Having read both MacDonald’s book (Culture of Critique) and Nathan Cofnas’ various critiques of that work, I find a few points worth raising here for the benefit of my readers.
In his book MacDonald tracks Jewish involvement in various intellectual movements: Marxism, Boasnian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Neo-Conservatism. MacDonald’s accusation is that Jews get involved in these intellectual movements specifically to forward a Jewish ethnic agenda that benefits their group exclusively, to the detriment of Gentiles, and that they don’t advocate for these ideas among their own group. He calls this a “group evolutionary strategy” to advance their group interests in hostile environments.
Cofnas points out a few exaggerations and flaws in this narrative. He notices a few things that MacDonald leaves out:
- high Jewish intermarriage rates among the diaspora non-Orthodox (72% among non-Orthodox American Jews who got married in the last decade)
- most Jewish leftists (with some exceptions) that MacDonald brings up also advocated for similar liberal stances for Jews (intermarriage, no in-group exclusivity, anti-Zionism, etc.) / that undermines the idea that those leftists were pursuing a ruthless tribalism for their own group
- The triumph of liberal social policy in Israel itself (LGBT, feminism, pornography, etc.) / negates the idea that Jews are uniformly pursuing traditionalism for their own people
- The existence of right-wing and even race-realist Jews who have participated in right-wing intellectual movements too (less so than leftist movements, but nonetheless they exist)
- The involvement of many Gentiles in the same leftist movements (and other leftist movements not mentioned by MacDonald) that MacDonald tries to pin exclusively on Jews
These are hard pills to swallow for the MacDonald thesis believers. When you look into the details, the Jewish monolith simply isn’t real and Cofnas makes a good case for this by pointing out Jewish involvement in right-wing political ideologies like Libertarianism, Paleo-Conservatism, even race-realism groups like American Renaissance, hereditarianism in the sciences, etc. He notes the prominent role of many Jews in the rise of Italian fascism, which contradicts the stereotype that all Jews are opposed to patriotism or nationalism in Gentile societies. There’s too many Jews on all sides of politics for the “Jewish monolith” meme to hold up. How would their involvement in these right-wing movements fit with the “group evolutionary strategy” hypothesis?
What Cofnas essentially argues is that Jews by and large get sorted on the left side of politics because of “right-wing anti-Semitism” and it’s hard to argue that point looking at the history of movements like National Socialism, the Russian monarchists, etc., who made anti-Judaism a prominent feature of their cause. If Jews are not welcome on the Right, then they will naturally gravitate to the Left, and then their prominence on the Left will be used as evidence of why they’re bad by right-wingers. I don’t think that’s the only reason many Jews join the political Left; there are also cultural and religious factors that lead them there. They do sometimes reference the bible when justifying pro-immigration policies, for example, and they often cite historical persecutions for why they favour pluralism, which Cofnas acknowledges. I call this the post-Holocaust PTSD motive for Jewish leftism.
Cofnas sums up his critique this way:
MacDonald paints a picture of Jews as hypocrites who impose liberalism on gentiles and adopt nationalism for themselves, but he ignores the fact that many of the most influential Jews seem to promote liberalism and multiculturalism for both gentiles and Jews. Just as problematically, in a number of cases MacDonald fails to report that Jews whom he identifies as ethnic activists took stands against Israel and other Jewish interests (again, defining “Jewish interests” in MacDonald’s terms as ethnic self-preservation).
We can look at a few examples here.
George Soros, who has said his Jewish experience in the Holocaust motivates him to push for an “open society” that will respect the rights of all minorities, applies the same liberal standards to Israel. He is known to fund pro-Palestine groups protesting Israel:
The cash from Soros and his associations has been key to the protests in Columbia University. At the Columbia University, three groups set up the tent city last Wednesday. These groups are Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime. The SJP termed the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel as “a historic win”. The SJP reportedly received $300,000 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2017 and also took in $355,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019, as per media reports. The Rockefeller Brothers fund is chaired by Joseph Pierson and includes David Rockefeller Jr, a fourth-generation member of the oil dynasty, on its board of directors.
Soros has infamously clashed with right-wing Israeli PM Netanyahu who accused him of funding the opposition to his plan to deport African migrants from Israel:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday accused Jewish billionaire George Soros of funding a widespread campaign against the government’s plan to deport African migrants and asylum-seekers. Soros, who in recent years has backed groups critical of Israeli government policy, has become a bugbear for the pro-Israel right.
Soros vigorously opposed the Iraq war (which was promoted by pro-Israel Zionists):
A billionaire philanthropist is running full-page ads in major US newspapers challenging the honesty of the Bush administration’s case for waging war on Iraq. The ads, estimated to cost about $185,000, were co-sponsored by US philanthropists Dorothy and Lewis B Cullman.
George’s son Alex said this:
I worry when Jews in America start to support policies in Israel which they wouldn’t support in America which don’t allow for separation of church and state, which don’t give full rights to people who are technically living under occupation, and which don’t allow for immigration of people who aren’t Jews, or for non-Jews to become citizens. I will always support Israel as a nation state, but I don’t live there. In the end, I don’t believe in a Jewish world and a non-Jewish world.
