched legends” of psychoanalytic history. More-over, one might note that Darwin’s theory also provoked intense hostility during Darwin’s life, and recently there has been a great deal of public hostility directed at recent elaborations of Darwin’s theory as it pertains to human behavior. Nevertheless, these theoretical perspectives have not developed the authoritarian, separatist traits of psychoanalysis. Indeed, evolutionists and behavioral geneticists have attempted to influence mainstream research in anthropology, psychology, sociology, and other fields by publishing data in mainstream journals and often by using mainstream methodologies. Controversy and hostility by itself need not lead to orthodoxy or to separation from the university. In the world of science, controversy leads to experimentation and rational argumentation. In the world of psychoanalysis, it leads to expulsion of the nonorthodox and to splendid isolation from scientific psychology.

Indeed, in works such as Grosskurth’s (1991) The Secret Ring and Peter Gay’s biography of Freud, much comment is made on the authoritarian nature of the movement, but discussions of the need for authoritarianism as resulting from external pressures on psychoanalysis are extremely vague and almost completely absent. Instead, the drive for orthodoxy comes from within the movement as the direct result of the personalities of a small group of loyalists and their absolute commitment to their master’s cause.

Reflecting the utility of psychoanalysis as an instrument of psychological domination and thought control, Freud himself refused to be analyzed. Freud’s refusal resulted in difficulties with Jung (Jung 1961) and, much later, with Ferenczi, who commented that the refusal was an example of Freud’s arrogance (Grosskurth 1991, 210-211). In contrast, Freud used psychoanalysis to sexually humiliate two of his most fervent disciples, Ferenczi and Jones. Freud’s analysis of the women involved in relationships with Ferenczi and Jones resulted in the women leaving the men but remaining on friendly terms with Freud (see Grosskurth 1991, 65). Grosskurth suggests that Freud’s actions were a test of his disciples’ loyalty, and the fact that Jones continued in the movement after this humiliation indicates the extent to which Freud’s followers showed unquestioned obedience to their master.

An ethologist observing these events would conclude that Freud had behaved like the quintessential dominant male, which Freud mythologized in Totem and Taboo, but only symbolically, since Freud did not apparently have a sexual relationship with the women (although he was “captivated” by Jones’s gentile female friend [Grosskurth 1991, 65]). To have refrained from killing the father under these circumstances was to have successfully passed through the Oedipal situation—an acknowledgment of fealty to Freud the father figure.

Besides controlling his male underlings, Freud used psychoanalysis to pathologize female resistance to male sexual advances. This is apparent in the famous analysis of the teenage Dora, who rejected the advances of an older married man. Dora’s father sent her to Freud because he wanted her to accede to the man’s advances as an appeasement gesture because the father was having an affair with the man’s wife. Freud obligingly attributed Dora’s rejection to repressing amorous desires toward the man. The message is that 14-year-old girls who reject the sexual advances of older married men are behaving hysterically. An evolutionist would interpret her behavior as an understandable (and adaptive) consequence of her evolved psychology. Reflecting the generally positive accounts of Freud in the popular media of the 1950s, Donald Kaplan (1967), a lay analyst writing in Harper’s, wrote that Freud had “exercised his finest ingenuity” in the case of Dora: “Three months with Freud may have been the only experience with unimpeachable integrity in her long, unhappy life.” Lakoff and Coyne (1993) conclude their discussion of Dora by arguing that in general psychoanalysis was characterized by thought control, manipulation, and debasement of the analysand. Crews (1993, 56) also describes a “scarcely believable” case in which Freud manipulated Horace Frink, president of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, into a disastrous divorce and remarriage to an heiress, the latter event to be accompanied by a sizable financial contribution to the psychoanalytic movement. Frink’s second wife later divorced him. Both divorces were accompanied by episodes of manic depression.

An important corollary of these findings is that psychoanalysis has many features in common with brainwashing (Bailey 1960, 1965; Salter 1998).¹⁰⁶ During training sessions, any objection by the future psychoanalyst is viewed as a resistance to be overcome (Sulloway 1979b). Many contemporary analysands feel that their analysts behaved aggressively toward them, turning them into devoted and passive followers of their highly idealized analyst, a role facilitated by the “unquestioned authority” of the analyst (Orgel 1990, 14). Masson (1990, 86) describes his training analysis as “like growing up with a despotic parent,” since the qualities it requires in the prospective analysts are meekness and abject obedience.

I suggest that the inculcation of passive and devoted followers via the aggression and thought control represented by psychoanalysis has always been an important aspect of the entire project. At a deep level, the fundamentally pseudoscientific structure of psychoanalysis implies that disputes cannot be resolved in a scientific manner, with the result that, as Kerr (1992) notes, the only means of resolving disputes involves the exercise of personal power. The result was that the movement was doomed to develop into a mainstream orthodoxy punctuated by numerous sectarian deviations originated by individuals who were expelled from the movement. These offshoots then replicated the fundamental structure of all psychoanalysis-inspired movements: “Each major disagreement over theory or therapy seemed to require a new validating social group, a psychoanalytic tradition that recent splits within Freudian institutes seem only to confirm” (Hale 1995, 26). Whereas real science is individualistic at its core, psychoanalysis in all its manifestations is fundamentally a set of cohesive, authoritarian groups centered around a charismatic leader.

Despite the complete lack of support by a body of scientific research and the authoritarian, highly politicized atmosphere of the movement, psychoanalysis has at least until recently “maintained a considerable place of honor within residency and medical student curricula and teaching.” The American Psychiatric Association (APA) “over many years has been led primarily by medical psychoanalysts, both as medical director in the person of Dr. Melvin Sabshin and through a succession of psychoanalyst presidents” (Cooper 1990, 182). The APA has supported the American Psychoanalytic Society in many ways directly and indirectly. The intellectual credibility of psychoanalysis within the wider psychiatric community and a considerable portion of its financial resources have therefore been achieved not by developing a body of scientific research or even being open to alternative perspectives, but by political influence within the APA.

Another source of financial support for psychoanalysis derived from its acceptance within the Jewish community. Jews have been vastly overrepresented as patients seeking psychoanalytic treatments, accounting for 60 percent of the applicants to psychoanalytic clinics in the 1960s (Kadushin 1969). Indeed, Glazer and Moynihan (1963, 163) describe a Jewish subculture in New York in mid-twentieth-century America in which psychoanalysis was a central cultural institution that filled some of the same functions as traditional religious affiliation: “Psychoanalysis in America is a peculiarly Jewish product… [Psychoanalysis] was a scientific form of soul-rebuilding to make them whole and hardy, and it was divorced, at least on the surface, from mysticism, will, religion, and all those other romantic and obscure trends that their rational minds rejected” (p. 175). Patients and analysts alike were participating in a secular movement that retained the critical psychological features of traditional Judaism as a separatist, authoritarian, and collectivist cultlike movement.

Finally, it is reasonable to conclude that Freud’s real analysand was gentile culture, and that psychoanalysis was fundamentally an act of aggression toward that culture. The methodology and institutional structure of psychoanalysis may be viewed as attempts to brainwash gentile culture into passively accepting the radical criticism of gentile culture entailed by the fundamental postulates of psychoanalysis. Draped in scientific jargon, the authority of the analyst depended ultimately on a highly authoritarian movement in which dissent resulted in expulsion and elaborate rationalizations in which such behavior was pathologized.

Indeed, the following passage, written to Karl Abraham, shows that Freud thought that in order to accept psychoanalysis, gentiles had to overcome “inner resistances” resulting from their racial origins. Comparing Abraham to Jung, Freud wrote, “You are closer to my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship [ Rassenverwandschaft], while he as a Christian and a pastor’s son finds his way to me only against great inner resistances” (in Yerushalmi 1991, 42).

Gentiles’ acceptance of psychoanalysis would thus, in a sense, represent the Jews’ conquering the “innate” tendencies of the Christians—the victory of the Semitic general against his hated adversary, gentile culture. Indeed, Kurzweil (1989) shows that the tendency to pathologize disagreement not only occurred within the movement and in reference to defectors but also was often applied to whole countries where psychoanalysis failed to take root. Thus the early lack of a positive reception for psychoanalysis in France was ascribed to “irrational defenses” (p. 30), and a similar situation in Austria was attributed to a “general resistance” to psychoanalysis (p. 245), where “resistance” is used with psychoanalytic connotations.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AS A TOOL IN THE RADICAL
CRITICISM OF WESTERN CULTURE: THE WIDER
CULTURAL INFLUENCE OF FREUD’S THEORY

Because Freud’s ideology was self-consciously subversive and, in particular, because it tended to undermine Western institutions surrounding sex and marriage, it is of some interest to consider the effects of these practices from an evolutionary perspective. Western marriage has long been monogamous and exogamous, and these features contrast strongly with features of other stratified societies, especially societies from the Near East, such as ancient Israel (MacDonald 1995b,c; PTSDA, Ch. 8).

Freud’s views in Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents represent a failure to grasp the uniqueness of Roman and later Christian institutions of marriage and the role of Christian religious practices in producing the uniquely egalitarian mating systems characteristic of Western Europe.¹⁰⁷ In Western Europe the repression of sexual behavior has fundamentally served to support socially imposed monogamy, a mating system in which differences in male wealth are much less associated with access to females and reproductive success than in traditional non-Western civilizations where polygyny has been the norm. As elaborated also in PTSDA (Ch. 8), polygyny implies sexual competition among males, with wealthy males having access to vastly disproportionate numbers of women and lower-status men often being unable to mate at all. This type of marriage system is very common among the traditional stratified human societies of the world, such as classical China, India, the Muslim societies, and ancient Israel (Betzig 1986; Dickemann 1979). While poor males cannot find a mate in such a system, women are reduced to chattel and are typically purchased as concubines by wealthy males. Socially imposed monogamy thus represents a relatively egalitarian mating system for men.

Moreover, because of higher levels of sexual competition among males, the status of women in non-Western societies is immeasurably lower than in Western societies where monogamy has developed (MacDonald 1988a, 227-228; J. Q. Wilson 1993a). It is no accident that the recent movement toward women’s rights developed in Western societies rather than in the other stratified societies of the world. The massive confusion characteristic of psychoanalysis is also apparent in Freud’s close colleague, Fritz Wittels. Wittels expected an era of liberation and sexual freedom to be ushered in by a group of Jewish psychoanalytic messianists, but his expectation was based on a profound misunderstanding of sex and human psychology. Wittels condemned “our contemporary goddamned culture” for forcing women into “the cage of monogamy” (in Gay 1988, 512), a comment that completely misunderstands the effects of inter-male sexual competition as represented by polygyny.

There are sound reasons for supposing that monogamy was a necessary condition for the peculiarly European “low-pressure” demographic profile described by Wrigley and Schofield (1981). This demographic profile results from late marriage and celibacy of large percentages of females during times of economic scarcity. The theoretical connection with monogamy is that monogamous marriage results in a situation where the poor of both sexes are unable to mate, whereas in polygynous systems an excess of poor females merely lowers the price of concubines for wealthy males. Thus, for example, at the end of the seventeenth century approximately 23 percent of individuals of both sexes remained unmarried between ages 40 to 44, but, as a result of altered economic opportunities, this percentage dropped at the beginning of the eighteenth century to 9 percent, and there was a corresponding decline in age of marriage (Wrigley & Schofield 1981). Like monogamy, this pattern was unique among the stratified societies of Eurasia (Hajnal 1965, 1983; MacFarlane 1986; R. Wall 1983; Wrigley & Schofield, 1981).

In turn, the low pressure demographic profile appears to have had economic consequences. Not only was marriage rate the main damper on population growth, but, especially in England, this response had a tendency to lag well behind favorable economic changes so that there was a tendency for capital accumulation during good times rather than a constant pressure of population on food supply:

The fact that the rolling adjustment between economic and demographic fluctuations took place in such a leisurely fashion, tending to produce large if gradual swings in real wages, represented an opportunity to break clear from the low-level income trap which is sometimes supposed to have inhibited all pre-industrial nations. A long period of rising real wages, by changing the structure of demand, will tend to give a disproportionately strong boost to demand for commodities other than the basic necessities of life, and so to sectors of the economy whose growth is especially important if an industrial revolution is to occur. (Wrigley & Schofield 1981, 439; see also Hajnal 1965; MacFarlane 1986)

There is thus some reason to suppose that monogamy, by resulting in a low pressure demographic profile, was a necessary condition for industrialization. This argument suggests that socially imposed monogamy—embedded in the religious and cultural framework of Western societies—may indeed be a central aspect of the architecture of Western modernization.

Another important effect of Western institutions of sex and marriage was to facilitate high-investment parenting. As already indicated, perhaps the most basic mistake Freud made was the systematic conflation of sex and love. This was also his most subversive mistake, and one cannot overemphasize the absolutely disastrous consequences of accepting the Freudian view that sexual liberation would have salutary effects on society.

Contrary to the psychoanalytic perspective, evolutionary theory is compatible with a discrete systems perspective in which there are at least two independent systems influencing reproductive behavior (MacDonald 1988a, 1992, 1995a): One system is a pair bonding system that facilitates stable pair bonds and high-investment parenting. This system essentially brings the father into the family as a provider of resources for children by providing a basis for close affectional ties (romantic love) between men and women. There is good evidence for such a system both in attachment research and personality psychology.

The second system may be characterized as a sexual attraction-mating system that facilitates mating and short-term sexual relationships. This system is psychometrically associated with extraversion, sensation seeking, aggression, and other appetitive systems. Psychological research supports the hypothesis that individuals who are high on these systems tend to have more sexual partners and relatively disinhibited sexual behavior. Highest in young-adult males, this system underlies a low-investment style of mating behavior in which the male’s role is simply to inseminate females rather than provide continuing investment in the children. Many human societies have been characterized by intense sexual competition among males to control large numbers of females (e.g., Betzig 1986; Dickemann 1979; MacDonald 1983). This male pursuit of large numbers of mates and sexual relationships has nothing to do with love. It is the defining characteristic of Western culture to have significantly inhibited this male tendency while at the same time providing cultural supports for pair bonding and companionate marriage. The result has been a relatively egalitarian, high-investment mating system.

The psychoanalytic emphasis on legitimizing sexuality and premarital sex is therefore fundamentally a program that promotes low-investment parenting styles. Low-investment parenting is associated with precocious sexuality, early reproduction, lack of impulse control, and unstable pair bonds (Belsky, Steinberg & Draper 1991). Ecologically, high-investment parenting is associated with the need to produce competitive offspring, and we have seen that one aspect of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy has been a strong emphasis on high-investment parenting (PTSDA, Ch. 7). Applied to gentile culture, the subversive program of psychoanalysis would have the expected effect of resulting in less-competitive children; in the long term, gentile culture would be increasingly characterized by low-investment parenting, and, as indicated below, there is evidence that the sexual revolution inaugurated, or at least greatly facilitated, by psychoanalysis has indeed had this effect.

In this regard, it is interesting to note that an important aspect of the social imposition of monogamy in Western Europe has been the development of companionate marriage. One of the peculiar features of Western marriage is that there has been a trend toward companionate marriage based on affection and consent between partners (e.g., Brundage 1987; Hanawalt 1986; MacFarlane 1986; Stone 1977, 1990; Westermarck 1922). Although dating this affective revolution in the various social strata remains controversial (Phillips 1988), several historians have noted the prevalence and psychological importance of affectionate parent-child and husband-wife relations in Western Europe since the Middle Ages (Hanawalt 1986; MacFarlane 1986; Pollack 1983), or at least since the seventeenth century (e.g., Phillips 1988; Stone 1977, 1990). Stone (1990) notes that by the end of the eighteenth century “even in great aristocratic households mutual affection was regarded as the essential prerequisite for matrimony” (p. 60).

In view of Freud’s animosity toward Western culture and the Catholic Church in particular, it is interesting that the Church’s policy on marriage included a largely successful attempt to emphasize consent and affection between partners as normative features of marriage (Brundage 1975, 1987; Duby 1983; Hanawalt 1986; Herlihy 1985; MacFarlane 1986; Noonan 1967, 1973; Quaife 1979; Rouche 1987; Sheehan 1978). Anti-hedonism and the idealization of romantic love as the basis of monogamous marriage have also periodically characterized Western secular intellectual movements (Brundage 1987), such as the Stoics of late antiquity (e.g., P. Brown 1987; Veyne 1987) and nineteenth-century Romanticism (e.g., Corbin 1990; Porter 1982).

From an evolutionary perspective, consent frees individuals to pursue their own interests in marriage, among which may be compatibility and conjugal affection. Although affection can certainly occur in the context of arranged marriages (and this has been emphasized by some historians of Republican Rome [e.g., Dixon 1985]), all things being equal, free consent to marriage is more likely to result in affection being one criterion of importance.

Indeed, one sees in these findings a fundamental difference between Judaism as a collectivist group strategy, in which individual decisions are submerged to the interests of the group, versus Western institutions based on individualism. Recall the material reviewed in PTSDA (Ch. 7) indicating that until after World War I arranged marriages were the rule among Jews because the economic basis of marriage was too important to leave to the vagaries of romantic love (Hyman 1989). Although high-investment parenting was an important aspect of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, conjugal affection was not viewed as central to marriage with the result that, as Cuddihy (1974) notes, a long line of Jewish intellectuals regarded it as a highly suspect product of an alien culture. Jews also continued to practice consanguineous marriages—a practice that highlights the fundamentally biological agenda of Judaism (see PTSDA, Ch. 8)—well into the twentieth century whereas, as we have seen, the Church successfully countered consanguinity as a basis of marriage beginning in the Middle Ages. Judaism thus continued to emphasize the collectivist mechanism of the social control of individual behavior in conformity to family and group interests centuries after the control of marriage in the West passed from family and clan to individuals. In contrast to Jewish emphasis on group mechanisms, Western culture has thus uniquely emphasized individualist mechanisms of personal attraction and free consent (see PTSDA, Ch. 8).

I conclude that Western religious and secular institutions have resulted in a highly egalitarian mating system that is associated with high-investment parenting. These institutions provided a central role for pair bonding, conjugality, and companionship as the basis of marriage. However, when these institutions were subjected to the radical critique presented by psychoanalysis, they came to be seen as engendering neurosis, and Western society itself was viewed as pathogenic. Freud’s writings on this issue (see Kurzweil 1989, 85 and passim) are replete with assertions on the need for greater sexual freedom to overcome debilitating neurosis. As we shall see, later psychoanalytic critiques of gentile culture pointed to the repression of sexuality as leading to anti-Semitism and a host of other modern ills.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CRITICISM OF WESTERN
CULTURE

Psychoanalysis has proved to be a veritable treasure trove of ideas for those intent on developing radical critiques of Western culture. Psychoanalysis influenced thought in a wide range of areas, including sociology, child rearing, criminology, anthropology, literary criticism, art, literature, and the popular media. Kurzweil (1989, 102) notes that “something like a culture of psychoanalysis was being established.” Torrey (1992) describes in some detail the spread of the movement in the United States, originally through the actions of a small group of predominantly Jewish activists with access to the popular media, the academic world, and the arts, to a pervasive influence in the 1950s: “It is a long road from a beachhead among New York intellectuals to a widespread influence in almost every phase of American life” (p. 37)—what Torrey terms an “assault on American culture” (p. 127).

And as Shapiro (1989, 292) points out, the vast majority of the New York Intellectuals not only had Jewish backgrounds but also strongly identified as Jews: “The surprising thing about the Jewish intellectuals is not that their expressions of Jewish identity were so pale but that they rejected the easy path of assimilation. That supposedly ‘cosmopolitan’ intellectuals should concern themselves with such a parochial matter as Jewish identity reveals the hold which Jewishness has had on even the most acculturated.” As indicated in Chapter 6, the New York Intellectuals were politically radical and deeply alienated from American political and cultural institutions.

Psychoanalysis was a major component of the Weltanschauung of these intellectuals. Torrey’s (1992) study indicates a strong overlap among psychoanalysis, liberal-radical politics, and Jewish identification among the American intellectual elite since the 1930s. Torrey (1992, 95) describes Dwight Macdonald as “one of the few goyim among the New York intelligentsia” involved in this movement which was centered around the journal Partisan Review (see Ch. 6). Given this association of psychoanalysis and the left, it is not surprising that Frederick Crews’s (1993; Crews et al. 1995) critique of psychoanalysis has been analyzed as an attack on the left: Writing in Tikhun, a publication that combines liberal-radical politics with Jewish activism and is regarded as a journal of the New York Intellectuals (see Ch. 6), Eli Zaretsky (1994, 67) noted that attacks like that of Crews “are continuous with the attack on the Left that began with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968… They continue the repudiation of the revolutionary and utopian possibilities glimpsed in the 1960s.” Psychoanalysis was an integral component of the countercultural movement of the 1960s; attacks on it are tantamount to attacking a cornerstone of liberal-radical political culture.

Moreover, the material reviewed by Torrey indicates that the preponderance of psychoanalytically inclined Jews among the intellectual elite continued in the post-World War II era. Torrey studied 21 elite American intellectuals identified originally by Kadushin (1974) on the basis of peer ratings as being the most influential. Of the 21, 15 were Jewish, and questionnaires and analysis of the writings of these 15 indicated that 11 had been “significantly influenced by Freudian theory at some point in their careers” (p. 185). (This includes three cases in which the writings of Wilhelm Reich, the leader of the Freudian left, were more influential than those of Freud: Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, and Norman Mailer.) In addition, 10 of these 11 (Saul Bellow excepted) were identified as having liberal or radical political beliefs at some period of their career.¹⁰⁸

The link between psychoanalysis and the political left, as well as the critical role of Jewish-controlled media in the propagation of psychoanalysis, can be seen in the recent uproar of Frederick Crews’s critiques of the culture of psychoanalysis. The original articles were published in the New York Review of Books—a journal that, along with Partisan Review and Commentary, is associated with the New York Intellectuals (see Ch. 6). Publication in the NYRB, as Crews notes, is “almost like pet owners who had negligently or maliciously consigned their parakeet to the mercies of an ever-lurking cat” (Crews et al. 1995, 288). The implication is that publications like the NYRB and the other journals associated with the New York Intellectuals have been instrumental in propagating psychoanalytic and similar doctrines as scientifically and intellectually reputable for decades, and it also suggests that had Crews published his articles in a less visible and less-politicized medium, they could have been safely ignored, as has commonly been the practice over the long history of psychoanalysis.

Several prominent Freudian critiques of culture remained fairly true to Freud’s original premises.¹⁰⁹ Herbert Marcuse, a countercultural guru of the 1960s, was a member of the first generation of the Frankfurt School whose activities are discussed extensively in Chapter 5. In Eros and Civilization Marcuse accepts Freud’s theory that Western culture is pathogenic as a result of the repression of sexual urges, paying homage to Freud, who “recognized the work of repression in the highest values of Western civilization—which presuppose and perpetuate unfreedom and suffering” (p. 240). Marcuse cites Wilhelm Reich’s early work approvingly as an exemplar of the “leftist” wing of Freud’s legacy. Reich “emphasized the extent to which sexual repression is enforced by the interests of domination and exploitation, and the extent to which these interests are in turn reinforced and reproduced by sexual repression” (p. 239). Like Freud, Marcuse points the way to a nonexploitative utopian civilization that would result from the complete end of sexual repression, but Marcuse goes beyond Freud’s ideas in Civilization and Its Discontents only in his even greater optimism regarding the beneficial effects of ending sexual repression.

Indeed, Marcuse ends the book with a ringing defense of the fundamental importance of sexual repression in opposition to several “neo-Freudian revisionist” theorists such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Henry Stack Sullivan. Interestingly, Marcuse proposes that neo-Freudianism arose because of the belief that orthodox Freudian sexual repression theory would suggest that socialism was unattainable (pp. 238-239). These neo-Freudian revisionists must thus be seen as continuing the psychoanalytic critique of culture, but in a manner that deemphasizes the exclusive concern with sexual repression. These theorists—and particularly Erich Fromm, who had a very strong Jewish identity (Marcus & Tar 1986, 348-350; Wiggershaus 1994, 52ff) and very selfconsciously attempted to use psychoanalysis to further a radical political agenda—can be viewed as optimistic-utopian.

Like Marcuse, Fromm was a member of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. A cornerstone of this approach is to view contemporary society as pathogenic and the development of socialism as ushering in a new era of loving human relationships. These writers were highly influential: For example, “A whole generation of college-educated Americans was deeply influenced by Erich Fromm’s argument, in Escape From Freedom, that National Socialism was the natural outcome of the interplay between a Protestant sensibility and the contradictions inherent in capitalism” (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 87). Fromm (1941) essentially viewed authoritarianism as resulting from an unconscious fear of freedom and a consequent need to seek certainty by joining fascist movements—an example of the tendency among Jewish intellectuals to develop theories in which anti-Semitism is fundamentally the result of the individual or social pathology of gentiles. Fromm, like the other Frankfurt School theorists reviewed in Chapter 5, developed a view in which psychological health was epitomized by individualists who achieved their potentials without relying on membership in collectivist groups: “Progress for democracy lies in enhancing the actual freedom, initiative, and spontaneity of the individual, not only in certain private and spiritual matters, but above all in the activity fundamental to every man’s existence, his work” (Fromm 1941, 272). As indicated in Chapter 5, radical individualism among gentiles is an excellent prescription for the continuation of Judaism as a cohesive group. 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.

John Murray Cuddihy emphasizes that a common theme of psychoanalytic critiques of Western culture is to suppose that surface Western civility is a thin veneer overlying anti-Semitism and other forms of psychopathology. Wilhelm Reich is an exemplar of this trend—”the violent encounter of the ‘tribal’ society of the shtetl with the ‘civil’ society of the West” (Cuddihy 1974, 111). In his book The Function of the Orgasm: Sex-Economic Problems of Biological Energy, Reich (1961, 206-207; italics in text) wrote, “the forces which had been kept in check for so long by the superficial veneer of good breeding and artificial self-control now borne by the very multitudes that were striving for freedom, broke through into action: In concentration camps, in the persecution of the Jews… In Fascism, the psychic mass disease revealed itself in an undisguised form.”

For Reich, the character armor that results ultimately from repressing sexual orgasms begins in civil discourse and ends at Auschwitz. Cuddihy notes Reich’s very wide influence from the 1940s into the 1970s, ranging from anarchist Paul Goodman, the poet Karl Shapiro, novelists Stanley Elkin, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Saul Bellow, and psychotherapists “Fritz” Perls of the Esalen Institute and Arthur Janov (author of Primal Scream). Goodman (1960), who along with Rosenfeld and Bellow are grouped among the New York Intellectuals discussed Chapter 6, wrote Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society, a highly influential indictment of society as thwarting instinctual urges by its insistence on conformity and repression. Here the utopian society was to be ushered in by the revolutionary vanguard of students, and indeed a 1965 survey of the leaders of the radical Students for a Democratic Society found that over half had read Goodman and Marcuse, a much higher percentage than had read Marx, Lenin, or Trotsky (Sale 1973, 205). In an article published in Commentary—itself an indication of the extent to which psychoanalytic social criticism had penetrated Jewish intellectual circles, Goodman (1961, 203) asks “What if the censorship itself, part of a general repressive anti-sexuality, causes the evil, creates the need for sadistic pornography sold at a criminal profit? ” (italics in text). Without adducing any evidence whatever that sadistic urges result from repressing sexuality, Goodman manages to suggest in typical psychoanalytic style that if only society would cease attempting to control sexuality, all would be well.

The disastrous conflation of sex and love in the writings of Freud and his disciples is also apparent in the literary world. Using the example of Leslie Fiedler, Cuddihy (1974, 71) emphasizes the fascination of Jewish intellectuals with cultural criticism emanating from Freud and Marx—whichever one seemed to work best for a particular author at a particular time. Courtly love was unmasked as sublimation—a ritualized attempt to avoid the coarseness of sexual intercourse with a female. And Dickstein (1977, 52) notes regarding Norman Mailer, “Gradually, like the rest of America, he shifted from a Marxian to a Freudian terrain. Like other fifties radicals he was most effective, and most prophetic in the psychosexual sphere rather than in the old political one… Where repression was, let liberation be: this was the message not only of Mailer but of a whole new line of Freudian (or Reichian) radicalism, which did so much to undermine the intellectual consensus of the cold war period.”

Although the works of Marcuse, Goodman, Fiedler, and Mailer are illustrative of the deeply subversive cultural critiques emanating from psychoanalysis, these works are only one aspect of an incredibly broad program. Kurzweil (1989) has provided a comprehensive overview of the influence of psychoanalysis on cultural criticism in all Western societies.¹¹⁰ A consistent thread in this literature is a concern for developing theories that entail radical critiques of society. The followers of Jaques Lacan, the French literary critic, for example, rejected a biological interpretation of drive theory but were nevertheless “as eager as their German colleagues to restore the radical stance of psychoanalysis” (Kurzweil 1989, 78). As expected in a nonscience, psychoanalytic influence has resulted in a veritable tower of Babel of theories in the area of literary studies: “In America, not even the contributors could agree on what their activities ultimately were proving or what they amounted to; they all had their own prejudices” (Kurzweil 1989, 195). Lacan’s movement splintered into numerous groups after his death, each group claiming legitimate descent from the master. Lacanian psychoanalysis continued be a tool in the radical cultural critiques of the Marxist Louis Althusser, as well as the highly influential Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. All of these intellectuals, including Lacan, were disciples of Claude Lévi-Strauss (see p. 22), who in turn was influenced by Freud (and Marx) (Dosse 1997 I, 14, 112-113).

The central role of psychoanalysis as cultural criticism can also be seen in its role in Germany after World War II. T. W. Adorno, an author of The Authoritarian Personality, is an excellent example of a social scientist who utilized the language of social science in the service of combating anti-Semitism, pathologizing gentile culture, and rationalizing Jewish separatism (see Ch. 5). Returning to Germany after World War II, Adorno expressed his fears that psychoanalysis would become “a beauty no longer able to disturb the sleep of humanity” (in Kurzweil 1989, 253). Eventually psychoanalysis became state supported in Germany, with every German citizen eligible for up to 300 hours of psychoanalysis (more in severe cases). In 1983 the government of Hesse sought empirical data on the success of psychoanalysis in return for funding a psychoanalytic institute. The response of the offended analysts is a revealing reminder of two central aspects of the psychoanalytic agenda, the pathologization of enemies and the centrality of social criticism: “They rose to the defense of psychoanalysis as a social critique… [They attacked the] unconscious lies of (unnamed but recognizable) psychoanalysts, their unhappy relationship to power, and their frequent neglect of the countertransference.” The result was a reinvigorization of psychoanalysis as a social critique and the production of a book that “enlarged their critiques to every political topic” (Kurzweil 1989, 315). Psychoanalysis can be justified solely by its usefulness in cultural criticism independent of data on its effectiveness in therapy.¹¹¹

The most influential psychoanalyst in post-World War II Germany was the leftist Alexander Mitscherlich, who viewed psychoanalysis as necessary to humanize Germans and “defend against the inhumanities of civilization” (in Kurzweil 1989, 234). Regarding the necessity to transform Germans in the wake of the Nazi era, Mitscherlich believed that only psychoanalysis held out the hope of redemption for the German people: “Each German had to face this past individually via a more or less ‘pragmatic’ Freudian analysis” (p. 275). His journal Psyche adopted a generally adversarial stance toward German culture, combining Marxist and psychoanalytic perspectives in an attempt to further “antifascist thinking” (p. 236). The “Bernfeld Circle” of leftist psychoanalysts emphasizing the “social-critical elements of psychoanalysis” was also active in Germany during this period (p. 234).

As is typical of the field generally, these psychoanalysts also produced a plethora of theories of anti-Semitism with no way to decide among them. In 1962 Mitscherlich organized a conference entitled “The Psychological and Social Assumptions of Anti-Semitism: Analysis of the Psychodynamics of a Prejudice,” which offered several highly imaginative psychoanalytic theories in which antiSemitism was analyzed as essentially a social and individual pathology of gentiles. For example, in his contribution Mitscherlich proposed that children developed hostility when required to obey teachers, and that this then led to identification with the aggressor and ultimately to a glorification of war. Mitscherlich believed that German anti-Semitism was “just one more manifestation of German infantile authoritarianism” (p. 296). Béla Grunberger concluded that “oedipal ambivalence toward the father and anal-sadistic relations in early childhood are the anti-Semite’s irrevocable inheritance” (p. 296). Martin Wangh, analyzed Nazi anti-Semitism as resulting from enhanced Oedipal complexes resulting from father absence during World War I: “Longing for the father… had strengthened childish homosexual wishes which later projected onto the Jews” (p. 297).

CONCLUSION

We begin to grasp that the deviser of psychoanalysis was at bottom a visionary but endlessly calculating artist, engaged in casting himself as the hero of a multivolume fictional opus that is part epic, part detective story, and part satire on human self-interestedess and animality. This scientifically deflating realization… is what the Freudian community needs to challenge if it can. (Crews et al. 1995, 12-13)

I conclude that psychoanalysis has fundamentally been a political movement that has been dominated throughout its history by individuals who strongly identified as Jews. A consistent theme has been that psychoanalysis has been characterized by intense personal involvement. The intense level of emotional commitment to psychoanalytic doctrines and the intense personal identification with Freud himself as well as with others in the direct line of descent from Freud suggest that for many of its practitioners, participation in the psychoanalytic movement satisfied deep psychological needs related to being a member of a highly cohesive, authoritarian movement.

It is also not surprising, given the clear sense of Jewish intellectual, moral, and, indeed, racial superiority to gentiles that pervaded the early phases of the movement, that outsiders have proposed that psychoanalysis not only had powerful religious overtones but also was directed at achieving specific Jewish interests (Klein 1981, 146). The view that psychoanalysis is a “special interest” movement has continued into the contemporary era (Klein 1981, 150).

I have noted that Jewish intellectual activity involving the radical criticism of gentile culture need not be conceptualized as directed at attaining specific economic or social goals of Judaism. From this perspective, the psychoanalytic subversion of the moral and intellectual basis of Western culture may simply result from social identity processes in which the culture of the outgroup is negatively valued. This does not appear to be the whole story, however.

One way in which psychoanalysis has served specific Jewish interests is the development of theories of anti-Semitism that bear the mantle of science but deemphasize the importance of conflicts of interest between Jews and gentiles. Although these theories vary greatly in detail—and, as typical of psychoanalytic theories generally, there is no way to empirically decide among them—within this body of theory anti-Semitism is viewed as a form of gentile psychopathology resulting from projections, repressions, and reaction formations stemming ultimately from a pathology-inducing society. The psychoanalysts who emigrated from Europe to the United States during the Nazi era expected to make psychoanalysis “into the ultimate weapon against fascism, anti-Semitism, and every other antiliberal bias” (Kurzweil 1989, 294). The most influential such attempts, deriving from the Studies in Prejudice series, will be discussed in the following chapter, but such theories continue to appear (e.g., Bergmann 1995; Ostow 1995; Young-Bruehl 1996). Katz (1983, 40), in discussing two examples of this genre, notes that “this sort of theory is as irrefutable as it is undemonstrable”—a description that has, as we have seen, always been a hallmark of psychoanalytic theorizing whatever the subject matter. In both cases there is no link whatever between the historical narrative of anti-Semitism and psychoanalytic theory, and Katz concludes that “the fact that such analogies [between anti-Semitism and certain clinical case histories of obsessive behavior] are far-fetched does not seem to disturb those who interpret all human affairs in psychoanalytic terms” (p. 41).

However, beyond this overt agenda in pathologizing anti-Semitism, it is noteworthy that within psychoanalytic theory, Jewish identity is irrelevant to understanding human behavior. As in the case of radical political ideology, psychoanalysis is a messianic universalist ideology that attempts to subvert traditional gentile social categories as well as the Jewish-gentile distinction itself, yet it allows for the possibility of a continuation of Jewish group cohesion, though in a cryptic or semi-cryptic state. As with radical political ideology, the Jew-gentile social categorization is of diminished salience and of no theoretical significance. As in the case of psychoanalytic theories of anti-Semitism, to the extent that psychoanalysis becomes part of the worldview of gentiles, social identity theory predicts that anti-Semitism would be minimized.

Gilman (1993, 115, 122, 124) suggests that Freud, as well as several other Jewish scientists of the period, developed theories of hysteria as a reaction to the view that Jews as a “race” were biologically predisposed to hysteria. In contrast to this racially based argument, Freud proposed a universal human nature—”the common basis of human life” (Klein 1981, 71) and then theorized that all individual differences resulted from environmental influences emanating ultimately from a repressive, inhumane society. Thus although Freud himself believed that Jewish intellectual and moral superiority resulted from Lamarckian inheritance and were thus genetically based, psychoanalysis officially denied the importance of biologically based ethnic differences or indeed the theoretical primacy of ethnic differences or ethnic conflict of any kind. Ethnic conflict came to be viewed within psychoanalytic theory as a secondary phenomenon resulting from irrational repressions, projections, and reaction formations and as an indication of gentile pathology rather than as a reflection of actual Jewish behavior.

I have noted that there was often an overlap between psychoanalysis and radical political beliefs among Jews. This is not at all surprising. Both phenomena are essentially Jewish responses to the Enlightenment and its denigrating effect on religious ideology as the basis for developing an intellectually legitimate sense of group or individual identity. Both movements are compatible with a strong personal sense of Jewish identity and with some form of group continuity of Judaism; indeed, Yerushalmi (1991, 81ff) argues persuasively that Freud saw himself as a leader of the Jewish people and that his “science” provided a secular interpretation of fundamental Jewish religious themes.

The similarities between these movements is far deeper, however. Both psychoanalysis and radical political ideology present critiques in which the traditional institutions and socio-religious categorizations of gentile society are negatively evaluated. Both movements, and especially psychoanalysis, present their intellectual critiques in the language of science and rationality, the lingua franca of post-Enlightenment intellectual discourse. However, both movements have a pronounced political atmosphere despite the scientific veneer. Such a result is perhaps scarcely surprising in the case of Marxist political ideology, although even Marxism has often been touted by its proponents as “scientific” socialism. Psychoanalysis has from the beginning been burdened in its quest for scientific respectability by the clear overtones of its being a sectarian political movement masquerading as science.

Both psychoanalysis and radical political ideology often resulted in a sense of a personal messianic mission to gentile society promising a utopian world free of class struggle, ethnic conflict, and debilitating neuroses. Both movements characteristically developed conceptions of Jewish group identity as leading gentiles to a utopian society of the future, the familiar “light of the nations” concept represented here in completely secular and “scientific” terms. The social categorizations advocated by these movements completely obliterated the social categorization of Jew-gentile, and both movements developed ideologies in which anti-Semitism was fundamentally the result of factors entirely extraneous to Jewish identity, Jewish group continuity, and Jewish-gentile resource competition. In the promised utopian societies of the future, the category of Jew-gentile would be of no theoretical importance, but Jews could continue to identify as Jews and there could be continuation of Jewish group identity while at the same time a principle source of gentile identity—religion and its concomitant supports for high-investment parenting—would be conceptualized as an infantile aberration. The universalist ideologies of Marxism and psychoanalysis thus were highly compatible with the continuation of Jewish particularism.

Besides these functions, the cultural influence of psychoanalysis may actually have benefited Judaism by increasing Jewish-gentile differences in resource competition ability, although there is no reason to suppose that this was consciously intended by the leaders of the movement. Given the very large mean differences between Jews and gentiles in intelligence and tendencies toward high-investment parenting, there is every reason to suppose that Jews and gentiles have very different interests in the construction of culture. Jews suffer to a lesser extent than gentiles from the erosion of cultural supports for high-investment parenting, and Jews benefit by the decline in religious belief among gentiles. As Podhoretz (1995, 30) notes, it is in fact the case that Jewish intellectuals, Jewish organizations like the AJCongress, and Jewish-dominated organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (see note 2) have ridiculed Christian religious beliefs, attempted to undermine the public strength of Christianity, and have led the fight for unrestricted pornography. The evidence of this chapter indicates that psychoanalysis as a Jewish-dominated intellectual movement is a central component of this war on gentile cultural supports for high-investment parenting.

It is interesting in this regard that Freud held the view that Judaism as a religion was no longer necessary because it had already performed its function of creating the intellectually, spiritually, and morally superior Jewish character: “Having forged the character of the Jews, Judaism as a religion had performed its vital task and could now be dispensed with” (Yerushalmi 1991, 52). The data summarized in this chapter indicate that Freud viewed Jewish ethical, spiritual, and intellectual superiority as genetically determined and that gentiles were genetically prone to being slaves of their senses and prone to brutality. The superior Jewish character was genetically determined via Lamarckian inheritance acting for generations as a result of the unique Jewish experience. The data reviewed in PTSDA (Ch. 7) indicate that there is indeed very good evidence for the view that there is a genetic basis for Jewish-gentile differences in IQ and high-investment parenting brought about ultimately by Jewish religious practices over historical time (but via eugenic practices, not via Lamarckian inheritance).

Given that the differences between Jews and gentiles are genetically mediated, Jews would not be as dependent on the preservation of cultural supports for high-investment parenting as would be the case among gentiles. Freud’s war on gentile culture through facilitation of the pursuit of sexual gratification, low-investment parenting, and elimination of social controls on sexual behavior may therefore be expected to affect Jews and gentiles differently, with the result that the competitive difference between Jews and gentiles, already significant on the basis of the material reviewed in PTSDA (Chs. 5, 7), would be exacerbated. There is evidence, for example, that more intelligent, affluent, and educated adolescents mature sexually at a relatively slow rate (Belsky et al. 1991; Rushton 1995). Such adolescents are more likely to abstain from sexual intercourse, so that sexual freedom and the legitimization of nonmarital sex are less likely to result in early marriage, single-parenting, and other types of low-investment parenting in this group. Greater intelligence is also associated with later age of marriage, lower levels of illegitimacy, and lower levels of divorce (Herrnstein & Murray 1994). Hyman (1989) notes that Jewish families in contemporary America have a lower divorce rate (see also Cohen 1986; Waxman 1989), later age of first marriage, and greater investment in education than non-Jewish families. Recent findings indicate that the age of first sexual intercourse for Jewish adolescents is higher and the rate of unwed teenage pregnancy lower than for any other ethnic or religious group in the United States. Moreover, since Jews are disproportionately economically affluent, the negative effects of divorce and single-parenting on children are undoubtedly much attenuated among Jews because of the economic stresses typically accompanying divorce and single-parenting are much lessened (McLanahan & Booth 1989; Wallerstein & Kelly 1980).

These data indicate that Jews have been relatively insulated from the trends toward low-investment parenting characteristic of American society generally since the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s. This finding is compatible with data reviewed by Herrnstein and Murray (1994) indicating overwhelming evidence that the negative effects of the shifts that have taken place in Western practices related to sex and marriage in the last 30 years have been disproportionately felt at the bottom of the IQ and socioeconomic class distributions and have therefore included relatively few Jews. For example, only 2 percent of the white women in Herrnstein and Murray’s top category of cognitive ability (IQ minimum of 125) and 4 percent of the white women in the second category of cognitive ability (IQ between 110 and 125) gave birth to illegitimate children, compared to 23 percent in the 4th class of cognitive ability (IQ between 75 and 90) and 42 percent in the fifth class of cognitive ability (IQ less than 75). Even controlling for poverty fails to remove the influence of IQ: High-IQ women living in poverty are seven times less likely to give birth to an illegitimate child than are low-IQ women living in poverty. Moreover, in the period from 1960 to 1991, illegitimacy among blacks rose from 24 percent to 68 percent, while illegitimacy among whites rose from 2 percent to 18 percent. Since the mean Jewish IQ in the United States is approximately 117 and verbal IQ even higher (see PTSDA, Ch. 7), this finding is compatible with supposing that only a very small percentage of Jewish women are giving birth to illegitimate babies, and those who do are undoubtedly much more likely to be wealthy, intelligent, and nurturing than the typical single mother from the lower cognitive classes.

The sexual revolution has thus had little effect on parental investment among people in the highest categories of cognitive ability. These results are highly compatible with the findings of Dunne et al. (1997) that the heritability of age of first sexual intercourse has increased since the 1960s. In their younger cohort (born between 1952 and 1965) genetic factors accounted for 49 percent of the variance among females and 72 percent of the variance among males, and there were no shared environmental influences. In the older cohort (born between 1922 and 1952) genetic influences accounted for 32 percent of the variance for females and none of the variance among males, and there was a significant shared environmental component for both sexes. These data indicate that the erosion of traditional Western controls on sexuality have had far more effect on those who are genetically inclined toward precocious sexuality and, in conjunction with the data presented above, indicate gentiles have been far more affected by these changes than have Jews.

Although other factors are undoubtedly involved, it is remarkable that the increasing trend toward low-investment parenting in the United States largely coincides with the triumph of the psychoanalytic and radical critiques of American culture represented by the political and cultural success of the countercultural movement of the 1960s. Since 1970 the rate of single-parenting has increased from one in ten families to one in three families (Norton & Miller 1992), and there have been dramatic increases in teenage sexual activity and teenage childbearing without marriage (Furstenberg 1991). There is excellent evidence for an association among teenage single-parenting, poverty, lack of education, and poor developmental outcomes for children (e.g., Dornbusch & Gray 1988; Furstenberg & Brooks-Gunn 1989; McLanahan & Booth 1989; J. Q. Wilson 1993b).

Indeed, all the negative trends related to the family show very large increases that developed in the mid-1960s (Herrnstein & Murray 1994, 168ff; see also Bennett 1994; Kaus 1995; Magnet 1993), including increases in trends toward lower levels of marriage, “cataclysmic” increases in divorce rates (p. 172), and rates of illegitimacy. In the case of divorce and illegitimacy rates, the data indicate a major shift upward during the 1960s from previously existing trend lines, with the upward trend lines established during that period continuing into the present. The 1960s was thus a watershed period in American cultural history, a view that is compatible with Rothman and Lichter’s (1996, xviiiff) interpretation of the shift during the 1960s in the direction of “expressive individualism” among cultural elites and the decline of external controls on behavior that had been the cornerstone of the formerly dominant Protestant culture. They note the influence of the New Left in producing these changes, and I have emphasized here the close connections between psychoanalysis and the New Left. Both movements were led and dominated by Jews.

The sexual revolution is “the most obvious culprit” underlying the decline in the importance of marriage (Herrnstein & Murray 1994, 544) and its concomitant increase in low-investment parenting:

What is striking about the 1960s “sexual revolution,” as it has properly been called, is how revolutionary it was, in sensibility as well as reality. In 1965, 69 percent of American women and 65 percent of men under the age of thirty said that premarital sex was always or almost always wrong; by 1972, these figures had plummeted to 24 percent and 21 percent… In 1990, only 6 percent of British men and women under the age of thirty-four believed that it was always or almost always wrong. (Himmelfarb 1995, 236)

Although there is little reason to suppose that the battle for sexual freedom so central to psychoanalysis had the intention of benefiting the average resource competition ability of Jews vis-à-vis gentiles, the psychoanalytic intellectual war on gentile culture may indeed have resulted in an increased competitive advantage for Jews beyond merely lessening the theoretical importance of the Jew-gentile distinction and providing a “scientific” rationale for pathologizing anti-Semitism. It is also a war that has resulted in a society increasingly split between a disproportionately Jewish “cognitive elite” and a growing mass of individuals who are intellectually incompetent, irresponsible as parents, prone to requiring public assistance, and prone to criminal behavior, psychiatric disorders, and substance abuse.

Although psychoanalysis is in decline now, especially in the United States, the historical record suggests that other ideological structures will attempt to accomplish some of the same goals psychoanalysis attempted to achieve. As it has done throughout its history, Judaism continues to show extraordinary ideological flexibility in achieving the goal of legitimizing the continuation of Jewish group identity and genetic separatism. As indicated in Chapter 2, many Jewish social scientists continue to fashion a social science that serves the interests of Judaism and to develop powerful critiques of theories perceived as antithetical to those interests. The incipient demise of psychoanalysis as a weapon in these battles will be of little long-term importance in this effort.

5

The Frankfurt School of Social Research
and the Pathologization of Gentile Group
Allegiances

THE POLITICAL AGENDA OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL RESEARCH

Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice… are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren. (Illuminations, Walter Benjamin 1968, 262)

To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. (T. W. Adorno 1967, 34)

Chapters 2-4 reviewed several strands of theory and research by Jewish social scientists that appear to have been influenced by specifically Jewish political interests. This theme is continued in the present chapter with a review of The Authoritarian Personality. This classic work in social psychology was sponsored by the Department of Scientific Research of the American Jewish Committee (hereafter, AJCommittee) in a series entitled Studies in Prejudice. Studies in Prejudice was closely connected with the so-called Frankfort School of predominantly Jewish intellectuals associated with the Institute for Social Research originating during the Weimar period in Germany. The first generation of the Frankfurt School were all Jews by ethnic background and the Institute of Social Research itself was funded by a Jewish millionaire, Felix Weil (Wiggershaus 1994, 13). Weil’s efforts as a “patron of the left” were extraordinarily successful: By the early 1930s the University of Frankfurt had became a bastion of the academic left and “the place where all the thinking of interest in the area of social theory was concentrated” (Wiggershaus 1994, 112). During this period sociology was referred to as a “Jewish science,” and the Nazis came to view Frankfurt itself as a “New Jerusalem on the Franconian Jordan” (Wiggershaus 1994, 112-113).

The Nazis perceived the Institute of Social Research as a communist organization and closed it within six weeks of Hitler’s ascent to power because it had “encouraged activities hostile to the state” (in Wiggershaus 1994, 128). Even after the emigration of the Institute to the United States, it was widely perceived as a communist front organization with a dogmatic and biased Marxist perspective, and there was a constant balancing act to attempt not to betray the left “while simultaneously defending themselves against corresponding suspicions” (Wiggershaus 1994, 251; see also p. 255).¹¹²

Gershom Scholem, the Israeli theologian and religious historian, termed the Frankfort School a “Jewish sect,” and there is good evidence for very strong Jewish identifications of many members of the school (Marcus & Tar 1986, 344). Studies in Prejudice was under the general editorship of Max Horkheimer, a director of the Institute. Horkheimer was a highly charismatic “‘managerial scholar’ who constantly reminded his associates of the fact that they belonged to a chosen few in whose hands the further development of ‘Theory’ lay” (Wiggershaus 1994, 2). Horkheimer had a strong Jewish identity that became increasingly apparent in his later writings (Tar 1977, 6; Jay 1980). However, Horkheimer’s commitment to Judaism, as evidenced by the presence of specifically Jewish religious themes, was apparent even in his writings as an adolescent and as a young adult (Maier 1984, 51). At the end of his life Horkheimer completely accepted his Jewish identification and achieved a grand synthesis between Judaism and Critical Theory (Carlebach 1978, 254-257). (Critical Theory is the name applied to the theoretical perspective of the Frankfurt School.) As an indication of his profound sense of Jewish identity, Horkheimer (1947, 161) stated that the goal of philosophy must to be vindicate Jewish history: “The anonymous martyrs of the concentration camps are the symbols of humanity that is striving to be born. The task of philosophy is to translate what they have done into language that will be heard, even though their finite voices have been silenced by tyranny.”

Tar (1977, 60) describes Horkheimer’s inspiration as deriving from his attempt to leave behind Judaism while nevertheless remaining tied to the faith of his fathers. Not surprisingly, there is an alienation and estrangement from German culture:

Had I just arrived from my homeland of Palestine, and in an amazingly short time mastered the rudiments of writing in German, this essay could not have been more difficult to write. The style here does not bear the mark of a facile genius. I tried to communicate with the help of what I read and heard, subconsciously assembling fragments of a language that springs from a strange mentality. What else can a stranger do? But my strong will prevailed because my message deserves to be said regardless of its stylistic shortcomings. (Horkheimer, My Political Confession; in Tar 1977, 60)

T. W. Adorno, first author of the famous Berkeley studies of authoritarian personality reviewed here, was also a director of the Institute, and he had a very close professional relationship with Horkheimer to the point that Horkheimer wrote of their work, “It would be difficult to say which of the ideas originated in his mind and which in my own; our philosophy is one” (Horkheimer 1947, vii). Jewish themes became increasingly prominent in Adorno’s writings beginning in 1940 as a reaction to Nazi anti-Semitism. Indeed, much of Adorno’s later work may be viewed as a reaction to the Holocaust, as typified by his famous comment that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno 1967, 34) and his question “whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed” (Adorno 1973, 363). Tar (1977, 158) notes that the point of the former comment is that “no study of sociology could be possible without reflecting on Auschwitz and without concerning oneself with preventing new Auschwitzes.” “The experience of Auschwitz was turned into an absolute historical and sociological category” (Tar 1977, 165). Clearly there was an intense Jewish consciousness and commitment to Judaism among those most responsible for these studies.

In Chapter 1 it was noted that since the Enlightenment many Jewish intellectuals have participated in the radical criticism of gentile culture. Horkheimer very self-consciously perceived an intimate link between Jewish assimilation and the criticism of gentile society, stating on one occasion that “assimilation and criticism are but two moments in the same process of emancipation” (Horkheimer 1974, 108). A consistent theme of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Critical Theory was the transformation of society according to moral principles (Tar 1977). From the beginning there was a rejection of value-free social science research (“the fetishism of facts”) in favor of the fundamental priority of a moral perspective in which present societies, including capitalist, fascist, and eventually Stalinist societies, were to be transformed into utopias of cultural pluralism.

Indeed, long before Studies in Prejudice Critical Theory developed the idea that positivistic (i.e., empirically oriented) social science was an aspect of domination and oppression. Horkheimer wrote in 1937 that “if science as a whole follows the lead of empiricism and the intellect renounces its insistent and confident probing of the tangled brush of observations in order to unearth more about the world than even our well-meaning daily press, it will be participating passively in the maintenance of universal injustice” (in Wiggershaus 1994, 184). The social scientist must therefore be a critic of culture and adopt an attitude of resistance toward contemporary societies.

The unscientific nature of the enterprise can also be seen in its handling of dissent within the ranks of the Institute. Writing approvingly of Walter Benjamin’s work, Adorno stated, “I have come to be convinced that his work will contain nothing which could not be defended from the point of view of dialectical materialism” (in Wiggershaus 1994, 161; italics in text). Erich Fromm was excised from the movement in the 1930s because his leftist humanism (which indicted the authoritarian nature of the psychoanalyst-patient relationship) was not compatible with the leftist authoritarianism that was an integral part of the current Horkheimer-Adorno line: “[Fromm] takes the easy way out with the concept of authority, without which, after all, neither Lenin’s avant-garde nor dictatorship can be conceived of. I would strongly advise him to read Lenin… I must tell you that I see a real threat in this article to the line which the journal takes” (Adorno, in Wiggershaus 1994, 266).

Fromm was excised from the Institute despite the fact that his position was among the most radically leftist to emerge from the psychoanalytic camp. Throughout his career, Fromm remained the embodiment of the psychoanalytic left and its view that bourgeois-capitalist society and fascism resulted from (and reliably reproduced) gross distortions of human nature (see Ch. 4). Similarly, Herbert Marcuse was excluded when his orthodox Marxist views began to diverge from the evolving ideology of Adorno and Horkheimer (see Wiggershaus 1994, 391-392).¹¹³

These exclusionary trends are also apparent in the aborted plans to reinstitute the Institute’s journal in the 1950s. It was decided that there were too few contributors with the Horkheimer-Adorno line to support a journal and the plans foundered (Wiggershaus 1994, 471). Throughout its history, to be a member of the Institute was to adopt a certain view and to submit to heavy editing and even censorship of one’s works to ensure conformity to a clearly articulated ideological position.

As might be expected from a highly authoritarian political movement, the result was a speculative, philosophical body of work that ultimately had no influence on empirically oriented sociology, although, as indicated below, it has had a profound influence on theory in the humanities. (The Authoritarian Personality is not included in this statement; it was very influential but had an empirical basis of sorts.) This body of work does not qualify as science because of its rejection of experimentation, quantification, and verification, and because of the priority of moral and political concerns over the investigation of the nature of human social psychology.

The priority of the moral and political agenda of Critical Theory is essential to understanding the Frankfurt School and its influence. Horkheimer and Adorno eventually rejected the classical Marxist perspective on the importance of class struggle for the development of fascism in favor of a perspective in which both fascism and capitalism were fundamentally conceptualized as involving domination and authoritarianism. Further, they developed the theory that disturbed parent-child relations involving the suppression of human nature were a necessary condition for domination and authoritarianism.

Obviously, this is a perspective that is highly compatible with psychoanalytic theory, and indeed psychoanalysis was a basic influence on their thinking. Virtually from the beginning, psychoanalysis had a respected position within the Institute for Social Research, particularly under the influence of Erich Fromm. Fromm held positions at the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute as well as at the Institute for Social Research, and along with other “left-Freudians” such as Wilhelm Reich and eventually Marcuse, he developed theories that incorporated both Marxism and psychoanalysis essentially by developing a theoretical link between the repression of instincts in the context of family relationships (or, as in the case of Fromm, the development of sado-masochistic and anal personality traits within the family) and the development of oppressive social and economic structures.

It is interesting that although the Horkheimer group developed a very strong hostility to empirical science and the positivistic philosophy of science, they felt no need to abandon psychoanalysis. Indeed, psychoanalysis was “a central factor in giving Horkheimer and the most important of his fellow theoreticians the sense that important insights could also be achieved—or even better achieved—by skipping over the specialized disciplines” (Wiggershaus 1994, 186). We shall see that psychoanalysis as a nonempirically based hermeneutic structure (which nevertheless masqueraded as a science) turned out to be an infinitely plastic tool in the hands of those constructing a theory aimed at achieving purely political objectives.

For Horkheimer and Adorno, the fundamental shift from the sociological to the psychological level that occurred during the 1940s was motivated by the fact that in Germany the proletariat had succumbed to fascism and in the Soviet Union socialism had not prevented the development of an authoritarian government that failed to guarantee individual autonomy or Jewish group interests (Tar 1977, 80; Wiggershaus 1994, 137ff, 391ff). Within the new perspective, authoritarianism was viewed as the fundamental problem, its origin traceable to family interactions and ultimately to the suppression of human nature (Tar 1977, 87-88). Nevertheless, the formal outline of the theory can be seen in philosophical form in the earlier work Studies on Authority and the Family of 1936, a work that presented Fromm’s psychoanalytic theory of authoritarian “sado-masochistic” family relationships and their putative linkages with bourgeois capitalism and fascism.

This philosophical-speculative approach to anti-Semitism was refined in the chapter on anti-Semitism in Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1944/1990) Dialectic of Enlightenment.¹¹⁴ In addition to being highly abstract and written in what might be termed a Hegelian manner, the style of writing is assertional: Statements about anti-Semitism are simply asserted with no attempt to provide any empirical justification.¹¹⁵ As Jacob Katz (1983, 40) notes, the Frankfurt School has “not been notable for the accuracy of its evaluation of the Jewish situation either before the advent of Nazism or afterward.” However, many of the ideas simply asserted there in a philosophical, speculative manner are identical to the theories of anti-Semitism contained in The Authoritarian Personality. Indeed, the authors viewed the chapter on anti-Semitism as a theoretical study for their anticipated empirical study of anti-Semitism (Wiggershaus 1994, 324). The Authoritarian Personality may thus be viewed as an attempt to provide these philosophical theories of anti-Semitism with empirical support, but the theory itself was fundamentally an a priori philosophical theory and was not viewed by its authors as subject to either verification or falsification:

Horkheimer seemed to consider the dialectics project and the anti-Semitism project as two distinct items relating to one another in the way that an abstract theory relates to its application to a concrete topic, or in the way that Hegel’s logic relates to the Hegelian philosophies of history, law or aesthetics. Was this not turning a distinction within the theoretical and empirical research process into a distinction which silently gave the theory the dignity of speculation and made it independent of the empiricism appropriate to science? And was empirical research not thus being denied its status as a dimension of reflected experience, and degraded into a means of illustrating the theory?… A further open question was whether their enthusiasm for the theory, and their contemptuous remarks about research in specific scientific disciplines, in fact represented more than mere evidence of personal values and moods; whether these did not have an influence on the way in which their scholarly work was carried out and on its results—particularly when external influences were forcing them to take both dimensions seriously. (Wiggershaus 1994, 320; see also Jay 1973, 240, 251)

The non-empirical nature of the theory of anti-Semitism was quite clear to Adorno as well: “[W]e never regarded the theory simply as a set of hypotheses but as in some sense standing on its own feet, and therefore did not intend to prove or disprove the theory through our findings but only to derive from it concrete questions for investigation, which must then be judged on their own merit and demonstrate certain prevalent socio-psychological structures” (Adorno 1969a, 363). The findings do indeed have to be judged on their own merit, and as indicated below, there is reason to suppose that the procedures used to verify the theory went well beyond the bounds of normal scientific practice.

Fundamentally The Authoritarian Personality studies resulted from a felt need to develop an empirical program of research that would support a politically and intellectually satisfying a priori theory of anti-Semitism in order to influence an American academic audience. As Horkheimer stated in 1943, “When we became aware that a few of our American friends expected of an Institute of Social Sciences that it engage in studies on pertinent social problems, fieldwork, and other empirical investigations, we tried to satisfy these demands as well as we could, but our heart was set on individual studies in the sense of Geisteswissenschaften [i.e., the humanities] and the philosophical analysis of culture” (in Wiggershaus 1994, 252).

Indeed, the goal of producing political propaganda by using the methods of social science was self-consciously articulated by Horkheimer. Thus Horkheimer reacted with enthusiasm to the idea of including criminals in the study: “Research would be able here to transform itself directly into propaganda, i.e., if it could be reliably established that a particularly high percentage of criminals were extreme anti-Semites, the result would as such already be propaganda. I would also like to try to examine psychopaths in mental hospitals” (in Wiggershaus 1994, 375; italics in text). Both groups were eventually included in the study.

A general theme in Dialectic of Enlightenment is that anti-Semitism is the result of “the will to destroy born of a false social order” (p. 168). The ideology that Jews possess a variety of negative traits is simply a projection resulting in a self-portrait of the anti-Semite: Anti-Semites accuse the Jews of wanting power, but in reality the anti-Semites “long for total possession and unlimited power, at any price. They transfer their guilt for this to the Jews” (p. 169).

There is a recognition that anti-Semitism is associated with gentile movements for national cohesiveness (pp. 169-170). The anti-Semitism arising along with such movements is interpreted as resulting from the “urge to destroy” carried out by “covetous mobs” that are ultimately manipulated by ruling gentile elites to conceal their own economic domination. Anti-Semitism is without function except to serve as a means of discharging the anger of those who are frustrated economically and sexually (p. 171).

Horkheimer and Adorno propose that modern fascism is basically the same as traditional Christianity because both involve opposition to and subjugation of nature. While Judaism remained a “natural religion” concerned with national life and self-preservation, Christianity turned toward domination and a rejection of all that is natural. In an argument reminiscent of Freud’s argument in Moses and Monotheism (see Ch. 4), religious anti-Semitism then arises because of hatred of those “who did not make the dull sacrifice of reason… The adherents of the religion of the Father are hated by those who support the religion of the Son—hated as those who know better” (p. 179).

This tendency to interpret anti-Semitism as fundamentally deriving from suppressing nature is central to Studies in Prejudice, and particularly The Authoritarian Personality.¹¹⁶ Suppression of nature results in projection of qualities of self onto the environment and particularly onto the Jews. “Impulses which the subject will not admit as his own even though they are most assuredly so, are attributed to the object—the prospective victim” (p. 187). Particularly important for this projection process are sexual impulses: “The same sexual impulses which the human species suppressed have survived and prevailed—in individuals and in nations—by way of the mental conversion of the ambient world into a diabolical system” (p. 187). Christian self-denial and, in particular, the suppression of sex result in evil and anti-Semitism via projection.¹¹⁷

Psychoanalytic theory is invoked as an explanation of this process in a manner that, in its emphasis on suppressed hatred for the father, also anticipates the theory utilized in The Authoritarian Personality. Aggressive urges originating in the id are projected onto the external world by actions of the superego. “The forbidden action which is converted into aggression is generally homosexual in nature. Through fear of castration, obedience to the father is taken to the extreme of an anticipation of castration in conscious emotional approximation to the nature of a small girl, and actual hatred to the father is suppressed” (p. 192).

Forbidden actions underlain by powerful instincts are thus turned into aggression, which is then projected onto victims in the external world, with the result that “he attacks other individuals in envy or persecution just as the repressed bestialist hunts or torments an animal” (p. 192). A later passage decries the “suppression of animal nature into scientific methods of controlling nature” (p. 193). Domination of nature, viewed as central to Christianity and fascism, thus derives ultimately from suppressing our animal nature.

Horkheimer and Adorno then attempt to explain the role of conformity in fascism. They argue that cohesive gentile group strategies are fundamentally based on a distortion of human nature—a central theme of The Authoritarian Personality. They posit a natural, nonconforming, reflective self in opposition to society that has been corrupted by capitalism or fascism. The development of large industrial interests and the culture industry of late capitalism have destroyed in most people the inner-directed, reflective power that can produce “self-comprehending guilt” (p. 198), which could oppose the forces leading to anti-Semitism. This inner directed reflection was “emancipated” from society and even directed against society (p. 198), but under the above-mentioned forces, it conforms blindly to the values of the external society.

Thus humans are portrayed as naturally opposed to the conformity demanded by a highly cohesive society. As indicated below, a consistent theme of The Authoritarian Personality is the idea that gentile participation in cohesive groups with high levels of social conformity is pathological, whereas similar behavior of Jews with respect to the group cohesiveness characteristic of Judaism is ignored: Indeed, we have seen that Judaism is portrayed in The Dialectic of Enlightenment as morally superior to Christianity.

The gentile elite is then said to take advantage of the situation by directing the projected hostility of the masses into anti-Semitism. Jews are an ideal target for this projected hostility because they represent all that is antithetical to totalitarianism: “Happiness without power, wages without work, a home without frontiers, religion without myth. These characteristics are hated by the rulers because the ruled secretly long to possess them. The rulers are only safe as long as the people they rule turn their longed-for goals into hated forms of evil” (p. 199).

The conclusion is that if the rulers in fact allowed the ruled to be like the Jews, there would be a fundamental turning point of history:

By overcoming that sickness of the mind which thrives on the ground of self-assertion untainted by reflective thought, mankind would develop from a set of opposing races to the species which, even in nature, is more than mere nature. Individual and social emancipation from domination is the countermovement to false projection, and no Jew would then resemble the senseless evil visited upon him as upon all persecuted beings, be they animals or men. (p. 200)

The end of anti-Semitism is thus viewed as a precondition for the development of a utopian society and the liberation of humanity—perhaps the closest that the Frankfurt School ever came to defining utopia.¹¹⁸ The envisioned utopian society is one in which Judaism can continue as a cohesive group but in which cohesive, nationalistic, corporate gentile groups based on conformity to group norms have been abolished as manifestations of psychopathology.

Horkheimer and Adorno developed the view that the unique role of Judaism in world history was to vindicate the concept of difference against the homogenizing forces thought to represent the essence of Western civilization: “The Jews became the metaphoric equivalent of that remnant of society preserving negation and the non-identical” (Jay 1980, 148). Judaism thus represents the antithesis of Western universalism. The continuation and acceptance of Jewish particularism becomes a precondition for the development of a utopian society of the future.

Within this perspective, the roots of anti-Semitism are therefore to be sought in individual psychopathology, not in the behavior of Jews. Nevertheless, there is some acknowledgment that the actual characteristics of Jews may be involved in historical anti-Semitism, but Horkheimer and Adorno theorize that the Jewish characteristics that have led to anti-Semitism were forced on Jews. Jews are said to have incurred the wrath of the lower classes because Jews were the originators of capitalism: “For the sake of economic progress which is now proving their downfall, the Jews were always a thorn in the side of the craftsmen and peasants who were declassed by capitalism. They are now experiencing to their own cost the exclusive, particularist character of capitalism” (p. 175). However, this Jewish role is viewed as forced on the Jews who were completely dependent on gentile elites for their rights even into the nineteenth century. Under these circumstances, “Commerce is not their vocation, it is their fate” (p. 175). The success of the Jews then constituted a trauma to the gentile bourgeoisie, “who had to pretend to be creative” (p. 175); their anti-Semitism is thus “self-hatred, the bad conscience of the parasite” (p. 176).

There are indications that the original anti-Semitism project envisioned a more elaborate discussion of “Jewish character traits” that led to anti-Semitism along with suggested methods for overcoming them. However, “The topic never became part of the Institute’s programme, perhaps partly out of consideration for the sensitivity of most Jews towards this topic, and partly to avoid exposing the Institute to the accusation that it was turning the problem of anti-Semitism into a Jewish problem” (Wiggershaus 1994, 366). Indeed, the Institute was well aware of a 1945 Jewish Labor Committee survey of working-class Americans in which the latter complained of Jewish behaviors related to the types of actual dealings working-class individuals would be likely to have with Jews (see SAID, Ch. 2). Adorno appears to have believed that these attitudes were “less irrational” than the anti-Semitism of other classes (see Wiggershaus 1994, 369).

I have noted that a powerful tendency in both radical politics and psychoanalysis has been a thoroughgoing critique of gentile society. An important theme here is that Studies in Prejudice and, especially, The Authoritarian Personality attempt to show that gentile group affiliations, and particularly membership in Christian religious sects, gentile nationalism, and close family relationships, are an indication of psychiatric disorder. At a deep level the work of the Frankfurt School is addressed to altering Western societies in an attempt to make them resistant to anti-Semitism by pathologizing gentile group affiliations. And because this effort ultimately eschews the leftist solutions that have attracted so many twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals, it is an effort that remains highly relevant to the current post-Communist intellectual and political context.

The opposition of Jewish intellectuals to cohesive gentile groups and a homogeneous gentile culture has perhaps not been sufficiently emphasized. I have noted in Chapter 1 that the Conversos were vastly overrepresented among the humanist thinkers in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain who opposed the corporate nature of Spanish society centered around the Christian religion. I have also noted that a central thrust of Freud’s work was to continue to strongly identify as a Jew while at the same time developing a theory of Christian religious affiliation in which the latter is conceptualized as fulfilling infantile needs.

Similarly, another way of conceptualizing the Jewish advocacy of radical political movements consistent with the material in Chapter 3 is that these political movements may be understood as simultaneously undermining gentile intrasocietal group affiliations, such as Christianity and nationalism, at the same time allowing for the continuation of Jewish identification. For example, Jewish Communists consistently opposed Polish nationalist aspirations, and after they came to power in the post-World War II era they liquidated Polish nationalists and undermined the role of the Catholic Church while simultaneously establishing secular Jewish economic and social structures.

It is of some historical interest to note that an important feature of the rhetoric of German anti-Semites (e.g., Paul Lagarde [see Stern 1961, 60, 65]) throughout the nineteenth century into the Weimar period was that Jews advocated political forms such as liberalism, which opposed structuring society as a highly cohesive group, at the same time they themselves retained an extraordinary group cohesiveness that enabled them to dominate Germans. During the Weimar period the Nazi propagandist Alfred Rosenberg complained that Jews advocated a completely atomized society while at the same time exempting themselves from this process. Whereas the rest of society was to be prevented from participating in highly cohesive groups, the Jews “would retain their international cohesiveness, blood ties, and spiritual unity” (Aschheim 1985, 239). In Mein Kampf, Hitler clearly believed that Jewish advocacy of liberal attitudes was a deception overlaying a commitment to racialism and a highly cohesive group strategy: “While he [the Jew] seems to overflow with ‘enlightenment,’ ‘progress,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘humanity,’ etc., he himself practices the severest segregation of his race” (p. 315). The conflict between Jewish advocacy of Enlightenment ideals and actual Jewish behavior was noted by Klein (1981, 146): “Annoyed by the parochial attachments of other people, and unreceptive to the idea of a pluralistic state, many non-Jews interpreted the Jewish assertion of pride as a subversion of the ‘enlightened’ or egalitarian state. The Jewish stress on national or racial pride reinforced the non-Jewish perception of the Jew as a disruptive social force.”

Ringer (1983, 7) also notes that a common component of anti-Semitism among academics during the Weimar period was a perception that Jews attempted to undermine patriotic commitment and social cohesion of society. Indeed, the perception that Jewish critical analysis of gentile society was aimed at dissolving the bonds of cohesiveness within the society was common among educated gentile Germans, including university professors (Ringer 1983, 7). One academic referred to the Jews as “the classic party of national decomposition” (in Ringer 1983, 7).

In the event, National Socialism developed as a cohesive gentile group strategy in opposition to Judaism, a strategy that completely rejected the Enlightenment ideal of an atomized society based on individual rights in opposition to the state. As I have argued in SAID (Ch. 5), in this regard National Socialism was very much like Judaism, which has been throughout its history fundamentally a group phenomenon in which the rights of the individual have been submerged in the interests of the group.

As evident in the material reviewed here and in the previous chapters, at least some influential Jewish social scientists and intellectuals have attempted to undermine gentile group strategies while leaving open the possibility that Judaism continue as a highly cohesive group strategy. This theme is highly compatible with the Frankfurt School’s consistent rejection of all forms of nationalism (Tar 1977, 20). The result is that in the end the ideology of the Frankfurt School may be described as a form of radical individualism that nevertheless despised capitalism—an individualism in which all forms of gentile collectivism are condemned as an indication of social or individual pathology.¹¹⁹ Thus in Horkheimer’s essay on German Jews (see Horkheimer 1974), the true enemy of the Jews is gentile collectivities of any kind, and especially nationalism. Although no mention is made of the collectivist nature of Judaism, Zionism, or Israeli nationalism, the collectivist tendencies of modern gentile society are deplored, especially fascism and communism. The prescription for gentile society is radical individualism and the acceptance of pluralism. People have an inherent right to be different from others and to be accepted by others as different. Indeed, to become differentiated from others is to achieve the highest level of humanity. The result is that “no party and no movement, neither the Old Left nor the New, indeed no collectivity of any sort was on the side of truth… [T]he residue of the forces of true change was located in the critical individual alone” (Maier 1984, 45).

As a corollary of this thesis, Adorno adopted the idea that the basic role of philosophy is the negative role of resisting attempts to endow the world with any “universality,” “objectivity,” or “totality,” that is, with a single organizing principle for society that would homogenize society because it applied to all humans (see especially Adorno’s Negative Dialectics [Adorno 1973]; see also the review of Adorno’s ideas on this concept in Jay [1984, 241-275]). In Negative Dialectics the main example attacked by Adorno is Hegel’s idea of universal history (also a stalking horse for Jacques Derrida; see below), but a similar argument applies to any ideology, such as nationalism that results in a sense of national or pan-human universality. For example, the principle of exchange characteristic of capitalism is rejected because through it all humans become commensurable and thus lose their unique particularity. Science too is condemned because of its tendency to seek universal principles of reality (including human nature) and its tendency to look for quantitative, commensurable differences between humans rather than qualitative differences. Each object “should be respected in its ungeneralized historical uniqueness” (Landmann 1984, 123). Or, as Adorno (1974, 17) himself noted in Minima Moralia: “In the face of the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere.” In the end, the only criterion for a better society was that it be one in which “one can be different without fear” (p. 131). The former communist had become an advocate of radical individualism, at least for the gentiles. As discussed in Chapter 4, Erich Fromm (1941), another member of the Frankfurt School until he was excluded, also recognized the utility of individualism as a prescription for gentile society while nevertheless remaining strongly identified as a Jew.

Congruent with this stress on individualism and the glorification of difference, Adorno embraced a radical form of philosophical skepticism which is completely incompatible with the entire social science enterprise of The Authoritarian Personality. Indeed, Adorno rejected even the possibility of ontology (“reification”) because he viewed the contrary positions as ultimately supporting totalitarianism. Given Adorno’s preoccupation with Jewish issues and strong Jewish identity, it is reasonable to suppose that these ideological structures are intended to serve as a justification of Jewish particularism. In this view, Judaism, like any other historically particular entity, must remain beyond the reach of science, forever incomprehensible in its uniqueness and ever in opposition to all attempts to develop homogeneous social structures in the society as a whole. However, its continued existence is guaranteed as an a priori moral imperative.

