The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity

This new book by Goldstein shows a pattern put forth by Kevin MacDonald in his trilogy on Jews with regards to how Jews look at themselves and how they present themselves to others. (MacDonald 2002a,1998a) It also reflects on the current debate with regards to the meaning of race, differences in intelligence between races, difference in personality traits between races, and how deception played an integral part on the part of Jews in order to fit in and remain free of prejudice.

Essentially, Jews always considered themselves to be a race more than a religion or ethnic group, up until after the Second World War. For various reasons, after that, race was played down. In fact, many Jews have been at the current forefront of denying that race has any meaning, while other Jews go about using genetics to define the Jewish race and also to fight genetic diseases that afflict Jews.

Goldstein states: "Far from playing the role of undifferentiated whites, Jews held an uncertain relationship to whiteness from the late nineteenth century until the end of World War II, a period when both Jews and non-Jews spoke of the 'Jewish race' and of 'Hebrew blood.' Although these racialized understandings of Jewishness have long been discredited among scientists and laypeople, they were very real to those who employed them during these years."

This is most assuredly mistaken, as some people try to deny the reality of race, while others recognize it for what it certainly is—differences in allele frequencies in different groups (races) that alter the average expression of genetic diseases, personality traits, intelligence, physical appearance, etc.

In a paper written by the Jewish golden boy psychologist and scientific researcher from Harvard, Steven Pinker, in The New Republic Online entitled "The Lessons of the Ashkenazim," he discusses the fact that Ashkenazim Jews have an average IQ 108 to 115, the highest average IQ of any known race. He also states that there is no environmental factors that could account for this high IQ, and it must be genetic.

Pinker states: "They mention historical accounts attesting that intermarriage was indeed rare, and genetic evidence pointing to an admixture of about 0.5 to 1 percent of neighboring genes per generation. Note that over many centuries this is enough to make Ashkenazim genetically similar to their European neighbors, so the notion of a distinct 'Jewish race' is indeed nonsense. But the two populations are not identical: the genetic overlap due to interbreeding is around one-third to one-half, depending on which genes you look at."

The "distinct" race is the recurring straw man that race deniers use to claim races don't exist, and yet no one claims there is such a thing as a distinct race anymore than there are distinct breeds of dogs. And, there are no specific number of races; one can slice human groups into two races, three races or ten thousand races—it is all a matter of what one wants to do with these different groupings. They can be used for research, to set immigration policy, etc.

Does the intermarriage rate likewise make two neighboring races more similar? Not necessarily. Wolpoff and Caspari, in their book Race and Human Evolution describe how slow influxes of new genes into a race merely provides new genes to work with, but selection can continue keeping a race relatively stable. Kevin MacDonald looks at Jewish history and describes numerous practices that kept the Jewish race stable in terms of intelligence and personality types. (MacDonald 2002a) One of these Pinker disparages: "Jews have long had an ambivalent attitude toward their own intelligence, and toward their reputation for intelligence. There is an ethnic pride at the prevalence of Jews in occupations that reward brainpower…. Many Jews subscribe to a folk theory that attributes Jewish intelligence to what would have to be the weirdest example of sexual selection in the living world: that for generations in the shtetl, the brightest yeshiva boy was betrothed to the daughter of the richest man, thereby favoring the genes, if such genes there are, for Talmudic [studies]."

He makes two errors here; first it is not "folk theory" but is documented by Jews in their long written history. It may not occur in any degree today, but in the past these marital arrangements took place. One indicator that this did take place is that though the average IQ of Jews is very high, it is slanted towards verbal skills. No other race has this large differential between practical intelligence and verbal intelligence. MacDonald has pointed out that much of Talmudic and other studies were meant as IQ tests, because the reading, memorization, and skill in debating had little to do with religion, but seemed to be merely tests of reasoning and debating skills. But this was only one method for selecting for high Jewish IQs. Others were simple communal practices, such as not tolerating or helping Jews with lower intelligence, and encouraging them to leave the community. Many of these eugenic devices of course changed over time and from place to place. And among some Jewish communities such as in Yemen the average intelligence is quite low. (Pinker has a political agenda and is not hesitant to put forth arguments when they suite his purpose.)

Back to The Price of Whiteness. Goldstein states, "Despite the diverse nature of the American population and the presence of many groups that were considered distinct in a racial sense—Native Americans, Asians, Latinos and various European groups as well as African Americans—whites consistently tried to understand the racial landscape through the categories of 'black' and 'white.' Thus, even as American racial commentators frequently spoke of Mongolians and Mexicans, Celts and Teutons, Alpines and Mediterraneans, they often struggled to suppress this unnerving complexity by marking some of these groups as good candidates for assimilation into white America and confirming others as racial outsiders by comparing them to and lumping them with African Americans."

