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Jews Debate Whiteness

21 June 2017 Tanstaafl 31 Comments

Non-White critics of the recent Hollywood remake of Wonder Woman, specifically the casting of former Miss Israel Gal Gadot in the lead role, prompted an argument among jews whether Gadot and jews more generally are “white”.

Nothing about their exchange will surprise regular readers here, but it may help educate Whites who are just beginning to grapple with identity, race, and the jew problem. Under the current anti-White/pro-jew regime most Whites are conditioned to be more comfortable hearing jews complain about “anti-semitism” and their White problem, rather than the other way around. So here you go, this conversation is for you.

If you can look beyond the superficial details – this actress, this movie, in 2017 – what you’ll get here is a glimpse of jewing across space and time. It’s easy to imagine the countless similar debates jews have had in their shtetls and ghettos over the past millennia – though instead of Whiteness at these times and places they would have been arguing about whether or not Babylonianess, Egyptianess, Greekness, Romaness, Spanishness, Russianess, or Germaness was good or bad for the jews.

The links are presented in chronological order. Most of the articles are referring and responding to each other, so the excerpts below capture the most relevant, least redundant portions of the exchange. Even so, it’s a long read. If at any point you get bored or nauseous then by all means skip to the end where I’ll sum up the key points.

The back-and-forth started (seemingly out of the blue) a few months before focusing on and expanding around Gadot.

24 Jan 2017, Dani Ishai Behan, timesofisrael.com: Are Jews A People of Color?:

For as long as we can remember, our people have always occupied a racially “ambiguous” position in North America. Although at first we were considered ‘Asiatics’ alongside other West Asian ethnic groups (leading to numerous attempts at denaturalizing us), lobbying efforts would eventually expand the definition of White to include Middle Easterners and North Africans. However, a political climate has emerged in recent decades wherein our racial status is once again mired in bitterness and uncertainty.

All throughout history, the racial othering of Jews has led to some pretty horrific results, so it is understandable why some would prefer to leave race/ethnicity out of the equation altogether. But at the same time, conceptualizing Jews as either “white” or “just a religion”, as many of our detractors are wont to do, helps to perpetuate a culture of antisemitism on the anti-racist left. That is to say, if we are “just white people with funny hats”, then we are perforce not “really” an oppressed group, thereby enabling anti-racists to retain their credentials without having to listen to Jews or take our concerns seriously. This construct is also inextricably tied up in antisemitic politics, reifying notions of Jewish “privilege” along with the (incorrect) aspersion that Israel’s re-establishment was a “white colonial” project, implying that Ashkenazic Jews (who made up the majority of pre-1948 Zionist olim) are foreign interlopers with no real roots in the region and whose attachment to the land is, at best, inauthentic, inorganic, and exclusively religious in nature.

Another argument that is frequently made is that a large percentage of us have white-ish appearances, but this is fairly common among all Levantine groups, not just Jews. Moreover, fair skinned Latinos, Iranians, Pashtuns, and Native Americans aren’t exactly rare either. This is called “white passing”: the ability to blend in and escape some of the more immediate effects of non-whiteness while still suffering from the marginalization and othering that non-Jewish minorities experience. To put it another way, looking white is not the same as being white.

I’ve heard all of the arguments for Jewish “whiteness”, but I have yet to hear one that is truly convincing.

1 June 2017, Matthew Mueller, comicbook.com, Wonder Woman: There IS A Person Of Color In The Lead Role:

Yep, with a quick google search, it turns out that Gal Gadot is not actually Caucasian, but is in fact Israeli.

Gadot was born in Rosh Ha’ayin, Israel, and served in the Israeli Defense Force for two years before winning Miss Israel in 2004. Yes, she won Miss Israel, but she isn’t a person of color? You get why that doesn’t make sense, right?

Simply put: LOOKING White, doesn’t mean you ARE white

1 June 2017, S.I. Rosenbaum, twitscreech, starts here:

oh my god ok OFFICIAL EXPLANATION OF ASHKENAZI ETHNICITY: 1/????

