May 8, 2008 | 1:07 pm

Long Beach professor justifies anti-Semitism

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Follow me on

I do not think Jews are living in 1938 Germany. But it really has seemed lately liked I’ve transitioned to the anti-Semitism beat. Besides posting several items on the topic during the past few days, I spent last night at UC Irvine, listening to a speech from Norman Finkelstein, who has certainly been called an anti-Semite, and that followed two weeks of researching and writing a profile of Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor at Cal State Long Beach whose books have been compared to “Mein Kampf.”

In the above video, which is 41 minutes long, MacDonald appears on the TV program “Current Issues,” hosted by Palestinian American Hesham Tillawi. The focus of their conversation is the negative influence and clannish behavior of Jews. At the 17-minute mark, MacDonald describes his opinions, detailed in a three-volume series and subsequent essays that can be found at kevinmacdonald.net, as “rational” anti-Semitism.

MacDonald once served as an expert witness for Holocaust-denier David Irving, and many of his theories of Judaism as a “group evolutionary strategy” are controversial. The least palatable are that Judaism has a built in eugenics program—the study of Talmud, which, he claims, stemmed the reproduction of dumber members of the Tribe—and that anti-Semitism, even Nazism, were gentile responses to Jewish success.

He’s been on the faculty of Cal State Long Beach 23 years now, having achieved full tenure in 1994. But the university is under increasing pressure from some of MacDonald’s colleagues and outside organizations to denounce his writings, which, obviously, have very little to do with child psychology and, to his credit, have been kept out of the classroom.

Under the headline, “The Professor Anti-Semites Love,” MacDonald carries this week’s cover for The Jewish Journal. It’s a long profile—from his childhood in Oshkosh to the origins of his research to the contents of his books and the battle against him—so I’ll just mention now the biggest problem MacDonald has had: his anti-Semitic admirers.

As a warning, there will be some very vulgar language from someone who would like to see the fulfillment of the Final Solution:

Read more of this post

15 Comments — Leave your comment

Share this post: del.icio.us Digg Facebook Google Reddit StumbleUpon Technorati YahooMyWeb

November 20, 2007 | 4:18 pm

Is there really a superior race?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced into retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn’t “the same as ours.” “Racist, vicious and unsupported by science,” said the Federation of American Scientists. “Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence,” declared the U.S. government’s supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied “that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn’t a scientific leg to stand on.”

I wish these assurances were true. They aren’t.

Gulp. Those are two powerful yet common words. And, man, Slate’s William Saletan has some chutzpah for being able to write such a politically uncomfortable, if not incorrect, article. But facts are facts. And Saletan has sort of been down this road before with ‘Jewgenics.’

More importantly, he isn’t using this as a platform to bash blacks.

Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there’s strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It’s time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true. If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you’re not the first to feel that way.

He relates the mental-visceral struggle over racial genetics to the challenges Christians faced a century ago as Darwin’s theory of evolution became the scientific standard.

Evolution forced Christians to bend or break. They could insist on the Bible’s literal truth and deny the facts, as Bryan did. Or they could seek a subtler account of creation and human dignity. Today, the dilemma is yours. You can try to reconcile evidence of racial differences with a more sophisticated understanding of equality and opportunity. Or you can fight the evidence and hope it doesn’t break your faith. I’m for reconciliation. Later this week, I’ll make that case. But if you choose to fight the evidence, here’s what you’re up against. Among white Americans, the average IQ, as of a decade or so ago, was 103. Among Asian-Americans, it was 106. Among Jewish Americans, it was 113. Among Latino Americans, it was 89. Among African-Americans, it was 85. Around the world, studies find the same general pattern: whites 100, East Asians 106, sub-Sarahan Africans 70.

The article continues with more studies, more evidence and an explanation. It gets a bit boring at that point, especially because I couldn’t stop wondering whether God would actually not create all men equally. Maybe. The Bible states that we are made in God’s image, but we are all different—physically, mentally, emotionally, etc.—so clearly there is no standard. I just don’t know the answer to this. Today, Saletan offered his third article on this topic, a breakdown of what the evidence of intellectual inequality teaches us and what we can do to close the gap.

Don’t tell me those Nigerian babies aren’t cognitively disadvantaged. Don’t tell me it isn’t genetic. Don’t tell me it’s God’s will. And in the age of genetic modification, don’t tell me we can’t do anything about it.

No, we are not created equal. But we are endowed by our Creator with the ideal of equality, and the intelligence to finish the job.