It is interesting that today, Whites are pitted against "people of color" in order to group all oppressed people under that label, even though East Asians are hardly oppressed even in the United States where they are wealthier than Whites, many Mexicans are European, and Semites are classified as being White. Government racial classifications are now used purely for political reasons. Geneticists use genes frequencies to determine different lineages, not arbitrary divisions to satisfy political goals.

Goldstein explains that Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe in the 1880s surpassed other Eastern Europeans as skilled workers, merchants, etc. and quickly climbed the economic ladder. So they quickly started competing with Whites—but how would they define themselves as a race? Did they want to be looked at as White or as Jewish? They felt they were a separate race and a superior race to all others. Whites also saw Jews as both racially different and yet very similar to Whites.

Goldstein states, "Second, an equally wrenching dilemma for Jews was the struggle they faced over their own racial self-definition. Having long been confined to the social margins of the Central and Eastern European societies in which they lived, Jews from those regions had come to see 'apartness' as one of the most salient aspects of Jewish identity. As a result, in the American context they often defined themselves as a distinct 'race,' a description that captured their strong emotional connection to Jewish peoplehood. As Jews came under increasing scrutiny in American racial discourse, however, they were often torn between their commitment to Jewish racial identity and their desire to be seen as stable members of white society. Jews often tried to obscure, downplay, or tailor their racial self-understanding to conform to the needs of the larger culture, but ultimately it continued to make its claim on them as they fashioned themselves as white Americans. Thus, in multiple ways, claiming the status of 'whites' in America was far from simple for Jews. It involved a complex emotional process in which conflicting desires for acceptance and distinctiveness often found no easy balance…. My interest in this study, however, is to demonstrate the tremendous pressures Jews and similar groups were under to conform to the dominant racial paradigm, and the significant constraints that were placed on expressions of group difference by a world intent on seeing itself in terms of black and white."

Goldstein explains how immigrants, one group after another, entered the United States as a racial group, and upon assimilation they became White. For example, the Irish who arrived in great numbers from the potato famine, were looked down upon with almost the same disdain as Blacks because of the low level jobs they took. They often took jobs that slave owners would not allow their slaves to do because of the risks.

Goldstein explains the common view of race: "In 1887, Solomon Schindler, rabbi of Boston's Temple Israel, delivered a Friday evening sermon to his congregation on the topic 'Why Am I a Jew?' Schindler spoke of the universal task of Judaism, its superior logical foundation, and its concordance with reason in explaining why he was a follower of Jewish religious teachings. But first and foremost, he emphasized, his connection to Jewishness was a matter of 'race.' Despite the fact that the Jewish nation had disappeared from the earth, Schindler told his congregants, 'it remains a fact that we spring from a different branch of humanity, that different blood flows in our veins, that our temperament, our tastes, our humor is different. . . . In a word, we differ [from non-Jews] in our views and in our mode of thinking in many cases as much as we differ in our features….' What Schindler's remark testifies to, however, is the pervasive use of racial language as a means for Jewish self-definition in late-nineteenth-century America, even among those most anxious to take their place in American life. By 'race' nineteenth-century Jews meant something different from 'ethnicity' in its present usage. Their conception of Jewish distinctiveness was one rooted not in cultural particularity but in biology, shared ancestry, and blood."

Jews were understood to be a race in Western societies, by both Jews and gentiles, as early as the fifteenth century. During the American Revolution, they often chose to classify themselves as a nation, as many other groups defined themselves, but this then became a problem of accusations of dual loyalty. At that time, the Jews started to define themselves in religious terms. Later, in the 1870s, when concern for group cohesion became an issue, they started using race to define themselves again.

Goldstein: "Under the pressure of the shifting social boundaries of the 1870s, the language of race became an attractive vehicle for self-expression among American Jews and was used liberally in the weekly Jewish press, in popular novels and magazines, and in the pronouncements of Jewish leaders. The great appeal of racial language was its unique ability to capture the strong attachment of Jews to Jewish peoplehood, a feeling heightened during a time when many of the familiar markers of Jewishness were receding. Because Jews could no longer count on clear social boundaries to set them off from non-Jews, they looked to race as a transcendent means of understanding and expressing the ties that held them together as a group. In short, racial language helped them express their ongoing attachment to the social dimension of Jewishness even as the social distinctiveness of Jews began to weaken."

Race also allowed the Jews to maintain their status as an oppressed people. They viewed the Aryans as conquerors and the Jews as peacemakers. For thousands of years, this persecution complex is both dominant in their religious celebrations and their view and fear of the other—extreme xenophobia. A recent article about the Semitic tribes in Iraq pointed out that marriages are still arranged often between cousins and second cousins. With inbreeding comes extreme ethnocentrism. The Jews likewise have a history of inbreeding resulting in particularism. Also, only committed Jews would have remained in the Jewish community. Less committed Jews, over time, would have tended to convert, leaving behind ever more committed Jews with a heightened sense of groupishness.

