1. Cofnas claims that if he is successful in refuting CofC, he would have in effect refuted the first two books as well (here and here). This is incorrect. In fact, the three books are quite separate theoretically and discuss entirely different data sets. A People That Shall Dwell Alone develops a theory of Judaism in traditional societies based on the idea that humans are able to create “experiments in living” that can, e.g., erect barriers between themselves and the surrounding society, structure mating opportunities in a eugenic manner, and structure relationships within the Jewish community and between Jews and non-Jews. CofC could be completely misguided but all the claims made in A People That Shall Dwell Alone true.

The same may be said about Separation and Its Discontents whose value depends on the adequacy of the theoretical framework (social identity theory which, although mentioned in CofC, is hardly essential to that work and certainly not disputed by Cofnas) and the accuracy of my use of the historical sources. Again, CofC could be completely misguided while Separation and Its Discontents was entirely valid.

2. Cofnas proposes a “default hypothesis” of Jewish involvement in twentieth-century liberal movements, namely: Because of Jewish intelligence and geography—particularly intelligence—Jews are likely to be overrepresented in any intellectual movement or activity that is not overtly anti-Semitic.” I accept the idea of high average Ashkenazi IQ, especially verbal IQ, although I defer to Richard Lynn’s research on the mean; my critique of Cochran and Harpending is here. I therefore expect Jews to be overrepresented in intellectual movements, and we could leave it at that. However, there is nothing wrong with attempting something more ambitious, such as exploring how these intellectuals perceived their actions (motivation) and exploring the dynamics of the movements by asking questions like whether ethnic networking was important (as it has been throughout Jewish history) and whether any generalizations could be made about the leaders of these movements (the guru phenomenon) and how they dealt with dissent. I agree that in general and for obvious reasons, Jews won’t be attracted to theories that cast Jews in a bad light; indeed, a major point regarding Jewish motivation for the theories discussed is to oppose anti-Semitism. Moreover, as mentioned below, Jews have been underrepresented in some theories and cultural trends that do not cast Jews in a bad light or at least do not necessarily do so—e.g., populism, paleoconservatism, and promotion of European national cultures.

This is the general framework (from the Preface to the paperback edition of Culture of Critique, 2002):

(1.) Find influential movements dominated by Jews, with no implication that all or most Jews are involved in these movements and no restrictions on what the movements are. For example, I touch on Jewish neo-conservatism which is a departure in some ways from the other movements I discuss [later expanded into a chapter-length essay using the same framework as CofC]. In general, relatively few Jews were involved in most of these movements and significant numbers of Jews may have been unaware of their existence. Even Jewish leftist radicalism—surely the most widespread and influential Jewish sub-culture of the twentieth century—may have been a minority movement within Jewish communities in the United States and other Western societies for most periods. As a result, when I criticize these movements I am not necessarily criticizing most Jews. Nevertheless, these movements were influential and they were Jewishly motivated.

(2.) Determine whether the Jewish participants in those movements identified as Jews and thought of their involvement in the movement as advancing specific Jewish interests. Involvement may be unconscious or involve self-deception, but for the most part it was quite easy and straightforward to find evidence for these propositions. If I thought that self-deception was important (as in the case of many Jewish radicals), I provided evidence that in fact they did identify as Jews and were deeply concerned about Jewish issues despite surface appearances to the contrary. …

(3.) Try to gauge the influence of these movements on gentile society. Keep in mind that the influence of an intellectual or political movement dominated by Jews is independent of the percentage of the Jewish community that is involved in the movement or supports the movement. [For example, Zionism is a Jewish movement that, until the establishment of Israel, was not a majority view within the Jewish community. It was nevertheless influential (e.g., obtaining the Balfour Declaration, pressuring President Truman to recognize Israel).]

(4.) Try to show how non-Jews responded to these movements—for example, were they a source of anti-Semitism?

Several of the movements I discuss have been very influential in the social sciences. However, I do not argue that there are no Jews who do good social science, and in fact [in Chapter 2] I provide a list of prominent Jewish social scientists who in my opinion do not meet the conditions outlined under (2) above.

This framework will be useful in the ensuing discussion. In any case, a default position is just that. Simplifying theory certainly has its advantages, but quite often much more can be said. Of course, the burden is on me to show that a more complex theory gives a deeper explanation of what we see.