The prescription that gentile society adopt a social organization based on radical individualism would indeed be an excellent strategy for the continuation of Judaism as a cohesive, collectivist group strategy. Research summarized by Triandis (1990, 1991) on cross-cultural differences in individualism and collectivism indicates that anti-Semitism would be lowest in individualist societies rather than societies that are collectivist and homogeneous apart from Jews. A theme of PTSDA (Ch. 8) is that European societies (with the notable exceptions of the National Socialist era in Germany and the medieval period of Christian religious hegemony—both periods of intense anti-Semitism) have been unique among the economically advanced traditional and modern cultures of the world in their commitment to individualism. As I have argued in SAID (Chs. 3-5), the presence of Judaism as a highly successful and salient group strategy provokes anti-individualist responses from gentile societies.

Collectivist cultures (and Triandis [1990, 57] explicitly includes Judaism in this category) place a much greater emphasis on the goals and needs of the ingroup rather than on individual rights and interests. Collectivist cultures develop an “unquestioned attachment” to the ingroup, including “the perception that ingroup norms are universally valid (a form of ethnocentrism), automatic obedience to ingroup authorities, and willingness to fight and die for the ingroup. These characteristics are usually associated with distrust of and unwillingness to cooperate with outgroups” (p. 55). In collectivist cultures morality is conceptualized as that which benefits the group, and aggression and exploitation of outgroups are acceptable (Triandis 1990, 90).

People in individualist cultures, in contrast, show little emotional attachment to ingroups. Personal goals are paramount, and socialization emphasizes the importance of self-reliance, independence, individual responsibility, and “finding yourself” (Triandis 1991, 82). Individualists have more positive attitudes toward strangers and outgroup members and are more likely to behave in a prosocial, altruistic manner to strangers. Because they are less aware of ingroup-outgroup boundaries, people in individualist cultures are less likely to have negative attitudes toward outgroup members (1991, 80). They often disagree with ingroup policy, show little emotional commitment or loyalty to ingroups, and do not have a sense of common fate with other ingroup members. Opposition to outgroups occurs in individualist societies, but the opposition is more “rational” in the sense that there is less of a tendency to suppose that all of the outgroup members are culpable for the misdeeds of a few. Individualists form mild attachments to many groups, whereas collectivists have an intense attachment and identification to a few ingroups (1990, 61).

The expectation is that individualists will tend to be less predisposed to antiSemitism and more likely to blame any offensive Jewish behavior as resulting from transgressions by individual Jews rather than stereotypically true of all Jews. However Jews, as members of a collectivist subculture living in an individualistic society, are themselves more likely to view the Jewish-gentile distinction as extremely salient and to develop stereotypically negative views about gentiles.

In Triandis’s terms, then, the fundamental intellectual difficulty presented by The Authoritarian Personality is that Judaism itself is a highly collectivist subculture in which authoritarianism and obedience to ingroup norms and the suppression of individual interests for the common good have been of vital importance throughout its history (PTSDA, Chs. 6, 8). Such attributes in gentiles tend to result in anti-Semitism because of social identity processes. Jews may, as a result, perceive themselves to have a vital interest in advocating a highly individualist, atomized gentile culture while simultaneously maintaining their own highly elaborated collectivist subculture. This is the perspective developed by the Frankfurt School and apparent throughout Studies in Prejudice.

However, we shall see that The Authoritarian Personality extends beyond the attempt to pathologize cohesive gentile groups to pathologize adaptive gentile behavior in general. The principal intellectual difficulty is that behavior that is critical to Judaism as a successful group evolutionary strategy is conceptualized as pathological in gentiles.

REVIEW OF THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY

The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson & Sanford 1950) is a true classic of research in social psychology. It has generated thousands of studies, and references continue to appear in textbooks, although in recent years there has been increasing criticism and rejection of the personality approach to intergroup prejudice and hostility. Nathan Glazer (1954, 290) noted, “No volume published since the war in the field of social psychology has had a greater impact on the direction of the actual empirical work being carried on in the universities today.” Despite its influence, from the beginning it has been common to point out technical problems with the construction of the scales and the conduct and interpretation of the interviews (see Altemeyer 1981, 33-51; 1988, 52-54; Billings, Guastello & Rieke 1993; R. Brown 1965, 509ff; Collier, Minton & Reynolds 1991, 196; Hyman & Sheatsley 1954). The result is that The Authoritarian Personality has become something of a textbook on how not to do social science research.

Nevertheless, despite technical problems with the original scale construction, there is no question that there is such a thing as psychological authoritarianism, in the sense that it is possible to construct a reliable psychometric scale that measures such a construct. Whereas the F-scale from the original Authoritarian Personality studies is plagued with an acquiescent response set bias, more recent versions of the scale have managed to avoid this difficulty while retaining substantially the same correlates with other scales. However, the validity of the scale in measuring actual authoritarian behavior, as opposed to having a high score on an authoritarianism scale, continues to be controversial (see Billings et al. 1993).

In any case, my treatment will emphasize two aspects of The Authoritarian Personality that are central to the political program of the Frankfurt School: (1) I will emphasize the double standard in which gentile behavior inferred from high scores on the F-scale or the Ethnocentrism Scales is viewed as an indication of psychopathology, whereas precisely the same behavior is central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy; (2) I will also criticize the psychodynamic mechanisms involving disturbed parent-child relationships proposed to underlie authoritarianism. These proposed psychodynamic mechanisms are responsible for the highly subversive nature of the book considered as political propaganda; not coincidentally, it is this strand of the project that has often struck commentators as highly questionable. Thus Altemeyer (1988, 53) notes that despite the “unconvincing” nature of the scientific evidence supporting it, the basic idea that anti-Semitism is the result of disturbed parent-child relationships has “spread so widely through our culture that it has become a stereotype.” Moreover, much of the incredible success of the Authoritarian Personality studies occurred because of the book’s widespread acceptance among Jewish social scientists, who by the 1950s had assumed a prominent role in the American academic community and were very concerned with anti-Semitism (Higham 1984, 154; see also below).

The politicized nature of The Authoritarian Personality has long been apparent to mainstream psychologists. Roger Brown noted, “The study called The Authoritarian Personality has affected American life: the theory of prejudice it propounded has become a part of popular culture and a force against racial discrimination. Is it also true? You must be the judge… The Berkeley study of authoritarian personality does not leave many people indifferent. Cool objectivity has not been the hallmark of this tradition. Most of those who have participated have cared deeply about the social issues involved” (Brown 1965, 479, 544). The last part of Brown’s comment reflects the feeling one has in reading the book, namely, that the beliefs of the authors were important in conceptualizing and interpreting the research.

A good example of such a reader is Christopher Lasch (1991, 445ff), who noted “The purpose and design of Studies in Prejudice dictated the conclusion that prejudice, a psychological disorder rooted in ‘authoritarian’ personality structure, could be eradicated only by subjecting the American people to what amounted to collective psychotherapy—by treating them as inmates of an insane asylum.” From the beginning, this was social science with a political agenda: “By identifying the ‘liberal personality’ as the antithesis of the authoritarian personality, they equated mental health with an approved political position. They defended liberalism… on the grounds that other positions had their roots in personal pathology” (Lasch 1991, 453).

The Authoritarian Personality begins by acknowledging Freud as a general influence, and especially his role in making the intellectual world “more aware of the suppression of children (both within the home and outside) and society’s usually naive ignorance of the psychological dynamics of the life of the child and the adult alike” (p. x). In congruence with this general perspective, Adorno and his colleagues “in common with most social scientists, hold the view that antiSemitism is based more largely upon factors in the subject and in his total situation than upon actual characteristics of Jews” (p. 2). The roots of antiSemitism are therefore to be sought in individual psychopathology—”the deeplying needs of the personality” (p. 9)—and not in the behavior of Jews.

Chapter II (by R. Nevitt Sanford) consists of interview material from two individuals, one high on anti-Semitism (Mack), the other low on anti-Semitism (Larry). Mack is quite ethnocentric and tends to see people in terms of ingroup-outgroup relationships in which the outgroup is characterized in a stereotypically negative manner. As predicted for such a person on the basis of social identity theory (Hogg & Abrams 1987), his own group, the Irish, has approved traits, and outgroups are seen as homogeneous and threatening. Whereas Mack is strongly conscious of groups as a unit of social categorization, Larry does not think in terms of groups at all.

Although Mack’s ethnocentrism is clearly viewed as pathological, there is no thought given to the possibility that Jews also have analogously ethnocentric thought processes as a result of the extreme salience of ingroup-outgroup relationships as an aspect of Jewish socialization. Indeed, in SAID (Ch. 1) I noted that Jews would be more likely than gentiles to have negative stereotypes about outgroups and to view the world as composed fundamentally of homogeneous, competing, threatening, and negatively stereotyped outgroups. Moreover, there is excellent evidence, summarized throughout this volume, that Jews have often held negative views of gentile (i.e., outgroup) culture. Nevertheless, as we shall see, the agenda of The Authoritarian Personality is that similar ethnocentric attitudes among gentiles are traceable to pathological early influences on personality.

Further, a consistent theme in Chapters 2-4 is that a major thrust of Jewish intellectual movements since the nineteenth century has been to devise theories that minimize the importance of the social category Jew-gentile while allowing for the continuation of a very strong sense of Jewish identity. Larry’s tendency not to see the social environment in terms of groups is linked with an absence of anti-Semitism, whereas Mack’s anti-Semitism is necessarily linked to the importance of groups as a social category.

These themes and their influence on scale construction can be seen in Chapters III and IV (by Daniel J. Levinson). Levinson notes that anti-Semites tend to see Jews as members of groups rather than as individuals, and he suggests that the effectiveness of individual experience with Jews “would seem to depend in large part on the individual’s capacity for individuated experiences” (p. 95; italics in text).¹²⁰ Levinson also notes that individuals who themselves belong to groups with a strong ingroup ideology, such as sororities, are more likely to be anti-Semitic (p. 104). Again, the implication is that strong ingroup ideologies should be reserved for Jews and are dangerous in others. These findings fit well with the discussion of individualist versus collectivist societies at the beginning of this chapter: Jews, as a highly cohesive group, have an interest in advocating a completely atomistic, individualistic society in which ingroup-outgroup distinctions are not salient to gentiles.

The Ethnocentrism Scale has three subscales, one involving attitudes toward African Americans, one involving attitudes toward minorities in general, and one involving patriotism. Although the presentation of the Ethnocentrism Scale leads one to believe that the researchers are studying ethnocentrism in general, in fact the scale items are exclusively concerned with ethnocentrism among the Caucasian Christian population. Those high in ethnocentrism according to this scale have negative attitudes toward African Americans and Jews and positive attitudes toward white, Christian dominance. For example, one item on the Ethnocentrism Scale is “In view of the present national emergency [World War II], it is highly important to limit responsible government jobs to native, white, Christian Americans.” The result of including such items is that a strongly identified Jew, for whom the ingroup-outgroup distinction is salient, would have a low score on Levinson’s ethnocentrism scale.

Items on the Anti-Semitism Scale appear to imply that an aspect of antiSemitism is the gentile view that Jews constitute a distinctive group. For example, one of the items is “The trouble with letting Jews into a nice neighborhood is that they gradually give it a typical Jewish atmosphere.” Brown (1965, 483) comments, “How could it be otherwise? Surely Jews will produce a Jewish atmosphere. They will at any rate do so if one thinks of Jews as ‘categorically different from non-Jews.’ However, it is just this saliency of ‘Jewishness’ which the authors consider the beginning of anti-Semitism.” Here the implicit assumption is that the salience of the Jewish-gentile social categorization signals anti-Semitism in gentiles and therefore indicates disturbed parent-child relations. Nevertheless, among Jews such a social categorization process is critical for the continuation of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy.

Similarly ironic as an aspect of the Anti-Semitism Scale is the inclusion of the items “I can hardly imagine myself marrying a Jew” and “It is wrong for Jews and Gentiles to intermarry.” Such attitudes apparently result from disturbed parent-child relationships among gentiles and the suppression of human nature, yet the rejection of intermarriage has been common among Jews. Indeed, the “threat” of intermarriage has recently produced a crisis within the Jewish community and has resulted in intensive efforts to persuade Jews to marry other Jews (see SAID, Ch. 8).

Other items reflecting aspects of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy in fact have substantial empirical support. For example, several items are concerned with perceptions of Jewish clannishness and its effect on residential patterns and business practices.¹²¹ Other items are concerned with perceptions that Jews engage in cultural separatism and with perceptions that Jews have power, money and influence out of proportion to their numbers in the population. There is an item that reflects the overrepresentation of Jews in leftist and radical political causes: “There seems to be some revolutionary streak in the Jewish make-up as shown by the fact that there are so many Jewish Communists and agitators.” However, data reviewed in this volume, SAID, and PTSDA indicate that in fact there is considerable truth in all these generalizations. Being high on the AntiSemitism Scale may therefore simply mean that one has access to more information rather than a sign of a disturbed childhood.

Particularly interesting is the patriotism scale, designed to tap attitudes involving “blind attachment to certain national cultural values, uncritical conformity with the prevailing group ways, and rejection of other nations as outgroups” (p. 107). Again, strong attachment to group interests among the majority group is considered pathology, whereas no mention is made of analogous group attachments among Jews. An advocacy of strong discipline and conformity within the majority group is an important indicator of this pathology: One scale item reads, “Minor forms of military training, obedience, and discipline, such as drill, marching, and simple commands, should be made a part of the elementary school educational program.” However, no mention is made of discipline, conformity, and the socialization of group cohesiveness as important ideals within minority group strategies. As indicated in PTSDA (Ch. 7), traditional Jewish socialization practices have placed strong emphasis on discipline within the group and psychological acceptance of group goals (i.e., conformity).

These results are of interest because an important aspect of this entire effort is to pathologize positive attitudes toward creating a highly cohesive, well-disciplined group strategy among gentiles, but nevertheless failing to censure such attitudes among Jews. Individuals high on the Ethnocentrism Scale as well as the Anti-Semitism Scale are undoubtedly people who are very group-conscious. They see themselves as members of cohesive groups, including, in some cases, their own ethnic group and, at the highest level, the nation; and they view negatively outgroup individuals and individuals who deviate from group goals and group norms. In Chapter III Levinson states that anti-Semites want power for their own groups and value clannishness in their own groups while condemning similar Jewish behavior (p. 97). Conversely, the data reviewed in this volume are highly compatible with the proposition that many Jews want power for their own group and value clannishness in their own group but condemn such behavior in gentiles. Indeed, the discussion at the beginning of this chapter indicates that this is precisely the ideology of the Frankfurt School responsible for these studies.

From the standpoint of the authors of The Authoritarian Personality, group consciousness in the majority is viewed as pathological because it tends necessarily to be opposed to Jews as a cohesive, unassimilated, and unassimilable minority group. Viewed from this perspective, the central agenda of The Authoritarian Personality is to pathologize gentile group strategies while nevertheless leaving open the possibility of Judaism as a minority group strategy.

In his discussion, Levinson views ethnocentrism as fundamentally concerned with ingroup-outgroup perceptions, a perspective that is congruent with social identity theory that I have proposed as the best candidate for developing a theory of anti-Semitism. Levinson concludes, “Ethnocentrism is based on a pervasive and rigid ingroup-outgroup distinction; it involves stereotyped negative imagery and hostile attitudes regarding outgroups, stereotyped positive imagery and submissive attitudes regarding ingroups, and a hierarchical, authoritarian view of group interaction in which ingroups are rightly dominant, outgroups subordinate” (p. 150; italics in text).

Further, Levinson notes “The ethnocentric ‘need for an outgroup’ prevents that identification with humanity as a whole which is found in anti-ethnocentrism” (p. 148). Levinson clearly believes that ethnocentrism is a sign of psychiatric disorder and that identification with humanity is the epitome of mental health, but he never draws the obvious inference that Jews themselves are unlikely to identify with humanity, given the importance of ingroup-outgroup distinctions so central to Judaism. Moreover, Levinson describes the anti-Semite Mack’s demand that Jews assimilate as a demand that Jews “liquidate themselves, that they lose entirely their cultural identity and adhere instead to the prevailing cultural ways” (p. 97). Levinson sees the demand that Jews assimilate, and thus abandon rigid ingroup-outgroup social categorization processes, as an aspect Mack’s anti-Semitic psychopathology; at the same time Levinson is perfectly willing to advocate that the anti-Semite identify with humanity and abandon ingroup-outgroup social categorization processes. Clearly ethnocentrism and its concomitant salience of ingroup-outgroup social categorization is to be reserved for Jews and pathologized as an aspect of gentile behavior.

The material reviewed throughout this volume indicates that a major thrust of Jewish intellectual activity has been to promote liberal-radical political beliefs in gentiles. Here Levinson links ethnocentrism with conservative economic and political views, with the implication that these attitudes are part of a pervasive social pathology stemming ultimately from disturbed parent-child relationships. Levinson finds an association among political conservatism, economic conservatism (support of prevailing politicoeconomic ideology and authority), and ethnocentrism (stigmatization of outgroups).¹²² However, “The further development of liberal-radical views is ordinarily based on imagery and attitudes identical to those underlying anti-ethnocentric ideology: opposition to hierarchy and to dominance-submission, removal of class and group barriers, emphasis on equalitarian interaction, and so on” (p. 181).

Here the ethical superiority of the removal of group barriers is advocated in an official publication of the AJCommittee, an organization dedicated to a way of life in which de facto group barriers and the discouraging of intermarriage have been and continue to be critical and the subject of intense feelings among Jewish activists.¹²³ Given the overwhelming evidence that Jews support leftist-liberal political programs and continue to have a strong Jewish identification (see Ch. 3), one can only conclude that the results are another confirmation of the analysis presented there: Leftism among Jews has functioned as a means of deemphasizing the importance of the Jewish-gentile distinction among gentiles while nevertheless allowing for its continuation among Jews.

Levinson then proceeds to a section of the analysis with large repercussions. Levinson provides data showing that individuals with different political party preferences than their fathers have lower ethnocentrism scores. He then proposes that rebelling against the father is an important predictor of lack of ethnocentrism: “Ethnocentrists tend to be submissive to ingroup authority, anti-ethnocentrists to be critical and rebellious, and… the family is the first and prototypic ingroup” (p. 192).

Levinson asks the reader to consider a two-generation situation in which the first generation tends to be relatively high on ethnocentrism and political conservatism; that is, they identify with their ethnic group and its perceived economic and political interests. Prediction of whether children will similarly identify with their ethnic group and its perceived interests depends on whether children rebel against their fathers. The conclusion of this syllogism, given the values implicit in the study, is that rebelling against parental values is psychologically healthy because it results in lower ethnocentrism scores. Conversely, lack of rebellion against the parent is implicitly viewed as pathological. These ideas are expanded in later sections of The Authoritarian Personality and indeed constitute a central aspect of the entire project.

One wonders if these social scientists would similarly advocate that Jewish children should reject their families as the prototypical ingroup. The transmission of Judaism over the generations has required that children accept parental values. In Chapter 3 it was noted that during the 1960s radical Jewish students, but not radical gentile students, identified strongly with their parents and with Judaism. I have also discussed extensive socialization practices whereby Jewish children were socialized to accept community interests over individual interests. These practices function to produce strong ingroup loyalty among Jews (see PTSDA, Chs. 7, 8). Again, there is an implicit double standard: Rebellion against parents and the complete abandonment of all ingroup designations is the epitome of mental health for gentiles, whereas Jews are implicitly allowed to continue with a strong sense of ingroup identity and follow in their parents’ footsteps.

Similarly with regard to religious affiliation, R. Nevitt Sanford (Chapter VI) finds that affiliation with various Christian religious sects is associated with ethnocentrism, and that individuals who have rebelled against their parents and adopted another religion or no religion are lower on ethnocentrism. These relationships are explained as due to the fact that acceptance of a Christian religion is associated with “conformity, conventionalism, authoritarian submission, determination by external pressures, thinking in ingroup-outgroup terms and the like vs. nonconformity, independence, internalization of values, and so forth” (p. 220). Again, individuals identifying strongly with the ideology of a majority group are viewed as suffering from psychopathology, yet Judaism as a viable religion would necessarily be associated with these same psychological processes. Indeed, Sirkin and Grellong (1988) found that rebellion and negative parent-child relationships during adolescence were associated with Jewish young people’s abandoning Judaism to join religious cults. Negative parent-child relationships predict lack of acceptance of parents’ religious group membership, whatever the religion involved.

Part II of The Authoritarian Personality consists of five chapters by Else Frenkel-Brunswik presenting interview data from a subset of the subjects studied in Part I. Although there are pervasive methodological difficulties with these data, they provide a fairly consistent, theoretically intelligible contrast in the family relationships between high scorers and low scorers on the Ethnocentrism Scale.¹²⁴ However, the picture presented is quite different from that which the authors of The Authoritarian Personality intend to convey. In conjunction with the material from the projective questions in Chapter XV, the data strongly suggest that high scorers on the Ethnocentrism Scale tend to come from very functional, adaptive, competent, and concerned families. These individuals identify with their families as a prototypical ingroup and appear intent on replicating that family structure in their own lives. Low scorers appear to have ambivalent, rebellious relationships with their families and identify minimally with their family as an ingroup.

Frenkel-Brunswik first discusses differences in attitudes toward parents and conceptions of the family. Prejudiced individuals “glorify” their parents and view their family as an ingroup.¹²⁵ Low-scoring individuals, in contrast, are said to have an “objective” view of their parents combined with genuine affection. To make these claims plausible, Frenkel-Brunswik must show that the very positive attitudes shown by high scorers are not genuine affection but are simply masks for repressed hostility. However, as Altemeyer (1981, 43) notes, “It is at least possible… that [the parents of the high scorers] really were a little better than most, and that the small relationships found have a perfectly factual, nonpsychodynamic explanation.” I would go further than Altemeyer and claim that the parents and families of the high scorers were almost certainly quite a bit “better” than the parents and families of the low scorers.

Frenkel-Brunswik’s only example of genuine affection on the part of a low scorer involves a female subject who recounted her despair at being abandoned by her father. (It would appear from data discussed below that abandonment and ambivalence are generally more common among the low scorers.) This subject, F63, makes the following comment: “But I remember when my father left, [my mother] came to my room and said ‘You’ll never see your Daddy again.’ Those were her exact words. I was crazy with grief and felt it was her fault. I threw things, emptied drawers out of the window, pulled the spreads off the bed, then threw things at the wall” (p. 346). The example does indeed show a strong attachment between father and daughter, but the point clearly is that the relationship is one of abandonment, not affection. Moreover, Frenkel-Brunswik mentions that some of the low scorers appear to have “blocked affect” regarding their parents; that is, the low scorers have no emotional response at all toward them. One wonders, then, in what sense the low scorers can be said to have genuinely positive emotional relationships with their parents. As we shall see, the data as a whole indicate very high levels of hostility and ambivalence among the low scorers.

In contrast, high scoring women are said to perceive themselves as “victimized” by their parents. The word “victimized” has negative connotations, and my own reading of the published interview material suggests that the subjects are expressing negative feelings toward parental discipline or unfairness within the context of an overall positive relationship. Parent-child relationships, like any relationship, may be viewed as consisting of positive and negative attributes from the standpoint of the child—much like an account ledger. Relationships in general are not likely to be perfect from the standpoint of all parties because people’s interests conflict. The result is that a perfect relationship from one person’s standpoint may seem like exploitation to the other person in the relationship. So it is in parent-child relationships (MacDonald 1988a, 166-169). A perfect relationship from the standpoint of the child would be unbalanced and would undoubtedly be highly unbalanced against the parent—what is usually termed a permissive or indulgent parent-child relationship.

My interpretation of the research on parent-child interaction (and this is a mainstream point of view) is that children will accept high levels of parental control if the relationship with the parents is positive overall (MacDonald 1988a, 1992a, 1997). Developmental psychologists use the term “authoritative parenting” to refer to parenting in which the child accepts parental control within the context of a generally positive relationship (Baumrind 1971; Maccoby & Martin 1983). Although children of authoritative parents undoubtedly may not always enjoy parental discipline and restrictions, this style of parenting is associated with well-adjusted children.

A child may therefore resent some activities of the parent within the context of an overall positive relationship, and there is no psychological difficulty with supposing that the child could accept having to perform unpleasant work or even being discriminated against as a female while nevertheless having a very positive overall view of the parent-child relationship. Frenkel-Brunswik’s examples of girls who have very positive views of their parents but also complain about situations in which they were made to do housework or were treated less well than their brothers need not be interpreted as indicating suppressed hostility.

Frenkel-Brunswik states that these resentments are not “ego-accepted” by the girls, a comment I interpret as indicating that the girls did not view the resentment as completely compromising the relationship. Her example of such non-ego-accepted resentment is as follows: F39: Mother was “terribly strict with me about learning to keep house… I am glad now, but I resented it then.” It is only by accepting a psychodynamic interpretation in which normal resentments about being required to work are a sign of powerful suppressed hostilities and rigid defense mechanisms that we can view these women as in any sense pathological.¹²⁶ It is ultimately the proposed repressed hostility engendered by parental discipline that results in anti-Semitism: “The displacement of a repressed antagonism toward authority may be one of the sources, and perhaps the principal source, of… antagonism toward outgroups” (p. 482).

Whereas the negative feelings high scorers had toward their parents tend to derive from parental efforts to discipline the child or get the child to do household chores, the negative feelings of the low scorers are the result of feelings of desertion and loss of affection (p. 349). However, in the case of the low scorers, Frenkel-Brunswik emphasizes that the desertions and loss of love are frankly accepted, and this acceptance, in her view, precludes psychopathology. I have already discussed F63, whose father abandoned her; another low scoring subject, M55, states, “For example, he would take a delicacy like candy, pretend to offer us some and then eat it himself and laugh uproariously… Makes him seem sort of a monster, though he’s not really” (p. 350). It is not surprising that such egregious examples of parental insensitivity are vividly recalled by the subject. However, in the upside-down world of The Authoritarian Personality, their being recalled is viewed as a sign of mental health in the subjects, whereas the overtly positive relationships of the high scorers are a sign of deep, unconscious layers of psychopathology.

Contemporary developmental research on authoritative parenting and parent-child warmth also indicates that authoritative parents are more successful in transmitting cultural values to their children (e.g., MacDonald 1988a, 1992, 1997a). In reading the interview material, one is struck by the fact that low scorers have rather negative views of their parents, whereas high scorers have quite positive views. It is reasonable to suppose that the low scorers would be more rebelliousness against parental values, and this indeed occurs.

Part of the deception of The Authoritarian Personality, however, is that low scorers’ resentment directed toward their parents is interpreted as a sign that parental discipline is not overpowering. “Since typical low scorers do not really see their parents as any too overpowering or frightening, they can afford to express their feelings of resentment more readily” (p. 346). The meager signs of affection in the children of low scorers and the obvious signs of resentment are thus interpreted by Frenkel-Brunswik as genuine affection, whereas the very positive perceptions of their parents held by the high scorers are viewed as the result of extreme parental authoritarianism resulting in repressions and denial of parental faults.

These results are an excellent example of the ideological biases characteristic of this entire project. A developmental psychologist looking at these data is impressed by the fact that the parents of the high scorers manage to inculcate a very positive perception of family life in their children while managing to discipline them nonetheless. As indicated above, contemporary researchers label this type of parent as authoritative, and the research supports the general proposal that children of such parents will accept adult values. Children from such families have close relationships with their parents, and they accept parental values and group identifications. Thus if the parents accept religious identifications, the child from such a family is more likely to accept them as well. And if parents hold up education as a value, the children are also likely to accept the importance of doing well in school. These authoritative parents set standards for their children’s behavior and monitor compliance with these standards. The warmth of the parent-child relationship motivates the child to conform to these standards and to monitor his or her behavior in a manner that avoids violating ingroup (i.e., family) norms of behavior.

The deeply subversive agenda of The Authoritarian Personality is to pathologize this type of family among gentiles. However, since parental affection is viewed positively according to the theory, evidence for parental affection among the high scorers must be interpreted as a mask for parental hostility; and the low scorers had to be interpreted as having affectionate parents despite surface appearances to the contrary. Rebellion against parents by the low scorers is then conceptualized as the normal outcome of affectionate child rearing—a ridiculous view at best.¹²⁷

Fundamentally, then, the political agenda of The Authoritarian Personality is to undercut gentile family structure, but the ultimate aim is to subvert the entire social categorization scheme underlying gentile society. The authors of The Authoritarian Personality are studying a society in which variation in families can be seen as ranging from families that essentially replicate current social structure to families that produce rebellion and change in social structure. The former families are highly cohesive, and children within these families have a strong sense of ingroup feeling toward their families. The children also fundamentally accept the social categorization structure of their parents as the social categories expand to include church, community, and nation.

This relatively strong sense of ingroup thinking then tends, as expected by social identity research, to result in negative attitudes to individuals from different religions, communities, and nations. From the standpoint of the authors of The Authoritarian Personality, this type of family must be established as pathological, despite the fact that this is exactly the type of family necessary for the continuation of a strong sense of Jewish identity: Jewish children must accept the social categorization system of their parents. They must view their families as ingroups and ultimately accept the ingroup represented by Judaism. Again, the fundamental intellectual difficulty that runs throughout the entire book is that its agenda must inevitably pathologize in gentiles what is critical to the maintenance of Judaism.

The success of the families of high scorers in transmitting parental values is illustrated by the fact that children of the high scorers feel a sense of obligation and duty toward their parents. Note particularly the response of F78, about whom it was said, “Her parents definitely approve of the engagement. Subject wouldn’t even go with anyone if they didn’t like him” (p. 351). Here a woman who intends to marry someone approved by her parents and who takes account of the views of her parents in dating is viewed as having a psychiatric disorder. One wonders if Frenkel-Brunswik would similarly analyze such a response in a Jewish subject. Another indication of the overwhelmingly positive family experiences of the high scorers is that they often comment that their parents were very solicitous toward them. Within Frenkel-Brunswik’s worldview, this is another sign of pathology among the high scorers that is variously labeled “ego alien dependence” (p. 353) and “blatant opportunism” (p. 354).

Consider, for example, the following response from a high scorer, F79: “I always say my mother is still taking care of me. You should see my closets—stacked with fruits, jams, pickles… She just loves to do things for people” (p. 354).¹²⁸ To categorize such an expression of parental solicitude as part of a pathological syndrome is truly astonishing. Similarly, Frenkel-Brunswik terms the following comment by a high-scoring woman as illustrative of the blatant opportunism characteristic of high scorers: “Father was extremely devoted to family—will work his fingers to the bone for them—never has done any drinking” (p. 365). Another high scorer (F24), in describing how “wonderful” her father is, says, “He is always willing to do anything for you” (p. 365).

An evolutionist would interpret these comments as indicating that the parents of high scorers invest greatly in their families and make the welfare of their families their first priority. They insist on appropriate behavior from their children and are not reticent about using physical punishment to control children’s behavior. Data summarized in PTSDA (Ch. 7) indicate that this is exactly the type of parenting characteristic of Jews in traditional Eastern European shtetl societies. In these societies high-investment parenting and conformity to parental practices, especially religious belief, were very important. Jewish mothers in these communities are said to be characterized by an “unremitting solicitude” regarding their children (Zborowski & Herzog 1952, 193). They engage in “boundless suffering and sacrifice. Parents ‘kill themselves’ for the sake of their children” (p. 294). At the same time there is a strong sense of parental control over children, including anger directed at the child and considerable use of physical punishment performed in anger (pp. 336-337). Patterns of highly intrusive, solicitous, dependency-producing, and authoritarian parenting continue among contemporary Hasidic Jews (Mintz 1992, 176ff).

This style of high-investment parenting in which high levels of solicitude are combined with powerful controls over children’s behavior is effective in getting children to identify with parental values in traditional Jewish societies. Supreme among these values is accepting parents’ religion and the necessity of choosing a marriage partner suitable to the parents and especially to avoid marrying a gentile. To have a child marry a gentile is a horrifying, catastrophic event that indicates that “something must be wrong with the parents” (Zborowski & Herzog 1952, 231). For Frenkel-Brunswik, however, parental solicitude, accepting parental values, and parental influence on marriage decisions are a sign of pathology—a forerunner of fascism. For gentiles, but apparently not for Jews, rebellion against parental values is the epitome of mental health.

The interview data on the family as an ingroup are particularly interesting in this regard. High-scoring subjects are proud of their families, their accomplishments, and their traditions. With typical rhetorical chutzpah, Frenkel-Brunswik calls these expressions of family pride “a setting off of a homogeneous totalitarian family against the rest of the world” (p. 356). For example, a high scorer, F68, states of her father, “His folks were pioneers—gold settlers and quite wealthy. Everyone knows the———’s of———County up that way” (p. 357). Pride in oneself and one’s family is an indicator of psychiatric disorder.

Further evidence that the family relationships of high scorers are more positive comes from the data on parental conflict. The following comment is described as typical by the high-scoring men as a response to being asked how their parents got along together. M41: “Fine, never did hear no quarreling.”¹²⁹ In contrast, rather severe parental conflict is quite apparent in the records of the low scorers. M59: “Well, just the usual family quarrels. Maybe raise her voice a bit. (What bones of contention?) Well, the fact that in the first ten years of my mother’s married life, my dad used to get drunk quite often and he would beat her physically and later on, as the children were growing up, she resented my father’s influence, though he contributed to our support… He used to come about twice a week, sometimes oftener” (p. 369).¹³⁰

This picture of conflict in the families of low scorers receives the following interpretation by Frenkel-Brunswik: “The foregoing records illustrate the frankness and the greater insight into the marital conflicts of the parents” (p. 369). The assumption seems to be that all families are characterized by alcoholism, desertion, physical abuse, quarreling, and narcissistic preoccupation with one’s own pleasures rather than family needs. Mental health in the low scorers is indicated by their being aware of familial psychopathology, whereas the pathological high scorers simply fail to recognize these phenomena in their families and persist in their delusions that their parents are self-sacrificing, loving disciplinarians.

This is a good example of the usefulness of psychodynamic theory in creating a politically effective “reality.” Behavior that conflicts with one’s theory can be ascribed to repression of deep conflicts, and truly pathological behavior becomes the essence of sanity because the subject recognizes it as such. Frenkel-Brunswik invents the term “denial of conflict” as a description of the “pathology” of the high-scoring families (p. 369), a term that is reminiscent of “ego-alien dependence” and “victimization” mentioned earlier. My reading of these protocols would lead me to label the relationships as “lack of conflict,” but in the upside-down world of The Authoritarian Personality, lack of apparent conflict is a sure sign of the denial of extremely severe conflict.¹³¹

The same picture is presented in sibling relationships. Sibling relationships described in very positive terms by high-scoring subjects are pathologized as “conventional idealization” or “glorification,” whereas the very negative relationships of low scorers are described as “objective appraisal.” The following description of a brother from a high scorer illustrates how Frenkel-Brunswik manages to pathologize highly cohesive, self-sacrificing family life among gentiles: M52: “Well, he’s a wonderful kid… Has been wonderful to my parents… Now 21. Always lived at home… Gives most of his earnings to my parents” (p. 378). The assumption seems to be that this description could not conceivably be accurate and is therefore an example of pathological “glorification of siblings.”

Frenkel-Brunswik also attempts to pathologize gentile concern with social class and upward social mobility. High scorers are portrayed as “status concerned” and therefore pathological for such statements as the following: M57, on being asked why his parents disciplined him, replies, “Well, they didn’t want me to run with some kind of people—slummy women—always wanted me to associate with the higher class of people” (p. 383).¹³²

A concern with social status is thus viewed as pathological. An evolutionary perspective, in contrast to Frenkel-Brunswik’s view, emphasizes the adaptive significance of social class status. An evolutionist would find the behavior of the parents to be quite adaptive, since they want their son to be concerned about upward social mobility and want a respectable woman for a daughter-in-law. The parents are concerned about social status, and an evolutionist would note that such a concern has been of critical evolutionary importance in stratified societies over historical time (See PTSDA, Ch. 7).

The other example of concern with social status presented by Frenkel-Brunswik is an individual who is concerned with having biological heirs. A high scorer says, “I want a home and I want to get married, not because I want a wife, but because I want a child. I want the child because I want someone to pass my things on to—I suddenly have become very conscious of my background that I forget about. (How do you mean?) Family background” (p. 383). Again, biologically adaptive gentile behavior is pathologized, and one wonders if the authors would consider the official, religiously based concern with reproductive success, biological relatedness, and control of resources among Jews as similarly pathological.

In her summary and discussion of the family interview data, Frenkel-Brunswik (pp. 384-389) then chooses to ignore the obvious signs of conflict, hostility, and ambivalence in the families of low scorers and characterizes them as “nurturant-loving” (p. 388) and as exhibiting “free-flowing affection” (p. 386). These families produce children with a “greater richness and liberation of emotional life” (p. 388), and the children exhibit a successful “sublimation of instinctual tendencies” (p. 388). Obvious signs of cohesiveness, affection, harmony, discipline, and successful transmission of family values in the families of high scorers are interpreted as “an orientation of power and contempt for the allegedly inferior” (p. 387). These families are characterized by “fearful subservience to the demands of the parents and by an early suppression of impulses” (p. 385).

This inversion of reality continues in the chapter entitled “Sex, People, and Self as Seen through Interviews.” High-scoring males appear as more sexually successful and as having high self-conceptions of masculinity; high-scoring females are described as popular with boys. Low-scoring males appear as sexually inadequate and low-scoring females as uninterested in men or unable to attract men. The low-scoring pattern is then interpreted as “open admission” of sexual inadequacy and therefore a sign of psychological health, and the high-scoring pattern is labeled as “concerned with social status” and therefore pathological. The assumption is that psychopathology is indicated by overt social adjustment and feelings of self-esteem; while mental health is indicated by feelings of inadequacy and admissions of “insufficiency” (p. 389).

Frenkel-Brunswik then attempts to show that high scorers are characterized by “anti-Id moralism.” The protocols indicate that the men are attracted to women and fall in love with women who are not particularly interested in sex. For example, M45: “We didn’t get on too good sexually because she was kind of on the frigid line, but still in all I was in love with her and I still am. I’d like nothing more than to go back to her” (p. 396). High-scoring males appear to value sexual decorum in females they intend to marry: M20: “Yes, I went through high school with one girl… Very religious… She was more or less what I was looking for. Very religious.”¹³³

An evolutionist looking at these protocols is impressed by the fact that the high-scoring males appear as individuals who wish to enter a marriage in which they have a high degree of paternity confidence. They want a woman with high moral standards who is unlikely to be sexually attracted to other males, and they seek women with conventional moral values. High-scoring females seem intent on being exactly this sort of woman. They project the image of having very high standards of sexual decorum and wish to maintain a reputation as nonpromiscuous.

Further, the high-scoring females want males who are “hardworking, ‘go-getting’ and energetic, ‘a good personality,’ (conventionally) moral, ‘clean-cut,’ deferent toward women” (p. 401).¹³⁴ An evolutionist would expect that this type of sexual behavior and discrimination of marriage partners to be characteristic of those entering “high-investment” marriages characterized by sexual fidelity by the female and by high levels of paternal involvement. This highly adaptive tendency of high-scoring females to seek investment from males Frenkel-Brunswik labels “opportunistic” (p. 401).

Conventional attitudes toward marriage are also an aspect of the “pathological” attitudes of high scorers. High scorers “tend to place a great deal of emphasis on socioeconomic status, church membership, and conformity with conventional values” (p. 402). For example, F74: “(Desirable traits?) Boyfriend should be about the same socioeconomic status. They should enjoy doing the same things and get along without too many quarrels.”¹³⁵ This woman is highly discriminating in her choice of mate. She is very concerned to marry someone who is responsible, reliable, and will invest in a long-term relationship. For Frenkel-Brunswik, however, these attitudes are a sign of opportunistic behavior. Despite obvious signs of strong affection in F78 (see note 24) and the clear indication that F74 desires a relationship characterized by harmony and mutual attraction and interests, Frenkel-Brunswik summarizes the results as indicating a “lack of individuation and of real object relationship” (p. 404) and a “paucity of affection” (p. 404).

Again, psychodynamic theory allows the author to ascribe surface admiration and affection to underlying hostility, whereas the surface problems of the low scorers are a sign of mental health: “Some of the records of low-scoring subjects refer rather frankly to their inadequacies, inhibitions, and failures in sex adjustment. There also is evidence of ambivalence toward one’s own sex role and toward the opposite sex although this ambivalence is of a different, more internalized kind from the combination of overt admiration and underlying disrespect characteristic of high scorers” (p. 405). We may not see this underlying disrespect and thus have no evidence for its existence. But psychodynamic theory allows Frenkel-Brunswik to infer its existence nonetheless.

The tendency to pathologize behaviors related to adaptive functioning can also be seen in the discussion of self-concept. High scorers are found to have a very positive self-image, whereas low scorers are filled with insecurity, self-condemnation, and even “morbid” self-accusations (p. 423ff)—results interpreted as due to the repressions of the high-scorers and the objectivity of the low scorers.¹³⁶

In a later section (“Conformity of Self and Ideal”), Frenkel-Brunswik finds that for high scorers there is little gap between present self and ideal self. Thus high-scoring men describe themselves in a “pseudomasculine” manner, and idealize this type of behavior. Part of their supposed pathology is to have famous American heroes whom they admire and wish to emulate, such as Douglas MacArthur, Andrew Carnegie, and George Patton. Low scorers, however, perceive a gap between their present and ideal selves—a gap Frenkel-Brunswik interprets thus: “Being basically more secure, it seems, they can more easily afford to see a discrepancy between ego-ideal and actual reality” (p. 431). “As adults, low scorers often continue to manifest open anxieties and feelings of depression, due perhaps at least in part to their greater capacity of facing insecurity and conflict” (p. 441).

Again, psychodynamic theory comes to the rescue. Low-scoring subjects appear on the surface as deeply insecure and self-abnegating, and they are unsatisfied with their present selves. But this behavior is interpreted as a sign of greater security than that of the high scorers, who on the surface appear to be self-confident and proud of themselves. In another inversion of reality, Frenkel-Brunswik summarizes her data on self-concept as indicating that “unprejudiced individuals seem to be on better terms with themselves, due perhaps to the fact that they have been more loved and accepted by their parents. Thus they are more ready to admit falling short of their ideals and of the roles they are expected to play by our culture” (p. 441).

Gentiles’ striving after success is also pathologized. In addition to being more likely to seek higher social status and have highly successful American heroes as role models, high scorers appear to want material resources (p. 433ff). Whereas low scorers describe themselves as isolates as children, high scorers are socially popular, hold offices in schools and social organizations, and have many friends. The latter attributes are termed “gang-sociability” by Frenkel-Brunswik (p. 439)—another rhetorical flourish intended to pathologize the behavior of socially successful gentiles.

In fact one might infer that a prominent aspect of this material is the attempt to pathologize adaptive gentile behavior in general. Gentiles who value high-investment marital relationships and cohesive families, who are upwardly mobile and seek material resources, who are proud of their families and identify with their parents, who have high self-concepts, who believe that Christianity is a positive moral force (p. 408) and a spiritual consolation (p. 450), who strongly identify as males or females (but not both!), and who are socially successful and wish to emulate paragons of social success (e.g., American heroes) are viewed as having a psychiatric disorder.

It is highly ironic that a publication of a major Jewish organization would include a concern with social status and material resources, high-investment parenting, identifying with parents, and having pride in one’s family among the signs of psychiatric disorder in gentiles given the extent to which all these attributes characterize Jews. Indeed, the authors make the remarkable conclusion: “We are led to suspect, on the basis of results in numerous areas, that upward class mobility and identification with the status quo correlate positively with ethnocentrism, and that downward class mobility and identification go with anti-ethnocentrism” (p. 204).

Again, the proposed indicators of gentile pathology have been and continue to be critical to the success of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. There has always been intense social pressure for upward mobility and resource acquisition in the Jewish community emanating partly from parents, and Jews have in fact been extraordinarily upwardly mobile. Indeed, Herz and Rosen (1982, 368) note, “Success is so vitally important to the Jewish family ethos that we can hardly overemphasize it… We cannot hope to understand the Jewish family without understanding the place that success for men (and recently women) plays in the system.” And in PTSDA (Ch. 7) it was noted that social class status has been strongly linked with reproductive success in Jewish communities in traditional societies.

Yet, gentiles who are socially isolated, who have negative and rebellious attitudes toward their families, who are ambivalent and insecure in their sexual identities, who have low self-esteem and are filled with debilitating insecurities and conflicts (including insecurities regarding parental affection), who are moving downward in social status, and who have negative attitudes toward high social status and acquisition of material resources are viewed as the epitome of psychological health.¹³⁷

In all this material much is made of the fact that low scorers often seem to seek affection in their relationships. A reasonable interpretation of the findings on affection-striving is that the low scorers have had much more rejecting, ambivalent parent-child relationships compared to the high scorers, with the result that they seek such warm, affectionate relationships in others. There is much evidence in the interview material that the actual parent-child relationships of the low scorers were ambivalent and hostile, and often characterized by desertion and even abuse (see above). The expected consequence of such a situation is that the child will be rebellious against the parents, not identify with the family or larger social categories accepted by the family, and be preoccupied with seeking affection (MacDonald 1992a, 1997a).

The positive family experiences of the high scorers, in contrast, provide them with a powerful sense of emotional security in their personal relationships, with the result that in the projective testing they are “externally oriented” (pp. 563, 565) and concentrate to a much greater extent on instrumental values important in attaining social status and accomplishing other socially approved tasks, such as accumulating resources—”work—ambition—activity” (p. 575). Levinson pathologizes this external orientation by saying that “individuals giving these responses seem afraid to look inward at all, for fear of what they will find” (p. 565). Their worries center around failing and letting down the group, especially the family. They seem intensely motivated to succeed and to make their families proud.

However, this does not mean that the high scorers are unable to develop affectional relationships or that love and affection are unimportant to them. We have already seen that high scorers are attracted to high-investment relationships in which sex is a relatively minor concern, and these individuals appear to accept the primacy of other qualities, including love and common interests, as the basis of marriage. For the high scorers the achievement of emotional security does not become a “holy grail” quest; they do not look for it everywhere. The low scorers, though, seem to be engaged in a rather pathetic search for love that was presumably missing from their early relationships. As Frenkel-Brunswik comments in summarizing the interview data on sexual orientation, “Ambivalence toward the other sex seems in low scorers often to be the consequence of an overly intense search for love that is not easily satisfied” (p. 405).

Like securely attached children in the presence of an attachment object, high scorers are free to explore the world and engage in adaptive, externally directed behavior without constantly worrying about the status of their attachment with their mothers (Ainsworth et al. 1978). Low scorers, in contrast, like insecurely attached children, seem preoccupied with security and affection needs. Since these needs have not been met within their families, they seek affection in all their relationships; at the same time they are preoccupied with their own failures, have diffuse hostility toward others, and are rebellious against anything their parents valued.

DISCUSSION

The perspective developed here thus inverts the psychodynamic perspective of The Authoritarian Personality because it essentially accepts the data at their face value. Because of their fundamentally political program of indicting gentile culture and especially gentiles who represent the most successful and culturally approved members of their society, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality were forced to adopt a psychodynamic perspective in which all of the relationships were inverted. Surface insecurity becomes a sign of deep-felt security and a realistic perspective on life. Surface security and self-confidence become signs of deep insecurities and unresolved hostilities symptomatic of a fear of “looking inside.”

Another fundamental mistake is to suppose that any inhibition of children’s desires produces hostility and submerged aggression toward the parent. That the parents of the high scorers discipline their children but their children still admire them and, indeed, “glorify” them is thus, from the intellectual perspective of The Authoritarian Personality, ipso facto evidence that there is suppressed hostility and aggression toward the parents (see especially p. 357).

It should be apparent from the above discussion, however, that the “victimization” and the underlying hostility are entirely inferred. They are theoretical constructs for which there is not a shred of evidence. There is no reason whatever to suppose that disciplining children leads to suppressed hostility when it is done in the context of a generally positive relationship.

Psychoanalysis was obviously an ideal vehicle for creating this upside-down world. Both Brown (1965) and especially Altemeyer (1988) note the arbitrariness of the psychodynamic explanations found in The Authoritarian Personality. Thus Altemeyer (1988, 54) notes that statements of praise for one’s parents in high scorers are a sign of “over-glorification” and repression of aggression, whereas statements of hostility are taken at face value. Statements alluding to both praise and hostility are taken as a combination of overglorification and accurate recollection.

Psychoanalysis essentially allowed the authors to make up any story they wanted. If the family relationships of high scorers were very positive on the surface, one could propose that the surface happiness and affection masked deep, unconscious hostilities. Any shred of negative feelings high scorers felt toward their parents then became a lever to be used to create an imaginary world of suppressed hostility masked by surface affection. Yet when, in another volume of Studies in Prejudice Bettelheim and Janowitz (1950) found that anti-Semites described poor relationships with their parents, the results were taken at face value. The result was not science, but it was effective in achieving its political goals.

It is noteworthy that all five volumes of the Studies in Prejudice utilize psychoanalysis to produce theories in which anti-Semitism is attributed to intrapsychic conflict, sexual repressions, and troubled parent-child relationships while also denying the importance of cultural separatism and the reality of group-based competition for resources (other examples, including the theory of Freud in Moses and Monotheism, are reviewed in Ch. 4.) Psychoanalytic interpretations of anti-Semitism continue to appear (e.g., Ostow 1995). There is a sort of family resemblance to the theories in that much use is made of projections and the development of complicated psychodynamic formulations, although the actual dynamics are not at all identical. At times, as in another volume in the Studies in Prejudice series (Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder [Ackerman & Jahoda 1950]), there seems to be no comprehensible general theory of anti-Semitism but, rather, a set of ad hoc psychodynamic proposals whose only similarity is that anti-Semitism involves the projection of some sort of intrapsychic conflict. So far as I know, there has been no attempt to subject these different psychodynamic theories to empirical tests that would distinguish among them.

It may appear disturbing to accept the alternative picture developed here. I am essentially saying that the families of the high scorers were adaptive. They combined warmth and affection with a sense of responsibility and discipline, and the children appear to have been ambitious and interested in upholding the values of family and country. The family functioned as an ingroup, as Frenkel-Brunswik and Levinson propose, and the successful transmission of cultural values may well have included negative attributions toward individuals from other groups of which the family was not a member. The high scorers then accepted the ingroup-outgroup biases of their parents, just as they accepted many other parental values. High scorers are thus socially connected and feel a responsibility to ingroup (family) norms. In Triandis’s (1990, 55) terms, these individuals are “allocentric” people living in an individualist society; that is, they are people who are socially integrated and receive high levels of social support. They identify strongly with ingroup (family) norms.

The perspective developed here emphasizes identificatory processes as underlying the transmission of family attitudes (MacDonald 1992a, 1997a). As Aronson (1992, 320-321) notes, all of the studies connecting prejudice with parent-child relationships inspired by The Authoritarian Personality are correlational, and the results can equally well be explained as due to identificatory processes. Similarly, Billig (1976, 116-117)) argues that competent families may be prejudiced, and that prejudices may be transmitted within families in the same manner as any number of other beliefs are transmitted. Thus Pettigrew (1958) found high levels of anti-black prejudice among South African whites, but their personalities were rather normal and they were not high on the F-scale measuring authoritarianism.

The high scorers studied in The Authoritarian Personality accept the ingroup-outgroup biases of their parents and other parental values, but this does not explain the origins of parental values themselves. The data provided here show how competent families can be instrumental in transmitting such values between generations. Contemporary developmental psychology provides no reason to suppose that competent, affectionate families would necessarily produce children with no negative attributions regarding outgroups.

Another major theme here is that whereas allegiance to ingroups indicates psychopathology in gentiles, the epitome of psychological health for the authors of The Authoritarian Personality is the individualist who is completely detached from all ingroups, including his or her family. As indicated above, research on individualism-collectivism indicates that such individualists would be less prone to anti-Semitism. It is interesting that for Adorno the most laudable type of low scorer is “The Genuine Liberal,” whose “views regarding minorities are guided by the idea of the individual” (p. 782).¹³⁸ The exemplar of a genuine liberal discussed in the text (F515) believes that anti-Semitism is due to jealousy because Jews are smarter. This person is quite willing to allow completely free competition between Jews and gentiles: “We don’t want any competition. If they [Jews] want it they should have it. I don’t know if they are more intelligent, but if they are they should have it” (p. 782).¹³⁹

According to Adorno, then, psychologically healthy gentiles are unconcerned about being outcompeted by Jews and declining in social status. They are complete individualists with a strong sense of personal autonomy and independence, and they conceptualize Jews as individuals completely independent of their group affiliation. While gentiles are censured for not being individualists, Adorno does not censure Jews who identify strongly with a group that historically has functioned to facilitate resource competition with gentiles (PTSDA, Chs. 5, 6) and remains a powerful influence in several highly contentious areas of public policy, including immigration, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties (Goldberg 1996, 5). Indeed, social identity theory predicts that Jews would be more likely to have stereotyped, negative conceptualizations of gentiles than the reverse (SAID, Ch. 1).

The personality approach to outgroup prejudice has been criticized in the years since the publication of The Authoritarian Personality. Social identity research suggests that variation in outgroup hostility is independent of variation in personality or in parent-child relationships. This research indicates that although there are individual differences in attraction to ingroups (and, indeed, Jews are very high on ethnocentrism), attitudes toward outgroups reflect universal adaptations (see SAID, Ch. 1). Within the social identity perspective, much of the variation in outgroup hostility can be explained by situational variables such as the perceived permeability of the outgroup and whether the ingroup and outgroup are engaged in resource competition.

Consistent with this perspective, Billig (1976, 119-120) notes that the exclusive focus on personality (i.e., the unchanging traits of individuals) fails to take into account the role of self-interest in ethnic conflict. Moreover, studies such as that of Pettigrew (1958) indicate that one can easily be a racist without having an authoritarian personality; these studies also suggest a role for local norms which may themselves be influenced by perceived resource competition between groups.

Conversely, Altemeyer (1981, 28) notes that fascist, authoritarian governments are not necessarily hostile toward minorities, as in the case of fascist Italy. Indeed, the role of traditional norms is well-illustrated by this example. Jews were prominent members of early Italian fascist governments and active thereafter (Johnson 1988, 501). Italian society during the period was, however, highly authoritarian, and there was a corporate, highly cohesive group structure to the society as a whole. The government was highly popular, but antiSemitism was not important until Hitler forced the issue. Because anti-Semitism was not an official component of the Italian fascist group strategy, authoritarianism occurred without anti-Semitism.

Altemeyer (1981, 238-239) also reports finding much lower correlations between authoritarianism and ethnic prejudice in his studies than were found by Adorno et al. Moreover, Altemeyer notes that the data are consistent with the proposal that authoritarian individuals are ethnocentric only to the extent that other ethnic groups are conventional targets of discrimination by groups with which the authoritarian individual identifies. Similarly, “intrinsically” religious people tend to be hostile toward outgroups only where the religion itself does not proscribe such hostility (Batson & Burris 1994). The defining feature of authoritarian individuals in this view is simply their adoption of the social conventions and norms of the group, some of which may involve negative attitudes toward outgroups. This proposal is highly compatible with the present approach to group identification and group conflict.

In addition, Billig (1976) found that many fascists failed to conform to the rigid, inhibited stereotype portrayed by the authors of The Authoritarian Personality. Such a portrayal is implicit in the psychoanalytic theory that liberation of sexual urges would lead to an end to anti-Semitism, but these fascists were uninhibited, violent, and anti-authoritarian.¹⁴⁰ Personality trait theory also fails to explain short-term changes in hatred toward Jews, such as found by Massing (1949), which could not possibly have been caused by changes in parent-child relationships or patterns of sexual repression. One might also mention the very rapid changes in American attitudes toward the Japanese before, during, and after World War II, or the rapid decline in anti-Semitism in the United States following World War II.

A prominent aspect of the Authoritarian Personality program of research was the conflation of two rather separate concepts, hostility toward other ethnic groups and authoritarianism. It is interesting in this regard that authoritarianism in personality would appear to involve susceptibility to engaging in group strategies, and that engaging in group strategies may be only tangentially related to hostility toward other ethnic groups. Altemeyer (1988, 2) defines “right-wing authoritarianism” as involving three central attributes: submission to legitimate social authority; aggression toward individuals that is sanctioned by the authorities; adherence to social conventions.

Clearly, individuals high on these traits would be ideal members of cohesive human group evolutionary strategies. Indeed, such attributes would define the ideal Jew in traditional societies: submissive to the kehilla authorities, strongly adherent to within-group social conventions such as the observance of Jewish religious law, and characterized by negative attitudes toward gentile society and culture seen as manifestations of an outgroup. Consistent with this formulation, high scorers on the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale (RWA) tend to be highly religious; they tend to be the most orthodox and committed members of their denomination; they believe in group cohesiveness, group loyalty, and identify strongly with ingroups (Altemeyer 1994, 134; 1996, 84). Without question, traditional Jewish society and contemporary Jewish Orthodox and fundamentalist groups are highly authoritarian by any measure. Indeed, Rubenstein (1996) found that Orthodox Jews were higher on RWA than “traditional Jews,” and both of these groups were higher than secular Jews.

A primary motivation of the Berkeley group can then be seen as an attempt to pathologize this powerful sense of group orientation among gentiles partly by forging a largely illusory (or at least highly contingent) link between these “group-cohesiveness” promoting traits and anti-Semitism. The Berkeley group succeeded in disseminating the ideology that there was a “deep,” structural connection between anti-Semitism and this powerful sense of group orientation. By providing a unitary account of authoritarianism and hostility toward outgroups and by locating the origins of this syndrome in disturbed parent-child relations, the Berkeley group had effectively developed a powerful weapon in the war against anti-Semitism.

The present theoretical perspective is compatible with the research results indicating that ethnic hostility and anti-Semitism are only tangentially related to authoritarianism. It has been noted that authoritarianism refers to a set of traits that predispose individuals to strongly identify with highly cohesive groups that impose uniform standards of behavior on group members. Since authoritarian individuals are highly prone to submerging themselves within the group, conforming to group conventions, and accepting group goals, there will indeed be a tendency toward anti-Semitism when the ingroup itself is anti-Semitic; there will also be a tendency toward ethnocentrism when the group membership itself is based on ethnicity.

This is essentially the position of Altemeyer (1981, 238), since he proposes that the fairly weak associations usually found between authoritarianism and hostility toward outgroups reflect conventional hostility toward outgroups. From this perspective, these concepts may be empirically associated in particular samples, but there is no structural connection between them. The association simply reflects the authoritarian tendency to adopt social conventions and norms of the group, including the negative attitudes toward particular outgroups. This perspective would account for the significant but modest correlations (.30-.50) Altemeyer (1994) finds between authoritarianism and ethno-centrism.

Moreover, from the standpoint of social identity research, there is no empirical or logical requirement that powerful, cohesive groups need necessarily be based on ethnicity as an organizing principle. As argued in SAID, whether the group itself is anti-Semitic seems to depend crucially on whether Jews are perceived as a highly salient, impermeable group within the larger society and whether they are perceived as having conflicts of interest with gentiles. There is a great deal of evidence that perceptions of group competition with Jews have often not been illusory. Social identity theory proposes that as between-group competition becomes more salient, there will be an increasing tendency for people to join cohesive, authoritarian groups arrayed against perceived outgroups.

In conclusion, I have no doubt that the results of studies on authoritarianism, including The Authoritarian Personality, can be integrated with contemporary psychological data. However, I would suggest that developing a body of scientific knowledge was never an important consideration in these studies. The agenda is to develop an ideology of anti-Semitism that rallies ingroup loyalties to Judaism and attempts to alter gentile culture in a manner that benefits Judaism by portraying gentile group loyalties (including nationalism, Christian religious affiliation, close family relationships, high-investment parenting, and concern with social and material success) as indicators of psychiatric disorder. Within these writings the nature of Judaism is completely irrelevant to anti-Semitism; Judaism is conceptualized, as Ackerman and Jahoda (1950, 74) suggest in another volume of Studies in Prejudice, as a Rorschach inkblot in which the pathology of anti-Semites is revealed. These theories serve the same functions that Jewish religious ideology has always served: the rationalization of the continuation of Judaism both to ingroup members and to gentiles combined with very negative views of gentile culture.

As in the case of psychoanalysis generally, the results of scientific investigation appear to be largely unrelated to the dissemination and persistence of the idea that authoritarianism or certain types of parent-child relationships are linked to hostility toward other groups. A consistent thread of Altemeyer’s (1981) review of the Authoritarian Personality literature is that these ideas persist within the wider culture and even within textbooks in college psychology courses in the absence of scientific support:¹⁴¹

The reader familiar with the matter knows that most these criticisms are over 25 years old, and now they might be considered little more than flaying a dead horse. Unfortunately the flaying is necessary, for the horse is not dead, but still trotting around—in various introductory psychology and developmental psychology textbooks, for example. Methodological criticisms seem to travel a shorter circuit and die a much quicker death than “scientific breakthroughs.” In conclusion then, no matter how often it is stated that the Berkeley investigators [i.e., Adorno et al.] discovered the childhood origins of authoritarianism, the facts of the matter are anything but convincing. (Altemeyer 1988, 38)¹⁴²

In this regard it is interesting that in addition to the failure to replicate the Berkeley group’s central empirical finding of a strong association between authoritarianism and hostility toward other ethnic groups, The Authoritarian Personality also suffers from severe methodological shortcomings, some of which suggest conscious attempts at deception. Besides the “response set” difficulty pervading the construction of all the scales, perhaps simply reflecting naïveté in scale construction, Altemeyer (1981, 27-28) notes that the F-scale measuring authoritarianism was constructed by retaining items that correlated well with anti-Semitism. Altemeyer notes, for example, that the item “Books and movies ought not to deal so much with the sordid and seamy side of life; they ought to concentrate on themes that are entertaining and uplifting” appeared on earlier versions of the F-scale and was highly discriminating. However, it did not correlate highly with the Anti-Semitism Scale and was dropped from later versions. Altemeyer notes, “Despite the statement… that the most discriminating items on the initial form were carried over to the next model ‘in the same or slightly revised form,’ the ‘books and movies’ item simply disappeared, forever. It is not hard to construct a scale which will correlate highly with another if you eliminate items that are insufficiently related with the target” (pp. 27-28).

The suggestion is that highly discriminating items were dropped if they did not correlate with anti-Semitism, despite assurances to the contrary. In fact, Wiggershaus (1994, 372ff) shows quite clearly that Adorno placed a high priority on developing the F-scale as an indirect means of measuring anti-Semitism, that he was little concerned about following normal scientific procedures in achieving this goal, and that his procedure was exactly as Altemeyer describes:

In Berkeley, we then developed the F-scale with a freedom which differed considerably from the idea of a pedantic science which has to justify each of its steps. The reason for this was probably what, over there, might have been termed the “psychoanalytic background” of the four of us who were leading the project, particularly our familiarity with the method of free association. I emphasize this because a work like The Authoritarian Personality… was produced in a manner which does not correspond at all to the usual image of positivism in social science… We spent hours waiting for ideas to occur to us, not just for entire dimensions, “variables” and syndromes, but also for individual items for the questionnaire. The less their relation to the main topic was visible, the prouder we were of them, while we expected for theoretical reasons to find correlations between ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism and reactionary views in the political and economic sphere. We then checked these items in constant “pre-tests,” using these both to restrict the questionnaire to a reasonable size, which was technically necessary, and to exclude those items which proved not to be sufficiently selective. (Adorno; in Wiggershaus 1994, 373)

It is not difficult to suppose that the entire program of research of The Authoritarian Personality involved deception from beginning to end. This is suggested by the authors’ clear political agenda and the pervasive double standard in which gentile ethnocentrism and gentile adherence to cohesive groups are seen as symptoms of psychopathology whereas Jews are simply viewed as victims of irrational gentile pathologies and no mention is made of Jewish ethnocentrism or allegiance to cohesive groups. There was also a double standard in which left-wing authoritarianism was completely ignored whereas right-wing authoritarianism was “found” to be a psychiatric disorder.¹⁴³ As indicated above, deception is also suggested by the fact that the basic theory of the role of parent-child relations in producing ethnocentrism and hostility toward outgroups was developed as a philosophical theory conceptualized by the authors as not subject to empirical verification or falsification. Indeed, the entire thrust of the Frankfurt School’s view of science rejects the idea that science should attempt to understand reality in favor of the ideology that science ought to serve moral (i.e., political) interests. Further, it is suggested by the fact that the anti-democratic leanings of Adorno and Horkheimer and their radical critique of the mass culture of capitalism were not apparent in this work intended for an American audience (Jay 1973, 248). (Similarly, Horkheimer tended to portray Critical Theory as a form of radicalism to his “Marxist friends” while representing it “as a form of faithfulness to the European tradition in the humanities and philosophy” when discussing it with “official university people” [Wiggershaus 1994, 252].)

Finally, there were a host of well-recognized methodological difficulties, including the use of unrepresentative subjects in the interview data, the very incomplete and misleading information on the reliability of the measures, and the discussion of insignificant relationships as if they were significant (Altemeyer 1981). I have also pointed out the extremely strained, ad hoc, and counterintuitive interpretations that characterize the study (see also Lasch 1991, 453). Particularly egregious is the consistent use of psychodynamic thinking to produce any desired interpretive outcome.

Of course, deception may not be as important here as self-deception—a common enough feature of Jewish intellectual history (see SAID, Chs. 7, 8). In any case, the result was excellent political propaganda and a potent weapon in the war on anti-Semitism.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

Although it is difficult to assess the effect of works like The Authoritarian Personality on gentile culture, there can be little question that the thrust of the radical critique of gentile culture in this work, as well as other works inspired by psychoanalysis and its derivatives, was to pathologize high-investment parenting and upward social mobility, as well as pride in family, religion, and country, among gentiles. Certainly many of the central attitudes of the largely successful 1960s countercultural revolution find expression in The Authoritarian Personality, including idealizing rebellion against parents, low-investment sexual relationships, and scorn for upward social mobility, social status, family pride, the Christian religion, and patriotism.

We have seen that despite this antagonistic perspective on gentile culture, Jewish 1960s radicals continued to identify with their parents and with Judaism. The countercultural revolution was in a very deep sense a mission to the gentiles in which adaptive behavior and group-identifications of gentiles were pathologized while Jewish group identification, ingroup pride, family pride, upward social mobility, and group continuity retained their psychological importance and positive moral evaluation. In this regard, the behavior of these radicals was exactly analogous to that of the authors of The Authoritarian Personality and Jewish involvement in psychoanalysis and radical politics generally: Gentile culture and gentile group strategies are fundamentally pathological and are to be anathemized in the interests of making the world safe for Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy.

As with political radicalism, only a rarified cultural elite could attain the extremely high level of mental health epitomized by the true liberal:

The replacement of moral and political argument by reckless psychologizing not only enabled Adorno and his collaborators to dismiss unacceptable political opinions on medical grounds; it led them to set up an impossible standard of political health—one that only members of a self-constituted cultural vanguard could consistently meet. In order to establish their emotional “autonomy,” the subjects of their research had to hold the right opinions and also to hold them deeply and spontaneously. (Lasch 1991, 453-455)

In the post-World War II era The Authoritarian Personality became an ideological weapon against historical American populist movements, especially McCarthyism (Gottfried 1998; Lasch 1991, 455ff). “[T]he people as a whole had little understanding of liberal democracy and… important questions of public policy would be decided by educated elites, not submitted to popular vote” (Lasch 1991, 455).

These trends are exemplified in The Politics of Unreason, a volume in the Patterns of American Prejudice Series funded by the ADL and written by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab (1970). (Raab and Lipset also wrote Prejudice and Society, published by the ADL in 1959. Again, as in the Studies in Prejudice Series [funded by the AJCommittee] there is a link between academic research on ethnic relations and Jewish activist organizations. Raab’s career has combined academic scholarship with deep involvement as a Jewish ethnic activist; see Ch. 7, note 1.) As indicated by the title, The Politics of Unreason analyses political and ideological expressions of ethnocentrism by European-derived peoples as irrational and as being unrelated to legitimate ethnic interests in retaining political power. “Right-wing extremist” movements aim at retaining or restoring the power of the European-derived majority of the United States, but “Extremist politics is the politics of despair” (Lipset & Raab 1970, 3). For Lipset and Raab, tolerance of cultural and ethnic pluralism is a defining feature of democracy, so that groups that oppose cultural and ethnic pluralism are by definition extremist and anti-democratic. Indeed, citing Edward A. Shils (1956, 154), they conceptualize pluralism as implying multiple centers of power without domination by any one group—a view in which the self-interest of ethnic groups in retaining and expanding their power is conceptualized as fundamentally anti-democratic. Attempts by majorities to resist the increase in the power and influence of other groups are therefore contrary to “the fixed spiritual center of the democratic political process” (p. 5). “Extremism is anti-pluralism… And the operational heart of extremism is the repression of difference and dissent” (p. 6; italics in text).

Right-wing extremism is condemned for its moralism—an ironic move given the centrality of a sense of moral superiority that pervades the Jewish-dominated intellectual movements reviewed here, not to mention Lipset and Raab’s own analysis in which right-wing extremism is labeled “an absolute political evil” (p. 4) because of its links with authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Right-wing extremism is also condemned for its tendency to advocate simple solutions to complex problems, which, as noted by Lasch (1991), is a plea that solutions to social problems should be formulated by an intellectual elite. And finally, right-wing extremism is condemned because of its tendency to distrust institutions that intervene between the people and their direct exercise of power, another plea for the power of elites: “Populism identifies the will of the people with justice and morality” (p. 13). The conclusion of this analysis is that democracy is identified not with the power of the people to pursue their perceived interests. Rather, democracy is conceptualized as guaranteeing that majorities will not resist the expansion of power of minorities even if that means a decline in their own power.

Viewed at its most abstract level, a fundamental agenda is thus to influence the European-derived peoples of the United States to view concern about their own demographic and cultural eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology. Adorno’s concept of the “pseudo-conservative” was used by influential intellectuals such as Harvard historian Richard Hofstadter to condemn departures from liberal orthodoxy in terms of the psychopathology of “status anxiety.” Hofstadter developed the “consensus” approach to history, characterized by Nugent (1963, 22) as having “a querulous view of popular movements, which seem to threaten the leadership of an urbanized, often academic, intelligentsia or elite, and the use of concepts that originated in the behavioral sciences.” In terms derived entirely from the Authoritarian Personality studies, pseudo-conservatism is diagnosed as “among other things a disorder in relation to authority, characterized by an inability to find other modes for human relationship than those of more or less complete domination or submission” (Hofstadter 1965, 58). As Nugent (1963, 26) points out, this perspective largely ignored the “concrete economic and political reality involved in populism and therefore left it to be viewed fundamentally in terms of the psychopathological and irrational.” This is precisely the method of The Authoritarian Personality: Real conflicts of interest between ethnic groups are conceptualized as nothing more than the irrational projections of the inadequate personalities of majority group members.

Lasch also focuses on the work of Leslie Friedman, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset as representing similar tendencies. (In a collection of essays edited by Daniel Bell [1955] entitled The New American Right, both Hofstadter and Lipset refer approvingly to The Authoritarian Personality as a way of understanding right-wing political attitudes and behavior.) Nugent (1963, 7ff) mentions an overlapping set of individuals who were not historians and whose views were based mostly on impressions without any attempt at detailed study, including Victor Ferkiss, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Lipset, Edward A. Shils, and Peter Viereck. However, this group also included historians who “were among the luminaries of the historical profession” (Nugent 1963, 13), including Hofstadter, Oscar Handlin, and Max Lerner—all of whom were involved in intellectual activity in opposition to restrictionist immigration policies (see Ch. 7). A common theme was what Nugent (1963, 15) terms “undue stress” on the image of the populist as an anti-Semite—an image that exaggerated and oversimplified the Populist movement but was sufficient to render the movement as morally repugnant. Novick (1988, 341) is more explicit in finding that Jewish identification was an important ingredient in this analysis, attributing the negative view of American populism held by some American Jewish historians (Hofstadter, Bell, and Lipset) to the fact that “they were one generation removed from the Eastern European shtetl [small Jewish town], where insurgent gentile peasants meant pogrom.”

There may be some truth in the latter comment, but I rather doubt that the interpretations of these Jewish historians were simply an irrational legacy left over from European anti-Semitism. There were also real conflicts of interest involved. On one side were Jewish intellectuals advancing their interests as an urbanized intellectual elite bent on ending Protestant, Anglo-Saxon demographic and cultural predominance. On the other side were what Higham (1984, 49) terms “the common people of the South and West” who were battling to maintain their own cultural and demographic dominance. (The struggle between these groups is the theme of the discussion of Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy in Ch. 7 as well as the discussion of the New York Intellectuals in Ch. 6. Several of the intellectuals mentioned here are regarded as members of the New York Intellectuals [Bell, Glazer, Lipset, Riesman, and Shils], while others [Hofstadter and Handlin] may be regarded as peripheral members; see Ch. 7, note 26.)

As the vanguard of an urbanized Jewish intellectual elite, this group of intellectuals was also contemptuous of the lower middle class generally. From the perspective of these intellectuals, this class

clung to outworn folkways—conventional religiosity, hearth and home, the sentimental cult of motherhood—and obsolete modes of production. It looked back to a mythical golden age in the past. It resented social classes more highly placed but internalized their standards, lording it over the poor instead of joining them in a common struggle against oppression. It was haunted by the fear of slipping farther down the social scale and clutched the shreds of respectability that distinguished it from the class of manual workers. Fiercely committed to a work ethic, it believed that anyone who wanted a job could find one and that those who refused to work should starve. Lacking liberal culture, it fell easy prey to all sorts of nostrums and political fads. (Lasch 1991, 458)

Recall also Nicholas von Hoffman’s (1996) comment on the attitude of cultural superiority to the lower middle class held by the liberal defenders of communism during this period, such as Hofstadter and the editors of The New Republic. “In the ongoing kulturkampf dividing the society, the elites of Hollywood, Cambridge and liberal thank-tankery had little sympathy for bow-legged men with their American Legion caps and their fat wives, their yapping about Yalta and the Katyn Forest. Catholic and kitsch, looking out of their picture windows at their flock of pink plastic flamingos, the lower middles and their foreign policy anguish were too infra dig to be taken seriously” (von Hoffman 1996, C2).

Another good example of this intellectual onslaught on the lower middle-class associated with the Frankfurt School is Erich Fromm’s (1941) Escape from Freedom, in which the lower middle-class is regarded as highly prone to developing “sado-masochistic” reaction formations (as indicated by participating in authoritarian groups!) as a response to their economic and social status frustrations. It is not surprising that the lower middle-class target of this intellectual onslaught—including, one might add, the mittlestand of Wilhelminian German politics—has historically been prone to anti-Semitism as an explanation of their downward social mobility and their frustrated attempts to achieve upward social mobility. This group has also been prone to joining cohesive authoritarian groups as a means of attaining their political goals. But within the context of The Authoritarian Personality, the desire for upward social mobility and the concern with downward social mobility characteristic of many supporters of populist movements is a sign of a specific psychiatric disorder, a pathetic result of inappropriate socialization that would disappear in the liberalized utopian society of the future.

Although Critical Theory ceased to be a guide for protest movements by the early 1970s (Wiggershaus 1994, 656), it has retained a very large influence in the intellectual world generally. In the 1970s, the Frankfurt School intellectuals continued to draw the fire of German conservatives who characterized them as the “intellectual foster-parents of terrorists” and as fomenters of “cultural revolution to destroy the Christian West” (Wiggershaus 1994, 657). “The inseparability of concepts such as Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and neo-Marxism indicates that, from the 1930’s onwards, theoretically productive left-wing ideas in German-speaking countries had focused on Horkheimer, Adorno and the Institute of Social Research” (Wiggershaus 1994, 658).