Goldstein notes, "In 1895, Max J. Kohler, one of the founders of the American Jewish Historical Society, wrote that the new communal interest in American Jewish history was due primarily to 'race pride,' which he defined as 'gratification over the deeds of members of our race, present or past, purely because of our common ties of race.' Kohler's statement exemplifies how American Jews could at once celebrate Jewish contributions to the American way of life and attribute these contributions to a distinct Jewish racial identity. It was this reasoning that led Jewish newspapers to relentlessly hail the achievements of Jewish musicians, athletes, inventors, and philanthropists. Jews employed this logic even when lauding prominent Jews in other countries. In fact, the more enmeshed in a particular national culture Jewish figures were, the more American Jews seemed to take pride in their 'racial' accomplishments. Benjamin Disraeli, despite his baptism, became a favorite hero of American Jews, who saw in him an exemplar of Jewish racial traits. Emma Lazarus, in an essay in the Century magazine, described the British prime minister as a 'brilliant Semite' who exhibited the 'patient humility' and 'calculating self-control' that had allowed the Jewish race to survive the centuries despite persecution."

If Whites did the same today, we would be accused of White Supremacy, and yet even today the Jews claim to be the superior race. And this racial superiority was not to be diluted, similar to Nazi Germany's Nuremberg Laws. "In 1884, when leading Reform rabbis converted several women to Judaism in order for them to be married to Jews, the American Hebrew commenced a campaign against the 'conversion farce,' using race as its chief weapon. Converts, held the paper, could not be made into authentic Jews since 'to be a Jew means to be of the stock of Abraham—to be of the Hebrew race.' In this case, fear of intermarriage led the paper to modify the traditional Jewish view, which allows conversion to Judaism, in favor of a racial argument that built a more effective barrier around Jewish identity."

This supremacy of the Jewish race takes several forms and has changed over time. Goldstein notes, "Einhorn believed strongly that Jews had a mission to spread ethical monotheism, a task that required their dispersion among the nations. But he also held firmly to the view that Jewish racial purity had to be preserved in order for Jews to effectively carry out this mission. Thus, he was able to express the Jewish attachment to peoplehood by reducing it to an innate capacity for morality and religious service. 'Israel has disappeared as a nation,' he wrote in 1870, but 'as a race with certain qualities of soul and mind which form the life-giving condition and root of its own peculiar historical mission, it has remained and will remain as such until the time when this mission shall have been fulfilled.' For this reason he considered intermarriage 'a nail in the coffin of the small Jewish race, with its lofty mission.' Einhorn's views were echoed by his son-in-law and disciple, Kaufmann Kohler, who argued in 1878 against the admission of male proselytes to Judaism who had not undergone the rite of circumcision. Since Israel's historical mission necessitated a high degree of racial purity, he explained, the requirement of circumcision should be preserved as 'a wall able to prevent an inflow of impure elements.' Kohler felt that non-Jews should be encouraged to embrace monotheism and live ethically but not 'to become part of the Jewish community and to undertake the priestly vocation of the Jews, which is assumed [only] by birth.' Like his father-in-law, Kohler maintained a strict opposition to intermarriage. 'Just because we belong to all nations,' he wrote, 'we must not lose our identity by being absorbed.'"

Kohler argued for Jewishness to be defined by religion, but later changed his mind in favor of a racial definition. Much of Goldstein's book deals with these shifting definitions of what it means to be a Jew, and much of it was discussed only internally among other Jews. To others, they would often define themselves differently. By the 1890s, most rabbis had a strong "attachment to a racial notion of Jewishness."

During this period, many scholars have tried to claim that the eugenics' movement was driven by White supremacy, xenophobia, or a desire to oppress lesser races. However, much of the eugenics' movement was driven by situational concerns brought about by massive immigration that caused major disruptions in social norms. "As the new century approached, Americans increasingly felt the impact of massive social transformations related to industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. These changes unnerved many members of the dominant white society, who sometimes worried about their ability to meet the daunting challenges they presented. While generally white Americans were able to overcome such fears and preserve a sense of optimism in the face of change, they often began to search for ways to boost their confidence and infuse their society with a sense of order and stability." An unbiased reading of the eugenics' movement leads to a far more benevolent concern for people. One could always find some sinister types to point at as White supremacists, but most people were just concerned about the increasing slums, overcrowding, disease, prostitution, drunkenness, etc.—the same concerns we have today, but it was far worse then.