I hate the Soros’ because they are globalist maniacs committed to swamping the West with Third World barbarians, but you can see here that they are more or less consistent in their leftism, even calling out other Jews who are not consistent in their political stances depending on the country. Committed Jewish leftists will tend to be tolerant of non-Jewish immigration to Israel and certainly lean left on social issues within Israel. Some exceptions pop up like hypocrite Chuck Schumer.
Israel allows the non-Jewish spouses of Jews to become Israeli citizens under the Law of Return:
As of 2021, 3,340,000 Jews have immigrated to Israel since its independence in 1948.[15] Hundreds of thousands of people who do not have Jewish status under Orthodox Jewish interpretations of halakha received Israeli citizenship, as the law confers citizenship to all offspring of a Jew (including grandchildren) and their spouses.[16]
The Israeli Communist Party manifesto says this:
The CPI fights for: (1) the interests and rights of the workers and the raising of their quality of life; the development of the country for the benefits of all its inhabitants, both Jews and Arabs, without discrimination; against all forms of racism, national chauvinism and social reaction; the defense of human rights and against all forms of discrimination; the defense of democratic liberties and against the danger of Fascism; (2) the equality of both civic and national rights of the Arab population in Israel and its recognition as a national minority; the legislation of an equal citizenship law; the defense of the rights of Arab citizens who were torn from their land and property; for Jewish-Arabic fraternity; (3) the equality of rights for women in all spheres; an end to all forms of violence and coercion towards women; (4) for an equality of rights of Mizrachi Jews; (5) for the defense of the rights of children and youths; (6) for the defense of foreign workers; (7) against militarism and for the recognition of the right of conscientious objection; (8) for the separation of religion and state; to guarantee freedom of conscience; the end of all forms of religious coercion; guaranteeing freedom of worship for all religions without discrimination, and the right of every person to freely choose a secular or religious way of life. In both th e past and the present, the Communist Party of Israel swims against the tide national chauvinism among Jews and Arabs. We reject the ideological roots and the praxis of Zionism, which breed racist attitudes and undermines equality and democracy.
Sounds exactly like the kind of melting pot open society the Soros’ envision for Israel.
The pro-refugee organization HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid) also backs refugees in Israel and organizes support for them:
Israel has one of the lowest recognition rates of refugees in the world, and we are happy to be part of changing that. HIAS has had a presence in Israel since 1950 and has worked primarily with the asylum seeker community since 2014, providing legal services and other forms of aid.
The radical leftist Jewish group Anti-Defamation League, known for its support of Israel generally, stood with HIAS in opposing Netanyahu’s plan to deport African asylum seekers:
ADL and HIAS have grave concerns over a reported Israeli government plan to deport tens of thousands of African asylum seekers from Israel, either by coercion or force. Under this plan, Sudanese and Eritreans in Israel were given three months to leave the country or face indefinite incarceration. In this open letter, the American organizations urge Prime Minister Netanyahu to refrain from implementing this plan.
The ADL even scolds its fellow Jews who take an anti-LGBT stance and acts as tone police of the Jewish community to keep them squarely in the social liberal camp.
I will say that the ADL, while mildly opposing the more extreme manifestations of Israeli Zionism or Jewish supremacism, is fairly quiet on those issues and mostly just attacks perceived anti-Semites and anti-Zionists. So if they’re attacking anti-Zionism and conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, then they by default support Zionism. So they could be categorized, in my view, in the “hypocrite” category on the topic of immigration and nationalism while probably supporting a socially liberal program for Israel on other issues like LGBT, abortion, etc.
Jewish “anti-racist” activist Tim Wise makes it quite clear here he’s an anti-Zionist.
He opposes a Jewish state and wants Israel to become a multi-racial democracy, like he does in the West:
He is a critic of Israel, and philosophically opposed to Zionism, which he views as not only oppressive to non-Jews in Palestine, but detrimental to Jews as well, and counter to Jewish values.
Look into any of these major leftist Jewish figures and you’ll find it’s normally the case they advocate for the same stuff in Israel. There are some cases of Jews with conflicting views on Israel vs a Western country, but for these hardcore anti-racist activists it’s pretty consistent.
Another example is pro-immigration zealot Ronit Lentin in Ireland where she “became increasingly involved in Palestine solidarity activism”. She’s described here as “an anti-racist and pro-Palestine activist” and published a book Thinking Palestine which a reviewer described as, “‘The book should be read closely by serious pro-Palestinian activists wishing to sharpen their conceptual tools in the ceaseless battle against Zionist propaganda.'” She pushes multiculturalism for both the West and Israel. She’s a bad influence for sure but at least consistent.
One notable exception is Barbara Spectre, who pushed for multiculturalism in Sweden, but is married to a rabbi and has made no notable critique of Israel (that I’m aware of) vis-a-vis its policy towards Palestinians.