However, the influence of the Frankfurt School has gone well beyond the German-speaking world, and not only with The Authoritarian Personality studies, the writings of Erich Fromm, and the enormously influential work of Herbert Marcuse as a countercultural guru to the New Left. In the contemporary intellectual world, there are several journals devoted to this legacy, including New German Critique, Cultural Critique, and Theory, Culture, and Society: Explorations in Critical Social Science. The influence of the Frankfurt School increased greatly following the success of the New Left countercultural movement of the 1960s (Piccone 1993, xii). Reflecting its current influence in the humanities, the Frankfurt School retains pride of place as a major inspiration at the meetings of the notoriously postmodern Modern Language Association held in December 1994. Kramer and Kimball (1995) describe the large number of laudatory references to Adorno, Horkheimer, and especially Walter Benjamin, who had the honor of being the most-referred-to scholar at the convention.¹⁴⁴ Marxism and psychoanalysis were also major influences at the conference. One bright spot occurred when the radical Marxist Richard Ohmann acknowledged that the humanities had been revolutionized by the “critical legacy of the Sixties” (p. 12)—a point of view, Kramer and Kimball note, often denied by the academic left but commonplace in conservative publications like The New Criterion and central to the perspective developed here.

Reflecting the congruence between the Frankfurt School and contemporary postmodernism, the enormously influential postmodernist Michel Foucault stated, “If I had known about the Frankfurt School in time, I would have been saved a great deal of work. I would not have said a certain amount of nonsense and would not have taken so many false trails trying not to get lost, when the Frankfurt School had already cleared the way” (in Wiggershaus 1994, 4). Whereas the strategy of the Frankfurt School was to deconstruct universalist, scientific thinking by the use of “critical reason,” postmodernism has opted for complete relativism and the lack of objective standards of any kind in the interests of preventing any general theories of society or universally valid philosophical or moral systems (Norris 1993, 287ff).¹⁴⁵

Contemporary postmodernism and multiculturalist ideology (see, e.g., Gless & Herrnstein Smith 1992) have adopted several central pillars of the Frankfurt School: the fundamental priority of ethics and values in approaching education and the social sciences; empirical science as oppressive and an aspect of social domination; a rejection of the possibility of shared values or any sense of universalism or national culture (see also Jacoby’s [1995, 35] discussion of “post-colonial theory”—another intellectual descendant of the Frankfurt School); a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in which any attempt to construct such universals or a national culture is energetically resisted and “deconstructed”—essentially the same activity termed by Adorno “negative dialectics.” There is an implicit acceptance of a Balkanized model of society in which certain groups and their interests have a priori moral value and there is no possibility of developing a scientific, rational theory of any particular group, much less a theory of pan-human universals. Both the Frankfurt School and postmodernism implicitly accept a model in which there is competition among antagonistic groups and no rational way of reaching consensus, although there is also an implicit double standard in which cohesive groups formed by majorities are viewed as pathological and subject to radical criticism.

It is immensely ironic that this onslaught against Western universalism effectively rationalizes minority group ethnocentrism while undercutting the intellectual basis of ethnocentrism. Intellectually one wonders how one could be a postmodernist and a committed Jew at the same time. Intellectual consistency would seem to require that all personal identifications be subjected to the same deconstructing logic, unless, of course, personal identity itself involves deep ambiguities, deception, and self-deception. This in fact appears to be the case for Jacques Derrida, the premier philosopher of deconstruction, whose philosophy shows the deep connections between the intellectual agendas of postmodernism and the Frankfurt School.¹⁴⁶ Derrida has a complex and ambiguous Jewish identity despite being “a leftist Parisian intellectual, a secularist and an atheist” (Caputo 1997, xxiii). Derrida was born into a Sephardic Jewish family that immigrated to Algeria from Spain in the nineteenth century. His family were thus crypto-Jews who retained their religious-ethnic identity for 400 years in Spain during the period of the Inquisition.

Derrida identifies himself as a crypto-Jew—”Marranos that we are, Marranos in any case whether we want to be or not, whether we know it or not” (Derrida 1993a, 81)—a confession perhaps of the complexity, ambivalence, and self-deception often involved in post-Enlightenment forms of Jewish identity. In his notebooks, Derrida (1993b, 70) writes of the centrality that Jewish issues have held in his writing: “Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about.” In the same passage he writes that he has always taken “the most careful account, in anamnesis, of the fact that in my family and among the Algerian Jews, one scarcely ever said ‘circumcision’ but ‘baptism,’ not Bar Mitzvah but ‘communion,’ with the consequences of softening, dulling, through fearful acculturation, that I’ve always suffered from more or less consciously” (1993b, 72-73)—an allusion to the continuation of crypto-Jewish practices among the Algerian Jews and a clear indication that Jewish identification and the need to hide it have remained psychologically salient to Derrida. Significantly, he identifies his mother as Esther (1993b, 73), the biblical heroine who “had not made known her people nor her kindred” (Est. 2:10) and who was an inspiration to generations of crypto-Jews. Derrida was deeply attached to his mother and states as she nears death, “I can be sure that you will not understand much of what you will nonetheless have dictated to me, inspired me with, asked of me, ordered from me.” Like his mother (who spoke of baptism and communion rather than circumcision and Bar Mitzvah), Derrida thus has an inward Jewish identity while outwardly assimilating to the French Catholic culture of Algeria. For Derrida, however, there are indications of ambivalence for both identities (Caputo 1997, 304): “I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts” (Derrida 1993b, 170).

Derrida’s experience with anti-Semitism during World War II in Algeria was traumatic and inevitably resulted in a deep consciousness of his own Jewishness. Derrida was expelled from school at age 13 under the Vichy government because of the numerus clausus, a self-described “little black and very Arab Jew who understood nothing about it, to whom no one ever gave the slightest reason, neither his parents nor his friends” (Derrida 1993b, 58).

The persecutions, which were unlike those of Europe, were all the same unleashed in the absence of any German occupier… It is an experience that leaves nothing intact, an atmosphere that one goes on breathing forever. Jewish children expulsed from school. The principal’s office: You are going to go home, your parents will explain. Then the Allies landed, it was the period of the so-called two-headed government (de Gaulle-Giraud): racial laws maintained for almost six months, under a “free” French government. Friends who no longer knew you, insults, the Jewish high school with its expulsed teachers and never a whisper of protest from their colleagues… From that moment, I felt—how to put it?—just as out-of-place in a closed Jewish community as I did on the other side (we called them “the Catholics”). In France, the suffering subsided. I naively thought that anti-Semitism had disappeared… But during adolescence, it was the tragedy, it was present in everything else… Paradoxical effect, perhaps, of this brutalization: a desire for integration in the non-Jewish community, a fascinated but painful and suspicious desire, nervously vigilant, an exhausting aptitude to detect signs of racism, in its most discreet configurations or its noisiest disavowals. (Derrida 1995a, 120-121; italics in text)

Bennington (1993, 326) proposes that the expulsion from school and its aftermath were “no doubt… the years during which the singular character of J.D.’s ‘belonging’ to Judaism is imprinted on him: wound, certainly, painful and practiced sensitivity to antisemitism and any racism, ‘raw’ response to xenophobia, but also impatience with gregarious identification, with the militancy of belonging in general, even if it is Jewish… I believe that this difficulty with belonging, one would almost say of identification, affects the whole of J.D.’s oeuvre, and it seems to me that ‘the deconstruction of the proper’ is the very thought of this, its thinking affection.”

Indeed, Derrida says as much. He recalls that just before his Bar Mitzvah (which he again notes was termed ‘communion’ by the Algerian Jewish community), when the Vichy government expelled him from school and withdrew his citizenship, “I became the outside, try as they might to come close to me they’ll never touch me again… I did my ‘communion’ by fleeing the prison of all languages, the sacred one they tried to lock me up in without opening me to it [i.e., Hebrew], the secular [i.e., French] they made clear would never be mine” (Derrida 1993b, 289).

As with many Jews seeking a semi-cryptic pose in a largely non-Jewish environment, Derrida altered his name to Jacques. “By choosing what was in some way, to be sure, a semi-pseudonym but also very French, Christian, simple, I must have erased more things than I could say in a few words (one would have to analyze the conditions in which a certain community—the Jewish community in Algeria—in the ‘30s sometimes chose American names)” (Derrida 1995a, 344). Changing his name is thus a form of crypsis as practiced by the Algerian Jewish community, a way of outwardly conforming to the French, Christian culture while secretly remaining Jewish.

Derrida’s Jewish political agenda is identical to that of the Frankfurt School:

The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and native tongue… The idea is to disarm the bombs… of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants,… all of whom… are wholly other. Contrary to the claims of Derrida’s more careless critics, the passion of deconstruction is deeply political, for deconstruction is a relentless, if sometimes indirect, discourse on democracy, on a democracy to come. Derrida’s democracy is a radically pluralistic polity that resists the terror of an organic, ethnic, spiritual unity, of the natural, native bonds of the nation (natus, natio), which grind to dust everything that is not a kin of the ruling kind and genus (Geschlecht). He dreams of a nation without nationalist or nativist closure, of a community without identity, of a non-identical community that cannot say I or we, for, after all, the very idea of a community is to fortify (munis, muneris) ourselves in common against the other. His work is driven by a sense of the consummate danger of an identitarian community, of the spirit of the “we” of “Christian Europe,” or of a “Christian politics,” lethal compounds that spell death of Arabs and Jews, for Africans and Asians, for anything other. The heaving and sighing of this Christian European spirit is a lethal air for Jews and Arabs, for all les juifs [i.e., Jews as prototypical others], even if they go back to father Abraham, a way of gassing them according to both the letter and the spirit. (Caputo 1997, 231-232)

Derrida has recently published a pamphlet advocating immigration of non-Europeans into France (see Lilla 1998). As with the Frankfurt School, the radical skepticism of the deconstructionist movement is in the service of preventing the development of hegemonic, universalist ideologies and other foundations of gentile group allegiance in the name of the tout autre, i.e., the “wholly other.” Caputo ascribes Derrida’s motivation for his deconstruction of Hegel to the latter’s conceptualization of Judaism as morally and spiritually inferior to Christianity because of its legalism and tribalistic exclusivism, whereas Christianity is the religion of love and assimilation, a product of the Greek, not the Jewish spirit. These Hegelian interpretations are remarkably congruent with Christian self-conceptualizations and Christian conceptions of Judaism originating in antiquity (see SAID, Ch. 3), and such a conceptualization fits well with the evolutionary analysis developed in PTSDA. Re-interpretations and refutations of Hegel were common among nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals (see SAID, Ch. 6), and we have seen that in Negative Dialectics Adorno was concerned to refute the Hegelian idea of universal history for similar reasons. “Hegel’s searing, hateful portrait of the Jew… seem[s] to haunt all of Derrida’s work;… by presenting in the most loyal and literal way just what Hegel says, Derrida shows… that Hegel’s denunciations of the Jew’s castrated heart is a heartless, hateful castration of the other” (Caputo 1994, 234, 243). As with the Frankfurt School, Derrida posits that the messianic future is unknown because to say otherwise would lead to the possibility of imposed uniformity, “a systematic whole with infinite warrant” (Caputo 1994, 246), a triumphal and dangerous truth in which Jews as exemplars of the tout autre would necessarily suffer. The human condition is conceptualized as “a blindness that cannot be remedied, a radical, structural condition in virtue of which everyone is blind from birth” (Caputo 1994, 313).

As with the Frankfurt School, the exemplars of otherness have a priori moral value. “In deconstruction love is extricated from the polemic against the Jews by being re-thought in terms of the other, of les juifs… If this organic Hegelian Christian-European community is defined as making a common (com) defense (munis) against the other, Derrida advances the idea of laying down his arms, rendre les armes, surrendering to the other” (p. 248). From this perspective, acknowledging the possibility of truth is dangerous because of the possibility that truth could be used against the other. The best strategy, therefore, is to open up “a salutary competition among interpretations, a certain salutary radical hermeneuticizing, in which we dream with passion of something unforeseeable and impossible” (Caputo 1994, 277). To the conflicting views of differing religions and ideologies, Derrida “opposes a community, if it is one, of the blind[;]… of the blind leading the blind. Blindness makes for good communities, provided we all admit that we do not see, that in the crucial matters we are all stone blind and without privileged access, adrift in the same boat without a lighthouse to show the other shore” (Caputo 1997, 313-314). Such a world is safe for Judaism, the prototypical other, and provides no warrant for the universalizing tendencies of Western civilization (Caputo 1997, 335)—what one might term deconstruction as de-Hellenization or de-Westernization. Minority group ethnic consciousness is thus validated not in the sense that it is known to be based on some sort of psychological truth, but in the sense that it can’t be proved untrue. On the other hand, the cultural and ethnic interests of majorities are “hermeneuticized” and thus rendered impotent—impotent because they cannot serve as the basis for a mass ethnic movement that would conflict with the interests of other groups.

Ironically from the standpoint of the theory of Judaism developed here, Derrida (who has thought a great deal about his own circumcision in his Circonfession [Derrida 1993b]) realizes that circumcision, which he likens to a shibboleth because of its usefulness as a mechanism of ingroup demarcation (i.e., as a mark of Jewish exclusiveness and “otherness”), is a two-edged sword. Commenting on the work of Holocaust poet Paul Celan, Derrida (1994, 67) states, “the mark of a covenant or alliance, it also intervenes, it interdicts, it signifies the sentence of exclusion, of discrimination, indeed of extermination. One may, thanks to the shibboleth, recognize and be recognized by one’s own, for better and for worse, in the cleaving of partaking: on the one hand, for the sake of the partaking and the ring of the covenant, but also, on the other hand, for the purpose of denying the other, of denying him passage or life… Because of the shibboleth and exactly to the extent that one may make use of it, one may see it turned against oneself: then it is the circumcised who are proscribed or held at the border, excluded from the community, put to death, or reduced to ashes” (Derrida 1994, 67-68; italics in text).

Despite the dangers of circumcision as a two-edged sword, Derrida (1994, 68) concludes that “there must be circumcision,” a conclusion that Caputo (1997, 252) interprets as an assertion of an irreducible and undeniable human demand “for a differentiating mark, for a mark of difference.” Derrida thus subscribes to the inevitability (innateness?) of group demarcations, but, amazingly and apologetically, he manages to conceptualize circumcision not as a sign of tribal exclusivism, but as “the cut that opens the space for the incoming of the tout autre” (Caputo 1994, 250)—a remarkable move because, as we have seen, Derrida seems quite aware that circumcision results in separatism, the erection of ingroup-outgroup barriers, and the possibility of between-group conflict and even extermination. But in Derrida’s gloss, “spiritually we are all Jews, all called and chosen to welcome the other” (Caputo 1994, 262), so that Judaism turns out to be a universalist ideology where marks of separatism are interpreted as openness to the other. In Derrida’s view, “if circumcision is Jewish it is only in the sense that all poets are Jews… Everyone ought to have a circumcised heart; this ought to form a universal religion” (Caputo 1994, 262). Similarly in a discussion of James Joyce, Derrida contrasts Joyce and Hegel (as prototypical Western thinkers) who “close the circle of the same” with “Abrahamic [i.e., Jewish] circumcision, which cuts the cord of the same in order to be open to the other, circumcision as saying yes… to the other” (Caputo 1997, 257). Thus in the end, Derrida develops yet another in the age-old conceptualizations of Judaism as a morally superior group while ideologies of sameness and universality that might underlie ideologies of social homogeneity and group consciousness among European gentiles are deconstructed and rendered as morally inferior.

6

The Jewish Criticism of Gentile Culture:
A Reprise

Do you remember, he asked me, what Lueger, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, once said to the municipality of Vienna when a subsidy for the natural sciences was asked for? “Science? That is what one Jew cribs from another.” That is what I say about Ideengeschichte, history of ideas. (Isaiah Berlin, reflecting on a conversation with Lewis Namier; in Efron 1994, 13)

The material in the previous four chapters indicates that individuals who strongly identified as Jews have been the main motivating force behind several highly influential intellectual movements that have simultaneously subjected gentile culture to radical criticism and allowed for the continuity of Jewish identification. Together these movements comprise the intellectual and political left in this century, and they are the direct intellectual ancestors of current leftist intellectual and political movements, particularly postmodernism and multiculturalism.

Collectively, these movements have called into question the fundamental moral, political, and economic foundations of Western society. A critical feature of these movements is that they have been, at least in the United States, top-down movements in the sense that they were originated and dominated by members of a highly intelligent and highly educated group. These movements have been advocated with great intellectual passion and moral fervor and with a very high level of theoretical sophistication. Each movement promised its own often overlapping and complementary version of utopia: a society composed of people with the same biological potential for accomplishment and able to be easily molded by culture into ideal citizens as imagined by a morally and intellectually superior elite; a classless society in which there would be no conflicts of interest and people would altruistically work for the good of the group; a society in which people would be free of neuroses and aggression toward outgroups and in tune with their biological urges; a multicultural paradise in which different racial and ethnic groups would live in harmony and cooperation—a utopian dream that also occupies center stage in the discussion of Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy in Chapter 7. Each of these utopias is profoundly problematic from an evolutionary perspective, a theme that will be returned to in Chapter 8.

The originators of these movements were all vitally concerned with antiSemitism, and all of the utopias envisioned by these intellectual and political movements would end anti-Semitism while allowing for Jewish group continuity. A generation of Jewish radicals looked to the Soviet Union as an idyllic place where Jews could rise to positions of preeminence and where anti-Semitism was officially outlawed while Jewish national life flourished. The psychoanalytic movement and the Frankfurt School looked forward to the day when gentiles would be inoculated against anti-Semitism by a clinical priesthood that could heal the personal inadequacies and the frustrations at loss of status that gentiles murderously projected onto the Jews. And the Boasians and the Frankfurt School and their descendants would prevent the development of anti-Semitic ideologies of majoritarian ethnocentrism.

A palpable sense of intellectual and moral superiority of those participating in these movements is another characteristic feature. This sense of intellectual superiority and hostility to gentiles and their culture was a recurrent theme of the leftist movements discussed in Chapter 3. I have also documented a profound sense of intellectual superiority and estrangement from gentile culture that characterized not only Freud but also the entire psychoanalytic movement. The sense of superiority on the part of a “self-constituted cultural vanguard” (Lasch 1991, 453-455) of Jewish intellectuals toward lower-middle-class mores and attitudes was a theme of Chapter 5.

Regarding moral superiority, the central pose of post-Enlightenment Jewish intellectuals is a sense that Judaism represents a moral beacon to the rest of humanity (SAID, Ch. 7). These movements thus constitute concrete examples of the ancient and recurrent Jewish self-conceptualization as a “a light of the nations,” reviewed extensively in SAID (Ch. 7). Moral indictments of their opponents are a prominent theme in the writings of political radicals and those opposing biological perspectives on individual and group differences in IQ. A sense of moral superiority was also prevalent in the psychoanalytic movement, and we have seen that the Frankfurt School developed a moral perspective in which the existence of Judaism was viewed as an a priori moral absolute and in which social science was to be judged by moral criteria.

As noted in Chapter 1, current psychological theory and data are highly compatible with supposing that viewpoints advocated by minorities are able to influence attitudes held by the majority, especially when possessing a high degree of internal consistency and especially when they are disseminated from the most prestigious academic and media institutions in the society. Although the influence on gentile societies of Jewish involvement in these intellectual and political movements cannot be assessed with any degree of certainty, the material presented here suggests that Jewish involvement was a critical factor in the triumph of the intellectual left in late-twentieth-century Western societies.

Several features of these intellectual movements can be viewed as serving Jewish interests. The greatest danger for a minority group strategy is the development of a highly cohesive, sectarian majority group that views the minority group as a negatively evaluated outgroup. In combating this potential threat, one type of strategy has been to actively promote universalist ideologies within the larger society in which the Jewish-gentile social categorization is of minimal importance. Judaism as a cohesive, ethnically based group strategy continues to exist, but in a cryptic or semi-cryptic state. The exemplar of this strategy is leftist political ideology; however psychoanalysis and even forms of Judaism that minimize phenotypic differentiation between Jews and gentiles, such as Reform Judaism (see SAID, Ch. 6), adopt a similar strategy.

Jewish interests are also served by facilitating radical individualism (social atomization) among gentiles while retaining a powerful sense of group cohesion among Jews—the agenda of the Frankfurt School. Gentile group identifications are regarded as an indication of psychopathology. An important component of this strategy is the deconstruction of majoritarian intellectual movements that are incompatible with the continuation of Judaism. These majoritarian intellectual movements may range from radical assimilationism (e.g., the forced conversions to Christianity) to exclusivist majority group strategies based on majority group ethnocentrism (e.g., National Socialism).

Jewish interests are also served by the Frankfurt School ideology that gentile concerns about losing social status and being eclipsed economically, socially, and demographically by other groups are an indication of psychopathology. As an exceptionally upwardly mobile group, this ideology serves Jewish interests by defusing gentile concerns about their downward mobility, and we shall see in Chapter 7 that Jewish organizations and Jewish intellectuals have been at the forefront of the movement to eclipse the demographic and cultural dominance of European-derived peoples in Western societies.

Several themes common to these Jewish intellectual movements bear mentioning. An important thread apparent in the discussions of psychoanalysis, Boasian anthropology, the Frankfurt School, and radical intellectual and political circles has been that Jewish intellectuals have formed highly cohesive groups whose influence derives to great extent from the solidarity and cohesiveness of the group. The influence of minority ideologies is augmented to the extent that there is a high degree of consensus and internal intellectual consistency among those adopting the minority position (see Ch. 1). Intellectual activity is like any other human endeavor: Cohesive groups outcompete individualist strategies. Indeed, the fundamental truth of this axiom has been central to the success of Judaism throughout its history (PTSDA, Ch. 5).

Indeed, Jewish associational patterns in science go well beyond the cohesive intellectual movements discussed here. Recently Greenwald and Schuh (1994) demonstrated a pattern of ethnic discrimination in scientific citations whereby Jewish authors were 40 percent more likely to cite Jewish authors than were non-Jewish authors. Jewish first authors of scientific papers were also approximately three times more likely to have Jewish coauthors than were non-Jewish first authors. Although the methods used in the study did not allow determination of the direction of discrimination, the findings reported throughout this volume strongly suggest that a large proportion of the discrimination originates with Jewish scientists. This is also suggested by the disproportionate representation of Jewish coauthors, presumably the result of Jewish ingroup associational patterns both as mentors and colleagues. Moreover, where there are proportionate differences in group size, individuals in minority groups are generally more prone to ingroup bias than are majority group members (Mullen 1991), suggesting that Jews would be more strongly inclined toward ethnic discrimination than gentiles.

Citation by other scientists is an important indication of scholarly accomplishment and is often a key measure used in tenure decisions by universities. As a result, ethnocentric biases in citation patterns are not merely an index of ingroup bias among Jewish scientists; these patterns also have the effect of promoting the work and reputation of other Jewish scientists. Providing further evidence in this regard, the studies by Kadushin (1974), Shapiro (1989, 1992), and Torrey (1992) of twentieth-century American intellectuals indicate not only a strong overlap among Jewish background, Jewish ethnic identification, Jewish associational patterns, radical political beliefs, and psychoanalytic influence but also a pattern of mutual citation and admiration. In Kadushin’s study, almost half of the complete sample of elite American intellectuals were Jewish (Kadushin 1974, 23). The sample was based on the most frequent contributors to leading intellectual journals, followed by interviews in which the intellectuals “voted” for another intellectual whom he or she considered most influential in their thinking. Over 40 percent of the Jews in the sample received six or more votes as being most influential, compared to only 15 percent of non-Jews (p. 32).

Jews have also been greatly overrepresented as editors, publishers and contributors to a variety of radical and liberal periodicals, including The Nation, The New Republic, and The Progressive (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 105). In 1974 The New Republic (TNR) was purchased by Martin Peretz, son of a “devoted Labor Zionist and right-wing Jabotinskyist” (Alterman 1992, 185) and himself a leftist student activist before moving in the direction of neoconservatism. The only consistent theme in Peretz’s career is a devotion to Jewish causes, particularly Israel. He reflects a major theme of Chapter 3 in that he abandoned the New Left when some in the movement condemned Israel as racist and imperialist. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, he told Henry Kissinger that his “dovishness stopped at the delicatessen door” (p. 185), and many among his staff feared that all issues would be decided on the basis of what was “good for the Jews” (p. 186). Indeed, one editor was instructed to obtain material from the Israeli embassy for use in TNR editorials. “It is not enough to say that TNR’s owner is merely obsessed with Israel; he says so himself. But more importantly, Peretz is obsessed with Israel’s critics, Israel’s would-be critics, and people who never heard of Israel, but might one day know someone who might someday become a critic” (p. 195).

Similarly, in the literary world, the highly influential left-wing journal Partisan Review (PR) was a principle showcase of “the New York Intellectuals,” a group dominated by editors and contributors with a Jewish ethnic identity and a deep alienation from American political and cultural institutions (Cooney 1986, 225ff; Shapiro 1989; Wisse 1987). Clement Greenberg, the highly influential art critic whose work helped establish the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1940s, is a prototypical member of this group. He made his reputation entirely within what one might term a Jewish intellectual milieu. Greenberg was a writer for PR, managing editor of Contemporary Jewish Record (the forerunner of Commentary), long-time editor of Commentary under Elliot Cohen, as well as art critic for The Nation.

There was thus an overlap between official Jewish publications and the secular intellectual journals associated with the New York Intellectuals. Indeed, Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, became the most widely known journal of the New York Intellectuals, serving to introduce a wider audience to their ideas while also dealing with Jewish issues. Several New York Intellectuals had editorial positions at Commentary, including, besides Greenberg, Robert Warshow, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, and Norman Podhoretz; PR editor Philip Rahv also served as managing editor for Contemporary Jewish Record. Because of the overlap among the contributors and editors, the following are considered the magazines associated with the New York Intellectuals (Jumonville 1991, 8, 234): PR, Commentary, Menorah Journal, Dissent, The Nation, Politics, Encounter, The New Leader, The New York Review of Books, The Pubic Interest, The New Criterion, The National Interest, and Tikkun.

PR originated as an offshoot of the Communist Party, its central figures all Marxists and admirers of Trotsky. There was, however, an increasingly heavy dose of psychoanalysis beginning in the 1940s. (Lional Trilling, for example, wrote of his much greater allegiance to Freud compared to Marx [Jumonville 1991, 126].) There was also a great deal of influence and cross-fertilization between the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School (Jumonville 1991, 66; Ch. 5). The New York Intellectuals gradually evolved away from advocacy of socialist revolution toward a shared commitment to anti-nationalism and cosmopolitanism, “a broad and inclusive culture” in which cultural differences were esteemed (Cooney 1986, 233). (As we shall see in Ch. 7, Commentary published articles during the 1950s favoring multiculturalism and high levels of immigration of all racial and national groups into the United States.) They conceived themselves as alienated, marginalized figures—a modern version of traditional Jewish separateness and alienation from gentile culture. “They did not feel that they belonged to America or that America belonged to them” (Podhoretz 1967, 117; emphasis in text). Indeed, Podhoretz (1979, 283) was asked by a New Yorker editor in the 1950s “whether there was a special typewriter key at Partisan Review with the word ‘alienation’ on a single key.” They also advocated a secular humanist perspective and opposed religious values at least partly because of the past association between anti-Semitism and Christian religious ideology. The result was “a continuity of perspective in the work of the New York Intellectuals running through the 1930s and 1940s… [T]he New York Intellectuals embraced cosmopolitan values… [T]heir loyalty to those values was intensified by their consciousness of being Jewish, and [that] consciousness helped to make the Partisan Review variant of cosmopolitanism a discrete intellectual position” (Cooney 1986, 245).

It would be difficult to overestimate the New York Intellectuals’ influence on American high culture in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly in the areas of literary criticism, art criticism, sociology, and “intellectual high journalism” (Jumonville 1991, 9). Irving Kristol (1983, 10) writes of PR’s “intimidating presence” among his college friends. In the words of art critic Hilton Kramer:

For certain writers and intellectuals of my generation…drawn to PR in the late forties and early fifties…it was more than a magazine, it was an essential part of our education, as much a part of that education as the books we read, the visits we made to the museums, the concerts we attended, and the records we bought. It gave us an entrée to modern cultural life—to its gravity and complexity and combative character—that few of our teachers could match… It conferred upon every subject it encompassed—art, literature, politics, history, and current affairs—an air of intellectual urgency that made us, as readers, feel implicated and called upon to respond. (Kramer 1996, 43)

Greenberg grew up in the Yiddish-speaking radical sub-culture of New York (“Everyone his family knew was a socialist. As a small boy he thought socialist meant Jewish” [Rubenfeld 1997, 60].) Like the other New York Intellectuals, Greenberg had a strong Jewish identity that ultimately influenced his work. “I believe that a quality of Jewishness is present in every word I write, as it is in almost every word of every other contemporary American Jewish writer” (in Rubenfeld 1997, 89). As editor of Contemporary Jewish Record, Greenberg published an article that openly referred to Henry Adams’s anti-Semitism, a taboo at the time. He was also a major promoter of the work of Franz Kafka whom he regarded as a quintessentially Jewish voice in literature: “The revolutionary and hypnotic effect of the works of Franz Kafka… upon the literary avant-garde of the world has been without parallel… Kafka seems to initiate a new [age of fiction] single-handed, pointing a way beyond most of the cardinal assumptions upon which Western fiction has rested until now. Kafka’s writings represent, moreover, perhaps the first time that an essentially and uniquely Jewish notion of reality, expressed hitherto nowhere but in religious forms, has found a secular voice” (in Rubenfeld 1997, 92-93). In a review in PR of a militantly Zionist book by Arthur Koestler denigrating European Jews and praising the Zionists who were colonizing Palestine, Greenberg (1946, 582) exhibited a sense of Jewish superiority, noting “It is possible I want to suggest, to adopt standards of evaluation other than those of Western Europe. It is possible that by ‘world-historical’ standards the European Jew represents a higher type than any yet achieved in history.” In 1949 a conflict between this nascent Jewish intellectual establishment broke out with the older, predominantly gentile literary establishment over the issue of an award to Ezra Pound, whose poetry reflected his fascist sympathies and his anti-Semitism. Greenberg emphasized the priority of the moral over the aesthetic, writing that “life includes and is more important than art and it judges things by their consequences… As a Jew, I myself cannot help being offended by the matter of Pound’s latest poetry; and since 1943 things like that make me feel physically afraid too” (Greenberg 1949, 515; italics in text).

Philosopher Sidney Hook also had a strong Jewish identification; hewas a Zionist, a strong supporter of Israel, and an advocate of Jewish education for Jewish children (see Hook 1989). Hook played a decisive leadership role in the group (Jumonville 1991, 28), and, as indicated above, he had an editorial position at Commentary. In his “Reflections on the Jewish Question” he wrote, “the causes of antisemitism are not to be found in the behavior of Jews” (Hook 1949, 465). Rather, the sources of anti-Semitism are to be found “in the beliefs and habits and culture of the non-Jews” (p. 468), particularly Christianity. AntiSemitism “is endemic to every Christian culture whose religions made Jews the eternal villain in the Christian drama of salvation” (pp. 471-472).

Hook developed an elaborate apologia for Judaism in the modern world. Being a Jew is simply a social category with no ethnic implications: “A Jew is anyone who for any reason calls himself such or is called such in any community whose practices take note of the distinction” (p. 475; italics in text). According to Hook, there are no Jewish intellectual movements except those, like Zionism and Hassidism, that are explainable “by the social and cultural pressures of Western Christendom.” Jewish intellectuals are said to be influenced much more by gentile intellectuals than by their status as Jews. Indeed, Hook asserts an extreme philosophical nominalism entirely at odds with the entire history of Judaism: Jews do not exist as a group at all. Judaism is a completely atomistic voluntary concatenation of individuals whose only biological ties are within the nuclear family: “Only individuals exist” (p. 481).

Moreover, Hook felt that one had a moral obligation to remain a Jew:

[For most Jews] escape [from being Jewish] was practically impossible, that where it was possible the psychological costs were usually too burdensome, and that morally it was intrinsically degrading to capitulate to irrational prejudice and deny kinship with their own fathers and mothers who, often against heroic odds, had courageously kept their integrity and faith whatever it was. (p. 479)

Like many leftists, Hook approved of the dream of human universalism, but the dream “overlooks the fact that human beings live as Jews and non-Jews here and now and will continue to do so for a long time to come; that the dream itself is based upon the acceptance of differences among men and not on the hope of an undifferentiated unity; and that the microbes of antisemitism infect even movements which do not officially allow for its existence” (p. 481). (Hook was highly sensitive to anti-Semitism on the left, beginning with the Trotsky-Stalin conflict during the 1920s; see Ch. 3.) Jews would thus continue to exist as Jews long after Hook’s utopia of democratic socialism had been created. For Hook, leftist universalism properly understood implies an acceptance of cultural diversity as not only central to a philosophy of Judaism but central to the idea of democracy itself:

No philosophy of Jewish life is required except one—identical with the democratic way of life—which enables Jews who for any reason at all accept their existence as Jews to lead a dignified and significant life, a life in which together with their fellowmen they strive collectively to improve the quality of democratic, secular cultures and thus encourage a maximum of cultural diversity, both Jewish and non-Jewish… If it is pruned of its Utopianism and its failure to understand that the ethics of democracy presupposes not an equality of sameness or identity but an equality of differences, much of the universalist view still has a large measure of validity. (pp. 480-481)

For Hook (1948, 201-202), “diversity of experience [including ethnic and cultural diversity], direct or indirect, is immediately enjoyable… It safeguards us against provincialism and the tyranny of the familiar, whose hold may sometimes be so strong as to incapacitate us from making new responses necessary for survival… Growth in maturity consists largely in learning to appreciate differences.” Hook thus expresses the fundamental Jewish interest in cultural and ethnic diversity that is a central theme of Chapter 7 on Jewish involvement in U.S. immigration policy.

The New York Intellectuals included the following prominent Jewish participants, classified roughly according to main area of involvement, although they tended to be generalists rather than specialists: Elliot Cohen (editor of Menorah Journal and founding editor of Commentary); Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt (political philosophy, political and intellectual journalism); William Phillips and Philip Rahv (editors of PR; literary criticism, intellectual journalism); Lional Trilling, Diana Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Alfred Kazin, and Susan Sontag (literary criticism); Robert Warshow (film criticism and cultural criticism); Isaac Rosenfeld, Delmore Schwartz, Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer (fiction and poetry, literary criticism); Irving Howe (political journalism, literary criticism); Melvin J. Lasky, Norman Podhoretz, and Irving Kristol (political journalism); Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, David Riesman, and Michael Walzer (sociology); Lionel Abel, Clement Greenberg, George L. K. Morris, Meyer Schapiro, and Harold Rosenberg (art criticism).

The New York Intellectuals spent their careers entirely within a Jewish social and intellectual milieu. When Rubenfeld (1997, 97) lists people Greenberg invited to social occasions at his apartment in New York, the only gentile mentioned is artist William de Kooning. Revealingly, Michael Wrezin (1994, 33) refers to Dwight Macdonald, another Trotskyist contributor to PR, as “a distinguished goy among the Partisanskies.” Another non-Jew was writer James T. Farrell, but his diary records a virtually all-Jewish social milieu in which a large part of his life was spent in virtual non-stop social interaction with other New York Intellectuals (Cooney 1986, 248). Indeed, Podhoretz (1967, 246-248) refers to the New York Intellectuals as a “family” who, when they attended a party, arrived at the same time and socialized among their ingroup.

Cultural critique was central to the work of the New York Intellectuals. To Rahv (1978, 305-306), modernist culture was important because of its potential for cultural critique. Modernism encouraged “the creation of moral and aesthetic values running counter to and often violently critical of the bourgeois spirit.” “What is modern literature if not a vindictive, neurotic, and continually renewed dispute with the modern world?” Such pronouncements on the critical potential of even the most abstract art reflected the views of Frankfurt School theorists Adorno and Horkheimer, the latter of whom noted that “An element of resistance is inherent in the most aloof art” (Horkheimer 1941, 291).

The New York Intellectuals exemplified the tendency to exude a sense of moral and intellectual superiority combined with a very realpolitic ability to promote and consolidate the power of the ingroup that is typical of the movements reviewed in this volume. In their own self-conception, the New York Intellectuals “combined genuine loyalty to values under siege with the cultivation of an image—the image of a detached and alienated intelligentsia holding the line against corruptions of mind and spirit” (Cooney 1986, 200). I have noted that Clement Greenberg emphasized the priority of the moral over the aesthetic. Similarly, Lionel Trilling viewed literary criticism as centrally concerned with “the quality that life does not have but should have” (in Jumonville 1991, 123). In the political arena, issues were portrayed as “a struggle between good and evil… The emphatic, emotion-charged, often moralistic positions that the New York Intellectuals established, and the tendency to identify their own views with fundamental intellectual integrity, worked against the commitment to openness and free thought proclaimed in their public statements and implicit in their attachment to cosmopolitan values” (Cooney 1986, 265).

The elitism in their [the New York Intellectuals’] outlook was not a socioeconomic sort dependent on upper-class privileges, of course, but rather an intellectual elitism—a Jeffersonian aristocracy of talent, ability, intelligence, and critical acuity. They were worried about maintaining the intellectual vocation and its values. Further, they were the elite in the sense of being elect or chosen. But all these types of elitism had some connection: they were ways of conserving power for one group, and they resulted in a patronizing condescension toward the lower orders of society. (Jumonville 1991, 169)

This condescension and failure to respect others’ ideas are particularly obvious in the New York Intellectuals’ attitudes toward traditional American culture, especially the culture of rural America. There is a large overlap between the New York Intellectuals and the anti-populist forces who, as discussed in Chapter 5, used The Authoritarian Personality to pathologize the behavior of gentile Americans and particularly the lower middle class. The New York Intellectuals were cultural elitists who abhorred cultural democracy and feared the masses while nevertheless remaining consistently left-of-center politically. The movement was “a leftist elitism—a leftist conservatism, we might say—that slowly evolved into… neoconservatism (Jumonville 1991, 185). The New York Intellectuals associated rural America with “nativism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, and fascism as well as with anti-intellectualism and provincialism; the urban was associated antithetically with ethnic and cultural tolerance, with internationalism, and with advanced ideas… The New York Intellectuals simply began with the assumption that the rural—with which they associated much of American tradition and most of the territory beyond New York—had little to contribute to a cosmopolitan culture… By interpreting cultural and political issues through the urban-rural lens, writers could even mask assertions of superiority and expressions of anti-democratic sentiments as the judgments of an objective expertise” (Cooney 1986, 267-268; italics in text). In Chapter 7 the battle between this urbanized intellectual and political establishment and rural America is joined over the issue of immigration, in this case with the support of all of the mainstream Jewish political organizations.

PR also had an ingroup-outgroup mentality that is entirely consistent with the other Jewish-dominated intellectual movements reviewed here. Norman Podhoretz describes the PR crowd as a “family” that derived “out of the feeling of beleaguered isolation shared with the masters of the modernist movement themselves, elitism—the conviction that others were not worth taking into consideration except to attack, and need not be addressed in one’s writing; out of that feeling as well, a sense of hopelessness as to the fate of American culture at large and the correlative conviction that integrity and standards were only possible among ‘us.’” It was an insular world in which the only people who even existed were ingroup members: “[T]he family paid virtually no heed to anyone outside it except kissing cousins… To be adopted into the family was a mark of great distinction: it meant you were good enough, that you existed as a writer and an intellectual” (Podhoretz 1967, 115-116, 151; italics in text).

Like the other intellectual movements reviewed in this volume, PR had a sense of community and groupness, “a sense of common purpose and group support around the magazine”; the basic question about a prospective writer was whether he was “‘our’ kind of writer” (Cooney 1986, 225, 249). Among this self-described alienated and marginalized group there was also an atmosphere of social support that undoubtedly functioned as had traditional Jewish ingroup solidarity arrayed against a morally and intellectually inferior outside world. They perceived themselves as “rebel intellectuals defending a minority position and upholding the best traditions of radicalism” (p. 265). PR provided “a haven and support” and a sense of social identity; it “served to assure many of its members that they were not alone in the world, that sympathetic intellectuals existed in sufficient number to provide them with social and professional moorings” (Cooney 1986, 249). There was thus a great deal of continuity to this “coherent, distinguishable group” of intellectuals “who mainly began their careers as revolutionary communists in the 1930s [to] become an institutionalized and even hegemonic component of American culture during the conservative 1950s while maintaining a high degree of collective continuity” (Wald 1987, 12, 10).

Consistent with the multiple overlapping alliances generated by this Jewish intellectual milieu, there were charges that a Jewish literary establishment was able to determine success in the literary world and that it advanced the careers of Jewish writers. Jewish group cohesiveness was implied by Truman Capote and Gore Vidal who complained about the ability of Jewish intellectuals to determine success in the literary world and to their tendency to promote Jewish writers (see Podhoretz 1986, 24). Capote described a “Jewish mafia” in the literary world as a “clique of New York-oriented writers who control much of the literary scene through the influence of the quarterlies and intellectual magazines. All of these publications are Jewish-dominated and this particular coterie employs them to make or break writers by advancing or withholding attention” (in Podhoretz 1986, 23).

I suppose that in addition to whatever conscious feelings of Jewishness underlie these associational patterns, there is also an unconscious solidarity that Jews have with other Jews and that facilitates the overlapping alliances and mutual citation patterns discussed here. Greenwald and Schuh (1994) argue that the discrimination effects found in their study of Jewish scientists are unconscious, partly because they find the pattern of Jewish-non-Jewish ethnic discrimination among scientists involved in research on prejudice who, it is plausible to suppose, would not themselves consciously adopt a pattern of ethnic discrimination. In fact, a large body of research indicates unconscious prejudice among people who qualify as non-prejudiced on the basis of apparently honest self-reports (Crosby, Bromley & Saxe 1980; Gaertner & Dovidio 1986). These findings fit well with the importance of self-deception as an aspect of Judaism (SAID, Ch. 8): Jewish scientists who perceive themselves to be entirely nonprejudiced unconsciously favor ingroup members.

Several examples of such deep feelings of Jewish solidarity were given in SAID (Ch. 1), and these feelings were found to be characteristic of Freud in Chapter 4. They are exemplified by the following comments of Clinton administration Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich (1997, 79), on his first face-to-face meeting with Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Alan Greenspan: “We have never met before, but I instantly know him. One look, one phrase, and I know where he grew up, how he grew up, where he got his drive and his sense of humor. He is New York. He is Jewish. He looks like my uncle Louis, his voice is my uncle Sam. I feel we’ve been together at countless weddings, bar mitzvahs, and funerals. I know his genetic structure. I’m certain that within the last five hundred years—perhaps even more recently—we shared the same ancestor.” As New York Intellectual Daniel Bell notes, “I was born in galut and I accept—now gladly, though once in pain—the double burden and the double pleasure of my self-consciousness, the outward life of an American and the inward secret of the Jew. I walk with this sign as a frontlet between my eyes, and it is as visible to some secret others as their sign is to me” (Bell 1961, 477). Theologian Eugene Borowitz (1973, 136) writes that Jews seek each other out in social situations and feel “far more at home” after they have discovered who is Jewish.¹⁴⁷ Moreover, “most Jews claim to be equipped with an interpersonal friend-or-foe sensing device that enables them to detect the presence of another Jew, despite heavy camouflage.” These deep and typically unconscious ties of genetic similarity (Rushton 1989) and sense of common fate as members of the same ingroup lead to the powerful group ties among Jewish intellectual and political activists studied here.

The theory of individual differences in individualism-collectivism developed in SAID (Ch. 1) predicts that Jews, because of a greater genetic and environmental push toward collectivism, would be especially attracted to such groups. Sulloway (1979b) describes the “cultlike” aura of religion that has permeated psychoanalysis—a characterization that fits well with the proposal that Judaism must be understood as involving the psychological mechanisms underlying participation in religious cults (see SAID, Ch. 1). The parallels between traditional Judaism and psychoanalysis as an authoritarian, cohesive ingroup that enforces conformity on group members thus go well beyond the formal structure of the movement to include a deep sense of personal involvement that satisfies similar psychological needs. From the standpoint of the theory developed in SAID, it is not in the least surprising that the secular organizations developed and dominated by Jews, including also radical political movements and Boasian anthropology, would end up appealing to the same psychological systems as did traditional Judaism. At a basic level, Judaism involves a commitment to an exclusionary group that actively maintains barriers between the ingroup and the rest of the world.

This group cohesion is particularly striking in situations where Jewish intellectuals have continued to function as cohesive groups even after antiSemitism during the Nazi era forced them to emigrate. This occurred with psychoanalysis and also with the Frankfurt School. A similar pattern was evident in the highly influential Vienna Circle in philosophy (Horowitz 1987).

In the intellectual world, group cohesiveness has facilitated the advocacy of particular viewpoints within academic professional associations (e.g., the Boasian program within the American Anthropological Association; psychoanalysis within the American Psychiatric Association). Rothman and Lichter (1982, 104-105) note that Jews formed and dominated cohesive subgroups with a radical political agenda in several academic societies in the 1960s, including professional associations in economics, political science, sociology, history, and the Modern Language Association. They also suggest a broad political agenda of Jewish social scientists during this period: “We have already pointed out the weaknesses of some of these studies [on Jewish involvement in radical political movements]. We suspect that many of the ‘truths’ established in other areas of the social sciences during this period suffer from similar weaknesses. Their widespread acceptance… may have had as much to do with the changing ethnic and ideological characteristics of those who dominated the social science community as they did with any real advance in knowledge” (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 104). Sachar (1992, 804) notes that the Caucus for a New Politics of the American Political Science Association was “overwhelmingly Jewish” and that the Union of Radical Political Economists was initially disproportionately Jewish. Moreover, as Higham (1984, 154) notes, the incredible success of the Authoritarian Personality studies was facilitated by the “extraordinary ascent” of Jews concerned with anti-Semitism in academic social science departments in the post-World War II era.

Once an organization becomes dominated by a particular intellectual perspective, there is enormous intellectual inertia created by the fact that the informal networks dominating elite universities serve as gatekeepers for the next generation of scholars. Aspiring intellectuals, whether Jewish or gentile, are subjected to a high level of indoctrination at the undergraduate and graduate levels; there is tremendous psychological pressure to adopt the fundamental intellectual assumptions that lie at the center of the power hierarchy of the discipline. As discussed in Chapter 1, once a Jewish-dominated intellectual movement attains intellectual predominance, it is not surprising that gentiles would be attracted to Jewish intellectuals as members of a socially dominant and prestigious group and as dispensers of valued resources.

Group cohesiveness can also be seen in the development of worshipful cults that have lionized the achievements of group leaders (Boasian anthropology and psychoanalysis). Similarly, Whitfield (1988, 32) summarizes the “ludicrous overpraise” of Zionist scholar Gershon Scholem. Daniel Bell, a Harvard sociologist and leading member of the New York Intellectuals, labeled Scholem’s Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah the most important book of the post-World War II era. Novelist Cynthia Ozick proclaimed, “There are certain magisterial works of the human mind that alter ordinary comprehension so unpredictably and on so prodigious a scale that culture is set awry and nothing can ever be seen again except in the strange light of that new knowledge[,]… an accretion of fundamental insight [that] takes on the power of a natural force. Gershom Scholem’s oeuvre has such a force; and its massive keystone, Sabbatai Sevi, presses down on the grasping consciousness with the strength not simply of its invulnerable, almost tidal, scholarship, but of its singular instruction in the nature of man.” Whitfield comments that “by the time Ozick was done, even Aristotle began to look like an underachiever; even Freud was confined to ‘a peephole into a dark chamber,’ while Scholem had become elevated into ‘a radio telescope monitoring the universe.’” (Apart from ethnic boosterism, perhaps Scholem was viewed as of universal importance because he deliberately downplayed Jewish particularism in his work [See Preface to the first paperback edition.])

It is interesting to note other examples of cohesive groups of Jewish intellectuals besides those considered in the previous chapters. In sixteenth-century Spain a concentrated group of Converso intellectuals were intimately involved in making the University of Alcalá into a bastion of nominalism—a doctrine widely viewed as subversive of religion (González 1989). George Mosse (1970, 172) describes a group of predominantly Jewish leftist intellectuals in the Weimar period that “attained a certain cohesion through the journals it made its own.” Similarly, Irving Louis Horowitz (1987, 123) describes an “organic group” of Austrian Marxist intellectuals during the pre-World War II period who “shared in common Jewish ancestry if not Zionist persuasions.” Horowitz (1987, 124) notes that the Austrian Marxist group and the Frankfurt School had “shared ethnic and religious backgrounds… not to mention overlapping networks and cohorts” resulting ultimately from the unity of prewar European German Jewish life.

Another interesting example is a highly cohesive group of neo-Kantian Jewish intellectuals centered at the University of Marburg under the leadership of Hermann Cohen in late-nineteenth-century Germany (Schwarzchild 1979, 136). Cohen (1842-1918), who ended his career teaching at a rabbinical seminary, rejected the historicism of the Volkisch thinkers and the Hegelians in favor of an idealistic version of Kantian rationalism. A primary intellectual goal was to suppose that the ideal Germany must be defined in universal moral terms that rationalized the continued existence of Jewish particularism: “A Germanism that might demand of me that I surrender my religion and my religious inheritance, I would not acknowledge as an ideal peoplehood in which the power and dignity of the state inhere… [A] Germanism that might demand such a surrender of religious selfhood, or that could even approve of and project it, simply contradicts the world-historical impulsion of Germanism” (in Schwarzchild 1979, 143). As with the Frankfurt School there is an absolute ethical imperative that Judaism exist and that Germany not be defined in ethnic terms that would exclude Jews: In Cohen’s philosophical utopia, different “socio-historical entities will not so much merge into one as live peaceably and creatively with one another” (Schwarzchild 1979, 145), an expression of Horace Kallen’s cultural pluralism model reviewed in Chapter 7. Cohen’s group was viewed by antiSemites as having an ethnic agenda, and Schwarzchild (1979, 140) notes that “the spirit of Marburg neo-Kantianism was in fact largely determined by the Jewishness of its adherents.” A common criticism was that the Marburg School engaged in highly creative reinterpretations of historical texts, notably including interpretations of Judaism and such notoriously ethnocentric Jewish thinkers as Maimonides as representing a universalistic ethical imperative. Suggesting deception or self-deception, there was a tension between Cohen’s avowed German nationalism with his pronouncements of great concern for the suffering of Jews in other countries and his urging of other Jews to look to German Jews for guidance (Rather 1990, 182-183).

During the 1920s, there was “a distinct coterie” of Jewish intellectuals (Lionel Trilling, Herbert Solow, Henry Rosenthal, Tess Slesinger, Felix Morrow, Clifton Fadiman, Anita Brenner) centered around the Menorah Journal under the leadership of Elliot Cohen (later the founding editor of Commentary) (Wald 1987, 32). This group, which later overlapped a great deal with the New York Intellectual group described above, was devoted to promoting the ideas of cultural pluralism. (Horace Kallen, the originator of cultural pluralism as a model for the United States [see Ch. 7], was a founder of the Menorah Society.) Reflecting its fundamentally Jewish political agenda, during the 1930s this group gravitated to the Communist Party and its auxiliary organizations, believing that, in the words of one observer, “the socialist revolution and its extension held out the only realistic hope of saving the Jews, among others, from destruction” (in Wald 1987, 43). Further, while adopting an ideology of revolutionary internationalism, the group “shared with cultural pluralism a hostility to assimilation by the dominant culture” (Wald 1987, 43)—another indication of the compatibility of leftist universalism and Jewish non-assimilation that is a theme of Chapter 3.

Beginning in the early 1950s there was a group centered around Irving Howe, including Stanley Plastrik, Emanuel Geltman and Louis Coser who organized the magazine Dissent as the PR coterie moved steadily away from revolutionary socialism (Bulik 1993, 18). In addition to leftist social criticism, Howe wrote extensively about Yiddish literature and Jewish history; his The World of Our Fathers records his nostalgic appreciation of the Yiddish-socialist subculture of his youth. Dissent was greatly influenced by the Frankfort School in the area of cultural criticism, particularly the work of Adorno and Horkheimer, and it published work by Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse based on their syntheses of Freud and Marx. In the New Left era, the radical Foundation for Policy Studies was centered around a group of Jewish intellectuals (Sachar 1992, 805).

Among leftists, we have seen that Jewish communists tended to have Jewish mentors and idealized other Jews, especially Trotsky, who were leaders or martyrs to the cause (see Ch. 3). Even the Jewish neoconservative movement has sought intellectual inspiration from Leo Strauss rather than from gentile conservative intellectuals such as Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, or James Burnham (Gottfried 1993, 88). For Strauss as a highly committed Jew, liberalism is only the best of several alternatives that are even more unacceptable (i.e., the extreme left or right). Strauss complains of the assimilatory tendencies in liberal society and its tendencies to break down the group loyalty so central to Judaism and to replace it with “membership in a nonexistent universal human society” (Tarcov & Pangle 1987, 909). Strauss’s political philosophy of democratic liberalism was fashioned as an instrument of achieving Jewish group survival in the post-Enlightenment political world (see Tarcov & Pangle 1987, 909-910). Prior to their conversion, Goldberg (1996, 160) notes that the future neoconservatives were disciples of Trotskyist theoretician Max Shachtman, also a Jew and a prominent member of the New York Intellectuals (see also Irving Kristol’s [1983] “Memoirs of a Trotskyist”).

In the cases of psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School, and to a lesser extent Boasian anthropology, we have seen that these cohesive groups typically had strong overtones of authoritarianism, and like traditional Judaism itself, they were highly exclusionary and intolerant of dissent. Cuddihy (1974, 106) points out that Wilhelm Reich had the distinction of being expelled from both the German Communist Party (for his “incorrect” view of the causes of fascism) and psychoanalysis (for his political fanaticism): “Reich’s attempt to ‘marry’ two of the Diaspora ideologues, Freud and Marx, ended in his separation from the two movements speaking in their names.” Recall also David Horowitz’s (1997, 42) description of the world of his parents who had joined a “shul” run by the CPUSA. Note the ingroup-outgroup mentality, the sense of moral superiority, the sense of being a minority persecuted by the goyim, and the powerful overtones of authoritarianism and intolerance of dissent:

What my parents had done in joining the Communist Party and moving to Sunnyside was to return to the ghetto. There was the same shared private language, the same hermetically sealed universe, the same dual posturing revealing one face to the outer world and another to the tribe. More importantly, there was the same conviction of being marked for persecution and specially ordained, the sense of moral superiority toward the stronger and more numerous goyim outside. And there was the same fear of expulsion for heretical thoughts, which was the fear that riveted the chosen to the faith.

An ingroup-outgroup orientation, noted above as a characteristic of the PR coterie, was apparent also in leftist political groups which were also predominantly Jewish during this period. In the words of PR editor William Phillips (1983, 41), “The Communists were experts at maintaining a fraternal atmosphere that distinguished sharply between insider and outsider. One couldn’t just leave; one had to be expelled. And expulsion from the tribe brought into motion a machinery calculated to make the expelled one a complete pariah. Party members were forbidden to talk to the ex-Communist, and a campaign of vilification was unleashed whose intensity varied according to the importance of the expelled person.” We have seen that psychoanalysis dealt with its dissenters in a similar manner.

These movements tended to center around a charismatic leader (Boas, Freud, or Horkheimer) with a powerful moral, intellectual, and social vision, and the followers of these leaders had an intense devotion toward them. There was an intense psychological sense of missionary zeal and, as we have seen, moral fervor. This phenomenon occurred in the case of psychoanalysis and the Boasian movement, and (with massive irony) this was also the case with Critical Theory: “The theory which filled Adorno and Marcuse with a sense of mission both before and after the war was a theory of a special sort: in the midst of doubts it was still inspiring, in the midst of pessimism it still spurred them on towards a kind of salvation through knowledge and discovery. The promise was neither fulfilled nor betrayed—it was kept alive” (Wiggershaus 1994, 6). Like Freud, Horkheimer inspired intense loyalty combined with personal insecurity (at least partly because of his control over the Institute’s budget [Wiggershaus 1994, 161-162]), so that his underlings at the Institute, like Adorno, became fixated on him and intensely jealous of their rivals for their master’s favors. Adorno “was prepared to identify himself completely with the great cause of the Institute, measuring everything by that standard” (Wiggershaus 1994, 160). When fellow institute member Leo Lowenthal complained that “Adorno showed a sense of zealousness not far removed from a sense of resentment,” Horkheimer commented that this is what he valued in Adorno: “For [Horkheimer], all that mattered was that [Adorno’s] zealous aggressiveness, which was able to detect concessions to the bourgeois academic system in the work of Lowenthal, Marcuse, Fromm, and even more so in the work of others, should be channeled along the right lines, namely those with significance for social theory” (Wiggershaus 1994, 163).

Rallying around charismatic leaders (Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg) has also been apparent among Jewish radicals (see Ch. 3). The New York Intellectuals may be an exception because they were relatively de-centralized and quite querulous and competitive with each other, with no one rising to the preeminent status of a Freud or Boas. However, like many Jewish leftists, they tended to idolize Trotsky, and, as we have seen, Sidney Hook played a decisive leadership role in the group (Jumonville 1991, 28). They also constituted a distinct coterie centered around the “little magazines” whose editors wielded great power and influence over the careers of would-be group members. Elliot Cohen, despite his lack of presence as a writer, had a charismatic influence on those who wrote for him as editor of Menorah Journal and Commentary. Lional Trilling labeled him a “tormented ‘genius’” (in Jumonville 1991, 117), a leader who influenced many, including Trilling in their journey from Stalinism to anti-Stalinism and finally toward the beginnings of neoconservatism. Prospective members of the ingroup typically idolized ingroup members as cultural icons. Norman Podhoretz (1967, 147) writes of his “wide-eyed worshipful fascination” with the PR crowd at the beginning of his career. Ingroup members paid “rapt attention” to others in the group (Cooney 1986, 249). Like different branches of psychoanalysis, there were offshoots of these magazines initiated by people with somewhat different aesthetic or political visions, such as the circle around Dissent whose central figure was Irving Howe.

This tendency to rally around a charismatic leader is also a characteristic of traditional Jewish groups. These groups are extremely collectivist in Triandis’s (1990, 1991) sense. The authoritarian nature of these groups and the central role of a charismatic rabbi are particularly striking: “A haredi… will consult his rabbi or hasidic rebbe on every aspect of his life, and will obey the advice he receives as though it were an halachic ruling” (Landau 1993, 47). “The haredim’s blind obeisance to rabbis is one of the most striking characteristics of haredism in the eyes of the outside world, both Jewish and Gentile” (Landau 1993, 45). Famous rebbes are revered in an almost godlike manner (tzaddikism, or cult of personality), and indeed there was a recent controversy over whether the Lubavitcher Rebbe Schneerson claimed to be the Messiah. Many of his followers believed that he was; Mintz (1992, 348ff) points out that it is common for Hasidic Jews to view their rebbe as the Messiah.

This intensity of group feeling centered around a charismatic leader is reminiscent of that found among traditional Eastern European Jews who were the immediate ancestors of many of these intellectuals. Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin (1971, 69) recounts his visit to a synagogue in Galicia (Poland) in 1903:

There were no benches, and several thousand Jews were standing closely packed together, swaying in prayer like the corn in the wind. When the rabbi appeared the service began. Everybody tried to get as close to him as possible. The rabbi led the prayers in a thin, weeping voice. It seemed to arouse a sort of ecstasy in the listeners. They closed their eyes, violently swaying. The loud praying sounded like a gale. Anyone seeing these Jews in prayer would have concluded that they were the most religious people on earth.

Later those closest to the rabbi were intensely eager to eat any food touched by the rabbi, and the fish bones were preserved by his followers as relics.

As expected on the basis of social identity theory, all these movements appear to have a strong sense of belonging to an ingroup viewed as intellectually and morally superior and fighting against outgroups seen as morally depraved and as intellectually inferior (e.g., Horkheimer’s constant admonition that they were among the “chosen few” destined to develop Critical Theory). Within the ingroup, disagreement was channeled into a narrowly confined intellectual space, and those who overstepped the boundaries were simply excised from the movement. The comments of Eugen Bleuler to Freud when he left the psychoanalytic movement in 1911 are worth quoting again because they describe a central feature of psychoanalysis and the other movements reviewed in this volume: “[T]his ‘who is not for us is against us,’ this ‘all or nothing,’ is necessary for religious communities and useful for political parties. I can therefore understand the principle as such, but for science I consider it harmful” (in Gay 1987, 144-145). All these features are central to traditional Judaism as well and are compatible with proposing that a basic feature of all manifestations of Judaism is a proneness to developing highly collectivist social structures with a strong sense of ingroup-outgroup barriers (see PTSDA, Ch. 8).

Another important theme is that psychoanalysis and the Authoritarian Personality studies showed strong overtones of indoctrination: Theories were developed in which behavior that did not conform to politically acceptable standards was conceptualized as an indication of psychopathology. This is apparent in the tendency for psychoanalysis to attribute rejection of psychoanalysis itself to various forms of psychopathology, as well as in its general perspective that a pathology-inducing gentile culture was the source of all forms of psychiatric diagnosis and that anti-Semitism was the sign of a disturbed personality. The Authoritarian Personality studies built on this tradition with its “discovery” that the failure to develop a “liberal personality” and to deeply and sincerely accept liberal political beliefs was a sign of psychopathology.

Indeed, one might note that a common theme of all these movements of cultural criticism is that gentile-dominated social structures are pathogenic. From the psychoanalytic perspective, including the Frankfurt School, human societies fail to meet human needs that are rooted in human nature, with the result that humans develop a variety of psychiatric disorders as a response to our fall from naturalness and harmony with nature. Or humans are seen as a blank slate on which Western capitalist culture has written greed, gentile ethnocentrism, and other supposed psychiatric disorders (Marxism, Boasian anthropology).

Group cohesion can also be seen in the support these movements have obtained from the wider Jewish community. In Chapter 5 I noted the importance Jewish radicals placed on maintaining ties with the wider Jewish community. The wider Jewish community provided economic support for psychoanalysis as the preferred form of psychotherapy among Jews (Glazer & Moynihan 1963); it also provided philanthropic support for institutes of psychoanalysis. Jews also provided the great majority of the financial support of the University of Frankfurt as a haven for German-Jewish intellectuals beginning in the Wilhelmine period (see W. E. Mosse 1989, 318ff), and the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt was established by a Jewish millionaire, Felix Weil, with a specific intellectual-political mission that eventually developed into Critical Theory (Wiggershaus 1994). In the United States, foundations such as the Stern Family Fund, the Rabinowitz Fund, and the Rubin Foundation provided money for radical underground publications during the 1960s (Sachar 1992, 804). Much earlier, American Jewish capitalists like Jacob Schiff financed Russian radical movements directed at overthrowing the Czar and may well have had considerable impact (Goldstein 1990, 26-27; Szajkowski 1967).

Moreover, Jewish influence in the popular media was an important source of favorable coverage of Jewish intellectual movements, particularly psychoanalysis and 1960s political radicalism (Rothman & Lichter 1982). Favorable media depictions of psychoanalysis were common during the 1950s, peaking in the mid-sixties when psychoanalysis was at the apex of its influence in the United States (Hale 1995, 289). “Popular images of Freud revealed him as a painstaking observer, a tenacious worker, a great healer, a truly original explorer, a paragon of domestic virtue, the discover of personal energy, and a genius” (p. 289). Psychiatrists were portrayed in movies as “humane and effective. The number of Hollywood stars, directors, and producers who were ‘in analysis’ was legion” (p. 289). An important aspect of this process has been the establishment of journals directed not only at a closed community of academic specialists but also at a wide audience of educated readers and other consumers of the counterculture.

The support of the wider Jewish community can also be seen in the association between Jewish-owned publishing houses and these intellectual movements, as in the case of the association between the Frankfurt School and the Hirschfeld Publishing Company (Wiggershaus 1994, 2). Similarly the Straussian neoconservative movement developed access to the mainstream intellectual media. Disciples of Leo Strauss have developed their own publishing and reviewing network, including neoconservative publications, Basic Books, and the university presses at Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Chicago (Gottfried 1993, 73).

These ideologies were promulgated by the most prestigious institutions of the society, and especially by elite universities and the mainstream media, as the essence of scientific objectivity. The New York Intellectuals, for example, developed ties with elite universities, particularly Harvard, Columbia, the University of Chicago, and the University of California-Berkeley, while psychoanalysis and Boasian anthropology became well entrenched throughout academia. The moral and intellectual elite established by these movements dominated intellectual discourse during a critical period after World War II and leading into the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. These movements dominated intellectual discourse by the time of the sea change in immigration policy in the 1960s (see Ch. 7). The implication is that individuals receiving a college education during this period were powerfully socialized to adopt liberal-radical cultural and political beliefs. The ideology that ethnocentrism was a form of psychopathology was promulgated by a group that over its long history had arguably been the most ethnocentric group among all the cultures of the world. This ideology was promulgated by strongly identified members of a group whose right to continue to exist as a cohesive, genetically impermeable group ideally suited to maximizing its own political, economic, and cultural power was never a subject of discussion. However, the failure to adopt these beliefs on the part of gentiles was viewed as an admission of personal inadequacy and an acknowledgment that one was suffering from a condition that would benefit from psychiatric counseling.

Scientific and intellectual respectability was thus a critical feature of the movements reviewed here. Nevertheless, these intellectual movements have been fundamentally irrational—an irrationality that is most apparent in the entire conduct of psychoanalysis as an authoritarian, quasi-scientific enterprise and in the explicit depiction of science as an instrument of social domination by the Frankfurt School. It is also apparent in the structure of psychoanalysis and radical political ideology, which are, like traditional Jewish religious ideology, essentially hermeneutic theories in the sense that the theory is derived in an a priori manner and is constructed so that any event is interpretable within the theory. The paradigm is shifted from a scientific perspective that emphasizes the selective retention of theoretical variants (Campbell 1987; Hull 1988; Popper 1963) to a hermeneutic exercise in which any and all events can be interpreted within the context of the theory. In the case of Critical Theory, and to a considerable extent, psychoanalysis, the actual content of the theory continually changed and there was divergence among its practitioners, but the goal of the theory as a tool of leftist social criticism remained intact.

Despite the fundamental irrationality of these movements, they have often masqueraded as the essence of scientific or philosophical objectivity. They have all sought the aura of science. Hollinger (1996, 160), in describing what he terms “a secular, increasingly Jewish, decidedly left-of-center intelligentsia based largely but not exclusively in the disciplinary communities of philosophy and the social sciences,” notes that “science offered itself to [Harvard historian Richard] Hofstadter and to many of his secular contemporaries as a magnificent ideological resource. Or, to put the point more sharply, these men and women selected from the available inventory those images of science most useful to them, those serving to connect the adjective scientific with public rather than private knowledge, with open rather than closed discourses, with universal rather than local standards of warrant, with democratic rather than aristocratic models of authority.” Harvard Sociologist Nathan Glazer included himself and the other New York Intellectuals in his statement that “Sociology is still for many socialists and sociologists the pursuit of politics through academic means (in Jumonville 1991, 89). Jumonville (1991, 90) comments that “Part of the impact of the New York group on American intellectual life is that they dignified that outlook of political pursuit. They were never embarrassed to admit the political content of their work, and in fact brought into the intellectual mainstream the idea that all strong work had ideological and political overtones.”

Even the Frankfurt School, which developed an ideology in which science, politics, and morality were systematically conflated, presented The Authoritarian Personality as a scientifically based, empirically grounded study of human behavior because of a perceived need to appeal to an American audience of empirically oriented social scientists. Moreover, the rhetoric surrounding the Institute of Social Research never failed to emphasize the scientific nature of its undertaking. Carl Grünberg, the first director of the Institute, very selfconsciously attempted to divert suspicion that the Institute was committed to a dogmatic, political form of Marxism. It was committed, he maintained, to a clearly articulated scientific research methodology: “I need not emphasize the fact that when I speak of Marxism here I do not mean it in a party-political sense, but in a purely scientific one, as a term for an economic system complete in itself, for a particular ideology and for a clearly delineated research methodology” (in Wiggershaus 1994, 26). Similarly, the PR group portrayed itself as being on the side of science, as exemplified by PR editor William Phillips, whose list of “scientists” included Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky (Cooney 1986, 155, 194).

Particularly important in this general endeavor has been the use of a rationally argued, philosophical skepticism as a tool in combating scientific universalism. Skepticism in the interest of combating scientific theories one dislikes for deeper reasons has been a prominent aspect of twentieth-century Jewish intellectual activity, apparent not only as a defining feature of Boasian anthropology but also in much anti-evolutionary theorizing and in the dynamic-contextualist view of behavioral development discussed in Chapter 2. In general this skepticism has been aimed at precluding the development of general theories of human behavior in which genetic variation plays a causative role in producing behavioral or psychological variation or in which adaptationist processes play an important role in the development of the human mind. The apotheosis of radical skepticism can be seen in the “negative dialectics” of the Frankfurt School and in Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction which are directed at deconstructing universalist, assimilatory theories of society as a homogeneous, harmonious whole on the theory that such a society might be incompatible with the continuity of Judaism. As in the case of Jewish political activity described in Chapter 7, the effort is aimed at preventing the development of mass movements of solidary groups of gentiles and a repetition of the Holocaust.

The fundamental insight of the Frankfurt School and its recent postmodernist offshoots, as well the Boasian School of anthropology and much of the criticism of biological and evolutionary perspectives in the social sciences reviewed in Chapter 2, is that a thoroughgoing skepticism and its consequent fragmentation of intellectual discourse within the society as a whole is an excellent prescription for the continuity of collectivist minority group strategies. Within the intellectual world, the greatest potential danger for a collectivist minority group strategy is that science itself as an individualist enterprise conducted in an atomistic universe of discourse could in fact coalesce around a set of universalist propositions about human behavior, propositions that would call into question the moral basis of collectivist minority group strategies such as Judaism. One way to prevent this is for science itself to be problematized and replaced by a pervasive skepticism about the structure of all reality.

The intended effect of such movements (and to a considerable extent their actual effect) has been to impose a medieval anti-scientific orthodoxy on much of the contemporary intellectual world. Unlike the Christian medieval orthodoxy which was fundamentally anti-Semitic, it is an orthodoxy that simultaneously facilitates the continuation of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, deemphasizes Judaism as an intellectual or social category, and deconstructs the intellectual basis for the development of majoritarian gentile group strategies.

None of this should be surprising to an evolutionist. Intellectual activity in the service of evolutionary goals has been a characteristic of Judaism dating from the ancient world (see SAID, Ch. 7). In this regard I suggest that it is no accident that science has developed uniquely in Western individualistic societies. Science is fundamentally an individualistic phenomenon incompatible with high levels of the ingroup-outgroup thinking that has characterized the Jewish intellectual movements discussed in these chapters and indeed has come to characterize much of what currently passes as intellectual discourse in the West—especially postmodernism and the currently fashionable multicultural movement.

Scientific groups do not have essences in the sense that there are no essential group members and no essential propositions one must ascribe to in order to be a group member (Hull 1988, 512). In the movements reviewed here, however, both of these essentialist propositions appear to be true. For example, whereas, as Hull suggests, even Darwin could have absented himself or been ejected from the group without the evolutionary program losing its identity, I rather doubt that Freud could have been similarly ejected from the psychoanalytic movement without changing entirely the focus of the movement. In a comment that indicates the fundamentally individualist nature of scientific communities, Hull notes that although each individual scientist has his or her own view of the essential nature of the conceptual system, the adoption of such an essentialist perspective by the community as a whole could only prevent the conceptual growth characteristic of real science.

This individualistic conceptualization of science is highly compatible with recent work in the philosophy of science. A fundamental issue in the philosophy of science is to describe the type of discourse community that promotes scientific thinking in any area of endeavor. As phrased by Donald Campbell (1993, 97), the question is “which social systems of belief revision and belief retention would be most likely to improve the competence-of-reference of beliefs to their presumed referents?” I propose that a minimal requirement of a scientific social system is that science not be conducted from an ingroup-outgroup perspective. Scientific progress (Campbell’s “competence-of-reference”) depends on an individualistic, atomistic universe of discourse in which each individual sees himself or herself not as a member of a wider political or cultural entity advancing a particular point of view but as an independent agent endeavoring to evaluate evidence and discover the structure of reality. As Campbell (1986, 121-122) notes, a critical feature of science as it evolved in the seventeenth century was that individuals were independent agents who could each replicate scientific findings for themselves. Scientific opinion certainly coalesces around certain propositions in real science (e.g., the structure of DNA, the mechanisms of reinforcement), but this scientific consensus is highly prone to defection in the event that new data cast doubt on presently held theories. Thus Barker and Gholson (1984) show that the long rivalry between cognitivist and behaviorist positions in psychology essentially hinged on the results of key experiments that resulted in defection or recruitment to these positions within the psychological community. Arthur Jensen (1982, 124) summarizes this view well when he notes that “when many individual scientists… are all able to think as they please and do their research unfettered by collectivist or totalitarian constraints, science is a self-correcting process.”

Each individual participant in a real science must view himself or herself as a free agent who is continually evaluating the available evidence in order to arrive at the best possible current understanding of reality. A variety of extra-scientific influences may affect individual scientists in conducting and evaluating research results, such as the need not to offend one’s superior or give comfort to a rival research group (Campbell 1993). A real scientist, however, must self-consciously attempt to remove at least the influence of personal relationships, group ties, gender, social class, political and moral agendas, and even career advancement possibilities. Real scientists change their beliefs on the basis of evidence and are willing to abandon presently held beliefs if they conflict with the evidence (Hull 1988, 19).

The assumption is that by honestly endeavoring to remove these influences, scientific consensus increasingly coalesces around propositions in which the referents of scientific propositions have an important role in the creation of scientific belief. As Stove (1982, 3) notes, despite resistance to the proposition in a large part of the intellectual world, there has been an enormous growth of knowledge in the past 400 years. Nevertheless, consensual progress in the social sciences has not occurred, and I rather doubt that consensual progress will occur until research ceases to be conducted from an ingroup-outgroup perspective.

In the movements reviewed here, intellectual endeavor had strong overtones of social group solidarity, as individual participants could always count on others to hold similar views and to present a united front against any unwelcome data. One consequence of the group conflict in the Iberian peninsula during the period of the Inquisition was that science became impossible (Castro 1971, 576; Haliczer 1989). The ideology supporting the Inquisition, including theologically derived views of the nature of physical reality, became an aspect of a collectivist worldview in which any deviation from the established ideology was viewed as treason to the group. Science requires the possibility and intellectual respectability of committing treason; or rather, it requires the impossibility of treason because there is an implicit understanding that one’s views of reality are not a function of group allegiance but of one’s independent (individualistic) evaluation of the available evidence.

In a real science the fundamental structure of reality cannot be decided a priori and protected from empirical disconfirmation, as is the case whenever groups develop a political stake in a particular interpretation of reality. Yet this is precisely what occurred during the Inquisition and the period of medieval Christian religious orthodoxy, and it has been the case in all the intellectual movements reviewed here (as well as in much of the Jewish historiography reviewed in SAID, Ch. 7). Because the movements reviewed here have had an underlying Jewish political agenda, the essential doctrines and the direction of research were developed a priori to conform to those interests. And because of the fundamental irrationality of the ideologies involved, the only form these movements could take was that of an authoritarian ingroup that would simply excise dissenters from the group. Within these movements the route to a successful career involved, as a necessary condition, authoritarian submission to the fundamental tenets of the intellectual movement.