In the argument over intelligence testing and the 1924 immigration act, it has been asserted that Eastern Europeans, including Jews, were seen as having low intelligence. However, even those giving the tests had doubts that this was the case, and that these early tests must have been flawed. Goldstein clarifies this distortion: "Among the many immigrants from Southern and Eastern European who arrived on American shores between 1880 and 1924, Jews were the group most identified with the ways of the modern world. Unlike most non-Jewish immigrants, Jews had not been farmers or peasants in Europe, but had practiced trades and professions that eased their transition to the modern urban setting."

Just like the immigration debate today, too many immigrants tend to disrupt diverse aspects of society from hospitals going under because of the cost of caring for the uninsured, to wages falling for traditional blue collar labor, to a new sector for immigrant advocates such as low-wage service sector unions, to lawyers, and even churches to increase membership, society divides along who is gaining and who is losing from massive immigration. A century ago, similar rapid social and economic changes caused society to try and find solutions. And again today, eugenics plays into the immigration debate, though it is hidden under the types of entry granted—guest workers to pick crops or skilled immigrants to fill white-collar positions.

Goldstein notes: "By turning the issue to one of religious liberty, Wolf ignored the true reason for the bureau's classification while claiming that his request was 'in accordance with the spirit and genius of our American institutions.' When the officials replied that they classified all immigrants according to race, and that they were interested in Jews as a racial rather than a religious group, Wolf set out to gather written opinions on the question of Jewish racial identity from leading Jews that might be used in convincing the Bureau of Immigration to reconsider. Much to Wolf's dismay, however, many of the leaders failed to support his position, holding that the bureau was correct in counting the Jews as a distinct race. In addition, Philip Cowen, the editor of the American Hebrew and one of those who had been involved in the initial discussions of immigration policy with Powderly, fired off an editorial arguing that racial classification ought to be retained as a matter of pride, since the statistics reflected well on Jews and demonstrated the superiority of Jewish immigrants to their Polish and Slavic counterparts. Apparently unable to gain a consensus among Jewish leaders or to create a sense of urgency concerning racial classification, Wolf remained quiet on the issue for several years."

Many scholars today conveniently forget that attitudes of Jewish supremacy over other Whites is as prevalent as Whites feeling superior to Blacks. Most scholars are loath to use the word superior today because what criteria would be used? If it was athleticism, Blacks would be superior—with intelligence—well many deny it is different between races (though some Jews like Pinker seem to be breaking this taboo once again and claiming Jewish superiority).

Though the Jews were considered White, they developed a more ambivalent attitude towards Blacks. Seeing themselves as being oppressed in Europe, they often aligned themselves with Blacks against Whites as the situation suited them. Like Whites, in Chicago, Jews tried to keep Blacks out of Jewish neighborhoods. But they also took steps to try and improve Black conditions because of their European experience with oppression.

During the progressive era, acculturated Jews wanted to be classified as White, but were hesitant to give up their distinctive racial classification. "As a result, the question of whether Jews ought to fashion themselves as a race or merely a religious denomination became one of the most hotly debated issues of early-twentieth-century Jewish communal discourse. The climate of tension surrounding the issue of Jewish racial self-definition in the early twentieth century stood in sharp contrast to the ease with which Jews had been able to define themselves as a race in previous decades. Before their whiteness became suspect, Jews often found in race a comforting means of self-understanding, one that provided a sense of security as they continued toward their goal of greater social integration. Now, with their place in America's racial constellation increasingly in doubt, many Jews began to question the viability of race as a means of self-description. Yet despite the increasing danger of the racial label after the turn of the century, American Jews did not part easily with their racial self-conception. While strong debate emerged among Jews during these years over the racial definition of Jewishness, what is most striking is the extent to which a broad spectrum of Jews, ranging from staunch accommodationists to devoted Zionists, were torn between a continued attachment to Jewish racial identity and the desire to be seen as white. Faced with these conflicting imperatives, most Jews of the period were unable to settle on any one clear definition of the term 'Jew.'"

This was the beginning of the slow transition, where Jews saw dangers in being seen as a different race from Whites. They wanted to be included in the "great Caucasian" race, but they feared that it would lead to calls by Whites for them to fully assimilate—losing their Jewish particularism. Jews began the slow process of obfuscation where they would redefine themselves in several different ways depending upon the perceived threats.

