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Recently I was asked, as happens periodically in this forum, to clarify my position on that thorniest of thorny questions: The Jewish Question. Specifically, @faceh asked me, after I had criticized his equating White Nationalism with statements about “gassing the Jews”, whether I would support the removal of all Jewish individuals from positions of power in White countries. Work stuff pulled me away for a few days and I’ve been unable to answer his question, but I think it’s a useful opportunity for a larger post.
I’ve spoken before about how my conception of Whiteness can be modeled as a series of concentric circles. The central circle - the cluster of the most archetypally and uncontroversially representative examples of Whiteness - consists, roughly, of the historic populations of what can broadly be called Northwestern Europe (the British Isles, Scandinavia minus Finland, the Low Countries, Northern France) plus the German-speaking peoples of Central Europe and the Tyrol, as well as the diaspora populations of these ethnic groups in the New World. Some ardent Nordicists would stop here and say that only people who fit into this first circle count as properly White, but this is a fringe position and not one to which I subscribe. My ancestry is 100% British Isles on all sides as far back as I can trace it, which is hundreds of years, so I don’t object to the Nordicist position out of any personal conflict of interest, but it seems to me that any conception of Whiteness that leads you to conclude that the Romans weren’t white is just a massive own-goal.
So, then we move on to the second circle, in which we find the populations of Spain, Portugal, most of Italy, Southern France, Finland, Hungary, and arguably the West Slavs and the Balts. All of these ethnicities have certain aspects that make them non-central examples of Whiteness - such as partial admixture from non-White substrates, like the Finns and the Iberians, or speaking a non-Indo-European language, in the case of the Hungarians and the Finns. Still, these are very White-looking people, relatively speaking, and their cultures have all played an important part in European history.
Past that, you get to a third circle, encompassing the South and East Slavs, the Romanians/Moldovars, the Maltese, the Sicilians, and the modern Greeks. The boundaries of this circle are blurry, and there are certainly aspects of these cultures which strike members of the central circle as quite distinctly foreign, which is part of why nativists and White Nationalists of the early 20th century vociferously resisted the mass immigration of these peoples into Anglosphere countries. Many of these ethnic groups contain very significant recent genetic admixture from non-European conqueror groups. An argument can be made (and sometimes is made) to exclude this circle from discussions of Whiteness. For me personally, though, any model of Whiteness that kicks out Tchaikovsky and Nikola Tesla is, again, an avoidable own-goal. The outer edges of this circle is where pretty much any commonly-used understanding of Whiteness would stop, though. There’s one glaring exception, though, and that is Ashkenazi Jews.
If you ask the average American if Jews are White, he’ll probably say yes, although it’s likely he hasn’t really thought much about it. If you show him a picture of, say, the Beastie Boys, he’ll readily and without hesitation identify it as a trio of White guys - he might not even be aware that they’re Jewish; still, if he reflects a bit on Jewish history and the fraught relationship between Jews and gentile Whites, he might concede that the question is complicated. And indeed it is! On the Dissident/White Identitarian Right, the question of whether or not Jews are White is generally considered to have been definitively answered - in the negative - and has been for some years now. However, there are some of us in that sphere who aren’t totally comfortable with nor confident about that answer.
I’ve spoken before about my warm feelings toward Jewish culture and Jewish people. The first girl I ever loved was (and still is!) Jewish, and my most recent long-term relationship was with a Jewish woman. The Jewish approach to comedy forms a foundational piece of my sense of humor: clever, heavily verbally-oriented, sarcastic, self-deprecating, at times neurotic, and suffused with a general sense of unease and alienation. From an early age, I strongly related to the Jewish intellectual tradition: contrarian, relentlessly critical and deconstructive, never taking anything at face value or uncritically accepting a proposition. It’s a culture that venerates intelligence, high verbal IQ, and the ability and willingness to argue. I strongly considered converting to Judaism for years, because I suspected that I would feel at home in that tradition. (And could land a beautiful Jewish woman - I have a type, and the Ashkenazi female phenotype epitomizes it.)
So, when I started getting deeper into the Dissident Right sphere, I found the discussion of the “JQ” to be by far the most difficult part to digest. While there is still a healthy Jew-welcoming (or, at least, Jew-neutral) faction of the White Right (Jared Taylor of American Renaissance has never publicly recanted his statement about Jews - “They look White to me!” and Paul Gottfried and Nathan Cofnas are still important rightist voices), the overwhelming stance of the hard Right is that the JQ has not only been answered in the negative, but is one of the most important questions - if not the single most important question - that one must answer when considering geopolitics today. I tend to keep my head down when the Jew stuff comes up in those spaces, simply because I know I’ll be shouted down and potentially singled out for suspicion as a subversive/infiltrator. But, the doubts and reservations I feel internally have not been resolved to my satisfaction.
