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Apropo of the discussion below, I decided to look into these oft-repeated claims about Jewish overrepresentation in certain sectors of the economy. So I decided to look at the banking industry. I looked at the top executives of the 25 largest US banks by total assets; anyone listed on the bank's website under "leadership team" or some other such designation counts as a top executive, usually between 10 and 25 people for each bank. As far as determining who's Jewish, I mostly went by last names, although if someone was obviously black or Asian I skipped the name entirely. The results? Of 414 total executives, I found 19 Jews, or about 4.3%. Considering that only a little over 2% of the country is Jewish, this is significant overrepresentation. Or is it?
The first problem is that I had to rely on names to determine if someone was Jewish as that isn't the kind of information included in most corporate bios. And most of the names I came across weren't Cohen and Leibowitz but generic names like Weiss and Stein or something else that's German or Russian-sounding. For my purposes I assumed all these people were Jewish unless their bio specifically mentioned working for a Christian charity or something (like Jason Schugel), so I probably overestimated the total number of Jews by a few, though on the flip side there are Jews with gentile names I may have missed. And then there's the fact that a significant number of these Jews were women. In addition to the whole problem of married names, the stereotypical image of a Jewish banker is not a woman. Additionally, a lot of these executives were general counsel, or HR execs, or were involved in some other aspect of the business not directly related to banking, but I didn't bother to account for this because they're still obviously influential and are top executives at large banks, but one could make the argument that they shouldn't be counted.
Methodological issues aside, though, the more salient point is that while 4.3% may be a significant overrepresentation in a strict statistical sense (it's about double the expected number), this isn't the kind of overrepresentation most people have in mind when they talk about Jews and banking. It's hard to make the argument that at 4.5% Jews in any way control the industry, or even have any significant impact on it as a group. Relatively speaking, this is about half the number of Christians in Egypt. When you look at the individual banks, 11 of them, or nearly half, don't have any Jews in top leadership positions. An additional 10 have 1, and the remaining 4 have 2. The most Jewish bank on the list is Goldman Sachs at number 5, with 2 of 9 top executives, including the CEO, being Jewish. In other words, even the most obviously Jewish big bank in the country still has 80% gentiles in top leadership positions.
Is my methodology off? Probably. I limited myself to the top 25 banks because that's what I had time for, but I doubt that including the top 100 would have made much difference considering that below that you start getting into regional banks from areas where the Jewish population isn't particularly high and US divisions of foreign banks. But it's still something to look at. I could have included more people than the top executives, though any cutoff is arbitrary; I'm sure if you go all the way down to including branch employees the number of Jews would thin considerably. You could use boards of directors instead of executives. I don't know what kind of effect this would have but I avoided boards because they don't concern themselves with the day-to-day operations of the company and their members aren't necessarily in the banking industry at all, but you can make the argument. Whatever you think about my methodology, though, if you're going to challenge it, at least do the work. Don't just tell me my methodology is bad and you're just sure if I had used a different methodology I would have found that the whole industry is totally dominated by Jews. Because this is what people have been doing for years, and it's obviously bullshit. People have been talking about Jewish domination of various industries in the United States for years, but as soon as I take a cursory look at the most stereotypical Jewish business this "dominance" doesn't even crack 5%.
Unsurprising. According to the NYT feat Steve Sailer, Jews obviously dominate only as University Presidents, at 56%, less so as heads of news and media companies (36-40%), and across the sample of powerful positions the NYT has gathered make up merely 13%, which given what we know about IQ disparities probably indicates systemic anti-Semitism. Consider this also an endorsed alternative to your work (in the future, please attach CSV at least, when you're talking about 414 data points and aggressively demanding a quantitative analysis).
Seriously though, I do suspect that this methodology is wrong, much like counting ML papers and SOTA results on synthetic benchmarks can create the impression that the US is lagging behind China (indeed, «The China-US AI research gap has continued to widen, with Chinese institutions producing 4.5 times as many papers than American institutions since 2010, and significantly more than the US, India, UK, and Germany combined»), while in reality not a single Chinese paper is of any consequence and Google alone, with a few dozen major papers, is running circles around the entire rest of the planet, with OpenAI and Meta in tow.
Goldman Sachs is not bigger than JPMorgan Chase, but it aggressively defines standards and pushes ethical guidelines for others to follow; it may be that David Solomon, or whatever he represents, has higher agency than Jamie Dimon. And do you seriously say that the CEO has 1/10th of the power because there are 9 more executives listed? Does Xi have 1/7th of the Standing Committee's power?
To be fair, he could have even less. Structure matters. Maybe it's like the difference between the LA Times and the New York Times: «...the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. [...] It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.» I suspect it's not a coincidence that Sulzbergers guard their turf so jealously while the LA Times is ran more like a regular business. (In the same vein, what is interesting about Goldman Sachs is not its current CEO but the historical predominance of Jewish executives, and the often clannish nature of their succession. GS is not merely a property).
BlackRock, meanwhile, this «industry leader in environmental, social and corporate governance» that issues moralizing letters to its clients, is not even a bank, has pitiful assets by bank standards and can mainly brag of «assets under management» ($10 trillion of them, though) and thus doesn't make it to your list with its diverse leadership.
It may work the other way around too. Like Churchill has said once, «...the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek – all Jews.» This is an unsubstantiated, qualitative judgement of a savvy well-connected operator, that no counting of raw beans could check – how do we know if Litvinoff truly was more powerful than Tchitcherin? His rank doesn't indicate that! Kushner, too, didn't outrank Trump, nor does Blinken outrank Biden, yet the former has bragged of defining Trump's policy in the Middle East (one of the few parts of Trump's presidency that have been allowed posterity) and basically running the whole show, and the latter is perhaps more influential still. And someone like Pompeo is a purebred Gentile, but his beliefs about the supernatural primacy of Israel, uhh... Ditto for Pelosi – does it matter if she isn't as Jewish as Schumer?