Goldstein explains, "While rabbis often had trouble disentangling notions of Jewish chosenness and ethical mission from Jewish race and peoplehood, these leaders knew the urgency of denying Jewish racial difference. The prominent attorneys Simon Wolf and Louis Marshall, the banker and philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff and the scholar Cyrus Adler were among those who believed that Jews ought never to articulate an identity that conflicted with the demands of American national culture, regardless of how they privately understood themselves. While in Jewish publications a leader such as Wolf sometimes continued to refer to the Jews as a race, to the non-Jewish world he carefully termed them 'American citizens of Jewish faith.' Adler, who later collected and published the papers of his colleague Schiff, stated that the philanthropist frequently declared himself a 'faith-Jew' rather than a 'race-Jew,' a distinction to which Adler himself also subscribed. When Louis Marshall was questioned on the matter, he responded that he entirely concurred with Schiff, who regarded Judaism as 'a faith, and not as a race.' According to Marshall, there were, 'ethnologically . . . as many types of Jews as there are countries in which they have lived,' since 'climate, environment, economic conditions, intermarriage, food, and a thousand other influences operate as causes of differentiation between Jews of one country and those of another.' Jews, he argued, were 'united by the bonds of religion and none other.'"

About this same time however, Zionism was firmly attached to Jews being a race, which further confounded the issue for Jewish leaders. As Goldstein explains, "So divisive was the issue of race in the Jewish community that, by 1910, Israel Friedlaender, a historian at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, could call it the 'shibboleth according to which the various Jewish parties are distinguished from one another.' Yet despite the charged nature of racial politics among American Jews, it would be a mistake to view the Jewish community as completely polarized on the issue of race. Because the denial of racial identity was often a diversionary tactic rather than a reflection of their true feelings, establishment Jews sometimes found it difficult to avoid references to the 'Jewish race.'"

It was official doctrine that Judaism was a universal religion, but it was also understood that this official doctrine was not to be practiced—Judaism was a race-based faith more than a religion. Its many rules and institutions were built around separation from other races. Assimilation was anathema. "Few social phenomena expressed the commitment of acculturated Jews to a racial self-understanding during the early twentieth century as did their avoidance of intermarriage. Despite increasing pressure to down-play racial commitments, most Jews of this period continued, as they had in the nineteenth century, to treat marriage as a key factor in Jewish racial preservation and as the line at which social interaction with non-Jews was to be drawn. According to a study carried out in New York between 1908 and 1912, the intermarriage rate among Jews was only 1.17 percent, compared to a rate of nearly 17 percent among Italians and 33 percent among non-Jewish Germans. Only the city's African Americans had a lower rate of intermarriage than Jews. As Jewish socialite Esther J. Ruskay explained, when Jews and non-Jews did intermarry during this period it 'raised such a storm of criticism and disapproval for all parties concerned than any tendencies in this direction [were] kept in healthful check.'"

It is an odd concept, that in order for the Jews to complete their mission to the world—described in various ways like universal brotherhood, peace, justice, etc.—that the genes of the Jews could not change. Their moral essence was in their blood. This rationale of genes, heritage, history, and religion seems to have changed over time and the only constant thread in this apologia is to keep the Jewish race pure.

After the First World War, Jews were recognized as being too powerful and too radical: "Under these circumstances, Jews increasingly became a target for those nervous about the direction of modern American culture. In their attempt to understand why the nation was going astray from what they considered its core values, many white Americans cast the Jewish 'race' as an infiltrating force, one that was powerful enough to penetrate the central institutions of American life but dedicated to its own selfish interests. This view of the Jew was articulated almost immediately after the war, when the nation was gripped by a series of red scares, and Jews were singled out by witnesses before several congressional committees as importers of revolutionary communism to these shores."

Again, many scholars have tried to make the 1924 immigration act one of keeping out "inferior" people. Goldstein correctly points out that it was an effort to reduce the number of immigrants to a manageable level that could be assimilated. About this same time, the leading anthropologist Franz Boas was arguing that race did not exist, though the concept was not well received by the general public, not even Jews who were just getting a glimpse of Hitler's racial policies (which reflected very similarly to the Jewish attitude about race). Still, slowly, scholars were putting forth a pluralistic notion of the importance of culture, religion and egalitarianism.

During the interwar years, lower class Jews from Europe returned to unifying under racial solidarity as a challenge to acculturated Jews who were now beginning to deny race in order to distance themselves from these new lesser Jews. Just like Hitler breathed life into the German populace after a failed war and economy, these lower class Jews embraced their own racial superiority to lift themselves up to a higher status. Goldstein states, "Because their interactions with the non-Jewish world were still heavily mediated by a strong sense of Jewish particularism, nurtured both by their history and the antisemitism of the interwar years, Eastern European Jews found it almost impossible to define Jewishness in purely religious terms or to deny their Jewishness altogether. Echoing the rhetoric of the day, the Chicago Yidisher kurier argued that the ties of blood between Jews were a 'reality' whether Jews liked it or not, and no amount of abstract theorizing or wordplay could obscure that 'fact.' 'To judge from . . . the attitude of even the most liberal and radical-minded Jews to the problem of Judaism,' the Orthodox paper editorialized, 'one must say that the very basis of the Jewish reality is Jewish blood.' Echoing these sentiments from the other end of the ideology spectrum, a writer for the Chicago edition of the socialist Forverts argued: 'Judaism is in our blood. Even the least religious among us is Jewish to the core.'"