Basically, I place Ashkenazi Jews in a nebulous fourth Circle of Whiteness. This peripheral circle’s boundaries are in flux, and ethnic groups in this circle can drop out or drift into this circle based on political and material developments within their own cultures. Groups that orbit in this circle also include the Japanese, the South Koreans, Latin American mestizos, Persians, Ottoman Turks, Indian Brahmins, and Arabs. The history of relations between these groups and the more central circles of Whiteness is incredibly fraught, and filled with periods of violence and persecution, conquest, inter-ethnic competition, and mistrust. Arabs and Turks were the great racial/religious enemy of Europeans for centuries, with enormous bloodshed and iterated conquests on both sides; on the flip side, they were on the forefront of scientific/cultural advances during a time of severe cultural regression and stagnation in Europe, and Arab/Turkish scholars were primarily responsible for preserving the works of the great Greco-Roman thinkers during that same time when White Europeans were busy abdicating their responsibilities as stewards of that tradition. Jews in medieval Europe were heavily represented in a parasitic rentier class, which contributed greatly to the animosity so many Europeans felt toward them; however, they were also massively overrepresented in vitally-important technical fields such as medicine. Something like two-thirds of doctors in medical Germany were Jews, meaning that countless gentile White lives were saved or immeasurably improved by Jews.
The great question, to my mind, when it comes to this fourth circle is: will these groups ever see themselves as White? Obviously these groups are always going to be peripheral to Whiteness; nobody is ever going to see a Japanese person as just as white as a Dutchman. However, with the looming population explosion in sub-Saharan Africa and the Global South more generally, we could be approaching a situation in which it will become necessary for the civilizations of the Global North to begin mounting a coordinated defense against the waves of migration that could soon begin spilling out of the Global South. In the same way that Christian Europeans had to bury their long-standing inter-ethnic enmities in order to present a unified front against Saracen and Turk invaders, it may be necessary for societies above a certain level of material and cultural development to bury the hatchet and form a phalanx against the marauding hordes spilling across the Sahara and the Darien Gap. If such a scenario arises, civilizations such as China, India and Iran may have to make the crucial choice about whether or not they want to stand with Europeans, in a united Eurasian front - a Fortress Eurasia, if you will - to repel the invaders, or whether to actively join or facilitate the invaders as they overwhelm and annihilate the already weakened and degenerated peoples of Europe and the Anglosphere.
If such a scenario arises, I want these civilizations on my side. (“I never thought I would die side-by-side with an Arab.” “What about a friend?”) Under such conditions, a criterion of “White enough” will necessarily be sufficient. Jews are well within the “White enough” category, as far as I’m concerned, and I wish that others on the White Right would not be so cavalier about continuing to ignite the already-burning bridge with an ethnic group that still has the capacity to become a powerful ally, but which also had the possibility to continue its development into an equally powerful and implacable enemy.
So, the Jewish Question is actually a series of questions, and some of those questions need to be answered by Jews themselves. I don’t know how many Jews, or what percentage of Jews, see themselves as my enemy, or are likely to act as my enemies as worldwide racial conflict begins to boil over. I’m open to believing that the answer isn’t as dire as many on my side believe. I don’t know the answer, and I’m still trying to talk it out.
My thoughts on this: Much words, little heat, little light. I suspect you'll be modded for "phalanx against the marauding hordes spilling across the Sahara and the Darien Gap."
Why do you think these "concentric circles" of whiteness are categories worth maintaining and considering morally relevant? I'm sympathetic to The Great Replacement hand-wringing because a group of people (both white and not) are going extinct. This process is, as far as I can tell, being defended because addressing it would gore sacred cows. As for other downsides, it's possible that the nature of replacement will cause institutions and culture to change unpleasantly.
Besides those two issues, why do you care if natives are being replaced by slavs or mestizos or han chinese or sikhs? They're being replaced, the same. The human organisms who live in the West (I mean by broad definition, including Japan) are endangered one way or another. And their culture, if you care about that.
To wit, you want to form an alliance with the "fourth circlers" to prevent "nineteenth circlers" from taking over. Why was it worth fighting with fourth circlers to begin with?