Jewish anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow apply the same principles to both Jews and Gentiles, the West and Israel. Their website says this:
Palestinian dispossession and occupation are by design. Zionism has meant profound trauma for generations, systematically separating Palestinians from their homes, land, and each other. Zionism, in practice, has resulted in massacres of Palestinian people, ancient villages and olive groves destroyed, families who live just a mile away from each other separated by checkpoints and walls, and children holding onto the keys of the homes from which their grandparents were forcibly exiled.
By creating a racist hierarchy with European Jews at the top, Zionism erased those histories and destroyed those communities and relationships. In Israel, Jewish people of color – from the Arab world, North Africa, and East Africa – have long been subjected to systemic discrimination and violence by the Israeli government. That hierarchy also creates Jewish spaces where Jews of color are marginalized, our identities and commitments questioned & interrogated, and our experiences invalidated. It prevents us from seeing each other — fellow Jews and other fellow human beings — in our full humanity.
IfNotNow, a similar group, lays out their mission to defeat Zionism and “Ashkenazi dominance” in Israel, as well as AIPAC.
Jewish anti-Zionists like Max Blumenthal, Norman Finkelstein, Miko Peled, Noam Chomsky, David Sheen, Ilan Pappe and others positively fall outside the mold of the “group strategy” outlined by MacDonald. They apply their liberal egalitarian standards even more categorically towards Israel, dedicating much of their lives to opposing ethno-religious nationalism there. This Jewish disconformity on the Israel/Zionism issue is not something a “group evolutionary strategy” can explain.
There’s also some consistency on the other end, with Israeli nationalists like Netanyahu approving of stricter border policies in the West. Netanyahu and Likud in Israel have had warm relations with immigration-restrictionist populist parties in Europe (Orban, Geert Vilders, Spain’s Vox, etc.) and the Donald Trump-led Republicans in the US, which indicates their tolerance towards those types of policies in the West so long as the parties aren’t explicitly anti-Israel or anti-Jewish. Netanyahu personally called for Western countries to restrict immigration in his 1995 book:
Israel, despite being led by hardcore Likud Zionists committed to a Jewish majority, has permitted the prescence of two million Arab Israelis, 150,000 Druze and other non-Jewish citizens, and has embraced a mostly socially liberal program for the country.
Additionally, 168,000 Ethiopian Jews (who are black) have been incorporated into the country.
Mizrahi and Ethiopian are both somewhat distinct ethnicities from the Sephardim and Ashkenazim, so Israel is far from an ethnically pure state.
There are dozens of LGBT rights groups in Israel and Tel Aviv hosts large gay pride rallies every year.
Abortion is legal in Israel as is pornography.
Feminism is also rampant in Israel and laws are biased against men. This documentary says “Israeli women are the freest in the East, emancipated and independent”:
PEW Research says this:
Most U.S. Jews – with the exception of the Orthodox – say that rabbis should perform interfaith weddings. The same is true for same-sex weddings. Among U.S. Jews who are married, 2% say they are married to a spouse who is the same sex, while 3% of Jews who are married or living with a partner have a partner who is the same sex.
Also:
About one-in-ten U.S. Jewish adults identify as gay or lesbian (4%) or bisexual (5%)
So most US Jews not only welcome interfaith marriages among Jews but also homosexual marriages.
Reform Judaism fully welcomes Gentile converts to the faith. A NYT report from the 80s says:
The synagogue branch of Reform Judaism has started a vigorous program to invite conversions by non-Jewish partners in mixed marriages and by those Americans who express no religious preference. The plan, approved this week in Boston by the biennial convention of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, an organization of 735 Reform synagogues, represents a historic step toward welcoming non-Jews into Judaism, but stops short of encouraging outright proselytizing.
A website for Reform Judaism says this:
Modern-day Reform Jews wholeheartedly welcome those who have chosen to convert to Judaism, recognizing that our Jewish community is made stronger by those who actively seek to become Jews. As more and more Jews-by-choice enter the Jewish community and as public discussion of such choice grows more commonplace, Jews-by-choice have found that their acceptance in the Jewish community has grown. In fact, the Reform Jewish community, as a whole, is proud of its many congregational leaders, as well as a number of rabbis and cantors, who are Jews-by-choice.
Reform Jewish congregations also celebrate multiculturalism, diversity and multi-racial Jews. One congregation’s website says:
We rejoice that at least 25% of the Jewish population is racially and ethnically diverse, including African, African American, Latino (Hispanic), Asian, Native American, Sephardic, Mizrahi, and mixed-race Jews by heritage and marriage. Also, cross-cultural and cross-racial adoptions have been a part of our history from biblical times. We welcome you to bring color, flavor, and fullness to our Congregation. Recognizing that we are all created b’tzelem Elohim (in the image of God), we are pleased to welcome the multicultural/multiracial/multiethnic Jewish individuals and families in our community.