Throughout the book, Goldstein sounds almost like one discussing White supremacist attitudes, except these attitudes are held by Jews. Today, with racial revisionism, Jews have not been as examined and condemned for their racial attitudes as Whites. Whites alone seem to have the honor of being the only race held culpable for a rather revisionist scientific understanding of race during this time (note there are many other groups rarely as condemned as Whites like East Asians, Asian Indians, tribalism throughout the Middle East and Africa, etc.). During the interwar years however, a much more open discussion about race was permitted.

Goldstein notes, "Labor activist Bertha Wallerstein, writing in the Nation, implored Jews to struggle for their rights as 'human beings without making a whole romance of the race.' Wallerstein argued that the 'jingo Jew' whose motto was 'Right or wrong, my race!' was 'as rampantly Semitic as the Ku Klux Klan is Nordic.' One of the strongest critics of Jewish racial assertiveness during these years was Walter Lippmann, a prominent journalist who condemned what he saw as Jews' aggressive tendency toward self-segregation. Contacted by officials at Harvard for his opinion on the issue of Jewish admissions there, Lippmann replied that he 'did not regard Jews as innocent victims.' Jews, he wrote, perpetuated many 'disturbing social habits' that were the result of 'tribal inbreeding.' Lippmann argued that limiting the number of Jewish students was the only way to insure the breakdown of Jewish racial distinctiveness and encourage 'fusion' between Jews and non-Jews. The insistence that Jews made more of their racial origins than they needed to was especially common among a certain class of Jewish doctors and psychologists, who spoke of a Jewish obsession with racial differences that edged on psychosis."

Note how such statements targeting Jews would border on lunacy, and yet similar charges continue to be made against Whites such as the "Protestant Ethic," Whites have a propensity for "authoritarianism" (The Frankfurt School), we are "sexually suppressed" (Freudian psychoanalysis), etc. (MacDonald 2002b) Even with advanced scientific tools, such as magnetic resonance imaging to see if the brain is thinking in racial terms, the testing is generally used to see how racist the White brain is when presented with images of Blacks. It is just assumed that all other races are free of racialized thinking.

Goldstein continues, "Writer Samuel Ornitz lampooned the views of some of New York's assimilationist psychologists through the character of Dr. Lionel Crane (ne Lazarus Cohen), whose views on Jewish identity were presented in Ornitz's novel of American Jewish life, Haunch, Paunch, and Jowl (1923). As the founder of the field of 'race psychopathology,' Crane believed the Jews suffered from a severe case of 'racial paranoia, and implored them to 'let intermarriage bring in the saving tonic of new blood.' Though somewhat fanciful, Crane's views were not too different from those of flesh-and-blood doctors like Wolfe or New York physician Maurice Fishberg. Speaking before the International Eugenics Conference in 1921, Fishberg argued that intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews would not only solve the problem of social friction but would produce a mix of racial qualities that would prove 'a benefit to white humanity….' While Jewish newspapers had long made a habit of praising the accomplishments of Jews and crediting them to superior racial traits, in the climate of the interwar years this practice became a virtual cottage industry among American Jews….[The] rabbi of New York's elite Reform congregation, Temple Emanuel, predicted that intermarriage would lead to a decline in the 'superiority of Jewish genius' and the distinctive 'psychic heritage' of the Jew, which had always been nurtured by keeping out 'foreign blood.'"

Just picture such discussions taking place today in churches, the media, politics, etc. Even on the Internet, such statements are met with apoplectic outrage if directed at anything Jewish, but is commonly heard directed against Whites. Perhaps this is because the White race is not anywhere near as xenophobic and paranoid as are Jews on average. Our evolutionary past has equipped us with different sensibilities. And yet, race today is such a sensitive subject that it is very difficult to test a variety of races and see how they differ in personality traits or intelligence.