I'm imagining an alternate universe where you are posting about how people with Type I Diabetes must not burn bridges with people with Hypothyroidism to defend themselves from the rising Type II Diabetes menace.
I've never seen any coherent evidence that the over-representation of jews in powerful positions compared to anglos/germans/latins/slavs is any different from the whites being over-represented compared to blacks. The far-right, in a way, forms a carnival mirror to BLM. They search for a conspiracy, ingroup bias, or systematic oppression to answer what boils down to simple capacity.
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I don't think the argument is over capacity. Everyone knows Jews are smart. The questions are, are they nepotistic? Do they agitate as a class?
I think they do. I think they behave the exact way wokes claim whites do (but whites don't).
I don't have much in the way of an anti-Jew bias and don't care about it very much. But I think it's interesting, especially after seeing what happened to Kanye for being, essentially, the modern equivalent to Marilyn Manson (Kanye is as much a genuine Nazi as Manson was a genuine satanist).
Not everyone who is anti-semitic is a Nazi. Kanye is getting his talking points from the Nation of Islam and Black Israelites. That strain of black thought is deeply anti-semitic (and also believes some hilariously-improbable conspiracy theories). But he is also a bipolar guy off his meds, who is building conspiracies in his head surrounding his divorce, and is really mad at some Jewish lawyers that represented his wife, among a whole bunch of other things.
Kanye has said a lot of wild shit about a lot of different groups. But when he went after Jews, everything changed. They rapidly coordinated against him, and took him from billionaire to millionaire over night.
Hilariously, even his bank kicked him out. And his talent agency. I'm sure that will go a long way in terms of proving that Jews don't have disproportionate power in Hollywood, banking and law.
Do women or black people control the NFL? No. It’s owned by old white guys. But Jon Gruden isn’t coaching anymore.
Did Jewish people just start working in the entertainment industry? Ice Cube appearing on the cover of the Nation of Islam’s rabidly anti-semitic newspaper ‘The Final Call’, years after his previous controversy surrounding his lyrics, didn’t keep him from being cast in family comedies.
I sincerely think you would like Farrakhan’s book where he cherry picks which Jewish bankers helped finance the slave trade, ignoring all the gentiles that did as well, and everyone else involved, and paints it as a coordinated “Jewish” effort.
You're misreading me. I don't really care that Jews agitate very effectively as a class, and have an outsized influence in some industries. But they do.
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Per Pew, "Fully 42% of all currently married Jewish respondents indicate they have a non-Jewish spouse. Among those who have gotten married since 2010, 61% are intermarried." That indicates a low level of in-group solidarity.
I don't believe in some grand Jewish conspiracy. I would expect them to interbreed with white elites. As Yarvin says, the story of Jews in America is a story of assimilation, not domination.
But the upper crust whites are a hell of a lot more Jewish than the bottom tier. And as such, they have more power. And because of the Holocaust/Jewish advocacy, they're still capable of agitating as a class when they want, in a way that upper crust whites can't or won't.
"They interbreed with other elites" isn't much of a gotcha for what I'm saying.
But why do we care that they are capable of agitating as a class? That is true of lots of economic, social, ethnic, etc (eg: AARP), groups, including groups with a lot more political power.
They are more effective at it. But I'm not saying that we have to care. I don't really care.
I doubt that they, or anyone,is as effective as AARP.
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Obviously endogamy and in-group solidarity are not the same thing, although it's reasonable to assume a correlation.
But we're having this exact conversation every four-six months. The question always is, what's the baseline for comparison? Jews constitute 2.4% of the US as per your source; even adjusted for SES, they are outnumbered by non-Jewish peers in every stratum. Choosing Jews as marriage partners even 39% of the time suggests some preference for endogamy. This is measured by odds ratios in the relevant literature, as described here by, appropriately, Rosenfeld.
New Demographic Perspectives on Studying Intermarriage in the United States, Phillips 2013 in Contemporary Jewry explains further:
And there's the issue of, well, Jews not really constituting a homogenous demographic. Orthodox Jews overwhelmingly marry and even befriend each other.
Religious affiliation, unsurprisingly, interacts with descent.
Endogamy values for [non-Hispanic] Whites are not provided and are a PITA to calculate.
P.S.
As noted in my response to KulakRevolt, the 2% number is not the relevant one; the relevant pct is the pct of Jews among college educated Americans who live in the few metro areas where Jewish people live -- the article you cite notes that "Americans overwhelmingly marry within [their] educational level.