Another remarks: “We’re a global, multiracial people that’s growing more racially and ethnically diverse through interfaith and interracial marriage, conversion, and adoption.”
Another Reform website fully embraces diversity for Jews:
A major component of this is ensuring that all our Jewish communal spaces are affirming for all Jews and their loved ones, something which we – both as the Reform Jewish community and as a broader Jewish community – have not yet achieved. We can further advance toward this vision by learning and implementing three core principles/practices: diversity, inclusion, and equity.
The memes you see online tend to monolithically portray all Jews as “racist ethno-centrists” who would only advocate for social liberalism and degeneracy in the “goyim countries” while keeping Israel free of these vices. The truth is, many of these vices (with the exception of casino gambling) have arrived to Israel, a country run exclusively by Jews. If this was all just mendaciously designed to injure Gentiles, then why have they embraced much of it in Israel?
Cofnas’ argument against MacDonald’s thesis is that Jews are not a hive-mind and thus not all are pursuing the same objectives let alone “group strategy,” nor can all Jews even agree on what that strategy should look like. Jewish liberalism will eventually lead to the disappearance of Jewry into assimilation, which is what Frans Boas himself advocated for, stating:
Thus it would seem that man being what he is, the Negro problem will not disappear in America until Negro blood has been so much diluted that it will no longer be recognized just as anti-Semitism will not disappear until the last vestige of the Jew as a Jew has disappeared.
If Boas advocated for total Jewish assimilation with Gentiles to the point where Jewish identity disappears, as it appears he did there, then he can’t be counted as a self-interested Jew “advancing Jewish interests”. Franz Boas looms large in MacDonald’s thesis of group strategy, but the case for him being motivated by Jewish considerations is weak. He had a strong German cultural identity to the point of co-founding a German cultural society in America:
He also married a Catholic Gentile, which disputes MacDonald who falsely claimed he married a Jew to prove his ethno-centrism. Many scholars concluded that Boas had a weak Jewish identification and a stronger German one:
The likely reality of the situation is this illuminated by Glick (1982): throughout his life, Franz Boas was by identity primarily a German or German-American (who probably “never identified himself in his public writings as Jewish”) and “recognized the right, indeed the duty, of Germans in America to maintain pride in their national origins and cultural heritage, but advocated assimilation to the point of literal disappearance for Jews.” (In agreement is Damrosch (1995, 1), cited earlier.) In fact, “in common with many other Jews, particularly German Jews and others of a strongly assimilationist bent, he did not acknowledge the existence of a specifically Jewish cultural or ethnic identity.” Rather, he displayed considerable partiality to Germany
Another Jewish Boasian, Alexander Goldenweiser, criticized Jewish Zionists as “racial snobs” oppressing Arabs:
Here for once, the tables are reversed, and the Jew turns into a racial snob. . . . In the “democratic” organization of the new Jewish state, the Arab is outvoted and ruled against his will by the Jewish people with the assistance of foreign British police. . . . Those same Arabs . . . are regarded by the Jews as inferior, as a primitive race.
Even Israel Zangwill, known for popularizing the “melting pot” idea of America, did not advocate for racial intermixing between black and White and was referring to a “European melting pot” as immigration at that time mostly came from Europe. A line from Zangwill’s famous play was this: “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming.“
Zangwill said this:
The devil is not so black nor the black so devilish as he is painted. This is not to deny that the prognathous face is an ugly and undesirable type of countenance or that it connotes a lower average of intellect and ethics, or that white and black are as yet too far apart for profitable fusion. Melanophobia, or fear of the black, may be pragmatically as valuable a racial defence for the white as the counter-instinct of philoleucosis, or love of the white, is a force of racial uplifting for the black. . . .
[N]egroes of genius . . . should be far less unwelcome than that which starts with the dregs of both races. But the negroid hair and complexion being, in Mendelian language, “dominant,” these black traits are not easy to eliminate from the hybrid posterity; and in view of all the unpleasantness, both immediate and contingent, that attends the blending of colours, only heroic souls on either side should dare the adventure of intermarriage. Blacks of this temper, however, would serve their race better by making Liberia a success or building up an American negro State, as Mr. William Archer recommends, or at least asserting their rights as American citizens in that sub-tropical South which without their labour could never have been opened up.
So Zangwill was more or less advocating for blacks to self-govern in Africa (Liberia) or in some isolated part of America where they can all go. The melting pot idea of Zangwill, which got twisted by modern progressives later to mean inviting the whole world to America, was that the various ethnicities of Europe immigrating to America should give up their previous identities and become exclusively American.
I guess you could argue that he more or less helped kickstart the spirit of that progressive idea, but you can’t argue in good faith that he was equivalent to a modern progressive who sees America as a dumping ground for the Third World.
When you get down deep into the details, it is not as black and white as the MacDonald side makes it out to be.