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3. Cofnas claims that I haven’t provided evidence that Jews involved in particular intellectual movements have often gone out of their way to recruit non-Jews as visible leaders of the movement. I will discuss this as it arises in his detailed comments on Boas where I also mention Freud, and leftist radicalism. However, this phenomenon goes far beyond the intellectual and political movements discussed in CofC. In Chapter 6 of Separation and Its Discontents (pp. 193–196) I discuss several historical examples, beginning with the New Christians during the period of the Inquisition in fifteenth-century Spain. Jewish organizations had an active role in establishing and maintaining gentile-dominated organizations opposed to anti-Semitism in Germany in the period from 1870 to 1933 and in supplying materials without any indication of their source to anti-fascist candidates in the U.K. in the 1930s. In the U.S., I cite historian Howard Sachar for his discussion of “non-Jewish ‘front’ committees at which Jews would prove exceptionally adept in future years.” including areas such as opposition to Czarist Russia, support for liberal immigration policies, removing Christianity from the public square, and socialist and communist movements (the latter of which is expanded on in Chapter 3 of CofC). In the same vein, I also cite research indicating that in the ancient world there was an entire apologetic literature written by Jews masquerading as gentiles.

As I note in Separation and Its Discontents, such a strategy makes excellent psychological sense:

From an evolutionary perspective the intent is to make the Jewish cause appear to be in the interests of others as well. When goals are cast in ethnic or national terms, they are not likely to appeal to those outside the group. Indeed, such obviously self-interested goals would be likely to alert outsiders to conflicts of interest between ingroup and outgroup. On the other hand, a standard finding in social psychology is that people are more likely to respond positively when goals are advocated by similar others, or when the goal is cast as being in the interests of all rather than in the interests of an outgroup, as predicted by social identity theory and genetic similarity theory (see Chapter 1).

4. Cofnas claims that I cherry-pick examples and ignore examples that do not fit my theory, pointing to examples like Noam Chomsky and Karl Marx. However, as noted above, there is no implication that all Jews (or all famous Jews) fit into a particular mold. There was in fact strong opposition to Zionism within the Jewish community during the early decades of the twentieth century motivated by fears, based firmly in Jewish history, that Zionism among Diaspora Jews would be seen as disloyalty by their fellow citizens (see the sections titled “Zionism as a Risky Strategy” and “Zionist Extremism Becomes Mainstream” in “Zionism and the Internal Dynamics of Judaism,” 220–228). Chomsky’s position has been outside the Jewish mainstream, although quite recently segments of liberal Jews have actively opposed central features of Zionism as it exists in Israel today (e.g., Philip Weiss (editor of Mondoweiss), Jewish Voice for Peace, J Street).

Like Chomsky, these Jews tend to be on the left, generally perceiving a conflict between contemporary leftist ideals of multicultural harmony (which they support) and the reality of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. Support for Israel is definitely slipping on the left. For example, the 2018 AIPAC convention had a host of prominent politicians—as usual, but with a greater than usual emphasis on Democratic politicians—presumably an attempt to shore up support for Israel within the Democratic Party (see Philip Weiss, “Schumer and Dems Outdo Trump at AIPAC—There’s No Peace Because ‘Palestinians Don’t Believe in Torah’”). Nevertheless, opposition to Israel within the party is growing, with more voices than ever willing to reject the AIPAC line. Opposition to Israel has also become quite important in the UK Labour Party (often vilified as “anti-Semitism”)

It’s also worth noting that although there has always been a substantial consensus on Israel since its establishment by American Jews, the Israel Lobby has maintained this consensus partly by policing the Jewish community by punishing dissenters (see here, here, here)—a very traditional mechanism of control within the Jewish community discussed in Chapter 7 of A People That Shall Dwell Alone. Nevertheless, dissent is growing within the Jewish community.

But the important question, as always, is not counting heads—even prominent ones like Chomsky—but in determining where the influence lies, and at this writing there is no indication for a diminishing influence of the Israel Lobby and major Jewish donors on American political elites. These donors collectively contribute vastly out of proportion to their numbers and many of them are well-known to be strong supporters of Israel. In the U.S., donors like Haim Saban (“a one-note person whose one note is Israel”) and Sheldon Adelson, prominent donors to the Democrat and Republican parties respectively, come to mind as primarily motivated to support pro-Israel policies. But they are not alone. On a list of “the top 50 donors to 527’s and super-PACs, eight of the 36 Republican bigs were Jewish, and of the 14 Democrats, only one was not Jewish.” The Democrats are basically funded by Jews, and Jewish donations to the GOP are too large to be ignored by politicians seeking higher office. President Trump’s largest donor was Sheldon Adelson (at least $25 million), “who has long prioritized Israel in his political calculations.” Adelson is reputed to have influenced the move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, and has recently offered to fund the move. Philip Weiss suggests that Adelson’s money is behind the recent appointment of Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State.

Regarding Marx, I have a brief discussion of the perception that Marx was an anti-Semite at the beginning of Chapter 3 whose topic is “whether acceptance of radical, universalist ideologies and participation in radical, universalist movements are compatible with Jewish identification.” As I note there, whatever Marx’s views, they are not important for understanding Jewish participation on the left over the time span covered in the book (~1900–1970), and in general the point of that chapter is that Jewish leftists tended to have strong Jewish identifications and were quite concerned about anti-Semitism (perhaps not the case with Marx). These leftists were not in any sense anti-Semites.