When modern racial categories were being invented in Europe ~1492, they stuck Ashkenazim and Sephardic Jews in a separate category.>

Up til WW2 Ashkenazim were viewed by whites as a racial category distinct from “white” and “colored.” >

In the U.S, Ashkenazim have been assimilated to some extent to WASP culture and gradually afforded “white” status (on a conditional basis)>

We have many of the privileges of “regular” whites. Probably the best way to think of Ashkenazim in America is “white passing.” >

But even when we’re “not white” we’re not “of color.” We revert to that separate racial category outside the “white/colored” dichotomy. >

2 June 2017, Noah Berlatsky, forward.com, Why Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman Is White / Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman Is White — Let’s Not Pretend Otherwise:

The whiteness of “Wonder Woman” doesn’t seem up for debate. And yet, some have decided to debate it. An argument has been bubbling underground on social media that Gal Gadot, who plays the title role, is actually a person of color. It was aired in full by Matthew Mueller at comicbook.com. “Gal Gadot is not actually Caucasian, but is in fact Israeli,” Mueller announces confidently. He then goes on to chastise POC critics for not recognizing her casting as triumph for diverse representation.

Mueller doesn’t actually have much of an argument. He mentions a Times of Israel blog post which points to the history of Jewish oppression and waffles back and forth on whether Jews might be considered POC. But mostly Mueller just announces “Gadot is Israeli!” like a magician pulling a piece of lint out of a hat and trying to convince you it’s a rabbit.

Mueller can get away with this slapdash approach because race is itself such an incoherent concept. Mueller argues that “Caucasian” equals “white,” as if whiteness is an actual ethnicity or regional background.

But the truth is that whiteness isn’t a biological or historical truth; it’s a fuzzy, culturally determined category that has fluctuated widely over time. At various historical moments and in various places, Irish people, Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans, and, of course, Jews, have been excluded from the category of “white people.” It may seem ridiculous to say that a nationality like “Israeli” is non-white—but Donald Trump racialized the nationality of Mexicans during the 2016 campaign. Whiteness isn’t a formally defined, logical system. It’s a blunt instrument designed to enable some people to hurt others. As such, it doesn’t have to be particularly elegant or well made.

In this context, the best definition of white people is simply “people who are considered white.”

Perhaps the clearest sign that Gadot is white, though, is Mueller’s own argument. The fact that some groups who were once seen as non-white have become white and successful is a constant talking point for people who don’t want to deal with ongoing racism. Robert Kennedy famously pointed to the success of the Irish to deflect James Baldwin’s criticisms of racism in the United States. The very incoherence of whiteness becomes a way to defend whiteness. “Our ideology makes no sense; therefore we can’t actually be oppressing you” is a ridiculous argument, but a consistently popular one.

Gadot is white. But that’s not to say that Jews face no discrimination. On the contrary, Gadot’s casting illustrates the quieter, ongoing failures of Jewish representation in superhero films. As I’ve discussed here before, Hollywood seems constitutionally incapable of casting a Jewish actor to play a Jewish hero whose Jewishness is narratively acknowledged. Gadot can be Wonder Woman only if she sets aside her Jewishness as a visible identity. Heroism is only available as a reward for assimilation.

The Wonder Woman film challenges the idea that only men can be heroes. But it accepts the conventional wisdom that says that, to be a hero, you must disappear into whiteness. That’s a message that hurts people of color. And it’s a message that ultimately hurts Jews who are not people of color as well.

4 June 2017, Dani Ishai Behan, timesofisrael.com, Yes, Ashkenazi Jews (Including Gal Gadot) Are People of Color:

Jews are a historically persecuted and displaced Middle Eastern ethnicity indigenous to Israel, as well as one of the oldest and most continuous victims of European colonialism. However, the “anti-racist” left is generally hostile to Jews (particularly Ashkenazim aka Jews who wound up in Central and Eastern Europe as a result of colonialism) identifying as Middle Eastern, as a people of color, or even as a minority at all.

Now let us take a look at the history and heritage of Ashkenazi Jews. An indigenous people of the Middle East, Ashkenazi Jews were driven out of their homeland by European (and later Arab) colonists and taken as slaves to Europe where they were consistently regarded as savages, periodically massacred, and excluded from society on the grounds that they are a foreign, non-Christian, and non-European (or in the words of our European oppressors: Oriental/Asiatic) presence on European soil. The above-mentioned race categories created during the Inquisition were really a direct response to the possibility that the Spanish crown hadn’t successfully expelled ALL of the Jews and Moors in their midst. As such, an edict called “limpieza de sangre” (“purity of blood”) was made law, wherein anyone of non-European descent (i.e. Jewish or Arab-Moor) was given the ultimatum of conversion to Christianity or death. And even those Jews who did convert were still viewed with suspicion, and treated as second class.