Ignoring Gentile Involvement
A major critique of MacDonald from Cofnas and the writer behind Mischling Review is that he went to great pains to omit any references to radical leftist Gentiles and their influence on the Jewish subjects in his book because it would weaken his overall case that this is all exclusively Jewish-motivated and Jewish-led. One such example here:
So in his treatment of Levi-Strauss, MacDonald excised parts of a text that implied Strauss was influenced by leftist-liberal Gentile philosophers John-Jacques Rosseau and Jean-Paul Sartre. MacDonald also claimed that Levy-Strauss had a strong Jewish identity and was concerned with anti-Semitism, but a researcher uncovered strong evidence that Strauss did not identify strongly as Jewish and identified much more as French.
Cofnas makes mention of MacDonald’s selective treatment of the 1965 Hart-Cellar immigration bill in the US, putting all focus on Cellar and the pro-immigration Jewish groups who backed the bill. Cofnas writes:
As always, MacDonald’s version of history is tendentious, highlighting liberal Jews, making unsupported speculations about their motives, and ignoring or downplaying the role played by gentiles. He says that, in the century leading up to the 1965 immigration law, Jewish groups opportunistically made alliances with other groups whose interests temporarily converged with Jewish interests (e.g., a constantly changing set of ethnic groups, religious groups, pro-communists, anticommunists, the foreign policy interests of various presidents, the political need for presidents to curry favor with groups influential in populous states in order to win Philosophia (2021) 49:1329–1344 1337 1 3 national elections, etc.). Particularly noteworthy was the support of a liberal immigration policy from industrial interests wanting cheap labor. This is a mealy-mouthed way of saying that there were powerful gentile groups with the same position on immigration as the Jewish groups.
It is true that Jewish groups helped push for the passage of the bill as did Emannuel Cellar and Jacob Javits who were Jewish, but the bill’s co-sponsor Phillip Hart was not Jewish and neither were other major backers of the bill like Ted Kennedy. Cofnas acknowledges the role Jewish organizations played in pushing for the bill, but counters that they were not alone:
Kennedy’s election in 1960 “ensured that immigration reform, though not a priority for the new administration, would find a place on the new president’s agenda” (ibid.: 55). In 1965, Johnson was president, and Democrats controlled both the Senate (68–32) and the House (295–140). Graham comments: “These circumstances, especially the egalitarian thrust from the civil rights movement, virtually ensured that the 89th Congress would be pressed by the White House and the congressional leadership to abolish the national origins quota system in 1965” (ibid.: 56).
So John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson and other non-Jewish Democrats were strongly in favour of the civil rights movement and immigration reform. Here’s a speech from JFK on civil rights in which he comes out strongly for black liberation and integration:
Various Kennedy family politicians were all major protagonists of the civil rights movement and immigration reform of the 60s:
Immigration reform was also a personal project of John F. Kennedy, Chin notes, whose pamphlet written as a senator was published after his assassination as the book A Nation of Immigrants, and argued for the elimination of the National Origins Quota System in place since 1921. Ted Kennedy, along with Attorney General and Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.), were both proponents of the bill, in part to honor their brother and also because it was consistent with their general interest in civil rights and international cold war politics, Chin adds.
Kennedy was not for unlimited immigration but absolutely supported a color-blind policy based on merit:
Renewal of the system was particularly offensive to groups that represented Italians and Jews, who had been particularly affected by the restrictions. The American Committee on Italian Migration conducted an intensive lobbying campaign. Publication of A Nation of Immigrants was a project of the Anti-Defamation league of B’nai B’rith, which had been impressed by Sen. John F. Kennedy’s record of supporting liberal immigration laws, including measures to accept refugees from war-ravaged Europe. The book was actually written by a member of Kennedy’s staff, Myer Feldman. Describing Kennedy’s participation as minimal, Feldman said the senator had “reviewed it, and did some editing.”10
While Kennedy was one of his era’s most outspoken reform advocates, he used a 1957 speech to the American Jewish Congress to make clear that he did not favor unlimited immigration. He stated his conviction that “we should have a system of limited and selective migration to the United States.” Kennedy’s principal objection with the status quo was about “the nature, not the existence” of restrictions. Asserting that a selective policy was necessary, he said that policy should “give preference to an immigrant because he is a nuclear physicist rather than because he is an Anglo-Saxon.”11
Kennedy was aware of the political as well as the ideological value of expansive immigration policies, especially in northern states where immigrants and their families were concentrated. In a 1955 letter to fellow Sen. Lyndon Johnson, he wrote, “The Democratic Party must do something to fulfill its 1952 pledges concerning revision of the McCarran Act if it is to have any appeal in the large cities of the North in 1956.”12
Notice that an Italian group also strongly lobbied for the reform. A description of that group’s activities is as follows:
The American Committee on Italian Migration (ACIM) was organized in February 1952 as a member agency of the National Catholic Resettlement Council, which later formed part of the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC). From its inception, ACIM’s chief objective was the liberalization of the United States immigration policy that, as delineated in the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, rested upon a restrictive “national origins” quota. ACIM undertook a wide range of activities, from raising funds to sponsoring new Italian immigrants into the United States and promoting new immigration legislation by Congress. This collection contains additional materials donated to CMS by ACIM in 2003, mostly documenting ACIM’s work in the 1970s-1990s. The collection contains office files and case records pertaining to lobbying US Congress regarding immigration law, and to the assistance of Italian immigrants in Italy and the United States.