Nevertheless, at times the situation is more complicated, and even participation in a real scientific culture can also be used to advance Jewish ethnic interests. In Chapter 2 it was noted that the empirical research of Harvard population biologist R. C. Lewontin actually uses methods condemned by the extreme methodological purism with which he has opposed several evolutionary and biological approaches to human behavior. It is interesting in this regard that Lewontin (1994a, 33) appears to be aware that participation in a truly scientific culture creates a “bank account of legitimacy which we can then spend on our political and humanist pursuits.” Lewontin has therefore established a reputation in a real scientific community and then used that reputation to advance his ethnic agenda, part of which is to insist on a methodological rigor that is incompatible with social science. Even real science can be converted into political currency.

At a deeper level, I suppose, a fundamental aspect of Jewish intellectual history has been the realization that there is really no demonstrable difference between truth and consensus. Within traditional Jewish religious discourse, “truth” was the prerogative of a privileged interpretive elite that in traditional societies consisted of the scholarly class within the Jewish community. Within this community, “truth” and “reality” were nothing more (and were undoubtedly perceived as nothing more) than consensus within a sufficiently large portion of the interpretive community. “Without the community we cannot ascribe any real meaning to notions like the word of God or holiness. Canonization of Holy Scripture takes place only in the context of the understanding of those scriptures by a community. Nor can scripture be holy for an individual alone without a community. The holiness of writ depends upon a meaning that is ‘really there’ in the text. Only the communal reading-understanding of the texts makes their meaning, the meaning that is capable of being called holy, as real as the community itself” (Agus 1997, 34).

As we have seen in SAID (Ch. 7), Jewish religious ideology was an infinitely plastic set of propositions that could rationalize and interpret any event in a manner compatible with serving the interests of the community. Authority within the Jewish intellectual community was always understood to be based entirely on what recognized (i.e., consensual) scholars had said. It never occurred to the members of this discourse community to seek confirmation of their views from outside the community of intellectual discourse itself, either from other (gentile) discourse communities or by trying to understand the nature of reality itself. Reality was whatever the group decided it should be, and any dissent from this socially constructed reality would have to be performed within a narrow intellectual space that would not endanger the overall goals of the group.

Acceptance of the Jewish canon, like membership in the intellectual movements reviewed here, was essentially an act of authoritarian submission. The basic genius of the Jewish intellectual activity reviewed in these chapters is the realization that hermeneutic communities based solely on intellectual consensus within a committed group are possible even within the post-Enlightenment world of intellectual discourse and may even be successfully disseminated within the wider gentile community to facilitate specific Jewish political interests.

The difference from the pre-Enlightenment world, of course, is that these intellectual discourses were forced to develop a facade of science in order to appeal to gentiles. Or, in the case of the skeptical thrust of Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction and the Frankfurt School (but not involvement in activities such as The Authoritarian Personality), it was necessary to defend the viability of philosophical skepticism. The scientific veneer and philosophical respectability sought by these movements then functioned to portray these intellectual movements as the result of individualistic free choice based on rational appraisals of the evidence. This in turn necessitated that great efforts were required to mask Jewish involvement and domination of the movements, as well as the extent to which the movements sought to attain specific Jewish political interests.

Such efforts at deemphasizing Jewish involvement have been most apparent in radical political movements and psychoanalysis, but they are also apparent in Boasian anthropology. Although the Jewish political agenda of the Frankfurt School was far less camouflaged, even here an important aspect of the program was the development of a body of theory applicable to any universalist conception of society and not in any way dependent on the articulation of a specifically Jewish political agenda. As a result, this ideological perspective and its postmodern descendants have been enthusiastically embraced by non-Jewish minority group intellectuals with their own political agendas.

The phenomenon is a good example of the susceptibility of Western individualist societies to invasion by cohesive collectivist groups of any kind. I have noted a strong historical tendency for Judaism to prosper in Western individualist societies and to decline in Eastern or Western collectivist societies (see SAID, Chs. 3-5; PTSDA, Ch. 8). Jews benefit greatly from open, individualistic societies in which barriers to upward mobility are removed and in which intellectual discourse is not prescribed by gentile-dominated institutions like the Catholic Church. But, as Charles Liebman (1973, 157) points out, Jews “sought the options of the Enlightenment but rejected its consequences” by (in my terms) retaining a strong sense of group identity in a society nominally committed to individualism. Individualist societies develop republican political institutions and institutions of scientific inquiry that assume that groups are maximally permeable and highly subject to defection when individual needs are not being met. Individualists have little loyalty to ingroups and tend not to see the world in terms of ingroups and outgroups. There is a strong tendency to see others as individuals and evaluate them as individuals even when the others are acting as part of a collectivist group (Triandis 1995).

As a result, intellectual movements that are highly collectivist may come to be regarded by outsiders in individualistic societies as the result of individualistic, rational choice of free agents. Evidence suggests that Jews have been concerned to portray Jewish intellectual movements as the result of enlightened free choice. Thus Jewish social scientists were instrumental in portraying Jewish involvement in radical political causes as “the free choice of a gifted minority” (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 118), and I have noted the role of the media in portraying Freud as a tireless seeker of truth. Yet because of their collective, highly focused efforts and energy, these groups can be much more influential than the atomized, fragmented efforts of individuals. The efforts of individualists can easily be ignored, marginalized, or placed under anathema; in contrast, the collectivity continues to dominate intellectual discourse because of its cohesiveness and its control of the means of intellectual production. In the long run, however, there is reason to believe that the Western commitment to individualism depends on the absence of powerful and cohesive collectivist groups acting within society (SAID, Chs. 3-5).

It is of some importance that none of these post-Enlightenment intellectual movements reviewed here developed a specific positive rationale for continued Jewish identification. The material reviewed in this volume indicates that such an ideological rationale will not be forthcoming because, in a very basic sense, Judaism represents the antithesis of the Enlightenment values of individualism and its correlative scientific intellectual discourse. In the economic and social sphere, Judaism represents the possibility of a powerful, cohesive group ethnic strategy that provokes anti-individualist reactions in gentile outgroups and threatens the viability of individualist political and social institutions. In the intellectual sphere, Judaism has resulted in collectivist enterprises that have systematically impeded inquiry in the social sciences in the interests of developing and disseminating theories directed at achieving specific political and social interests.

It is thus not surprising that although these theories were directed at achieving specific Jewish interests in the manipulation of culture, they “could not tell their name”; that is, they were forced to minimize any overt indication that Jewish group identity or Jewish group interests were involved, and they could not develop a specific rationale for Judaism acceptable within a post-Enlightenment intellectual context. In SAID (Ch. 2) I noted that the Jewish contribution to the wider gentile culture in nineteenth-century Germany was accomplished from a highly particularistic perspective in which Jewish group identity continued to be of paramount subjective importance despite its “invisibility.” Similarly, because of the need for invisibility, the theories and movements discussed here were forced to deemphasize Judaism as a social category—a form of crypsis discussed extensively in SAID (Ch. 6) as a common Jewish technique in combating antiSemitism. In the case of the Frankfurt School, “What strikes the current observer is the intensity with which many of the Institute’s members denied, and in some cases still deny, any meaning at all to their Jewish identities” (Jay 1973, 32). The originators and practitioners of these theories attempted to conceal their Jewish identities, as in the case of Freud, and to engage in massive self-deception, as appears to have been common among many Jewish political radicals. Recall the Jewish radicals who believed in their own invisibility as Jews while nevertheless appearing as the quintessential ethnics to outside observers and at the same time taking steps to ensure that gentiles would have highly visible positions in the movement (pp. 91-93). The technique of having gentiles as highly visible exemplars of Jewish-dominated movements has been commonly used by Jewish groups attempting to appeal to gentiles on a wide range of Jewish issues (SAID, Ch. 6) and is apparent in the discussion of Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy in the following chapter. As an additional example, Irving Louis Horowitz (1993, 91) contrasts the “high-profile,” special-interest pleading of the new ethnic and sexual minorities within sociology with the Jewish tendency toward a low-profile strategy. Although Jews dominated American sociology beginning in the 1930s, specifically Jewish interests and political agendas were never made salient.

Given this history, it is highly ironic that Jewish neoconservative intellectuals have been in the forefront demanding that social science accept a scientific paradigm rather than the subjectivist, anti-science racialist ideologies typical of recent multiculturalist ideologues. Thus Irving Louis Horowitz (1993) shows that Jews dominated American sociology beginning in the 1930s and were instrumental in the decline of Darwinian paradigms and the rise of conflict models of society based on radical political theory. Horowitz notes, however, that this Jewish domination of sociology is now threatened by affirmative action hiring policies that place a cap on the number of Jews admitted to the profession as well as by the anti-Semitism and the politically motivated research agendas of these new ethnic minorities that increasingly influence the profession. Faced with this state of affairs, Horowitz (1993, 92) makes a plea for a scientific, individualist sociology: “Jewish growth and survival are best served in a democratic polity and by a scientific community.”

The material reviewed here is highly relevant to developing a theory of how human evolved psychology interfaces with cultural messages. Evolutionists have shown considerable interest in cultural evolution and its relation to organic evolution (Flinn 1997). Dawkins (1976), for example, developed the idea of “memes” as replicating cultural units transmitted within societies. Memes may be adaptive or maladaptive for the individuals or the societies adopting them. In terms of the present undertaking, the Jewish intellectual and cultural movements reviewed here may be viewed as memes designed to facilitate the continued existence of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy; their adaptiveness for gentiles who adopt them is highly questionable, however, and indeed, it is unlikely that a gentile who believes that, for example., anti-Semitism is necessarily a sign of a pathological personality is behaving adaptively.

The question is: What evolved features of the human mind make people likely to adopt memes that are inimical to their own interests? On the basis of the material reviewed here, one critical component appears to be that these memes are promulgated from highly prestigious sources, suggesting that one feature of our evolved psychology is a greater proneness to adopt cultural messages deriving from people and individuals with high social status. Social learning theory has long been aware of the tendency for models to be more effective if they have prestige and high status, and this tendency fits well with an evolutionary perspective in which seeking high social status is a universal feature of the human mind (MacDonald 1988a). Like other modeling influences, therefore, maladaptive memes are best promulgated by individuals and institutions with high social status, and we have seen that a consistent thread of the Jewish intellectual movements reviewed here has been that they have been promulgated by individuals representing society’s most prestigious intellectual and media institutions and they have attempted to cloak themselves in the veneer of science because of the high status of science. Individuals such as Freud have become cultural icons—true cultural heroes. The cultural memes emanating from his thought, therefore, have a much greater opportunity to take root in the culture as a whole.

Also relevant is that the movements reviewed here typically occurred in an atmosphere of Jewish crypsis or semi-crypsis in the sense that the Jewish political agenda was not an aspect of the theory and the theories themselves had no overt Jewish content. Gentile intellectuals approaching these theories were therefore unlikely to view them as aspects of Jewish-gentile cultural competition or as an aspect of a specifically Jewish political agenda; to the contrary, they were more likely to view the promulgators of these theories as “just like themselves”—as individualists seeking scientifically grounded truth about humans and their societies. Social psychological theory has long known that similarity is highly conducive to liking, and this phenomenon is susceptible to an evolutionary analysis (Rushton 1989). The proposal is that if these theories had been promulgated by traditionally Orthodox Jews, with their different modes of dress and speech patterns, they never would have had the cultural impact that they in fact had. From this perspective, Jewish crypsis and semi-crypsis are essential to the success of Judaism in post-Enlightenment societies—a theme discussed in SAID (Ch. 9).

Evolved mechanisms that facilitate the acceptance of maladaptive ideologies among gentiles are not the whole story, however. In SAID (Ch. 8) I noted a general tendency for self-deception among Jews as a robust pattern apparent in several historical eras and touching on a wide range of issues, including personal identity, the causes and extent of anti-Semitism, the characteristics of Jews (e.g., economic success), and the role of Jews in the political and cultural process in traditional and contemporary societies. Self-deception may well be important in facilitating Jewish involvement in the movements discussed here. I have noted evidence for this in the case of Jewish political radicals, and Greenwald and Schuh (1994) persuasively argue that the ingroup ethnic bias exhibited by their sample of researchers on prejudice is not conscious. Many of the Jews involved in the movements reviewed here may sincerely believe that these movements are really divorced from specifically Jewish interests or are in the best interests of other groups as well as Jews. They may sincerely believe that they are not biased in their associational patterns or in their patterns of citation in scientific articles, but, as Trivers notes (1985), the best deceivers are those who are self-deceived.

Finally, theories of social influence deriving from social psychology are also relevant and may yield to an evolutionary analysis. I have suggested that the memes generated by these Jewish intellectual movements achieve their influence, at least at first, because of the processes of minority group influence. The issue of whether this aspect of social psychology may be viewed as part of the evolved design features of the human mind remains to be researched.

7

Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S.
Immigration Policy

Today,… the immigrants—above all the Jewish immigrants—seem more American than [the WASP] does. They are the faces and voices and inflections of thought that seem most familiar to us, literally second nature. [The WASP] is the odd ball, the stranger, the fossil. We glance at him, a bit startled and say to ourselves, “Where did he go?” We remember him: pale, poised, neatly dressed, briskly sure of himself. And we see him as an outsider, an outlander, a reasonably noble breed in the act of vanishing… He has stopped being representative, and we didn’t notice it until this minute. Not so emphatically, anyway.

What has happened since World War II is that the American sensibility has become part Jewish, perhaps as much Jewish as it is anything else… The literate American mind has come in some measure to think Jewishly. It has been taught to, and it was ready to. After the entertainers and novelists came the Jewish critics, politicians, theologians. Critics and politicians and theologians are by profession molders; they form ways of seeing. (Walter Kerr 1968, D1, D3)

Immigration policy is a paradigmatic example of conflicts of interest between ethnic groups because immigration policy determines the future demographic composition of the nation. Ethnic groups unable to influence immigration policy in their own interests will eventually be displaced by groups able to accomplish this goal. Immigration policy is thus of fundamental interest to an evolutionist.

This chapter discusses ethnic conflict between Jews and gentiles in the area of immigration policy. Immigration policy is, however, only one aspect of conflicts of interest between Jews and gentiles in the United States. The skirmishes between Jews and the gentile power structure beginning in the late nineteenth century always had strong overtones of anti-Semitism. These battles involved issues of Jewish upward mobility, quotas on Jewish representation in elite schools beginning in the nineteenth century and peaking in the 1920s and 1930s, the anti-communist crusades in the post-World War II era, as well as the very powerful concern with the cultural influences of the major media extending from Henry Ford’s writings in the 1920s to the Hollywood inquisitions of the McCarthy era and into the contemporary era (SAID, Ch. 2). That anti-Semitism was involved in these issues can be seen from the fact that historians of Judaism (e.g., Sachar 1992, 620ff) feel compelled to include accounts of these events as important to the history of Jews in the United States, by the anti-Semitic pronouncements of many of the gentile participants, and by the self-conscious understanding of Jewish participants and observers.

The Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy in the United States is especially noteworthy as an aspect of ethnic conflict. Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy has had certain unique qualities that have distinguished Jewish interests from the interests of other groups favoring liberal immigration policies. Throughout much of the period from 1881 to 1965, one Jewish interest in liberal immigration policies stemmed from a desire to provide a sanctuary for Jews fleeing from anti-Semitic persecutions in Europe and elsewhere. Anti-Semitic persecutions have been a recurrent phenomenon in the modern world beginning with the Russian pogroms of 1881 and continuing into the post-World War II era in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. As a result, liberal immigration has been a Jewish interest because “survival often dictated that Jews seek refuge in other lands” (Cohen 1972, 341). For a similar reason, Jews have consistently advocated an internationalist foreign policy because “an internationally-minded America was likely to be more sensitive to the problems of foreign Jewries” (p. 342).

There is also evidence that Jews, much more than any other European-derived ethnic group in the United States, have viewed liberal immigration policies as a mechanism of ensuring that the United States would be a pluralistic rather than a unitary, homogeneous society (e.g., Cohen 1972). Pluralism serves both internal (within-group) and external (between-group) Jewish interests. Pluralism serves internal Jewish interests because it legitimates the internal Jewish interest in rationalizing and openly advocating an interest in overt rather than semi-cryptic Jewish group commitment and nonassimilation, what Howard Sachar (1992, 427) terms its function in “legitimizing the preservation of a minority culture in the midst of a majority’s host society.” Both Neusner (1993) and Ellman (1987) suggest that the increased sense of ethnic consciousness seen in Jewish circles recently has been influenced by this general movement within American society toward the legitimization of cultural pluralism and minority group ethnocentrism. This trend toward overt rather than the semi-cryptic forms that have characterized Judaism in twentieth-century Western societies is viewed by many as critical to the continuity of Judaism (e.g., Abrams 1997; Dershowitz 1997; see SAID, Ch. 8). Reform Judaism, the least overt form of contemporay Judaism, is becoming steadily more traditional, including a greater emphasis on religious rituals and a deep concern to prevent intermarriage. A recent conference of Reform rabbis emphasized that the upsurge in traditionalism is partly the result of the increasing legitimacy of ethnic consciousness in general (Los Angeles Times, June 20, 1998, A26).

Ethnic and religious pluralism also serves external Jewish interests because Jews become just one of many ethnic groups. This results in the diffusion of political and cultural influence among the various ethnic and religious groups, and it becomes difficult or impossible to develop unified, cohesive groups of gentiles united in their opposition to Judaism. Historically, major anti-Semitic movements have tended to erupt in societies that have been, apart from the Jews, religiously or ethnically homogeneous (see SAID). Conversely, one reason for the relative lack of anti-Semitism in the United States compared to Europe was that “Jews did not stand out as a solitary group of [religious] non-conformists” (Higham 1984, 156). Although ethnic and cultural pluralism are certainly not guaranteed to satisfy Jewish interests (see Ch. 8), it is nonetheless the case that ethnically and religiously pluralistic societies have been perceived by Jews as more likely to satisfy Jewish interests than are societies characterized by ethnic and religious homogeneity among gentiles.

Indeed, at a basic level, the motivation for all the Jewish political and intellectual activity reviewed throughout this volume is intimately linked to fears of anti-Semitism. Svonkin (1997, 8ff) shows that a sense of “uneasiness” and insecurity pervaded American Jewry in the wake of World War II even in the face of evidence that anti-Semitism had declined to the point that it had become a marginal phenomenon. As a direct result, “The primary objective of the Jewish intergroup relations agencies [i.e., the AJCommittee, the AJCongress, and the ADL] after 1945 was… to prevent the emergence of an anti-Semitic reactionary mass movement in the United States” (Svonkin 1997, 8).

Writing in the 1970s, Isaacs (1974, 14ff) describes the pervasive insecurity of American Jews and their hypersensitivity to anything that might be deemed anti-Semitic. Interviewing “noted public men” on the subject of anti-Semitism in the early 1970s, Isaacs asked, “Do you think it could happen here?” “Never was it necessary to define ‘it.’ In almost every case, the reply was approximately the same: ‘If you know history at all, you have to presume not that it could happen, but that it probably will,’ or ‘It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when’” (p. 15). Isaacs, correctly in my view, attributes the intensity of Jewish involvement in politics to this fear of anti-Semitism. Jewish activism on immigration is merely one strand of a multipronged movement directed at preventing the development of a mass movement of anti-Semitism in Western societies. Other aspects of this program are briefly reviewed below.

Explicit statements linking immigration policy to a Jewish interest in cultural pluralism can be found among prominent Jewish social scientists and political activists. In his review of Horace Kallen’s (1956) Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea appearing in Congress Weekly (published by the AJCongress), Joseph L. Blau (1958, 15) noted that “Kallen’s view is needed to serve the cause of minority groups and minority cultures in this nation without a permanent majority”—the implication being that Kallen’s ideology of multiculturalism opposes the interests of any ethnic group in dominating the United States. The well-known author and prominent Zionist Maurice Samuel (1924, 215), writing partly as a negative reaction to the immigration law of 1924, wrote, “If, then, the struggle between us [i.e., Jews and gentiles] is ever to be lifted beyond the physical, your democracies will have to alter their demands for racial, spiritual and cultural homogeneity with the State. But it would be foolish to regard this as a possibility, for the tendency of this civilization is in the opposite direction. There is a steady approach toward the identification of government with race, instead of with the political State.”

Samuel deplored the 1924 legislation as violating his conceptualization of the United States as a purely political entity with no ethnic implications.

We have just witnessed, in America, the repetition, in the peculiar form adapted to this country, of the evil farce to which the experience of many centuries has not yet accustomed us. If America had any meaning at all, it lay in the peculiar attempt to rise above the trend of our present civilization—the identification of race with State… America was therefore the New World in this vital respect—that the State was purely an ideal, and nationality was identical only with acceptance of the ideal. But it seems now that the entire point of view was a mistaken one, that America was incapable of rising above her origins, and the semblance of an ideal-nationalism was only a stage in the proper development of the universal gentile spirit… To-day, with race triumphant over ideal, anti-Semitism uncovers its fangs, and to the heartless refusal of the most elementary human right, the right of asylum, is added cowardly insult. We are not only excluded, but we are told, in the unmistakable language of the immigration laws, that we are an “inferior” people. Without the moral courage to stand up squarely to its evil instincts, the country prepared itself, through its journalists, by a long draught of vilification of the Jew, and, when sufficiently inspired by the popular and “scientific” potions, committed the act. (pp. 218-220)

A congruent opinion is expressed by prominent Jewish social scientist and ethnic activist Earl Raab, who remarks very positively on the success of American immigration policy in altering the ethnic composition of the United States since 1965.¹⁴⁸ Raab notes that the Jewish community has taken a leadership role in changing the Northwestern European bias of American immigration policy (1993a, 17), and he has also maintained that one factor inhibiting anti-Semitism in the contemporary United States is that “an increasing ethnic heterogeneity, as a result of immigration, has made it even more difficult for a political party or mass movement of bigotry to develop” (1995, 91). Or more colorfully:

The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country.

We [Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible—and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever. (Raab 1993b, 23)

Positive attitudes toward cultural diversity have also appeared in other statements on immigration by Jewish authors and leaders. Charles Silberman (1985, 350) notes, “American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief—one firmly rooted in history—that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of U.S. Jews to endorse ‘gay rights’ and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called ‘social’ issues.”¹⁴⁹

Similarly, in listing the positive benefits of immigration, the director of the Washington Action Office of the Council of Jewish Federations stated that immigration “is about diversity, cultural enrichment and economic opportunity for the immigrants” (in Forward, March 8, 1996, 5). And in summarizing Jewish involvement in the 1996 legislative battles over immigration, a newspaper account stated, “Jewish groups failed to kill a number of provisions that reflect the kind of political expediency that they regard as a direct attack on American pluralism” (Detroit Jewish News, May 10, 1996).

Because liberal immigration policies are a vital Jewish interest, it is not surprising that support for liberal immigration policies spans the Jewish political spectrum. We have seen that Sidney Hook, who along with the other New York Intellectuals may be viewed as an intellectual precursor of neoconservatism, identified democracy with the equality of differences and with the maximization of cultural diversity (see Ch. 6). Neoconservatives have been strong advocates of liberal immigration policies, and there has been a conflict between predominantly Jewish neoconservatives and predominantly gentile paleoconservatives over the issue of Third World immigration into the United States. Neoconservatives Norman Podhoretz and Richard John Neuhaus reacted very negatively to an article by a paleo-Conservative concerned that such immigration would eventually lead to the United States being dominated by such immigrants (see Judis 1990, 33). Other examples are neoconservatives Julian Simon (1990) and Ben Wattenberg (1991) both of whom advocate very high levels of immigration from all parts of the world, so that the United States will become what Wattenberg describes as the world’s first “Universal Nation.” Based on recent data, Fetzer (1996) reports that Jews remain far more favorable to immigration to the United States than any other ethnic group or religion.

It should be noted as a general point that the effectiveness of Jewish organizations in influencing U.S. immigration policy has been facilitated by certain characteristics of American Jewry that are directly linked with Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, and particularly an IQ that is at least one standard deviation above the Caucasian mean (PTSDA, Ch. 7). High IQ is associated with success in a broad range of activities in contemporary societies, including especially wealth and social status (Herrnstein & Murray 1994). As Neuringer (1971, 87) notes, Jewish influence on immigration policy was facilitated by Jewish wealth, education, and social status. Reflecting its general disproportionate representation in markers of economic success and political influence, Jewish organizations have been able to have a vastly disproportionate effect on U.S. immigration policy because Jews as a group are highly organized, highly intelligent and politically astute, and they were able to command a high level of financial, political, and intellectual resources in pursuing their political aims. Similarly, Hollinger (1996, 19) notes that Jews were more influential in the decline of a homogeneous Protestant Christian culture in the United States than Catholics because of their greater wealth, social standing, and technical skill in the intellectual arena. In the area of immigration policy, the main Jewish activist organization influencing immigration policy, the AJCommittee, was characterized by “strong leadership [particularly Louis Marshall], internal cohesion, well-funded programs, sophisticated lobbying techniques, well-chosen non-Jewish allies, and good timing” (Goldstein 1990, 333). Goldberg (1996, 38-39) notes that presently there are approximately 300 national Jewish organizations in the United States with a combined budget estimated in the range of $6 billion—a sum, Goldberg notes, greater than the gross national product of half the members of the United Nations.

The Jewish effort toward transforming the United States into a pluralistic society has been waged on several fronts. In addition to discussing legislative and lobbying activities related to immigration policy, mention will also be made of Jewish efforts in the intellectual-academic arena, the area of church-state relationships, and organizing African Americans as a political and cultural force.

(1) Intellectual-academic efforts. Hollinger (1996, 4) notes “the transformation of the ethnoreligious demography of American academic life by Jews” in the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, as well as the Jewish influence on trends toward the secularization of American society and in advancing an ideal of cosmopolitanism (p. 11). The pace of this influence was very likely influenced by the immigration battles of the 1920s. Hollinger notes that the “old Protestant establishment’s influence persisted until the 1960s in large measure because of the Immigration Act of 1924: had the massive immigration of Catholics and Jews continued at pre-1924 levels, the course of U.S. history would have been different in many ways, including, one may reasonably speculate, a more rapid diminution of Protestant cultural hegemony. Immigration restriction gave that hegemony a new lease of life” (22). It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the immigration battles from 1881 to 1965 have been of momentous historical importance in shaping the contours of American culture in the late twentieth century.

Of particular interest here is the ideology that the United States ought to be an ethnically and culturally pluralistic society. Beginning with Horace Kallen, Jewish intellectuals have been at the forefront in developing models of the United States as a culturally and ethnically pluralistic society. Reflecting the utility of cultural pluralism in serving internal Jewish group interests in maintaining cultural separatism, Kallen personally combined his ideology of cultural pluralism with a deep immersion in Jewish history and literature, a commitment to Zionism, and political activity on behalf of Jews in Eastern Europe (Sachar 1992, 425ff; Frommer 1978).

Kallen (1915, 1924) developed a “polycentric” ideal for American ethnic relationships. Kallen defined ethnicity as deriving from one’s biological endowment, implying that Jews should be able to remain a genetically and culturally cohesive group while participating in American democratic institutions. This conception that the United States should be organized as a set of separate ethnic-cultural groups was accompanied by an ideology that relationships between groups would be cooperative and benign: “Kallen lifted his eyes above the strife that swirled around him to an ideal realm where diversity and harmony coexist” (Higham 1984, 209). Similarly in Germany, the Jewish leader Moritz Lazarus argued in opposition to the views of the German intellectual Heinrich von Treitschke that the continued separateness of diverse ethnic groups contributed to the richness of German culture (Schorsch 1972, 63). Lazarus also developed the doctrine of dual loyalty, which became a cornerstone of the Zionist movement. Already in 1862 Moses Hess had developed the view that Judaism would lead the world to an era of universal harmony in which each ethnic group retained its separate existence but no group controlled any area of land (see SAID, Ch. 5).

Kallen wrote his 1915 book partly in reaction to the ideas of Edward A. Ross (1914). Ross was a Darwinian sociologist who believed that the existence of clearly demarcated groups would tend to result in between-group competition for resources—clearly a perspective that is highly congruent with the theory and data presented in SAID. Higham’s comment is interesting because it shows that Kallen’s romantic views of group coexistence were massively contradicted by the reality of between-group competition in his own day. Indeed, it is noteworthy that Kallen was a prominent leader of the AJCongress. During the 1920s and 1930s the AJCongress championed group economic and political rights for Jews in Eastern Europe at a time when there was widespread ethnic tensions and persecution of Jews, and despite the fears of many that such rights would merely exacerbate current tensions. The AJCongress demanded that Jews be allowed proportional political representation as well as the ability to organize their own communities and preserve an autonomous Jewish national culture. The treaties with Eastern European countries and Turkey included provisions that the state provide instruction in minority languages and that Jews have the right to refuse to attend courts or other public functions on the Sabbath (Frommer 1978, 162).

Kallen’s idea of cultural pluralism as a model for the United States was popularized among gentile intellectuals by John Dewey (Higham 1984, 209), who in turn was promoted by Jewish intellectuals: “If lapsed Congregationalists like Dewey did not need immigrants to inspire them to press against the boundaries of even the most liberal of Protestant sensibilities, Dewey’s kind were resoundingly encouraged in that direction by the Jewish intellectuals they encountered in urban academic and literary communities” (Hollinger 1996, 24). “One force in this [culture war of the 1940s] was a secular, increasingly Jewish, decidedly left-of-center intelligentsia based largely… in the disciplinary communities of philosophy and the social sciences… The leading spirit was the aging John Dewey himself, still contributing occasional articles and addresses to the cause (p. 160). (The editors of Partisan Review, the principal journal of the New York Intellectuals, published work by Dewey and called him “America’s leading philosopher” [ PR 13:608, 1946]; Dewey’s student, New York Intellectual Sidney Hook [1987, 82], was also unsparing in his praise of Dewey, terming him “the intellectual leader of the liberal community in the United States” and “a sort of intellectual tribune of progressive causes.”) Dewey, as the leading American secularist, was allied with a group of Jewish intellectuals opposed to “specifically Christian formulations of American democracy” (Hollinger 1996, 158). Dewey had close links with the New York Intellectuals, many of whom were Trotskyists, and he headed the Dewey Commission that exonerated Trotsky of charges brought in the Moscow trials of 1936. Dewey was highly influential with the public at large. Henry Commager described Dewey as “the guide, the mentor, and the conscience of the American people; it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for a generation no issue was clarified until Dewey had spoken” (in Sandel 1996, 36). Dewey was the foremost advocate of “progressive education” and helped establish the New School for Social Research and the American Civil Liberties Union, both essentially Jewish organizations (Goldberg 1996, 46, 131). As with several other gentiles discussed in this volume, Dewey, whose “lack of presence as a writer, speaker, or personality makes his popular appeal something of a mystery” (Sandel 1996, 35), thus represented the public face of a movement dominated by Jewish intellectuals.

Kallen’s ideas have been very influential in producing Jewish self-conceptualizations of their status in America. This influence was apparent as early as 1915 among American Zionists, such as Louis D. Brandeis.¹⁵⁰ Brandeis viewed the United States as composed of different nationalities whose free development would “spiritually enrich the United States and would make it a democracy par excellence” (Gal 1989, 70). These views became “a hallmark of mainstream American Zionism, secular and religious alike” (Gal 1989, 70). Cultural pluralism was also a hallmark of the Jewish-dominated intergroup relations movement following World War II, although these intellectuals sometimes couched these ideas in terms of “unity in diversity” or “cultural democracy” in an effort to remove the connotation that the United States should literally be a federation of different national groups as the AJCongress advocated in the case of Eastern Europe and elsewhere (Svonkin 1997, 22). Kallen’s influence extended really to all educated Jews:

Legitimizing the preservation of a minority culture in the midst of a majority’s host society, pluralism functioned as intellectual anchorage for an educated Jewish second generation, sustained its cohesiveness and its most tenacious communal endeavors through the rigors of the Depression and revived anti-semitism, through the shock of Nazism and the Holocaust, until the emergence of Zionism in the post-World War II years swept through American Jewry with a climactic redemptionist fervor of its own. (Sachar 1992, 427)

As David Petegorsky, Executive Director of the AJCongress, stated in an address to the biennial convention of the AJCongress in 1948:

We are profoundly convinced that Jewish survival will depend on Jewish statehood in Palestine, on the one hand, and on the existence of a creative, conscious and well-adjusted Jewish community in this country on the other. Such a creative community can exist only within the framework of a progressive and expanding democratic society, which through its institutions and public policies gives full expression to the concept of cultural pluralism. (In Svonkin 1997, 82; italics in text)

Besides the ideology of ethnic and cultural pluralism, the ultimate success of Jewish attitudes on immigration was also influenced by intellectual movements reviewed in Chapters 2-6. These movements, and particularly the work of Franz Boas, collectively resulted in a decline of evolutionary and biological thinking in the academic world. Although playing virtually no role in the restrictionist position in the congressional debates on immigration (which focused mainly on the fairness of maintaining the ethnic status quo; see below), a component of the intellectual zeitgeist of the 1920s was the prevalence of evolutionary theories of race and ethnicity (Singerman 1986), particularly the theories of Madison Grant. In The Passing of the Great Race Grant (1921) argued that the American colonial stock was derived from superior Nordic racial elements and that immigration of other races would lower the competence level of the society as a whole as well as threaten democratic and republican institutions. Grant’s ideas were popularized in the media at the time of the immigration debates (see Divine 1957, 12ff) and often provoked negative comments in Jewish publications such as The American Hebrew (e.g., March 21, 1924, 554, 625).

Grant’s letter to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization emphasized the principle argument of the restrictionists, that is, that the use of the 1890 census of the foreign born as the basis of the immigration law was fair to all ethnic groups currently in the country, and that the use of the 1910 census discriminated against the “native Americans whose ancestors were in this country before its independence.” He also argued in favor of quotas from Western Hemisphere nations because these countries “in some cases furnish very undesirable immigrants. The Mexicans who come into the United States are overwhelmingly of Indian blood, and the recent intelligence tests have shown their very low intellectual status. We have already got too many of them in our Southwestern States, and a check should be put on their increase.”¹⁵¹ Grant was also concerned about the unassimilability of recent immigrants. He included with his letter a Chicago Tribune editorial commenting on a situation in Hamtramck, Michigan, in which recent immigrants were described as demanding “Polish rule,” the expulsion of non-Poles, and use of only the Polish language by federal officials. Grant also argued that differences in reproductive rate would result in displacement of groups that delayed marriage and had fewer children—a comment that reflects ethnic differences in life history strategy (Rushton 1995) and clearly indicating a concern that as a result of immigration his ethnic group would be displaced by ethnic groups with a higher rate of natural increase. Reflecting his concerns about immigrants from Mexico, recent data indicate that adolescent women of Mexican background have the highest birthrate in the United States and people of Mexican background will be a majority of the state of California by 2040. In 1995, women aged 15-19 of Mexican origin had a birth rate of 125 per 1000 compared to 39 per 1000 for non-Latina Whites and 99 per 100 for non-Latina blacks. The overall birthrate for the three groups is 3.3 for Latina women, 2.2 for non-Latina black women, and 1.8 for non-Latina white women (Los Angeles Times, Feb. 13, 1998, pp. A1, A16). Moreover, Latino activists have a clearly articulated policy of “reconquering” the United States via immigration and high birth rates.¹⁵²

In Chapter 2 I showed that Stephen Jay Gould and Leon Kamin have presented a highly exaggerated and largely false account of the role of the IQ debates of the 1920s in passing immigration restriction legislation. It is also very easy to overemphasize the importance of theories of Nordic superiority as an ingredient of popular and congressional restrictionist sentiment. As Singerman (1986, 118-119) points out, “racial anti-Semitism” was employed by only “a handful of writers;” and “the Jewish ‘problem’… was a minor preoccupation even among such widely-published authors as Madison Grant or T. Lothrop Stoddard and none of the individuals examined [in Singerman’s review] could be regarded as professional Jew-baiters or full-time propagandists against Jews, domestic or foreign.” As indicated below, arguments related to Nordic superiority, including supposed Nordic intellectual superiority, played remarkably little role in Congressional debates over immigration in the 1920s, the common argument of the restrictionists being that immigration policy should reflect equally the interests of all ethnic groups currently in the country. There is even evidence that the Nordic superiority argument had little favor with the public: A member of the Immigration Restriction League stated in 1924 that “the country is somewhat fed up on high brow Nordic superiority stuff” (in Samelson 1979, 136).

Nevertheless, it is probable that the decline in evolutionary and biological theories of race and ethnicity facilitated the sea change in immigration policy brought about by the 1965 law. As Higham (1984) notes, by the time of the final victory in 1965, which removed national origins and racial ancestry from immigration policy and opened up immigration to all human groups, the Boasian perspective of cultural determinism and anti-biologism had become standard academic wisdom. The result was that “it became intellectually fashionable to discount the very existence of persistent ethnic differences. The whole reaction deprived popular race feelings of a powerful ideological weapon” (Higham 1984, 58-59).

Jewish intellectuals were prominently involved in the movement to eradicate the racialist ideas of Grant and others (Degler 1991, 200). Indeed, even during the earlier debates leading up to the immigration bills of 1921 and 1924, restrictionists perceived themselves to be under attack from Jewish intellectuals. In 1918 Prescott F. Hall, secretary of the Immigration Restriction League, wrote to Grant, “What I wanted… was the names of a few anthropologists of note who have declared in favor of the inequality of the races… I am up against the Jews all the time in the equality argument and thought perhaps you might be able offhand to name a few (besides [Henry Fairfield] Osborn) whom I could quote in support” (in Samelson 1975, 467).

Grant also believed that Jews were engaged in a campaign to discredit racial research. In the introduction to the 1921 edition of The Passing of the Great Race, Grant complained that “it is well-nigh impossible to publish in the American newspapers any reflection upon certain religions or races which are hysterically sensitive even when mentioned by name. The underlying idea seems to be that if publication can be suppressed the facts themselves will ultimately disappear. Abroad, conditions are fully as bad, and we have the authority of one of the most eminent anthropologists in France that the collection of anthropological measurements and data among French recruits at the outbreak of the Great War was prevented by Jewish influence, which aimed to suppress any suggestion of racial differentiation in France” (pp. xxxii-xxxiii).

Boas was greatly motivated by the immigration issue as it occurred early in the century. Carl Degler (1991, 74) notes that Boas’s professional correspondence “reveals that an important motive behind his famous head-measuring project in 1910 was his strong personal interest in keeping the United States diverse in population.” The study, whose conclusions were placed into the Congressional Record by Representative Emanuel Celler during the debate on immigration restriction (Cong. Rec. , April 8, 1924, 5915-5916), concluded that the environmental differences consequent to immigration caused differences in head shape. (At the time, head shape as determined by the “cephalic index” was the main measurement used by scientists involved in racial differences research.) Boas argued that his research showed that all foreign groups living in favorable social circumstances had become assimilated to the United States in the sense that their physical measurements converged on the American type. Although he was considerably more circumspect regarding his conclusions in the body of his report (see also Stocking 1968, 178), Boas (1911, 5) stated in his introduction that “all fear of an unfavorable influence of South European immigration upon the body of our people should be dismissed.” As a further indication of Boas’s ideological commitment to the immigration issue, Degler makes the following comment regarding one of Boas’s environmentalist explanations for mental differences between immigrant and native children: “Why Boas chose to advance such an adhoc interpretation is hard to understand until one recognizes his desire to explain in a favorable way the apparent mental backwardness of the immigrant children” (p. 75).

The ideology of racial equality was an important weapon on behalf of opening immigration up to all human groups. For example, in a 1951 statement to Congress, the AJCongress stated, “The findings of science must force even the most prejudiced among us to accept, as unqualifiedly as we do the law of gravity, that intelligence, morality and character, bear no relationship whatever to geography or place of birth.”¹⁵³ The statement went on to cite some of Boas’s popular writings on the subject as well as the writings of Boas’s protégé Ashley Montagu, perhaps the most visible opponent of the concept of race during this period.¹⁵⁴ Montagu, whose original name was Israel Ehrenberg, theorized in the period immediately following World War II that humans are innately cooperative, but not innately aggressive, and there is a universal brotherhood among humans (see Shipman 1994, 159ff). In 1952 another Boas protégé, Margaret Mead, testified before the President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization (PCIN) (1953, 92) that “all human beings from all groups of people have the same potentialities… Our best anthropological evidence today suggests that the people of every group have about the same distribution of potentialities.” Another witness stated that the executive board of the American Anthropological Association had unanimously endorsed the proposition that “[a]ll scientific evidence indicates that all peoples are inherently capable of acquiring or adapting to our civilization” (PCIN 1953, 93) (see Ch. 2 for a discussion of the success of the political efforts of the Boasians to dominate the American Anthropological Association). By 1965 Senator Jacob Javits (Cong. Rec. , 111, 1965, 24469) could confidently announce to the Senate during the debate on the immigration bill that “both the dictates of our consciences as well as the precepts of sociologists tell us that immigration, as it exists in the national origins quota system, is wrong and without any basis in reason or fact for we know better than to say that one man is better than another because of the color of his skin.” The intellectual revolution and its translation into public policy had been completed.

(2) Church-state relationships. One aspect of the Jewish interest in cultural pluralism in the United States has been that Jews have a perceived interest that the United States not be a homogeneous Christian culture. As Ivers (1995, 2) notes, “Jewish civil rights organizations have had an historic role in the postwar development of American church-state law and policy.” In this case the main Jewish effort began only after World War II, although Jews opposed linkages between the state and the Protestant religion much earlier. For example, Jewish publications were unanimous in their opposition to Tennessee’s law that resulted in the 1925 Scopes trial in which Darwinism was pitted against religious fundamentalism (Goldfarb 1984, 43):

It matters not whether evolution is or is not true. What matters is that there are certain forces in this country who insist that the Government shall see to it that nothing is taught in this country which will in any way cast a doubt on the infallibility of the Bible. There you have the whole issue boiled down. In other words, it is a deliberate un-American attempt to unite Church and State… And we go even further than that and assert that it is an attempt to unite State with Protestant Church. (Jewish Criterion 66 [July 10, 1925]; italics in text)

The Jewish effort in this case was well funded and was the focus of well-organized, highly dedicated Jewish civil service organizations, including the AJCommittee, the AJCongress, and the ADL. It involved keen legal expertise both in the actual litigation but also in influencing legal opinion via articles in law journals and other forums of intellectual debate, including the popular media. It also involved a highly charismatic and effective leadership, particularly Leo Pfeffer of the AJCongress:

No other lawyer exercised such complete intellectual dominance over a chosen area of law for so extensive a period—as an author, scholar, public citizen, and above all, legal advocate who harnessed his multiple and formidable talents into a single force capable of satisfying all that an institution needs for a successful constitutional reform movement… That Pfeffer, through an enviable combination of skill, determination, and persistence, was able in such a short period of time to make church-state reform the foremost cause with which rival organizations associated the AJCongress illustrates well the impact that individual lawyers endowed with exceptional skills can have on the character and life of the organizations for which they work… As if to confirm the extent to which Pfeffer is associated with post- Everson [i.e., post-1946] constitutional development, even the major critics of the Court’s church-state jurisprudence during this period and the modern doctrine of separationism rarely fail to make reference to Pfeffer as the central force responsible for what they lament as the lost meaning of the establishment clause. (Ivers 1995, 222-224)

Similarly, Jews in nineteenth-century France and Germany attempted to remove education from control by the Catholic and Lutheran churches respectively, while for many gentiles Christianity was an important part of national identity (Lindemann 1997, 214). Because of such activities, anti-Semites commonly viewed Jews as destroyers of the social fabric.

(3) Organization of African Americans and the intergroup relations movement in the post-World War II era. Finally, Jews have also been instrumental in organizing African Americans as a political force that served Jewish interests in diluting the political and cultural hegemony of non-Jewish European Americans. Jews played a very prominent role in organizing blacks beginning with the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and, despite increasing black anti-Semitism, continuing into the present.

By mid-decade [ c. 1915], the NAACP had something of the aspect of an adjunct of B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee, with the brothers Joel and Arthur Spingarn serving as board chairman and chief legal counsel, respectively; Herbert Lehman on the executive committee; Lillian Wald and Walter Sachs on the board (though not simultaneously); and Jacob Schiff and Paul Warburg as financial angels. By 1920, Herbert Seligman was director of public relations, and Marha Greuning served as his assistant… Small wonder that a bewildered Marcus Garvey stormed out of NAACP headquarters in 1917, muttering that it was a white organization. (Levering-Lewis 1984, 85)

Wealthy Jews were important contributors to the National Urban League as well: “Edwin Seligman’s chairmanship, and the presence on the board of Felix Adler, Lillian Wald, Abraham Lefkowitz, and, shortly thereafter, Julius Rosenwald, principal Sears, Roebuck Company stockholder, forecast significant Jewish contributions to the League” (Levering-Lewis 1984, p. 85). In addition to providing funding and organizational talent (the presidents of the NAACP were Jews until 1975), Jewish legal talent was harnessed on behalf of African American causes. Louis Marshall, a prominent player in the Jewish efforts on immigration (see below), was a principal NAACP attorney during the 1920s. African Americans played little role in these efforts: For example, until 1933 there were no African American lawyers in the NAACP legal department (Friedman 1995, 106). Indeed, a theme of revisionist historians reviewed by Friedman is that Jews organized African Americans for their own interests rather than in the best interests of African Americans. In the post-World War II period the entire gamut of Jewish civil service organizations were involved in black issues, including the AJCommittee, the AJCongress, and the ADL: “With professionally trained personnel, fully equipped offices, and public relations know-how, they had the resources to make a difference” (Friedman 1995, 135). Jews contributed from two thirds to three quarters of the money for civil rights groups during the 1960s (Kaufman 1997, 110). Jewish groups, particularly the AJCongress, played a leading role in drafting civil rights legislation and pursuing legal challenges related to civil rights issues mainly benefiting blacks (Svonkin 1997, 79-112). “Jewish support, legal and monetary, afforded the civil rights movement a string of legal victories… There is little exaggeration in an American Jewish Congress lawyer’s claim that ‘many of these laws were actually written in the offices of Jewish agencies by Jewish staff people, introduced by Jewish legislators and pressured into being by Jewish voters’” (Levering-Lewis 1984, 94).

Harold Cruse (1967, 1992) presents a particularly trenchant analysis of the Jewish-black coalition that reflects several themes of this volume. First, he notes, “Jews know exactly what they want in America” (121; italics in text). Jews want cultural pluralism because of their long-term policy of nonassmilation and group solidarity. Cruse notes, however, that the Jewish experience in Europe has shown them that “two can play this game” (i.e., develop highly nationalistic solidary groups), and “when that happens, woe be to the side that is short on numbers” (p. 122; italics in text). Cruse is here referring to the possibility of antagonistic group strategies (and, I suppose, the reactive processes) that form the subject matter of SAID (Chs. 3-5). Correspondingly, Cruse observes that Jewish organizations view Anglo-Saxon (read Caucasian) nationalism as their greatest potential threat and they have tended to support pro-black integration (i.e., assimilationist, individualist) policies for blacks in America, presumably because such policies dilute Caucasian power and lessen the possibility of a cohesive, nationalist anti-Semitic Caucasian majority. At the same time, Jewish organizations have opposed a black nationalist position while pursuing an anti-assimilationist, nationalist group strategy for their own group.

Cruse also points out the asymmetry in black-Jewish relations: While Jews have held prominent roles in black civil rights organizations and have been actively involved in funding these organizations and in making and implementing the policies of these organizations, blacks have been completely excluded from the inner workings and policy-making bodies in Jewish organizations. To a considerable extent, at least until quite recently, the form and goals of the black movement in the United States should be seen as an instrument of Jewish strategy with goals very similar goals to those pursued in the arena of immigration legislation.

The Jewish role in African American affairs must, however, be seen as part of the broader role of what participants termed the “intergroup relations movement” that worked to “eliminate prejudice and discrimination against racial, ethnic, and religious minorities” in the period following World War II (Svonkin 1997, 1). As with the other movements with strong Jewish involvement, Jewish organizations, particularly the AJCommittee, the AJCongress, and the ADL, were the leaders, and these organizations provided the major sources of funding, devised the tactics, and defined the objectives of the movement. As was also the case with the movement to shape immigration policy, its aim was the very self-interested aim of preventing the development of a mass anti-Semitic movement in the United States: Jewish activists “saw their commitment to the intergroup relations movement as a preventive measure designed to make sure ‘it’—the Nazis’ war of extermination against European Jewry—never happened in America” (Svonkin 1997, 10).

This was a multi-faceted effort, ranging from legal challenges to bias in housing, education, and public employment; legislative proposals and efforts to secure their passage into law in state and national legislative bodies; efforts to shape messages emanating from the media; educational programs for students and teachers; and intellectual efforts to reshape the intellectual discourse of academia. As with Jewish involvement in immigration policy and a great many other instances of Jewish political and intellectual activity in both modern and premodern times (see SAID, Ch. 6), the intergroup relations movement often worked to minimize overt Jewish involvement (e.g., Svonkin 1997, 45, 51, 65, 71-72).

As in the nineteenth-century attempt to define Jewish interests in terms of German ideals (Ragins 1980, 55; Schmidt 1959, 46), the rhetoric of the intergroup relations movement stressed that its goals were congruent with American self-conceptualizations, a move that stressed the Enlightenment legacy of individual rights while effectively ignoring the republican strand of American identity as a cohesive, socially homogeneous society and the “ethnocultural” strand emphasizing the importance of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity in the development and preservation of American cultural forms (Smith 1988; see Ch. 8). Liberal cosmopolitanism and individual rights were also conceived as congruent with Jewish ideals originating with the prophets (Svonkin 1997, 7, 20), a conceptualization that ignores the negative conceptualizations of outgroups and discrimination against outgroups and a pronounced tendency toward collectivism that have been central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. As Svonkin notes, Jewish rhetoric during this period relied on an illusory view of the Jewish past that was tailor-made to achieve Jewish objectives in the modern world, where the Enlightenment rhetoric of universalism and individual rights retained considerable intellectual prestige.

Of critical importance in rationalizing Jewish interests during this period were the intellectual movements discussed in this volume, particularly Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, and the Frankfurt School of Social Research. As also indicated in Chapter 5, Jewish organizations were involved in funding research in the social sciences (particularly social psychology), and there developed a core of predominantly Jewish academic activists who worked closely with Jewish organizations (Svonkin 1997, 4; see Ch. 5). Boasian anthropology was enlisted in post-World War II propaganda efforts distributed and promoted by the AJCommittee, the AJCongress, and the ADL, as in the film Brotherhood of Man, which depicted all human groups as having equal abilities. During the 1930s the AJCommittee financially supported Boas in his research; and in the postwar era, the Boasian ideology that there were no racial differences as well as the Boasian ideology of cultural relativism and the importance of preserving and respecting cultural differences deriving from Horace Kallen were important ingredients of educational programs sponsored by these Jewish activist organizations and widely distributed throughout the American educational system (Svonkin 1997, 63, 64).

By the early 1960s an ADL official estimated that one-third of America’s teachers had received ADL educational material based on these ideas (Svonkin 1997, 69). The ADL was also intimately involved in staffing, developing materials, and providing financial assistance for workshops for teachers and school administrators, often with involvement of social scientists from the academic world—an association that undoubtedly added to the scientific credibility of these exercises. It is ironic, perhaps, that this effort to influence the public school curriculum was carried on by the same groups that were endeavoring to remove overt Christian influences from the public schools.¹⁵⁵

The ideology of intergroup animosity developed by the intergroup relations movement derived from the Studies in Prejudice series described in Chapter 5. It explicitly viewed manifestations of gentile ethnocentrism or discrimination against outgroups as a mental disease and thus literally a public health problem. The assault on intergroup animosity was likened to the medical assault on deadly infectious diseases, and people with the disease were described by activists as “infected” (Svonkin 1997, 30, 59). A consistent theme of the intellectual rationale for this body of ethnic activism emphasized the benefits to be gained by increased levels of intergroup harmony—an aspect of the idealism inherent in Horace Kallen’s conceptualization of multiculturalism—without mentioning that some groups, particularly European-derived, non-Jewish groups, would lose economic and political power and decline in cultural influence (Svonkin 1997, 5). Negative attitudes toward groups were viewed not as the result of competing group interests but rather as the result of individual psychopathology (Svonkin 1997, 75). Finally, while gentile ethnocentrism was viewed as a public health problem, the AJCongress fought against Jewish assimilation. The AJCongress “was explicitly committed to a pluralistic vision that respected group rights and group distinctiveness as a fundamental civil liberty” (Svonkin 1997, 81).

JEWISH ANTI-RESTRICTIONIST POLITICAL ACTIVITY

Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity in the United States up to 1924

Jewish involvement in altering the intellectual discussion of race and ethnicity appears to have had long term repercussions on U.S. immigration policy, but Jewish political involvement was ultimately of much greater significance. Jews have been “the single most persistent pressure group favoring a liberal immigration policy” in the United States in the entire immigration debate beginning in 1881 (Neuringer 1971, 392-393):

In undertaking to sway immigration policy in a liberal direction, Jewish spokespersons and organizations demonstrated a degree of energy unsurpassed by any other interested pressure group. Immigration had constituted a prime object of concern for practically every major Jewish defense and community relations organization. Over the years, their spokespersons had assiduously attended congressional hearings, and the Jewish effort was of the utmost importance in establishing and financing such non-sectarian groups as the National Liberal Immigration League and the Citizens Committee for Displaced Persons.

As recounted by Nathan C. Belth (1979, 173) in his history of the ADL, “In Congress, through all the years when the immigration battles were being fought, the names of Jewish legislators were in the forefront of the liberal forces: from Adolph Sabath to Samuel Dickstein and Emanuel Celler in the House and from Herbert H. Lehman to Jacob Javits in the Senate. Each in his time was a leader of the Anti-Defamation League and of major organizations concerned with democratic development.” The Jewish congressmen who are most closely identified with anti-restrictionist efforts in Congress have therefore also been leaders of the group most closely identified with Jewish ethnic political activism and self-defense.

Throughout the almost 100 years prior to achieving success with the immigration law of 1965, Jewish groups opportunistically made alliances with other groups whose interests temporarily converged with Jewish interests (e.g., a constantly changing set of ethnic groups, religious groups, pro-communists, anticommunists, the foreign policy interests of various presidents, the political need for presidents to curry favor with groups influential in populous states in order to win national elections, etc.). Particularly noteworthy was the support of a liberal immigration policy from industrial interests wanting cheap labor, at least in the period prior to the 1924 temporary triumph of restrictionism. Within this constantly shifting set of alliances, Jewish organizations persistently pursued their goals of maximizing the number of Jewish immigrants and opening up the United States to immigration from all of the peoples of the world. As indicated in the following, the historical record supports the proposition that making the United States into a multicultural society has been a major Jewish goal beginning in the nineteenth century.

The ultimate Jewish victory on immigration is remarkable because it was waged in different arenas against a potentially very powerful set of opponents. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, leadership of the restrictionists was provided by Eastern patricians such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. However, the main political basis of restrictionism from 1910 to 1952 (in addition to the relatively ineffectual labor union interests) derived from “the common people of the South and West” (Higham 1984, 49) and their representatives in Congress. Fundamentally, the clashes between Jews and gentiles in the period between 1900 and 1965 were a conflict between Jews and this geographically centered group. “Jews, as a result of their intellectual energy and economic resources, constituted an advance guard of the new peoples who had no feeling for the traditions of rural America” (Higham 1984, 168-169), a theme also apparent in the discussion of the New York Intellectuals in Chapter 6 and in the discussion of Jewish involvement in political radicalism in Chapter 3.

Although often concerned that Jewish immigration would fan the flames of anti-Semitism in America, Jewish leaders fought a long and largely successful delaying action against restrictions on immigration during the period from 1891 to 1924, particularly as they affected the ability of Jews to immigrate. These efforts continued despite the fact that by 1905 there was “a polarity between Jewish and general American opinion on immigration” (Neuringer 1971, 83). In particular, whereas other religious groups such as Catholics and ethnic groups such as the Irish had divided and ambivalent attitudes toward immigration and were poorly organized and ineffective in influencing immigration policy, and whereas labor unions opposed immigration in their attempt to diminish the supply of cheap labor, Jewish groups engaged in an intensive and sustained effort against attempts to restrict immigration.

As recounted by Cohen (1972, 40ff), the AJCommittee’s efforts in opposition to immigration restriction in the early twentieth century constitute a remarkable example of the ability of Jewish organizations to influence public policy. Of all the groups affected by the immigration legislation of 1907, Jews had the least to gain in terms of numbers of possible immigrants, but they played by far the largest role in shaping the legislation (Cohen 1972, 41). In the subsequent period leading up to the relatively ineffective restrictionist legislation of 1917, when restrictionists again mounted an effort in Congress, “only the Jewish segment was aroused” (Cohen 1972, 49).

Nevertheless, because of the fear of anti-Semitism, efforts were made to prevent the perception of Jewish involvement in anti-restrictionist campaigns. In 1906 Jewish anti-restrictionist political operatives were instructed to lobby Congress without mentioning their affiliation with the AJCommittee because of “the danger that the Jews may be accused of being organized for a political purpose” (comments of Herbert Friedenwald, AJCommittee secretary; in Goldstein 1990, 125). Beginning in the late nineteenth century, anti-restrictionist arguments developed by Jews were typically couched in terms of universalist humanitarian ideals; as part of this universalizing effort, gentiles from old-line Protestant families were recruited to act as window dressing for their efforts, and Jewish groups such as the AJCommittee funded pro-immigration groups composed of non-Jews (Neuringer 1971, 92).

As was the case in later pro-immigration efforts, much of the activity was behind-the-scenes personal interventions with politicians in order to minimize public perception of the Jewish role and to avoid provoking the opposition (Cohen 1972, 41-42; Goldstein 1990). Opposing politicians, such as Henry Cabot Lodge, and organizations like the Immigration Restriction League were kept under close scrutiny and pressured by lobbyists. Lobbyists in Washington also kept a daily scorecard of voting tendencies as immigration bills wended their way through Congress and engaged in intense and successful efforts to convince Presidents Taft and Wilson to veto restrictive immigration legislation. Catholic prelates were recruited to protest the effects of restrictionist legislation on immigration from Italy and Hungary. When restrictionist arguments appeared in the media, the AJCommittee made sophisticated replies based on scholarly data and typically couched in universalist terms as benefiting the whole society. Articles favorable to immigration were published in national magazines, and letters to the editor were published in newspapers. Efforts were made to minimize the negative perceptions of immigration by distributing Jewish immigrants around the country and by getting Jewish aliens off public support. Legal proceedings were filed to prevent the deportation of Jewish aliens. Eventually mass protest meetings were organized.

Writing in 1914, the sociologist Edward A. Ross believed that liberal immigration policy was exclusively a Jewish issue. Ross quotes the prominent author and Zionist pioneer Israel Zangwill who articulated the idea that the United States is an ideal place to achieve Jewish interests.

America has ample room for all the six millions of the Pale [i.e., the Pale of Settlement, home to most of Russia’s Jews]; any one of her fifty states could absorb them. And next to being in a country of their own, there could be no better fate for them than to be together in a land of civil and religious liberty, of whose Constitution Christianity forms no part and where their collective votes would practically guarantee them against future persecution. (Israel Zangwill, in Ross 1914, 144)

Jews therefore have a powerful interest in immigration policy:

Hence the endeavor of the Jews to control the immigration policy of the United States. Although theirs is but a seventh of our net immigration, they led the fight on the Immigration Commission’s bill. The power of the million Jews in the Metropolis lined up the Congressional delegation from New York in solid opposition to the literacy test. The systematic campaign in newspapers and magazines to break down all arguments for restriction and to calm nativist fears is waged by and for one race. Hebrew money is behind the National Liberal Immigration League and its numerous publications. From the paper before the commercial body or the scientific association to the heavy treatise produced with the aid of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, the literature that proves the blessings of immigration to all classes in America emanates from subtle Hebrew brains. (Ross 1914, 144-145)

Ross (1914, 150) also reported that immigration officials had “become very sore over the incessant fire of false accusations to which they are subjected by the Jewish press and societies. United States senators complain that during the close of the struggle over the immigration bill they were overwhelmed with a torrent of crooked statistics and misrepresentations of Hebrews fighting the literacy test.” Zangwill’s views were well known to restrictionists in the debates over the 1924 immigration law (see below). In an address reprinted in The American Hebrew (Oct. 19, 1923, 582), Zangwill noted, “There is only one way to World Peace, and that is the absolute abolition of passports, visas, frontiers, custom houses, and all other devices that make of the population of our planet not a co-operating civilization but a mutual irritation society.” His famous play, The Melting Pot (1908), was dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt and depicts Jewish immigrants as eager to assimilate and intermarry. The lead character describes the United States as a crucible in which all the races, including the “black and yellow” races, are being melted together.¹⁵⁶ However, Zangwill’s views on Jewish-gentile intermarriage were ambiguous at best (Biale 1998, 22-24) and he detested Christian proselytism to Jews. Zangwill was an ardent Zionist and an admirer of his father’s religious orthodoxy as a model for the preservation of Judaism. He believed Jews were a morally superior race whose moral vision had shaped Christian and Muslim societies and would eventually shape the world, although Christianity remained morally inferior to Judaism (see Leftwich 1957, 162ff). Jews would retain their racial purity if they continued to practice their religion: “So long as Judaism flourishes among Jews there is no need to talk of safeguarding race or nationality; both are automatically preserved by the religion” (in Leftwich 1957, 161).

Despite deceptive attempts to present the pro-immigration movement as broad-based, Jewish activists were aware of the lack of enthusiasm of other groups. During the fight over restrictionist legislation at the end of the Taft administration, Herbert Friedenwald, AJCommittee secretary, wrote that it was “very difficult to get any people except the Jews stirred up in this fight” (in Goldstein 1990, 203). The AJCommittee contributed heavily to staging anti-restrictionist rallies in major American cities but allowed other ethnic groups to take credit for the events, and it organized groups of non-Jews to influence President Taft to veto restrictionist legislation (Goldstein 1990, 216, 227). During the Wilson Administration, Louis Marshall stated, “We are practically the only ones who are fighting [the literacy test] while a “great proportion” [of the people] is “indifferent to what is done” (in Goldstein 1990, 249).

The forces of immigration restriction were temporarily successful with the immigration laws of 1921 and 1924, which passed despite the intense opposition of Jewish groups. Divine (1957, 8) notes, “Arrayed against [the restrictionist forces] in 1921 were only the spokespersons for the southeastern European immigrants, mainly Jewish leaders, whose protests were drowned out by the general cry for restriction.” Similarly, during the 1924 congressional hearings on immigration, “The most prominent group of witnesses against the bill were representatives of southeastern European immigrants, particularly Jewish leaders” (Divine 1957, 16).

Jewish opposition to this legislation was motivated as much by their perception that the laws were motivated by anti-Semitism and that they discriminated in favor of Northwestern Europeans as by concern that they would curtail Jewish immigration (Neuringer 1971, 164)—a view that is implicitly in opposition to the ethnic status quo favoring Northwestern Europeans. Opposition to biasing immigration in favor of Northwestern Europeans remained characteristic of Jewish attitudes in the following years, but the opposition of Jewish organizations to any restrictions on immigration based on race or ethnicity can be traced back to the nineteenth century.

Thus in 1882 the Jewish press was unanimous in its condemnation of the Chinese Exclusion Act (Neuringer 1971, 23) even though this act had no direct bearing on Jewish immigration. In the early twentieth century the AJCommittee at times actively fought against any bill that restricted immigration to white persons or non-Asians, and only refrained from active opposition if it judged that AJCommittee support would threaten the immigration of Jews (Cohen 1972, 47; Goldstein 1990, 250). In 1920 the Central Conference of American Rabbis passed a resolution urging that “the Nation… keep the gates of our beloved Republic open… to the oppressed and distressed of all mankind in conformity with its historic role as a haven of refuge for all men and women who pledge allegiance to its laws” (in The American Hebrew, Oct. 1, 1920, 594). The American Hebrew (Feb. 17, 1922, 373), a publication founded in 1867, to represent the German-Jewish establishment of the period, reiterated its long-standing policy that it “has always stood for the admission of worthy immigrants of all classes, irrespective of nationality.” And in his testimony at the 1924 hearings before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, the AJCommittee’s Louis Marshall stated that the bill echoed the sentiments of the Ku Klux Klan; he characterized it as inspired by the racialist theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. At a time when the population of the United States was over 100 million, Marshall stated, “[W]e have room in this country for ten times the population we have”; he advocated admission of all of the peoples of the world without quota limit, excluding only those who “were mentally, morally and physically unfit, who are enemies of organized government, and who are apt to become public charges.”¹⁵⁷ Similarly, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, representing the AJCongress and a variety of other Jewish organizations at the House Hearings, asserted “the right of every man outside of America to be considered fairly and equitably and without discrimination.”¹⁵⁸

By prescribing that immigration be restricted to 3 percent of the foreign born as of the 1890 census, the 1924 law prescribed an ethnic status quo approximating the 1920 census. The House Majority Report emphasized that prior to the legislation, immigration was highly biased in favor of Eastern and Southern Europeans, and that this imbalance had been continued by the 1921 legislation in which quotas were based on the numbers of foreign born as of the 1910 census. The expressed intention was that the interests of other groups to pursue their ethnic interests by expanding their percentage of the population should be balanced against the ethnic interests of the majority in retaining their ethnic representation in the population.

The 1921 law gave 46 percent of quota immigration to Southern and Eastern Europe even though these areas constituted only 11.7 percent of the U.S. population as of the 1920 census. The 1924 law prescribed that these areas would get 15.3 percent of the quota slots—a figure actually higher than their present representation in the population. “The use of the 1890 census is not discriminatory. It is used in an effort to preserve as nearly as possible, the racial status quo of the United States. It is hoped to guarantee as best we can at this late date, racial homogeneity in the United States The use of a later census would discriminate against those who founded the Nation and perpetuated its institutions” (House Rep. No. 350, 1924, 16). After three years, quotas were derived from a national origins formula based on 1920 census data for the entire population, not only for the foreign born. No doubt this legislation represented a victory for the Northwestern European peoples of the United States, yet there was no attempt to reverse the trends in the ethnic composition of the country; rather, the efforts aimed to preserve the ethnic status quo.

Although motivated by a desire to preserve an ethnic status quo, these laws may also have been motivated partly by anti-Semitism, since during this period liberal immigration policy was perceived as mainly a Jewish issue (see above). This certainly appears to have been the perception of Jewish observers: Prominent Jewish writer Maurice Samuel (1924, 217), for example, writing in the immediate aftermath of the 1924 legislation, wrote that “it is chiefly against the Jew that anti-immigration laws are passed here in America as in England and Germany,” and such perceptions continue among historians of the period (e.g., Hertzberg 1989, 239). This perception was not restricted to Jews. In remarks before the Senate, the anti-restrictionist Senator Reed of Missouri noted, “Attacks have likewise been made upon the Jewish people who have crowded to our shores. The spirit of intolerance has been especially active as to them” (Cong. Rec. , Feb. 19, 1921, 3463). During World War II Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson stated that it was opposition to unrestricted immigration of Jews that resulted in the restrictive legislation of 1924 (Breitman & Kraut 1987, 87).

Moreover, the House Immigration Committee Majority Report (House Rep. No. 109, Dec. 6, 1920) stated that “by far the largest percentage of immigrants [are] peoples of Jewish extraction” (p. 4), and it implied that the majority of the expected new immigrants would be Polish Jews. The report “confirmed the published statement of a commissioner of the Hebrew Sheltering and Aid Society of America made after his personal investigation in Poland, to the effect that ‘If there were in existence a ship that could hold 3,000,000 human beings, the 3,000,000 Jews of Poland would board it to escape to America’” (p. 6).

The Majority Report also included a report by Wilbur S. Carr, head of the United States Consular Service, that stated that the Polish Jews were “abnormally twisted because of (a) reaction from war strain; (b) the shock of revolutionary disorders; (c) the dullness and stultification resulting from past years of oppression and abuse…; Eighty-five to ninety percent lack any conception of patriotic or national spirit. And the majority of this percentage are unable to acquire it” (p. 9 see Breitman & Kraut [1987, 12] for a discussion of Carr’s antiSemitism). (In England many recent Jewish immigrants refused to be conscripted to fight the czar during World War I; see note 14). The report also noted consular reports that warned that “many Bolshevik sympathizers are in Poland” (p. 11). Likewise in the Senate, Senator McKellar cited the report that if there were a ship large enough, three million Poles would immigrate. He also stated that “the Joint Distribution Committee, an American committee doing relief work among the Hebrews in Poland, distributes more than $1,000,000 per month of American money in that country alone. It is also shown that $100,000,000 a year is a conservative estimate of money sent to Poland from America through the mails, through the banks, and through the relief societies. This golden stream pouring into Poland from America makes practically every Pole wildly desirous of going to the country from which such marvelous wealth comes” (Cong. Rec. , Feb. 19, 1921, 3456).

As a further indication of the salience of Polish-Jewish immigration issues, the letter on alien visas submitted by the State Department in 1921 to Albert Johnson, chairman of the Committee on Migration and Naturalization, devoted over four times as much space to the situation in Poland as it did to any other country. The report emphasized the activities of the Polish Jewish newspaper Der Emigrant in promoting emigration to the United States of Polish Jews, as well as the activities of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Society and wealthy private citizens from the United States in facilitating immigration by providing money and performing the paperwork. (There was indeed a large network of Jewish agents in Eastern Europe who, in violation of U.S. law, “did their best to drum up business by enticing as many emigrants as possible” [Nadell 1984, 56].) The report also described the condition of the prospective immigrants in negative terms: “At the present time it is only too obvious that they must be subnormal, and their normal state is of very low standard. Six years of war and confusion and famine and pestilence have racked their bodies and twisted their mentality. The elders have deteriorated to a marked degree. Minors have grown into adult years with the entire period lost in their rightful development and too frequently with the acquisition of perverted ideas which have flooded Europe since 1914 [presumably a reference to radical political ideas that were common in this group; see below]” (Cong. Rec. , April 20, 1921, 498).

The report also stated that articles in the Warsaw press had reported that “propaganda favoring unrestricted immigration” is being planned, including celebrations in New York aimed at showing the contributions of immigrants to the development of the United States. The reports for Belgium (whose emigrants originated in Poland and Czechoslovakia) and Romania also highlighted the importance of Jews as prospective immigrants. In response, Representative Isaac Siegel stated that the report was “edited and doctored by certain officials”; he commented that the report did not mention countries with larger numbers of immigrants than Poland. (For example, the report did not mention Italy.) Without explicitly saying so (“I leave it to every man in the House to make his own deductions and his own inferences therefrom” [ Cong. Rec. , April 20, 1921, 504]), the implication was that the focus on Poland was prompted by anti-Semitism.

The House Majority Report (signed by 15 of its 17 members with only Reps. Dickstein and Sabath not signing) also emphasized the Jewish role in defining the intellectual battle in terms of Nordic superiority and “American ideals” rather than in the terms of an ethnic status quo actually favored by the committee:

The cry of discrimination is, the committee believes, manufactured and built up by special representatives of racial groups, aided by aliens actually living abroad. Members of the committee have taken notice of a report in the Jewish Tribune (New York) February 8, 1924, of a farewell dinner to Mr. Israel Zangwill which says:

Mr. Zangwill spoke chiefly on the immigration question, declaring that if Jews persisted in a strenuous opposition to the restricted immigration there would be no restriction. “If you create enough fuss against this Nordic nonsense,” he said, “you will defeat this legislation. You must make a fight against this bill; tell them they are destroying American ideals. Most fortifications are of cardboard, and if you press against them, they give way.”

The Committee does not feel that the restriction aimed to be accomplished in this bill is directed at the Jews, for they can come within the quotas from any country in which they were born. The Committee has not dwelt on the desirability of a “Nordic” or any other particular type of immigrant, but has held steadfastly to the purpose of securing a heavy restriction, with the quota so divided that the countries from which the most came in the two decades ahead of the World War might be slowed down in order that the United States might restore its population balance. The continued charge that the Committee has built up a “Nordic” race and devoted its hearing to that end is part of a deliberately manufactured assault for as a matter of fact the committee has done nothing of the kind. (House Rep. No. 350, 1924, 16)

Indeed, one is struck in reading the 1924 congressional debates by the rarity with which the issue of Nordic racial superiority is raised by those in favor of the legislation, whereas virtually all the anti-restrictionists raised this issue.¹⁵⁹ After a particularly colorful comment in opposition to the theory of Nordic racial superiority, restrictionist leader Albert Johnson remarked, “I would like very much to say on behalf of the committee that through the strenuous times of the hearings this committee undertook not to discuss the Nordic proposition or racial matters” (Cong. Rec. , April 8, 1924, 5911). Earlier, during the hearings on the bill, Johnson remarked in response to the comments of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise representing the AJCongress, “I dislike to be placed continually in the attitude of assuming that there is a race prejudice, when the one thing I have tried to do for 11 years is to free myself from race prejudice, if I had it at all.”¹⁶⁰ Several restrictionists explicitly denounced the theory of Nordic superiority, including Senators Bruce (p. 5955) and Jones (p. 6614) and Representatives Bacon (p. 5902), Byrnes (p. 5653), Johnson (p. 5648), McLoed (pp. 5675-5676), McReynolds (p. 5855), Michener (p. 5909), Miller (p. 5883), Newton (p. 6240), Rosenbloom (p. 5851), Vaile (p. 5922), Vincent (p. 6266), White, (p. 5898), and Wilson (p. 5671; all references to Cong. Rec., April 1924).

Indeed, it is noteworthy that there are indications in the congressional debate that representatives from the far West were concerned about the competence and competitive threat presented by Japanese immigrants, and their rhetoric suggests they viewed the Japanese as racially equal or superior, not inferior. For example, Senator Jones stated, “We admit that [the Japanese] are as able as we are, that they are as progressive as we are, that they are as honest as we are, that they are as brainy as we are, and that they are equal in all that goes to make a great people and nation” (Cong. Rec. , April 18, 1924, 6614); Representative MacLafferty emphasized Japanese domination of certain agricultural markets (Cong. Rec. , April 5, 1924, p. 5681), and Representative Lea noted their ability to supplant “their American competitor” (Cong. Rec. , April 5, 1924, 5697). Representative Miller described the Japanese as “a relentless and unconquerable competitor of our people wherever he places himself” (Cong. Rec. , April 8, 1924, 5884); see also comments of Representatives Gilbert (Cong. Rec. , April 12, 1924, 6261), Raker (Cong. Rec. , April 8, 1924, 5892), and Free (Cong. Rec. , April 8, 1924, 5924ff).

Moreover, whereas the issue of Jewish-gentile resource competition was not raised during the congressional debates, quotas on Jewish admissions to Ivy League universities were a highly salient issue among Jews during this period. The quota issue was highly publicized in the Jewish media, which focused on activities of Jewish self-defense organizations such as the ADL (see, e.g., the ADL statement published in The American Hebrew, Sept. 29, 1922, 536). Jewish-gentile resource competition may therefore have been on the minds of some legislators. Indeed, President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard was the national vice-president of the Immigration Restriction League as well as a proponent of quotas on Jewish admission to Harvard (Symott 1986, 238), suggesting that resource competition with an intellectually superior Jewish group was an issue for at least some prominent restrictionists.

It is probable that anti-Jewish animosity related to resource competition issues was widespread. Higham (1984, 141) writes of “the urgent pressure which the Jews, as an exceptionally ambitious immigrant people, put upon some of the more crowded rungs of the social ladder” (Higham 1984, 141). Beginning in the nineteenth century there were fairly high levels of covert and overt anti-Semitism in patrician circles resulting from the very rapid upward mobility of Jews and their competitive drive. Prior to World War I, the reaction of the gentile power structure was to construct social registers and emphasize genealogy as mechanisms of exclusion—”criteria that could not be met my money alone” (Higham 1984, 104ff, 127). During this period Edward A. Ross (1914, 164) described gentile resentment for “being obliged to engage in a humiliating and undignified scramble in order to keep his trade or his clients against the Jewish invader”—suggesting a rather broad-based concern with Jewish economic competition. Attempts at exclusion in a wide range of areas increased in the 1920s and reached their peak during the difficult economic situation of the Great Depression (Higham 1984, 131ff).