The acknowledgement that Ashkenazim are non-European/non-white, which really dates all the way back to the pre-Christian era, continued to pervade Western society into the Enlightenment era and beyond. A few choice quotes from some of the more notable European philosophers (as well as some who are less notable) should prove instructive….

Behan here quotes past remarks on the jew problem from several prominent White men, whom he calls “anti-semites” because they recognized jews as alien and/or harmful to their people.

Furthermore, in this new era of political correctness, and with full knowledge that Jews stood much to gain from the Western left’s newfound respect for indigenous rights and protection of disadvantaged minorities, those whose hearts continued to smolder with antisemitism changed course and cast Jews as “white Europeans”, thereby allowing them to continue ostracizing us a backwards, oppressive, powerful, and malignant force.

Back to Rosenbaum, she goes on to assert that Ashkenazim enjoy all of the “regular privileges” white people do, which is false. She is conflating the ability to pass (a common trait for certain POC groups, especially other Middle Easterners – Jews aren’t “special” here) with actually being white, despite her earlier concession that they’re not the same thing.

Granted, some Ashkenazim – as well as some non-Ashkenazim – do have ambiguous or ostensibly “white” facial features, which are mainly the result of Cossack rapes during pogroms, and can therefore camouflage themselves, but a very large number cannot. As can be seen in the link I just posted, many either have a “Jewish” appearance, or a full blown Middle Eastern one. Moreover, having to hide one’s ethnic background just to be treated as a “normal” human being is not privilege, because white people (*actual* white people, not Jews, Arabs, etc) don’t have to do this. They don’t need to change their names, or flatten their noses, or bleach their skin, or straighten their hair, or take their kippahs off, etc. The fact that Ashkenazim, and white passing Jews in general, need to *work* just to be seen as regular people really says it all, and many (if not most) don’t even have the ability to do that. It’s simply not comparable.

More to the point, Jews are perhaps the oldest victims of what has come to be known as Orientalism. From the Greek and Roman colonial era where we were deemed “savages” in need of culture and enlightenment, to the evolution of these views under Christianity, to Enlightenment era Europeans openly declaring that we are Asiatics who are therefore culturally stagnant and incapable of reason, science, or progress, Orientalism has always been the bedrock of European antisemitism.

All in all, we mustn’t make the mistake of assuming Jews enjoy “white privilege” just because our experiences are not symmetrical with those of African-Americans or Hispanics, as to do so would be unreasonable, fallacious, and hypocritical (again, no other ethnic minority is held to this standard). Anti-Jewish racism looks different because the stereotypes are different. In other words, we are not viewed by society as “uneducated thugs”, but as “dishonest”, “conniving”, “clannish”, and “bloodthirsty” mongrels who control everything behind the scenes, and these racist tropes play out in the way we are treated in this country. Moreover, we are frequently profiled at airports, viewed with suspicion when we are too successful, assumed to be in control of the US government, assaulted on the streets, typecast on TV and in movies (barring a number of exceptions) as geeks, criminals, hypochondriacs, and other stereotypes, our scalps are molested for horns by strangers, and so on and so forth.

Inasmuch as a group’s non-whiteness is contingent on their history, experiences, heritage, and relationship with the concept of “white” as defined by its pioneers, Ashkenazim certainly do qualify as a non-white people.

But unlike Rosenbaum, Noah’s arguments invoke – intentionally or otherwise – the very popular antisemitic myth that Gadot (and presumably all Ashkenazim) is an ethnic European, not a Semite/Middle Easterner. And as I previously noted here, being exiled/taken as slaves to Europe and raped during pogroms after our land was taken from us does not make Ashkenazim white, or European. To brazenly conflate any portion of our people with those who tried for so long to erase us is one of the worst insults you could possibly hurl at a Jew. It is literally giving Europeans antisemites the very thing they’ve wanted all along – for us to be whitewashed and ultimately disappear.

That aside, Berlatsky himself doesn’t seem too sure of what whiteness actually is, wildly oscillating back and forth between “it’s all about appearance” and “it’s complicated”. For instance, he initially disputes the idea that whiteness “is an actual ethnicity or regional background”, only to later contradict himself within the same piece by declaring Gadot to be “white” because she is fair skinned and “European” (even though Ashkenazi Jews are not European – see above).

Jews qua Jews (barring white converts like Ivanka Trump, who make up less than 1 percent of the global Jewish population) are people of color, and the fact that this is even controversial at all sheds light on how deeply entrenched antisemitism has become as once again, the Jew is being made the “other of others”.