MacDonald makes no mention of that Italian-Catholic lobby group in his discourse on the 1965 immigration bill.
Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Baines Johnson championed the immigration reform cause after Kennedy’s assassination:
But as Johnson delivered his first such address less than two months after becoming president he became an energetic advocate of the reform. “We must … lift by legislation the bars of discrimination against those who seek entry into our country, particularly those who have much needed skills and those joining their families,” President Johnson said. In a reference to the legislation’s use of preferences to replace national quotas, he added: “A nation that was built by the immigrants of all lands can ask those who now seek admission: ‘What can you do for our country?’ But we should not be asking: ‘In what country were you born?'”
We can see a convergence of interests emerging here among the ethnic/religious minority groups: Italian Catholics, Irish Catholics (like Kennedy) and Jews, all of whom perhaps felt slighted by the cultural dominance of WASPs.
All of that is interesting, especially considering that JFK was not known to be a stooge of Israel or Zionist interests, having pressured Israel to submit to more rigorous inspections to scuttle its burgeoning nuclear weapons program:
Kennedy pressured the government of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to prevent a military nuclear program, particularly after stage-managed tours of the Dimona facility for U.S. government scientists in 1961 and 1962 raised suspicions within U.S. intelligence that Israel might be concealing its underlying nuclear aims. Kennedy’s long-run objective, documents show, was to broaden and institutionalize inspections of Dimona by the International Atomic Energy Agency. … Declassified documents reveal that more than any other American president, John F. Kennedy was personally engaged with the problem of Israel’s nuclear program; he may also have been more concerned about it than any of his successors. Of all U.S. leaders in the nuclear age, Kennedy was the nonproliferation president.
JFK and his brother Robert also tried to pressure the American Zionist Council to register as a foreign agent. JFK also supported Arab and African independence and nationalism:
JFK personally supported Arab and African nationalism. As a senator in 1957, he criticized the Eisenhower administration for supporting and sending weapons to France in their war against the Algerian independence movement. In a 9,000 word presentation to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he criticized “western imperialism” and called for the US to support Algerian independence. Algerian President Ben Bella, who France had tried to assassinate and considered far too radical by many in NATO, was given a huge and impressive welcome to the White House.
A piece on JFK’s diplomatic conflict with Zionist Israel notes this:
Kennedy wanted to steer the Jewish Zionists away from the racist, militaristic and ultra-nationalistic impulses which have led to where we are today.
Kennedy supported Palestinian rights and the right of return:
All of that sounds to me like Kennedy was working to pressure Israel to become a more liberal and tolerant society, a very interesting case of a Catholic Gentile pressuring Zionist Jews to abandon in-group preference in favour of liberal equality. (Another interesting example of that is former US President Jimmy Carter who became a strong critic of Israel and Zionism). So the usual cop-out logic that liberal politicians like Kennedy are mere “puppets” of the Jewish lobby can’t reasonably be asserted here given his less-than-sycophantic stance on Israel and its domestic American lobby. He held genuine progressive beliefs and pursued them politically. He applied the same standards to both the US and Israel.
The national origins quota system was also already being circumvented to allow in hundreds of thousands of non-European immigrants:
On the other hand, Graham says that, in the wake of the civil rights movement and political developments that coincided with Lyndon B. Johnson’s election, “[a]bolishing that system [i.e., the national-origins quotas] seemed an idea whose time had come” (ibid.: 61). He explains that “[t]he immigration system constructed in the 1920s…was threatened by growing evidence that it no longer worked” (ibid.: 53). In the years leading up to 1965, an “incoherent patchwork of special government measures” had already been established to circumvent the national-origins quotas (ibid.: 53–54). Between 1945 and 1960, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower used “executive parole authority” to admit 700,000 refugees outside the quota system (ibid.: 54). “Congress…responded to the…political and cold war pressures by expanding the use of special statutes that worked outside the annual immigration quotas.” In the 1950s, “the Bracero program imported on average 360,000 low-wage workers a 1338 Philosophia (2021) 49:1329–1344 1 3 year from Mexico alone,” which “produced a deepening channel of migration and expanding lodgments of permanent settlement” in the US.