Now, how do we develop a proper methodology for apportioning relative power of groups in a principled way? I admit it's hard, but I think this involves what Moldbug is going on about with his reformalization. We evaluate individual actors as moved by others or actively moving them; their interpersonal relationships and their career obligations to organizations with unambiguous and hopefully self-admitted allegiances; we chart trajectories leading people from the crib to powerful positions; and thus reveal a network of influence.
Necessarily, this is going to give off crazy vibes – so nobody decent will bother. Certainly couldn't be me!
Well, we now know how it ended, we have the benefits of knowing that ZOG even at its strongest stands no chance against COG.
Lesson of history is: if you have a (((problem))) in your house, call the Caucasians
Yeah, I mean, that Churchill quote is about the worst example that one can use, since we know now that Trotsky, Zinoviev etc. would be sidelined very quickly (even before their actual fall it was not them getting their policies through in the short run, ie. before Stalin took over the show firmly - it was Bukharin, Rykov etc. who formed the majority in Politburo with Stalin implementing the NEP and the more moderate 20s foreign policy, and Stalin only turned on the Right after marginalizing the Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev for good. Not exactly what I'd call a firm source of principal inspiration and driving power! Litvinov was also (during a later period, of course) used for a time for whatever purposes Stalin had and then dumped quick once his Jewishness became an obstacle to getting closer to Nazi Germany.
In general, it's the study of early Soviets that has most convinced me how tendentious the "Jew-counters" tend to get. I've seen people argue that Lenin was Jewish (according to current info Lenin might have been 1/4 Jewish, but if he was, he didn't know his roots), that Stalin was Jewish (some theory says that "Dzugashvili" comes from a word meaning Jew - it doesn't, that Bukharin was Jewish (absolutely no other reason to suspect so expect that he was a Bolshevik - yes, it's that circular), that other early firmly gentile communist figures like Engels and Karl Liebknecht were Jewish etc etc. Or people using this Putin quote as first proof that the first Soviet government was 80 % Jewish - one can actually go to Wikipedia to check the ethnicities of the members of the first Council of People's Commissars, and as far as I've been able to ascertain, only one of them was (Trotsky).
BTW, to all people who complain about "Jewish control", look at Tsarist Russia.
Here is the last Tsarist government, count the names.
Yes, German names, 5 out of 16. I am too lazy to look up percentage of Germans in Russian empire and calculate the overrepresentation rate right now, but at first sight, GOG makes ZOG look like amateurs.
The difference is that you don't need to look for reasons why the Tsarist government was so bloodthirsty because it wasn't.
When you are looking over Soviet governance you have to answer the question of "why were they so downright genocidal against Russians?". Ethnic animus is one of the answers that is on the table.
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Good enough for Israeli Law of Return.
Given the Soviet Union’s complexity and predilection for numerous layers of bureaucracy it is a difficult to quantify the number of Jews throughout senior leadership positions during and just after the revolution of 1917. Half of the top contenders in the Central Committee of the Communist Party to take power after Lenin’s health declined in 1922 – Lev Kamenev, Trotsky and Zinoviev – were Jewish. Yakov Sverdlov, the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee from November 1917 to his death in 1919, was Jewish. Born in 1885, he had joined the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1902 and became a member of the Bolshevik faction with Lenin early on. Like others of his generation he took part in the 1905 revolution. His father converted to Russian Orthodoxy.
The Central Committee of the USSR is instructive as an indicator of the prominence of Jews in leadership positions. In the Sixth Congress of the Bolshevik Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and its Central Committee elected in August 1917, we find that five of the committee’s 21 members were Jewish. This included Trotsky, Zinoviev, Moisei Uritsky, Sverdlov and Grigori Sokolnikov. Except for Sverdlov, they were all from Ukraine. The next year they were joined by Kamenev and Radek. Jews made up 20% of the central committees until 1921, when there were no Jews on this leading governing body.
But also not enough to be sent automatically to the camps in Nazi Germany (unless there were other complicating factors, of course). Why would this be the relevant criteria, again, especially - as stated - as there is no evidence that Lenin was ever aware of his Jewish heritage?
And they lost.
Which is more than expected on the basis of demography, but hardly anywhere close to anything forming a majority, or even a commanding plurality (especially considering that Jewish Bolsheviks often fought among themselves - Zinoviev and Kamenev turning on Trotsky etc.)
To me it seems that there are fairly good neutral explanations why there were more Jews than would demographically have been expected in early stages of Bolsheviks/CPSU; it was natural for Jews to gravitate to revolutionary left-wing politics in a situation where the right wing was openly antisemitic as a matter of course and centrism often meant the tacit preservation of antisemitic structures, and as an added factor Bolsheviks had a specific need for people who knew German (Yiddish would at least offer you a good basis for this) for diplomatic purposes in the early years, with many Bolsheviks of the Jewish ethnicity having prominent diplomatic roles, and also the language factor allowing many Jewish Bolsheviks to become exiles easily, benefitting from hanging around with Lenin who was also an exile. Once those factors became less relevant, the power of such people diminished rapidly, often with fatal results.
(Of course one could also argue that exactly none of them were Jewish in the religious sense, as Bolshevik Party required strict atheism of all of its members anyhow...)
As the joke goes:
"What are you worried about? Your documents say 'Russian'!"
"So? They're gonna break my face, not my documents!"
(Lost in translation: the ambiguity between "hit in the face" and "hit according to the face")
...How many Russians and Russian speakers are here anyway?
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