5 June 2017, Joel Finkelstein, forward.com, Are Gal Gadot And Other Ashkenazi Jews White? The Answer Is Complicated…And Insidious:

So, is Gal Gadot white? Is she North African/Middle Eastern and Israeli and Jewish and European and white? Is she all six of these things? Or perhaps something else? Who decides whether Jews are white, and what forces guides those decisions?

The ambiguity of Jewish ethnicity serves as a perverse weapon in hands hostile to Jewish identity. It leaves Jews historically vulnerable to anti-Semitism from extreme ideologies on both sides of the political spectrum; Jews are at once the ultimate insiders (white) or ultimate outsiders (other).

The authoritarian right, as recent studies suggest (and as any casual trip to 4Chan will confirm), couples Jewish privilege to themes of parasitism and conspiratorial, outside power. Message boards and twitter feeds everywhere on the right confirm the alarming growth of these racialized ideas at disturbing rates in right-wing social media. The authoritarian right, like the Nazis, attack the Jew as the ultimate outsider to the singular cause of ethnic nationality.

On the extreme left, Jews assume the mantle of ultimate insider. Unlike right wing authoritarian anti-Semitism, left wing anti-Semitism asserts Jewish whiteness excludes Jews from being persecuted. In this psychological fantasy, Jews emerge as powerful white insiders: the elite. Under the thin veneer of social justice, this poisonous narrative forcibly decouples Jewish identities and legitimate suffering from the causes of all other oppressed persons of color. For the far left, a Jew is the ultimate white person. Stalinists decried the insider, “corrupt bourgeois nationalists” to target Jews specifically and forcibly send them to Gulags en masse and redistribute their wealth.

Being white is the new version of the insider and outsider game in identity politics.

On the right, whiteness projections transmute to a mirror opposite. The popular alt-right blogger Radix decries “the rise of a hostile Jewish elite,” a privileged other, he admonishes his readers, threatening the purity of white America itself. In light of this, it is clear that being “white” emerges as a central, modern grammar of “othering” in Jewish existence for both poles of the political extremes.

When we believe, as Noah Berlatsky argues, that “being white is really just a matter of what people see you as,” I would respectfully suggest that history and current events should give Jews pause. For the sake of Jewish life everywhere, let’s start by educating ourselves to understand dangerous nuances of whiteness and how it plays so perniciously into an anti-Semitic reality that we internalize when we believe it. Anti-Semitism, from the left and right, is the largest and most systematic global operation of persecution ever launched against a single people.

7 June 2017, Noah Berlatsky, forward.com, Why Do White People Get Mad When They’re Called White? / Why Do White People Get Mad When We Call ‘Wonder Woman’ White?

When I wrote a piece at the Forward pointing out that Gal Gadot is white, I did not expect there to be a backlash. Gadot is, after all, playing a white character; she was clearly cast because people see her as white.

The argument that she was a person of color was transparently made in bad faith; it was meant to distract from actual POC folks asking for better representation. I thought I was making a fairly uncontroversial point.

White people, though, really don’t like to be told that they’re white. The piece prompted a number of rebuttals, including one by Dani Ishai Behan at the Times of Israel and a piece by Joel Finkelstein at the Forward’s contributor’s network.

Finkelstein and Behan, though, barely mention the issue of casting. Instead, they both spiral off to argue that Jews are oppressed. Jews certainly have been oppressed in some times and places. But white Jews are not currently shut out of roles in Hollywood. If someone says, “I cannot get a job because I am discriminated against,” and you respond by saying, with Behan, “well, my ancestors may at one point have been raped by Cossacks,” you’re not participating in a good faith discussion. You’re trying to cloud the issue so you don’t have to face the particular injustice that’s in front of you at the moment.

The move to talk about something else — anything else — is, ironically, typical of the way in which whiteness defends itself when challenged. Finkelstein and Behan insist they are not white. Okay, then. Why then are they so desperately uninterested in the injustices and indignities meted out to people of color? Finkelstein says it is anti-Semitic to advance a narrative that “decouples Jewish identities and legitimate suffering from the causes of all other oppressed persons of color.” But there is not a word in his piece about the causes of those other people of color, even though the conversation was originally about the fact that people of color don’t get represented as heroes in Hollywood. There is an issue facing people of color on the table. When you talk about standing with them in suffering, are you actually standing with them? Or are you standing on their necks?