So, mixed-ancestry Jews are more likely to intermarry, while single-ancestry Jews are less likely to intermarry. What does that say about Jews overall? And note that Orthodox Jews are very much a minority
More importantly, They have some preference for edogamy" is a far, far cry from "they exhibit dangerous levels of in-group preference." The bottom line is that most Jewish marriages since 2010 have been to non-Jews. That is evidence that in-group bias is not very strong.
Note also that Pew reports that "U.S. Jews are also less likely than the overall U.S. public to say religion is “very important” to them (21% vs. 41%). Slightly more than half of Jews say religion is “not too” or “not at all important” in their lives, compared with one-third of Americans overall who say the same." and that "bout half of Orthodox Jews in the U.S. say they have “not much” (23%) or “nothing at all” (26%) in common with Reform Jews, and a majority of Reform Jews reciprocate those feelings: 39% say they have “not much” in common with the Orthodox and 21% say they have “nothing at all” in common. Just 9% of Orthodox Jews feel they have “a lot” in common with Reform Jews and vice versa."
So, all the actual evidence presented so far seems to refute the claim
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Not necessarily. A jew marrying a gentile can still be excessively ethnocentric in all matter besides marital. Similar to how an anti-immigration forklift operator can have an asian wife. .
No, of course not necessarily. it is a single data point (albeit one more than provided by the OP). And, yes, an anti-immigrant forklift operator have an immigrant* wife, but how many do?
*I am assuming that not all anti-immigrant forklift operators have antipathy for Asian-Americans who were born here.
I should have clarified, an 'imported' or foreign born asian wife. What I was saying is that this single data point doesn't necessarily point in the direction you need it to. It's not a matter of how many, it's a matter of recognizing that the course of your life and your expressed political beliefs don't always line up 100%. And just because they don't doesn't mean you don't feel how you feel regarding politics and your in and outgroups.
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I'm not sure how much you can draw from that... Given how integrated Jews are and how much a minority they are in absolute terms (1.8%), a 39% intra-racial preference would represent an EXTREME ingroup preference over what we'd expect if they just considered themselves interchangeably white.
Like do you think American's of German Descent would in-marry at 39% in a random segment of America where they're 1.8% of the population? or do you think it'd very quickly approach the random rate of 1.8%?
You overstate your case a bit; in places were most Jewish people actually live, they make up more than 1.8% of the pop. Moreover, given the trend toward college educated persons rarely marrying those without a college education, the relevant pct is probably the Jewish pct of college students, which in the regions in which Jewish students attend college, is a substantial pct. And note that about 30% of Jews have graduate or professional degrees - they are even more unlikely to be in the marriage market.
As for German-Americans, when it comes to marriage, religion is obviously a more important determinant than ancestry, and apparently 76 percent of married Catholics with children are married to other Catholics, though perhaps the numbers for married Catholics w/o kids is lower.
Most importantly, the question is not, "do Jewish people exhibit more in-group preference than German-Americans or whatever." That is a red herring. The question is, is the in-group preference of Jewish people high enough that it is a threat of some sort, as the OP claimed? The outmarriage rates are a data point that tends to indicate not (Note, btw, that in general intermarriage rates
PS: Here is another data point: Jewish Americans are less likely than Americans of other religions to say that religion is very important to them, and more likely (44%) to say it is not too or not at all important
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I'd be open to evidence for this, but I've never seen it. The argument that jews are "parasite ethnicity" that silently coordinates to weaken its host country is cogent. (So is Critical Race Theory's description of systematic racism.) And it seems to match history the demographics of power. (So does Critical Race Theory.)
I need evidence — for example, some study showing off-the-charts Jewish ingroup bias — to take it more seriously than other just-so stories about the world.
I don't believe the parasite class weakening the host shit.
I think they are a group of high achievers that agitate effectively as a class, and may preferentially hire other Jews.
Nothing more, nothing less
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I don't have any statistics, but I think Jews having outsized power in certain areas (Hollywood, banking) is fairly obvious.
I believe that Jews preferentially hire other Jews, but I don't have stats.
It also seems obvious that Jews agitate as a class.
Kanye has said a lot of crazy shit about a lot of people and groups, but look what happened when he went against Jews. They coordinated against him, and hurt him more effectively than any other group has been capable of.
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"Studies show" isn't the be all end all of certainty (effectiveness of parachutes, etc). It's an open secret that Indians in management at many large tech firms in America preferentially hire other Indians to such a degree that entire departments become Indian, often of specific castes (probably eliding some nuance here but I'm sure some of our resident Indian longposters will show up to nitpick).