Nevertheless, it is worth noting that John Murray Cuddihy, whose The Ordeal of Civility is cited repeatedly in CofC, provides what one might term a deep Jewish structure to Marx’s work. For example:

The “final triumph” of Marxism is Marx’s refusal to give a remedial and apologetic reading of the economic behavior of the Jews, describing it with unembarrassed bluntness, only to turn around and made this crude Judentum the very stuff (Unterbau) of the bourgeois civilization of the goyim. It is a failure of understanding that seeds in Marx’s conviction—that stripped of his sublimations and refinements a Gentile is as avaricious as a Jew—an offense only to Jews. “Christianity,” Marx writes, “overcame real Judaism only in appearance. It was too refined, too spiritual, to eliminate the crudeness of practical need except by elevating it into the blue. Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism, and Judaism is the vulgar practical application of Christianity.” Like theodicies, the sociodicies of the Diaspora giants cope with the problem of pain, suffering, and evil. Each bestows meaning, and thus “solves” the tsuris of Galut, the status-loss of Emancipation, the humiliations of “assimilation” (“imitation”), the embarrassment of being defined as “primitive.” If, as E. M. Forster said, “Coarseness reveals; vulgarity conceals,” Freud, Marx, and Lévi-Strauss struggle to redefine Ostjude: He becomes—like Rousseau’s “natural” man—an instrument of critique of the Jewish (and Gentile) parvenu. He may be a “primitive” and crude; he is not hypocritical (Freud’s “ethnic of honesty”). … ORDER IT NOW When Jewry was physically peripheral to Europe, locked into its shtetlach in the pale, this provincial assertion of moral superiority, of moral purism, was that of a spatial outsider, a geographical provincial. With Emancipation into Europe, the axis of this moralism shifted from a horizontal to a vertical plane, splitting into the toplofty “mission to the Gentiles” of Reform Judaism on the one hand and, on the other, into Marx’s underclass of society and Freud’s underside of personality. In each case, proletariat and id were invested with a subversively pure moral critique of the hypocritical, if superior, civilization of the West. … To learn the nature of the civilization of the West we must go…to the great unassimilated, implacable Jews of the West, to a Marx, to a Freud, to a Lévi-Strauss, to a Harry Wolfson, to those who exhibit a principled and stubborn resistance to the whole Western “thing.” These proud pariahs experience Western civilization as an incognito or secularized form of Christianity, and they therefore openly resist it as such.

Again, nothing really hinges on whether Marx identified as a Jew or saw himself as advancing Jewish interests. However, I agree with Cuddihy’s assessment, and conclude that Marx’s writing does suggest at least an implicit congruence with the main themes of CofC.

Regarding Soros, he was not mentioned for two reasons: during the mid-1990s when the book was written, he had not become the iconic funder of the left that he is today. Moreover, Soros’s actions are consistent with those of many Jewish activists on the left these days: strong support for immigration and multiculturalism throughout the Diaspora and critical of Israel (see above). I have never read anything on Soros’s Jewish identification and how he sees his actions in light of being Jewish but would be interested in doing so. Whatever one finds on this, it would not impact the material on Jewish intellectual and political movements—particularly the Jewish role in altering US immigration policy and promoting multiculturalism, and certainly including the other movements discussed in CofC. Again, I never assume Jews are monolithic on any issue.

Cofnas: “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).”

Again, support for Israel is not synonymous with how Jews see their ethnic interests at any particular time, and there has likely never been a time when it was unanimous. Jewish support for a Jewish ethnostate was a minority view among Jews prior to the end of World War II, and today Jewish support for Israel in the Diaspora is declining—particularly noticeable among liberal/left Jews. There may be many reasons for this, ranging from lofty idealism to concern that Israeli policies will be disastrous for Israel and Jewish interests in the long run.

5. Cofnas: “Many twentieth-century Jews ostensibly abandoned their Jewish identity and sought to assimilate. MacDonald points out that these Jews often did not support gentile nationalist movements—which he acknowledges were anti-Semitic—and he argues that this is evidence that these Jews were insincere in their desire to assimilate and were actually engaging in ‘Jewish crypsis’ (his term).”

Cofnas gives no examples of this, either from CofC or my other writing, although in a later passage he claims that I attribute crypsis to the Frankfurt School luminaries (discussed below). As a result, I can’t rebut it. However, in 2016 I wrote an article on how Jews should be treated if they express interest in aiding the Alt Right (see section titled “Jews and the Alt Right” in “The Alt Right and the Jews“), and I have several Jewish writers who write for The Occidental Observer (e.g., Dr. Marcus Alethia: “As an American (first) and Jew (second) who supports Trump and Trumpism, the European New Right, and anyone concerned with the long-term impacts of mass immigration, I want to see more Jews, particularly younger, Generation Z Jews move to our ideological side.” I am more than happy to welcome such individuals.

