The Jewish role in undermining America

Paul Gottfried looks at how his fellow Jews have affected the United States:

Jews are also a more cohesive group than WASPs—who may be the least unified and most atomized ethnicity on earth. A diatribe against WASPs will not hurt its author and may even bring him or her admiring recognition. By contrast, adverse comments about Jews, or about the “Holocaust Industry” in the case of Norman Finkelstein, who (despite being Jewish himself) lost his job at Depaul University after Alan Dershowitz weighed in against him, can be professionally fatal.

The late Joe Sobran once observed that denying that Jews are powerless can bring swift retribution. That is precisely because the Jewish community is anything but powerless. The professionally conscious intellectual is also expected to stress the supposed agonies of the American Jewish experience—for example, the virulently anti-Semitic past for which American Christians are considered responsible.

This unpleasantness is, of course, much exaggerated. American Jews suffered far less prejudice in the US than most other immigrant groups, including ethnic Catholics. Before the arrival at the beginning of the twentieth century of masses of Eastern European Jews, who struck even the very tolerant historian Frederick Jackson Turner as “hard to assimilate”, the German and Sephardic Jews who were already here encountered mostly good will from Christians. Were it not for the Jewish newcomers, this older Jewish minority would have totally melted away through intermarriage with upper-class Protestants.

The problem was those Eastern European Jews, who tended to come from unemancipated shtetls in much less modernized societies, generally didn’t like the bourgeois Christian society they encountered. They found it to be alien, threatening or just disagreeable. And, as Kevin MacDonald accurately shows in The Culture of Critique, these Jews have played a decisive role in subverting once-established culture.

MacDonald may overstate the continuity of the role Jews have occupied as the grave-diggers of non-Jewish cultures, and the negative response to the host country exhibited by earlier Jewish settlers in the New World. But his treatment of the relentless crusade waged by Jewish intellectuals against bourgeois decencies since the early twentieth century is certainly on the mark.

No matter where one looks at this war against the Gentile heritage—whether it is being fought in the name of gay marriage, feminism, militant secularism, or Open Borders—Jews are invariably in the vanguard. And MacDonald is spot-on when he observes that, when the American Right was taken over by Jewish journalists, the effect was to push “conservatism” toward the left.

The one apparent exception to this tendency: the successful identification of the transformed American Right with Jewish nationalism. Thus the “conservative” media happily treats Connecticut’s socially liberal Senator Joe Lieberman as an honorary man of the Right, apparently because he is working to advance “democracy” in the Middle East—by which is meant that he is good on Israel and on encouraging war against Israel’s presumed enemies.