In the 1924 debates, however, the only Congressional comments suggesting a concern with Jewish-gentile resource competition (as well as a concern that Jewish immigrants were alienated from the cultural traditions of America and tended to have a destructive influence) that I have been able to find are the following from Representative Wefald:

I for one am not afraid of the radical ideas that some might bring with them. Ideas you cannot keep out anyway, but the leadership of our intellectual life in many of its phases has come into the hands of these clever newcomers who have no sympathy with our old-time American ideals nor with those of northern Europe, who detect our weaknesses and pander to them and get wealthy through the disservices they render us.

Our whole system of amusements has been taken over by men who came here on the crest of the south and east European immigration. They produce our horrible film stories, they compose and dish out to us our jazz music, they write many of the books we read, and edit our magazines and newspapers. (Cong. Rec., April 12, 1924, 6272)

The immigration debate also occurred amid discussion in the Jewish media of Thorsten Veblen’s famous essay “The intellectual pre-eminence of Jews in modern Europe” (serialized in The American Hebrew beginning September 10, 1920). In an editorial of July 13, 1923 (p. 177), The American Hebrew noted that Jews were disproportionately represented among the gifted in Louis Terman’s study of gifted children and commented that “this fact must give rise to bitter, though futile, reflection among the so-called Nordics.” The editorial also noted that Jews were overrepresented among scholarship winners in competitions sponsored by the state of New York. The editorial pointedly noted that “perhaps the Nordics are too proud to try for these honors. In any event the list of names just announced by the State Department of Education at Albany as winners of these coveted scholarships is not in the least Nordic; it reads like a confirmation roster at a Temple.”

There is, in fact, evidence that Jews, like East Asians, have higher IQ’s than Caucasians (Lynn 1987; Rushton 1995; PTSDA, Ch. 7). Indeed, Terman had found that Chinese were equal in IQ to Caucasians—further indication that, as Carl Degler (1991, 52) notes, “their IQ scores could not have been an excuse for the discrimination” represented by the 1924 legislation. As indicated above, there is considerable evidence from the congressional debates that the exclusion of Asians was motivated at least partly by fears of competition with a highly talented, intelligent group rather than by feelings of racial superiority.

The most common argument made by those favoring the legislation, and the one reflected in the Majority Report, is the argument that in the interests of fairness to all ethnic groups, the quotas should reflect the relative ethnic composition of the entire country. Restrictionists noted that the census of 1890 was chosen because the percentages of the foreign born of different ethnic groups in that year approximated the general ethnic composition of the entire country in 1920. Senator Reed of Pennsylvania and Representative Rogers of Massachusetts proposed to achieve the same result by directly basing the quotas on the national origins of all people in the country as of the 1920 census, and this was eventually incorporated into law. Representative Rogers argued, “Gentlemen, you can not dissent from this principle because it is fair. It does not discriminate for anybody and it does not discriminate against anybody” (Cong. Rec. , April 8, 1924, 5847). Senator Reed noted, “The purpose, I think, of most of us in changing the quota basis is to cease from discriminating against the native born here and against the group of our citizens who come from northern and western Europe. I think the present system discriminates in favor of southeastern Europe” (Cong. Rec. , April 16, 1924, 6457) (i.e., because 46 percent of the quotas under the 1921 law went to Eastern and Southern Europe when they constituted less than 12 percent of the population).

As an example illustrating the fundamental argument asserting a legitimate ethnic interest in maintaining an ethnic status quo without claiming racial superiority, consider the following statement from Representative William N. Vaile of Colorado, one of the most prominent restrictionists:

Let me emphasize here that the restrictionists of Congress do not claim that the “Nordic” race, or even the Anglo-Saxon race, is the best race in the world. Let us concede, in all fairness that the Czech is a more sturdy laborer, with a very low percentage of crime and insanity, that the Jew is the best businessman in the world, and that the Italian has a spiritual grasp and an artistic sense which have greatly enriched the world and which have, indeed, enriched us, a spiritual exaltation and an artistic creative sense which the Nordic rarely attains. Nordics need not be vain about their own qualifications. It well behooves them to be humble. What we do claim is that the northern European, and particularly Anglo-Saxons made this country. Oh, yes; the others helped. But that is the full statement of the case. They came to this country because it was already made as an Anglo-Saxon commonwealth. They added to it, they often enriched it, but they did not make it, and they have not yet greatly changed it. We are determined that they shall not. It is a good country. It suits us. And what we assert is that we are not going to surrender it to somebody else or allow other people, no matter what their merits, to make it something different. If there is any changing to be done, we will do it ourselves. (Cong. Rec. , April 8, 1924, 5922)

The debate in the House also illustrated the highly salient role of Jewish legislators in combating restrictionism. Representative Robison singled out Representative Sabath as the leader of anti-restrictionist efforts; without mentioning any other opponent of restriction, he also focused on Representatives Jacobstein, Celler, and Perlman as being opposed to any restrictions on immigration (Cong. Rec. , April 5, 1924, 5666). Representative Blanton, complaining of the difficulty of getting restrictionist legislation through Congress, noted, “When at least 65 per cent of the sentiment of this House, in my judgment, is in favor of the exclusion of all foreigners for five years, why do we not put that into law? Has Brother Sabath such a tremendous influence over us that he holds us down on this proposition?” (Cong. Rec. , April 5, 1924, 5685). Representative Sabath responded, “There may be something to that.” In addition, the following comments of Representative Leavitt clearly indicate the salience of Jewish congressmen to their opponents during the debate:

The instinct for national and race preservation is not one to be condemned, as has been intimated here. No one should be better able to understand the desire of Americans to keep America American than the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Sabath], who is leading the attack on this measure, or the gentlemen from New York, Mr. Dickstein, Mr. Jacobstein, Mr. Celler, and Mr. Perlman. They are of the one great historic people who have maintained the identity of their race throughout the centuries because they believe sincerely that they are a chosen people, with certain ideals to maintain, and knowing that the loss of racial identity means a change of ideals. That fact should make it easy for them and the majority of the most active opponents of this measure in the spoken debate to recognize and sympathize with our viewpoint, which is not so extreme as that of their own race, but only demands that the admixture of other peoples shall be only of such kind and proportions and in such quantities as will not alter racial characteristics more rapidly than there can be assimilation as to ideas of government as well as of blood. (Cong. Rec. , April 12, 1924, 6265-6266)

The view that Jews had a strong tendency to oppose genetic assimilation with surrounding groups was expressed by other observers as well and was a component of contemporary anti-Semitism (see Singerman 1986, 110-111). Jewish avoidance of exogamy certainly had a basis in reality (PTSDA, Chs. 2-4), and it is worth recalling that there was powerful opposition to intermarriage even among the more liberal segments of early-twentieth-century American Judaism and certainly among the less liberal segments represented by the great majority of Orthodox immigrants from Eastern Europe who had come to constitute the great majority of American Jewry. The prominent nineteenth-century Reform leader David Einhorn, for example, was a lifelong opponent of mixed marriages and refused to officiate at such ceremonies, even when pressed to do so (Meyer 1989, 247). Einhorn was also a staunch opponent of conversion of gentiles to Judaism because of the effects on the “racial purity” of Judaism (Levenson 1989, 331). The influential Reform intellectual Kaufman Kohler was also an ardent opponent of mixed marriage. In a view that is highly compatible with Horace Kallen’s multiculturalism, Kohler concluded that Israel must remain separate and avoid intermarriage until it leads humankind to an era of universal peace and brotherhood among the races (Kohler 1918, 445-446). The negative attitude toward intermarriage was confirmed by survey results. A 1912 survey indicated that only seven of 100 Reform rabbis had officiated at a mixed marriage, and a 1909 resolution of the chief Reform group, the Central Council of American Rabbis, declared that “mixed marriages are contrary to the tradition of the Jewish religion and should be discouraged by the American Rabbinate” (Meyer 1988, 290). Gentile perceptions of Jewish attitudes on intermarriage, therefore, had a strong basis in reality.

Far more important than the Jewish tendency toward endogamy in engendering anti-Jewish animosity during the congressional debates of 1924 were two other prominent themes of this project: Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were widely perceived as unassimilable and as retaining a separate culture (see SAID, Ch. 2); they were also thought to be disproportionately involved in radical political movements (see Ch. 3).

The perception of radicalism among Jewish immigrants was common in Jewish as well as gentile publications. The American Hebrew editorialized, “[W]e must not forget the immigrants from Russia and Austria will be coming from countries infested with Bolshevism, and it will require more than a superficial effort to make good citizens out of them” (in Neuringer 1971, 165). The fact that Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were viewed as “infected with Bolshevism… unpatriotic, alien, unassimilable” resulted in a wave of antiSemitism in the 1920s and contributed to the restrictive immigration legislation of the period (Neuringer 1971, 165). In Sorin’s (1985, 46) study of immigrant Jewish radical activists, over half had been involved in radical politics in Europe before emigrating, and for those immigrating after 1900, the percentage rose to 69 percent. Jewish publications warned of the possibilities of anti-Semitism resulting from the leftism of Jewish immigrants, and the official Jewish community engaged in “a near-desperation… effort to portray the Jew as one hundred per cent American” by, for example, organizing patriotic pageants on national holidays and by attempting to get the immigrants to learn English (Neuringer, 1971, 167).¹⁶¹

From the standpoint of the immigration debates, it is important to note that in the 1920s a majority of the members of the Socialist Party were immigrants and that an “overwhelming” (Glazer 1961, 38, 40) percentage of the CPUSA consisted of recent immigrants, a substantial percentage of whom were Jews. As late as June 1933 the national organization of the CPUSA was still 70 percent foreign born (Lyons 1982, 72-73); in Philadelphia in 1929, fully 90 percent of Communist Party members were foreign born, and 72.2 percent of the CPUSA members in Philadelphia were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Lyons 1982, 71).

Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity, 1924-1945

The saliency of Jewish involvement in U.S. immigration policy continued after the 1924 legislation. Particularly objectionable to Jewish groups was the national origins quota system. For example, a writer for the Jewish Tribune stated in 1927, “[W]e… regard all measures for regulating immigration according to nationality as illogical, unjust, and un-American” (in Neuringer 1971, 205). During the 1930s the most outspoken critic of further restrictions on immigration (motivated now mainly by the economic concerns that immigration would exacerbate the problems brought on by the Great Depression) was Representative Samuel Dickstein, and Dickstein’s assumption of the chairmanship of the House Immigration Committee in 1931 marked the end of the ability of restrictionists to enact further reductions in quotas (Divine 1957, 79-88). Jewish groups were the primary opponents of restriction and the primary supporters of liberalized regulations during the 1930s; their opponents emphasized the economic consequences of immigration during a period of high unemployment (Divine 1957, 85-88). Between 1933 and 1938 Representative Dickstein introduced a number of bills aimed at increasing the number of refugees from Nazi Germany and supported mainly by Jewish organizations, but the restrictionists prevailed (Divine 1957, 93).

During the 1930s concerns about the radicalism and unassimilability of Jewish immigrants as well as the possibility of Nazi subversion were the main factors influencing the opposition to changing the immigration laws (Breitman & Kraut 1987). Moreover, “Charges that the Jews in America were more loyal to their tribe than to their country abounded in the United States in the 1930s” (Breitman & Kraut 1987, 87). There was a clear perception among all parties that the public opposed any changes in immigration policy and was particularly opposed to Jewish immigration. The 1939 hearings on the proposed legislation to admit 20,000 German refugee children therefore minimized Jewish interest in the legislation. The bill referred to people “of every race and creed suffering from conditions which compel them to seek refuge in other lands.”¹⁶² The bill did not mention that Jews would be the main beneficiaries of the legislation, and witnesses in favor of the bill emphasized that only approximately 60 percent of the children would be Jewish. The only person identifying himself as “a member of the Jewish race” who testified in favor of the bill was “one-fourth Catholic and three-quarters Jewish,” with Protestant and Catholic nieces and nephews, and from the South, a bastion of anti-immigration sentiment.¹⁶³

In contrast, opponents of the bill threatened to publicize the very large percentage of Jews already being admitted under the quota system—presumably an indication of the powerful force of a “virulent and pervasive” anti-Semitism among the American public (Breitman & Kraut 1987, 80). Opponents noted that the immigration permitted by the bill “would be for the most part of the Jewish race,” and a witness testified “that the Jewish people will profit most by this legislation goes without saying” (in Divine 1957, 100). The restrictionists argued in economic terms, for example, by frequently citing President Roosevelt’s statement in his second inaugural speech “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished” and citing large numbers of needy children already in the United States. The main restrictionist concern, though, was that the bill was yet another in a long history of attempts by anti-restrictionists to develop precedents that would eventually undermine the 1924 law. For example, Francis Kinnecutt, president of the Allied Patriotic Societies, emphasized that the 1924 law had been based on the idea of proportional representation based on the ethnic composition of the country. The legislation would be a precedent “for similar unscientific and favored-nation legislation in response to the pressure of foreign nationalistic or racial groups, rather than in accordance with the needs and desires of the American people.”¹⁶⁴

Wilbur S. Carr and other State Department officials were important in minimizing the entry of Jewish refugees from Germany during the 1930s. Undersecretary of State William Phillips was an anti-Semite with considerable influence on immigration policy from 1933 to 1936 (Breitman & Kraut 1987, 36). Throughout the period until the end of World War II attempts to foster Jewish immigration, even in the context of knowledge that the Nazis were persecuting Jews, were largely unsuccessful because of an unyielding Congress and the activities of bureaucrats, especially those in the State Department. Public discussion in periodicals such as The Nation (Nov. 19, 1938) and The New Republic (Nov. 23, 1938) charged that the restrictionism was motivated by antiSemitism, whereas opponents of admitting large numbers of Jews argued that admission would result in an increase in anti-Semitism. Henry Pratt Fairchild (1939, 344), who was a restrictionist and was highly critical of Jews generally (see Fairchild 1947), emphasized the “powerful current of anti-foreignism and anti-Semitism that is running close to the surface of the American public mind, ready to burst out into violent eruption on relatively slight provocation.” Public opinion remained steadfast against increasing the quotas for European refugees: A 1939 poll in Fortune (April 1939) showed that 83 percent answered no to the following question: “If you were a member of Congress would you vote yes or no on a bill to open the doors of the United States to a larger number of European refugees than now admitted under our immigration quotas?” Less than 9 percent replied yes and the remainder had no opinion.

Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity, 1946-1952

Although Jewish interests were defeated by the 1924 legislation, “the discriminatory character of the Reed-Johnson Act continued to rankle all sectors of American Jewish opinion” (Neuringer 1971, 196). During this period, an article by Will Maslow (1950) in Congress Weekly reiterated the belief that the restrictive immigration laws intentionally targeted Jews: “Only one type of law, immigration legislation which relates to aliens outside the country, is not subject to constitutional guarantees, and even here hostility toward Jewish immigration has had to be disguised in an elaborate quota scheme in which eligibility was based on place of birth rather than religion.” The Jewish concern to alter the ethnic balance of the United States is apparent in the debates over immigration legislation during the post-World War II era. In 1948 the AJCommittee submitted to a Senate subcommittee a statement simultaneously denying the importance of the material interests of the United States and affirming its commitment to immigration of all races: “Amer-icanism is not to be measured by conformity to law, or zeal for education, or literacy, or any of these qualities in which immigrants may excel the native-born. Americanism is the spirit behind the welcome that America has traditionally extended to people of all races, all religions, all nationalities” (in Cohen 1972, 369).

In 1945 Representative Emanuel Celler introduced a bill ending Chinese exclusion by establishing token quotas for Chinese, and in 1948 the AJCommittee condemned racial quotas on Asians (Divine 1957, 155). In contrast, Jewish groups showed indifference or even hostility toward immigration of non-Jews from Europe (including Southern Europe) in the post-World War II era (Neuringer 1971, 356, 367-369, 383). Thus Jewish spokespersons did not testify at all during the first set of hearings on emergency legislation to allow immigration of a limited number of German, Italian, Greek, and Dutch immigrants, escapees from communism, and a small number of Poles, Asians, and Arabs. When Jewish spokespersons eventually testified (partly because a few of the escapees from communism were Jews), they took the opportunity to once again focus on their condemnation of the national origins provisions of the 1924 law.

Jewish involvement in opposing restrictions during this period was motivated partly by attempts to establish precedents in which the quota system was bypassed and partly by attempts to increase immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe. The Citizen’s Committee on Displaced Persons, which advocated legislation to admit 400,000 refugees as nonquota immigrants over a period of four years, maintained a staff of 65 people and was funded mainly by the AJCommittee and other Jewish contributors (see Cong. Rec., Oct. 15, 1949, 14647-14654; Neuringer 1971, 393). Witnesses opposing the legislation complained that the bill was an attempt to subvert the ethnic balance of the United States established by the 1924 legislation (Divine 1957, 117). In the event, the bill that was reported out of the subcommittee did not satisfy Jewish interests because it established a cutoff date that excluded Jews who had migrated from Eastern Europe after World War II, including Jews fleeing Polish anti-Semitism. The Senate subcommittee “regarded the movement of Jews and other refugees from eastern Europe after 1945 as falling outside the scope of the main problem and implied that this exodus was a planned migration organized by Jewish agencies in the United States and in Europe” (Senate Rep. No. 950 [1948], 15-16).

Jewish representatives led the assault on the bill (Divine 1957, 127), Representative Emanuel Celler calling it “worse than no bill at all. All it does is exclude… Jews” (in Neuringer 1971, 298; see also Divine 1957, 127). In reluctantly signing the bill, President Truman noted that the 1945 cutoff date “discriminates in callous fashion against displaced persons of the Jewish faith” (Interpreter Releases 25 [July 21, 1948], 252-254). In contrast, Senator Chapman Revercomb stated that “there is no distinction, certainly no discrimination, intended between any persons because of their religion or their race, but there are differences drawn among those persons who are in fact displaced persons and have been in camp longest and have a preference” (Cong. Rec. , May 26, 1948, 6793). In his analysis, Divine (1957, 143) concludes that

the expressed motive of the restrictionists, to limit the program to those people displaced during the course of the war, appears to be a valid explanation for these provisions. The tendency of Jewish groups to attribute the exclusion of many of their coreligionists to anti-Semitic bias is understandable; however, the extreme charges of discrimination made during the 1948 presidential campaign lead one to suspect that the northern wing of the Democratic party was using this issue to attract votes from members of minority groups. Certainly Truman’s assertion that the 1948 law was anti-Catholic, made in the face of Catholic denials, indicates that political expediency had a great deal to do with the emphasis on the discrimination issue.

In the aftermath of this bill, the Citizens Committee on Displaced Persons released a report claiming the bill was characterized by “hate and racism” and Jewish organizations were unanimous in denouncing the law (Divine 1957, 131). After the 1948 elections resulted in a Democratic Congress and a sympathetic President Truman, Representative Celler introduced a bill without the 1945 cutoff date, but, after passing the House, the bill failed in the Senate because of the opposition of Senator Pat McCarran. McCarran noted that the Citizens Committee had spent over $800,000 lobbying for the bill, with the result that “there has been disseminated over the length and breadth of this nation a campaign of misrepresentation and falsehood which has misled many public-spirited and well-meaning citizens and organizations” (Cong. Rec. , April 26, 1949, 5042-5043). After defeat, the Citizens Committee increased expenditures to over $1,000,000 and succeeded in passing a bill, introduced by Representative Celler, with a 1949 cutoff date that did not discriminate against Jews but largely excluded ethnic Germans who had been expelled from Eastern Europe. In an odd twist in the debate, restrictionists now accused the anti-restrictionists of ethnic bias (e.g., Senator Eastland, Cong. Rec. , April 5, 1950, 2737; Senator McCarran, Cong. Rec. , April 5, 1950, 4743).

At a time when there were no outbreaks of anti-Semitism in other parts of the world creating an urgent need for Jewish immigration and with the presence of Israel as a safe haven for Jews, Jewish organizations still vigorously objected to the continuation of the national origins provisions of the 1924 law in the McCarran-Walter law of 1952 (Neuringer 1971, 337ff). Indeed, when U.S. District Court of Appeals Judge Simon H. Rifkind testified on behalf of a wide range of Jewish organizations against the McCarran-Walter bill he noted emphatically that because of the international situation and particularly the existence of Israel as a safe haven for Jews, Jewish views on immigration legislation were not predicated on the “plight of our co-religionists but rather the impact which immigration and naturalization laws have upon the temper and quality of American life here in the United States.”¹⁶⁵ The argument was couched in terms of “democratic principles and the cause of international amity” (Cohen 1972, 368)—the implicit theory being that the principles of democracy required ethnic diversity (a view promulgated by Jewish intellectual activists such as Sidney Hook [1948, 1949; see Ch. 6] at the time) and the theory that the good will of other countries depended on American willingness to accept their citizens as immigrants. “The enactment of [the McCarran-Walter bill] will gravely impair the national effort we are putting forth. For we are engaged in a war for the hearts and minds of men. The free nations of the world look to us for moral and spiritual reinforcement at a time when the faith which moves men is as important as the force they wield.”¹⁶⁶

The McCarran-Walter law explicitly included racial ancestry as a criterion in its provision that Orientals would be included in the token Oriental quotas no matter where they were born. Herbert Lehman, a senator from New York and the most prominent senatorial opponent of immigration restriction during the 1950s (Neuringer 1971, 351), argued during the debates over the McCarran-Walter bill that immigrants from Jamaica of African descent should be included in the quota for England and stated that the bill would cause resentment among Asians (Neuringer 1971, 346, 356). Representatives Celler and Javits, the leaders of the anti-restrictionists in the House, made similar arguments (Cong. Rec. , April 23, 1952, 4306, 4219). As was also apparent in the battles dating back to the nineteenth century, the opposition to the national origins legislation went beyond its effects on Jewish immigration to advocate immigration of all the racial-ethnic groups of the world.

Reflecting a concern for maintaining the ethnic status quo as well as the salience of Jewish issues during the period, the report of the subcommittee considering the McCarran immigration law noted that “the population of the United States has increased three-fold since 1877, while the Jewish population has increased twenty-one fold during the same period” (Senate Rep. No. 1515 [1950], 2-4). The bill also included a provision that naturalized citizens automatically lost citizenship if they resided abroad continuously for five years. This provision was viewed by Jewish organizations as motivated by anti-Zionist attitudes: “Testimony by Government officials at the hearings… made it clear that the provision stemmed from a desire to dissuade naturalized American Jews from subscribing to a deeply held ideal which some officials in contravention of American policy regarded as undesirable.”¹⁶⁷

Reaffirming the logic of the 1920s restrictionists, the subcommittee report emphasized that a purpose of the 1924 law was “the restriction of immigration from southern and eastern Europe in order to preserve a predominance of persons of northwestern European origin in the composition of our total population” but noted that this purpose did not imply “any theory of Nordic supremacy” (Senate Rep. No. 1515 [1950], 442, 445-446). The argument was mainly phrased in terms of the “similarity of cultural background” of prospective immigrants, implying the rejection of theories of cultural pluralism (Bennett 1966, 133). As in 1924, theories of Nordic supremacy were rejected, but unlike 1924 there was no mention of the legitimate ethnic self-interest of the Northwestern European peoples, presumably a result of the effectiveness of the Boasian onslaught on this idea.

Without giving credence to any theory of Nordic superiority, the subcommittee believes that the adoption of the national origins formula was a rational and logical method of numerically restricting immigration in such a manner as to best preserve the sociological and cultural balance in the population of the United States. There is no doubt that it favored the peoples of the countries of northern and western Europe over those of southern and eastern Europe, but the subcommittee holds that the peoples who had made the greatest contribution to the development of this country were fully justified in determining that the country was no longer a field for further colonization and, henceforth, further immigration would not only be restricted but directed to admit immigrants considered to be more readily assimilable because of the similarity of their cultural background to those of the principal components of our population. (Sen. Rep. No. 1515, 81st Cong., 2nd Sess. 1950, 455)

It is important to note that Jewish spokespersons differed from other liberal groups in their motives for opposing restrictions on immigration during this period. In the following I emphasize the congressional testimony of Judge Simon H. Rifkind, who represented a very broad range of Jewish agencies in the hearings on the McCarran-Walter bill in 1951.¹⁶⁸

1. Immigration should come from all racial-ethnic groups:

We conceive of Americanism as the spirit behind the welcome that America has traditionally extended to people of different races, all religions, all nationalities. Americanism is a tolerant way of life that was devised by men who differed from one another vastly in religion, race background, education, and lineage, and who agreed to forget all these things and ask of a new neighbor not where he comes from but only what he can do and what is his spirit toward his fellow men. (p. 566)

2. The total number of immigrants should be maximized within very broad economic and political constraints: “The regulation [of immigration] is the regulation of an asset, not of a liability” (p. 567). Rifkind emphasized several times that unused quotas had the effect of restricting total numbers of immigrants, and he viewed this very negatively (e.g., p. 569).

3. Immigrants should not be viewed as economic assets and imported only to serve the present needs of the United States:

Looking at [selective immigration] from the point of view of the United States, never from the point of view of the immigrant, I say that we should, to some extent, allow for our temporary needs, but not to make our immigration problem an employment instrumentality. I do not think that we are buying economic commodities when we allow immigrants to come in. We are admitting human beings who will found families and raise children, whose children may reach the heights—at least so we hope and pray. For a small segment of the immigrant stream I think we are entitled to say, if we happen to be short of a particular talent, “Let us go out and look for them,” if necessary, but let us not make that the all-pervading thought. (p. 570)

The opposition to needed skills as the basis of immigration was consistent with the prolonged Jewish attempt to delay the passage of a literacy test as a criterion for immigration beginning in the late nineteenth century until a literacy test was passed in 1917.

Although Rifkind’s testimony was free of the accusation that immigration policy was based on the theory of Nordic superiority, Nordic superiority continued to be a prominent theme of other Jewish groups, particularly the AJCongress, in advocating immigration from all ethnic groups. The statement of the AJCongress focused a great deal of attention on the importance of the theory of Nordic supremacy as motivating the 1924 legislation. Contrary to Rifkind’s surprising assertion of the traditional American openness to all ethnic groups, it noted the long history of ethnic exclusion that existed before these theories were developed, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the gentlemen’s agreement with Japan of 1907 limiting immigration of Japanese workers, and the exclusion of other Asians in 1917. The statement noted that the 1924 legislation had succeeded in preserving the ethnic balance of the United States as of the 1920 census, but it commented that “the objective is valueless. There is nothing sacrosanct about the composition of the population in 1920. It would be foolish to believe that we reached the peak of ethnic perfection in that year.”¹⁶⁹ Moreover, in an explicit statement of Horace Kallen’s multicultural ideal, the AJCongress statement advocated “the thesis of cultural democracy which would guarantee to all groups ‘majority and minority alike… the right to be different and the responsibility to make sure that their differences do not conflict with the welfare of the American people as a whole.’ “¹⁷⁰

During this period the Congress Weekly, the journal of the AJCongress, regularly denounced the national origins provisions as based on the “myth of the existence of superior and inferior racial stocks” (Oct. 17, 1955, p. 3) and advocated immigration on the basis of “need and other criteria unrelated to race or national origin” (May 4, 1953, p. 3). Particularly objectionable from the perspective of the AJCongress was the implication that there should be no change in the ethnic status quo prescribed by the 1924 legislation (e.g., Goldstein 1952a, 6). The national origins formula “is outrageous now… when our national experience has confirmed beyond a doubt that our very strength lies in the diversity of our peoples” (Goldstein 1952b, 5).

As indicated above, there is some evidence that the 1924 legislation and the restrictionism of the 1930s was motivated partly by anti-Semitic attitudes. AntiSemitism and its linkage with anti-communism were also apparent in the immigration arguments during the 1950s preceding and following the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act. Restrictionists often pointed to evidence that over 90 percent of American Communists had backgrounds linking them to Eastern Europe. A major thrust of restrictionist efforts was to prevent immigration from this area and to ease deportation procedures to prevent Communist subversion. Eastern Europe was also the origin of most Jewish immigration, and Jews were disproportionately represented among American Communists, with the result that these issues became linked, and the situation lent itself to broad anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the role of Jews in U.S. politics (e.g., Beaty 1951). In Congress, Representative John Rankin, a notorious anti-Semite, without making explicit reference to Jews, stated:

They whine about discrimination. Do you know who is being discriminated against? The white Christian people of America, the ones who created this nation… I am talking about the white Christian people of the North as well as the South…

Communism is racial. A racial minority seized control in Russia and in all her satellite countries, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and many other countries I could name.

They have been run out of practically every country in Europe in the years gone by, and if they keep stirring race trouble in this country and trying to force their communistic program on the Christian people of America, there is no telling what will happen to them here. (Cong. Rec., April 23, 1952, 4320)

During this period mainstream Jewish organizations were deeply concerned to eradicate the stereotype of communist-Jew and to develop an image of Jews as liberal anti-communists (Svonkin 1997). “The fight against the stereotype of Communist-Jew became a virtual obsession with Jewish leaders and opinion makers throughout America” (Liebman 1979, 515). (As an indication of the extent of this stereotype, when the gentile anthropologist Eleanor Leacock was being screened for security clearance by the FBI in 1944, in an effort to document her associations with political radicals her friends were asked whether she associated with Jews [Frank 1997, 738].) The AJCommittee engaged in intensive efforts to change opinion within the Jewish community by showing that Jewish interests were more compatible with advocating American democracy than Soviet communism (e.g., emphasizing Soviet anti-Semitism and support of nations opposed to Israel in the period after World War II) (Cohen 1972, 347ff).¹⁷¹ Although the AJCongress acknowledged that communism was a threat, the group adopted an “anti-anticommunist” position that condemned the infringement of civil liberties contained in the anti-communist legislation of the period. It was therefore “at best a reluctant and unenthusiastic participant” (Svonkin 1997, 132) in the Jewish effort to develop a strong public image of anticommunism during this period—a position that reflected the sympathies of many among its predominantly second- and third-generation Eastern European immigrant membership.

This radical Jewish subculture and its ties to communism were much in evidence during riots in Peekskill, New York in 1949. Peekskill was a summer destination for approximately 30,000 predominantly Jewish professionals associated with socialist, anarchist, and communist colonies originally established in the 1930s. The immediate cause of rioting was a concert given by avowed communist Paul Robeson and sponsored by the Civil Rights Congress, a pro-communist group branded as subversive by the U.S. attorney general. Rioters made anti-Semitic statements at a time when the linkage between Jews and communism was highly salient. The result was an image-management effort on the part of the AJCommittee in which the anti-Semitic angle of the event was minimized—an example of the quarantine method of Jewish political strategizing (see SAID, Ch. 6 Note 14). This strategy conflicted with other groups, such as the AJCongress and the ACLU, who endorsed a report that attributed the violence to anti-Semitic prejudice and emphasized that the victims had been deprived of their civil liberties because of their communist sympathies.

Particularly worrisome to American Jewish leaders was the arrest and conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for spying. Leftist supporters of the Rosenbergs, many of whom were Jewish, attempted to portray the event as an instance of anti-Semitism, in the words of one prominent commentator, “The lynchings of these two innocent American Jews, unless stopped by the American people, will serve as a signal for a wave of Hitler-like genocidal attacks against the Jewish people throughout the United States” (in Svonkin 1997, 155). These leftist organizations actively sought to enlist mainstream Jewish opinion on the side of this interpretation (Dawidowicz 1952). However, in doing so they made the Jewish identities of these individuals and the connection between Judaism and communism even more salient. The official Jewish community went to great lengths to alter the public stereotype of Jewish subversion and disloyalty. Similarly, in its attempt to indict communism, the AJCommittee commented on the trial of Rudolph Slansky and his Jewish colleagues in Czechoslovakia. This trial was part of the anti-Semitic purges of Jewish communist elites in Eastern Europe after World War II, completely analogous to similar events in Poland recounted by Schatz (1991) and discussed in Chapter 3. The AJCommittee stated, “The trial of Rudolph Slansky, renegade Jew and his colleagues, who betrayed Judaism in serving the Communist cause, should awaken everyone to the fact that anti-Semitism has become an open instrument of Communist policy. It is ironical that these men who deserted Judaism, which is inimical to Communism, are now being used as an excuse for the Communist anti-Semitic campaign” (in Svonkin 1997, 282n114).

Jewish organizations cooperated fully with the House Un-American Activities Committee, and defenders of the Rosenbergs and other communists were hounded out of mainstream Jewish organizations where they had previously been welcome. Particularly salient was the 50,000-member Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order (JPFO), a subsidiary of the International Workers Order (IWO), which was listed as a subversive organization by the U.S. attorney general. The AJCommittee prevailed on local Jewish organizations to expel the JPFO, a move staunchly resisted by the JPFO, and the AJCongress dissolved the affiliate status of the JPFO as well as another communist-dominated organization, the American Jewish Labor Council. Similarly, mainstream Jewish organizations dissociated themselves from the Social Service Employees Union, a Jewish labor union for workers in Jewish organizations. This union had previously been expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations because of its Communist sympathies.

Jewish organizations successfully obtained a prominent role for Jews in the prosecution of the Rosenbergs, and, after the guilty verdicts, the AJCommittee and the American Civil Liberties Union were active in promoting public support for them (Ginsberg 1993, 121; Navasky 1980, 114ff). The periodical Commentary, published by the AJCommittee, “was rigorously edited to ensure that nothing that appeared within it could be in any way construed as favorable to Communism” (Liebman 1979, 516), and it even went out of its way to print extremely anti-Soviet articles.

Nevertheless, the position of mainstream Jewish organizations such as the AJCommittee, which opposed communism, often coincided with the position of the CPUSA on issues of immigration. For example, both the AJCommittee and the CPUSA condemned the McCarran-Walter act while, on the other hand, the AJCommittee had a major role in influencing the recommendations of President Truman’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization (PCIN) for relaxing the security provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act, and these recommendations were warmly greeted by the CPUSA at a time when a prime goal of the security provisions was to exclude communists (Bennett 1963, 166). (Judge Julius Rifkind’s remarks at the Joint Hearings on the McCarran-Walter Act [see p. 278 above] also condemned the security provisions of the bill.) Jews were disproportionately represented on the PCIN as well as in the organizations viewed by Congress as communist front organizations involved in immigration issues. The chairman of the PCIN was Philip B. Perlman and the staff of the commission contained a high percentage of Jews, headed by Harry N. Rosenfield (Executive Director) and Elliot Shirk (Assistant to the Executive Director), and its report was wholeheartedly endorsed by the AJCongress (see Congress Weekly, Jan. 12, 1952, 3). The proceedings were printed as the report Whom We Shall Welcome with the cooperation of Representative Emanuel Celler.

In Congress, Senator McCarran accused the PCIN of containing communist sympathizers, and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) released a report stating that “some two dozen Communists and many times that number with records of repeated affiliation with known Communist enterprises testified before the Commission or submitted statements for inclusion in the record of the hearings… Nowhere in either the record of the hearings or in the report is there a single reference to the true background of these persons” (House Rep. No. 1182, 85th Cong., 1st Session, 47). The report referred particularly to communists associated with the American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born (ACPFB), headed by Abner Green. Green, who was Jewish, figured very prominently in these hearings, and Jews were generally disproportionately represented among those singled out as officers and sponsors of the ACPFB (pp. 13-21). HUAC provided evidence indicating that the ACPFB had close ties with the CPUSA and noted that 24 of the individuals associated with the ACPFB had signed statements incorporated into the printed record of the PCIN.

The AJCommittee was also heavily involved in the deliberations of the PCIN, including providing testimony and distributing data and other material to individuals and organizations testifying before the PCIN (Cohen 1972, 371). All its recommendations were incorporated into the final report (Cohen 1972, 371), including a deemphasis on economic skills as criteria for immigration, scrapping the national origins legislation, and opening immigration to all the peoples of the world on a “first come, first served basis,” the only exception being that the report recommended a lower total number of immigrants than recommended by the AJCommittee and other Jewish groups. The AJCommittee thus went beyond merely advocating the principle of immigration from all racial and ethnic groups (token quotas for Asians and Africans had already been included in the McCarran-Walter Act) to attempt to maximize the total number of immigrants from all parts of the world within the current political climate.

Indeed, the Commission (PCIN 1953, 106) pointedly noted that the 1924 legislation had succeeded in maintaining the racial status quo, and that the main barrier to changing the racial status quo was not the national origins system, because there were already high levels of nonquota immigrants and because the countries of Northern and Western Europe did not fill their quotas. Rather, the report noted that the main barrier to changing the racial status quo was the total number of immigrants. The Commission thus viewed changing the racial status quo of the United States as a desirable goal, and to that end made a major point of the desirability of increasing the total number of immigrants (PCIN 1953, 42). As Bennett (1963, 164) notes, in the eyes of the PCIN, the 1924 legislation reducing the total number of immigrants “was a very bad thing because of its finding that one race is just as good as another for American citizenship or any other purpose.”

Correspondingly, the defenders of the 1952 legislation conceptualized the issue as fundamentally one of ethnic warfare. Senator McCarran stated that subverting the national origins system “would, in the course of a generation or so, tend to change the ethnic and cultural composition of this nation” (in Bennett 1963, 185), and Richard Arens, a congressional staff member who had a prominent role in the hearings on the McCarran-Walter bill as well as in the activities of HUAC, stated, “These are the critics who do not like America as it is and has been. They think our people exist in unfair ethnic proportions. They prefer that we bear a greater resemblance or ethnic relationship to the foreign peoples whom they favor and for whom they are seeking disproportionately greater immigration privileges” (in Bennett 1963, 186). As Divine (1957, 188) notes, ethnic interests predominated on both sides. The restrictionists were implicitly advocating the ethnic status quo, while the anti-restrictionists were rather more explicit in their desire to alter the ethnic status quo in a manner that conformed to their ethnic interests, although the anti-restrictionist rhetoric was phrased in universalistic and moralistic terms.

The salience of Jewish involvement in immigration during this period is also apparent in several other incidents. In 1950 the representative of the AJCongress testified that the retention of the national origins system in any form would be “a political and moral catastrophe” (“Revision of Immigration Laws” Joint Hearings, 1950, 336-337). The national origins formula implies that “persons in quest of the opportunity to live in this land are to be judged according to breed like cattle at a country fair and not on the basis of their character fitness or capacity” (Congress Weekly 21, 1952, 3-4). Divine (1957, 173) characterizes the AJCongress as representing “the more militant wing” of the opposition because of its principled opposition to any form of the national origins formula, whereas other opponents merely wanted to be able to distribute unused quotas to Southern and Eastern Europe.

Representative Francis Walter noted the “propaganda drive that is being engaged in now by certain members of the American Jewish Congress opposed to the Immigration and Nationality Code” (Cong. Rec., March 13, 1952, 2283), noting particularly the activities of Dr. Israel Goldstein, president of the AJCongress, who had been reported in the New York Times as having stated that the immigration and nationality law would place “a legislative seal of inferiority on all persons of other than Anglo-Saxon origin.” Representative Walter then noted the special role that Jewish organizations had played in attempting to foster family reunion rather than special skills as the basis of U.S. immigration policy. After Representative Jacob Javits stated that opposition to the law was “not confined to the one group the gentleman mentioned” (Cong. Rec. , March 13, 1952, 2284), Walter responded as follows:

I might call your attention to the fact that Mr. Harry N. Rosenfield, Commissioner of the Displaced Persons Commission [and also the Executive Director of the PCIN; see above] and incidentally a brother-in-law of a lawyer who is stirring up all this agitation, in a speech recently said:

The proposed legislation is America’s Nuremberg trial.

It is “racious” and archaic, based on a theory that people with different styles of noses should be treated differently.

Representative Walter then noted that the only two organizations hostile to the entire bill were the AJCongress and the Association of Immigration and Nationality Lawyers, the latter “represented by an attorney who is also advising and counseling the American Jewish Congress.” (Goldstein [1952b] himself noted that “at the time of the Joint House-Senate hearings on the McCarran bill, the American Jewish Congress was the only civic group which dared flatly to oppose the national origins quota formula.”)

Representative Emanuel Celler replied that Walter “should not have overemphasized as he did the people of one particular faith who are opposing the bill” (p. 2285). Representative Walter agreed with Celler’s comments, noting that “there are other very fine Jewish groups who endorse the bill.” Nevertheless, the principle Jewish organizations, including the AJCongress, the AJCommittee, the ADL, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, did indeed oppose the bill (Cong. Rec., April 23, 1952, 4247), and when Judge Simon Rifkind testified against the bill in the joint hearings, he emphasized that he represented a very wide range of Jewish groups, “the entire body of religious opinion and lay opinion within the Jewish group, religiously speaking, from the extreme right and extreme left” (p. 563).¹⁷² Rifkind represented a long list of national and local Jewish groups, including in addition to the above, the Synagogue Council of America, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Jewish War Veterans of the United States, and 27 local Jewish councils throughout the United States. Moreover, the fight against the bill was led by Jewish members of Congress, including especially Celler, Javits, and Lehman, all of whom, as indicated above, were prominent members of the ADL.

Albeit by indirection, Representative Walter was clearly calling attention to the special Jewish role in the immigration conflict of 1952. The special role of the AJCongress in opposing the McCarran-Walter Act was a source of pride within the group: On the verge of victory in 1965, the Congress bi-Weekly editorialized that it was “a cause of pride” that AJCongress president Rabbi Israel Goldstein had been “singled out by Representative Walter for attack on the floor of the House of Representatives as the prime organizer of the campaign against the measures he co-sponsored” (Feb. 1, 1965, 3).

The perception that Jewish concerns were an important feature of the opposition to the McCarran-Walter Act can also be seen in the following exchange between Representative Celler and Representative Walter. Celler noted, “The national origin theory upon which our immigration law is based…[mocks] our protestations based on a question of equality of opportunity for all peoples, regardless of race, color, or creed.” Representative Walter replied, “a great menace to America lies in the fact that so many professionals, including professional Jews, are shedding crocodile tears for no reason whatsoever” (Cong. Rec. , Jan. 13, 1953, 372). And in a comment referring to the peculiarities of Jewish interests in immigration legislation, Richard Arens noted, “One of the curious things about those who most loudly claim that the 1952 act is ‘discriminatory’ and that it does not make allowance for a sufficient number of alleged refugees, is that they oppose admission of any of the approximately one million Arab refugees in camps where they are living in pitiful circumstances after having been driven out of Israel” (in Bennett 1963, 181).

The McCarran-Walter Act passed despite President Truman’s veto, and Truman’s “alleged partisanship to Jews was a favorite target of anti-Semites” (Cohen 1972, 377). Prior to the veto, Truman was intensively lobbied, “particularly [by] Jewish societies” opposed to the bill; government agencies, meanwhile, including the State Department (despite the anti-restrictionist argument that the bill would have catastrophic effects on U.S. foreign policy) urged Truman to sign the bill (Divine 1957, 184). Moreover, individuals with openly anti-Semitic attitudes, such as John Beaty (1951), often focused on Jewish involvement in the immigration battles during this period.

Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity, 1953-1965

During this period the Congress Weekly regularly noted the role of Jewish organizations as the vanguard of liberalized immigration laws: In its editorial of February 20, 1956 (p. 3), for example, it congratulated President Eisenhower for his “unequivocal opposition to the quota system which, more than any other feature of our immigration policy, has excited the most widespread and most intense aversion among Americans. In advancing this proposal for ‘new guidelines and standards’ in determining admissions, President Eisenhower has courageously taken a stand in advance of even many advocates of a liberal immigration policy and embraced a position which had at first been urged by the American Jewish Congress and other Jewish agencies.”

The AJCommittee made a major effort to keep the immigration issue alive during a period of widespread apathy among the American public between the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act and the early 1960s. Jewish organizations intensified their effort during this time (Cohen 1972, 370-373; Neuringer 1971, 358), with the AJCommittee helping to establish the Joint Conference on Alien Legislation and the American Immigration Conference—both organizations representing pro-immigration forces—as well as providing most of the funding and performing most of the work of these groups. In 1955 the AJCommittee organized a group of influential citizens as the National Commission on Immigration and Citizenship “in order to give prestige to the campaign” (Cohen 1972, 373). “All these groups studied immigration laws, disseminated information to the public, presented testimony to Congress, and planned other appropriate activities… There were no immediate or dramatic results; but AJC’s dogged campaign in conjunction with like-minded organizations ultimately prodded the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to action” (Cohen 1972, 373).

An article by Oscar Handlin (1952), the prominent Harvard historian of immigration, is a fascinating microcosm of the Jewish approach to immigration during this period. Writing in Commentary (a publication of the AJCommittee) almost 30 years after the 1924 defeat and in the immediate aftermath of the McCarran-Walter Act, Handlin entitled his article “The immigration fight has only begun: Lessons of the McCarran-Walter setback.” The title is a remarkable indication of the tenacity and persistence of Jewish commitment to this issue. The message is not to be discouraged by the recent defeat, which occurred despite “all the effort toward securing the revision of our immigration laws” (p. 2).

Handlin attempts to cast the argument in universalist terms as benefiting all Americans and as conforming to American ideals that “all men, being brothers, are equally capable of being Americans” (p. 7). Current immigration law reflects “racist xenophobia” (p. 2) by its token quotas for Asians and its denial of the right of West Indian blacks to take advantage of British quotas. Handlin ascribes the restrictionist sentiments of Pat McCarran to “the hatred of foreigners that was all about him in his youth and by the dim, recalled fear that he himself might be counted among them” (p. 3)—a psychoanalytic identification-with-the-aggressor argument (McCarran was Catholic).

In his article Handlin repeatedly uses the term “we”—as in “if we cannot beat McCarran and his cohorts with their own weapons, we can do much to destroy the efficacy of those weapons” (p. 4)—suggesting Handlin’s belief in a unified Jewish interest in liberal immigration policy and presaging a prolonged “chipping away” of the 1952 legislation in the ensuing years. Handlin’s anti-restrictionist strategy included altering the views of social scientists to the effect “that it was possible and necessary to distinguish among the ‘races’ of immigrants that clamored for admission to the United States” (p. 4). Handlin’s proposal to recruit social scientists in the immigration battles is congruent with the political agenda of the Boasian school of anthropology discussed above and in Chapter 2. As Higham (1984) notes, the ascendancy of such views was as an important component of the ultimate victory over restrictionism.

Handlin presented the following highly tendentious rendering of the logic of preserving the ethnic status quo that underlay the arguments for restriction from 1921 to 1952:

The laws are bad because they rest on the racist assumption that mankind is divided into fixed breeds, biologically and culturally separated from each other, and because, within that framework, they assume that Americans are Anglo-Saxons by origin and ought to remain so. To all other peoples, the laws say that the United States ranks them in terms of their racial proximity to our own ‘superior’ stock; and upon the many, many millions of Americans not descended from the Anglo-Saxons, the laws cast a distinct imputation of inferiority. (p. 5)

Handlin deplored the apathy of other “hyphenated Americans” to share the enthusiasm of the Jewish effort: “Many groups failed to see the relevance of the McCarran-Walter Bill to their own position.” He suggests that these groups ought to act as groups to assert their interests: “The Italian American has the right to be heard on these issues precisely as an Italian American” (p. 7; italics in text). The implicit assumption is that the United States ought to be composed of cohesive subgroups with a clear sense of their group interests in opposition to the peoples deriving from Northern and Western Europe or of the United States as a whole. Also, there is the implication that Italian Americans have an interest in furthering immigration of Africans and Asians and in creating such a multiracial and multicultural society.

Handlin developed this perspective further in a book, Race and Nationality in American Life, published in 1957.¹⁷³ This book is a compendium of psychoanalytic “explanations” of ethnic and class conflict deriving from The Authoritarian Personality school combined with the Boasian theory that there are no biological differences between the races that influence behavior. There is also a strong strand of the belief that humans can be perfected by changing defective human institutions. Handlin advocates immigration from all areas of the world as a moral imperative. In his discussion of Israel in Chapter XII, however, there is no mention that Israel ought to be similarly inclined to view open immigration from throughout the world as a moral imperative or that Jews should not be concerned with maintaining political control of Israel. Instead the discussion focuses on the moral compatibility of dual loyalties for American Jews to both the United States and Israel. Handlin’s moral blindness regarding Jewish issues can also be seen in Albert Lindemann’s (1997, xx) comment that Handlin’s book Three Hundred Years of Jewish Life in America failed to mention Jewish slave traders and slave owners “even while mentioning by name the ‘great Jewish merchants’ who made fortunes in the slave trade.”

Shortly after Handlin’s article, William Petersen (1955), also writing in Commentary, argued that pro-immigration forces should be explicit in their advocacy of a multicultural society and that the importance of this goal transcended the importance of achieving any self-interested goal of the United States, such as obtaining needed skills or improving foreign relations. In making his case he cited a group of predominantly Jewish social scientists whose works, beginning with Horace Kallen’s plea for a multicultural, pluralistic society, “constitute the beginning of a scholarly legitimization of the different immigration policy that will perhaps one day become law” (p. 86), including, besides Kallen, Melville Herskovits (the Boasian anthropologist; see Ch. 2), Geoffrey Gorer, Samuel Lubell, David Riesman (a New York Intellectual; see Ch. 6), Thorsten Sellin, and Milton Konvitz.

These social scientists did indeed contribute to the immigration battles. For example, the following quotation from a scholarly book on immigration policy by Milton Konvitz of Cornell University (published by Cornell University Press) reflects the rejection of national interest as an element of U.S. immigration policy—a hallmark of the Jewish approach to immigration:

To place so much emphasis on technological and vocational qualifications is to remove every vestige of humanitarianism from our immigration policy. We deserve small thanks from those who come here if they are admitted because we find that they are “urgently” needed, by reason of their training and experience, to advance our national interests. This is hardly immigration; it is the importation of special skills or know-how, not greatly different from the importation of coffee or rubber. It is hardly in the spirit of American ideals to disregard a man’s character and promise and to look only at his education and the vocational opportunities he had the good fortune to enjoy. (Konvitz 1953, 26)

Other prominent social scientists who represented the anti-restrictionist perspective in their writings were Richard Hofstadter and Max Lerner. Hofstadter, who did much to create the image of the populists of the West and South as irrational anti-Semites (see Ch. 5), also condemned the populists for their desire “to maintain a homogeneous Yankee civilization” (Hofstadter 1955, 34). He also linked populism to the immigration issue: In Hofstadter’s view, populism was “in considerable part colored by the reaction to this immigrant stream among the native elements of the population” (1955, 11).

In his highly acclaimed America as a Civilization, Max Lerner provides an explicit link between much of the intellectual tradition covered in previous chapters and the immigration issue. Lerner finds the United States to be a tribalistic nation with a “passionate rejection of the ‘outsider’” (1957, 502), and he asserts that “with the passing of the [1924 immigration] quota laws racism came of age in America” (p. 504). Lerner laments the fact that these “racist” laws are still in place because of popular sentiment, “whatever the intellectuals may think.” This is clearly a complaint that when it came to immigration policy, Americans were not following the lead of the predominantly Jewish urbanized intellectual elite represented by Lerner. The comment reflects the anti-democratic, anti-populist element of Jewish intellectual activity discussed in Chapters 5 and 6.

Lerner cites the work of Horace Kallen as providing a model for a multicultural, pluralistic America (p. 93), saying, for example, that he (Lerner) approves of “the existence of ethnic communities within the larger American community, each of them trying to hold on to elements of group identity and in the process enriching the total culture pattern” (p. 506). Correspondingly, while acknowledging that Jews have actively resisted exogamy (p. 510), Lerner sees nothing but benign effects of immigration and interbreeding: “Although some cultural historians maintain that the dilution of native stock is followed by cultural decadence, the example of the Italian city-states, Spain, Holland, Britain, and now Russia and India as well as America indicates that the most vigorous phase may come at the height of the mingling of many stocks. The greater danger lies in closing the gates” (p. 82).

Lerner cites approvingly Franz Boas’s work on the plasticity of skull size as a paradigm showing the pervasiveness of environmental influences (p. 83), and on this basis he asserts that intellectual and biological differences between ethnic groups are entirely the result of environmental differences. Thus, “One can understand the fear of the more prolific birth rate of the minorities, but since they are largely the product of lower living standards the strategy of keeping the living standards low by enclosing the minorities in walls of caste would seem self-defeating” (p. 506). And finally, Lerner uses The Authoritarian Personality as an analytic tool in understanding ethnic conflict and anti-Semitism (p. 509).

Handlin wrote that the McCarran-Walter law was only a temporary setback, and he was right. Thirty years after the triumph of restrictionism, only Jewish groups remained as persistent and tenacious advocates of a multicultural America. Forty-one years after the 1924 triumph of restrictionism and the national origins provision and only 13 years after its reaffirmation with the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, Jewish organizations successfully supported ending the geographically based national origins basis of immigration intended to result in an ethnic status quo in what was now a radically altered intellectual and political climate.

Particularly important is the provision in the Immigration Act of 1965 that expanded the number of nonquota immigrants. Beginning in their testimony on the 1924 law, Jewish spokespersons had been in the forefront in attempts to admit family members on a nonquota basis (Neuringer 1971, 191). During the House debates on immigration surrounding the McCarran-Walter Act, Representative Walter (Cong. Rec. , March 13, 1952, 2284) noted the special focus that Jewish organizations had on family reunion rather than on special skills. Responding to Representative Javits who had complained that under the bill 50 percent of the quota for blacks from the British West Indies colonies would be reserved for people with special skills, Walter noted, “I would like to call the gentleman’s attention to the fact that this is the principle of using 50 percent of the quota for people needed in the United States. But, if that entire 50 percent is not used in that category, then the unused numbers go down to the next category which replies to the objections that these Jewish organizations make much of, that families are being separated.”

Prior to the 1965 law, Bennett (1963, 244) commenting on the family unification aspects of the 1961 immigration legislation, noted that the “relationship by blood or marriage and the principle of uniting families have become the ‘open Sesame’ to the immigration gates.” Moreover, despite repeated denials by the anti-restrictionists that their proposals would affect the ethnic balance of the country, Bennett (1963, 256) commented that the “repeated, persistent extension of nonquota status to immigrants from countries with oversubscribed quotas and flatly discriminated against by [the McCarran-Walter Act] together with administrative waivers of inadmissibility, adjustment of status and private bills, is helping to speed and make apparently inevitable a change in the ethnic face of the nation” (p. 257)—a reference to the “chipping away” of the 1952 law recommended as a strategy in Handlin’s article. Indeed, a major argument apparent in the debate over the 1965 legislation was that the 1952 law had been so weakened that it had largely become irrelevant and there was a need to overhaul immigration legislation to legitimize a de facto situation.

Bennett also noted that “the stress on the immigration issue arises from insistence of those who regard quotas as ceilings, not floors [opponents of restriction often referred to unused quotas as “wasted” because they could be given to non-Europeans], who want to remake America in the image of small-quota countries and who do not like our basic ideology, cultural attitudes and heritage. They insist that it is the duty of the United States to accept immigrants irrespective of their assimilability or our own population problems. They insist on remaining hyphenated Americans” (1963, 295).

The family-based emphasis of the quota regulations of the 1965 law (e.g., the provision that at least 24 percent of the quota for each area be set aside for brothers and sisters of citizens) has resulted in a multiplier effect that ultimately subverted the quota system entirely by allowing for a “chaining” phenomenon in which endless chains of the close relatives of close relatives are admitted outside the quota system:

Imagine one immigrant, say an engineering student, who was studying in the United States during the 1960s. If he found a job after graduation, he could then bring over his wife [as the spouse of a resident alien], and six years later, after being naturalized, his bothers and sisters [as siblings of a citizen]. They, in turn, could bring their wives, husbands, and children. Within a dozen years, one immigrant entering as a skilled worker could easily generate 25 visas for in-laws, nieces, and nephews. (McConnell 1988b, 98)

The 1965 law also deemphasized the criterion that immigrants should have needed skills. (In 1986 less than four percent of immigrants were admitted on the basis of needed skills, whereas 74 percent were admitted on the basis of familial relatedness [see Brimelow 1995].) As indicated above, the rejection of a skill requirement or other tests of competence in favor of “humanitarian goals” and family unification had been an element of Jewish immigration policy at least since debate on the McCarran-Walter Act of the early 1950s and extending really to the long opposition to literacy tests dating from the end of the nineteenth century.

Senator Jacob Javits played a prominent role in the Senate hearings on the 1965 bill, and Emanuel Celler, who fought for unrestricted immigration for over 40 years in the House of Representatives, introduced similar legislation in that body. Jewish organizations (American Council for Judaism Philanthropic Fund, Council of Jewish Federations & Welfare Funds and B’nai B’rith Women) filed briefs in support of the measure before the Senate subcommittee, as did organizations such as the ACLU and the Americans for Democratic Action with a large Jewish membership (Goldberg 1996, 46).

Indeed, it is noteworthy that well before the ultimate triumph of the Jewish policy on immigration, Javits (1951) authored an article entitled “Let’s open the gates” that proposed an immigration level of 500,000 per year for 20 years with no restrictions on national origin. In 1961 Javits proposed a bill that “sought to destroy the [national origins quota system] by a flank attack and to increase quota and nonquota immigration” (Bennett 1963, 250). In addition to provisions aimed at removing barriers due to race, ethnicity, and national origins, included in this bill was a provision that brothers, sisters, and married sons or daughters of U.S. citizens and their spouses and children who had become eligible under the quota system in legislation of 1957 be included as nonquota immigrants—an even more radical version of the provision whose incorporation in the 1965 law facilitated non-European immigration into the United States. Although this provision of Javit’s bill was not approved at the time, the bill’s proposals for softening previous restrictions on Asian and black immigration as well as removing racial classification from visa documents (thus allowing unlimited nonquota immigration of Asians and blacks born in the Western Hemisphere) were approved.

It is also interesting that the main victory of the restrictionists in 1965 was that Western Hemisphere nations were included in the new quota system, thus ending the possibility of unrestricted immigration from those regions. In speeches before the Senate, Senator Javits (Cong. Rec. , 111, 1965, 24469) bitterly opposed this extension of the quota system, arguing that placing any limits on immigration of all of the people of the Western Hemisphere would have severely negative effects on U.S. foreign policy. In a highly revealing discussion of the bill before the Senate, Senator Sam Ervin (Cong. Rec. , 89th Cong., 1st Sess., 1965, 24446-51) noted that “those who disagree with me express no shock that Britain, in the future, can send us 10,000 fewer immigrants than she has sent on an annual average in the past. They are only shocked that British Guyana cannot send us every single citizen of that country who wishes to come.” Clearly the forces of liberal immigration really wanted unlimited immigration into the United States.

The pro-immigrationists in 1965 also failed to prevent a requirement that the secretary of labor certify that there are insufficient Americans able and willing to perform the labor that the aliens intend to perform and that the employment of such aliens will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of American workers. Writing in the American Jewish Year Book, Liskofsky (1966, 174) noted that pro-immigration groups opposed these regulations but agreed to them in order to get a bill that ended the national origins provisions. After passage “they became intensely concerned. They voiced publicly the fear that the new, administratively cumbersome procedure might easily result in paralyzing most immigration of skilled and unskilled workers as well as of non-preference immigrants.” Reflecting the long Jewish opposition to the idea that immigration policy should be in the national interest, the economic welfare of American citizens was viewed as irrelevant; securing high levels of immigration had become an end in itself.

The 1965 law is having the effect that it seems reasonable to suppose had been intended by its Jewish advocates all along: The Census Bureau projects that by the year 2050, European-derived peoples will no longer be a majority of the population of the United States. Moreover, multiculturalism has already become a powerful ideological and political reality. Although the proponents of the 1965 legislation continued to insist that the bill would not affect the ethnic balance of the United States or even impact its culture, it is difficult to believe that at least some proponents were unaware of the eventual implications. Opponents, certainly, quite clearly believed the legislation would indeed affect the ethnic balance of the United States. Given their intense involvement in the fine details of immigration legislation, their very negative attitudes toward the Northwestern European bias of pre-1965 U.S. immigration policy, and their very negative attitudes toward the idea of an ethnic status quo embodied, for example, in the PCIN document Whom We Shall Welcome, it appears unlikely to suppose that organizations like the AJCommittee and the AJCongress were unaware of the inaccuracy of the projections of the effects of this legislation that were made by its supporters. Given the clearly articulated interests in ending the ethnic status quo evident in the arguments of anti-restrictionists from 1924 through 1965, the 1965 law would not have been perceived by its proponents as a victory unless they viewed it as ultimately changing the ethnic status quo. As noted, immediately after passage of the law, there was anxiety among immigration advocates to blunt the restrictive effects of administrative procedures on the number of immigrants. Revealingly, the anti-restrictionists viewed the 1965 law as a victory. After regularly condemning U.S. immigration law and championing the eradication of the national origins formula precisely because it had produced an ethnic status quo, the Congress bi-Weekly ceased publishing articles on this topic.

Moreover, Lawrence Auster (1990, 31ff) shows that the supporters of the legislation repeatedly glossed over the distinction between quota and nonquota immigration and failed to mention the effect that the legislation would have on non-quota immigration. Projections of the number of new immigrants failed to take account of the well-known and often commented-upon fact that the old quotas favoring Western European countries were not being filled. Continuing a tradition of over 40 years, pro-immigration rhetoric presented the 1924 and 1952 laws as based on theories of racial superiority and as involving racial discrimination rather than in terms of an attempt to create an ethnic status quo.

Even in 1952 Senator McCarran was aware of the stakes at risk in immigration policy. In a statement reminiscent of that of Representative William N. Vaile during the debates of the 1920s quoted above, McCarran stated,

I believe that this nation is the last hope of Western civilization and if this oasis of the world shall be overrun, perverted, contaminated or destroyed, then the last flickering light of humanity will be extinguished. I take no issue with those who would praise the contributions which have been made to our society by people of many races, of varied creeds and colors. America is indeed a joining together of many streams which go to form a mighty river which we call the American way. However, we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies. Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain. The solution of the problems of Europe and Asia will not come through a transplanting of those problems en masse to the United States… I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the enemies of this legislation succeed in riddling it to pieces, or in amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed more to promote this nation’s downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence as a nation. (Senator Pat McCarran, Cong. Rec. , March 2, 1953, 1518)

APPENDIX: JEWISH PRO-IMMIGRATION EFFORTS IN
OTHER WESTERN COUNTRIES

The purpose of this appendix is to show that Jewish organizations have pursued similar policies regarding immigration in other Western societies. In France, the official Jewish community has consistently been in favor of immigration by non-Europeans. Recently the French Jewish community reacted strongly to pronouncements by actress Bridgette Bardot that “my country, France, has been invaded again by a foreign population, notably Muslims” (Forward, May 3, 1996, 4). Chaim Musiquant, executive director of CRIF, the umbrella organization for French Jewry, stated that Bardot’s statement “skirt[ed] at the edge of racism.”

Jewish attitudes toward anti-immigrant sentiment in Germany can be seen by the following incident. A common (presumably self-deceptive) aspect of contemporary Jewish self-conceptualization is that Israel is an ethnically and culturally diverse society as a result of large scale immigration of Jews from different parts of the world (e.g., Peretz 1997, 8; Australia/Israel Review [issue 22.5, April 11-24, 1997]), so much so that it should be held up as a model of ethnic relations and pro-immigrant attitudes for the rest of the world. Recently B’nai B’rith, acting in response to what it viewed as indications of a resurgence of neo-Nazism and anti-immigration sentiment in Germany, received a grant from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization to bring German representatives to Israel because Israel is “a diverse, formative society, which, under strains of war, terrorism and massive, deprived, immigration, has strived to develop a just, democratic and tolerant society” (“Toleration and Pluralism: A Comparative Study; UNESCO Evaluation Report Request no. 9926). “Our view was that the multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-fissured, democratic society of Israel… could provide a credible and worthwhile point of comparison for others coming from a similarly highly-charged society.”

In England, as in the United States, there was an ethnic battle beginning around 1900 in response to the influx of Eastern European Jews fleeing czarist anti-Semitism. Jewish political activity was instrumental in defeating an immigration restriction bill introduced by the Conservative government in 1904. In this case, the Anglo-Jewish political establishment represented by the Board of Deputies took a moderate stance, presumably because of fears that further immigration of Eastern European Jews would fan the flames of anti-Semitism. However, by this time the majority of the British Jewish community consisted of recent immigrants, and the Jewish Chronicle, the principle newspaper of the British Jewish community, campaigned vigorously against the bill (Cesarani 1994, 98). The anti-restrictionist forces won when Nathan Laski, president of the Manchester Old Hebrew Congregation, got Winston Churchill to oppose the bill. “Later Churchill freely admitted that, in the Grand Committee of the House of Commons, he had ‘wrecked the Bill.’ Led by Churchill, the Liberals, Evans-Gordon [a restrictionist Conservative MP] asserted, ‘choked it [the Bill] with words until the time-limit was reached.’… A jubilant Laski wrote to Churchill: ‘I have had over 20 years experience in elections in Manchester—& without flattery I tell you candidly—there has not been a single man able to arouse the interest that you have already done—thus I am sure of your future success’” (Alderman 1983, 71). In the following month Churchill won election from West Manchester, a district with a large Jewish electorate.

Alderman (p. 72) shows that restrictionist legislation was popular except among the recent immigrants who had quickly become a numerical majority of the Jewish community, and, as indicated above, were already able to have a decisive influence on immigration legislation. However, a more moderate bill passed in 1905 despite Jewish opposition. In this case Jewish pressure succeeded in securing exemptions for victims of “prosecution” on religious or political grounds, but not “persecution” (p. 74). Again the Board of Deputies failed to make a major effort in opposition to the legislation, and Jewish Ministers of Parliament did not rise in opposition. However, for the recent immigrants, many of whom were on the electoral registers illegally, this was a major issue, and “at the general election of January 1906 these electorates wreaked a terrible vengeance upon those politicians who had supported the passage of the Aliens’ Immigration Act” (p. 74). Jews overwhelmingly supported candidates who opposed the legislation, and in at least two districts their votes were decisive, including the West Manchester district that returned Winston Churchill. The new Liberal government did not repeal the legislation, but enforced it more leniently. Since the law was directed against “undesirables,” there is considerable doubt that it prevented any significant number of Jews from entering, although it probably did encourage many Jews to go to the United States rather than England. It is noteworthy that in 1908 Churchill lost an election in his Manchester district when there were defections among his Jewish supporters displeased about his opposition to repealing the law as a prospective member of the cabinet and attracted to the Conservative position on support for religious schools. Churchill nonetheless remained a staunch supporter of Jewish interests until “in July 1910 Churchill, no longer dependent on Jewish votes, spoke in glowing terms of the 1905 legislation.”

As in the case of America, there are also indications that Jewish support for immigration extended beyond advocating Jewish immigration into England. The Jewish Chronicle, the principle Jewish newspaper in England, opposed restriction on Commonwealth immigration in an editorial in the October 20, 1961 edition (p. 20). The editorial noted that Jews perceived the 1905 legislation as directed against them and stated, “all restrictions on immigration are in principle retrogressive steps, particularly for this country, and a disappointment to those throughout the world who would like to see the limitations on the freedom of movement reduced rather than increased. The issue is one of moral principle.”

During the 1970s the Conservative Party opposed immigration into Britain because, in the words of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Britain was in danger of being “swamped” by peoples who lacked “fundamental British characteristics” (Alderman 1983, 148). Conservative politicians attempted to obtain Jewish support on this issue, but the anti-immigration policy was condemned by official Jewish organizations, including the Board of Deputies, on the basis that “Since all British Jews are, or are descended from, immigrants, it was unethical—even immoral, for a Jew to support immigration control, or at least tighter immigration control” (Alderman 1983, 148-149). (In its editorial of February 24, 1978 [p. 22] the Jewish Chronicle supported a non-restrictionist immigration policy, but was careful to avoid framing the issue as a Jewish issue, presumably because a Conservative Jewish Minister of Parliament, Keith Joseph, had appealed to Jews as Jews to support restriction. The Chronicle was most concerned to deny the existence of a Jewish vote.) Jews who did support the government policy did so out of fear that increased immigration would lead to a fascist backlash and therefore increased anti-Semitism.

In the case of Canada, Abella (1990, 234-235) notes the important contribution of Jews in bringing about a multicultural Canada and, in particular, in lobbying for more liberal immigration policies. Reflecting this attitude, Arthur Roebuck, attorney general of Ontario, was greeted “with thunderous applause” at a 1935 convention for the Zionist Organization of Canada when he stated that he looked “forward to the time when our economic conditions will be less severe than they are today and when we may open wide the gates, throw down the restrictions and make of Canada a Mecca for all the oppressed peoples of the world” (in M. Brown 1987, 256). Earlier in the century, there were conflicts between Jews and gentiles over immigration that were entirely analogous to the situation in England and the United States, including the anti-Semitic motivation of many attempting to restrict immigration (Abella & Troper 1981, 52-55; M. Brown 1987, 239). As in the United States, Jews have strongly opposed majoritarian ethnocentric and nationalist movements, such as the Parti Québécois, while remaining strong supporters of Zionism (M. Brown 1987, 260ff). Indeed, in the very close 1995 vote on Quebec separatism, the overwhelming support of Jews and other minorities for preserving links with Canada was blamed by separatist leader Jaques Parizeau for their defeat.

It is remarkable that the sea change in immigration policy in the Western world occurred at approximately the same time (1962-1973), and in all countries the changes reflected the attitudes of elites rather than the great mass of citizens. In the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia public opinion polls of European-derived peoples have consistently shown overwhelming rejection of immigration by non-European-derived peoples (Betts 1988; Brimelow 1995; Hawkins 1989; Layton-Henry 1992). A consistent theme has been that immigration policy has been formulated by elites with control of the media and that efforts have been made by political leaders of all major parties to keep fear of immigration off the political agenda (e.g., Betts 1988; Layton-Henry 1992, 82).

In Canada the decision to abandon a “White Canada” policy came from government officials, not from elected politicians. The White Canada policy was effectively killed by regulations announced in 1962, and Hawkins (1989, 39) comments, “This important policy change was made not as a result of parliamentary or popular demand, but because some senior officials in Canada, including Dr. [George] Davidson [Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and later a senior administrator at the United Nations] rightly saw that Canada could not operate effectively within the United Nations, or in the multiracial Commonwealth, with the millstone of a racially discriminatory immigration policy round her neck.” In neither Australia nor Canada was there ever any popular sentiment to end the older European bias of immigration policy.

The primary and identical motivation of Canadian and Australian politicians in trying to exclude first the Chinese, then other Asian migrants and finally all potential non-white immigrants, was the desire to build and preserve societies and political systems in their hard-won, distant lands very like those of the United Kingdom. They also wished to establish without challenge the primary role there of her founding peoples of European origin… Undisputed ownership of these territories of continental size was felt to be confirmed forever, not only by the fact of possession, but by the hardships and dangers endured by the early explorers and settlers; the years of back-breaking work to build the foundations of urban and rural life… The idea that other peoples, who had taken no part in these pioneering efforts, might simply arrive in large numbers to exploit important local resources, or to take advantage of these earlier settlement efforts, was anathema. (Hawkins 1989, 23)

Given the elite origins of the non-European immigration policies that emerged throughout the West during this period despite popular opposition, it is of considerable interest that very little publicity was given to certain critical events. In Canada, the Report of the Special Joint Committee of 1975 was a critical event in shaping non-European immigration policy of the 1978 immigration law, but “sad to say, since the press failed to comment on the report and the electronic media had remained uninvolved, the Canadian public heard little of it” (Hawkins 1989, 59-60).

Looking back on this national debate on immigration and population which lasted for six months at most, it can be said now that it was a very effective one-time consultation with the immigration world, and with those Canadian institutions and organizations to whom immigration is an important matter. It did not reach “the average Canadian” for one simple reason: The Minister and Cabinet did not trust the average Canadian to respond in a positive way on this issue, and thought this would create more trouble than it was worth. As a result of this view, they did not want to commit the funds to organize extensive public participation, and made only a minimal effort to mobilize the media on behalf of a truly national debate. The principle benefit of this approach was that the badly needed new Immigration Act was on the statute book only a little later than Mr. [Robert] Andras [Minister of Manpower and Immigration] and his colleagues [Hawkins emphasizes Andras’ Deputy Minister Alan Gotlieb as the second prime mover of this legislation] originally envisaged. The principle loss was what some would regard as a golden opportunity to bring a great many individual Canadians together, to discuss the future of their vast under-populated land. (Hawkins 1989, 63)

Only after the 1978 law was in effect did the government embark on a public information campaign to inform Canadians of their new immigration policy (Hawkins 1989, 79). Hawkins (1989) and Betts (1988) make similar points about the changes in Australian immigration policy. In Australia the impetus for change in immigration policy came from small groups of reformers that began appearing in some Australian universities in the 1960s (Hawkins 1989, 22). Betts (1988, 99ff) in particular emphasizes the idea that the intellectual, academic, and media elite “trained in the humanities and social sciences” (p. 100) developed a sense of being a member of a morally and intellectually superior ingroup battling against Australian parochial nonintellectuals as an outgroup. As in the United States, there is a perception among Jews that a multicultural society will be a bulwark against anti-Semitism: Miriam Faine, an editorial committee member of the Australian Jewish Democrat stated, “The strengthening of multicultural or diverse Australia is also our most effective insurance policy against antisemitism. The day Australia has a Chinese Australian Governor General I would feel more confident of my freedom to live as a Jewish Australian” (in McCormack 1994, 11).

As in the United States, family unification became a centerpiece of immigration policy in Canada and Australia and led to the “chaining” phenomenon mentioned above. Hawkins shows that in Canada, family reunion was the policy of liberal Ministers of Parliament desiring higher levels of Third World immigration (p. 87). In Australia, family reunion became increasingly important during the 1980s, which also saw a declining importance of Australian development as a criterion for immigration policy (p. 150). Reflecting these trends, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry passed a resolution at its December 1, 1996, meeting to express “its support for the proposition that Australia’s long term interests are best served by a non-discriminatory immigration policy which adopts a benevolent attitude to refugees and family reunion and gives priority to humanitarian considerations.” The main Jewish publication, the Australia/Israel Review, has consistently editorialized in favor of high levels of immigration of all racial and ethnic groups. It has published unflattering portraits of anti-restrictionists (e.g., Kapel 1997) and, in an effort at punishment and intimidation, published a list of 2000 people associated with Pauline Hanson’s anti-immigration One Nation party (“Gotcha! One Nation’s Secret Membership List”; July 8, 1998).

It seems fair to conclude that Jewish organizations have uniformly advocated high levels of immigration of all racial and ethnic groups into Western societies and have also advocated a multicultural model for these societies.

8

Conclusion: Whither Judaism and the West?

One conclusion of this volume is that Jews have played a decisive role in developing highly influential intellectual and political movements that serve their interests in contemporary Western societies. These movements are only part of the story however. There has been an enormous growth in Jewish power and influence in Western societies generally, particularly the United States. Ginsberg (1993) notes that Jewish economic status and cultural influence have increased dramatically in the United States since 1960. Shapiro (1992, 116) shows that Jews are overrepresented by at least a factor of nine on indexes of wealth, but that this is a conservative estimate, because much Jewish wealth is in real estate, which is difficult to determine and easy to hide. While constituting approximately 2.4 percent of the population of the United States, Jews represented half of the top one hundred Wall Street executives and about 40 percent of admissions to Ivy League colleges. Lipset and Raab (1995) note that Jews contribute between one-quarter and one-third of all political contributions in the United States, including one-half of Democratic Party contributions and one-fourth of Republican contributions.

The general message of Goldberg’s (1996) book Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, is that American Judaism is well organized and lavishly funded. It has achieved a great deal of power, and it has been successful in achieving its interests. There is a great deal of consensus on broad Jewish issues, particularly in the areas of Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties (p. 5). Indeed, the consensus on these issues among Jewish activist organizations and the Jewish intellectual movements reviewed here despite a great deal of disagreement on other issues is striking. Massive changes in public policy on these issues beginning with the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s coincide with the period of increasing Jewish power and influence in the United States.