6 Cofnas claims that I misrepresent sources but defers examples. I will discuss these as they come up in his specific comments.

7. Cofnas claims that my theory can’t be falsified because “no evidence is ever provided that is acknowledged to count against the theory.” Cofnas asserts this because he does not really grasp what I am saying. Again, there are different groups of Jews. He brings up affirmative action which I discuss briefly in Chapter 8. However, the point I am making in Chapter 8 that in a multicultural society, there will be disagreements on issues like affirmative action because different ethnic groups have different talents and abilities. In general in CofC I attempted to describe different factions regarded as influential and attempted to understand if Jewish influence is important in particular areas. But in the case of affirmative action, I have never done an examination of the relative importance of different strands of Jewish activism and voting have been in the affirmative action debate and so don’t care to comment. The individual Jews and even Jewish organizations that I list there as opposing affirmative action may or may not be representative of the Jewish community as a whole. Similarly, in the lead up to the Iraq war, there was considerable (I think decisive: here, here, here) influence from neoconservatives and Jewish organization like AIPAC, but polls indicated most Jews opposed the war.

As noted above, what would count against what I am arguing is to show that I am wrong about specific claims—that, e.g., there is no interesting sense in which psychoanalysis was a Jewish movement, or that Jews and the organized Jewish community (not all Jews) were not at all decisive in influencing U.S. immigration policy, or I am mistaken about the internal dynamics of these movements (e.g., the treatment of dissenters, the guru phenomenon). Cofnas doesn’t even begin to address any of these issues. The theses of CofC are eminently falsifiable.

Is the theory presented in CofC predictive? Predictive power is considered the gold standard of scientific theories. However, consider the difficulties of developing a predictive theory of Jewish group behavior in the post-Enlightenment West, i.e., after the lapse of strong community controls on the behavior of individual Jews typical of traditional societies. Within the Jewish group there is wide variation in Jewish identity, ranging from highly committed activists to Jews who are uninvolved for personal reasons (e.g., psychiatric issues or bad experiences with the Jewish community) or perhaps they have family ties to non-Jews because of intermarriage or they are lower on ethnocentrism. The activist edge of the Jewish community tends to be the most strongly identified and will be the main force charting the direction of the community as a whole, and there is often more or less of a consensus among the organized Jewish community on particular issues like immigration or Israel, despite there being some strongly identified Jews who dissent from this consensus (e.g., Stephen Steinlight on immigration [here, pp. iv–vi) or Philip Weiss on Zionism).

But even assuming a well-reasoned consensus among the activists as to what is in the interests of Jews, this consensus could change if conditions change. Activists might evaluate the effects of Muslim immigration as harming Jewish interests in the long run, as Steinlight does, and the consensus of Diaspora Jews on Israel may change for a number of reasons (e.g., they may see their position in the Diaspora West as endangered because Israeli behavior has become indefensible and has lost support from non-Jews). Such a change in activist consensus would likely be gradual, just as the decline in Jewish support for the USSR was gradual. Non-Jewish elites may begin to see that their business interests are compromised because of successful pressure by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or Muslims may begin to exert real power in the West, as seems to be happening in the U.K.

Moreover, the consensus may not be entirely rational. It’s clear that many activist Jews in the Diaspora (but by no means all) will support Israel no matter what, while at the same time Israel has become increasingly dominated by extreme ethnonationalists bent on extending current policy of dispossessing the Palestinians (see, e.g., here, p. 49–50; here). A prediction of what Diaspora Jews will do if these trends continue to accelerate would be a bit like predicting the weather in Los Angeles on a specific day in 2030. I am content to regard CofC as a descriptive historical account of some important examples of Jewish group behavior embedded within an evolutionary framework and leave it at that.

8. Cofnas claims that I have ignored centuries of non-Jewish radicalism. Not true. What I call an “indigenous culture of critique“ has been a major concern of mine for years (see also here, here, and here) and will be a central part of a book on Western peoples (an interest of mine that long pre-dated my interest in Judaism; e.g., here, here) that I hope to finish this year. My view is that because Western peoples are more individualistic (and therefore less ethnocentric), they are more prone to such views, but that in the early twentieth century a Darwinian-based movement became dominant in the social sciences and had influenced U.S. immigration policy. Darwinism was essentially destroyed by the Jewish-dominated movements discussed in CofC only to be resurrected in pale form with the publication of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology. Nevertheless, Darwinism remains a very minor influence in the social sciences and humanities as a whole . My argument for this is presented in my review of Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America and especially in my exchange with the author.