The history of Jewish oppression should, ideally, be a way for Jews, white or otherwise, to align themselves with marginalized people. The legacy of anti-Semitic caricature, as just one example, should make Jewish people aware of the importance of media representation. Film and television can lead people to hate others, to ignore others, and even to doubt themselves.

Jews who are white have a choice. We can side with the marginalized, noting that Jewish safety in a white society is uncertain, and what is done to others may one day, again, be done to us. Or we can leverage our particular history of past discrimination as a rhetorical weapon against folks who face discrimination now. To do the latter, no matter one’s color or background, is to embrace whiteness.

7 June 2017, Sarah Tuttle-Singer, timesofisrael.com, I am a light-skinned Jew. I am not ‘White’:

I am a light-skinned Jew.

I am not “White.”

Because Jews are a people — in many colors — from deep ebony all the way to alabaster — who can trace their DNA to a little strip of land no bigger than a fingernail.

And we are not “White.”

And just as science and genetics back this up,** historically in America we’ve been treated as non-White.

It’s true — we aren’t discriminated against the same way as People of Color.

And I am NOT comparing our experience to the systemic and systematic discrimination and outright persecution that many people continue to face in America to this day.

And it’s true, we DO enjoy White Privilege to a large extent… that is, until people find out we are Jewish and then that can change in a quick slither across the face — whether it’s a joke about how rich we must be, or a comment about how we must not be “fully Jewish” because we don’t have a big nose or dark hair or horns or some bullshit, or “is it true you drink Christian blood.”

And I am not looking for sympathy or acceptance or recognition — and to be very clear, I DO NOT identify as a person of color nor would I ever compare my experience to the violence and suffering many continue to suffer to this day.

But I am not White.

I am a light-skinned Jew.

And if you negate my family’s experience as non-whites who were treated as non-whites by Whites, if you deny the discrimination and persecution my people have experienced in America over the years — some systemic, some isolated, but all real and pervasive, then you are erasing our history as Jews in America and there’s a word for that: anti-Semitism.

**If you take the ancestry DNA test and you’re Eastern European Jewish, your results will be “ashkenazi Jewish” – NOT Eastern European.

8 June 2017, Avital Norman Nathman, kveller.com, Are Jews White? Here’s My Answer:

To say Judaism is complex, particularly when you place it in the context of history, is an understatement. As a people, we’ve been “othered” for most of our existence. There’s always been a king or führer or government who has seen to that: to remind us that we’re not like the majority, that we’re supposedly less than, different, and separate. This idea has essentially been imprinted into our DNA over the years.

Because others have defined us by our differences, it’s natural that we too—as a people—seek some definition of who exactly we are. This debate has been happening way before Gal Gadot, and I don’t think there’s an end to it in sight. Is Judaism a religion? An ethnicity? A race? All of the above? I understand why we grapple with these questions continuously because they hit at our identity: Who are we? What are we?

So are Jews white? The question in and of itself is super restrictive and exclusionary. We first need to look at the very real fact that Jews of color exist (despite the fact that Judaism in general has a problem with remembering that). Jews of color are people of color. They’ve got it going on double: Judaism and being a visible person of color.

But people like me? I’m white passing. When somebody looks at me—despite my frizzy curls and prominent nose—I’m read as a white woman. I experience and benefit from as much white privilege as the next white woman. This matters when it comes to me walking down the street, in retail situations, or interacting with the police. Sure, my obviously ethnic name might raise a prejudiced flag if I’m applying to a job or something else, and micro-aggressions are real. But in the majority of my day-to-day life living in America? I am white and experience all the benefits that come with it, regardless of my Judaism.

So… I’m white. But yes, I’ve experienced anti-Semitism (that time in high school when my boss called the cash register the “Jewish Piano” was fun). I’ve had the fear in my heart when Jewish Day schools were being targeted with bomb threats since my son attends one. And I won’t even get into the anti-Semitic dreck I’ve been assaulted with on social media. So yes, I can definitely understand the desire to be as far removed from “white” (aka the folks who perpetrate all of this) as possible.

However, I can experience all of that and still benefit from the infrastructure set up by years of white supremacy. White privilege and anti-Semitism can occur simultaneously. Yes, that’s incredibly frustrating, but that’s also reality. One does not negate the other.

Checking off “white” on a census or acknowledging how I benefit from white privilege doesn’t negate or erase the very real way Jews have been (and still are) treated. It does not cover up my ancestry—how my Bubbe survived the Holocaust along with her family while living in the woods of Poland in underground bunkers and in barns; how my grandfather survived a handful of concentration camps before being liberated from Dachau. How both of them witnessed and experienced unimaginable horrors simply for being Jewish. I’m a first generation American Jew that grew up bilingual. I get that for all intents and purposes I am an other, and that my privileges could be snatched away from me under certain set of circumstances.