Since the 1950s empirical studies of ethnic hierarchy in the United States have tracked changes in ethnic group resources, including elite representation (e.g., Alba & Moore 1982; Lerner, Nagai & Rothman 1996). These studies have often emphasized the overrepresentation of Protestant whites in corporate hierarchies and the military, but have failed to take into consideration group differences in commitment and organization. Salter (1998b) provides a theoretically based assessment of Jewish influence relative to African Americans and gentile European Americans based on Blalock’s (1967, 1989) model of group power as a function of resources multiplied by mobilization. Jews are far more mobilized than these other ethnic populations (one hesitates calling gentile European Americans a “group”). For example, while specifically ethnic organizations devoted to the ethnic interests of gentile European Americans are essentially political fringe groups with meager funding and little influence on the mainstream political process, Salter notes that the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee ranked second out the 120 most powerful lobbies as rated by members of Congress and professional lobbyists, with no other ethnic organization rated in the top 25. Furthermore, AIPAC is one of the few lobbies that relies heavily on campaign contributions to win allies. As indicated above, Jews contribute between one-third and one-half of all campaign money in federal elections, the donations motivated by “Israel and the broader Jewish agenda” (Goldberg 1996, 275). Jews are thus overrepresented in campaign contributions by a factor of at least 13 based on their percentage of the population and are overrepresented by a factor of approximately 6.5 if adjustment is made for their higher average income. In overseas donations, the Jewish lead is even greater. For example, in the 1920s, before the post-World War II explosion of Jewish giving to Israel, Jewish Americans may have given as much as 24 times more per capita to assist overseas Jews than did Irish Americans to assist Ireland in its struggle for independence from Great Britain. Yet this was the period of peak Irish ethnic philanthropy (Carroll 1978). The disparity has become much greater since World War II. Salter has adopted a preliminary conservative estimate of Jewish ethnic mobilization as four times that of white gentiles, based on comparison of per capita donations to non-religious ethnic causes.

In the Blalock equation influence is affected not only by mobilization but also by the resources held by the group. Salter estimates that Jews control approximately 26 percent of the “cybernetic resources” of the United States (i.e., resources as measured by representation in key areas such as government, media, finance, academia, corporations, and entertainment). This average level of resource control reflects both areas of high (> 40 percent) Jewish representation (e.g., mass media, high finance, the legal profession, the intellectual elite, entertainment) and low (≤ 10 percent) Jewish representation (e.g., corporate elite, military leaders, religious leaders, legislators). The overall estimate is comparable to that made by Lerner et al. (1996, 20) based on data gathered in the 1970s and 1980s. Lerner et al. arrive at a 23 percent overall Jewish representation in American elites. The results also parallel levels of Jewish overrepresentation in other societies, as in early twentieth-century Germany where Jews constituting approximately one percent of the population controlled approximately 20 percent of the economy (Mosse 1987, 1989) and also had a dominating influence on the media and the production of culture (Deak 1968, 28; Laqueur 1974, 73).

Substitution of these resource and mobilization values into the Blalock equation yields an estimate that Jewish influence on ethnic policy (immigration, race policy, foreign policy) is approximately three times the influence of gentile European Americans. The results are highly robust for different weightings of resources. Only an “extreme neo-Marxist” weighting of resources (i.e., one that weights only the corporate elite, the legislative branch of government, the military elite, foundations, and total group income) brings Jewish influence down to approximate parity of influence with gentile European Americans.

As indicated above, there is a broad Jewish consensus on such issues as Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties. This implies that Jewish influence and Jewish interests dominate these issues—a result that is highly compatible with the discussion of Jewish influence on immigration policy discussed Chapter 7 as well as the fact that all of these areas have seen enormous swings in public policy in accordance with Jewish interests that coincide with the rise of Jewish influence in the United States. Salter’s estimate that Jewish mobilization may be conceptualized as several times greater than that of gentile European Americans is well illustrated by the history of Jewish involvement in immigration policy: All of the major Jewish organizations were intensively involved in the battle over restrictive immigration for a period lasting an entire century despite what must have seemed devastating setbacks. This effort continues into the contemporary era. As discussed in Chapter 7, opposition to large-scale immigration of all racial and ethnic groups by large majorities of the European-derived population as well as the relative apathy of other groups—even groups such as Italian Americans and Polish Americans that might be expected to support the immigration of their own peoples—were prominent features of the history of immigration policy.

This “rise of the Jews”—to use Albert Lindemann’s (1997) phrase—has undoubtedly had important effects on contemporary Western societies. A major theme of the previous chapter is that high levels of immigration into Western societies conforms to a perceived Jewish interest in developing nonhomogeneous, culturally and ethnically pluralistic societies. It is of interest to consider the possible consequences of such a policy in the long term.

In recent years there has been an increasing rejection among intellectuals and minority ethnic activists of the idea of creating a melting pot society based on assimilation among ethnic groups (see, e.g., Schlesinger 1992). Cultural and ethnic differences are emphasized in these writings, and ethnic assimilation and homogenization are viewed in negative terms. The tone of these writings is reminiscent of the views of many late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals who rejected the assimilationist effects of Reform Judaism in favor of Zionism or a return to a more extreme form of cultural separatism such as Conservative or Orthodox Judaism.

The movement toward ethnic separatism is of considerable interest from an evolutionary point of view. Between-group competition and monitoring of outgroups have been a characteristic of Jewish-gentile interactions not only in the West but also in Muslim societies, and there are examples of between-group competition and conflict too numerous to mention in other parts of the world. Historically, ethnic separatism, as seen in the history of Judaism, has been a divisive force within societies. It has on several occasions unleashed enormous intra-societal hatred and distrust, ethnically based warfare, expulsions, pogroms, and attempts at genocide. Moreover, there is little reason to suppose that the future will be much different. At the present time there are ethnically based conflicts on every continent, and clearly the establishment of Israel has not ended ethnically based conflict for Jews returning from the diaspora.

Indeed, my review of the research on contact between more or less impermeable groups in historical societies strongly suggests a general rule that between-group competition and monitoring of ingroup and outgroup success are the norm. These results are highly consistent with psychological research on social identity processes reviewed in SAID (Ch. 1). From an evolutionary perspective, these results confirm the expectation that ethnic self-interest is indeed important in human affairs, and obviously ethnicity remains a common source of group identity in the contemporary world. People appear to be aware of group membership and have a general tendency to devalue and compete with outgroups. Individuals are also keenly aware of the relative standing of their own group in terms of resource control and relative reproductive success. They are also willing to take extraordinary steps to achieve and retain economic and political power in defense of these group imperatives.

Given the assumption of ethnic separatism, it is instructive to think of the circumstances that would, from an evolutionary perspective, minimize group conflict. Theorists of cultural pluralism such as Horace Kallen (1924) envision a scenario in which different ethnic groups retain their distinctive identity in the context of complete political equality and economic opportunity. The difficulty with this scenario from an evolutionary perspective (or even a common sense perspective) is that no provision is made for the results of competition for resources and reproductive success within the society. Indeed, the results of ethnic strife were apparent in Kallen’s day, but “Kallen lifted his eyes above the strife that swirled around him to an ideal realm where diversity and harmony coexist” (Higham 1984, 209).

In the best of circumstances one might suppose that separated ethnic groups would engage in absolute reciprocity with each other, so that there would be no differences in terms of economic exploitation of one ethnic group by the other. Moreover, there would be no differences on any measure of success in society, including social class membership, economic role (e.g., producer versus consumer; creditor versus debtor; manager versus worker), or fertility between the separated ethnic groups. All groups would have approximately equal numbers and equal political power; or if there were different numbers, provisions would exist to ensure that minorities would retain equitable representation in terms of the markers of social and reproductive success. Such conditions would minimize hostility between the groups because attributing one’s status to the actions of the other groups would be difficult.

Given the existence of ethnic separatism, however, it would still be in the interests of each group to advance its own interests at the expense of the other groups. All things being equal, a given ethnic group would be better off if it ensured that the other groups had fewer resources, lower social status, lower fertility, and proportionately less political power than itself. The hypothesized steady state of equality therefore implies a set of balance-of-power relationships—each side constantly checking to make sure that the other is not cheating; each side constantly looking for ways to dominate and exploit by any means possible; each side willing to compromise only because of the other sides’s threat of retaliation; each side willing to cooperate at cost only if forced to do so by, for example, the presence of external threat. Clearly, any type of cooperation that involves true altruism toward the other group could not be expected.

Thus the ideal situation of absolute equality in resource control and reproductive success would certainly require a great deal of monitoring and undoubtedly be characterized by a great deal of mutual suspicion. In the real world, however, even this rather grim ideal is highly unlikely. In the real world, ethnic groups differ in their talents and abilities; they differ in their numbers, fertility, and the extent to which they encourage parenting practices conducive to resource acquisition; they also differ in the resources held at any point in time and in their political power. Equality or proportionate equity would be extremely difficult to attain or to maintain after it has been achieved without extraordinary levels of monitoring and without extremely intense social controls to enforce ethnic quotas on the accumulation of wealth, admission to universities, access to high status jobs, and so on.

Because ethnic groups have differing talents and abilities and differing parenting styles, variable criteria for qualifying and retaining jobs would be required depending on ethnic group membership. Moreover, achieving parity between Jews and other ethnic groups would entail a high level of discrimination against individual Jews for admission to universities or access to employment opportunities and even entail a large taxation on Jews to counter the Jewish advantage in the possession of wealth, since at present Jews are vastly overrepresented among the wealthy and the successful in the United States. This would especially be the case if Jews were distinguished as a separate ethnic group from gentile European Americans. Indeed, the final evolution of many of the New York Intellectuals from Stalinism was to become neoconservatives who have been eloquent opponents of affirmative action and quota mechanisms for distributing resources. (Sachar [1992, 818ff] mentions Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Charles Krauthammer, Norman Podhoretz, and Earl Raab as opposed to affirmative action.) Jewish organizations (including the ADL, the AJCommittee, and the AJCongress) have taken similar positions Sachar (1992, 818ff).

In the real world, therefore, extraordinary efforts would have to be made to attain this steady state of ethnic balance of power and resources. Interestingly, the ideology of Jewish-gentile coexistence has sometimes included the idea that the different ethnic groups develop a similar occupational profile and implicitly control resources in proportion to their numbers. In medieval France, for example, Louis IX’s ordinance of 1254 prohibited Jews from engaging in moneylending at interest and encouraged them to live by manual labor or trade (see Richard 1992, 162). The dream of German assimilationists during the nineteenth century was that the occupational profile of Jews after emancipation would mirror that of the gentiles—a “utopian expectation… shared by many, Jews and non-Jews alike” (Katz 1986, 67). Efforts were made to decrease the percentage of Jews involved in trade and increase the percentages involved in agriculture and artisanry. In the event, however, the result of emancipation was that Jews were vastly overrepresented among the economic and cultural elite, and this overrepresentation was a critical feature of German anti-Semitism from 1870 to 1933 (see SAID, Ch. 5).

Similarly, during the 1920s when the United States was attempting to come to grips with Jewish competition at prestigious private universities, plans were proposed in which each ethnic group received a percentage of placements at Harvard reflecting the percentage of racial and national groups in the United States (Sachar 1992, 329). Similar policies—uniformly denounced by Jewish organizations—developed during the same period throughout Central Europe (Hagen 1996). Such policies certainly reflect the importance of ethnicity in human affairs, but levels of social tension are bound to be chronically high. Moreover, there is a considerable chance of ethnic warfare even were precise parity achieved through intensive social controls: As indicated above, it is always in the interests of any ethnic group to obtain hegemony over the others.

If one adopts a cultural pluralism model involving free competition for resources and reproductive success, differences between ethnic groups are inevitable; from an evolutionary perspective, there is the very strong prediction that such differences will result in animosity from the losing groups. After emancipation there was a powerful tendency for upward mobility among Jews in Western societies, including a large overrepresentation in the professions as well as in business, politics, and the production of culture. Concomitantly there were outbreaks of anti-Semitism originating often among groups that felt left behind in this resource competition or who felt that the culture being created did not meet their interests. If the history of Judaism tells us anything, it is that self-imposed ethnic separatism tends to lead to resource competition based on group membership, and consequent hatred, expulsions, and persecutions. Assuming that ethnic differences in talents and abilities exist, the supposition that ethnic separatism could be a stable situation without ethnic animosity requires either a balance of power situation maintained with intense social controls, as described above, or it requires that at least some ethnic groups be unconcerned that they are losing in the competition.

I regard this last possibility as unlikely in the long run. That an ethnic group would be unconcerned with its own eclipse and domination is certainly not expected by an evolutionist or, indeed, by advocates of social justice whatever their ideology. Nevertheless, this is in fact the implicit morality of the criticism by several historians of the behavior of the Spanish toward the Jews and Marranos during the Inquisition and the Expulsion, as, for example, in the writings of Benzion Netanyahu (1995), who at times seems openly contemptuous of the inability of the Spaniards to compete with the New Christians without resorting to the violence of the Inquisition. From this perspective, the Spaniards should have realized their inferiority and acquiesced in being economically, socially, and politically dominated by another ethnic group. Such a “morality” is unlikely to appeal to the group losing the competition, and from an evolutionary perspective, this is not in the least surprising. Goldwin Smith (1894/1972, 261) made a similar point a century ago:

A community has a right to defend its territory and its national integrity against an invader whether his weapon be the sword or foreclosure. In the territories of the Italian Republics the Jews might so far as we see, have bought land and taken to farming had they pleased. But before this they had thoroughly taken to trade. Under the falling Empire they were the great slave-traders, buying captives from barbarian invaders and probably acting as general brokers of spoils at the same time. They entered England in the train of the Norman conqueror. There was, no doubt, a perpetual struggle between their craft and the brute force of the feudal populations. But what moral prerogative has craft over force? Mr. Arnold White tells the Russians that, if they would let Jewish intelligence have free course, Jews would soon fill all high employments and places of power to the exclusion of the natives, who now hold them. Russians are bidden to acquiesce and rather to rejoice in this by philosophers, who would perhaps not relish the cup if it were commended to their own lips. The law of evolution, it is said, prescribes the survival of the fittest. To which the Russian boor may reply, that if his force beats the fine intelligence of the Jew the fittest will survive and the law of evolution will be fulfilled. It was force rather than fine intelligence which decided on the field of Zama that the Latin, not the Semite, should rule the ancient and mould the modern world.

Ironically, many intellectuals who absolutely reject evolutionary thinking and any imputation that genetic self-interest might be important in human affairs also favor policies that are rather obviously self-interestedly ethnocentric, and they often condemn the self-interested ethnocentric behavior of other groups, particularly any indication that the European-derived majority in the United States is developing a cohesive group strategy and high levels of ethnocentrism in reaction to the group strategies of others. The ideology of minority group ethnic separatism and the implicit legitimization of group competition for resources, as well as the more modern idea that ethnic group membership should be a criterion for resource acquisition, must be seen for what they are: blueprints for group evolutionary strategies. The history of the Jews must be seen as a rather tragic commentary on the results of such group strategies.

The importance of group-based competition cannot be overstated. I believe it is highly unlikely that Western societies based on individualism and democracy can long survive the legitimization of competition between impermeable groups in which group membership is determined by ethnicity. The discussion in SAID (Chs. 3-5) strongly suggests that ultimately group strategies are met by group strategies, and that societies become organized around cohesive, mutually exclusionary groups. Indeed, the recent multicultural movement may be viewed as tending toward a profoundly non-Western form of social organization that has historically been much more typical of Middle Eastern segmentary societies centered around discrete homogeneous groups. However, unlike in the multicultural ideal, in these societies there are pronounced relations of dominance and subordination. Whereas democracy appears to be quite foreign to such segmentary societies, Western societies, uniquely among the stratified societies of the world, have developed individualistic democratic and republican political institutions. Moreover, major examples of Western collectivism, including German National Socialism and Iberian Catholicism during the period of the Inquisition, have been characterized by intense anti-Semitism.

There is thus a significant possibility that individualistic societies are unlikely to survive the intra-societal group-based competition that has become increasingly common and intellectually respectable in the United States. I believe that in the United States we are presently heading down a volatile path—a path that leads to ethnic warfare and to the development of collectivist, authoritarian, and racialist enclaves. Although ethnocentric beliefs and behavior are viewed as morally and intellectually legitimate only among ethnic minorities in the United States, the theory and the data presented in SAID indicate that the development of greater ethnocentrism among European-derived peoples is a likely result of present trends.

One way of analyzing the Frankfurt School and psychoanalysis is that they have attempted with some success to erect, in the terminology of Paul Gottfried (1998) and Christopher Lasch (1991), a “therepeutic state” that pathologizes the ethnocentrism of European-derived peoples as well as their attempts to retain cultural and demographic dominance. However, ethnocentrism on the part of the European-derived majority in the United States is a likely outcome of the increasingly group-structured contemporary social and political landscape—likely because evolved psychological mechanisms in humans appear to function by making ingroup and outgroup membership more salient in situations of group-based resource competition (see SAID, Ch. 1). The effort to overcome these inclinations thus necessitates applying to Western societies a massive “therapeutic” intervention in which manifestations of majoritarian ethnocentrism are combated at several levels, but first and foremost by promoting the ideology that such manifestations are an indication of psychopathology and a cause for ostracism, shame, psychiatric intervention, and counseling. One may expect that as ethnic conflict continues to escalate in the United States, increasingly desperate attempts will be made to prop up the ideology of multiculturalism with sophisticated theories of the psychopathology of majority group ethnocentrism, as well as with the erection of police state controls on nonconforming thought and behavior.

I suppose that a major reason some non-Jewish racial and ethnic groups adopt multiculturalism is that they are not able to compete successfully in an individualistic economic and cultural arena. As a result, multiculturalism has quickly become identified with the idea that each group ought to receive a proportional measure of economic and cultural success. As indicated above, the resulting situation may oppose Jewish interests. Because of their high intelligence and resource-acquisition ability, Jews do not benefit from affirmative action policies and other group-based entitlements commonly advocated by minority groups with low social status. Jews thus come into conflict with other ethnically identified minority groups who use multiculturalism for their own purposes. (Nevertheless, because of their competitive advantage within the white, European-derived group with which they are currently classified, Jews may perceive themselves as benefiting from policies designed to dilute the power of the European-derived group as a whole on the assumption that they would not suffer any appreciable effect. Indeed, despite the official opposition to group-based preferences among Jewish organizations, Jews voted for an anti-affirmative action ballot measure in California in markedly lower percentages than did other European-derived groups.)

Although multiculturalist ideology was invented by Jewish intellectuals to rationalize the continuation of separatism and minority-group ethnocentrism in a modern Western state, several of the recent instantiations of multiculturalism may eventually produce a monster with negative consequences for Judaism. Irving Louis Horowitz (1993, 89) notes the emergence of anti-Semitism in academic sociology as these departments are increasingly staffed by individuals who are committed to ethnic political agendas and who view Jewish domination of sociology in negative terms. There is a strong strain of anti-Semitism emanating from some multiculturalist ideologues, especially from Afrocentric ideologues (Alexander 1992), and Cohen (1998, 45) finds that “multiculturalism is often identified nowadays with a segment of the left that has, to put it bluntly, a Jewish problem.” Recently the Nation of Islam, led by Louis Farrakhan, has adopted an overt anti-Semitic rhetoric. Afrocentrism is often associated with racialist ideologies, such as those of Molefi Asante (1987), in which ethnicity is viewed as the morally proper basis of self-identity and self-esteem and in which a close connection exists between ethnicity and culture. Western ideals of objectivity, universalism, individualism, rationality, and the scientific method are rejected because of their ethnic origins. Asante accepts a naive racialist theory in which Africans (the “sun people”) are viewed as superior to Europeans (the “ice people”).

Such movements mirror similar Jewish ideologies that rationalize a powerful concern with Jewish ethnicity and attempt to produce feelings of ethnic superiority within the group. These ideologies have been common throughout Jewish intellectual history, the most enduring embodied in the idea of chosenness and the “light of the nations” concept. SAID (Ch. 7) reviewed evidence indicating that Jewish historians and intellectuals, beginning in the ancient world, have often attempted to show that gentile cultural influences have had specifically Jewish precedents or even that various gentile philosophers and artists were actually Jews. This tradition has been carried on recently by two Sephardic Jews, Martin Bernal (1987) in his Black Athena and José Faur (1992) in his In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity.

Indeed, there may well be a general trend since the Enlightenment in which Jewish intellectuals have been at the vanguard of secular political movements, such as the movement for cultural pluralism, intended to serve Jewish interests as well as appeal to segments of the gentile population. Also apparent is a trend such that eventually these movements fractionate, the result of anti-Semitism within the very segment of the gentile population to which the ideology attempts to appeal, and Jews abandon these movements and seek to pursue their interests by other means.

Thus it has been noted here that Jews have played a prominent role in the political left in this century. We have also seen that as a result of anti-Semitism among gentiles on the left and on the part of Communist governments, eventually Jews either abandoned the left or they developed their own brand of leftism in which leftist universalism was compatible with the primacy of Jewish identity and interests.¹⁷⁴ Gore Vidal (1986) is a prominent example of a gentile leftist intellectual who has been highly critical of the role of neoconservative Jews in facilitating the U.S. military buildup of the 1980s and allying themselves with conservative political forces to aid Israel—charges interpreted as implying antiSemitism because of the implication that American Jews place the interests of Israel above American interests (Podhoretz 1986). Vidal also suggests that neoconservatism is motivated by the desire of Jews to make an alliance with gentile elites as a defense against possible anti-Semitic movements emerging during times of economic crisis.

Indeed, fear of anti-Semitism on the left has been the major impetus for founding the neoconservative movement (see Gottfried 1993, 80)—the final resting point of many of the New York Intellectuals whose intellectual and political evolution was discussed in Chapter 6. As Gottfried points out, the cumulative effect of neoconservatism and its current hegemony over the conservative political movement in the United States (achieved partly by its large influence on the media and among foundations) has been to shift the conservative movement toward the center and, in effect, to define the limits of conservative legitimacy. Clearly, these limits of conservative legitimacy are defined by whether they conflict with specifically Jewish group interests in a minimally restrictive immigration policy, support for Israel, global democracy, opposition to quotas and affirmative action, and so on.

As indicated in William F. Buckley’s (1992) In Search of Anti-Semitism, however, the alliance between gentile paleoconservatives and Jewish neoconservatives in the United States is fragile, with several accusations of antiSemitism among the paleoconservatives. Much of the difficulty derives from the tension between the nationalist tendencies of an important segment of U.S. conservatism and the perceptions of at least some gentile conservatives that Jewish neoconservatism is essentially a device for pursuing narrow Jewish sectarian interests, particularly with regard to Israel, church-state separation, and affirmative action.¹⁷⁵ Moreover, the neoconservative commitment to many aspects of the conservative social agenda is half-hearted at best (Gottfried 1993). Most importantly, neoconservatives pursue what is essentially an ethnic agenda regarding immigration while opposing the ethnocentric interests of the paleoconservatives in retaining their ethnic hegemony. The ethnic agenda of neoconservatism can also be seen in their promotion of the idea that the United States should pursue a highly interventionist foreign policy aimed at global democracy and the interests of Israel rather than aimed at the specific national interests of the United States (Gottfried 1993). Neoconservatism has also provided a Jewish influence on the American conservative movement to counterbalance the strong tendency for Jews to support liberal and leftist political candidates. Jewish ethnic interests are best served by influencing both major parties toward a consensus on Jewish issues, and, as indicated above, neoconservatism has served to define the limits of conservative legitimacy in a manner that conforms to Jewish interests.

As anti-Semitism develops, Jews begin to abandon the very movements for which they originally provided the intellectual impetus. This phenomenon may also occur in the case of multiculturalism. Indeed, many of the most prominent opponents of multiculturalism are Jewish neoconservatives, as well as organizations such as the National Association of Scholars (NAS), which have a large Jewish membership. (The NAS is an organization of academics opposed to some of the more egregious excesses of feminism and multiculturalism in the university.) It may well be the case, therefore, that the Jewish attempt to link up with secular political ideologies that appeal to gentiles is doomed in the long run. Ginsberg (1993, 224ff) essentially makes this point when he notes that there is increasing evidence for anti-Semitism among American liberals, conservatives, and populist radicals.

The case of multiculturalism is particularly problematic as a Jewish strategy. In this case one might say that Jews want to have their cake and eat it too. “Jews are often caught between fervent affirmation of the Enlightenment and criticism of it. Many Jews believe that the replacement of the Enlightenment ideal of universalism with a politics of difference and a fragmented ‘multiculture’ would constitute a threat to Jewish achievement. At the same time, they recognize the dangers of a homogeneous ‘monoculture’ for Jewish particularity… [Jews] seek to rescue the virtues of the Enlightenment from the shards of its failures and salvage an inclusive vision from multiculturalism, where fragmentation and divisiveness now reign” (Biale, Galchinsky, & Heschel 1998, 7). Multicultural societies with their consequent fragmentation and chronic ethnic tension are unlikely to meet Jewish needs in the long run even if they do ultimately subvert the demographic and cultural dominance of the peoples of European origin in lands where they have been dominant.

This in turn suggests a fundamental and irresolvable friction between Judaism and prototypical Western political and social structure. Certainly the very long history of anti-Semitism in Western societies and its recurrence time and again after periods of latency suggests such a view. The incompatibility of Judaism and Western culture can also be seen in the tendency for individualistic Western cultures to break down Jewish group cohesiveness. As Arthur Ruppin (1934, 339) noted earlier in the century, all modern manifestations of Judaism, from neo-Orthodoxy to Zionism, are responses to the Enlightenment’s corrosive effects on Judaism—a set of defensive structures erected against “the destructive influence of European civilization.” And at a theoretical level, there is a very clear rationale for supposing that Western individualism is incompatible with group-based resource conflict that has been the consistent consequence of the emergence of a powerful Judaism in Western societies (see SAID, Chs. 3-5).

One aspect of this friction is well articulated in Alan Ryan’s (1994, 11) discussion of the “latent contradiction” in the politics of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the authors of the highly controversial volume The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Ryan states, “Herrnstein essentially wants the world in which clever Jewish kids or their equivalent make their way out of their humble backgrounds and end up running Goldman Sachs or the Harvard physics department, while Murray wants the Midwest in which he grew up—a world in which the local mechanic didn’t care two cents whether he was or wasn’t brighter than the local math teacher. The trouble is that the first world subverts the second, while the second feels claustrophobic to the beneficiaries of the first.”¹⁷⁶

The social structure whose acceptance is here attributed to Murray envisions a moderately individualistic society, a society that is meritocratic and hierarchical but also cohesive and culturally and ethnically homogeneous. It is a society with harmony among the social classes and with social controls on extreme individualism among the elite.

There has been a powerful Western tendency to develop such societies, beginning at least in the Middle Ages, but also present, I believe, in the classical Roman civilization of the Republic. The ideal of hierarchic harmony is central to the social program of the Catholic Church beginning during the late Roman Empire and reaching its pinnacle during the High Middle Ages (MacDonald 1995c; SAID, Ch. 5). This ideal is apparent also in a powerful strand of German intellectual history beginning with Herder in the eighteenth century. A very central feature of this prototypical Western hierarchical harmony has been the social imposition of monogamy as a form of reproductive leveling that dampens the association between wealth and reproductive success. From an evolutionary perspective, Western societies achieve their cohesion because hierarchical social relationships are significantly divorced from reproductive consequences.

Such a world is threatened from above by the domination of an individualistic elite without commitment to responsible lower-status individuals who may have lesser intellectual ability, talent, or financial resources. It is threatened from within by the development of a society constituted by a set of ethnically divided, chronically competing, highly impermeable groups as represented historically by Judaism and currently envisioned as the model for society by the proponents of multiculturalism. And it is threatened from below by an increasing underclass of people with the attributes described by Herrnstein and Murray: intellectually incompetent and insufficiently conscientious to hold most kinds of job; irresponsible and incompetent as parents; prone to requiring public assistance; prone to criminal behavior, psychiatric disorders, and substance abuse; and prone to rapid demographic increase. Such people are incapable of contributing economically, socially, or culturally to a late-twentieth-century society or, indeed, to any human civilization characterized by a substantial degree of reciprocity, voluntarism and democracy.

Given that the continued existence of Judaism implies that the society will be composed of competing, more or less impermeable groups, the neoconservative condemnation of multiculturalism must be viewed as lacking in intellectual consistency. The neoconservative prescription for society embraces a particular brand of multiculturalism in which the society as a whole will be culturally fragmented and socially atomistic. These social attributes not only allow Jewish upward mobility, but also are incompatible with the development of highly cohesive, anti-Semitic groups of gentiles; they are also incompatible with group-based entitlements and affirmative action programs that would necessarily discriminate against Jews. As Horowitz (1993, 86) notes, “High levels of cultural fragmentation coupled with religious options are likely to find relatively benign forms of anti-Semitism coupled with a stable Jewish condition. Presumed Jewish cleverness or brilliance readily emerges under such pluralistic conditions, and such cleverness readily dissolves with equal suddenness under politically monistic or totalitarian conditions.”

Jewish neoconservatives readily accept a radically individualistic society in which Jews would be expected to become economically, politically, and culturally dominant while having minimal allegiance to the lower (disproportionately gentile) social classes. Such a society is likely to result in extreme social pressures as the responsible lower middle classes are placed in an increasingly precarious economic and political situation. As in the case of the intellectual activity of the Frankfurt School, the Jewish neoconservative prescription for the society as a whole is radically opposed to the strategy for the ingroup. Traditional Judaism, and to a considerable extent contemporary Judaism, obtained its strength not only from its intellectual and entrepreneurial elite but also from the unshakable allegiance of responsible, hard-working, lower-status Jews of lesser talent whom they patronized. And it must be stressed here that historically, the popular movements that have attempted to restore this prototypical Western state of hierarchic harmony, in opposition to the exploitation of individualistic elites and the divisiveness of intergroup conflict, have often had intensely anti-Semitic overtones.

Moreover, to a considerable extent the font et origo of the social policies and cultural shifts that have resulted in the dangerous situation now rapidly developing in the United States has been the Jewish-dominated intellectual and political movements described in this volume. I have attempted to document the role of those movements, particularly the 1960s leftist political and intellectual movement, in subjecting Western culture to radical criticism; it is the legacy of this cultural movement that has taken the lead in providing the intellectual basis of the multiculturalist movement and in rationalizing social policies that expand the underclass and expand the demographic and cultural presence of non-European peoples in Western societies.

From the standpoint of these leftist critics, the Western ideal of hierarchic harmony and assimilation is perceived as an irrational, romantic, and mystical ideal. Western civility is nothing more than a thin veneer masking a reality of exploitation and conflict—”a vast ecclesia super cloacum” (Cuddihy 1974, 142).¹⁷⁷ It is interesting in this regard that a basic strand of sociological theory beginning with Marx has been to emphasize conflict between social classes rather than social harmony. For example, Irving Louis Horowitz (1993, 75) notes that one result of the massive influence of Jewish intellectuals on American sociology beginning in the 1930s was that “the sense of America as a consensual experience gave way to a sense of America as a series of conflicting definitions,” including a heightened concern with ethnicity in general.

Historically, this conflict conception of social structure has typically been combined with the idea that the inevitable struggle between social classes can be remedied only by the complete leveling of economic and social outcomes. This latter ideal can then be attained only by adopting a radical environmentalist perspective on the origins of individual differences in economic success and other cultural attainments and by blaming any individual shortcomings on unequal environments. Because this radical environmentalism is scientifically unfounded, the social policies based on this ideology tend to result in high levels of social conflict as well as an increase in the prevalence of intellectual incompetence and social pathology.¹⁷⁸

From an evolutionary perspective, the prototypical Western social organization of hierarchic harmony and muted individualism is inherently unstable, a situation that undoubtedly contributes to the intensely dynamic nature of Western history. It has often been remarked that in the history of China nothing ever really changed. Dynasties characterized by intensive polygyny and moderate to extreme political despotism came and went, but there were no fundamental social changes over a very long period of historical time. The data reviewed by Betzig (1986) indicate that much the same can be said about the history of political organization in other stratified human societies.

In the West, however, the prototypical state of social harmony described above is chronically unstable. The unique initiating conditions involving a significant degree of reproductive leveling have resulted in a highly dynamic historical record (see MacDonald 1995c). The most common threat to hierarchic harmony has been the individualistic behavior of elites—a tendency that hardly surprises an evolutionist. Thus the early phases of industrialization were characterized by the unraveling of the social fabric and high levels of exploitation and conflict among the social classes. As another example, the slavery of Africans was a short-term benefit to an individualistic elite of southern aristocrats in the United States, but it also resulted in exploitation of the slaves and has been a long-term calamity for the society as a whole. We have also seen that Western elites in traditional societies have often actively encouraged Jewish economic interests to the detriment of other sectors of the native population, and in several historical eras Jews have been the instruments of individualistic behavior among gentile elites thus facilitating such individualistic behavior. Of considerable importance to the history of U.S. immigration policy has been the collaboration between Jewish activists and elite gentile industrialists interested in cheap labor, at least in the period prior to 1924. Recently, writers such as Peter Brimelow (1995, 229-232) and Paul Gottfried (1998) have called attention to an elite “New Class” of internationalists who are opposed to the nation-state based on ethnic ties and highly favorable to immigration that decreases the ethnic homogeneity of traditional societies. The self-interest of this group is to cooperate with similar individuals in other countries rather than to identify with the lower levels of their own society. Although this type of internationalism is highly congruent with a Jewish ethnic agenda—and Jews are undoubtedly disproportionately represented among this group, gentile members of the New Class must be seen as pursuing a narrowly individualistic agenda.

The individualism of elites has not been the only threat to Western hierarchic harmony, however. As recounted in SAID, this ideal has been shattered in critical historical eras by intense group conflict between Judaism and segments of gentile society. In the present age, perhaps for the first time in history, this hierarchic harmony is threatened by the development of an underclass whose membership consists disproportionately of racial and ethnic minority members and which has also resulted in intense group-based conflict. In particular, it is the large disproportion of African Americans in the American underclass that makes any political solution to this threat to hierarchic harmony problematic.¹⁷⁹

I have suggested that there is a fundamental and irresolvable friction between Judaism and prototypical Western political and social structure. The present political situation in the United States (and several other Western countries) is so dangerous because of the very real possibility that the Western European tendency toward hierarchic harmony has a biological basis. The greatest mistake of the Jewish-dominated intellectual movements described in this volume is that they have attempted to establish the moral superiority of societies that embody a preconceived moral ideal (compatible with the continuation of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy) rather than advocate social structures based on the ethical possibilities of naturally occurring types.¹⁸⁰ In the twentieth century many millions of people have been killed in the attempt to establish Marxist societies based on the ideal of complete economic and social leveling, and many more millions of people have been killed as a result of the failure of Jewish assimilation into European societies. Although many intellectuals continue to attempt to alter fundamental Western tendencies toward assimilation, muted individualism, and hierarchic harmony, there is a real possibility that these Western ideals are not only more achievable but also profoundly ethical. Uniquely among all stratified cultures of the world, prototypical Western societies have provided the combination of a genuine sense of belonging, a large measure of access to reproductive opportunities, and the political participation of all social classes combined with the possibilities of meritocratic upward social mobility.

As an evolutionist, one must ask what the likely genetic consequences of this sea change in American culture are likely to be. 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. The ideology of multiculturalism may be expected to increasingly compartmentalize groups in American society, with long-term beneficial consequences on continuation of the essential features of traditional Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. There is increasing consensus among Jewish activists that traditional forms of Judaism are far more effective in ensuring long-term group continuity than semi-assimilationist, semi-cryptic strategies such as Reform Judaism or secular Judaism. Reform Judaism is becoming steadily more conservative, and there is a major effort within all segments of the Jewish community to prevent intermarriage (e.g., Abrams 1997; Dershowitz 1997; see pp. 244-245). Moreover, as discussed in several parts of this book, Jews typically perceive themselves to benefit from a nonhomogeneous culture in which they appear as only one among many ethnic groups where there is no possibility of the development of a homogeneous national culture that might exclude Jews.

In addition, there may well be negative genetic consequences for the European-derived peoples of the United States and especially for the “common people of the South and West” (Higham 1984, 49)—that is, for lower-middle-class Caucasians derived from Northern and Western Europe—whose representatives desperately battled against the present immigration policy. Indeed, we have seen that a prominent theme of the New York Intellectuals as well as the Authoritarian Personality studies was the intellectual and moral inferiority of traditional American culture, particularly rural American culture. James Webb (1995) notes that it is the descendants of the WASPS who settled the West and South who “by and large did the most to lay out the infrastructure of this country, quite often suffering educational and professional regression as they tamed the wilderness, built the towns, roads and schools, and initiated a democratic way of life that later white cultures were able to take advantage of without paying the price of pioneering. Today they have the least, socioeconomically, to show for these contributions. And if one would care to check a map, they are from the areas now evincing the greatest resistance to government practices.” The war goes on, but it is easy to see who is losing.

The demographic rise of the underclass resulting from the triumph of the 1960s counter-cultural revolution implies that European-derived genes and gene frequencies will become less common compared to those derived from the African and the Latin American gene pools. On the other end of the IQ-reproductive strategy distribution, immigrants from East Asian countries are outcompeting whites in gaining admission to universities and in prestigious, high-income jobs. The long-term result will be that the entire white population (not including Jews) is likely to suffer a social status decline as these new immigrants become more numerous. (Jews are unlikely to suffer a decline in social status not only because their mean IQ is well above that of the East Asians but, more importantly, because Jewish IQ is skewed toward excelling in verbal skills. The high IQ of East Asians is skewed toward performance IQ, which makes them powerful competitors in engineering and technology. See PTSDA, [Ch. 7] and Lynn [1987]. Jews and East Asians are thus likely to occupy different niches in contemporary societies.) Presently white gentiles are the most underrepresented group at Harvard, accounting for approximately 25 percent of the students, while Asians and Jews constitute at least half of the student body while constituting no more than five percent of the population (Unz 1998). The United States is well on the road to being dominated by an Asian technocratic elite and a Jewish business, professional, and media elite.

Moreover, the shift to multiculturalism has coincided with an enormous growth of immigration from non-European-derived peoples beginning with the Immigration Act of 1965, which favored immigrants from non-European countries (see Auster 1990; Brimelow 1995). Many of these immigrants come from non-Western countries where cultural and genetic segregation are the norm, and within the context of multicultural America, they are encouraged to retain their own languages and religions and encouraged to marry within the group. As indicated above, the expected result will be between-group resource and reproductive competition and increased vulnerability of democratic and republican political institutions in a context in which long-term projections indicate that European-derived peoples will no longer be a majority of the United States by the middle of the next century.

Indeed, one might note that, while the Western Enlightenment has presented Judaism with its greatest challenge in all of its long history, contemporary multiculturalism in the context of high levels of immigration of peoples of all racial and ethnic groups presents the greatest challenge to Western universalism in its history. The historical record indicates that ethnic separatism among Caucasian-derived groups has a tendency to collapse within modern Western societies unless active attempts at ethnic and cultural segregation are undertaken, as has occurred among Jews. As expected from a resource-reciprocity point of view (MacDonald 1991, 1995b,c), in the absence of rigid ethnic barriers, marriage in Western individualist societies tends to be importantly influenced by a wide range of phenotypic features of the prospective spouse, including not only genetic commonality but also social status, personality, common interests, and other points of similarity. This individualist pattern of marriage decisions has characterized Western Europe at least since the Middle Ages (e.g., MacFarlane 1986; see PTSDA, Ch. 8).

The result has been a remarkable degree of ethnic assimilation in the United States among those whose ancestry derives from Europe (Alba 1985). This is particularly noteworthy because ethnic conflict and violence are on the rise in Eastern Europe, yet European-derived groups in the United States have an overwhelming sense of commonality. The long-term result of such processes is genetic homogenization, a sense of common interest, and the absence of a powerful source of intrasocietal division.

To suppose that the conflict over immigration has been merely a conflict over the universalist tendencies of Western culture would, however, be disingenuous. To a great extent the immigration debate in the United States has always had powerful ethnic overtones and continues to do so even after the European-derived peoples of the United States have become assimilated into a Western universalist culture. The present immigration policy essentially places the United States and other Western societies “in play” in an evolutionary sense which does not apply to other nations of the world, where the implicit assumption is that territory is held by its historically dominant people: Each racial and ethnic group in the world has an interest in expanding its demographic and political presence in Western societies and can be expected to do so if given the opportunity. Notice that American Jews have had no interest in proposing that immigration to Israel should be similarly multiethnic, or that Israel should have an immigration policy that would threaten the hegemony of Jews. I rather doubt that Oscar Handlin (1952, 7) would extend his statement advocating immigration from all ethnic groups into the United States by affirming the principle that all men, being brothers, are equally capable of being Israelis. I also doubt that the Synagogue Council of America would characterize Israeli immigration law as “a gratuitous affront to the peoples of many regions of the world” (PCIN 1953, 117). Indeed, the ethnic conflict within Israel indicates a failure to develop a universalist Western culture.

Consider the disparities between Jewish attitudes regarding multiculturalism in Israel versus the United States.

From a Jewish viewpoint, rejection of Zionism as an ideology and a force shaping the state [of Israel] is like rejecting the state itself. The refined distinction between the state and its character, and that between its Jewishness and Zionism, are neither understood nor condoned by the Jews. They are not interested in having Israel as a state, but rather as a Jewish-Zionist state… While it is legal, but not legitimate, in Israel to reject publicly or act against Zionism, according to the 1985 amendment of the election law, one may not run for the Knesset on an election slate which denies Israel as the state of the Jewish people. (Smooha 1990, 397)

A substantial digression from [the principle of equality] is caused by the special legal status accorded to the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund. They perform quasi-governmental functions such as planning and funding of new rural localities, support for cultural enterprises, provision of assistance to the elderly and other disadvantaged groups, and development and leasing of lands. Yet by their own constitution, these powerful institutions are obliged to serve Jews only… Discrimination is also embedded in the Jewish Religious Services Law which provides for publicly funded religious services to Jews only. Most of the discrimination is, however, rather covert. (Smooha 1990, 401)

Smooha (1990, 403) also notes that in a 1988 survey, 74 percent of Israeli Jews said that the state should prefer Jews to Arabs, and 43 percent favored the denial of the right to vote to Israeli Arab citizens. Whereas American Jews have been in the forefront of efforts to ensure ethnic diversity in the United States and other Western societies, 40 percent of the Jewish respondents agreed that Israel should encourage Israeli Arabs to leave the country, 37 percent had reservations, and only 23 percent objected to such a policy. Almost three quarters of Israeli Jews did not want to have an Arab as a superior in a job. Moreover, immigration to Israel is officially restricted to Jews.

It is also noteworthy that whereas Jews have been on the forefront of movements to separate church and state in the United States and often protested lack of religious freedom in the Soviet Union, the Orthodox rabbinical control of religious affairs in Israel has received only belated and half-hearted opposition by American Jewish organizations (Cohen 1972, 317) and has not prevented the all-out support of Israel by American Jews, despite the fact that Israel’s policy is opposite to the polices that Jewish organizations have successfully pursued in Western democracies. This phenomenon is an excellent example of the incompatibility of Judaism with Western forms of social organization, which results in a recurrent gap between Jewish behavior vis-à-vis its own group strategy and Jewish attempts to manipulate Western societies to conform to Jewish group interests.

At present the interests of non-European-derived peoples to expand demographically and politically in the United States are widely perceived as a moral imperative, whereas the attempts of the European-derived peoples to retain demographic, political, and cultural control is represented as “racist,” immoral, and an indication of psychiatric disorder. From the perspective of these European-derived peoples, the prevailing ethnic morality is altruistic and self-sacrificial. It is unlikely to be viable in the long run, even in an individualistic society. As we have seen, the viability of a morality of self-sacrifice is especially problematic in the context of a multicultural society in which everyone is conscious of group membership and there is between-group competition for resources.

Consider from an evolutionary perspective the status of the argument that all peoples should be allowed to immigrate to the United States. One might assert that any opposition to such a principle should not interest an evolutionist because human group genetic differences are trivial, so any psychological adaptations that make one resist such a principle are anachronisms without function in the contemporary world (much like one’s appendix). A Jew maintaining this argument should, to retain intellectual consistency, agree that the traditional Jewish concern with endogamy and consanguinity has been irrational. Moreover, such a person should also believe that Jews ought not attempt to retain political power in Israel because there is no rational reason to suppose that any particular group should have power anywhere. Nor should Jews attempt to influence the political process in the United States in such a manner as to disadvantage another group or benefit their own. And to be logically consistent, one should also apply this argument to all those who promote immigration of their own ethnic groups, the mirror image of group-based opposition to such immigration.

Indeed, if this chain of logic is pursued to its conclusion, it is irrational for anyone to claim any group interests at all. And if one also rejects the notion of individual genetic differences, it is also irrational to attempt to further individual interests, for example, by seeking to immigrate as an individual. Indeed, if one accepts these assumptions, the notion of genetic consequences and thus of the possibility of human evolution past and present becomes irrational; the idea that it is rational is merely an illusion produced perhaps by psychological adaptations that are without any meaningful evolutionary function in the contemporary world. One might note that this ideology is the final conclusion of the anti-evolutionary ideologies reviewed in this volume. These intellectual movements have asserted that scientific research shows that any important ethnic differences or individual differences are the result of environmental variation, and that genetic differences are trivial.

But there is an enormous irony in all of this: If life is truly without any evolutionary meaning, why have advocates propagated these ideologies so intensely and with such self-consciously political methods? Why have many of these same people strongly identified with their own ethnic group and its interests, and why have many of them insisted on cultural pluralism and its validation of minority group ethnocentrism as moral absolutes? By their own assumptions, it is just a meaningless game. Nobody should care who wins or loses. Of course, deception and self-deception may be involved. I have noted (p. 195) that a fundamental agenda has been to make the European-derived peoples of the United States view concern about their own demographic and cultural eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology.

If one accepts that both within-group and between-group genetic variation remains and is non-trivial (i.e., if evolution is an ongoing process), then the principle of relatively unrestricted immigration, at least under the conditions obtaining in late twentieth-century Western societies, clearly involves altruism by some individuals and established groups. Nevertheless, although the success of the intellectual movements reviewed in this volume is an indication that people can be induced to be altruistic toward other groups, I rather doubt such altruism will continue if there are obvious signs that the status and political power of European-derived groups is decreasing while the power of other groups increases. The prediction, both on theoretical grounds and on the basis of social identity research, is that as other groups become increasingly powerful and salient in a multicultural society, the European-derived peoples of the United States will become increasingly unified; among these peoples, contemporary divisive influences, such as issues related to gender and sexual orientation, social class differences, or religious differences, will be increasingly perceived as unimportant. Eventually these groups will develop a united front and a collectivist political orientation vis-à-vis the other ethnic groups. Other groups will be expelled if possible or partitions will be created, and Western societies will undergo another period of medievalism.

Jewish interests in immigration policy are an example of conflicts of interest between Jews and gentiles over the construction of culture. This conflict of interests extends well beyond immigration policy. There is a growing realization that the countercultural revolution of the 1960s is a watershed event in the history of the United States. Such a conceptualization is compatible with the work of Roger Smith (1988), who shows that until the triumph of the cultural pluralist model with the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, there were three competing models of American identity: the “liberal” individualist legacy of the Enlightenment based on “natural rights”; the “republican” ideal of a cohesive, socially homogeneous society (what I have identified as the prototypical Western social organization of hierarchic harmony); the “ethnocultural” strand emphasizing the importance of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity in the development and preservation of American cultural forms.

From the present perspective no fundamental conflict exists between the latter two sources of American identity; social homogeneity and hierarchic harmony may well be best and most easily achieved with an ethnically homogeneous society of peoples derived from the European cultural area. Indeed, in upholding Chinese exclusion in the nineteenth century, Justice Stephen A. Field noted that the Chinese were unassimilable and would destroy the republican ideal of social homogeneity. As indicated above, the incorporation of non-European peoples, and especially peoples derived from Africa, into peculiarly Western cultural forms is profoundly problematic.

As discussed at several points in this volume, the radical individualism embodied in the Enlightenment ideal of individual rights is especially problematic as a source of long-term stability in a Western society because of the danger of invasion and domination by group strategies such as Judaism and the possibility of the defection of gentile elites from the ideals represented in the other two models of social organization. These latter two events are particularly likely to destroy the social cohesiveness so central to Western forms of social organization. As Smith notes, the transformations of American society in the post-Civil War era resulted from the “liberal” cultural ideal “that opposed slavery, favored immigration, and encouraged enterprise while protecting property rights” and that posed a severe threat to the collective life at the center of American civilization.

It is this liberal legacy of American civilization that the Jewish intellectual movements reviewed in this volume have exploited in rationalizing unrestricted immigration and the loss of social homogeneity represented by the unifying force of the Christian religion. As Israel Zangwill said in advocating a Jewish strategy for unrestricted immigration, “tell them they are destroying American ideals” (see p. 267). The effect has been to create a new American ideal that is entirely at odds with the historic sources of American identity:

This ideal carries on the cosmopolitanism, tolerance, and respect for human liberty of the older liberal tradition, and so it can properly be termed a modern version of the liberal ideal. It is novel, however, in its rejection of Lockean liberalism’s absolutist natural law elements in favor of modern philosophic pragmatism and cultural relativism. And one of its chief theoretical architects, philosopher Horace Kallen, argued that cultural pluralism better recognizes human sociality, our constitutive attachments to distinctive ethnic, religious, and cultural groups. It therefore envisions America as a “democracy of nationalities, cooperating voluntarily and autonomously through common institutions in the enterprise of self-realization through the perfection of men according to their kind” (Kallen 1924, 124). Since all groups and individuals should be guaranteed equal opportunities to pursue their own destinies, the nation’s legacy of legal, racial, ethnic and gender discriminations is unacceptable according to the cultural pluralist ideal. At the same time, there must be no effort to transform equality into uniformity, to insist that all fit into a standard Americanized mold.

The ideal of democratic cultural pluralism finally came to predominance in American public law in the 1950s and especially the 1960s, finding expression in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the liberalizing 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, in new programs to provide educational curricula more attuned to the nation’s diverse cultural heritage, in bilingual ballots and governmental publications, and in affirmative action measures. (Smith 1988, 246)

Within this perspective, there is tolerance for different groups but the result is a tendency to “deprecate the importance or even the existence of a common national identity” (Kallen 1924, 59). Kallen, of course, was a very strongly identified Jew and a Zionist, and it is not at all surprising that his cultural ideal for the United States represents a non-Western form of social organization that conforms to Jewish interests and compromises the interests of the European-derived peoples of the United States. It is a social form that guarantees the continued existence of Judaism as a social category and as a cohesive ethnic group while at the same time, given the characteristics of Jews, guarantees Jews economic and cultural pre-eminence. Public policy based on this conceptualization is having the predictable long-term effect of marginalizing both culturally and demographically the European-derived peoples of the United States. Because the European-derived groups are less organized and less cohesive than Jews and because a therapeutic state has been erected to counter expressions of European-American ethnocentrism, it raises the distinct possibility that in the long run European Americans will be fragmented, politically powerless, and without an effective group identity at all.

The conflict of interest between Jews and gentiles in the construction of culture goes well beyond advocacy of the multicultural ideal. Because they are much more genetically inclined to a high-investment reproductive strategy than are gentiles, Jews are able to maintain their high-investment reproductive strategy even in the absence of traditional Western cultural supports for high-investment parenting (Ch. 4). Compared to gentiles, Jews are therefore much better able to expand their economic and cultural success without these traditional Western cultural supports. As Higham (1984, 173) notes, the cultural idealization of an essentially Jewish personal ethic of hedonism, anxiety, and intellectuality came at the expense of the older rural ethic of asceticism and sexual restraint.

Moreover, traditional Western supports for high-investment parenting were embedded in religious ideology and, I suppose, are difficult to achieve in a postreligious environment. Nevertheless, as Podhoretz (1995, 30) notes, it is in fact the case that Jewish intellectuals, Jewish organizations like the AJCongress, and Jewish-dominated organizations such as the ACLU have ridiculed Christian religious beliefs, attempted to undermine the public strength of Christianity, or have led the fight for lifting restrictions on pornography. Further, we have seen that psychoanalysis as a Jewish-dominated intellectual movement has been a central component of this war on gentile cultural supports for high-investment parenting. Whereas Jews, because of their powerful genetically influenced propensities for intelligence and high-investment parenting, have been able to thrive within this cultural milieu, other sectors of the society have not; the result has been a widening gulf between the cultural success of Jews and gentiles and a disaster for society as a whole.

The countercultural revolution of the 1960s may well be incompatible with traditional American freedoms. Traditional American freedoms such as the First Amendment freedom of speech (deriving from the Enlightenment liberal strand of American identity) have clearly facilitated specifically Jewish interests in the construction of culture, interests that conflict with the possibility of constructing a cohesive society built around high-investment parenting. Given that the popular media and the current intellectual environment of universities thrive on the freedom of elites to produce socially destructive messages, the political movements attempting to restore the traditional Western cultural supports for high-investment parenting will undoubtedly be forced to restrict some traditional American freedoms (see, e.g., Bork 1996). Cultural supports for high-investment parenting act as external forces of social control that maximize high-investment parenting among all segments of the population, even those who for genetic or environmental reasons are relatively disinclined to engage in such practices (MacDonald 1997, 1998b). Without such cultural controls, it is absolutely predictable that social disorganization will increase and the society as a whole will continue to decline.

Nevertheless, the continuity of peculiarly Western forms of social organization will remain a salient concern even if one ignores issues of ethnic competition entirely. I have emphasized that there is an inherent conflict between multiculturalism and Western universalism and individualism. Even were Western universalism to regain its moral imperative, whether all of humanity is willing or able to participate in this type of culture remains an open question. Universalism is a European creation, and it is unknown whether such a culture can be continued over a long period of time in a society that is not predominantly ethnically European. When not explicitly advocating multiculturalism, the rhetoric in favor of immigration has typically assumed a radical environmentalism in which all humans are portrayed as having the same potentials and as being equally moldable into functioning members of Western universalist and individualist societies. This premise is highly questionable. Indeed, one might say that the present volume in conjunction with PTSDA and SAID is testimony to the extremely ingrained anti-Western tendencies that occur among human groups. Given that a great many human cultures bear a strong resemblance to the collectivist, anti-assimilatory tendencies present in Jewish culture, it is highly likely that many of our present immigrants are similarly unable or unwilling to accept the fundamental premises of a universalistic, culturally homogeneous, individualistic society.

Indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that Western tendencies toward individualism are unique and based on evolved psychological adaptations (see PTSDA, Ch. 8). This genetic perspective proposes that individualism, like many other phenotypes of interest to evolutionists (MacDonald 1991), shows genetic variation. In PTSDA (Ch. 8) I speculated that the progenitors of Western populations evolved in isolated groups with low population density. Such groups would have been common in northern areas characterized by harsh ecological conditions, such as those that occurred during the ice age (see Lenz 1931, 657). Under ecologically adverse circumstances, adaptations are directed more at coping with the physical environment than at competition with other groups (Southwood 1977, 1981). Such an environment implies less selection pressure for collectivist, ethnocentric groups as embodied by historical Judaism. Evolutionary conceptualizations of ethnocentrism emphasize the utility of ethnocentrism in group competition. Ethnocentrism would be of no importance in combating the physical environment, and such an environment would not support large groups.

We have seen that Western individualism is intimately entwined with scientific thinking and social structures based on hierarchic harmony, sexual egalitarianism, and democratic and republican forms of government. These uniquely Western tendencies suggest that reciprocity is a deeply ingrained Western tendency. Western political forms from the democratic and republican traditions of ancient Greece and Rome to the hierarchic harmony of the Western Middle Ages and to modern democratic and republican governments assume the legitimacy of a pluralism of individual interests. Within these social forms is a tendency to assume the legitimacy of others’ interests and perspectives in a manner that is foreign to collectivist, despotic social structures characteristic of much of the rest of the world.

Another critical component of the evolutionary basis of individualism is the elaboration of the human affectional system as an individualistic pair-bonding system, the system that seemed so strange that it was theorized to be a thin veneer overlaying a deep psychopathology to a generation of Jewish intellectuals emerging from the ghetto (Cuddihy 1974, 71). This system is individualistic in the sense that it is based not on external, group-based social controls or familial dictate but, rather, on the intrinsically motivated role of romantic love in cementing reproductive relationships (see pp. 136-139). The issue is important because Western cultures are typically characterized as relatively individualistic compared to other societies (Triandis 1995), and there is reason to suppose that the affectional system is conceptually linked to individualism; that is, it is a system that tends toward nuclear rather than extended family organization. Triandis (1990) finds that individualistic societies emphasize romantic love to a greater extent than do collectivist societies, and Western cultures have indeed emphasized romantic love more than other cultures (see PTSDA, Ch. 8; MacDonald 1995b,c; Money 1980). This system is highly elaborated in Western cultures in both men and women, and it is psychometrically linked with empathy, altruism, and nurturance. Individuals who are very high on this system—predominantly females—are pathologically prone to altruistic, nurturant and dependent behavior (see MacDonald 1995a). On an evolutionary account, the relatively greater elaboration of this system in females is to be expected, given the greater female role in nurturance and as a discriminating mechanism in relationships of pair bonding. Such a perspective also accounts for the much-commented-on gender gap in political behavior in which females are more prone to voting for political candidates favoring liberal positions on social issues. Women more than men also endorse political stances that equalize rather than accentuate differences between individuals and groups (Pratto, Stallworth & Sidanius 1997).

In ancestral environments this system was highly adaptive, resulting in a tendency toward pair bonding and high-investment parenting, as well as intrinsically motivated relationships of close friendship and trust. This system continues to be adaptive in the modern world in its role in underlying high-investment parenting, but it is easy to see that the relative hypertrophy of this system may result in maladaptive behavior if a system designed for empathy, altruism, and nurturance of family members and others in a closely related group becomes directed to the world outside the family.¹⁸¹

The implication is that Western societies are subject to invasion by non-Western cultures able to manipulate Western tendencies toward reciprocity, egalitarianism, and close affectional relationships in a manner that results in maladaptive behavior for the European-derived peoples who remain at the core of all Western societies. Because others’ interests and perspectives are viewed as legitimate, Western societies have uniquely developed a highly principled moral and religious discourse, as in the arguments against slavery characteristic of the nineteenth-century abolitionists and in the contemporary discourse on animal rights. Such discourse is directed toward universal moral principles—that is, principles that would be viewed as fair for any rational, disinterested observer. Thus in his highly influential volume, Theory of Justice, John Rawls (1971) argues that justice as objective morality can only occur behind a “veil of ignorance” in which the ethnic status of the contending parties is irrelevant to considerations of justice or morality.

It is this intellectual tradition that has been effectively manipulated by Jewish intellectual activists, such as Israel Zangwill and Oscar Handlin, who have emphasized that in developing immigration policy Western principles of morality and fair play make it impossible to discriminate against any ethnic group or any individual. Viewed from the perspective of, say, an African native of Kenya, any policy that discriminates in favor of Northwestern Europe cannot withstand the principle that the policy be acceptable to a rational, disinterested observer. Because Zangwill and Handlin are not constrained by Western universalism in their attitudes toward their own group, however, they are able to ignore the implications of universalistic thinking for Zionism and other expressions of Jewish particularism. Because of its official policy regarding the genetic and cultural background of prospective immigrants, Israel would not be similarly subject to invasion by a foreign group strategy.

Indeed, one might note that despite the fact that a prominent theme of antiSemitism has been to stress negative personality traits of Jews and their willingness to exploit gentiles (SAID, Ch. 2), a consistent theme of Jewish intellectual activity since the Enlightenment has been to cast Jewish ethnic interests and Judaism itself as embodying a unique and irreplaceable moral vision (SAID, Chs. 6-8)—terms that emphasize the unique appeal of the rhetoric of the morality of the disinterested observer among Western audiences.

The result is that whether Western individualistic societies are able to defend the legitimate interests of the European-derived peoples remains questionable. A prominent theme appearing in several places in this volume and in PTSDA (Ch. 8) and SAID (Chs. 3-5) is that individualistic societies are uniquely vulnerable to invasion by cohesive groups such as has been historically represented by Judaism. Significantly, the problem of immigration of non-European peoples is not at all confined to the United States but represents a severe and increasingly contentious problem in the entire Western world and nowhere else: Only European-derived peoples have opened their doors to the other peoples of the world and now stand in danger of losing control of territory occupied for hundreds of years. Western societies have traditions of individualistic humanism, which make immigration restriction difficult. In the nineteenth century, for example, the Supreme Court twice turned down Chinese exclusion acts on the basis that they legislated against a group, not an individual (Petersen 1955, 78). The effort to develop an intellectual basis for immigration restriction was tortuous; by 1920 it was based on the legitimacy of the ethnic interests of Northwestern Europeans and had undertones of racialist thinking. Both these ideas were difficult to reconcile with the stated political and humanitarian ideology of a republican and democratic society in which, as Jewish pro-immigration activists such as Israel Zangwill emphasized, racial or ethnic group membership had no official intellectual sanction. The replacement of these assertions of ethnic self-interest with an ideology of “assimilability” in the debate over the McCarran-Walter act was perceived by its opponents as little more than a smokescreen for “racism.” At the end, this intellectual tradition collapsed largely as a result of the onslaught of the intellectual movements reviewed in this volume, and so collapsed a central pillar of the defense of the ethnic interests of European-derived peoples.

The present tendencies lead one to predict that unless the ideology of individualism is abandoned not only by the multicultural minorities (who have been encouraged to pursue their group interests by a generation of American intellectuals) but also by the European-derived peoples of Europe, North America, New Zealand, and Australia, the end result will be a substantial diminution of the genetic, political, and cultural influence of these peoples. It would be an unprecedented unilateral abdication of such power and certainly an evolutionist would expect no such abdication without at least a phase of resistance by a significant segment of the population. As indicated above, European-derived peoples are expected to ultimately exhibit some of the great flexibility that Jews have shown throughout the ages in advocating particular political forms that best suit their current interests. The prediction is that segments of the European-derived peoples of the world will eventually realize that they have been ill-served and are being ill-served both by the ideology of multiculturalism and by the ideology of de-ethnicized individualism.

If the analysis of anti-Semitism presented in SAID is correct, the expected reaction will emulate aspects of Judaism by adopting group-serving, collectivist ideologies and social organizations. The theoretically underdetermined nature of human group processes (PTSDA, Ch. 1; MacDonald 1995b) disallows detailed prediction of whether the reactive strategy will be sufficient to stabilize or reverse the present decline of European peoples in the New World and, indeed, in their ancestral homelands; whether the process will degenerate into a self-destructive reactionary movement as occurred with the Spanish Inquisition; or whether it will initiate a moderate and permanent turning away from radical individualism toward a sustainable group strategy. What is certain is that the ancient dialectic between Judaism and the West will continue into the foreseeable future. It will be ironic that, whatever anti-Semitic rhetoric may be adopted by the leaders of these defensive movements, they will be constrained to emulate key elements of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. Such strategic mimicry will, once again, lead to a “Judaization” of Western societies not only in the sense that their social organization will become more group-oriented but also in the sense that they will be more aware of themselves as a positively evaluated ingroup and more aware of other human groups as competing, negatively evaluated outgroups. In this sense, whether the decline of the European peoples continues unabated or is arrested, it will constitute a profound impact of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy on the development of Western societies.

This book is the final volume in the series on Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. A future comparative book, tentatively titled Diaspora Peoples, extends the focus to groups other than Jews and European peoples—the Romany, Assyrians, overseas Chinese, Parsis, and Sikhs, among others. It will test the extent to which the concepts and analyses employed in this series expand our understanding of group interaction, cooperation, and competition, and therefore human evolution in general.

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Index

Abel, L., 213

Abella, I., 296

Abraham, K., 109, 111, 133

Abrams, D., 12, 17, 89, 167

Abrams, E., 238, 316

Ackerman, N. W., 185, 190, n.120

Adams, G. R., n.127

Adams, H., 211

Adams-Markstrom, C., n.127

Adelson, A., 77

ADL, see Anti-Defamation League

Adler, A., 113, 114, 126, n.98

Adler, F., 251

Adorno, T. W., l, lxix, 142, 151–64 passim, 165, 167, 186–88, 190–98 passim, 202, 214, 220, 222, n.113, n.115, n.117, n.122, n.138, n.144, n.180

Adelson, H. L., 77

African Americans, 3, 85, 96, 168, 243, 251–53, 301, 309, 315–317, 322, n.179

Agus, A. G. E., 231

Ainsworth, M. D. S., 184

AJCommittee, see American Jewish Committee

AJCongress, see American Jewish Congress

Alba, R. D., 300, 318

Alcock, J., 38, n.65

Alderman G., 79, 81, 83, 294, 295, n.79, n.87, n.161, n.171

Alexander, E., 309

Alexander, R., xxv

Altemeyer, B., 165, 166, 173, 175, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, n.124, n.143

Alter, R., 15

Alter, V., xxxix

Alterman, E., liv, lxi, lxii, 208

Althusser, L., 21, 142

Altruism, 88, 107, 304, 321, 326, 327

America, see United States

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 147, 245, 279, 280, 324, n.95

American Jewish Committee, ix, xxxv, xxxvi, xlii, xlix, lvii, 2, 151, 171, 194, 239, 242, 250, 252-54, 254, 256, 257, 259, 260, 272, 278–81, 283, 285, 292, 305, n.48

American Jewish Congress, xxxix, xlii, lv, 69, 78, 147, 239, 240, 244–46, 249, 250, 252–55, 260, 264, 277–80, 282–84, 292, 305, 324, n.153, n.154, n.165, n.166, n.167

Anderson, M. M., l

Andreason, N.C., 48

Annenberg, G., xiv

Anthropology, see Boasian anthropology

Anti-Defamation League, xiv, xxxiv, xxxvi, xlviii, lvii, xliii–lxv, 72, 78, 194, 239, 250, 251, 253–55, 264, 283, 305, n.19, n.40, n.43, n.45, n.46, n.47, n.121., n.148, n.155

Anti-Jewish attitudes, see Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism, xxxii, xxxviii, lxv, lxvi–xlvii, lxix, 89, 110, 274, n.52, n.69; and Christianity, 210, 211–212, 228, 251; and collectivist societies, xxxi, 164–165, 187, 308, 313, 314, 329, n.68; and control of the internet, lxiii–lxv; and Jewish media control, xiii–xv; and Jewish self-deception, 236; and individualistic societies, 164–165, 313; and non-Jewish nationalism, 80, 84, 161–62; and rural America, 215; as concern of Jewish activists, intellectuals, and radicals, v, vi, ix, x, xl, lxiii–lxv, lxviii, 1, 3, 11–16, 18, 21, 23, 26, 31, 40–45, 56–57, 81, 86, 105–108, 111, 112, 115, 116–17, 153, 199–200, 210, 211, 215, 218, 238–41, 253, 256, 257, 259, 311, n.2, n.74, n.81, n.83, n.97, n.148, n.174; as increasing Jewish identification, 53–55, 116; as a personality disorder, 166–192, 195–197, 224, 235, 288, n.101, n.117; as involving irrational beliefs, li, n.120; as lessened by perceptions of group permeability, 45; as minimized by leftist ideology, 91, 93; as resulting from conflicts of interest, xxxii, li, 99, 306; as resulting from Jews as cultural critics, vi, 7, 8, 10, n.58; as resulting from Jewish disloyalty, 63, 99; as resulting from Jewish leftism, xlv, 78, 94–95, 97, 269, n.92; as resulting from Jewish immigration, ix, x, 83, 256; as resulting in Jewish messianism and fanaticism, 81; as resulting in Jewish self-deception, 95; by African Americans, 96, 309; by Jews, 77; charges of, as tool in promoting Jewish interests, xv–xviii, lxvii–lxix, lxiii, n.4, n.75, n.121, n.175; Frankfurt School Theory of, 156–92; Holocaust ideology as antidote to, xlviii–li; in Canada, 296, 298; in England, 294–95, n.161; in Germany, 305, n.49; in Poland, 272; in the U.S., ix, x, 237–38, 247, 253, 261, 263, 265, 268, 270–71, 273, 277–79, 284, n.89; in Western culture, 312; of Charles Lindbergh, xvi–xviii; of Henry Adams, 211; of Karl Marx, 50, n.71; on the left and by leftist governments, xliv, 62, 66, 73–74, 79, 91, 98–101, 103–04, 234, 280, 311, n.48; opposed by leftist governments, xxxix–xl, 58, 59, 60, 63–64, 72, 87, 88, 97–98, 101–02, 206; Populism and, 195–96, 288; portrayal in the media, lviii–lix; psychoanalytic theories of, 113, 117, 138, 140–146, 150, 166–92, n.101, n.117, n.140; resulting from Jewish intellectual movements, vi; resulting from Jewish radicalism, xlv–xlvi

Archer, J., n.181

Arendt, H., l, 213, n.108

Arens, R., 282, 284

Arlow, J. A., 129

Aronson, E., 186

Asante, M., 309

Aschheim, S. E., 82, 83, 161

Auerbach, B., 8

Auster, L., 292, 318

Australia, 294, 297–299, 328

Authoritarian Personality studies, 151–192 passim, 214, 218, 224, 227, 232, 286, 288, 317

Authoritarianism: as characteristic of Jewish intellectual movements, 26–28, 88, 122, 126–133, 144, 217, n.20, n.56; of anti-Jewish movements, 102, 143, 308; of traditional Jewish groups, xxxi, 88, 217, 221–226, 230–231, n.56; as concern of Jewish intellectuals, 140; see also Authoritarian Personality studies

Bailey, P., 131

Barak, E., li–lii

Bardot, B., 293

Barker, P., 229

Baron, S. W., xxxviii, 80

Barone, M., lxii

Barrett, W., 3

Barthes, R., 21, 142

Batson, C. D., 188

Beaty, J., 278, 284

Beinart, P., 85

Bell, D., 195, 196, 213, 217, 218, 305

Bellow, S., 139, 141

Belsky, J., 136, 148

Belth, N. C., 255

Bendersky, J., xii, xiv, xv, xix, xxi, xlii, xliv, lvi, n.6

Benedict, R., 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, n.61

Benjamin, W., l, 151, 154, 198, n.144

Bennett, M. T., 275, 280, 281, 282, 284, 289, 291

Bennett, W., lxii, 149

Bennington, G., 200

Berg, A. S., xiii, xvi

Bergmann, M. S., 145

Berlin, I., 205

Berman, B., xxxviii

Berman, J., 61–62, 100

Berman, M., xxxviii

Berman, R. A., n.145

Bernal, M., 310

Bernheimer, K., xliii, lviii

Bettelheim, B., 185

Betts, K., 296, 298

Betzig, L., 134, 136, 315

Bhushan, L. I., n.143

Biale, D., 259, 311

Bierut, B., 61, 65

Billig M., 185, 187, 188

Billings, S. W., 165

Blacklist, Hollywood, xliii, xliv, n.26, n.27

Blalock, Jr. H. M., 301, 302

Blau, J. L., 239

Bleuler, E., 126, 224

Boas, F., 21–29 passim, 48, 49, 222, 288, n.63; concern with anti-Semitism, 23 ; concern with immigration policy, 248, 249, 254; estrangement from gentile culture, 23–24; Jewish identity, 23–24; leftist politics of, 23, 30, n.63

Boasian anthropology, 1, 21–29 passim; and cultural criticism, 28, 225, n.59, n.62, n.146; as advancing Jewish ethnic interests, vii, lxviii, lxxiii, 23, 228; as advancing anti-restrictionist immigration policy, 247–48, 254, 275, 286–87; as cohesive group, 26–27, 207, 217–18, 221–22; as combating anti-Semitism, 12, 206; as combating racialist theories, xii, xviii, 23–24; as unscientific, 10, 24, 46–47, 227, n.69; de-emphasizing Jewish involvement, 26, 232; influence, 28, 226; political agenda, 25, 217, 249

Boer, D. P., 122

Bolshevism, see Communism

Bonaparte, M., 122

Bonner, J. T., 36

Booth, K., 148, 149

Bork, R., 324

Borowitz, E. B., 217, n.147

Boyd, R., 47

Brandeis, L., 245, n.148

Braun, L., n.99

Braungart, R. G., 77

Breitman, R. D., 261, 262, 270, 271

Brenner, C., 129

Bretherton, I., n.14

Brewer, M. B., 90

Brimelow, P., 290, 296, 315, 318

Broca, P., 35

Bromley, S., 216

Bronfenbrenner, n.68

Bronfman, C., xxxv

Bronfman, E. Jr., liii

Bronfman, E. Sr., xxxv, liii

Brooks-Gunn, J., 149

Brown, M., 296

Brown, N. O., 113, 123, n.109

Brown, P., 137

Brown, R., 165, 166, 168, 185, n.124

Brown v. Board of Education, n.146

Brundage, J., 136, 137

Buchanan, P., lxii, n.4

Buckley, W. F., lxiii, 310

Buhle, P., 72

Bulik, L. A., 220

Burgess, R. L., 42

Burke, E., 221

Burnham, J., 221

Burris, C. T., 188

Buss. D. M., 48

Cain, A., 37

Campbell, D., 226, 229, 230

Canada, 296–298

Capote, T., 216

Caputo, J. D., 199, 201, 202, 203, 204

Carlebach, J., 152, n.71

Carr, W. S., 261, 262, 271

Carroll, F. M., 301

Carroll, J. B., 36

Carroll, Joseph, 47

Castro, A., 7, 14, 103, 230, n.55

Catholic Church, xvi, xix, xx, 5, 232, 251, 273, 308, 312, n.8; and Communism, 64, 67, 90, 161; and monogamy, lxvi; as collectivist, 161, xxix; depiction in media, lix, n.34; Freud’s attitude toward, 111, 114, 115, 120, 137

Catholic culture, 199, 200

Catholics, 75, 106, 196, 242, 243, 256, 257, 270, 285, n.83, n.97

Caton, H. C., lxxiii, 29, n.59

Celan, P., l, lxix, 198

Celler, E., 248, 255, 267–68, 272–75, 281, 283, 290, n.159

Cesarani, D., 287

Chamberlain, H. S., 24, 360, n.70

Chamberlain, L., 114, n.74

Chandler, R., n.75

Charen, M., lxi

Chase, A., 34

Chavez, L., lxii

Chernin, P., xxvii

Chicago Tribune, xv, 246

Chomsky, N., n.108

Christianity, vii, xiii, xx, xxi, xxxiii, lix, lxiii, 12, 32, 55, 103, 228, 230, 278, 306, n.52; and anti-Semitism, lx, 85, 117, 211, n.175; and Communism, 58; and Derrida, 201–03; and Frankfurt School, 157–60, 168, 172, 182, 190, 193, 197, 207; and psychoanalysis, 106–09; 115–116, 133–34, n.98; as collectivist, 161, 164, n.177; Jewish opposition to, xxi, 5, 7–8, 14, 95, 147, 210, 242, 245, 249–251, 243, 258, 259, 323–24, n.83, n.90, n.175; media images of, lix, n.34; see also Catholic Church

Churchill, W., xlvii, 294–295

Churchland, P., 109

Church-state relations, Jewish involvement in, 187, 242, 249–251, 300, 302, 311

Cioffi, F., 118

Clemen, C. G., 106

Clinton, H., xix

Clinton, W. J., xix, 216

Cockburn, A., lxii

Cohen, E., 209, 213, 220, 223

Cohen, H., 219–220

Cohen, M. R., 71

Cohen, N. W., 2, 238, 256, 257, 260, 272, 274, 278, 282, 284, 285, 309, 320, n.48, n.150