How many studies on Indians preferentially hiring other Indians are there? A quick search came up with a ton of studies about Indians and Pakistanis getting discriminated against but zilch on Indian nepotism in U.S. tech hubs, so by your standards anyone who disagrees ought not trust their own lying eyes. Studying hiring practices of brown people (Indians) that disadvantage mostly white and Asian candidates in gauche so it is just not done.
So it goes with overrepresentation of Jews. Can you imagine a serious academic discussion about the topic, not to mention any affirmative action to correct the I can't because it would be immediately rejected, the researcher blacklisted as an "anti-Semite" (what does that even mean anymore), and discussion in the public fear quashed.
Here's the part where I have to prove my bona fides lest I get accused of being a 4chan pol poster. I don't think there's an international Jewish conspiracy or even a national one. The vast majority of Jews don't coordinate outside of their immediate networks, just like most people. There is however a "perfect storm" (for lack of a positive term) of factors that lead to Jewish overrepresentation. Like Indians, Chinese, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and many other communities with a strong group identity, they feel warmly towards and elevate their own (this is a good thing IMO). But, they also have a siege mentality that strengthens these feelings, cultural traits that happen to make one more successful in the modern information age, and higher IQs on average.
So there's no mass Jewish conspiracy, it's just a lucky confluence of genetic and historic factors, but AA proponents are still hypocritical for ignoring it, and whites should not be scolded for Jewish success by statistically aggregating the two.
And finally (and perhaps most controversially) the suppression of any "noticing" of this fact is extremely creepy. Wouldn't most people be concerned if there was massive overrepresentation of Scientologists, or Iranians, or [insert your favorite identity group] in positions of power? It would demand an explanation.
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There are plenty of examples of Jewish intellectuals explicitly agitating for the interests of the Jewish community in ways that would render an analogous white person unfit for polite company. There are NGOs that exist explicitly to further Jewish interests, and there is even an explicit Jewish ethnostate. Jewish people network with other Jewish people through their synagogues and holidays, Jewish parents often encourage their children to marry within the faith, and I doubt you could find many Jewish people who would deny that their social circles are disproportionately Jewish.
What manner of further evidence are you looking for? A survey in which Jewish hiring managers obliviously admit to giving Jewish applicants an unfair advantage? If something along those lines is your requirement, then you have constructed an epistemological fortress.
To make my own position clear, I acknowledge and respect the innate intellectual advantage of the Jewish population (although I vaguely suspect one could slice the "white" community in America more finely to derive a genetic cluster among white people who are equally performant and equally sizeable, if one had the inclination and data to do so), and do not view them as parasitic in any way. Their achievements in science, technology, art and business are genuine and mostly work to everyone's immense benefit. We would all be impoverished if Einstein had never existed, and ten thousand more lesser known exceptional individuals like him in every walk of life, none of whom can be explained by nepotism.
I do take exception to the Jewish community's unnecessary persistence in maintaining a parallel culture within America, conceptualizing and advocating for its interests as distinct from the white population. Intentionally resisting assimilation and pursuing exclusive ethnic interests is a defection in a multiethnic society, and it is toxic for the country in similar fashion to white identity politics. Antisemitism is in part a response to this defection, and not entirely unjustified.
The analogy I draw is to Survivor. In Survivor, one of the most powerful tactics in the chaotic early game is to form a rock-solid two-person alliance, because two strategically aligned votes make a powerful coalition in an unorganized field of monads. Thus the rational play in the early game is to seek out and punish players who have formed such a two-person alliance, as a means of defense against their manipulations.
Likewise if an ethnicity organizes and advocates for its interests, one should expect other ethnic groups to recognize the inherent division in loyalty and to object, reactively (in this case with antisemitism) or proactively (via an exclusive ethnogenesis of their own, e.g. white identity politics). The salience of whether "Jews are white" is likely a product of these reactive and proactive responses to a recognition of an ethnic group's defection.
My impression is that you object to not just Jewish ethnic identity, but Judaism as a religion. Is there any way Jews could "assimilate" into American society without completely abandoning their religion? And why doesn't this standard also apply to, say, Catholics?
I don't think assimilation necessarily requires abandoning a religion. Catholics have assimilated without abandoning their religion. It has just become less central to their identity over time.
Do American Catholics not network with other Catholics through churches and holidays, and even Catholic social organizations like the Knights of Columbus? Do Catholic parents not encourage their children to marry within the faith?
I don't see how American Jews have failed to assimilate beyond remaining religiously Jewish.
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