Goldberg states, "Despite the increasing popularity of a cultural or 'ethnic' definition of Jewish identity in intellectual circles, the notion of a Jewishness rooted in culture and not race failed to win a large following among American Jews in the years before World War II…. Newspaper columnist George Sokolsky echoed this point in 1935, explaining that no matter how hard scholars tried to uproot the race concept using scientific means, the daily social and political realities facing most Jews told them that "race does exist." Until society at large ceased to recognize the existence of a Jewish race, it would remain impossible for most Jews themselves to do so…. Paradoxically, while the climate of social exclusion meant that many American Jews were unable to break away from a racial self-understanding during these years, it also left Jews increasingly divided about how strongly they ought to assert their racial distinctiveness. In addition to insecurity stemming from their own experiences with Depression-era hostility, Jews in America were also struggling with the implications of events in Germany after 1933, paying particularly close attention to the series of racial laws promulgated by Hitler's new government. While such actions seemed to demand a defense of Jewish racial character, they also raised Jews' concerns about the ultimate danger of pressing racial arguments too far. In the early years of Nazi rule in Germany, many American Jews responded to the Nazi assault on the 'Jewish race' with intensified expressions of racial pride. In 1933, Yiddish journalist and political activist David Goldblatt answered Nazi claims with an English-language treatise comparing Jews' racial traits favorably with those of the 'Aryans' so idealized in Hitler's racial worldview."

Though Jews were led to assert their Jewish supremacy in the face of Hitlerism, some Jews recognized the dangers in defining groups by race—the Jews were powerful for their numbers but could easily suffer the same fate in the United States as they were experiencing in Germany. Voices were beginning to be heard to rid society of notions of race for cultural or ethnic divisions. But the real tipping point came when in America, it was the Jews that were seen as pushing us into war against Germany. (Powerful Anglo-Saxons however also pushed to save England but were not tarred with dual loyalty like the Jews were.) Thus, the beginning of radical environmentalism had a decade of intellectual discourse, led by Franz Boas, but the coming war finalized the destruction of maintaining any type of scientific balance between race, genes, and culture. Races would be declared to be nonexistent because it would unite people in the war effort.

Not unlike today, the government moved against any citizens that it perceived would undermine the war effort. Racist agitators were investigated for sedition, the Catholic Church was told to silence radical priests, publications were shut down, and a propaganda campaign was waged promoting tolerance and equality. Racial hatred was now un-American. Goldstein states, "Ultimately, the Roosevelt Administration believed that domestic stability would best be achieved by consolidating immigrants into the 'white' population and by reestablishing the clear division between blacks and whites that had been in doubt in American society for several decades. This process of stabilizing the black-white divide was most evident in the organization of American military forces, where blacks and Asians were segregated into their own units while Jews, Italians, and Irish were assigned to 'white' units along with men whose families had been in the United States for generations. The existence of a Pacific warfront where the Japanese enemy was defined as a nonwhite racial menace also gave credence to the notion of a unified white American fighting force. More than any other wartime development, the thorough integration of Jews and Catholics into the American military helped cement the public's view of these groups as unambiguously white."

Between Boas and Roosevelt, the propaganda worked. "In public opinion polls carried out just after the war, less than half of Americans surveyed still identified the Jews as a race, a sharp decline from the prewar tendency. The inclusive nationalism of the Roosevelt Administration, the integration of Jews into the U.S. military, and the spread of new theories about the difference between 'race' and 'ethnicity' all paved the way for Jews to gain acceptance as American whites during the war years." And that is how the concept of race died a slow death—not by science but by brain washing. Boas didn't want Jews to stand out, and Roosevelt had a war to win. But did everyone believe it?

Goldstein notes, "In fact, because Livingston's goal was to show how Jewish traits had helped make Jews contributors to the larger society, those involved in specifically Jewish activities—rabbis, communal leaders, Hebrew and Yiddish authors—were excluded. Similar works, like Mac Davis's Jews at a Glance, which offered a 'gallery of Jewish greatness and achievement,' appeared as late as 1956. The tendency, even at this late date, to define Jews as a group bound by unique qualities and ancestral ties rather than by particular cultural markers suggests that the rise of 'ethnicity' did not represent a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of Jewish identity. Instead, it was largely a linguistic strategy designed to recast their continued attachment to a racial self-understanding in terms more acceptable to the non-Jewish world."

During the decades after WWII, as race was eradicated as a biological concept, Jews started to intermarry with other races, sending fear among the Jewish establishment of a "Silent Holocaust"—Jews marrying non-Jews at an accelerating rate. To stem this trend, increased efforts were made to arrange for new means of maintaining Jewish solidarity from obsession with the newly discovered Holocaust (it was virtually ignored up until about 1967), to setting up new social arrangements and seminars for Jews, sending Jewish students to Israel to establish a personal connection with Zionism, etc. Racial reasons for not intermarrying could no longer be openly discussed. Tribalism had to take on new types of symbolism. "Over the next few decades, Jews began to express a growing impatience with the constraints of liberal universalism and exhibit a tendency to turn away from classical liberalism toward a more group-centered political agenda."