My history is real. The history of our people is real. But my place—as a white passing woman—in current society is also real. It is up to me to balance the two,to use that privilege and benefits gained by white supremacy to change the current system where people of color are the ones being hurt by systematic racism and oppressive infrastructure. Because when it really comes down to how I identify, the Jew in me realizes that acknowledging my privilege today enables me to take care of those around me, using what I’ve got.

13 June 2017, Tamar Herman, forward.com, What Gadot As ‘Wonder Woman’ Means To This Jewish Woman / The Gal Gadot Representation Conversation We’ve Been Missing:

Gal Gadot is as white, as I am. That level of whiteness is (sometimes) disputed as Ashkenazi Jews have, at least in recent American history, become the Schrodinger’s cat of racism. Which was why when someone erroneously claimed that Gadot is a person of color, it raised a lot of hackles, particularly because Wonder Woman had no lead characters of color.

Gadot isn’t just another white woman on screen, and it’s dismissive to say so. We wouldn’t be having debates about Ashkenazi heritage in 2017 if that were true. Gadot (and myself) are privileged in this day and age based on the color of our skin. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have the result of thousand of years of racism raging through our bloodstreams, and minds, filled with suffering and not being allowed to participate in mainstream society.

For the first time that I can recall, I was watching a visibly Jewish woman, speaking with an accent audibly tinged with Hebrew, aka the sound of Judaism for thousands of years, depicting a warrior who fights not just for herself, but for the greater good. It didn’t matter that Gadot was playing a fictional demigoddess built on Greek mythology. Every time I looked at her, every time she spoke, the thought, “Wonder Woman is Jewish!” raced through my mind.

16 June 2017, Mark Tseng-Putterman & Rebecca Pierce, forward.com, Gal Gadot Is Not White, Say Jews Of Color / What Jews Of Color Hear When You Say Gal Gadot Isn’t White:

Many have argued that while Gadot’s Diana is a strong female character, the film flattens womanhood to white womanhood, mostly showing a white woman moving through a white world and reminding woman of color that victories for white women’s representation often don’t make room for meaningful intersectionality.

This critique, largely put forth by black women, has been dismissed wholesale with claims that Gadot, an Israeli Jew of Ashkenazi heritage, is in fact a woman of color.

However, in the Jewish community, the controversy over Mueller’s article reignited a conversation about Jewish racialization and whiteness. As Jewish people of color working for racial justice and liberation in the United States, Israel, and Palestine, watching this conversation tiptoe around questions of white supremacy while centering the perspectives of white Ashkenazi Jews has moved us to intervene with our own perspectives.

The discourse has been suspect, often conflating race, ethnicity, nationality, and genetics. Besides Mueller’s nonsensical claim that Israeli is a race rather than a nationality (which obscures the oppression of racial minorities in Israel), his uncritical use of the term “Caucasian,” a pseudo-scientific term popularized by 18th century race scientists, sets us up for a conversation dependent on the logics of disproved race science rather than contemporary realities of politics, power, and privilege.

Reactionary pieces in The Times of Israel were not much better. Dani Ishai Behan and Sarah Tuttle-Singer alluded to particular Jewish genetics that prove Jews are a people of color, with Tuttle-Singer writing that “we are not white…science and genetics back this up.” The irony that, in an attempt to brand the “antiracist left” as anti-Semitic, Behan and Tuttle-Singer are parroting the same racial pseudoscience that Nazi Germany used to differentiate Jews from “Aryans,” appears to be lost. The myth that race has a genetic or biological basis was roundly refuted in a necessary Haaretz piece in which Ruth Schuster reminded commentators “there is no gene for ‘race’.”

What is the political impulse behind white Jews refusing to be named as white? Clearly, as the derailment of the original conversation about representation of women of color in film shows, it is not out of political identification with people of color. And while Behan bemoans the “troubled” relationship between the “‘antiracist’ left” (scare quotes his) and the Jewish community, branding those who question Jewish complicity with white supremacy as anti-Semitic make clear he is not interested in engaging racial justice movements in good faith. As with the American Jewish institutions that cut ties with the Movement for Black Lives over the latter’s inclusion of Palestine liberation in its policy platform, the derailment of the conversation about Wonder Woman and POC representation by white Jews reminds us that the antiracist left does not have an anti-Semitism problem so much as many in the Jewish community have an anti-racism problem.

