He explains at length how his background is so similar to Rudd’s, then turns on a dime and claims his Jewish ethnic background does not factor into his thinking at all. It is…baffling how Auster could ignore how much energy he devotes to “anti-anti-Semitism”, and his endless focus on Israel.

It’s amazing that Rudd writes this openly. It almost reads like satire.

Who was his intended audience, I wonder?

Whadaya think you’re some kinda Jedi?

The notion that the 1960s campus revolt represented primarily some kind of Jewish ethnic response to U.S. elite institutions like Columbia & Harvard then being controlled by people who weren’t of Jewish background is also disproven by the fact that when Mark visited the campus of Brooklyn College(whose student body was then predominantly of Jewish background) later in 1968, large numbers of more politically conservative Brooklyn College students apparently protested at his appearance and jeered at him until he retreated from the Brooklyn College campus.

Ironically, in 2010 the militaristic U.S. power elite and upper class folks that anti-war and anti-racist students confronted in the late 1960s at Columbia and elsewhere are still making life more miserable for most U.S. working-class and middle-class people of all ethnic backgrounds by waging endless war abroad and creating endless economic recession at home.

Auster starts by making a frank assessment of Rudd’s statements “about his Jewishness and the central role he says Jewishness played in the student radical movement”. He calls Rudd “an unrepentant anti-American radical”, whose “political and cultural loyalty is to secular Jewish leftist internationalism, not to America.” He describes the “mysterious parallelism” between them:

By the way, I went to the same high school as Mark Rudd, Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, which he discusses in his talk, and where I was two years behind him; in my sophomore year I was a member of the political science club of which he was president. We also went to the same university, Columbia. Furthermore, as I learn from his talk, his father was born two years before my father, and his mother was born two years before my mother. His family lived in Newark before moving to the suburbs, as my family did. And of course his family was Jewish, as mine was (though I must confess that I did not know until I read the speech that he was Jewish; I had always assumed he wasn’t.) So there would seem to be some kind of mysterious correspondence or parallelism between us. But there’s none that I can see, other than the external facts already mentioned. The intensely ethnocentric attitude, “We Jews versus those gentiles,” “We Jews as outsiders in America,” which he expresses throughout his talk and claims was the ubiquitous atmosphere in which he lived, did not exist in my family, in the development of my consciousness of the world, and in my America.

I looked for a deeper condemnation of Rudd and those like him. Something like a call for all right-thinking Americans to shun “the unrepentant anti-American radicals”, or consigning them to hell. Not there. Auster doesn’t think they’re the real problem. Who is?

Only in an America where the majority culture had already given up any belief in itself, could people get away with saying the kinds of things Rudd says.

America! “The majority”, i.e. Whites, are the real problem. All that tsk-tsking about Rudd turns out to be just so much jibberjabber for the gallery, served up because Auster’s pose as a champion of America compels him to “deal with” Rudd’s statements, somehow. So America’s champion blames America. And the bottom line in the critique, as usual, is that we did it to “ourselves”, it wasn’t those secular jewish leftist internationalists he was just waving his hands about.

Auster goes on to speculate that Rudd’s parents shouldn’t have been permitted to immigrate. Someone else suggests jews like Rudd should make aliyah. Of course, when such statements appear elsewhere Auster and his “conservative” friends join the “secular jewish leftist internationalists” in condemning it as “serious anti-semitism” and wondering which circle of hell to consign the subhuman offenders to.

Auster’s discussion eventually turns to questioning Rudd’s jewishness. He concludes:

Very interesting. This is a discussion I’ve had many times, with most every Jew I’ve talked to insisting that Jewishness is only a religion and not an ethnicity. Recently, however, I got a Jewish friend to agree that Jewishness consists both of religion and ethnicity.

This is classic Auster. He deals with “the central role [Rudd] says Jewishness played in the student radical movement” by blaming America, specifically “the majority”, collectively. Then wanders off copying and pasting dissembling about who’s a jew, to bury the “central role”.

Secular Jewish leftist internationalist Rudd is more forthright than “jewish fifth-columnist” Auster.