10 Comments — Leave your comment

November 1, 2007 | 3:02 pm

The study of ‘Jewgenics’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A regular topic on The God Blog is my quest to balance my Jewish heritage with my Christian beliefs. This has played out in posts about Jewish exceptionalism and that unanswerable question: Who is a Jew? Well, Slate takes on both those topics in this story about “Jewgenics”:

Are Jews a race? Is Jewish intelligence genetic?

If these notions make you cringe, you’re not alone. Many non-Jews find them offensive. Actually, scratch that. I have no idea whether non-Jews find them offensive. But I imagine that they do, which is why Jews like me wince at any suggestion of Jewish genetic superiority. We don’t even want to talk about it.

Actually, a bunch of us did talk about it, three days ago at a forum at the American Enterprise Institute. The main speaker was Jon Entine, an AEI fellow and author of a new book, Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People. He was joined by fellow AEI scholar Charles Murray and by Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at Northwestern University. Entine and Zoloth are Jewish. Murray isn’t but talks as though he wishes he were. “One of my thesis advisers at MIT was a Sephardic Jew,” he announced proudly, turning the old “some of my best friends” cliché upside down.

Entine laid out the data. The average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is 107 to 115, well above the human average of 100. This gap and the genetic theories surrounding it stirred discomfort in the room. Zoloth, speaking for many liberals, recalled a family member’s revulsion at the idea of a Jewish race. Judaism is about faith and values, she argued. To reduce it to biology is to make it exclusive, denying its openness to all. Worse, to suggest that Jews are genetically smart is to imply that non-Jews are inherently inferior, in violation of Jewish commitments to equality and compassion. My friend Dana Milbank, who’s a better (if I may use that word) Jew than I am, watched the discussion, went back to his office, and wrote a column in the Washington Post poking fun at all the talk of superior Jewish intellect. The column, as usual, was really smart.

But what if Judaism as a genetic inheritance is compatible with Judaism as a cultural inheritance? And what if the genes that make Jews smart also make them sick? If one kind of superiority comes at the price of another kind of inferiority, and if the transmission of Jewish values drives the transmission of Jewish genes, does that make the genetics and the superiority easier to swallow?

Apparently so.

 

0 Comments — Leave your comment

August 27, 2007 | 11:50 am

Lamenting Jewish ‘exceptionalism’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I like prodding my wife, who is not of Jewish descent, with claims of a special Jewish intelligence. I bring home issues of The Jewish Journal like this one and e-mail her essays like Charles Murray’s “Jewish Genius.”

But in this week’s New Jersey Jewish News (hat tip: Bintel Blog), Editor-in-Chief Andrew Silow-Carroll laments Jewish exceptionalism.

Of course, we have no one to blame but ourselves for the inordinate amount of attention we attract. We learned a lot of things in the desert but never quite got the hang of camouflage. When fate was handing out professions we picked finance, law, medicine, and movie-making. When God was handing out land, we said sure, we’ll take that one, the one sitting in the middle of about a gazillion Muslims. Maybe they won’t notice.   

And we make our own claims for exceptionalism, proudly but not always wisely. We’re happy to be included among the world’s “Three Great Religions,” and then we’re shocked by “God’s Warriors,” a six-hour series on CNN that devotes as much time to our crazies as it does to the Muslims’ and Christians’. I’d be happy to be demoted to the list of the world’s Not-So-Great Religions if it meant never having to suffer through another Christiane Amanpour interview with a Jewish extremist who is best known for failing to blow up the Dome of the Rock.

But that’s the price of exceptionalism: Specious comparisons between a tiny people’s relatively marginal record of terrorism, versus state-sponsored mass murderers who have destroyed untold numbers of mosques and shrines in Iraq and Hindu temples in India and Pakistan, not to mention the occasional synagogue.

The problem I have with this statement begins with “When God was handing out land.” I don’t recall God saying to Moses, “Where do you want to build my kingdom?” It was: “That occupied land over there—yeah, the one with the giants living in it. That’s where I want you to live. Go take it.” Secondly, there were no Muslims then, and there wouldn’t be until 500-plus years after the destruction of the Second Temple. Nonetheless, Silow-Carroll‘s point is an important one: Jews seems to suffer more as a group and are held to a higher standard than others. Like Silow-Carroll, a lot of Jews have been bemoaning the attention dedicated to the Jewish extremists in “God’s Jewish Warriors.” Here was what Robert J. Avrech, a Orthodox screenwriter, had to say at his blog, Seraphic Secret:

The whole two hours of this Al Jazeera program is such typical, and poisonous Arab propaganda that Karen and I are kind of fascinated. This huge lady [Christiane Amanpour] with the really bad hair interviews guess who as experts on Israel? Jimmy Carter. Karen Armstrong.  John Mearsheimer. There’s the obligatory angry loser from Peace Now — dude, clean your office, it looks like cat litter. And a couple of Israeli lefties who are so far gone they might as well be living in Damascus. Gee-willikers, Al Jazeera lady forgot to interview Hizbullah/Iranian-proxy strongman Hassan Nasrallah; his views on Israel are pretty much the same as the usual suspects above. He’s always ranting about the evils of the Israeli occupation. And he vehemently denies that he’s a Jew-hater. Like Carter, Armstrong and Mearsheimer he insists that he’s merely anti-Zionist.Yup, Nasrallah gets positively indignant when he’s accused of being an anti-Semite. Sheesh, can’t anyone criticize and bomb Israel without being accused of being a Jew-hater? There’s this long segment on the — horror musical sting here — Israel lobby. Obligatory shots of well-dressed, um Jews, tables of food, which I suppose is proof of evil, people chatting and looking, y’know, conspiratorial. I’m waiting for Al Jazeera lady to start quoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, because that’s really what this segment is all about, but I suppose she’s too cool for that. This is after all Al Jazeera. They are , allegedly, civilized.   Then fullback lady pulls out the big guns: Actual Jewish terrorists. She comes up with Baruch Goldstein, Yigal Amir, and a group who rigged explosives to the car of an Arab Mayor they suspected of aiding terrorists and who planned on blowing up an Arab girl’s school, Disgusting and wrong, but they were caught and arrested, by Jewish cops, thank G-d.  That’s it for Jewish terror. Personally, I think the Jewish people have shown remarkable restraint in the face of a genocidal enemy.

Back to Silow-Carroll, who notes that Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse “thinks the world insists on Jewish exceptionalism as part of a ‘culture of blame’ — as a way for countries and cultures to distract their followers from their real problems.” He then concludes with this:

I’m proud of the Jews. I really am. But sometimes I’m with Tevye. “I know, I know. We are Your chosen people,” says the hero of Fiddler on the Roof. “But, once in a while, can’t You choose someone else?”

0 Comments — Leave your comment

April 13, 2007 | 11:38 am

Roots of Jewish brainpower

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Why are Jews so smart? (Or dumb, depending on your point of reference.) Well, in this month’s Commentary Magazine, controversial scholar Charles Murray, a self-described “Scots-Irish Gentile,” has a piece titled “Jewish Genius” in which he writes that “going back to the time of Moses, Judaism was intertwined with intellectual complexity.”

In the first half of the 20th century, despite pervasive and continuing social discrimination against Jews throughout the Western world, despite the retraction of legal rights, and despite the Holocaust, Jews won 14 percent of Nobel Prizes in literature, chemistry, physics, and medicine/physiology. In the second half of the 20th century, when Nobel Prizes began to be awarded to people from all over the world, that figure rose to 29 percent. So far, in the 21st century, it has been 32 percent. Jews constitute about two-tenths of one percent of the world’s population. You do the math.

(skip)

New York City’s public-school system used to administer a pencil-and-paper IQ test to its entire school population. In 1954, a psychologist used those test results to identify all 28 children in the New York public-school system with measured IQ’s of 170 or higher. Of those 28, 24 were Jews.

(skip)

Nothing that I have presented up to this point is scientifically controversial. The profile of disproportionately high Jewish accomplishment in the arts and sciences since the 18th century, the reality of elevated Jewish IQ, and the connection between the two are not to be denied by means of data. And so we come to the great question: how and when did this elevated Jewish IQ come about?

Murray, of the American Enterprise Institute, tries to answer that question here. He refutes research published last year in the Journal of Biosocial Science that reported Ashkenazi Jews had heightened intelligence, but not Sephardic or Oriental Jews. Gregory Cochran, an author of that study, snaps back in The Forward.

“I would call it pure speculation,” said Cochran, who is a researcher in Utah. “I don’t think there’s any evidence he’s right.”

(skip)

Murray acknowledges that his work is based more on historical impressions than on rigorous science, but it is already provoking debate in a corner of the intellectual world that tends to make Jews very uncomfortable: genetics.

Cochran’s work was widely panned by geneticists, and Murray makes even less of an effort to placate these experts with scientifically grounded evidence. The assumption from which both researchers work — that intelligence has a genetic basis — is still disputed by many scientists. Harry Ostrer, a leading Jewish geneticist, said that Murray’s work was “speculation” and that both Murray and Cochran trade in a “love of group typology — Jews are smart and blacks are great athletes.”

1 Comments — Leave your comment