It’s important to note that the main purpose of the 1924 bill that established the national-origins quotas was to limit immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. As Graham says: immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Canada [were] exempt from quotas….Ironically, the national origins quota system curbed immigration from Europe but not from Latin America or the Caribbean. (ibid.: 46) Immigrants of African and Hispanic ancestry continued to come to the United States in significant numbers from the Caribbean and Latin America because the Western Hemisphere was excluded from quota systems or caps. Even after the sharp restrictions of 1921 and 1924, immigration law in the late 1920s admitted an average of 287,000 immigrants a year, chiefly because of the Western Hemispheric exclusion. (ibid.: 42)
MacDonald portrays Cellar’s intention as reducing specifically the White population of the country, but Cofnas provides a source which suggests that’s not true:
He [Graham] notes that Emanuel Celler—the Jewish congressman who officially proposed the 1965 legislation (also known as the Hart–Celler Act)—was “disturbed by the steep decline of European immigration.” Celler “introduced a bill to allow higher immigration from Ireland, Britain, and the Scandinavian countries, which he said had suffered from ‘unintentional discrimination’ as a result of his own law” (ibid., pp. 94–95).
So while Cellar was a pro-immigration liberal, it appears he did not intend specifically to harm Whites as he was still pushing for more European immigration afterwards when he saw that it had fallen in favour of other groups. So he was just a run-of-the-mill liberal on immigration without any specific animosity to Europeans as a group, something which MacDonald implies in his book. But Cellar and his bill did irreparable harm to the country in the end, even if he didn’t intend it to be so.
It’s undeniable that the Jewish lobby did play a role in both the 1965 Hart-Cellar act and the civil rights movement as a whole, which is not something they hide. The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism boasts of the pivotal role of Jewish liberals in the movement:
Judaism teaches respect for the fundamental rights of others as each person’s duty to God. “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor” (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a). Equality in the Jewish tradition is based on the concept that all of God’s children are “created in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27). From that flows the biblical injunction, “You shall have one law for the stranger and the citizen alike: for I, Adonai, am your God” (Leviticus 24:22).
American Jews played a significant role in the founding and funding of some of the most important civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
In 1909, Henry Moscowitz joined W.E.B. DuBois and other civil rights leaders to found the NAACP. Kivie Kaplan, a vice-chairman of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism), served as the national president of the NAACP from 1966 to 1975. Arnie Aronson worked with A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins to found the Leadership Conference.
From 1910 to 1940, more than 2,000 primary and secondary schools and 20 Black colleges (including Howard, Dillard and Fisk universities) were established in whole or in part by contributions from Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. At the height of the so-called “Rosenwald schools,” nearly 40 percent of Black people in the south were educated at one of these institutions.
During the Civil Rights Movement, Jewish activists represented a disproportionate number of white people involved in the struggle. Jews made up half of the young people who participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. Leaders of the Reform Movement were arrested with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964 after a challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations. Most famously, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched arm-in-arm with Dr. King in his 1965 March on Selma.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were drafted in the conference room of Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, under the aegis of the Leadership Conference, which for decades was located in the RAC’s building.
The Jewish community has continued its support of civil rights laws addressing persistent discrimination in voting, housing, and employment against not only women and people of Color but also in the LGBTQ+ community and the disabled community.
So there were some explicit Jewish ethno-religious motives for their support of minority rights. But I guess the argument of Cofnas is that there were plenty of non-Jewish fellow travelers like the Kennedys, Phillip Hart, LBJ, Italian-Catholic lobbies and others who played equally decisive roles in bringing this all about.
MacDonald also misrepresented statements by Karl Marx who advocated for the dissolution of Jews as a group:
Occasionally he imagines evidence based on nothing at all, as when he falsely says that Karl Marx held that “Judaism, freed from the principle of greed, would continue to exist in the transformed society after the revolution” (MacDonald 1998: 54). As I observed, Marx never said anything like this, and in fact he said the opposite, namely, the Jew would be “impossible” in a socialist society that “abolish[ed] the preconditions for huckstering” (Cofnas 2018: 149). (MacDonald (2018b) acknowledged that his claim about Marx was inaccurate, but responded by pointing out a typo in Cofnas (2018), which he apparently sees as a comparable error.)
Since Marx was anti-Jewish and advocated for the total dissolution of Jews as a group, he can’t be used as proof of a “Jewish group strategy”.
The evidence illuminates that Boas and Levy-Strauss don’t appear to have been motivated much by Jewish identity, nor was Marx, but that doesn’t mean that some of the modern Jewish anti-racists (like Soros, Tim Wise, etc.) aren’t motivated by their Jewish identity to promulgate anti-racism, which MacDonald’s chief critic admits is probably the case:
Overall, we find that Boasian anthropology as a movement was not guided by Jewish interests, and was in all likelihood an inevitable occurrence that exacerbated existing trends finalized by WWII and the Holocaust and their associated stigma against race and biology. It’s almost certainly not true, nor is it argued here, that Jewish interests were entirely irrelevant to all this; they may have played a role in the minds of some Jewish anti-racists in academia. After all, the few Black scientists of the era, also coming from a community afflicted with racism, were uniformly anti-racist in their outlook because of ethnic and self-interest.