Cohen, P. S., 86, 87

Cohen, S. M., 148

Cohn, W., 70

Collectivism, xxiii–xxxviii, 14, 26, 102, 132, 137, 141, 162–65, 168, 186, 217, 223–24, 228–230, 232, 233, 253, 308, 322, 325, 326, 329, n.104, n.114, n.116

Collier, G., 165

Commentary, 209, 210, 211, 213, 220, 223, 280, 285, 287, n.4

Communism, 127, 161, 196, 221, 272, n.67, n.77, n.143; and anti-Semitism, xxxix–xl, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63–64, 66, 72, 73–74, 79, 87, 88, 97–102, 103–104, 206, 234, 280, 310, 311, n.48; and Frankfurt School, 152, 161, 162, 163, n.113, n.119, n.120; and Jews, xxxvii–xlix, 11, 13, 14, 32, 50–104 passim, 152, 161, 169, 221, 238, 256, 269, 277–81. n.48, n.74; and the New York Intellectuals, 209, 216, 220, 222; see also Leftist politics

Conservative Judaism, 103, 303, n.88

Contemporary Jewish Record, 209, 211

Coon, C., xxxiii

Cooney, T. A., 3, 209, 210, 213, 214, 215, 216, 222, 227

Cooper, A. M., 119, 132

Corbin, A., 137

Coser, L., 220

Coulter, A., lxii

Coutouvidis, J., 62

Coyne, J. C., 121, 131

Crews, F., 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 127, 131, 139, 144

Cromwell, O., 112

Crosby, F., 216

Cruse, H., 252

Crypto-Judaism, xxii, 54, 65, 66, 90, 100, 199, n.82, n.97; see also Deception

Cuddihy, J. M., xxi, xxii, xxiii, 16, 18, 21, 77, 79, 108, 115, 123, 137, 141, 142, 221, 314, 326

Cultural pluralism, 161, 275; as Jewish interest, xxii, xxxiv, lvi–lvii, 22, 85, 153, 194, 238–255, 287–288, 294, 302–329, passim, n.89, n.173; as portrayed in the media, n.50; Derrida and, 201; New York Intellectuals and, 220

Cultural superiority of Judaism and Jewish intellectual-political movements, xxxvii, 87, 95, 96, 97, 108, 196, 215, 309; see also Jewish superiority; Intellectual superiority; Moral superiority

Courtois, S., xxxvii, xlv

Czechoslovakia, 262, 267, 278, 279

Dan, U., lxi

Darwin, C., xviii, xx, lxviii, 20, 106, 124, 129, 130, 229

Darwinism, 20–49, 250, n.70

Davenport, C., 23, 28, 35

Davis, R., 77

Dawidowicz, L., 91, 279

Dawkins, R., 235

de Kooning, W., 213

de LaGarde, P., 164

de Toledano, R., 50

Deak, I., 302

Deception, xxxix, 55, 60, 63, 89, 90, 92, 94, 98, 110, 111, 115, 121, 161, 175, 191, 192, 199, 200, 321, n.48, n.58, n.71, n.96, n.112, n.171; see also Crypto-Judaism, Self-deception

Deconstructionism, 198–204, 207, 228, 232, n.145, n.146

Decter, M., n.175

Degler, C., xviii, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 33, 35, 42, 46, 248, 249, 266

Dennett, D., 37, 47

Derrida, J., 163, 199–204, n.145, n.146

Dershowitz, A., lxi, 238, 316, n.4

Deutsch, H., 128

Dewey, J., 244–45

Dickemann, M., 134

Dickstein, M., 142

Dickstein, S., xlii, 33, 255, 263, 268, 270, n.159

Disraeli, B., 12–13, 86, n.52

Dissent, 209, 220, 223

Divine, R. A., 246, 259, 270, 271, 272, 273, 282, 284

Dixon, S., 137

Doctorow, E. L., 9

Doise, W., 90

Dornbusch, S. M., 149

Dorsey, G., 27

Dosse, F., 21, 22, 142, n.146

Dostoevsky, F., 120

Dovidio, J. F., 216

Draper, P., 136

Duby, G., 137

Dumont, P., xxxii

Dunne, M. P., 149

Durkheim, É., 8, 20

Editors of Fortune, xiii, xiv, n.2

Edwards, K., 90

Efron, J. M., 82, 205

Egan, V., 48

Ehrenburg, Ilya., xli, 56–57

Ehrenburg, Israel, 26

Ehrlich, H., xli

Eickleman, D. F., Einhorn, D., 268

Einstein, A., vii

Eisenhower, D. D., 284

Eisner, M., liv, lv

Eissler, K., 128

Eksteins, M., n.49

Elazar, D. J., 57

Elkin, S., 141

Ellenberger, H., 118, 126, 130

Ellis, J., 36

Ellman, Y., 238

England, xiii, xliv, lxviii, 9, 67, 79, 83, 112, 135, 261–62, 275, 294–96, 306, n.20, n.79, n.161, n.171

Epstein, J., 4

Epstein, M. M., 6

Eribon, D., 21

Erikson, E. H., n.127

Esterson, A., Ethnocentrism, 164–172, 182, 188–194, 198, 206–208, n.122, n.123, n.124, n.143, n.146; European, xix, xxi, xxiii–xxix, 18, 22, 225, 254–255, 296, 308, 311, 324, 326; Jewish, xxiv, xxx–xxxvii, xlix, lxvi, lxvii, 18, 45, 116, 187, 220, 226, 296, 326, n.147; Minority group, 238, 306–309, 321; Protestant, xix

Eugenics, 12, 24, 28, 34–35, 44, 124, 147, n.66, n.178

Evron, B., li

Evsektsiya, 52, 55, n.72

Eysenck, H., 118

Fahnestock, J., 47

Fairchild, H. P., 271

Fancher, R. E., 32

Farrakhan, L., 309

Farrell, J. T., 213

Faur, J., 7, 14, 310

Fefer, I., 52

Fehr, E., xxvii, xxviii

Feldman, L. H., 12

Ferenczi, S., 128, 130, n.96, n.105

Ferguson N., 46

Ferkiss, V., 195

Fetzer, J. S., 242

Fiedler, L., xxiii, 3, 142, 213

Field, G. G., n.70

Field, S. A., 322

Finkelstein, N., xlix, liii, lxii

Flacks, R., 76, 77

Flinn, M., 235

Fölsing, A., vii

Foner, E., xlv

Ford, H., 238

Fortune, lii, 271; see also Editors of Fortune

Foucault, M.. 21, 142, 198

Fox, R., 20

Foxman, A. H., xxxiv, xlviii

France, xix, xxvi, xliv, lxiv, 8, 9, 21, 24, 133, 200, 202, 248, 251, 293, 305, n.110

Frank, G., 22, 23, 24, 25, 278, n.60

Frankel, J., 81, 82, n.74

Frankfurt School of Social Research, 1, 77, 151–98 passim, 206n; advocating radical individualism, xix, 161–65, 207, 313; and cultural criticism, 160–161, 214, 221, n.90; and Jewish identity, 152, 206, 207, 219, 232, 234, n.90, n.118; and Marxism, 30, 155, n.119; and New York Intellectuals, 209; and psychoanalysis, 139–141, 155, 157–158; and skepticism, 47–48, 227–28, 232; as advancing Jewish ethnic interests, vii, lxviii, lxxiii, 254; as authoritarian movement, 154, 207, 217, 221; as undermining gentile group allegiances, 9, 158–65, 207, 219; influence of, 193–99, n.144; opposition to empiricist science, 152–53, 155, 226, n.70, n.145; political background of, 151–152; support from wider Jewish community, 225; theory of ethnocentrism, xviii, 18, 308; theories of anti-Semitism, 12, 18, 153–160, 165–92

Frankfurter, F., xv, n.176

Freedman, D. G., 39

Freeman, D., 24, 26, 27, 29

Frenkel-Brunswik, 165, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186n.124, n.134

Freud, A., 128

Freud S., 105–150 passim, 219, 233; and Alfred Adler, 113, 126, n.98; and C. G. Jung, 108–110, 113, 125–126, 127, 130, 133, n.98, n.105; and organization of psychoanalysis as political movement, 124–133, 222, 229; and Otto Rank, 127, n.96; and Sandor Ferenczi, 128, n.96, n.105; as advancing Jewish ethnic interests, vii; as advocate of sexual freedom, 106–107, 114, 118, n.107; as cultural critic, 15, 16, 106, 114–115, 117–118, 133–134, 138, 161, n.99; as racialist thinker, 108–109, 133, 147; as scientist, 27, 118–123, 225, n.59, n.62, n.105; belief in Jewish superiority, 108–09, 111, 115–116, 147, 206; concern with anti-Semitism, 115, 116–117; hatred of non-Jewish world, 14, 105, 107–108, 111–112, 114–115; idolized, 1, lxix, 27, 110, 125, 222, 235, n.57; influence, 138–143, 167, 209, 220–221, n.108, n.109, n.110, n.116; Jewish identity, vii, 105, 107–111, 116, 216, 234, n.72, n.99

Friedenwald, H., 257, 259

Friedman, L., 195

Friedman, M., 252

Friedman, M. L., n.127

Friedman, T., lxi

Frink, H., 131

Fromm, E., 114, 140–41, 154–55, 163, 197, 220, 222

Frommer, M., 243, 244

Fuchs, L., 80, n.85

Fundamentalism, Jewish, xxxii–xxxiv

Furstenberg, F. F., 149

Gabler, N., xiii, xiv, n.2, n.81

Gächter, S., xxvii, xxviii

Gaertner, S. L., 216

Gal, A., 245

Galchinsky, M., 311

Galton, F., lxviii, 35

Garfinkel, 16

Gay, P., 15, 16, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 134, 224, n.62, n.98, n.100

Geertz, C., n.69

Geffen, D., lv

Gelb, S. A., Gelertner, D., lxi

Geltman, E., 220

Genetic Similarity Theory, 217, 235

Gerlernter, D., xxi

Germany, vii, xii, xiii–xv, xix, xxvi, xxxii, xxxiv–xxxv, xli, xliii, xliv, xlv, xlvii, l, li, lvi, lx, lxi, lxiv, 7–10, 34, 36, 39, 50, 54, 55, 60, 63, 73, 77, 80, 82, 83, 84, 91, 96, 99, 105, 106, 109, 111, 142–43, 151, 152, 155, 161, 162, 164, 197, 200, 219, 220, 221, 225, 233, 243, 244, 251, 253, 260, 261, 270, 271, 272, 274, 293, 294, 301, 305, 308, 312, n.58, n.68, n.97, n.11, n.121, n.155, n.162, n.163, n.164

Gholson, B., 229

Gilman, S. L., 109, 145

Gilson, E., 8

Ginsberg, A., n.52

Ginsberg, B. P., 9, 53, 80, 98, 280, 300, 311, n.28

Gitelman, Z., xli, 52, 53

Glazer, N., 9, 72, 77, 28, 83, 132, 165, 195–196, 209, 213, 225, 227, 269, 305, n.121

Glenn, S. S., 36

Gless, D. J., 198

Goddard, H. H., 32–33, 36, n.64

Goldberg, H., n.83

Goldberg, Johah, lxi

Goldberg, J. J., xxii, 23, 187, 221, 242, 243, 245, 290, 300, 301, n.95

Goldblum, J., lx

Goldenson, L., lv

Goldenweiser, A., 25

Goldfarb, S. H., 250

Goldfrank, E. S., 25

Goldhagen, D., l, li

Goldman, E., 68, 70

Goldmann, N., xxxix

Goldschmidt, W., xxv

Goldstein, A., 82

Goldstein, I., 277, 282–84

Goldstein, J., 225, 242, 257, 259, 260

Gomulka, W., 63, 100

González, G., 219

Goodman, P., 3, 139, 141, 142, 213

Gordon, S., 8

Gottfredson, L. S., n.141

Gottfried, P., viii–ix, xviii, lxxiii, 77, 193, 221, 225, 308, 310, 311, 315, n.84

Gottlieb, G., 39, 43

Gould, S. J., 30–38, 41–43, 46–48, 247, n.65, n.66, n.70

Graham, D., n.32

Graham, K. M., n.32

Grant, M., 24, 28, 35, 246–48

Gray, K. D., 149

Green, A., 281

Green, G., lix

Greenberg, C., 209–211, 213, 214

Greenberg, P., lxi

Greenspan, A., 216

Greenwald, A. J., 208, 216, 236

Grellong, B. A., 172

Gross, B., 42, n.98

Grosskurth, P., 109, 127, 128, 130, 131, n.96

Grünbaum, A., 118

Grünberg, C., 227

Grunberger, B., 143

Guastello, S. J., 165

Gullotta, T. P., n.127

Guterman, N., 124

Ha’am, A., see Ginsberg, A.

Hagen, W. W., 59, 305

Haider, G., lx

Hajnal, J., xxv, 135

Hale, N., 114, 128, 129, 132, 225

Halevi, H. K., n.38

Haliczer, S., 230

Hall, P. F., 248

Hamilton, D., n.26

Hammer, A., n.82

Hammer, M. F., xxxvi

Hanawalt, B., 136, 137

Handlin, O., 195, 196, 285–288, 289, 319, 327, n.173

Hannan, K., vii

Hannibal, 112, 114, 115

Hanson, P., 299

Harris, M., 28

Harter, S., 87

Hartung J., lxxiii, 122

Harvey, I., 48

Hawkins, F., 296, 297, 298

Hegel, G. W. F., 156, 163, 202, 204, 219

Heilbrun, J., lxi

Heine, H., 7, 10, 13, n.71, n.76, n.107

Heller, J., 9, n.51

Henrich, J., xxviii

Henry, W. E., 106

Herder, J. G., 312

Herlihy D., 137

Herrnstein Smith, B., 198

Herrnstein, R., vi, 31, 148, 149, 150, 242, 312, 313, n.176, n.179

Herskovits, M., 25, 287

Hertzberg, A., 31, 32, 33, 35, 39, 56, 70, 78, 80, 261

Herz, F. M., 183

Herzl, T., 13, 16

Herzog, E., 177

Heschel, A. J., 56

Heschel, S., 311

Hess, M., 244

Hierarchic harmony, 32, 312, 314, 315, 316, 322, 326, n.179, n.180

Higham, J., 166, 196, 218, 239, 243, 244, 247, 248, 256, 265, 286, 303, 317, 324

High-investment parenting, 82, 135–37, 146, 147, 177, 180, 182, 183, 190, 193, 324–25, 327, n.178

Himmelfarb, G., 150

Himmelstrand, U., n.93

Hirsch, Jerry, 30, 40, 41

Hirsch, Judd, lviii

Hitchens, C., lxii

Hitler, A., vi, xlii, xliv, xlvi, xlvii, lx, lxiii, 43, 96, 152, 161, 187, 279, n.71

Hoffman, A., 77

Hoffman, J., 77

Hofstadter, R., 75, 194–196, 227, 287, 288, n.108

Hogg, M. A., 12, 17, 89, 167

Hollinger, D. A., xviii, 4, 5, 20, 30, 242, 243, 244, 245

Holocaust, ix, x, xxxiii, xxxiv, xli–xliii, xlvi, xlvii–lii, liii, lvii, lviii, lx, lxiii, lxiv, lxix, 31, 34, 41, 44, 56, 73, 93, 153, 203, 228, 245

Hook, S., 53, 64, 95, 209, 211–13, 223, 242, 244, 274, 305

Horkheimer, M., 152–62 passim, 192, 197, 198, 214, 220, 222, n.113. n.116, n/117, n.118, n.144

Horney, K., 140

Horowitz, D., lxi, 69, 93, 95

Horowitz, I. L., 20, 98, 102, 217, 219, 221, 234, 309, 313, 314, n.119, n.180

House Un-American Activities Committee, xlii, 280, 281, 282

Howe, I., 16, 50, 213, 220, 223, 305

HUAC, see House Un-American Activities Committee

Hull, D. L., 47, 226, 229, 230

Human Behavior and Evolution Society, viii

Hume, B., lxii

Hungary, xxxviii, xliii, xlv, xlvi, 32, 65, 80, 99–102, 257

Hunt, E., 36

Hyman, H. H., 165, n.124

Hyman, P. E., 137, 148

Identification, Jewish, x, xxii, xxx, xxxi, xxxviii, lix, l, lxviii, 7, 45, 51, 172, 176, 187, 233, 234, 236, 268, 270, 321, n.16, n.71, n.114, n.120, n.147; and antiSemitism, 12; Holocaust as source of, xlix, li; of T. W. Adorno, 153, 163; of American Jewish communists/radicals, 67–79; of anti-Populist intellectuals, 195; of Hannah Arendt, n.108; of Berthold Auerbach, 10; of Franz Boas, 23, 24; of Boasian anthropologists, 22, 24; of Noam Chomsky, n.108; of Jacques Derrida, 199; of Benjamin Disraeli, 12; of Hollywood screen writers, n.81; of Jewish intellectuals, vi, vii–viii, xxxv, lxxiii, 2, 3, 5, 9, 10, 18, 39, 138, 139, 195, 205, 226; of Jewish political activists, xxxv, lxxiii, 5, 255, n.150; of Jewish radicals/leftists, xl, xliv, xlv, 5, 9, 30, 51–96, 138, 146, 171, 193, 208, 310, 229, 232, n.81, n.,83; of Ilya Ehrenburg, 56–57; of Albert Einstein, vii; of Frankfurt School, 140, 152, 234, n.90, n.118; of Felix Frankfurter, xv; of Sigmund Freud, 105, 107–111, 116, 216, 234, n.72, n.99; of Erich Fromm, 140, 163; of S. J. Gould, 31–32; of Clement Greenberg, 211; of Armand Hammer, n.82; of Heinrich Heine, n.76; of Joseph Heller, n.51; of Richard Hofstadter, n.108; of Sidney Hook, 211; of Max Horkheimer, 152; of Jewish liberals, 138, 171; of Horace Kallen, 323; of Leon Kamin, 32; of Irving Kristol, n.108; of Richard Lerner, 43; Claude Lévi-Strauss, 21; of Charles Liebman, 10; of Rosa Luxemburg, 54–55; of Louis Marshall, n.150; of Karl Marx, 50, n.71; of Barry Mehler, 40; of Ashley Montagu, 26; of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., xv; of neo-Freudians, 140; of neo-conservatives, 310–11, n.86; of New York Intellectuals, 138, 209; of Polish Jewish communists, 58–67; of psychoanalysts, 106, 144, 146, 208; of radicals in the U.K., 79; of Otto Rank, n.97; of J. Rapoport, n.81; of Maurice Samuel, n.150; of Edward Sapir ; of Leon Trotsky , 53, n.74; see also Social identity theory

Identification, of non-Jews, 167–190, 207, 322–324, n.122

Immigration: as Jewish interest, v, ix–xi, xxiii, xxxv, xliv, l, liv, lxvii, lxviii, lxix, lxx, lxxiii, 85, 187, 196, 205–06, 234, 237–99 passim, 300, 302, 310, 319, 322, n.50; into European countries, xix, xx, xxi–xxii, xxxv, xlix, lxii, lxvii, lxviii, lxix, 226, 315, 317–328; Charles Davenport and, 35; Jacques Derrida and, 201–02; S. J. Gould and, 31–34; H.H. Goddard and, n.64; Madison Grant and, 35; Oscar Handlin and, 195, 285–287, 289, 319, 327; Sidney Hook and, 213; Max Lerner and, 195; Richard Lewontin and, 41; Leon Kamin and, 32–34, 41; neo-conservatives and, 310–311, n.86; New York Intellectuals and, 210, 215; Steven Rose and, 41; Maurice Samuel, n.86; Israel Zangwill and, 258–259, 263, 323, 327, 328; of Jewish radicals, 83, 269, n.161, n.171

Individualism, 5, 18, 24, 149, 164, 186, 187, 217, 232–33; and science, 132, 228–35, n.104; as advocated by Jewish intellectuals, 14–15, 103, 149, 162, 163, 165, 168, 186, 187, 207, 252; as characteristic of European societies, ix, xxi, xxiv–xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, lxix, 103, 137, 163, 164, 228, 307–329 passim, n.114; as ideal for Judaism, xxi, xxx, 102, 141, 232; as incompatible with group conflict, 230, 307–308, n.55

Inquisition, Iberian, x, 14, 103, 128, 199, 230, 238, 306, 308, 329

Intellectual superiority: attitudes of, as characteristic of Jewish-dominated intellectual movements, 108, 109, 111, 120, 144, 145, 147, 206, 214

Intelligence, xx, xxxvii, lviii, 3, 30–38, 41, 42, 46, 48, 148–149, 195, 207, 246, 247, 249, 249, 266, 312, n.66, n.124, n.141, n.179; of Jews, xii, xvi, lxx, 4, 5, 6, 80, 96, 147, 186, 205, 214, 242, 266, 307–308, 317, 324, n.50, n.56, n.178

International Herald Tribune, n.32

Internet, censorship of, lxiii–lxv

IQ, see Intelligence

Irving, D., liii, 101, 102

Isaacs S. D., 239

Isenberg, P., 9, 114, 115, 117, n.90

Israel, xxxiv–xxxvi, xlviii, lxiii162, 274, 293–294, 303, 319, n.14; focus of Jewish support, ix, xix, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxxvi, xli, xlvii, l–lii, liv–lxiii, 56–57, 62, 66–67, 71–74, 78–79, 93, 99, 100–101, 103, 208–209, 211, 278, 284, 286, 287, 300–302, 309–310, 319–320, n.4, n.16, n.48, n.83, n.84, n.89, n.175; Jewish fundamentalism in, xxxii–xxxiv, lxviii, lxix, lxx, lxxi; portrayal in media, lv–lxiii

Israel, ancient, 44, 116, 133, 134

Itzkoff S., lxxiii, 39, n.178

Ivers, G., 249, 251

JAC, see Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

Jacoby, J., lxi

Jacoby, R., 198

Jahoda, M., 185, 190, n.120

Janov, A., 141

Janowitz, M., 185

Javits, J., 249, 255, 275, 282, 283, 290, 291

Jay, M., 152, 156, 159, 163, 192, 234, n.118

Jensen, A., 35, 36, 46, 48, 229

Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, xxxix, 52, 53, 55, 56

Jewish superiority, 97, 109, 111, 144, 147, 211, n.101; see also cultural superiority, intellectual superiority, moral superiority

Jewish Tribune, 263, 270

Judaism, see Anti-Semitism; Conservative Judaism; Orthodox Judaism; Reform Judaism; Zionism

Johnson, A., 262, 264, 272, 285

Johnson, H., 107

Johnson, L., 78

Johnson, P., 1, 6, 7, 8, 12, 97, 118, 187, n.56, n.120

Jones, A. S., liv, lv

Jones E., 109–111, 127, 128, 130, 131

Joseph, K., 295

Joyce, J., 204

Judis, J., 242, n.175

Jumonville, N., 209, 210, 211, 214, 215, 223, 227

Jung, C. G., 109, 110, 113, 125, 126, 127, 133, n.98, n.105

Kadushin, C., 4, 132, 139, 208

Kafka, F., l, lxix, 211

Kagan, R., lxi

Kaganovich, L., xl, 97

Kahan Commission, lxiii, n.37

Kahan, S., xxxviii

Kallen, H., 219–220, 240, 243–245, 254, 268, 277, 287–288, 303, 323

Kamenev, L., 53

Kamin, L., 30, 32–34, 41, 43,247

Kammerer, P., n.58

Kann, K., xli, xli, 73, n.81

Kann, P. R., liv

Kantor, K. A., n.2

Kaplan, D., 131

Kaplan, H. J., 3

Kaplan, L., lxi

Katz J., 50, 145, 156, 305

Katzenberg, J., liii

Kaufman, J., 96, 252

Kaus, M., 149

Kazin, A., 3, 213

Keegan, J., 29

Keeley, L. H., 29

Kelly, J. B., 148

Kerr, J., 132

Kerr, W., 4, 132, 237

Keyes, A., lxii

Khrushchev, N., 100

Kiell, N., 130

Kimball, R., 197

Kinnecutt, F., 271

Kirk, R., 221, n.175

Kissinger, H., liv, 209, 215

Klehr, H., 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 86, 84

Klein, D. B., 106, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 144, 145, n.97, n.99

Klein Halevi, lxi

Klineberg, O., 26

Knode, J., 82

Kohler, K., 268

Konvitz, M., 287

Kornberg,, R., 13

Kostyrchenko, G., 52, 57, 98, 99

Kotkin, J., n.28, Kramer, H., 197, 198, 210

Krassner P., 77

Kraut, A. M., 261, 262, 270, 271

Krauthammer, C., lxi, 305

Kris, E., 122

Kristol, I., lxi, lxviii, 209, 210, 213, 221, 305, n.168, n.175

Kristol, W., lv, lxi, xlviii

Kroeber, A., 23, 25, 27, n.60

Kudlow, L., lxi

Kunkel, E. J., xxv

Kunstler, W., 79

Kurzweil E., 106, 113, 114, 121, 133, 138, 142, 145, n.98, 194, n.110, n.111

Lacan, J., 21, 142

Lachman-Mosse, H., n.49

Lacouture, J., n.8

Ladurie, E. L., n.95, xxvi

Lakoff, R. T., 121, 131

Lamarckianism, 107, 120, 145, 147, n.58, n.77

Landau, D., 223

Landes, R., 25

Landmann, M., 163

Laqueur, W., 301

Lasch, C., 166, 167, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 206, 308

Laski, H., 16

Lasky, M. J., 213

Laslett, P., xxvi

Lauck, G., lxiv

Layton-Henry, Z., 296

Lazarsfeld, P., 21

Lazarus, M., 243, 244

Lear, N., lix–lx, 9

Lefkowitz, A., 251

Leftist politics Jewish involvement in, v, xi, xxxvii–xlvii, lxvii, lxviii, lxix, lxxiii, 3, 5, 11, 18, 20, 22–23, 25, 30–32, 38, 40–41, 50–104, 114, 139–140, 143, 149–155, 160, 162, 169, 171, 173, 192, 195–199, 205–209, 212, 215, 219–227, 244, 269, 279, 283, 306, 310–311, 314, n.23, n.60, n.63, n.74, n.83, n.174, n.177m n.180; see also Communism

Lehman, H. H., xli, 251, 259, 274, 283

Lehrman, D. S., 39

Lenin, V. I., xxxix, 52, 96–97, 141, 154, 227, n.91

Lenz, F., xxv, 20, 325, n.58

Lerner, M., 195, 287–288

Lerner, R., 300, 301, n.68

Lerner, Richard M., 39, 40–45, 46, n.68

Levenson, A., 268

Levering-Lewis, D., 251, 252

Levey, G. B., 84, n.89

Levin, G. M., liv

Levin, N., 51, 67, 68, 69, 86, 91, 92, 103, n.72

Levins, R., 41

Levinson, D. J., 165, 168–171, 183, 186, n.120, n.122, n.123

Lévi-Strauss, C., 22

Levy, R. S., 91

Lewin, R., 20, 36, 37

Lewis, B., 6, 82

Lewontin, R., 30, 38, 41–48, 231, n.70

Lichter, L. S., n.50

Lichter, S. R., lvi, lvii, 8, 9, 20, 30, 50, 51, 53, 71, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 87, 90, 101, 103, 140, 149, 208, 218, 225, 233, n.50, n.83, n.85, n.88

Liebman, A., 11, 67, 68, 69, 71, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 84, 87, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 228, 280, n.80, n.85

Liebman, C. S., 10, 20, 84, 88, 89, 95, 232, n.85, n.114

Light of the nations theme of Jewish ideology, 18, 80, 112, 113, 146, 206, 309

Likud Party, xxxv–xxxvi

Lilla, M., 22, 202

Limbaugh, R., lxii

Lincoln, W. B., 80

Lind, M., lxii, n.175

Lindbergh, A. M., xvi–xvii

Lindbergh, C., xii–xviii, n.4, n.5

Lindemann, A. S., xxxviii, xlv, xlvi, 4, 6, 11, 53, 54, , 81, 96, 97, 98, 99, 251, 287, 302

Linton, R., 27

Lipset, S. M., 11, 76, 77, 78, 86, 194–96, 213, 300, n.148

Lipsky, S., xli

Lipstedt, D., lv

Liskofsky, S., 291

Litvinov, xlv

Lodge, H. C., 256, 257

Lorenz, K., 39

Louis IX, 305, n.177

Lowell, A. L., 265

Lowenstein, S. M., n.121

Lowenthal L., 222, n.124

Lowie, R., 25, 28

Loyalty, Jewish, xxxvi, xlix, 74, 99, 101, 171, 244

Lueger, K., 205

Lumet, S., xlv

Luxemburg, R., 54–55, 59, 222, n.83

Lynn, R., 33m 317, n.178

Lyons, P., 71, 74, 93, 94, 95, 269

Lyotard, J.-F., n.145

Lysenkoism, n.77

Maccoby, E., 174

Macdonald, D., 138, 213

MacDonald, K. B., viii, ix, xx, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxix, xxx, xlii, xlii, li, lx, lxv–lxviii, lxx, lxxiii, 42, 43, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 133, 134, 135, 136, 173, 174, 175, 183, 186, 235, 321, 315, 318, 325, 326, 329, n.13, n.107, n.178

MacFarlane, A., 135, 136, 137, 318

MacMillan, M., 118, 119

Magnet, M., 149

Mahler, J., 31

Maier, J. B., 152, 162

Mailer, N., 9, 139, 142, 213

Mannoni, O., 106

Marcia, J. E., n.127

Marcus, J., 11, 51, 140, 152

Marcuse, H., lii, 113, 117, 118, 123, 139–142, 154–155, 197, 220, 222, n.83, n.113

Marranos, see New Christians

Marshall, L., xxxix, 242, 251, 259, 260, n.150

Martin, J., 174

Marx, K., 13, 16, 20, 50, 89, 91, 118, 141, 142, 220, 221, 227, 314, n.71, n.110

Marxism, viii, xviii, xx, xlv, 16, 21, 31, 41, 46, 50, 59, 60, 69, 74, 87, 90, 92, 198, 209, 314, 316, n.23, n.57, n.74, n.83, n.84; and Frankfurt School, 152, 154–155, 192, 197, n.112; and psychoanalysis, 114, 141–143, 146–147, 209, 219–221, n.71, n.110; see also Leftist politics

Maslow, W., 272

Massing, P. W., 8, 188

Masson, J., 8, 126, 128, 129, 131

Matteson, D. R., n.127

Mayer, A., xlv

Mayer, E., n.121

Maynard Smith, J., 20, 37, 38

McCarran, P., 274, 281, 285, 292, 293

McCarran-Walter Act, 274–276, 278, 281–285, 286, 289–290, 328

McCarthyism, xlii, xliv, 32, 75, 84, 193, 238

McConnell, S., x, n.1

McCormack, D., 298

McCormick, R., 15

McGrath, W. J., 114, 115, 117

McLanahan, S., 148, 149

Mead, M., 20, 23, 25–29, 249, n.61, n.142

Medding, P. Y., n.89

Media, Jewish involvement in, xiii–xv, xviii–xx, xli, xliii, xlvii, li, lii–lxv, lxviii, lxix, 2, 6, 8, 9, 50, 79, 100, 131, 138, 139, 206, 225–226, 233, 235, 238, 246, 250, 253, 257, 296, 301, 302, 310, 317, n.28, n.32, n.175

Medved, M., lii, lix

Mehler, B., 40

Meir, G., 56

Meitlis, J., n.101

Menorah Journal, 209, 213, 220

Messianism, as characteristic of Jewish intellectual movements, 41, 82, 87–88, 111–112, 134, 145–146, 202, 223, n.71, n.102

Meyer, E., xiii

Meyer, M. A., 268, 269, n.71

Mezvinsky, N., xxxii–xxxiv

Michael, J. S., 36

Michaels, R., 119

Miele, F., 36

Miller L. F., 149

Miller, N., 90

Minc, H., 61

Minton, H. L., 165

Mintz, J. R., 177, 223

Mishkinsky, M., 51

Mitscherlich, A., 143

Molenaar, P. C. M., 42

Molotov, V., 53, 56

Moltz, H., 39

Money, J., 326

Monogamy as Western marriage system, xxiv–xxvi, xxx, xxxi, lxv, 133–37

Montagu, A., 26, 249

Moore, G., 300

Moral particularism: as characteristic of Judaism, ix, xxix, xxxi, xxxiv, xl

Moral superiority: as aspect of Jewish intellectual movements, xx, xxix, 65, 70, 108, 115, 116, 117, 120, 144, 145, 147, 194, 206, 214, 221, 316, n.83

Morris, D., lxi

Morris, G. L. K., 213

Morton, S. G., 35

Moscovici, S., 17

Mosse, G., 10, 84, 219, n.84, n.177, n.180

Mosse, W. E., 231, 302, n.49

Moynihan, D. P., 9, 132, n.121

Mugny, G., 17

Mullen, B., 208

Multiculturalism, see Cultural pluralism

Murray, C., vi, 148, 149, 150, 242, 312, 313, n.179

Musiquant, C., 293

Muuss, R. E. H., n.127

Myers, G., 30, 39

Nadell, P. S., 262

Nagai, A. K., 300

Namier, L., 205

Napoleon, 112

Nathan of Gaza, 118, n.102

Nation, lxii

National Socialism, x, xiii, xiv–xvii, xlv–xlvii, lxiii, 7–9, 34, 43–44, 56, 60, 64, 96, 107–108, 140, 143, 145, 151–153, 156, 161–162, 164, 207, 217, 241, 245, 253, 270–271, 294, 308, n.3, n.4, n.24, n.34,n.68, n.116, n.70, n.92

Nationalism: non-Jewish, xviii–xix, xxxv–xxxvi, xl, xlv, 44, 50, 51, 63, 66–67, 80, 89–90, 100, 159–163, 190, 201, 210, 215, 220, 240, 252, 271, 296, 310, n.71, n.93; Jewish, xxxv–xxxvi, 51, 52, 53, 81, 92, 97, 162, n.72, n.74, n.150

Navasky, V., 280, n.25

Nazism, see National Socialism

Neo-conservatism, v, vi, x, xi, xviii, lv, 103, 208, 215, 221, 223, 225, 234, 242, 305, 310–311, 313, n.54, n.86, n.89, n.175

Neo-Orthodox Judaism, see Orthodox Judaism

Netanyahu, Benjamin, xxxv

Netanyahu, Benzion, 306

Neuhaus, R. M., 242

Neuringer, S. M., 242, 255, 256, 257, 259, 260, 269, 270, 272, 273, 274, 275, 285, 289

Neusner, J., 238

New Christians, 6–7, 14–15, 103, 161, 199, 219l, 306, 310, n.54

Newsweek, n.32

Newsweek International, lxii

New York Intellectuals, vii, xviii, xxiii, lxxiii, 1, 3, 9, 13, 16, 38, 103, 132, 138–139, 141, 196, 205–36 passim, 242, 244, 245, 256, 259, 279, 287, 305, 310, 317, n.148, n.173

New York Post, x, xiii, lv, lxii

New York Review of Books, 38, 139, 209

New York Times, xiii, xiv, xli, liv–lv, lxii, 79, 282, n.25, n.32

Newhouse, S., xiii, liii, Niebuhr, R., xvi, xxi–xxiii

Nolte, E., xlv, xlvi

Noonan, J., T., 137

Nordic supremacy theory, xii, 24, 34, 247, 264, 266, 267, 275, 277, n.159

Norton A. J., 149

Novak, R., lxii

Novick P., 195

Nugent, W. T. K., 195

O’Brien, P., lxxi

Oedipal complex, 113, 121, 126–27, 131, 143

Ohmann, R., 198

Orgel, S., 119, 129, 131

O’Reilley, B., lxii

Orthodox Judaism, xxxvii, 83, 103, 189, 235, 159, 268, 303, 312, 320, n.87, n.88, n.121, n.161

Ostow, M.,145

Ozick, C., xxxviii, 16, 218–219

Palestinians, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxv, lii, lx, lxi, lxii, lxx, n.21

Pangle, T. L., 221

Partisan Review (PR), 3, 138–139, 209–11, 213, 215, 220, 222–223, 227, 244, n.173

Pavlov, I., n.77

PCIN, see President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization

Pearl, Jonathan, lvii, lviii

Pearl, Judith, lvii, lviii

Perelman, R., liii

Peretz, M., liv, lxi, 208–09, 294

Pérez, J. A., 17

Perle, F., 141

Perle, R., lxviii

Perlman, P. B., 267, 268, 280

Petegorsky, D., 246

Petersen, W., 287, 328

Pettigrew, T. F., 186, 187

Peyser, A., lxi

Pfeffer, L., 250–51

Phillips, R., 136

Phillips, W., 213, 222, 227

Phillips, W. Senator, 271

Piccone, P., 197

Pinker, S., viii, 37

Pinkus, B., 51, 52, 53, 96

Pipes, D., lxi

Pipes, R., 53, 80, 96, 98, 99, n.67, n.86

Plastrik, S.,220

Pluralism, see Cultural pluralism

Podhoretz, J., xi, lxi

Podhoretz, N., xi, lvi, lxii, lxiii, lxviii, 16, 147, 209, 210, 213, 215–216, 223, 242, 305, 310, 324, n.4, n.92, n.175

Pogrebin, L. C., n.174

Poland, xxxviii, 32, 51, 54, 55, 58–67, 69, 72, 74, 80, 87, 91, 94, 95, 98–101, 223, 261–263, 278–79, n.29, n.78

Pollack, L., 136

Popper, K., 226, n.115

Porter, R., 137

Postmodernism, 48, 197–99, 205, 228, 232, n.70, n.145, n.146

Powell, R. A., 122

Powers, S., n.50

Pratto, F., 327

Prawer, S. S., n.76

President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization (PCIN), 249, 280–82, 292, 319

Protestantism, xvi, xviii, xix–xxiii, 5, 20, 21, 77, 106, 140, 149, 196, 242, 243, 244, 250, 257, 270, 300

Psychoanalysis, viii, lviii, lxvii, lxviii, lxxiii, 1, 9, 14, 18, 198, 207, 208, 254, 285, n.90; 105–150 passim; and cultural critique, 15, 16, 106–107, 111, 114–116, 117–18, 123–24, 132–144, 160, 206, 324, n.95, n.100, n.109, n.110; and Boasian anthropology, 12, 28, 30, n.62; and the Frankfurt School, 154–55, 158, 185, 188, 190–191, 193, n.116, n.127; and group cohesiveness, 217–18, 221, n.57; and leftist politics, 114, 138–40, 146–147, n.74, n.83, n.98; and Marxism, 114; and New York Intellectuals, 209; and theories of anti-Semitism, xviii, 18, 112–113, 117–118, 141, 143–145, 158, 185, 193, 206, 286, 308, n.l01; as authoritarian movement, 27, 124–33, 221; as messianic movement, lviii, 41, 87, 112–13, 217, n.97; as political movement, 124–33, 144, 207, 222, 224, 229, n.52, n.105, n.106; as serving Jewish interests, 144–150, n.108Jewish involvement in, 104m 105–06, 109–10, 232, n.56, n.94, n.99; racialist thinking in, 107–10; role of Jewish intellectual media in promoting, lii, 38, 225; scientific status of, 118–24, 226, n.103, n.111

Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 131

Pulzer, P., 8, 91

Quaife, G. R., 137

Raab, E.,85, 194, 241, 300, 305, n.148

Race, 92, 278, 145; as category for immigration to Western countries, 260, 264, 270, 273, 273, 276–277, 281, 284, 286, 291, 301; Jewish, xiii, xxxv, 13, 109, 114, 115, 145, 161, 258, 259, 268, 271, n.52, n.58, n.150; white or nordic, xii–xiii, xviii, 240, 263, 267, 268, n.159; see also Racial differences research

Racial differences research, 22–28, 33, 36, 246, 246–49, 255, 286

Radical politics, Jewish involvement in, see Leftist politics

Radin, P., 25

Radosh, R., xliii, xliv, n.25

Ragins, S., 253

Rahv, P., 213

Raico, R., lxxiii

Rank, O., 112, 125–127, n.96, n.97

Rankin, J., 278

Rapoport, J., xl–xli, n.81

Rapoport, L., xxxviii, xxxix, 53, 80, 96

Rappoport, C., n.74

Rather, L. J., 220, n.52

Rawls, J., 327

Ray, J. J., n.143

Raz, N., 48

Redstone, S., liii

Reform Judaism, xxii, xxxi, lv, 78, 103, 112, 207, 239, 268–69, 303, 316, n.7, n.60, n.88

Reich, C., 16

Reich, R., 216

Reich, W. 16, 113–14, 123, 139–42, 155, 221

Reik, T., 123

Reike, M. L. 165

Reiner, R., lix

Reiser, M. I., 119

Revercomb, C., 273

Reynolds, G., 165

Reynolds, J., 62

Rice, E., 110, 116, 117

Richard, J., 305, n.177

Richards, R., 36

Richerson, P. J., 47

Riesman, D., 195–96, 213, 287

Rifkind, S. H., 274, 276–77, 280, 283

Ringer, F. K., 8, 162

Roberts, J. M., n.52

Roberts, P. C., n.176

Robertson, P., n.175

Roddy, J., n.8

Rodríguez-Puértolas, J., 7

Rogoff, H., 92

Romania, 262

Rome, x, xxvi, 52, 112, 114–115, 120, 133, 137, 312, 326, 329, n.114

Rose, S., 30, 41, 43

Rosen, E. J., 183

Rosenberg, A., 161

Rosenberg, H., 213

Rosenberg, J., 78

Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, xlii–xliv, 71, 72, 279–280

Rosenblatt, G., lxx

Rosenblatt, J. S., 39

Rosenfeld, I., 3, 68, 141, 213

Rosenfeld, M., 68

Rosenfield, H. N., 280, 283

Rosenman, S. I., xv

Rosenthal, A. M., xi, lxi

Rosenthal, H., 220

Rosenwald, J., 251, n.120

Ross, E. A., 244, 257–258, 265

Roth, P., 15, n.90

Rothman, S., 8, 9, 20, 30, 50, 51, 53, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 84, 87, 90, 91, 96, 101, 103, 114, 115, 117, 140, 149, 208, 217, 218, 225, 233, n.50, n.83, .n85, n.88, n.90

Rothschilds, n.175

Rouche, M., 137

Rubenfeld, F., 210, 211, 213

Rubenstein, G., 189

Rubenstein, J., xl, 56, 57, 98

Rubin, J., 77

Rudin, S., n.50

Rudnick, P., n.50

Rühle, O., n.71

Ruppin, A., 223, 312

Ruse, M., 30

Rushton J. P., lxxiii, 33, 35, 36, 42, 148, 217, 235, 247, 266, n.179

Russell, D. A., 36

Russell, J. C., lxxi

Russia, vii, x, xiii, xix, xxxvii–xlvii, 5, 11, 23, 25, 32, 51–53, 62, 75, 81, –83, 87, 92, 96–101, 127, 225, 238, 258, 269, 278, 288, 307, n.53, n.73, n.74, n.92, n.119, n.155

Ryan, A., 312, n.176

Sabath, A., 255, 263, 267–68, n.159

Sabin, J., lxxiii

Sachar, H. M., 77, 79, 99, 218, 220, 225, 238, 243, 245, 305

Safire, W., lxi

Said, E., lxii

Sale, K., 141

Salter, F., xiii, lxxiii, 131, 301, 302, 305

Samelson, F., 32, 33, 35, 247, 248

Sameroff, A., 39

Sammons, J. L., 13, n.71, n.107

Samuel, M., 240, 261, n.150

Sandel, M. J. 244, 245

Sanford, R. N., 165, 167, 172

Sapir, E., 25, 28

Sarich, V., 47

Saxe, L., 216

Schachtman, M., Schapiro, L., xxxix

Schapiro, M., 213

Schatz, J., 14, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 80, 87, 88, 91, 95, 100, 101, 279, n.83

Schiff, J., xxxix, xlii, xlv, 81, 225, 251

Schlesinger, A., 302

Schmidt, H. D., 253

Schneerson, M., xxxiii, 223

Schnierla, T. C., 39, 43

Schofield, R., 134, 135

Scholem, G., 82, 152, 218, 219

Schorsch, I., 244

Schuh, E. S., 208, 216, 236

Schwartz, D., 3, 213

Schwarzchild, S. S., 219

Science, as Western phenomenon, xxvii–xxx, lxvii, lxix, 228–236, 309, 326

Segal, N., 39

Segersträle, U., 47

Self-deception, vi, 10, 15, 54, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 65, 66, 67, 74, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 111, 192, 199, 216, 220, 234, 236, 321, n.48, n.147

Selzer, J., 47

Sennett, R., 21

Sexual reform and psychoanalysis, 106–07, 114, 118, 135–138, 147–150

Sexual repression, as element of psychoanalytic theory, 112–13, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123, 126, 140–44

Shafarevich, I., n.74

Shahak, I., xxxii–xxxiv

Shapiro, E. S., 78, 138, 208, 209, 300

Shapiro, K., 3, 141

Shapiro, N., lvi

Sharon, A., xxxiii, lx, lxi, n.36, n.38

Shavit, A., lx

Shaw, R. P., 82

Sheatsley, P. B., 165, n.124

Sheehan, M. M., 137

Shepherd, N., 54

Shils, E. A., 194–96, 213

Shipman, P., 26

Sidanius, J., 327

Silberman, C. E. P., 56, 84, 85, 241, n.28, n.89, n.149

Silverman, I., 39

Simon Wiesenthal Center, lxiii–lxv, n.41, n.42

Simon, J., 242

Sims, J. H., 106

Sinclair, A., 90

Singerman, R., 246, 247, 268

Sirkin, M. I., 172

Skepticism, as feature of Jewish intellectual movements, 8, 27, 46–48, 163, 202, 227–228, 232, n.146

Slansky, R., 279

Slusser, R. M.., xxxvii

Smith, G., 253, 306

Smith, R. M., 322, 323

Smooha, S., 319

Snyderman, M., Sobran, J., lxiii, n.4, n.75, n.175

Social identity theory, passim

Social science, as ideology, vii, 10, 18, 153–154; Jewish involvement in, vi–vii, viii, xx, lii, lxviii, 1, 8–9, 15, 18, 20–49 passim, 79, 80, 87, 90, 105, 110, 112, 116, 118–133, 139, 142, 144, 145, 145, 150, 151–158, 162, 163, 165, 166, 166–192, 195–198, 205–208, 218, 224, 226–236, 240, 244, 248, 249, 254, 258, 271, 286–287, 298, n.57, n.58, n.101, n.176, n.177

Sociobiology, see Darwinism

Sociology, 9, 20, 21, 130, 138, 151, 153–154, 210, 213, 218, 227, 234, 309, 314

Solkolnikov, G., 53

Solzhenitsyn, A., n.92

Sonnenfeld, B., n.50

Sontag, S., 213

Sorin, G., 5, 23, 51, 67, 68, 83, 269

Sorkin, D., 9

Southwood, T. R. E., 326

Soviet Union, see Russia

Spencer, H., 20

Spielberg, S., liii, lvii

Spier, L., 25

Spinoza, B., n.56

Spray, S. L., 106

Stalin, J., xxxvi–xxxix, xli, 52–53, 56–57, 60–61, 76, 79, 88, 97–103, 212, n.24, n.25

Stalinism, 126, 128, 153, 223, 305

Stallworth, L. M., 327

Stein, B., lvi, lix, lx, 9

Stein, G., 16

Steinberg, L., 136

Stern, F., 161

Stimson, H. L., 261

Stocking, G., 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 248, n.63

Stoddard, T. L., xii, 247

Stoecker, A., 8

Stone, L., xxv, 136

Stove, D. C., 230

Stratton, L. M., n.176

Strauss, L., 221, 225

Sugerman, 246, 247, 268

Sullivan, A., lxii

Sullivan, J., xi

Sullivan, H. S., 140

Sulloway, F., 118

Sulzberger family, xiii, li, liv

Svonkin, S., xlii, 69, 72, 239, 245, 246, 252, 278, 279, 280

Symons, D.,37

Symott, M. G., 265

Sykes, B., xxvii

Szajkowski, Z., xxxvii, xliii, xlv, xlvi, 81, 225, n.53

Tar, Z.,140, 152, 153, 155, 162

Tarcov, N., 221

Taylor, S. J., n.25

Terman, L. M., 33–34, 266

Thatcher, M., 295

Thernstrom, A., lxx

Thernstrom, S., lxx

Tifft, S. E., liv, lv, Tiger, L., 39

Tikkun, 209

Tobach, E., 39, 43

Tooby, J., viii

Toranska, T., 61, 62, 65

Torrey, E. F., 24, 27, 30, 107, 114, 118, 138, 139, 208, n.61

Triandis, H. C., xxiv, xxiii, 163, 164, 165, 186, 233, 326

Trilling, D., 213

Trilling, L., 16, 209, 213, 214, 220, 223

Trivers, R., 10, 236

Troper, H. E., 296

Trotsky, L., xxxix, xli, xlv, 53–54, 58–59, 92, 97, 103, 114, 141, 212, 220, 222, 227, 245, n.74, n.83

Trotskyism, 60, 114, 209, 213, 220, 221, 222, 245

Truman, H. S, 73, 273, 280, 284

Tucholsky, K., 8

Turney-High, H., 29

Ukraine, 38–42, 54, n.81

United States, v, x, xii, xiii, xx, 148, 149, 315, n.4m n.14, n.43; and antiSemitism, 188, n.6, n.148; and cultural pluralism, 194, 195, 220, 298, 307–08, 316, 319, 323, n.155; and Jewish involvement in adversary culture, 9, 314, n.110; and Jewish leftists, v, xli, xlii–xlvi, 11, 67–79, 81, 83, 85–86, 225, n.82; and policy toward Israel, lii, lxvii, lxix, lxx, xxxiv, n.175; and relations with Protestants in, xxii–xxiii; as European nation, xxxiv; conflicts between Jews and non-Jews in, lxvi, lxix, 237, 310, 323–324; decline of Christian culture in, 5, 249–251, 320; ethnic conflict in, 316–318, 322, n.179; decline of European ethnic consciousness in, xi–xxiii, xxxv, xlvii, 194–195, 295–296, 307–08, 317, 321; Holocaust activism in, xlix–lii; Jewish identity in, n.75; Jewish involvement in immigration policy of, ix–x, xxii, xxxv, lxx, 33, 34, 82, 85, 196, 205–06, 210, 213, 237–93, 294, 296, 298, 315, 319, 328; Jewish media influence in, xiv, xviii, xlii, lii–lxv, n.51; Jewish political influence in, xi–xvi, xviii, 81, 237–293, 310; Jewish attempts to censor the internet in, lxiii–lxv, 305; Jewish intellectual influence in, 25, 38, 87, 107, 138, 145, 150, 205, 225, n.105, n.110; Jewish power in, xx, lxviii–lxx, 300–02, 305; Neoconservative movement in, 103, 310, 311, n.175

Universalism: and Jewish intellectual movements, xxiii, 4, 10, 16–17, 41, 50–51, 87, 89, 90, 93, 96, 102, 145, 146, 162–163, 198, 202, 207, 212–213, 220–221, 232, 242, 257, 268, 282, 285, 310, n.62, n.90, n.109, n.145; and science, 227–228; as characteristic of Judaism, xxxiii–xxxiv, 79, 159, 219, n.23; as characteristic of Western societies, xxi, xxiii, xxvii, xxxi, 21, 22, 46, 159, 198, 202–203, 227–228, 254, 309, 311, 318–319, 325–327;

Uritsky, M. S., 96, n.91

Urofsky, M. I., n.176

Vaile, W. M., xii, 264, 267, 292

Vaksberg, A., 52, 53, 54, 56, 97, 98

van Valen, L., 35

Vassiliev, A., xlii

Veblen, T., 15

Veyne, P., 137

Vidal, G., 216, 310

Viereck, P., 195

von Eye, A., 42–43

von Hoffman, N., 75, 76, 196, 197

von Treitschke, H., 244

Wagner, R., 167

Wald, A. L., 216, 220

Wald, L., 251

Wall, R., 135

Wallerstein, J., 148

Walter, F., 282–84, 289

Walter-McCarran Act, see McCarran-Walter Act

Walzer, M., x, 13, 213

Wanger, W., n.3

Wangh, M., 143

Warburg, P., xxxix, xlii, 251, n.175

Washington Post, xiii, lxii, n.22, n.32, n.39

Warshow, R., 209, 213

Waters, E., n.14

Wattenberg, B., xi, lxi, 242

Waxman, C., 148

Webb, J., 317

Weber, M., 20

Wefald, Rep., 265

Weil, F., 151, 225

Weinstein, A., xlii

Weisfeld, G., 39

Weltfish, R., 25

Weng, L. J., 36

Werth, N., xxxvii, xxxix, xl, xli

Westermarck, G., 120, 136

Western culture, xii, xiii, xxii, xlvii, lxiii, 57, 82, 98; and Holocaust, xliii, xlviii; as influencing Judaism, 212, 238, 321, 318; characteristics of, xxiii–xxix, xxxi, xxiv, 32, 45, 46, 134–138, 204, 228, 312–29, n.95, n.107, n.115, n.178, n.181; Jewish contributions to, lxvi–lxvii, lxviii–lxx, 324; Jewish cultural critique of, xxx, 28, 29, 30, 32, 38, 73, 112–117m 118, 120, 123, 126, 133–144, 149, 159, 198, 203, 211, 224, 233, 300, n.62, n.98, n.109, n.146; Jewish hostility toward, 15, 32, n.83, n.100; and the Jewish left, v, xliv, xlv, xlvi–xlvii, 18–19, 81, 99, 206, 314; Jewish attempts to alter, v, viii, ix, xiii, xlvii, xlix, lvii, lxvi, lxviii, lxix, lxii, 7, 18, 19, 21–22, 148, 160, 197, 198, 207, 211, 239, 293, 296–97, 299, 302, 319, 320, n.23, n.50, n.56, n.179; and Judaism, 300–29

White, L., 10, 23, 24, 25, 27

Whitfield, S. J., 218, 219

Whiting, n.9, n.11

Whitney, G., lxxiii

Wiesel, E., xxxiii, xlviii, li

Wiesenthal, S., xlix; see also Simon Wiesenthal Center

Wiggershaus, R., 140, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 160, 191, 192, 197, 198, 222, 225, 227, n.112, n.113, n.143

Willerman, L. 48

Williams, G. C., 37, 47

Wilson, David S., lxxiii

Wilson, E. O., 36, 41, 42, 47

Wilson, J. Q., 123, 134, 149

Wilson, W., xlv, 257, 259, n.63

Winston, D., 78

Wise, S. S., xxxix, lv, 260, 264

Wiseman, F., 9

Wisse, R., 93, 209

Wissler, C., 27

Wittels, F., 113, 122, 125, 129, 134, n.105, n.106

Wolf, C., n.46, n.47

Wolf, E. R., 23

Wolf, L., xlv, n.53

Wolfowitz, P., lxviii

Wolin, S., xxxvii

World Jewish Congress, xxxv, xxxix, liii, lv

Wortis, J., 108

Wrezin, M.,213

Wright, R., 37, 38

Wrigley, E. A., 134, 135

Yerkes, R. M., 33

Yerushalmi, Y. H., 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 116, 117, 125, 133, 146, 157, n.101

Young-Bruehl, E., 145

Zablow, S., n.95

Zangwill, I., 258–59, 263, 323, 327, 328, n.156

Zaretsky, E., 139

Zborowski, M., 177

Zeevi, R., lxi

Zhemchuzhina, P., 56

Zhuk, xxxix

Zinoviev, G., xxxix, xlv–xlvi, 53, 97, n.91

Zionism, xv, xxxv, 2, 162, 245, 296, 303, 313, 319, 327, n.16, n.20; and Jewish leftism, xl, 51, 52, 53, 56, 59, 60, 66, 67, 71, 72, 74, 82, 83, 92, 94, 103, 219; of L. Brandeis, 245, n.177; of I. Ehrenberg, 56; of A. Einstein, vii; of S. Freud, 107; of B. Hecht; of S. Hook, 211, 212; of H. Kallen, 243, 323; of A. Koestler, 211; of M. Lazarus, 244; of L. Marshall, n.150; of. H. Morgenthau, Jr., xv; of M. Peretz, 208; of A. Ruppin, 223; of G. Scholem, 218; of I. Zangwill, 258, 259, 263

Zion, S., lxi

Zuckerman, M., liv, lxi

Endnotes

1. McConnell’s comments were made on an email discussion list, September 30, 2001.

2. This listing is based on several sources: Editors of Fortune (1936); To Bigotry No Sanction. A Documented Analysis of Anti-Semitic Propaganda. Prepared by the Philadelphia Anti-Defamation Council and the American Jewish Committee. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Anti-Defamation Council (1941); Gabler 1988; Kantor 1982; http://www.psu.edu/dept/inart10_110/inart10/radio.html.

3. Ben Hecht, who was a prominent Hollywood screenwriter and staunch Zionist, included pro-interventionist ideas in movies at this time (Authors Calendar, http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bhecht.htm). For example, in Angels over Broadway (1940), Hecht has the Douglas Fairbanks Jr. character ask, “What happened to the Poles, the Finns, the Dutch? They’re little guys. They didn’t win. . . .” Rita Hayworth replies, “They will, some day.” Hecht also made some uncredited additions to Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). When Hitchcock was asked about the anti-Nazi and pro-Britain message of the film, he said that it was all the doing of Walter Wanger and Ben Hecht. (Wanger was also Jewish; his birth name was Walter Feuchtwanger.) In the film a character says, “Keep those lights burning, cover them with steel, build them in with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them and, hello, America, hang on to your lights, they’re the only lights in the world.”

4. The only exception in recent years—albeit relatively minor—was Pat Buchanan’s 1990 column in which he referred to Israel’s “Amen Corner” in the United States advocating war with Iraq. (Indeed, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee had been lobbying Congress behind the scenes to declare war on Iraq [Sobran 1999]). Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary, promptly labeled Buchanan an “anti-Semite” without feeling the need to address the question of whether or not American Jews were indeed pressing for war with Iraq in order to benefit Israel. As in the case of Lindbergh’s remarks a half century earlier, truth was irrelevant. While this incident has not altered the taboo on discussing Jewish interests in the same way that it is common to discuss the interests of other ethnic groups, it has resulted in a long-term problem for Buchanan’s political career. When Buchanan ran for president in 2000, a hostile columnist writing in a prominent Jewish publication stated, “Out of the slime of the sewers and into the filth of the gutter a desperate Patrick J. Buchanan, the neo-Nazi, has crawled into the political arena using antiSemitism as his principal device to secure a future for himself” (Adelson 1999). The columnist went on to claim that Buchanan “always was a neo-Nazi” and that he “reveals the shallow quality of his tortured, sick, defective mind.” Not to be outdone, Alan Dershowitz (1999) wrote, “Let there be no mistake about it. Pat Buchanan is a classic anti-Semite with fascist leanings who hates Israel and loves Nazi war criminals.” The example illustrates that Jews continue to exert immense pressure, including smear tactics, to keep Jewish interests off limits in American political discussion. As with Lindbergh in an earlier generation, Buchanan’s experience is a grim reminder to politicians who dare raise the issue of Jewish interests in public debate. Buchanan became completely marginalized within the Republican Party and eventually left it for a spectacularly unsuccessful run as the Reform Party presidential candidate in 2000.

5. In a conversation with his wife on November 24, 1941, Charles Lindbergh was pessimistic about establishing a Jewish state:

C. and I get into an argument á propos of an article in the paper, a speech of a rabbi at a Jewish conference in which he said that the first thing that would have to be done at the peace table after the war was that a large indemnity would have to be paid to the Jews for their sufferings. Also speaks about having a piece of land of their own—which I am sympathetic with. . . . [C.] says it isn’t as simple as all that. Whose land are you going to take? . . . He is very pessimistic of its being solved without great suffering. (A. M. Lindbergh 1980, 239)

6. The following is based on Bendersky’s (2000, 2–46) study of U.S. military officers but is representative of commonly held attitudes in the early 20th century.

7. “Reform Judaism Nears a Guide to Conversion.” New York Times, June 27, 2001.

8. Jewish pressure for altering traditional Roman Catholic attitudes on Jewish responsibility for deicide are recounted in Lacouture (1995, 440–458) and Roddy (1966). Pope John XXIII deleted the “perfidious Jews” reference from the Holy Week liturgy (Lacouture 1995, 448). He then solicited the opinions of the world’s 2,594 bishops on the Church’s relations with the Jews. Virtually all of the respondents wished to maintain the status quo. The Pope was “bitterly disappointed by the response of the episcopate” (p. 449).

9. Burton, M. L., Moore, C. C., Whiting, J. W. M., & Romney, A. K. (1996). Regions based on social structure. Current Anthropology, 37: 87–123.

10. Laslett (1983) further elaborates this basic difference to include four variants ranging from West, West/central or middle, Mediterranean, to East.

11. Burton, M. L., Moore, C. C., Whiting, J. W. M., & Romney, A. K. (1996). Regions based on social structure. Current Anthropology, 37: 87–123.

12. Barfield, T. J. (1993). The Nomadic Alternative. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

13. Support for this classification comes from several places in my trilogy on Judaism and in turn depends on the work of many scholars. Besides the sources in this preface, special note should be made of the following: Evolutionary history: MacDonald 1994, Ch. 8; Marriage practices: MacDonald 1994 (Chs. 3 and 8); Marriage psychology: CofC (Chs. 4, 8); Position of women CofC (Ch. 4); Attitude toward outgroups and strangers: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 8), MacDonald 1998a (Ch. 1); Social structure: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 8), MacDonald 1998a (Chs. 1, 3–5), CofC (Chs. 6, 8, and passim as feature of Jewish intellectual movements); Socialization: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 7), CofC (Ch. 5); Intellectual stance: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 7), CofC (Ch. 6 and passim); Moral stance: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 6), CofC (Ch. 8).

14. Grossman et al. and Sagi et al., in I. Bretherton & E. Waters (Eds.), Growing Points in Attachment Theory and Research. Monographs for the Society for Research in Child Development, 50(1–2), 233–275 . Sagi et al. suggest temperamental differences in stranger anxiety may be important because of the unusual intensity of the reactions of many of the Israeli infants. The tests were often terminated because of the intense crying of the infants. Sagi et al. find this pattern among both Kibbutz-reared and city-reared infants, although less strongly in the latter. However, the city-reared infants were subjected to somewhat different testing conditions: They were not subjected to a pre-test socialization episode with a stranger. Sagi et al. suggest that the socialization pre-test may have intensified reactions to strangers among the Kibbutz-reared babies, but they note that such pre-tests do not have this effect in samples of infants from Sweden and the U.S. This again highlights the difference between Israeli and European samples.

15. A halachic difference refers to a distinction based on Jewish religious law.

16. The following comment illustrates well the different mindset that many strongly identified Jews have toward America versus Israel:

While walking through the streets of Jerusalem, I feel Jewish identity is first and foremost about self-determination and, by extension, the security and power that comes with having a state. I am quite comfortable in Israel with the sight of soldiers standing with machine guns and the knowledge that even a fair number of the civilians around me are probably packing heat. The seminal event in my Zionist consciousness, despite my being born after 1967 and having serious misgivings about Israel’s control over the territories, is still the dramatic victory of a Jewish army in the Six-Day War. Put me in New York, however, and suddenly the National Rifle Association symbolizes this country’s darkest side. It’s as if my subconscious knows instinctively that the moment we land at JFK Airport, it becomes time to stash away those images of Israeli soldiers taking control of Jerusalem’s Old City, of Moshe Dayan standing at the Western Wall, and to replace them with the familiar photograph of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching by the side of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (A. Eden, “Liberalism in Diaspora.” The Forward, Sept. 21, 2001)

17. www.adl.org/presrele/dirab%5F41/3396%5F41.asp

18. Jerusalem Post, March 5, 2001.

19. See, e.g., the ADL Policy Report on the prospects of immigration legislation in the George W. Bush administration and the 107th Congress: www.adl.org/issue%5Fgovernment/107/immigration.html.

20. In: S. S. Boyle (2001). The Betrayal of Palestine: The Story of George Antonius. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, p. 160. As recounted by Boyle, Sheean was hired by the Zionist publication, New Palestine, in 1929 to write about the progress of Zionism in that country. He went to Palestine, and after studying the situation, returned the money the Zionists had paid him. He then wrote a book (Personal History; New York: Literary Guild Country Life Press, 1935)—long out of print—describing his negative impressions of the Zionists. He noted, for example, “how they never can or will admit that anybody who disagrees with them is honest” (p. 160). This comment reflects the authoritarian exclusion of dissenters noted as a characteristic of Jewish intellectual and political movements in CofC (Ch. 6). His book was a commercial failure and he passed quietly into oblivion. The subject of Boyle’s book, George Antonius, was a Greek Orthodox Arab from what is today Lebanon. His book, The Arab Awakening (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938) presented the Arab case in the Palestinian-Zionist dispute. The appendices to his book include the Hussein-McMahon correspondence of October 24, 1915, between Sharif Hussein (who authorized the Arab revolt against the Turks) and Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt. The correspondence shows that the Arabs were promised independence in the whole area (including Palestine) after the war. Also in the appendices are the Hogarth Memorandum of January 1918 and the Declaration to the Seven of June 16, 1918, both of which were meant to reassure the Arabs that England would honor its earlier promises to them when the Arabs expressed concern after the Balfour Declaration. Britain kept these documents classified until Antonius published them in The Arab Awakening. Antonius was pushed out of the Palestine Mandate Administration by British Zionists and died broken and impoverished.

21. Daily Pilot, Newport Beach/ Costa Mesa, California, Feb. 28, 2000.

22. “Project Reminds Young Jews of Heritage.” The Washington Post, Jan. 17, 2000, p. A19.

23. Steinlight tempers these remarks by noting the Jewish commitment to moral universalism, including the attraction to Marxism so characteristic of Jews during most of the 20th century. However, as indicated in Chapter 3, Jewish commitment to leftist universalism was always conditioned on whether leftist universalism conformed to perceived Jewish interests, and in fact Jewish leftist universalism has often functioned as little more than a weapon against the traditional bonds of cohesiveness of Western societies.

24. In the early 1950s Stalin appears to have planned to deport Jews to a Jewish area in Western Siberia, but he died before this project was begun. During their occupation of Poland in 1940, the Soviets deported Jews who were refugees from Nazi-occupied Western Poland. However, this action was not anti-Jewish as such because it did not involve either Jews from the Soviet Union or from Eastern Poland. This deportation is more likely to have resulted from Stalin’s fear of anyone or any group exposed to Western influence.

25. Taylor, S. J. (1990). Stalin’s Apologist, Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow. New York: Oxford University Press; R. Radosh (2000). From Walter Duranty to Victor Navasky: The New York Times’ Love Affair with Communism. FrontPageMagazine.com, October 26; W. L. Anderson (2001), The New York Times Missed the Wrong Missed Story http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson45.html, November 17, 2001. Radosh’s article shows that the Times’ sympathy with communism continues into the present. The Times has never renounced the Pulitzer Prize given to Walter Duranty for his coverage of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan.

26. Hamilton, D. (2000). “Keeper of the Flame: A Blacklist Survivor.” Los Angeles. Times, October 3.

27. See www.otal.umd.edu/~rccs/blacklist/.

28. Discussions of Jewish ownership of the media include: Ginsberg 1993, 1; Kotkin 1993, 61; Silberman 1985, 147.

29. www.economictimes.com/today/31tech22.htm

30. The Forward, April 27, 2001, pp. 1, 9.

31. The Forward, November 14, 1997, p. 14.

32. A partial exception is the Washington Post Co. Until her recent death, the Washington Post was run by Katherine Meyer Graham, daughter of Eugene Meyer, who purchased the paper in the 1930s. Ms. Graham had a Jewish father and a Christian mother and was raised as an Episcopalian. Katherine’s husband, the former publisher of the Post, Phil Graham, was not Jewish. The Post’s publisher, since 1991, is Donald Graham, the son of Katherine and Phil Graham. This influential publishing group is thus less ethnically Jewish than the others mentioned here. The Washington Post Co. has a number of other media holdings in newspapers (The Gazette Newspapers, including 11 military publications), television stations, and magazines, most notably the nation’s number-two weekly newsmagazine, Newsweek. The Washington Post Co.’s various television ventures reach a total of about 7 million homes, and its cable TV service, Cable One, has 635,000 subscribers. In a joint venture with the New York Times, the Post publishes the International Herald Tribune, the most widely distributed English language daily in the world.

33. www.eonline.com/Features/Specials/Jews/

34. Cones (1997) provides a similar analysis:

This analysis of Hollywood films with religious themes or characters reveals that in the last four decades Hollywood has portrayed Christians as sexually rigid, devil worshipping cultists, talking to God, disturbed, hypocritical, fanatical, psychotic, dishonest, murder suspects, Bible quoting Nazis, slick hucksters, fake spiritualists, Bible pushers, deranged preachers, obsessed, Catholic schoolboys running amok, Adam & Eve as pawns in a game between God and Satan, an unbalanced nun accused of killing her newborn infant, dumb, manipulative, phony, outlaws, neurotic, mentally unbalanced, unscrupulous, destructive, foul mouthed, fraudulent and as miracle fabricators. Few, if any, positive portrayals of Christians were found in Hollywood films released in the last four decades.

35. Reprinted in the New York Times May 27, 1996.

36. James Ron, “Is Ariel Sharon Israel’s Milosevic?” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2001.

37. From the Kahan Commission Report (www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ign0):

We shall remark here that it is ostensibly puzzling that the Defense Minister did not in any way make the Prime Minister privy to the decision on having the Phalangists enter the camps.

It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for having disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists’ entry into the camps. These blunders constitute the non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged.

38. Yossi Klein Halevi, “Sharon has learned from his mistakes.” Los Angeles Times, February 7, 2001.

39. Washington Post, July 3, 2001; Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2001.

40. Jewish organizations have also been strong advocates of “hate crime” legislation. For example, in 1997 the ADL published Hate Crimes: ADL Blueprint for Action, which provides recommendations on prevention and response strategies to crimes of ethnic violence, such as penalty enhancement laws, training for law enforcement and the military, security for community institutions, and community anti-bias awareness initiatives. In June 2001 the ADL announced a program designed to assist law enforcement in the battle against “extremists and hate groups.” A major component of the Law Enforcement Initiative is the development of specialized hate crime, extremism, and anti-bias curricula for training programs designed for law enforcement.

41. SWC Press Information, July 15, 1999; www.wiesenthal.com.

42. E.g., SWC Press Information, November 29, 1999; January 26, 2001; www.wiesenthal.com.

43. ADL Press Release, September, 14, 1999; www.adl.org.

44. AFP Worldwide News Agency, April 4, 2001; www.afp.com.

45. ADL Press Release, August 22, 1996; www.adl.org.

46. C. Wolf. Racists, Bigots and the Law on the Internet. www.adl.org.

47. C. Wolf. Racists, Bigots and the Law on the Internet. www.adl.org.

48. As indicated in SAID (p. 261), the AJCommittee’s endeavor to portray Jews as not overrepresented in radical movements involved deception and perhaps self-deception. The AJCommittee engaged in intensive efforts to change opinion within the Jewish community to attempt to show that Jewish interests were more compatible with advocating American democracy than Soviet communism (e.g., emphasizing Soviet anti-Semitism and Soviet support of nations opposed to Israel in the period after World War II) (Cohen 1972, 347ff).

49. As anti-Semitism increased during the Weimar period, Jewish-owned liberal newspapers began to suffer economic hardship because of public hostility to the ethnic composition of the editorial boards and staffs (Mosse 1987, 371). The response of Hans Lachman-Mosse was to “depoliticize” his newspapers by firing large numbers of Jewish editors and correspondents. Eksteins (1975, 229) suggests that the response was an attempt to deflect right-wing categorizations of his newspapers as part of the Judenpresse.

50. A recent, perhaps trivial, example of this type of intellectual ethnic warfare is the popular movie Addams Family Values (released in November 1993), produced by Scott Rudin, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and written by Paul Rudnick. The bad guys in the movie are virtually anyone with blond hair (the exception being an overweight child), and the good guys include two Jewish children wearing yarmulkes. (Indeed, having blond hair is viewed as a pathology, so that when the dark-haired Addams baby temporarily becomes blond, there is a family crisis.) The featured Jewish child has dark hair, wears glasses, and is physically frail and nonathletic. He often makes precociously intelligent comments, and he is severely punished by the blond-haired counselors for reading a highly intellectual book. The evil gentile children are the opposite: blond, athletic, and unintellectual. Together with other assorted dark-haired children from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and white gentile children rejected by their peers (for being overweight, etc.), the Jewish boy and the Addams family children lead a very violent movement that succeeds in destroying the blond enemy. The movie is a parable illustrating the general thrust of Jewish intellectual and political activity relating to immigration and multi-culturalism in Western societies (see Ch. 7). It is also consistent with the general thrust of Hollywood movies. SAID (Ch. 2) reviews data indicating Jewish domination of the entertainment industry in the United States. Powers, Rothman and Rothman (1996, 207) characterize television as promoting liberal, cosmopolitan values, and Lichter, Lichter and Rothman (1994, 251) find that television portrays cultural pluralism in positive terms and as easily achieved apart from the activities of a few ignorant or bigoted miscreants.

51. Heller combines social criticism with a strong Jewish identity. In a talk described in The Economist (March 18, 1995, p. 92), Heller is quoted as saying that “being Jewish informs everything I do. My books are getting more and more Jewish.”

52. The ellipsis is as follows: “Destruction of the Semitic principle, extirpation of the Jewish religion, whether in the Mosaic or in the Christian form, the natural equality of man and the abrogation of property, are proclaimed by the secret societies who form provisional governments, and men of Jewish race are found at the head of every one of them.” Rather (1986) notes that anti-Semites who believed in Jewish conspiracies often cited this passage as well as the Protocols in support of their theories. He also points out, citing Roberts (1972), that Disraeli’s view that events were controlled by vast international conspiracies was commonplace in the nineteenth century. Rather links these beliefs with the secret society at the center of the psychoanalytic movement (see Ch. 4) as well as with a secret society named “the sons of Moshe” organized by the Zionist Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg) whose work is discussed in SAID (Ch. 5).

53. This passage was invoked by Lucien Wolf, secretary of the Conjoint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association, to rationalize Jewish support for Russian revolutionary movements (see Szajkowski 1967, 9).

54. The New Christian ideology implies that members of a highly cohesive, economically successful group are seeking to be judged as individuals rather than as members of a group by the surrounding society. It is of interest that the moral imperative of judging on the basis of individual merit was also a theme in the work of nineteenth-century Jewish writer Michael Beer (see Kahn 1985, 122) and is a major theme of the contemporary neoconservative movement of Jewish intellectuals. Beer was forced to disguise the identity of his protagonist (as a lower-caste Hindu) because his audience was unlikely to view an explicitly Jewish protagonist positively.

55. Castro’s thesis is that economic and intellectual backwardness was the heavy price Spain paid for its successful resistance to the ideology of individual merit. As noted in SAID (Ch. 1), maladaptive ideologies can develop in the context of group conflict because they provide a positive social identity in opposition to an outgroup. Thus Spain was unlikely to move toward an individualist, post-Enlightenment society when the advocates of individualism were viewed as covertly having allegiance to a highly cohesive group.

