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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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So Tucker is under fire from the ADL after Tucker claimed attacks on white women was because they were "key to reproducing the white race" or something to that effect. Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, has now openly called him a Nazi. Greenblatt in particular seems to have a personal obsession with Tucker, with him publicly demanding Fox News fire the talkshow host on previous occasions. Tucker has also been the subject of a massive frontpage NYT article claiming he was a white nationalist.

An Orthodox Jewish group has decided to never let a good opportunity stirring the pot go to waste, joining the fray by issuing a statement demanding him to resign. Who? Greenblatt, of course! They represent about 2000 rabbis, so it isn't a small group, though admittedly the Orthodox community within the American diaspora is much weaker than they are within the British community.

There are two things of interest to me. First, the intra-Jewish CW on how to deal with rising de facto white nationalism. Even the most generous reader of Tucker's words will have to concede that he is making explicit racial arguments on behalf of a race, namely his own. Whether you agree with him or not is beside the point. He is no longer mumbling or hinting.

But secular Jews, who have historically been most alarmed about white nationalism, are now training their guns on the Orthodox community. The NYT - arguably their house paper - unloaded on Jewish day schools (called "yeshivas") in a front page article some weeks ago. The Orthodox community is growing very fast and unlike previous eras, retention appears to be stronger. So we can expect the American Jewish community to look more like the British one (which tends to lean conservative). Right-wing Jews do of course worry about white nationalism but they tend to not overlook left-wing anti-Semitism as much as secular Jews do.

Just a few days ago, Jerusalem Post carried an Op-Ed predicting the end of the "golden age" for Jews in America. Were Nazis the culprits? No, the author contended. The threat is "Islamo-Leftists". As the Jewish community trends right, a more diverse range of opinions will flourish away from the monolithic focus on white radical right extremism. But at the same time, it is hard for non-Americans such as myself not to notice how open racial appeals are made by folks like Tucker or Ann Coulter. Admittedly, Coulter has dipped her toes in these waters in previous years but even a cursory look at her substack shows the word white come up just as often as conservative. A decade ago, that wouldn't have happened.

As a curiosity, her podcast partner is Mickey Kaus, who is Jewish. So we seem to be viewing two different trends. First, an ever-increasing explicit focus on race from white right-wingers away from generic terms like "conservative" or "Christian". Second, an internal Jewish struggle where the long-term trend seems to favour the right-leaning Orthodox community. Stuck in all of this, you have legacy organisations like the ADL which still has institutional clout. Yet Tucker seemingly cannot be fired despite being openly called a Nazi by the head of the ADL, something that I would not have expected under the era when Abe Foxman ran the organisation. Is this a sign of a weakening hold of the ADL within the Jewish community or a radicalisation (racialisation?) on the part of white America? The answer, it appears to me, seems to be both.

This is the first time a rabbinic group has called outright for Greenblatt to step down. "It is regrettable but necessary," averred CJV Midwestern Regional VP Rabbi Ze'ev Smason.

"First of all, Carlson was calling out racism, the furthest thing from being racist, proven by the fact that had each mention of 'black' and 'white' people been reversed throughout the video, everyone, including the ADL, would endorse his remarks as crucial for reconciliation and unity. But this egregious inversion is almost beside the point: the ADL's core mission is supposed to be fighting antisemitism, yet Greenblatt is so preoccupied with Carlson that the organization completely overlooked the Holocaust minimization in the statement it trumpeted out on Twitter. Any organization sensitive to antisemitic bias would have chosen a different source for the same video, had it wished to discuss it. An ADL insensitive to antisemitic bias has lost its reason to exist, and is merely obstructing real efforts to combat antisemitism, the world's oldest and most enduring form of hatred."

Now this is going to be interesting. 2000 Rabbis going hardcore DRRR to defend Tucker Carlson's defence of white people. The natural response to which is usually scoffing and rolled eyes and accusations of missing the point. Except they haven't missed the point at all - progressivism does not share the crown - and thanks to the one-upmanship of social media, we are probably in for a steadily increasing stream of progressive anti semitism as people go too far in opposing all this, further demonstrating their point. Or to put it more succinctly, it looks like these Rabbis have started Noticing.

It looks like a lot of Orthodox Jews would rather have a mildly white nationalist society which intentionally keeps them separate from the broader population, you mean. I doubt relations between, say, blacks and whites, or the percentage of the population that is of Hispanic ancestry, is at all relevant to these rabbis for any reason, regardless of, say, Hispanic overrepresentation in child sex abuse, or the black murder rate, or anything IQ related. Being separate from broader society is something that ultra-Orthodox rabbis desire for their communities and white nationalists are probably the most plausible(that does not mean actually plausible) group to deliver it for them politically in modern America.