Where MacDonald is Correct
Cofnas and Mischling Review have buttressed substantial evidence the MacDonald misrepresented the motivations of various Jewish intellectuals like Marx, Levy-Strauss and Franz Boas and used some dishonest omission tactics to downplay the influence of Gentile leftists in the same fields. It’s hard to deny Cofnas’ evidence that Jewish leftists are hardly as ethno-centric as MacDonald alleges considering their intermarriage rates in the West and their advocacy for leftist egalitarianism for Jews and Israel too (with some exceptions). However, some of these Jewish leftists are trying to establish what we can call a safety hatch. Alex Soros made that clear about his father’s work:
It is not charity, and his outlook represents more than mere solidarity with others who have endured similar fates. He believes in an open society because Jews and other minorities need rights and equality under the law to prevent another Holocaust.
That’s more or less what Israel itself was set up to do. In a sense, the mainstream Jewish interest groups are choreographing what they believe to be a “Jewish group safety strategy” as opposed to a strategy of Jewish in-group continuity. Here’s Jewish journalist Bret Stephens making the case that “liberal pluralism” has been good for Jews as a group:
Other Jews like Democrat politician Debbie Wasserman-Schulz have expounded on that point publicly, saying she pursues her liberal-egalitarian politics “through a Jewish lens”:
Countless other Jewish pundits have argued the same thing without shame.
They’re much less committed to an ethnic purity agenda (no group of Jews are ethnically pure anymore, they’re a mix of different ethnicities and don’t prevent further admixtures between Mizrahi, Sephardic, Ashkenazi and Ethiopian within Israel or between Jews and Gentiles outside of Israel) than they are to a generic “safety” agenda for the Jewish group.
What Cofnas fails to refute are the Jewish-motivations of the intellectuals behind two movements: Neo-Conservatism and the Frankfurt School. The evidence is overwhelming that the Frankfurt School intellectuals were primarily motivated by their Jewish identities and their opposition to anti-Semitism (and thus an in-group loyalty). This bias was only intensified by the events of World War II and Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. Likewise, it seems irrefutable that the neoconservatives, most of whom were Jewish, were motivated by Zionist commitments to the well-being of Israel. That case has been expounded on in many places, so I won’t go over it again here.
What Cofnas does dispute is the accusation of Jewish hypocrisy, which exists but has been overplayed by MacDonald. He relays how various Frankfurt School leaders had differing views on Israel. Fromm was strongly critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and at best supported a “bi-national” multi-ethnic state. Marcuse too was for a multicultural melting pot version of Israel with no exclusivity for Jews. He also supported the Palestinian right of return knowing it would end the Jewishness of the state.
By contrast, Horkheimer was the most pro-Israel of the bunch and donated to Zionist organizations. So there was no true uniformity of belief on the question of Zionism and it appears they mostly leaned towards a left-liberalism for Israel itself and didn’t support any hardcore Jewish racism against Arabs. What is undeniable is that the Frankfurt School leaders were strongly self-identifying Jews who were opposed to anti-Semitism and saw their work as a means to undermine it by weakening and discrediting right-wing social values as a whole. But that doesn’t necessarily prove that they were ruthless ethno-centrists themselves who wanted Jews to pursue ethno-religious in-group purity or supremacy over Gentiles. That part gets exaggerated.
Here are some various slides from ProblemGene’s analysis of MacDonald’s work showcasing the omnipresence of opposition to anti-Semitism that guided Frankfurt School thinkers’ development of Critical Theory.
What we can conclude from all this is that MacDonald is not infallible and is prone to cherry-picking and ignoring sources that refute him. It appears he has not made a sufficient case that Boasian egalitarian anthropology was motivated by Jewish concerns and used deceptive twisting of facts and omissions of contradictory evidence to beef up his case, but he is right that the Frankfurt School was.
So the picture is more complex than the MacDonald thesis would have us believe. The involvement of prominent leftist Gentiles in all of the aforesaid movements and in the original Liberal Enlightenment itself (Rosseau et al.) also casts doubt of the widespread belief on the far-right that our modern woes stem exclusively from the machinations of Jewish intellectuals.
What we can say is that Jewish intellectuals on the Left (some of whom had Jewish motivations, some not) have contributed disproportionately to the advancement of egalitarianism in Western societies (especially through the Frankfurt School) and their presence in the mass media, so they do bare part of the blame.
Progressive Jews should be called out for advancing the hostile dogma of anti-Whiteism in academia and there’s nothing wrong with pointing out their specific Jewish motives if evidence of it exists. Some leftist Jews do appear to be motivated, at least partly, by hatred or revenge against Gentiles, Christians, etc., for past persecutions of Jews. But that doesn’t mean we should blame these things exclusively on Jews or infer that all Jews bare responsibility for the machinations of Jewish leftists. Jewish leftists are not alone in that endeavor, as you can see today with prominent Gentile anti-racists like Robin DiAngelo, Ibram Kendi, Jane Elliot and others, who have their own ideological commitments and have done analogous damage to the West with their work and activism. All of these anti-White leftists, Jewish and Gentile, should be identified and shamed for their belligerent crusade to tear down the West and disenfranchise the White people who built it.
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