Lastly, as Black and Asian American Jews living and organizing in the United States, we are struck by the utter exclusion of the perspectives of Jewish people of color in the conversation. Despite our active engagement and prior writings on the topic, the discourse surrounding Gadot has been primarily white Ashkenazi Jews talking to one another. We question the centering of white Jews as experts on issues of Jews and race as Jewish people of color who necessarily understand the intersections of anti-Semitism and white supremacy based on lived experience. Meanwhile, the vitriolic response we have received when we have shared our voices — including being likened to Holocaust deniers — reflects the realities of racism within the Jewish community. If white Jews are people of color, what does that make us? The combined exclusion and vitriol directed towards our voices and perspectives reminds us that ironically, there is no room for Jewish people of color within a white Jewish racial frame that casts itself as non-white.

Let me start by pointing out that this neurotic talmudic exchange is a perfect example of two jews having three opinions about what’s best for the jews. It’s a semi-coded argument about Whites and Whiteness, conducted by jews on all sides. Though some dance around it more than others, all of them agree there is a fundamental difference between Whites and jews. They all identify themselves entirely positively as jews, and all regard Whites entirely negatively.

All these jews are perfectly fluent in the thought and language of anti-White “anti-racism”. The debate is more of a collegial intra-tribal conversation. It touches on virtually every Frankfurt School/Critical Theory/identity politics/semitically correct term or idea ever weaponized for use against Whites. Key words: othering, oppression, privilege. Key concepts: us versus them, who/whom.

To put it in something akin to their own terms, what these jews are discussing is intersectional jewing. As I’ve previously noted (here and here) “anti-racist” jewing has metastasized into something so baldly anti-White that it is beginning to blowback and interfere with the jewing of the jews who are still dissimulating as White.

What these jews are disagreeing about here is the narrative, how to jewsplain all this duplicitous jewing in some way that doesn’t place any blame on jews. Their problem lies in the apparent conflict between two big lies they have promoted: the idea that jews are White, and the idea that Whites are privileged and “racist”.

Some jews – like Behan, Mueller, and Tuttle-Singer – are relatively frank in describing Whites as enemies. They see no value in encouraging the conflation of jews with Whites. Other jews – like Berlatsky, Nathman, and Herman – favor maintaining the pretense, arguing that in the balance jews benefit from their transracial fraud. They insist they are “white”, or that goyim mistake them as such, but express no shared interests with Whites. On the whole they are more apt to express sympathy and see common interests with other non-Whites.

It is no surprise that the mixlings – Behan and Tseng-Putterman and Pierce – make the plainest distinction between jews and Whites. They’ve chosen their chosen halves. Nor it is any shock that the most visibly jewy jew – Berlatsky – likes the “jews are white” mask. He appreciates that jews can thus white-wash their jewing.

Of all this intersectional jewing the most emblematic moment was the two “anti-racist” people of discolor oyveying lamely about all the other jews being too “white” and taking the genetic/biological basis of race, and specifically jewry, for granted. Indeed, it is through hybrids that jewry’s virulence is most clearly expressed. The jew oppression narrative mutates and squirts about in awkward ways as the parasite manages various hosts, and crosses over to new ones, all necessitated by its very own zionism-for-me-chaos-for-thee jewaforming activity.

Finally, notice that none of the articles linked above mentions that jews run Hollywood and created the comic genre from which Wonder Woman and many of the more recent popular films derive. Herman’s emoting almost spills the beans. Most goyim don’t realize it, but the comic/Hollywood superhero is a jew metaphor, it’s how jews imagine themselves.

11 June 2017, Nathan Abrams, haaretz.com, The secret Jewish origins of Wonder Woman:

Jews sought invisibility and had to earn their “whiteness.” It was only begrudgingly bestowed upon them when they had assimilated to the point of no longer being perceived as a threat by mainstream society.

But all of this misses the point. Superheroes all have a coded Jewish history, whether they were invented by Jews or not. To paraphrase the great American comedian Lenny Bruce: If you’re a superhero, you’re Jewish even if you’re goyish.

Like all the other jews, Abrams propounds a typical jew version of history, portraying his toxic tribe as having no agency and thus no responsibility for anything even as he describes everything as springing from and revolving around them.