Over the last decade, the intermarriage rate for Jews is exceeding 50%, and with Jews and non-Jews socially mingling, Jewish supremacy can no longer be openly discussed—non-Jews were increasingly mixed in with the tribe and such statements would be embarrassing. Goldstein asserts, "Ultimately, it is hard to trace either an unchecked pattern of 'tribalist' assertiveness or a steady decline of 'tribalist' sensibility among contemporary American Jews. Cohen and Eisen report that 'tribalism' is being expressed more freely, but that because of the growing interconnections between Jewish and non-Jewish social worlds, Jews are increasingly careful about 'choosing certain spaces and times to express it,' and even then there are often 'lingering hesitations, anxieties and misgivings.' One might say that the two phenomena—growing ethnic assertiveness and a declining ethnic cohesiveness—are actually two sides of the same coin. Tribalism functions much like Jewish appeals to 'race' did during the nineteenth century, giving contemporary Jews a tool for selectively shoring up a Jewish identity that is increasingly in doubt. 'Throughout all the de-racializing stages of twentieth-century social thought, Jews have continued to invoke blood logic as a way of defining and maintaining group identity,' writes historian Susan Glenn. 'It is one of the ironies of modern Jewish history that concepts of tribalism based on blood and race have persisted not only in spite of but also because of the experience of assimilation.'"

Now that some Jews, who are highly regarded, like Steven Pinker, are finally openly discussing the racial superiority of Jews in average intelligence, race will begin to return as a biological category. No doubt, all of the recent books condemning the concept of race, eugenics, and racial differences in intelligence are due to the increased recognition that genes do count, and people as well as races differ because of genes more than environment. Goldstein states, "[There is a] major focus for genetic research, partly because of the disproportionate number of Jewish physicians who found their own community a convenient vehicle for study and because Jews, as a comparatively endogamous group, provide desirable conditions for the testing of genetic theories. During these decades, researchers identified no fewer than thirty different genetic mutations present in the Ashkenazic Jewish population, mutations that are linked to diseases such as breast, colon, prostate and ovarian cancers, as well as to emotional disorders like schizophrenia, manic depression, and autism. Despite repeated disclaimers by researchers that Jews are not necessarily any more susceptible to these diseases than other segments of the population, the growing interest in Jewish genetics has tended to revive the notion that Jews are a group united by biological ties, an idea that had been largely discredited among scientists since World War II."

With new genetic tools, Jewish and non-Jewish researchers are tracing racial blood lines (family lineages), races can now be classified by genetic markers at almost 100% accuracy, and Jews everywhere are more genetically similar to each other than to any other group besides other Semites. This does not mean however that these different branches of Jews are necessarily similar. The Ashkenazi Jews differ in intelligence from other Jews because of their breeding patterns in Eastern Europe. Yemenite Jews slid into illiteracy and suffered a dysgenic decline in intelligence.

So how will Jews define themselves in the future? As we have seen they do not have a common nation or heritage, nor is there a religious position they can fall back on as even baptized Jews are still embraced by Jews as part of the Jewish community, not Christian. Goldstein observes, "But these feelings among Jews do tell us something about the pain and resentment that has resulted from a system that often predicated full acceptance in white America on the abandonment of cultural distinctiveness and the disavowal of deeply held group ties, once expressed in the language of 'race.' For Jews who want to assert a particularist identity in today's America, the benefits of whiteness are increasingly questionable. Despite all of the economic and social benefits whiteness has conferred upon them, these Jews do not feel the kind of freedom whiteness is supposed to offer—the freedom to be utterly unselfconscious about one's cultural or ethnic background. In fact, many Jews at the turn of the twenty-first century seem particularly conscious of the way that being seen as white delegitimizes their claim to difference as Jews…. So does the fact that so many contemporary Jewish leaders and intellectuals advocate a Jewish religious revival, rather than an ethnic or 'tribalist' revival, as the key to Jewish continuity. In many respects, these spokespersons resemble Jewish leaders of the early twentieth century, who tried to bridge the gap between Jewishness and whiteness by asserting a religious self-definition, even though most Jews continued to think of themselves primarily as a 'race.'"

Religion does not look like a very viable means of rebuilding a Jewish identity: "[A] 2001 survey by the American Jewish Committee revealed that a plurality of American Jews—40 percent—said that 'being a part of the Jewish people' was the most important aspect of their identity. A much smaller percentage, only 14 percent, gave religious observance as their answer."

Now if we can move more Whites away from forming their identities around religion, state, or culture, we have a chance to end our self-destructive capitulation to other races' interests over our own. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates stand as glaring examples of how our brightest and best are willing to betray their own kin for universal moralism—giving billions of dollars to those races that hate us. Philanthropists have often chosen those moral causes that will win them admiration, rather than doing the hard work of directing their good fortunes to programs that have some probability of success.


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