56. Paul Johnson (1988, 408) takes the view that Jewish iconoclasm simply speeded up “changes that were coming anyway. The Jews were natural iconoclasts. Like the prophets, they set about smiting and overturning all the idols of the conventional modes with skill and ferocious glee.” Because it essentially trivializes the ultimate effects of Jewish intellectual efforts, such a view is inconsistent with Johnson’s claim that the emergence of Jews into the mainstream of Western intellectual discourse was “an event of shattering importance to world history” (pp. 340-341). Johnson offers no evidence for his view that the changes advocated by Jewish intellectuals were inevitable. Surely traditional Judaism did not encourage iconoclasm within the Jewish community (witness Spinoza’s fate and the generally authoritarian nature of community controls in traditional Jewish society [ PTSDA, Ch. 8]). Nor did traditional Jewish scholarship encourage iconoclasm. Although Talmudic studies definitely encouraged argumentation (pilpul; see PTSDA, Ch. 7), these discussions were performed within a very narrowly prescribed range in which the basic assumptions were not questioned. In the post-Enlightenment world, Jewish iconoclasm has clearly been much more directed at gentile culture than at Judaism, and evidence provided here and in the following chapters indicates that the iconoclasm was often motivated by hostility toward gentile culture. By Johnson’s own account, both Marxism and psychoanalysis are unlikely to have arisen from gentiles, since they both contain strong overtones of Jewish religious thinking, and I would argue that psychoanalysis especially is unlikely to have arisen except as a tool in the war on gentile culture. The results are much more plausibly due to the generally higher verbal IQ among Jews and their ability to form cohesive groups now directed at critiquing gentile culture rather than at comprehending the Torah and thereby achieving status within the Jewish community.

57. The comment referring to “solitary opposition” is disingenuous, since psychoanalysis from its origins was characterized by a strong group consciousness emanating from a committed core of members. Psychoanalysis itself energetically cultivated the image of Freud as a solitary hero-scientist battling for truth against a biased intellectual establishment. See Chapter 4.

58. Lenz (1931, 675) notes the historical association between Jewish intellectuals and Lamarckianism in Germany and its political overtones. Lenz cites an “extremely characteristic” statement of a Jewish intellectual that “The denial of the racial importance of acquired characters favours race hatred.” The obvious interpretation of such sentiments is that Jewish intellectuals opposed natural selection because of possible negative political implications. The suggestion is that these intellectuals were well aware of ethnic differences between Jews and Germans but wished to deny their importance for political reasons—an example of deception as an aspect of Judaism as an evolutionary strategy (SAID, Chs. 6-8). Indeed, Lenz notes that the Lamarckian Paul Kammerer, who was a Jew, committed suicide when exposed as a scientific fraud in an article in the prestigious British journal Nature. (The black spots on frogs, which were supposed to prove the theory of Lamarckianism, were in fact the result of injections of ink.) Lenz states that many of his Jewish acquaintances accept Lamarckianism because they wish to believe that they could become “transformed into genuine Teutons.” Such a belief may be an example of deception, since it fosters the idea that Jews can become “genuine Teutons” simply by “writing books about Geothe,” in the words of one commentator, despite retaining their genetic separatism. In a note (Lenz 1931, 674n), Lenz chides both the anti-Semites and the Jews of his day, the former for not accepting a greater influence of Judaism on modern civilization, and the latter for condemning any discussion of Judaism in terms of race. Lenz states that the Jewish opposition to discussion of race “inevitably arouses the impression that they must have some reason for fighting shy of any exposition of racial questions.” Lenz notes that Lamarckian sentiments became less common among Jews when the theory was completely discredited. Nevertheless, two very prominent and influential Jewish intellectuals, Franz Boas (Freeman 1983, 28) and Sigmund Freud (see Ch. 4), continued to accept Lamarckianism long after it became completely discredited.

59. I wish to thank Hiram Caton for his comments and help in the following discussion of the Boasian school of anthropology.

60. Although Kroeber did not have a self-conscious political agenda, his education in a leftist-Jewish environment may have had a lasting influence. Frank (1997, 734) notes that Kroeber was educated in schools linked to the Ethical Culture movement, “an offshoot of Reform Judaism” linked with leftist educational programs and characterized by an ideology of a humanistic faith that embraced all humanity.

61. Torrey (1992, 60ff) argues cogently that the cultural criticism of Benedict and Mead and their commitment to cultural determinism were motivated by their attempts to develop self-esteem as lesbians. As indicated in Chapter 1, any number of reasons explain why gentile intellectuals may be attracted to intellectual movements dominated by Jews, including the identity politics of other ethnic groups or, in this case, sexual nonconformists.

62. Although Freud is often viewed as a “biologist of the mind” (Sulloway 1979a), and although he was clearly influenced by Darwin and proposed a universal human nature, psychoanalysis is highly compatible with environmental influences and the cultural relativism championed by the Boasian school. Freud viewed mental disorder as the result of environmental influences, particularly the repression of sexuality so apparent in the Western culture of his day. For Freud, the biological was universal, whereas individual differences were the result of environmental influences. Gay (1988, 122-124) notes that until Freud, psychiatry was dominated by a biological model in which mental disorder had direct physical (e.g., genetic) causes.

63. Stocking (1968, 273ff) recounts Boas’s declaration of war on a group of anthropologists who had contributed to the war effort in World War I. Boas’s letter, printed in the leftist periodical The Nation, referred to President Wilson as a hypocrite and to American democracy as a sham. The group responded with “outraged patriotism” (Stocking 1968, 275), although the conflict reflected also the deep schism between the Boasian school and the rest of the profession.

64. See also Gelb (1986) for a revealing discussion of H. H. Goddard’s involvement in testing immigrants.

65. More recently, Gould (1997) accepts the idea that the human brain became large as a result of natural selection. Nevertheless, he states that most of our mental abilities and potentials may be spandrels. This is presumably an example of one of Alcock’s (1997) principles of Gouldian rhetoric, specifically that of protecting his own position by making illusory concessions to give the appearance of fair-mindedness in the attempt to restrict debate. Here Gould concedes that the brain must have evolved as a set of adaptations but concludes, without any evidence, that the result is mostly a collection of spandrels. Gould never lists even one example of a human mental or behavioral adaptation, even going so far as describing as “guesswork” the proposal that the human preference for sweets is innate. There is in fact an enormous body of research on many mammals showing that preference for sweets is innate (prenatal rats and sheep will increase their rate of swallowing shortly after the mother is injected with sweets; human neonates are attracted to sweet-tasting solutions). In addition, brain modules and chromosomal loci related to preference for sweets have been located.

66. As indicated below, a substantial body of research links brain size with IQ. Within Gould’s perspective, one could accept this research but still deny that intelligence has been an important aspect of human adaptation. It is interesting to note that Gould’s proposal is incompatible with a basic thesis of this project: that a fundamental aspect of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy has been a conscious effort to engage in eugenic practices directed at producing a highly intelligent elite and raising the mean intelligence of the Jewish population above the levels of gentile populations; and that intelligence has been a major aspect of Jewish adaptation throughout its history (see PTSDA, Ch. 7). Gould’s views on the importance of intelligence for human adaptation thus clearly conflict with the views and practices of his ancestors—views clearly articulated in the Talmud and in practices that were carried out for centuries. These practices are undoubtedly directly implicated in Gould’s success as an articulate, highly productive professor at Harvard.

67. After noting the tens of millions of deaths resulting from Soviet communism, Richard Pipes (1993, 511) states, “Communism failed because it proceeded from the erroneous doctrine of the Enlightenment, perhaps the most pernicious idea in the history of thought, that man is merely a material compound, devoid of either soul or innate ideas, and as such a passive product of an infinitely malleable social environment.” Although there is much to disagree with in this statement, it captures the idea that radical environmentalism is eminently capable of serving as an ideology underlying political regimes that carry out mass murder.

68. I should note that I have had considerable professional contact with Lerner and at one time he was a major influence on my thinking. Early in my career Richard Lerner wrote letters of recommendation for me, both when I was applying for academic positions and during the tenure review process after I was employed. The rejection of biological determinism is clearly central to the theoretical basis of my work in this volume and has been characteristic of my writing in the area of developmental psychology as well. Indeed, I have gone out of my way to cite Lerner’s work on developmental plasticity in my writings, and he cited some of my work on developmental plasticity in his On the Nature of Human Plasticity. I have also contributed to two books coedited by Lerner (Biological and Psycho-social Interactions in Early Adolescence and Encyclopedia of Adolescence).

Moreover, I have also been strongly influenced by the contextualist perspective in developmental psychology associated with Urie Bronfenbrenner and Richard Lerner and have several times cited Lerner in this regard (see my Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis [MacDonald 1988a, Ch. 9, and Sociobiological Perspectives in Human Development [MacDonald 1988b]). As a result of this influence, I made a major effort to reconcile contextualism with an evolutionary approach. Within this perspective, social structure is underdetermined by evolutionary theory, with the result that human development is also underdetermined by biological influences. (Indeed, in Chapter 9 of Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis, I show how National Socialism affected the socialization of German children, including indoctrination with anti-Semitism.) This theoretical perspective remains central to my world view and is described in some detail in PTSDA (Ch. 1).

69. Anti-theoretical perspectives are far from dead in anthropology. For example, the very influential Clifford Geertz (1973) has carried on the Boasian particularist tradition in anthropology in his rejection of attempts to find generalizations or laws of human culture in favor of interpretive, hermeneutic inquiries into the subjective, symbolic meaning systems unique to each culture. Applied to the present project, such a theoretical perspective would, for example, probe the subjective religious meanings to Jews of the Pentateuchal commandment to be fruitful and multiply and their fear of exogamy rather than attempt to describe the effects of fulfilling these commands on group and individual fitness, the genetic structure of Jewish populations, anti-Semitism, and so on.

70. It is interesting in this regard that the proto-Nazi racial theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain mounted an attempt to discredit science because of its perceived incompatibility with his political and cultural aims. In a move that long antedated the anti-science ideology of the Frankfurt School and contemporary postmodernism (see Ch. 5), Chamberlain argued that science was a social construction and the scientist was like an artist who was engaged in developing a symbolic representation of reality. “So strong was his insistence upon the mythical nature of scientific theory that he removed any real possibility of choosing between one concept and another, thus opening the door wide to subjective arbitrariness” (Field 1981, 296). In what I believe is a mirror-image of the motivations of many in the current anti-science movement, Chamberlain’s subjectivism was motivated by his belief that recent scientific investigations did not support his racialist theories of human differences. When science conflicts with political agendas, the best move is to discredit science. As noted in SAID (Ch. 5), Chamberlain was also very hostile toward evolutionary theory for political reasons. Amazingly, Chamberlain developed anti-selectionist arguments in opposition to Darwinism that predate similar arguments of modern critics of adaptationism such as Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould reviewed in this chapter: Chamberlain viewed Darwin’s emphasis on competition and natural selection as aspects of the evolutionary process as simply an anthropocentric version of the nineteenth-century “dogma of progress and perfectibility adapted to biology” (Field 1981, 298).

71. The issue of Marx’s Jewishness has been a continuing controversy (see Carlebach 1978, 310ff). Marx associated with both practicing Jews and individuals of Jewish ancestry throughout his life. Moreover, he was considered by others as Jewish and was continually reminded of his Jewishness by his opponents (see also Meyer 1989, 36). As indicated below, such externally imposed Jewish identity may have been common among Jewish radicals and surely implies that Marx remained conscious of being Jewish. Like many other Jewish intellectuals reviewed here, Marx had an antipathy toward gentile society. Sammons (1979, 263) describes the basis of the mutual attraction between Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx by noting that “they were not reformers, but haters, and this was very likely their most fundamental bond with one another.” Deception may also be involved: Carlebach (1978, 357) suggests that Marx may have viewed his Jewishness as a liability, and Otto Rühle (1929, 377) suggests that Marx (like Freud; see Ch. 4) went to elaborate lengths to deny his Jewishness in order to prevent criticism of his writings. Many writers have emphasized Marx’s Jewishness and professed to find Jewish elements (e.g., messianism, social justice) in his writing. A theme of anti-Semitic writing (most notably, perhaps, in Hitler’s writings) has been to propose that Marx had a specifically Jewish agenda in advocating a world society dominated by Jews in which gentile nationalism, gentile ethnic consciousness, and traditional gentile elites would be eliminated (see review in Carlebach 1978, 318ff).

72. Similarly, Levin (1988, 280) notes that some Evsektsiya activists clearly envisaged themselves as promoting Jewish nationalism compatible with existence within the Soviet Union. “It can even be argued that the Evsektsiya prolonged Jewish activity and certain levels of Jewish consciousness by their very efforts to wrench a new concept of a badly battered and traumatized Jewry… though at incalculable cost.”

73. A secret survey published in 1981 (New York Times, Feb. 20) on data from 1977 indicated that 78 percent of Soviet Jews said they would have “an aversion to a close relative marrying a non-Jew,” and 85 percent “wanted their children or grandchildren to learn Yiddish or Hebrew.” Other results indicate a continuing strong desire for Jewish culture in the Soviet Union: 86 percent of Jews wanted their children to go to Jewish schools, and 82 percent advocated establishing a Russian language periodical on Jewish subjects.

74. It should also be noted that in 1903 Trotsky declared at a conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (the major unifying organization for socialism in Russia at the time, including the Bolsheviks), that he and other Jewish representatives “regard ourselves as representatives of the Jewish proletariat” (in Frankel 1981, 242). This suggests that either he had altered his personal identity or that his later behavior was motivated by concerns to avoid anti-Semitism. Trotsky was also part of the ethnic nexus of psychoanalysis and Bolshevism in the Soviet Union. Trotsky was an ardent enthusiast of psychoanalysis, and, as indicated in Chapter 4, psychoanalysis must be considered a Jewish ethnic intellectual movement. The apex of the association between Marxism and psychoanalysis came in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, where all the top psychoanalysts were Bolsheviks, Trotsky supporters, and among the most powerful political figures in the country (see Chamberlain 1995). In work that is considered by Jewish organizations to be anti-Semitic (see note 22), Igor Shafarevich (1989) notes that Trotsky had a Jewish deputy and that Jewish writers have tended to idolize him. He cites a biography of Trotsky as saying: “From every indication, the rationalistic approach to the Jewish question that the Marxism he professed demanded of him in no way expressed his genuine feelings. It even seems that he was in his own way ‘obsessed’ with that question; he wrote about it almost more than did any other revolutionary.” Shafarevich also describes several other examples of Jewish Communists and leftists who had very pronounced tendencies toward Jewish nationalism. For example, Charles Rappoport, later a leader of the French Communist Party, is quoted as declaring that “The Jewish people [are] the bearer of all the great ideas of unity and human community in history… The disappearance of the Jewish people would signify the death of humankind, the final transformation of man into a wild beast” (p. 34).

75. Similar comments continue as a theme of writing about Jews in the contemporary United States. Joseph Sobran (1995, 5) describes Jews who

maintain their borders furtively and deal disingenuously with gentiles. Raymond Chandler once observed of them that they want to be Jews among themselves but resent being seen as Jews by gentiles. They want to pursue their own distinct interests while pretending that they have no such interests, using the charge of “anti-Semitism” as sword and shield. As Chandler put it, they are like a man who refuses to give his real name and address but insists on being invited to all the best parties. Unfortunately, it’s this [type of Jew] who wields most of the power and skews the rules for gentiles.

76. Consider the following comment on Heinrich Heine, who was baptized but remained strongly identified as a Jew: “Whenever Jews were threatened— whether in Hamburg during the Hep-Hep riots or in Damascus at the time of the ritual murder accusation—Heine at once felt solidarity with his people” (Prawer 1983, 762).

77. The cultural changes included the suppression of science to political interests and the canonization of the works of Lysenko and Pavlov. Whereas Pavlov’s scientific work remains interesting, an evolutionist, of course, is struck by the elevation of Lysenkoism to the status of dogma. Lysenkoism is a politically inspired Lamarckianism useful to communism because of the implication that people could be biologically changed by changing the environment. As indicated in Chapter 2 (see note 1), Jewish intellectuals were strongly attracted to Lamarckianism because of its political usefulness.

78. The “tested” comrades constituted an underground Jewish communist group in prewar Poland. When they came to power following the war, they allied themselves with other Jews who had not been communists prior to the war.

79. Similarly in England, the short-lived Hebrew Socialist Union was established in London in 1876 as a specifically Jewish association. Alderman (1992, 171) comments that this society “threw into sharp relief the problem that was to face all succeeding Jewish socialist organs and all subsequent Jewish trade unions: whether their task was simply to act as a channel through which Jewish workers would enter the English working-class movements—the Anglicization of the Anglo-Jewish proletariat—or whether there was a specifically Jewish (and Anglo-Jewish) form of labour organization and of socialist philosophy that demanded a separate and autonomous articulation.” Eventually a Yiddish-speaking Jewish trade union movement was established, and in cases where Jews joined previously existing unions, they formed specifically Jewish sub-groups within the unions.

80. The following discussion is based on Liebman (1979, 492ff).

81. A good example is Joe Rapoport, an American Jewish radical, whose autobiography (Kann 1981) shows the tendency for American Jewish radicals to perceive the Soviet Union almost exclusively in terms of whether it was good for Jews. Rapoport had a very strong Jewish identity and supported the Soviet Union because on balance he believed it was good for Jews. On his trip to the Ukraine in the early 1930s he emphasizes the Jewish enthusiasm for the regime but not the forced starvation of the Ukrainian peasants. Later he had a great deal of ambivalence and regret about supporting Soviet actions that were not in the Jewish interest. Similarly, Jews in the Hollywood Communist Party of screenwriters had strong Jewish identifications and were, privately at least, far more concerned about anti-Semitism than class warfare issues (Gabler 1988, 338).

82. The American businessman Armand Hammer had very close ties with the Soviet Union and served as a courier bringing money from the USSR for the support of communist espionage in the United States. Hammer is illustrative of the complexities of the Jewish identifications of communists and communist sympathizers. For most of his life he denied his Jewish background, but when near death he returned to Judaism and scheduled an elaborate Bar Mitzvah (Epstein 1996). Were his surface denials of his Jewish heritage to be taken at face value at the time they were made? (Hammer also portrayed himself as a Unitarian in dealing with Muslims.) Or was Hammer a crypto-Jew his entire life until openly embracing Judaism at the end?

83. As a personal note from when I was a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s, the overrepresentation of Jews in the New Left, especially during the early stages of protest to the Vietnam War, was rather obvious to everyone, so much so that during a “Teach-in” on the war held during the 1960s, I was recruited to give a talk in which I was to explain how an ex-Catholic from a small town in Wisconsin had come to be converted to the cause. The geographical (East Coast) and family origins (Jewish) of the vast majority of the movement were apparently a source of concern. The practice of having gentile spokespersons for movements dominated by Jews is noted in several sections of this volume and is also a common tactic against anti-Semitism (SAID, Ch. 6). Rothman and Lichter (1982, 81) quote another observer of the New Left scene at the University of Wisconsin as follows: “I am struck by the lack of Wisconsin born people and the massive preponderance of New York Jews. The situation at the University of Minnesota is similar.” His correspondent replied: “As you perceived, the Madison left is built on New York Jews.” My personal experience at Wisconsin during the 1960s was that the student protest movement was originated and dominated by Jews and that a great many of them were “red diaper babies” whose parents had been radicals. The intellectual atmosphere of the movement closely resembled the atmosphere in the Polish Communist movement described by Schatz (1991, 117)—intensely verbal pilpul-like discussions in which one’s reputation as a leftist was related to one’s ability in Marxist intellectual analysis and familiarity with Marxist scholarship, both of which required a great deal of study. There was also a great deal of hostility to Western cultural institutions as politically and sexually oppressive combined with an ever-present sense of danger and imminent destruction by the forces of repression—an ingroup bunker mentality that I now believe is a fundamental characteristic of Jewish social forms. There was an attitude of moral and intellectual superiority and even contempt toward traditional American culture, particularly rural America and most particularly the South—attitudes that are hallmarks of several of the intellectual movements reviewed here (e.g., the attitudes of Polish-Jewish communists toward traditional Polish culture; see also Chs. 5 and 6). There was also a strong desire for bloody, apocalyptic revenge against the entire social structure viewed as having victimized not only Jews but non-elite gentiles as well.

These students had very positive attitudes toward Judaism as well as negative attitudes toward Christianity, but perhaps surprisingly, the most salient contrast between Judaism and Christianity in their minds was in attitudes toward sexuality. In line with the very large Freudian influence of the period, the general tendency was to contrast a putative sexual permissiveness of Judaism with the sexual repression and prudery of Christianity, and this contrast was then linked with psychoanalytic analyses that attributed various forms of psychopathology and even capitalism, racism, and other forms of political oppression to Christian sexual attitudes. (See Chs. 4 and 5 for a discussion of the wider context of this type of analysis.) The powerful Jewish identification of these anti-Vietnam War radicals was clearly highlighted by their intense concern and eventual euphoria surrounding Israel’s Six-Day War of 1967.

It is also noteworthy that at Wisconsin the student movement idolized certain Jewish professors, particularly the charismatic social historian Harvey Goldberg, whose lectures presenting his Marxist view of European social history enthralled a very large following in the largest lecture hall on campus, as well as other Jewish leftists, including especially Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Herbert Marcuse. (The tendency for Jewish intellectual movements to become centered around highly charismatic Jewish figures is apparent in this chapter and is summarized as a general phenomenon in Chapter 6.) They adopted an attitude of condescension toward another well-known historian, George Mosse. Mosse’s Jewishness was quite salient to them, but he was viewed as insufficiently radical.

84. Paul Gottfried (1996, 9-10), a Jewish conservative, has this to say about his graduate student days at Yale in the 1960s: “All my Jewish colleagues in graduate school, noisy anti-anti-Communists, opposed American capitalist imperialism, but then became enthusiastic warmongers during the Arab-Israeli War in 1967. One Jewish Marxist acquaintance went into a rage that the Israelis did not demand the entire Mideast at the end of that war. Another, though a feminist, lamented that the Israeli soldiers did not rape more Arab women. It would be no exaggeration to say that my graduate school days resounded with Jewish hysterics at an institution where Wasps seemed to count only for decoration.”

85. See also Arthur Liebman’s (1979, 5-11), Charles Liebman’s (1973, 140), and Rothman and Lichter’s (1982, 112) critiques of Fuchs.

86. American neoconservatism is a specifically Jewish conservative political movement but is not relevant to Pipes’s argument as it applies to the Bolsheviks because its proponents have an overt Jewish identity and the movement is directed at achieving perceived Jewish interests, for example, with regard to Israel, affirmative action and immigration policy.

87. Religious orthodoxy was also compatible with attraction to anarchism: Alderman (1983, 64) quotes a contemporary writer to the effect that “the anarchists had achieved such popularity that they became almost respectable. A sympathizer could lay on his tefillin (phylacteries) on the morning of an Anarchist-sponsored strike, bless Rocker [a gentile anarchist leader], and still go off to evening service as an orthodox Jew.”

88. In Rothman and Lichter’s (1982, 217) study, radicalism among American Jews was inversely related to religious orthodoxy. Moreover, there was a major gap between the fairly homogeneous set of mean radicalism scores of students from homes affiliated with a Jewish religious denomination (Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform) compared to the higher radicalism scores of those from homes without Jewish religious affiliation. These results again suggest that radicalism functioned as a form of secular Judaism among this latter group.

89. Levey (1996), in his review of the literature on the attraction of American Jews to liberalism, rejects Medding’s (1977) theory that Jewish political behavior is a function of perceived “Jewish micro-political interests.” I was not persuaded by Levey’s argument. For example, Levey argues that the threat of anti-Semitism cannot explain the percentage of Jews that vote Democratic because the percentage of Jews who viewed the Republican Party as anti-Semitic was much lower than the percentage who voted for the Democratic Party, and some Jews voted Democrat even though they perceived anti-Semitism within the Democratic Party. However, perceived anti-Semitism may be only one reason why Jews vote against the Republicans. As stressed here, another perceived Jewish interest is to promote cultural and ethnic pluralism, and, as indicated from the quotes from Silberman (1985) presented on p. 84, the Democratic Party is much more associated with pluralism in the minds of Jews (and, I suppose, everyone else) than the Republican Party. Moreover, it seems difficult to deny that Jewish neoconservatives are pursuing their perception of specifically Jewish political interests, particularly support for Israel and the promotion of cultural and ethnic pluralism, within the Republican Party. Given this, it seems odd at best to suppose that Jewish Democrats are not similarly pursuing their perceived ethnic interests within the Democratic Party.

90. Similarly, as indicated in Chapters 4 and 5, both psychoanalysis and the ideology of the Frankfurt School downplay the importance of ethnic and cultural differences, engage in radical criticism of gentile culture, and simultaneously allow for the continuity of Jewish identification. Rothman and Isenberg (1974a, 75) note that the theme of combining hostility to gentile culture with accepting a universalist culture can be seen in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. “Portnoy considers himself something of a radical and despises his parents for their parochial Jewishness and their hatred of Christians. He supposedly identifies with the poor and the downtrodden, but his tirade to his analyst makes it clear that this identification is based partly on his own feelings of inferiority and partly on his desire to ‘screw’ the ‘goyim’.”

91. Known for his skill as an orator and his brutality toward counterrevolutionaries, Lev Zinoviev was a close associate of Lenin and a holder of a number of highly visible posts in the Soviet government. Moisei Solomonovich Uritsky was the notoriously brutal Cheka chief for Petrograd.

92. Jewish overrepresentation in the Bolshevik revolution has been a potent source of anti-Semitism ever since the revolution and was prominent in Nazi writing about Jews (e.g., Mein Kampf). In the aftermath of the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union there has been a polemical controversy regarding the extent and importance of the role of Jews in establishing and maintaining the revolution, often with strong overtones of anti-Semitism. In his 1982 book Russophobia, Igor Shafarevich, a mathematician and member of the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), argued that Jews were hostile to Russian culture and bore responsibility for the Russian Revolution (see Science 257, 1992, 743; The Scientist 6(19), 1992, 1). The NAS asked Shafarevich to resign his position in the academy, but he refused. See also Norman Podhoretz’s (1985) comments on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s latent antiSemitism.

93. Similarly, Himmelstrand (1967) notes that the Ibo in Nigeria were the strongest supporters of a nationalist government constituting all tribes. However, when they were disproportionately successful in this new, nontribal form of social organization, there was a violent backlash against them, and they then attempted to abandon the national government in favor of establishing their own tribal homeland.

94. The ethnic composition of the editorial board of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly is overwhelmingly Jewish, indicating that psychoanalysis remains fundamentally an ethnic movement. The editor, six of seven associate editors, and 20 of 27 editorial board members of the 1997 volume have Jewish surnames.

95. The continuing role of psychoanalysis in the movement toward sexual liberation can be seen in a recent debate over teenage sexuality. An article in the Los Angeles Times (Feb. 15, 1994, A1, A16) noted the opposition of the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood to a school program that advocated teenage celibacy. Sheldon Zablow, a psychiatrist and spokesperson for this perspective, stated “Repeated studies show that if you try to repress sexual feelings, they may come out later in far more dangerous ways—sexual abuse, rape” (p. A16). This psychoanalytic fantasy was compounded by Zablow’s claim that sexual abstinence has never worked in all of human history—a claim that indicates his unawareness of historical data on sexual behavior in the West (including Jewish sexual behavior), at least from the Middle Ages until the twentieth century (e.g., Ladurie 1986). I am not aware of any stratified traditional human society (and certainly not Muslim societies) that has taken the view that it is impossible and undesirable to prevent teenage sexual activity, especially by girls. As Goldberg (1996, 46) notes, “within the world of liberal organizations like the ACLU,… Jewish influence is so profound that non-Jews sometimes blur the distinction between them and the formal Jewish community.”

96. Also suggesting deception is that two of the Jewish members of Freud’s secret committee (Otto Rank and Sandor Ferenczi) had altered their names to appear non-Jewish (Grosskurth 1991, 17).

97. Rank had a very strong Jewish identity, viewing the pressures of assimilation emanating from German society during this period in very negative terms—as “morally and spiritually destructive” (Klein 1981, 130). Rank also had a positive attitude toward anti-Semitism and pressures to assimilate because they promoted the development of Jewish redemptive movements such as psychoanalysis: “Rank believed that the reaction of Jews to the threats of external and internal repression prompted them to preserve their relationship with nature and, in the process, to gain consciousness of this special relationship” (Klein 1981, 131). Rank, whose original name was Rosenfeld, appears to have been a crypto-Jew during part of his life. He adopted a non-Jewish name and converted to Catholicism in 1908 when entering the University of Vienna. In 1918, he reconverted to Judaism in order to enter into a Jewish marriage.

98. Adler “openly questioned Freud’s fundamental thesis that early sexual development is decisive for the making of character” (Gay 1988, 216-217) and neglected the Oedipal complex, infantile sexuality, the unconscious, and the sexual etiology of neuroses. Instead, Adler developed his ideas on “organ inferiority” and the hereditary etiology of “anal” character traits. Adler was an avid Marxist and actively attempted to create a theoretical synthesis in which psychological theory served utopian social goals (Kurzweil 1989, 84). Nevertheless, Freud termed Adler’s views “reactionary and retrograde” (Gay 1988, 222), presumably because from Freud’s view, the social revolution envisioned by psychoanalysis depended on these constructs. Freud’s actions regarding Adler are entirely comprehensible on the supposition that his acceptance of Adler’s “watered down” version of psychoanalysis would destroy Freud’s version of psychoanalysis as a radical critique of Western culture.

Similarly, Jung was expelled from the movement when he developed ideas that denigrated the centrality of sexual repression in Freud’s theory. “Jung’s most besetting disagreement with Freud, which runs through the whole sequence of his letters like an ominous subtext, involved what he once gently called [Jung’s] inability to define libido—which meant, translated, that he was unwilling to accept Freud’s term, to make it stand not just for the sexual drives, but for a general mental energy” (Gay 1988, 226; see also Grosskurth 1991, 43). Like Adler, Jung rejected the sexual etiology of neuroses, childhood sexuality, and the Oedipal complex; and like Adler’s ideas and unlike these fundamental Freudian doctrines, the idea of libido as restricted to sexual desire is of little use in developing a radical critique of Western culture, because Freud’s theory, as indicated here, depends on the conflation of sexual desire and love.

However, in addition, Jung developed a view that religious experience was a vital component of mental health: Freud, in contrast, remained hostile to religious belief (indeed, Gay [1988, 331] writes of Freud’s “pugilistic atheism”). As indicated elsewhere in this chapter, central to what one might term Freud’s pathologization of Christianity is his view that religious belief is nothing more than a reaction formation to avoid guilt feelings consequent to a primeval Oedipal event or, as developed in The Future of an Illusion, merely childish feelings of helplessness. Thus a central function of Totem and Taboo appears to have been to combat “everything that is Aryan-religious” (in Gay 1988, 331), a comment that at once illustrates Freud’s agenda of discrediting not just religion but gentile religion in particular and reveals the extent to which he viewed his work as an aspect of competition between ethnic groups.

99. It is noteworthy that an early member of the psychoanalytic movement, Ludwig Braun, believed that Freud was “genuinely Jewish,” and that to be Jewish meant, among other things, that one had “a courageous determination to combat or oppose the rest of society, his enemy” (Klein 1981, 85).

100. As a psychoanalyst himself, Gay imagines an erotic message underlying the surface meaning of aggression and hostility toward Western culture.

101. Other psychoanalytic interpretations of anti-Semitism as a pathological gentile reaction to Jewish superiority occurred during the period. In 1938 Jacob Meitlis, a psychoanalyst of the Yiddish Institute of Science (YIVO), stated: “We Jews have always known how to respect spiritual values. We preserved our unity through ideas, and because of them we survived to this day. Once again our people is faced with dark times requiring us to gather all our strength to preserve unharmed all culture and science during the present harsh storms” (in Yerushalmi 1991, 52). Anti-Semitism is here conceptualized as the price to be paid by Jews for bearing the burden of being the originators and defenders of science and culture. (Several other psychoanalytic theories of anti-Semitism are discussed below and in Ch. 5.)

102. Nathan of Gaza provided the intellectual foundation for the ill-fated Shabbetean messianic movement in the seventeenth century.

103. Similarly, in the French psychoanalytic movement of the mid-1960s, “The propositions of ‘linguistic’ psychoanalysis became assumptions. Soon, no one any longer questioned whether a self-assured disposition really could hide a vulnerable unconscious structure…: most French intellectuals accepted that both conscious and unconscious thought were organized in accordance with linguistic structures” (Kurzweil 1989, 245).

104. The imputation of egotistic motives is particularly interesting. As discussed in Chapter 6, all of the Jewish intellectual movements reviewed in this volume are fundamentally collectivist movements that demand authoritarian submission to hierarchical authority. Egotistic motives are therefore incompatible with these movements: such movements thrive on the submergence of self-interest to the goals of the group. In Chapter 6 I argue that science is inherently an individualistic enterprise in which there is minimal loyalty to an ingroup.

105. Fritz Wittels dates the desire for a “strict organization” to discussions among Freud, Ferenczi, and Jung that occurred during the 1909 voyage to the United States. “I think there is good reason to suppose that they discussed the need for a strict organization of the psychoanalytical movement. Henceforward, Freud no longer treated psychoanalysis as a branch of pure science. The politics of psychoanalysis had begun. The three travelers took vows of mutual fidelity, agreeing to join forces in the defense of the doctrine against all danger” (1924, 137).

106. Wittels (1924, 143-144) recounts an interpretation of a recurrent dream of Monroe Meyer, a student of psychoanalysis, in which Meyer feels in danger of choking after eating a large piece of beefsteak. The interpretation favored by Wittels is that of Stekel, who noted: “It seems to me that the beefsteak represents the indigestible analysis. My unfortunate colleague is compelled six times every week to swallow a wisdom which threatens to stifle him. The dream is the way in which his internal resistance to the analysis secures expression.” Whatever one might think of this interpretation, Wittel’s comments indicate that even during the 1920s, devoted disciples within the psychoanalytic community realized the danger that psychoanalysis could easily become a form of brainwashing.

107. This failure to comprehend the egalitarian nature of Western sexual customs was also apparent in Heinrich Heine’s vigorous opposition to the bourgeois sexual morality of the nineteenth century. As did Freud, Heine viewed sexual emancipation as a matter of liberation from the constraints imposed by an oppressive and overly spiritual Western culture. Sammons (1979, 199) notes, however, that “in the middle class public, sexual license had long been regarded as a characteristic vice of the aristocracy, while sexual discipline and respect for feminine virtue were associated with bourgeois virtue. In driving so roughly across the grain of these tabus, Heine was running his familiar risk of being perceived, not as an emancipator, but as temperamentally an aristocrat, and the resistance he generated was by no means restricted to the conservative public.” Indeed, lower- and middle-status males’ concern with controlling aristocratic sexual behavior was a prominent feature of nineteenth-century discourse about sex (see MacDonald 1995b,c). Wealthy individuals stand to benefit far more than their inferiors from the relaxation of traditional Western sexual mores.

108. The four elite Jewish intellectuals in this study who were apparently not influenced by Freud were Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, Richard Hofstadter, and Irving Kristol. Of these, only Noam Chomsky could possibly be regarded as someone whose writings were not highly influenced by his Jewish identity and specifically Jewish interests. The findings taken together indicate that the American intellectual scene has been significantly dominated by specifically Jewish interests and that psychoanalysis has been an important tool in advancing these interests.

109. For example, Norman O. Brown’s influential Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1985; originally published in 1959) completely accepts Freud’s analysis of culture as delineated in Civilization and Its Discontents. Brown finds the most important Freudian doctrine to be the repression of human nature, particularly the repression of pleasure seeking. This repression-caused neurosis is a universal characteristic of humans, but Brown claims that the intellectual history of repression originated in Western philosophy and Western religion. In terms highly reminiscent of some of Freud’s early associates, Brown points to a utopian future in which there is a “resurrection of the body” and a complete freeing of the human spirit.

110. Interestingly, Kurzweil (1989) notes that psychoanalysis was central to cultural criticism in both the United States and France, but the role of Marxism in critical analysis differed in the two countries. In the United States, where Marxism was anathema, the critics combined Marx and Freud, whereas in France, where Marxism was much more entrenched, psychoanalysis was combined with structural linguistics. The result was that “in both countries the radical claims for psychoanalysis were based on the opposition to familiar and accepted theoretical discourses and to existing biases” (p. 244).

111. As another example, Kurzweil describes a project in which a full-time staff of 20 psychoanalysts failed to alter the antisocial tendencies of ten hardened criminals through a permissive rehabilitation program. The failure of the program was attributed to the difficulty of reversing the effect of early experiences, and there were calls for preventive psychoanalysis for all German children.

112. Part of this balancing act was a conscious practice of self-censorship in an effort to remove Marxist language from their publications, so that, for example, “Marxism” was replaced with “socialism,” and “means of production” was replaced by “industrial apparatus” (Wiggershaus 1994, 366). The Marxist substance remained, but by means of this deception the Institute could attempt to defuse accusations of political dogmatism.

113. Marcuse remained an ardent Communist after Adorno and Horkheimer abandoned communism. In an internal document of the Institute from 1947, Marcuse wrote, “The Communist Parties are, and will remain, the sole anti-fascist power. Denunciation of them must be purely theoretical. Such denunciation is conscious of the fact that the realization of the theory is only possible through the Communist Parties” (in Wiggershaus 1994, 391). In the same document Marcuse advocated anarchy as a mechanism for achieving the revolution. Yet, Marcuse and Horkheimer never ceased contact, and Horkheimer was an admirer of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (Wiggershaus 1994, 470) as reflecting the Institute’s view that sexual repression resulted in domination over nature and that ending sexual repression would weaken destructive tendencies.

114. The general thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment is that the Enlightenment reflected the Western attempt to dominate nature and suppress human nature. Fascism was then viewed as the ultimate embodiment of the Enlightenment, since it represented the apotheosis of domination and the use of science as an instrument of oppression. In this perspective fascist collectivism is the logical outgrowth of Western individualism—a perspective that is fanciful to say the least. As discussed in PTSDA (Ch. 8), the collectivist nature of fascism has not been characteristic of Western political organizations. To a much greater extent than any other world cultural group, Western cultures have instead tended toward individualism beginning with the Greco-Roman world of antiquity; Judaism, in contrast, is a paradigm of a collectivist, group-oriented culture. As Charles Liebman (1973, 157) points out, it was the Jews who “sought the options of the Enlightenment but rejected its consequences,” by (in my terms) retaining a strong sense of group identity in a society nominally committed to individualism. And as argued in SAID (Chs. 3-5), there is good reason to suppose that the presence of Jews as a highly salient and successful group evolutionary strategy was a necessary condition for the development of prominent Western examples of collectivism.

115. Adorno’s philosophical style is virtually impenetrable. See Karl Popper’s (1984) humorous (and valid) dissection of the vacuity and pretentiousness of Adorno’s language. Piccone (1993) proposes that Adorno’s difficult prose was necessary to camouflage his revolutionary intent.

116. The theme that all modern ills, including National Socialism, collectivism, adolescent rebellion, mental illness, and criminality are due to the suppression of nature, including human nature, is also prominent in Horkheimer’s (1947, 92ff) Eclipse of Reason. In a passage that directly conforms to the psychoanalytic perspectives discussed in Chapter 4, the suppression of nature characteristic of civilization is said to begin at birth:

Each human being experiences the domineering aspect of civilization from his birth. To the child, the father’s power seems overwhelming, supernatural in the literal sense of the word. The father’s command is reason exempt from nature, an inexorable spiritual force. The child suffers in submitting to this force. It is almost impossible for an adult to remember all the pangs he experienced as a child in heeding innumerable parental admonitions not to stick his tongue out, not to mimic others, not to be untidy or forget to wash behind his ears. In these demands, the child is confronted by the fundamental postulates of civilization. He is forced to resist the immediate pressure of his urges, to differentiate between himself and the environment, to be efficient—in short, to borrow Freud’s terminology, to adopt a superego embodying all the so-called principles that his father and other father-like figures hold up to him. (pp. 109-110)

117. In a comment that predates the thesis of The Authoritarian Personality that anti-Semites are not introspective, Horkheimer and Adorno state that antiSemitism is not simply projection, but projection in the absence of reflection. Anti-Semites have no inner life and therefore tend to project their hatreds, desires, and inadequacies onto the environment: “It invests the outer world with its own content” (p. 190).

118. As an indication of the self-conscious Jewish identifications of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer attributed the refusal of Frankfurt theorists to “name the other” to their following the traditional Jewish taboo on naming God or describing paradise (see Jay 1980, 139).

119. The Frankfurt theorists inherited a strong opposition to capitalism from their previously-held radical beliefs. Irving Louis Horowitz (1987, 118) notes that the Critical Theorists were “caught between the Charybdis of capitalism—which they despised as a system of exploitation (whose fruits they nonetheless enjoyed), and the Scylla of communism—which they despised as a system of worse exploitation (whose bitter fruits they often escaped, unlike their Russian-Jewish counterparts).”

120. An interesting feature of the material in this section of The Authoritarian Personality is an attempt to demonstrate the irrationality of anti-Semitism by showing that anti-Semites have contradictory beliefs about Jews. As noted in SAID (Ch. 1), anti-Semitic beliefs are not expected to necessarily true or, I suppose, even logically consistent. However, The Authoritarian Personality exaggerates the self-contradictory nature of anti-Semitic beliefs in the service of emphasizing the irrational, projective nature of anti-Semitism. Thus Levinson states that it is contradictory for individuals to believe that Jews are clannish and aloof as well as to believe that Jews should be segregated and restricted (p. 76). Similarly in another volume of the Studies in Prejudice series, Ackerman and Jahoda (1950, 58) propose that anti-Semitic attitudes that Jews are clannish and intrusive are contradictory.

Agreement with such items is not self-contradictory. Such attitudes are probably a common component of the reactive processes discussed in SAID (Chs. 3-5). Jews are viewed by these anti-Semites as members of a strongly cohesive group who attempt to penetrate gentile circles of power and high social status, perhaps even undermining the cohesiveness of these gentile groups, while retaining their own separatism and clannishness. The belief that Jews should be restricted is certainly consistent with this attitude. Moreover, contradictory negative stereotypes of Jews, such as their being capitalist and communist (Ackerman & Jahoda 1950, 58), may be applied by anti-Semites to different groups of Jews, and these stereotyping processes may have a significant degree of truth: Jews may be overrepresented among successful capitalists and among radical political leaders. As noted in SAID (Ch. 2), there was indeed some truth to the idea that Jews were disproportionately likely to be political radicals and successful capitalists. “From emancipation onwards, the Jews were blamed both for seeking to ingratiate themselves with established society, enter in and dominate it; and, at the same time, for trying to destroy it utterly. Both charges had an element of truth” (Johnson 1988, 345).

Levinson also notes that the “Seclusive” scale includes statements such as “Jewish millionaires may do a certain amount to help their own people, but little of their money goes into worthwhile American causes,” whereas the “Intrusive” scale includes contradictory items such as “When Jews create large funds for educational or scientific research (Rosenwald, Heller, etc.), it is mainly due to a desire for fame and public notice rather than a really sincere scientific interest.” Again, one could easily affirm the first statement as a general rule and consistently believe that the exceptions result from Jewish self-interest. Nevertheless, Levinson concludes, “One major characteristic of anti-Semites is a relatively blind hostility which is reflected in the stereotypy, self-contradiction, and destructiveness of their thinking about Jews” (p. 76).

Anti-Semites are also said to oppose Jewish clannishness and Jewish assimilation. They demand that Jews “liquidate themselves, that they lose entirely their cultural identity and adhere instead to the prevailing cultural ways”; at the same time, “Jews who attempt to assimilate are apparently even more suspect than the others. Accusations of ‘prying,’ ‘power-seeking,’ and ‘imitation’ are made, and seemingly generous acts by Jews are attributed to hidden selfish motives… There is no logical basis for urging on the one hand that Jews become like everyone else, and on the other hand, that Jews be limited and excluded in the most important areas of social life” (p. 97).

This is a strange interpretation of the data. One could easily advocate that an outgroup assimilate but at the same time have negative attitudes regarding the present clannish, power-seeking behavior of outgroup members. Again, social identity research and evolutionary theory do not predict that individuals will hold true or self-consistent beliefs about an outgroup such as the Jews. Levinson, however, is clearly going far beyond the data in an attempt to portray antiSemitism as entirely irrational.

121. See also the discussion in SAID (Ch. 6) of ADL strategies to combat antiSemitism by making true statements about Jews into exemplars of anti-Semitic attitudes. Mayer (1979, 84)) notes that Orthodox Jews are highly concerned about living in an area which has a sufficiently high concentration of Jews, and Lowenstein (1983) shows that Jews continued to live in concentrated areas in Germany after emancipation. See also Glazer and Moynihan (1970) for similar data for American Jews.

122. Political conservatism and ethnocentrism are said to be difficult to separate, as indicated by the following item from the Political and Economic Conservatism Scale (PEC): “America may not be perfect, but the American Way has brought us about as close as human beings can get to a perfect society.” Levinson comments, “To support this idea is, it would seem, to express politico-economic conservatism and the ingroup idealization so characteristic of ethnocentrism” (p. 181). Here, as in the case of the discussion of the Ethnocentrism Scale itself, individuals who identify strongly with a dominant majority group and its interests are viewed as pathological. In fact the PEC scale was not as highly correlated with the F-Scale as was the Ethnocentrism Scale (E-Scale), a finding that Adorno tendentiously interpreted not as indicating that these concepts were not highly related but as indicating that “we are living in potentially fascist times” (p. 656)! As indicated in the conclusion of this chapter, the high correlation between the F-Scale and the E-Scale was a matter of design rather than an empirical finding.

123. The authors of The Authoritarian Personality take a strong moral position against ethnocentrism and political conservatism. Levinson notes, for example, that “The National Maritime Union… can take pride in having the lowest [means on the Ethnocentrism Scale]” (p. 196).

124. Frenkel-Brunswik’s interview data have been shown to suffer from serious methodological difficulties “from beginning to end” (Altemeyer 1981, 37; see also R. Brown 1965, 514ff). There are problems of generalization since fully 40 percent of the high-scoring male interviewees (8 out of 20) were inmates at San Quentin prison and 2 were patients at a psychiatric hospital at the time of the interviews. (Three of the 20 low scorers were from San Quentin, and 2 were from the psychiatric clinic.) As Altemeyer (1981, 37) notes, this type of sample obviously presents problems of generalization even granting the possibility that high scorers are more likely to be in prison. This problem is much less apparent in the interviews from the women, however, where the high scorers were mainly students and health workers, although 3 of the 25 were psychiatric patients.

Nevertheless, Altemeyer (1988, 37) notes that the San Quentin interviewees were “the backbone” of the statistically significant results separating the high and low scorers. Besides this method of inflating the level of statistical significance by including highly unrepresentative subjects, there was also a strong tendency to discuss results as if they were based on statistically significant differences when in fact the differences were not significant (Altemeyer 1988, 38).

It has also been shown that scores on the Ethnocentrism Scale are negatively associated with IQ, education, and socio-economic status to a much greater extent than found by the Berkeley group (Hyman & Sheatsley 1954). Lower socioeconomic status and its correlative lower IQ and education may result in ethnocentrism because such individuals have not been socialized in a university environment and because economic pressures (i.e., resource competition) are more likely to result in group identifications within the lower social classes. The latter perspective fits well with social identity research and with the general findings of another volume in the Studies in Prejudice series, Prophets of Deceit (Lowenthal & Guterman 1970).

125. Excerpts indicate that these individuals had very positive attitudes about their parents. A high-scoring female describes her mother as follows: “Mother—she amazes me—millions of activities—had two maids in———years ago, but never since—such calmness—never sick, never—beautiful women she really is” (p. 340; italics in text). Another (F24) describes her father as follows: “Father—he is wonderful; couldn’t make him better. He is always willing to do anything for you. He is about———years old, six feet tall, has dark brown hair, slim build, young-looking face, good-looking, dark green eyes” (p. 342).

126. Other examples of proposed resentment against parents by high-scoring subjects clearly suggest a parent who has strict rules and enforces them within the context of a relationship that is viewed positively overall. Thus a high-scoring subject says about her father, “I can’t say I don’t like him,… but he wouldn’t let me date at 16. I had to stay home” (p. 348). The interview material of a high-scoring female (F78) shows that “[h]er parents definitely approve of the engagement. Subject wouldn’t even go with anyone if they didn’t like him” (p. 351). Again, these subjects are labeled as victimized by their parents. The supposition seems to be that any parental strictures on children’s behavior, no matter how reasonable, are bound to result in enormously high levels of suppressed hostility and aggression in children.

127. This idea that rebellion against parental values and authority is a sign of mental health can also be seen in the theory of the psychoanalyst Erik Homberg Erikson (1968). Erikson proposed that the most important developmental issue of adolescence was the identity crisis and that going through an identity crisis was a necessary prerequisite for healthy adult psychological functioning. The evidence indicates, however, that adolescence is not normatively a time of rebellion against parents, but rebellion against parents is associated with hostile, rejecting family relationships.

The interesting point here is that research on identity processes during adolescence does not support the idea that adolescents who accept adult values show signs of psychopathology. The subjects who most resemble those viewed as pathological in The Authoritarian Personality are termed “foreclosure” subjects by Marcia (1966, 1967). These subjects have not experienced an identity crisis but have made commitments which they have accepted from other individuals, usually parents, without question. The families of foreclosure subjects tend to be child-centered and conformist (Adams, Gullotta, & Markstrom-Adams 1994). Matteson (1974) found that foreclosures participated in a “love affair” with their families, and Muuss (1988) summarizes evidence indicating that foreclosures are very close to and feel highly valued by their parents. Degree of control is intermediate, neither too harsh nor too limited, and such individuals perceive parents as accepting and supportive. The parent-child relationships of these individuals appear to be the authoritative parent-child relationships commonly viewed by developmental psychologists as producing optimal child development. Marcia and Friedman (1970) found that foreclosure women had high self-esteem and were low in anxiety, and Marcia (1980) summarizes several studies showing that the foreclosure females are well adjusted. There is thus no reason to suppose that adolescents who accept parental values are in any sense suffering from psychopathology.

On the contrary, individuals who have very poor parent-child relationships tend to be in the “identity diffused” category, namely individuals who completely fail to develop an identity. Very negative parent-child relationships are characteristic of such identity-diffused subjects (Adams, Gullotta, & Markstrom 1994), and they appear to lead to minimal identification with the values and ideologies of the parents. Parents of such individuals are described as “distant, detached, uninvolved and unconcerned” (Muuss l982; see also Marcia l980) and such individuals appear not to accept the values of their parents. There is even evidence that identity-diffused individuals are at risk for psychopathology.

128. Other examples: F71: “Right now, I’m [father’s] favorite… [H]e’ll do anything for me—takes me to school and calls for me” (p. 354); M47: “Well I guess her [mother] being so good and friendly to everybody, especially me. (For example?) Well, always trying to do everything for me. Very seldom go uptown without bringing something back for me” (p. 354); M13: “Mostly [father’s] attention to us kids was very admirable. He’s very honest, so much so that he won’t condone charge accounts. He’s known throughout the country as a man whose word is as good as his bond. His greatest contribution was denying himself pleasure to take care of us kids” (p. 354).

In the section “Image of the Mother: Sacrifice, Moralism, Restrictiveness,” mothers of high scorers are individuals who are highly self-sacrificing on behalf of their children and also have a strong sense of appropriate behavior which they attempt to inculcate in their children. M57: “She was a hard working lady, took care of us kids; she never did mistreat us in any way.” M13: “Mother was sick in bed a great deal of the time. She devoted her last strength to us kids.” M47: “She always taught me the difference between right and wrong, the things I should do and shouldn’t.”

129. Other typical comments of high scorers are as follows: M58: “If there were any conflicts between mother and father, I didn’t know.” F24: “Parents get along swell—never quarrel—hardly ever. Just over nonsense if they do. They quarrelled once after drinking wine over who got the last. Silly stuff like that”; F31: “My parents get along very well with each other, so far—knock on wood. They have their arguments, but they’re never serious because of my mother’s easy-going personality.”

130. Other typical comments of the low scorers are as follows: M15: “Mother accuses father of ‘keeping her down.’ She talks about her ambitions too much. Mother thinks of herself first. She doesn’t want to settle down in any church. Keeps suspecting father lets another singer get ahead of her. There are many quarrels between them, which upset me. Father sometimes threatened to leave”; M50: “Father was temperamental and father and mother had considerable domestic strife”; M55: “Mother went along with him on all the moralizing, though not as harsh as he was, not really a very good marriage. Mother should have married someone a lot more human and she probably would have been a lot better off… well, it’s hard to imagine him with anyone with whom he would get along.”

131. Similarly, when a subject reports no aggression against his father on the Thematic Apperception Test, the results are interpreted as indicating suppressed aggression against the father because the only aggression in the stories is done by characters the subject rejects. Aggressive imagery unrelated to the father is evidence for suppressed aggression against the father.

132. Another example of concern for social status among high scorers is the following from F79, who comes from a wealthy family that owns a lumber mill, a logging camp, and other business interests: “It’s a medium sized mill but I have no idea of his [father’s] income. Of course, we children have always been to private schools and lived in exclusive residential section. In———we had tennis courts and horses. We had more or less to start over again when we came to this country. We lived in a nice house but really couldn’t afford it. It was quite an effort to get into social circles. In———we felt secure and fitted in. Back here, we have lived at the same level but with anxiety about it. Mother and daddy have climbed socially… and I don’t care so much” (p. 384). Since the subject seems not so concerned about social status, one might wonder why the protocol was scored as it was.

133. The examples of “anti-Id moralism” among the high-scoring women include the following: F22: “Sex isn’t uppermost in my mind by any means… I’m more for having a good time with the exclusion of sex interest”; F31: “I think a girl should be friendly, but I don’t like necking in the back of a show. A boy and girl should be just friends” (p. 396).

High-scoring males appear to value sexual decorum in females they intend to marry: M6: “I like a girl who is level-headed and can talk on several topics. I don’t like the Maizie and Flo type or the sex boxes”; M14: “I want a girl whose sole interest is in the home.”

134. Other examples of adaptive female mate discrimination behavior among the high scorers deemed pathological by Frenkel-Brunswik are the following: F71: “Fine boy. Father a writer; grandfather secretary of———Canal; very wealthy family but he doesn’t have the drive and ambition that I want; I just have to have more drive; somebody who doesn’t have to lean on me. I had the feeling that if I walked away he would collapse… Another boy here has everything except that he isn’t thoughtful like… I’ve got to have someone who isn’t selfish.” F22: “I’m going to look (among other things) for the fellow’s views on supporting me. I’d like to marry someone, for instance, who is going into a profession—maybe a doctor” (p. 401).

135. The other two examples given of such “pathological” attitudes among females are the following:

F32: “Well, I think that because of the society in which we live, young people miss a great deal by not being married in the church of their faith. They lose the reverence for marriage and don’t learn the true meaning of marriage vows, when it is done so commercially (in a public office). I think that when people are married in church—by that I don’t mean a large wedding necessarily—they have one of the most beautiful experiences of their lives… The thing which the church can teach youth is ‘to choose.’ “ By this, she means principally the choice between right and wrong, but also to choose one’s friends. “In a church group one meets the right kind of young people; not the kind who hang around the lake shore at night.” (p. 403)

F78: “It was just love at first sight. He has brown hair, brown eyes, white teeth, not handsome, but good clean-cut looking; beautiful smile; mixes well, easy to get along with but has a will of his own. He’s lots of fun, interested in everything. He’s a high school graduate, now a mechanic in the ground crew of the Naval Air Transport. He wants to get into something in the mechanical line. Before the war he was an apprentice in the auto industry…” The vocation of her husband really wouldn’t matter. She thinks boy friend has good chances of getting along, definitely. She would like a profession—”sort of middle class.”

136. The high scorers are said to engage in “self-glorification” for saying such things as the following: F71: “Child—nervous because of mastoid operations… terrible time getting started in school… afraid of kids… this in first half of kindergarten… by second half I was a leader. Think one of my best assets is my poise—learned from moving around so much” (p. 425); F38, commenting on overcoming infantile paralysis: “I have always had a happy disposition, and I’ve always been honest with my family. I appreciate what they did for me. I’ve always tried to find a way so that I wouldn’t be a burden to them. I’ve never wanted to be a cripple. I was always dependable in a pinch. I’ve always been cheerful and I’m sure I’ve never made anyone feel bad because of my handicap. Maybe one of the reasons I have been cheerful is because of my handicap. I wore a cast on my leg until I was 4 years old.” (p. 425). (Subject goes on to describe her marital fidelity, happy married life, and good relationships with her family.) Only an extremely perverse interpretation of these data—an interpretation made possible by psychodynamic theory—could result in supposing that these individuals are anything less than heroic in their ability to overcome their disabilities and lead fulfilling, productive lives.

137. These tendencies are confirmed in the projective material in Chapter XV. Low scorers again appear to be highly conflicted, anxious, and guilt-ridden (pp. 550, 562). They “identify with the underdog” (p. 566) and have a “strong sense of failure, self-blame, helplessness or impotence” (p. 562). They strive after close relationships at the same time they attribute feelings of hostility and exploitiveness to others (p. 551).

138. In keeping with his generally unscientific approach to the data, Adorno provides no information on how these types were arrived at or what proportion of the subjects fit into the various categories. In the case of “The Genuine Liberal,” there is a discussion of one subject.

139. Interestingly, immediately after expressing the moral legitimacy of free competition between Jews and gentiles, the “genuine liberal” states, “Maybe if the Jews get in power they would liquidate the majority! That’s not smart. Because we would fight back” (p. 782) This subject clearly views Jews not as individuals but as a potentially menacing, cohesive group.

140. Similarly, in another volume of the Studies in Prejudice series, Bettelheim and Janowitz (1950) found that some of their anti-Semitic subjects were rebellious and uninhibited.

141. Gottfredson (1994) likewise notes that in the media and public opinion there persists the idea that intelligence tests are culturally biased and have nothing to do with performance in life, and this long after these ideas have been discredited by researchers on intelligence.

142. The same might be said about Margaret Mead’s work discussed in Chapter 2. Despite the fact that at this point any reasonable person must assume that the work is at least highly questionable, her work continues to appear prominently in many college textbooks. Mead was on the advisory board of the Institute’s antiSemitism project, which produced The Authoritarian Personality.

143. Several authors have found evidence for a general authoritarianism dimension in which attitudes toward authority are divorced from the ethnocentrism often included in measures of right-wing authoritarianism (e.g., Bhushan 1982; Ray 1972). Altemeyer (1994) notes that authoritarian individuals in North America and in the Soviet Union under communism had mirror-image authoritarian attitudes, with the latter supporting “hard line,” authoritarian communism. In Studies on Authority and the Family (the earlier attempt of the Frankfurt School to link family relationships and authoritarianism), it was impossible for an individual to be classified as authoritarian if he or she stated that socialism would improve the world situation and that capitalism caused hyperinflation. “The possibility that someone could remain loyal to the Communist Party or to its programme and nevertheless be authoritarian was thus excluded” (Wiggershaus 1994, 174).

144. The 1996 Arts and Humanities Citation Index listed approximately 375 citations of Adorno, 90 of Horkheimer, and 550 of Walter Benjamin. A search of the libraries of the University of California in April 1998 under the subject heading “Frankfurt School” listed 41 books published since 1988, with over 200 more on the topic of Critical Theory.

145. Consider the influential postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard (1984, 8) states that “the right to decide what is true is not independent of the right to decide what is just.” In the best tradition of the Frankfurt School, Lyotard rejects scientific accounts as totalitarian because they replace traditional accounts of culture with scientifically derived universals. As with Derrida, Lyotard’s solution is to legitimize all narratives, but the main project is to attempt to prevent what Berman (1989, 8) terms the development of “an institutionalized master narrative”—the same deconstructive project that originated with the Frankfurt School. It goes without saying that the rejection of science is entirely a priori—in the best tradition of the Frankfurt School.

146. I noted briefly the anti-Western ideology of Claude Lévi-Strauss in Chapter 2 (pp. 22-23). It is interesting that Derrida “deconstructed” Lévi-Strauss by accusing him of reactivating Rousseau’s romantic views of non-Western cultures and thereby making a whole series of essentialist assumptions that are not unwarranted by Derrida’s radical skepticism. “In response to Lévi-Strauss’s criticisms of philosophers of consciousness, Derrida answered that none of them… would have been as naive as Lévi-Strauss had been to conclude so hastily in favor of the innocence and original goodness of the Nambikwara [an African tribe]. Derrida saw Lévi-Strauss’s ostensibly ethnocentric-free viewpoint as a reverse ethnocentrism with ethnic-political positions accusing the West of being initially responsible, through writing, for the death of innocent speech” (Dosse 1997 II, 30). These comments are symptomatic of the changes inaugurated by postmodernism into the current intellectual zeitgeist. While the earlier critiques of the West by the Boasians and the structuralists romanticized non-Western cultures and vilified the West, the more recent trend is to express a pervasive skepticism regarding knowledge of any kind, motivated, I suppose, by the reasons outlined in this chapter (pp. 166, 201) and Chapter 6.

147. I became aware of Borowitz’s (1973) interesting account of Jewish self-deception, The Mask Jews Wear: Self-Deceptions of American Jewry, too late for inclusion in Chapter 8 of SAID. It is a good treatment of the complexities of Jewish identity in the post-Enlightenment world, albeit with some self-deceptions of its own, such as its equation of Jewish ethnocentrism with applied morality.

148. Raab is associated with the ADL and is executive director emeritus of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University. He is also a columnist for the San Francisco Jewish Bulletin. Among other works, he has coauthored, with Seymour Martin Lipset, The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (Lipset & Raab 1970), a volume in a series of books on anti-Semitism in the United States sponsored by the ADL and discussed in Chapter 5. Lipset is regarded as a member of the New York Intellectuals discussed in Chapter 6.

149. Moreover, a deep concern that an ethnically and culturally homogeneous America would compromise Jewish interests can be seen in Silberman’s (1985, 357-348) comments on the attraction of Jews to “the Democratic party… with its traditional hospitality to non-WASP ethnic groups… A distinguished economist who strongly disagreed with Mondale’s economic policies voted for him nonetheless. ‘I watched the conventions on television,’ he explained, ‘and the Republicans did not look like my kind of people.’ That same reaction led many Jews to vote for Carter in 1980 despite their dislike of him; ‘I’d rather live in a country governed by the faces I saw at the Democratic convention than by those I saw at the Republican convention’ a well-known author told me.”

150. The American Zionist Maurice Samuel, although condemning the 1924 immigration law as racist (see p. 240), had well developed racialist ideas of his own. Samuel wrote a well-known work, You Gentiles (1924), that contains a very clear statement of biological differences creating an unbridgeable gulf between Jews and gentiles:

Though you and we were to agree on all fundamental principles… yet we should remain fundamentally different. The language of our external expression is alike, but the language of our internal meaning is different… Instinct endures for glacial ages; religions evolve with civilizations. (p. 28)

The difference between us is abysmal. (p. 30)

This difference in behavior and reaction springs from something much more earnest and significant than a difference in our biologic equipment. (p. 34)

These are two ways of life, each utterly alien to the other. Each has its place in the world—but they cannot flourish in the same soil, they cannot remain in contact without antagonism. Though to life itself each way is a perfect utterance, to each other they are enemies. (p. 37)

The prominent and influential American Jewish pro-immigration activist Louis Marshall also had a strong attachment to Judaism which he viewed as a race. He stated that “As you know, I am not a Zionist, certainly not a Nationalist. I am… one who takes a pride in the literature, the history, the traditions, and the spiritual and intellectual contributions which Judaism has made to the world, and as I grow older, the feelings of love and reverence for the cradle of our race increase in intensity” (in Cohen 1972, 107). (The comment is another example of Jewish identification and group commitment increasing with age [see PTSDA, Ch. 7 Note 27]).

151. Restriction of Immigration, Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization House of Representatives, 68th Congress, 1st Sess., Jan. 5, 1924, 571.

152. See Reconquista!: The Takeover of America (Los Angeles: California Coalition for Immigration Reform, 1997).

153. Statement of the AJCongress, Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Congress, 1st Sess., on S. 716, H.R. 2379, and H.R. 2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, 391.

154. Statement of the AJCongress, Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Cong., 1st Sess., on S. 716, H.R. 2379, and H.R. 2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, 402-403.

155. The ADL continues to be a major promoter of diversity education through its A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE Institute (www.adl.org, June, 1998). Since 1985 this institute has trained more than 230,000 elementary and secondary school teachers in diversity education and conducted workplace diversity training programs for workers and college students in the United States. Teacher training programs have also been instituted in Germany and Russia.

156. Although blacks were included in the crucible in the play, Zangwill (1914) seems to have had ambiguous attitudes toward black-white intermarriage. In an afterword he wrote that blacks on average had lower intellect and ethics but he also looked forward to the time when superior blacks would marry whites.

157. Restriction of Immigration; Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization House of Representatives, sixty-eighth Cong., 1st Sess., Jan. 3, 1924, 309, 303.

158. Restriction of Immigration; Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization House of Representatives, sixty-eighth Cong., 1st Sess., Jan. 3, 1924, 341.

159. For example, in the Senate debates of April 15-19, 1924, Nordic superiority was not mentioned by any of the proponents of the legislation but was mentioned by the following opponents of the legislation: Senators Colt (p. 6542), Reed (p. 6468), Walsh (p. 6355). In the House debates of April 5, 8, and 15, virtually all the opponents of the legislation raised the racial inferiority issue, including Representatives Celler (pp. 5914-5915), Clancy (p. 5930), Connery (p. 5683), Dickstein (pp. 5655-5656, 5686), Gallivan (p. 5849), Jacobstein (p. 5864), James (p. 5670), Kunz (p. 5896), LaGuardia (p. 5657), Mooney (pp. 5909-5910), O’Connell (p. 5836), O’Connor (p. 5648), Oliver (p. 5870), O’Sullivan (p. 5899), Perlman (p. 5651), Sabath (pp. 5651, 5662), and Tague (p. 5873). Several representatives (e.g., Reps. Dickinson [p. 6267], Garber [pp. 5689-5693] and Smith [p. 5705]) contrasted the positive characteristics of the Nordic immigrants with the negative characteristics of more recent immigrants without distinguishing genetic from environmental reasons as possible influences. They, along with several others, noted that recent immigrants had not assimilated and they tended to cluster in urban areas. Representative Allen argued that there is a “necessity for purifying and keeping pure the blood of America” (p. 5693). Representative McSwain, who argued for the need to preserve Nordic hegemony, did so not on the basis of Nordic superiority but on the basis of legitimate ethnic self-interest (pp. 5683-5685; see also comments of Reps. Lea and Miller). Rep. Gasque introduced a newspaper article discussing the swamping of the race that had built America (p. 6270).

160. Restriction of Immigration, Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization House of Representatives, 68th Cong., 1st Sess., Jan. 3, 1924, 351.

161. Similarly, the immigration of Eastern European Jews into England after 1880 had a transformative effect on the political attitudes of British Jewry in the direction of socialism, trade unionism, and Zionism, often combined with religious orthodoxy and devotion to a highly separatist traditional lifestyle (Alderman, 1983, 47ff). The more established Jewish organizations fought hard to combat the well-founded image of Jewish immigrants as Zionist, religiously orthodox political radicals who refused to be conscripted into the armed forces during World War I in order to fight the enemies of the officially anti-Semitic czarist government (Alderman, 1992, 237ff).

162. Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, May 24-June 1, 1939: Joint Resolutions to Authorize the Admission to the United States of a Limited Number of German Refugee Children, 1.

163. Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, May 24-June 1, 1939: Joint Resolutions to Authorize the Admission to the United States of a Limited Number of German Refugee Children, 78.

164. Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, May 24-June 1, 1939: Joint Resolutions to Authorize the Admission to the United States of a Limited Number of German Refugee Children, 140.

165. Statement of the AJCongress, Joint Hearings before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Cong., 1st Sess., on S. 716, H.R. 2379, and H.R. 2816, March 6-April 9, 1951, 565.

166. Statement of the AJCongress, Joint Hearings before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Cong., 1st Sess., on S. 716, H.R. 2379, and H.R. 2816, March 6-April 9, 1951, 566. See also statement of Rabbi Bernard J. Bamberger, President of the Synagogue Council of America; see also the statement of the AJCongress, 560-561.

167. Statement of Will Maslow representing the AJCongress, Joint Hearings before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Cong., 1st Sess., on S. 716, H.R. 2379, and H.R. 2816, March 6-April 9, 1951, 394.

168. Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Cong., 1st Sess., on S. 716, H.R. 2379, and H.R. 2816, March 6-April 9, 1951, 562-595.

169. Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Cong., 1st Sess., on S. 716, H.R. 2379, and H.R. 2816, March 6-April 9, 1951, 410.

170. Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Cong., 1st Sess., on S. 716, H.R. 2379, and H.R. 2816, March 6-April 9, 1951, 404.

171. Similarly, in England in 1887 the Federation of Minor Synagogues was created by established British Jews to moderate the radicalism of newly arrived immigrants from Eastern Europe. This organization also engaged in deception by deliberately distorting the extent to which the immigrants had radical political attitudes (Alderman 1983, 60).

172. Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Cong., 1st Sess., on S. 716, H.R. 2379, and H.R. 2816, March 6-April 9, 1951, 563.

173. Handlin also contributed several articles and reviews to Partisan Review, the flagship journal of the New York Intellectuals. Reflecting his deep-seated belief in cultural pluralism, in a 1945 book review he stated, “I simply cannot grasp a conception of ‘Americanism’ that rests on the notion that ‘a social group constitutes a nation insofar as its members are of one mind’ “ (Handlin 1945, 269).

174. Similarly, L. C. Pogrebin (1991) describes her involvement as a major figure in the early feminist movement and her eventual disenchantment resulting from the blatant anti-Semitism of “third world” women, which was apparent at international conferences, and the lack of zeal on the part of Western feminists in condemning these outbursts. As did many Jewish leftists, Pogrebin eventually developed a hybrid in which feminist ideas were combined with a deep commitment to Jewish culture.

175. In turn, neoconservatives have responded that such charges are anti-Semitic. For example, Russell Kirk stated that “some prominent neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States,” a charge that Midge Decter labeled “a bloody piece of anti-Semitism” (see Judis 1990, 33). See also Norman Podhoretz’s (1986) comments on Joseph Sobran’s charges that U.S. foreign policy is determined by a powerful Jewish lobby that places Israel’s interests above America’s interests and harnesses the U.S. military to pursue Israeli military objectives. On the other hand, neoconservatives have sometimes called on Jews not to condemn the American religious right because of its support for Israel (e.g., Kristol 1984). This has occurred even though there are indications of anti-Semitism on the religious right. Thus Lind (1995a) notes the neoconservative support for Pat Robertson (e.g., Decter 1994). Robertson has decried the role of Jewish organizations in undermining the public visibility of Christianity, their voting for liberal political candidates, and their role in media attacks on Christianity (see Lind 1994a, 22). Robertson (1991) has also proposed an international conspiracy theory in which individual wealthy Jews (e.g., the Rothschilds, Paul Warburg) play a prominent role. Citing anecdotal data, Lind (1995b, 67) suggests that this neoconservative tolerance of such manifestations of anti-Semitism on the American religious right is motivated by the fact that the religious right has been a supporter of the Israeli right wing.

176. Ryan’s characterization of Herrnstein is reminiscent of Gal’s (1989, 138) characterization Louis Brandeis: “Brandeis worried about opportunity, about preserving a type of society in which ambitious and talented persons could, through hard work and ability, be able to make their fame and fortune.” Brandeis, a Zionist leader, was instrumental in originating the use of social science research in litigating social issues, a trend that culminated in the decision in Brown v. Board of Education (Urofsky 1989, 144). Roberts and Stratton (1995) detail the unethical behavior of Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter (a Brandeis protégé) and Philip Elman (a Justice Department lawyer) in bringing about this decision.

177. Although there undoubtedly were gaps between the theory and the reality of the medieval societas Christiana, in my view it is completely inaccurate to label the social achievement of the Middle Ages in these terms. In this regard, I would again hold up as an example medieval French society during the reign of Saint Louis (1226-1270) (see also SAID, appendix to Ch. 5). Louis had a powerful concern to develop a just society that preserved hierarchical relationships but nevertheless attempted to ensure harmonious economic and political relationships among his people, and there is little doubt that he was substantially successful in this endeavor (e.g., Richard 1992). Contrary to this view, George Mosse represents a mainstream perspective when he contrasts what he describes as the irrational, mystical tendencies of the Volkische intellectuals with the Jewish-dominated leftist intellectual movements of the period. The latter are described as rational, scientific, and based on a high ethical standard (see Mosse 1970, 171ff).

178. Such social policies are quite the opposite taken by historical Judaism and can only lead to the decline of the entire society in the long run. I have noted that a critical component of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy has been eugenic practices aimed at intelligence, conscientiousness, and high-investment parenting. These practices have resulted in Jews being highly qualified to participate in the increasingly technological, literate societies of the contemporary world. Similar eugenic proposals consciously aimed at strengthening the competitive ability of the group were also common among many progressive gentiles in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and such proposals have recently been revived by Seymour Itzkoff (1991) and Richard Lynn (1996). Current data and theory support the idea that eugenic procedures would result not only in a more competitive group, but also result in a much more harmonious society because they would produce a decline in criminality and psychiatric disorders. Eugenic practices may be seen to fall within the Western tradition, since traditional Western societies, while far more reproductively egalitarian than any other human stratified society, have also been characterized until recently by a moderate association between social success and reproductive success (MacDonald 1995c).

179. The fundamental problem, as documented extensively by Herrnstein and Murray (1994) and Rushton (1995), is that there is a 15-point gap between the average IQ of Caucasian and African Americans combined with a similar gap in which African Americans are disproportionately characterized by low-investment, high-fertility parenting. There is evidence that these very large group differences in IQ and reproductive strategy are genetically influenced and, in any case, they cannot be significantly changed with any known behavioral technology. These group differences have resulted in a strong tendency for African Americans to adopt a political strategy advocating programs that effectively expand the underclass while favoring group-based entitlements to ensure that their group will be proportionately represented in higher-socioeconomic-class occupations. The result has been an escalation of group-based resource competition in the United States that is formally analogous to the consequences of historical Judaism in Western societies but stems from a quite different group evolutionary strategy. It is this situation that is at present the most dangerous and most ineradicable threat to the Western ideal of hierarchic harmony.

180. Mosse (1970, 174) describes the Jewish-dominated leftist movements of the Weimar period as seeking “actively to make society correspond to a preconceived image of men and the world.” And Horowitz (1993, 62) notes of T. W. Adorno that “the more remote real people were from his political dreams, the less regard did he show for the masses as such… [Adorno] sets the stage for a culture of left-wing fascism… [that assumes] that what people believe is wrong and that what they ought to believe, as designed by some narrow elite stratum of the cultural apparatus, is essentially right.” For their part, the Volkische and conservative intellectuals who advocated a society based on hierarchic harmony advocated a return to a perhaps somewhat idealized version of actually existing historical societies, particularly the Middle Ages.

181. A very interesting analysis of the attachments humans show to pets in modern Western societies is that this phenomenon represents manipulation by pets of evolved systems designed to underlie close human relationships (Archer 1997). Many people form extremely close attachments to pets, carrying around photos of pets, grieving over the death of a pet, celebrating birthdays of pets, and so on, often at considerable financial cost to themselves. From an evolutionary perspective, such behavior is presumably maladaptive (at least in the absence of any overriding psychological benefits). In any case it represents exploitation on the part of animals, and it is reasonable to suppose that people who are prone to developing close relationships are more likely than average to be exploitable in this manner. These phenomena are much more characteristic of Western compared to other societies (Archer 1997). This finding fits well with the proposal that romantic love and attachments are more typical of Western societies and it illustrates how an evolved system that is highly adaptive in ancestral environments can result in maladaptive behavior in environments that are far removed from the environments in which the Western peoples evolved.

About the Author

Kevin MacDonald is Professor of Psychology at California State University-Long Beach, Long Beach, CA 90840-0901, USA. His research has focused on developing evolutionary perspectives in history and developmental psychology.

After receiving a Masters degree in evolutionary biology, he received a Ph.D. in biobehavioral sciences at the University of Connecticut working on behavioral development in wolves, and he continued developmental research during a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois performing research on human parent-child play. His research has focused on developing evolutionary perspectives in developmental psychology. He has also authored four books, Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis (NY: Plenum, 1988) and A People that Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Westport, CT, 1998), and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, CT, 1998).