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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Sixth-generation American secular Jewish academics with a fertility rate of 0.9 who volunteer for 'Jewish Voice for Peace' and whose conception of Judaism is essentially identical to progressive social justice (much as is the Christianity of the average modern Episcopalian/Anglican priest) and hardcore Israeli religious Zionists intent on colonizing the West Bank and having 5+ children, who couldn't give less of a shit about American politics are two very different groups of people. "Isn't it curious that some of group argue for this, while others argue for that" can literally be applied to any large group of people, including Americans, women, software engineers and so on. It isn't that there are no examples of blatant hypocrisy, because there are, but that this is a universal part of the human condition. See all the senior white men in every big corporation who are happy to remain in power and pay themselves large amounts of money, but who kick the ladder away from any young white guys who would replace them by ensuring the junior staff are fully diverse. They're not replacing themselves with a black CEO.

the issue ought to be considered by posing the following questions:

In my opinion, the more salient question is something like this:

Did Jewish overrepresentation in 19th and 20th century intellectual movements substantially alter the trajectory of Western liberalism / progressivism, or merely accelerate it?

Jews did not, after all, invent the enlightenment (ironically some 20th century Jewish chauvinists overstated Spinoza’s importance to try to suggest they did, but this was ahistorical). Hegel, from whom Marx derived his ideas, was not Jewish. Nor were almost all of the early egalitarians and liberals of the Scottish and French enlightenments who established the worldview that would captivate America’s progressive founders, which would write the constitution, which would lead perhaps inexorably to the present day.

The contention of most Jewish reactionaries, including Moldbug and myself, is that while Ashkenazi Jews embraced liberal ideas with great zeal after the Haskalah (lacking the context of the Christian ideas from which they emerged, and to some extent excited about the emancipatory possibilities they offered) for relatively obvious reasons, they did not invent these ideas, they did not invent their popularity, and they probably did not substantially alter their trajectory.

This places these Jewish reactionaries in an older Catholic and occasionally even Protestant reactionary tradition that, though at times antisemitic, did not place Jews at the center of its ‘axis of evil’, seeing Jewish overrepresentation among communists and progressives merely as a consequence, rather than a cause, of wider sociopolitical developments. Churchill, for example, shared this view to some extent. French Catholic reactionaries did and sometimes still do consider Jews as merely a junior coalition partner of secularists, Freemasons, Protestants and others. It’s also very different to the other view on the dissident right, popularized by MacDonald and others, that Jewishness is ‘central’ to the entire development of modernity and that liberalism was basically fine before around 1920 or 1950 or some arbitrary point in the 20th century.

Sixth-generation American secular Jewish academics with a fertility rate of 0.9 who volunteer for 'Jewish Voice for Peace' and whose conception of Judaism is essentially identical to progressive social justice (much as is the Christianity of the average modern Episcopalian/Anglican priest) and hardcore Israeli religious Zionists intent on colonizing the West Bank and having 5+ children, who couldn't give less of a shit about American politics are two very different groups of people

The overwhelming majority of Jews in elite positions are Zionists. Most may identify as liberal Zionists - if one can be a "liberal ethno-nationalist" - but they are Zionists. These JVP types are fringe elements. It's a fact that many Jews in the US preach liberal ideology to the goyim while heavily supporting an ethno-nationalist creed for Israel.

In a sense, this is a higher-IQ version of German Turks who vote for the left in the Germany but support Erdogan when voting from abroad. In my view, the true underlying values of a community can only be revealed when they are in the majority. There are too many ethnic self-interest incentives when you're a minority.

The overwhelming majority of Jews in elite positions are Zionists. Most may identify as liberal Zionists - if one can be a "liberal ethno-nationalist" - but they are Zionists.

Yes, in the same way that a lot of influential Boston "irish" were pro-IRA, completely independently from (and often with little knowledge of) the actual conditions on the ground in Ulster. Or in the way that it took Ghandi and the scattering of subcontinental elites across the British empire to really create the modern idea of a pan-regional, pan-linguistic, and pan-religious "Indian" nation-state. Or the way it took American "blacks" who'd been in the U.S. for generations to invent "Pan-Africanism".

The politics of a diaspora community are very different from, and motivated by very different concerns than, the politics of the "mother country."

In Israel, most secular Ashkenazim from the same background as American Jewry vote for progressive parties whose plan for government is a coalition with the Arab parties. There are very few hardcore religious Zionists in the US because almost definitionally ethnats seek to move to their ethnic homeland.

The overwhelming majority of Jews in liberal elite positions are Zionists. They may identify as liberal Zionists - if one can be a "liberal ethno-nationalist" - but they are Zionists.

The overwhelming majority of liberal Jews poll as liking Israel and consider it important to ‘Jewishness’ in a vague way. They have no particular opinion on Israeli immigration policy, no particular opinion on the Israeli government (although many poll as being hostile to ethnats like Bibi) and no opinion on what percentage of the Israeli population Jews should make up. Most have no idea what the demographics of Israel even are. Most American Jews have never been to Israel. In 2021, Pew Found only 25% of American Jews polled as “very attached” to Israel. (A further 30% polled as “somewhat” attached). Surveys of Irish Americans say 50-70% consider themselves to have a strong connection to Ireland and Irish culture, for reference.

The idea that most American Jews, including and especially ‘liberal elite’ Jews, consciously support Jewish ethnonationalism - ie. the specific attempt to ensure Israel retains a Jewish ethnic supermajority - simply isn’t borne out by the facts. That many American Jews care about Israel is obvious. Most Irish Americans care about Ireland, indeed former House speaker Paul Ryan was such an Irish ethnonationalist that he spent years lobbying for massively increased visas (with such a high cap that there would have essentially been an open border) for Irish people to come to the US and President Biden openly taunts the British government with his ethnic loyalty to what he considers his ethnic homeland.

But it doesn’t follow that most American Jews are staunch Israeli ethnonationalists, or have ever given much thought to Israel’s demography.

There are many non-Jewish Zionists in the U.S, interestingly enough. Most dispensational evangelicals are to some extent, as they think theologically that there will be a restoration of Israel before the end of the world, and tend to think that the formation of the state of Israel is a step towards that.