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Jew Identity: Non-White, Anti-White

18 December 2016 Tanstaafl 31 Comments

The jews have noticed that White racial consciousness is growing. A few are freaking out and screeching to each other that Trump’s selection and the rise of the jew-aware alt-right is why jews, as jews, should freak out and screech more. This hysterical reaction, which only further exposes jew malevolence and power, is collective. It is what they are. The internet merely amplifies their jewing, allowing more of us to see it more clearly.

The essence of jew identity is inherently schizophrenic – a loud-furtive tribe of name-changing shape-shifting fraudsters who insist they are the victims of the many peoples they’ve parasitized and ultimately offed. They have thrived as a group because they are so keenly aware of themselves as a group, but also because they are aware that they thrive at the expense of others, their hosts, whose awareness jews spend a great deal of effort monitoring and ruthlessly manipulating – to suppress or redirect toward their own ends.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a jewsmedia jewess whose long-term special concern has been to jewsplain, specifically to jews, how two toxic jew-driven anti-White memes – that jews are White, and that “White privilege” is evil – are colliding, and how this collision might ultimately not be good for the jews.

In a recent piece published by The Forward, Bovy empathizes with another, younger jewsmedia jewess, Sydney Brownstone. ‘Oh Man, Do I Look Too Jewish?’:

I have lived for 26 years under the illusion that I am unconditionally white, for example, and in pictures recently I have started looking at my face and going, oh man, do I look too Jewish? I’ve never done that before or at least not since I was 13 and like comparing myself to girls wearing Abercrombie.

Brownstone expressed this perfectly typical cryptic jew expression of hostility in a conversation with two other blabbermouth-stranger jewsmedia jews.

Brownstone was describing her concern about an impending alt-right revolution. She explicitly connected her antipathy for “a bunch of gun nuts shooting people” to her own conflicted self-image – a lifetime comfortably posturing as White while simultaneously seeing herself and her own violent, nutty tribe as separate from and at odds with Whites:

It’s just really weird to see this rise of anti-semitism, and think about kind of umm the historical pathway that even got my family on this continent and I know that, Eli, you share kind of a similar history. But I feel like there are ghosts that live in our blood and those ghosts are telling us to run or to remember the revolutions that our families survived and to look out for the signs that are happening now.

History is kind of umm weird because jewing. As White racial consciousness rose a hundred years ago jews as a group were compelled, by the Whites who ostensibly still governed America at that time, to resolve the weirdness, to present an argument that jews were racially “white”. Galvanized by this threat to their jewness a few jews went through the required motions. At the same time, other jews set out to remove the threat by constructing anti-“racism”.

Bovy offers an intimate and explicitly racial interpretation of Brownstone’s feels:

In one sense, pale-skinned American Jews are only now experiencing a shift in our racial self-conception. But if you step back and look at how these same Jews — specifically, the Jewish girls — often experience their teen and preteen years, it starts to seem as if maybe this experience of racist anti-Semitism isn’t entirely new.

And it feels a bit full-circle-ish, I must say, when you learn (on Facebook, where else?) that your 13-year-old self’s Abercrombie-girl equivalent now supports Trump.

Bovy, like Brownstone, clearly sees two separate groups – jews, whom they identify and sympathize with, versus Whites, whom they don’t. They act conflicted because there is a conflict, and they know they are on the jew side, against Whites.

No group is more conscious of race and identity than jews, who are well aware of the privilege they enjoy when Whites mistake them as White. They never tire of expressing their dislike and distrust for Whites, but also recognize the value of the error, the advantage it provides them to manipulate White thoughts and actions: “As a White, I think my fellow Whites suck.” At other times, especially when such goyposing fails, they revert to more explicit jewing: “As a jew, I can’t believe this craaaaaazy anti-semitism exists, shut it down.”

In this respect Bovy is a full-time one-jewess band – more overt jew, less pretend “white”, but constantly dancing around the fault line. Bovy titled her take on Trump’s selection Between Guilt and Fear: White, Jewish, and Female after a Trump Victory:

But when I see “white women” posts from white Jewish women, I pause. Are we white women? Today? That is, are we complicit in what’s just happened?

The short, honest answer is no, jews aren’t White, they’re anti-White. But while Brownstone and Bovy provide one of the more blatant examples, it isn’t the only one.

Another jewsmedia jewess, Emma Green, coyly asks Are Jews White? (This article was published by The Atlantic, a “jewish Commentary” in the same sense as The Jew Republic.) Like Bovy, Green blames all this jewy double-talk, which has been going on forever, on the alt-right and Trump.

On the extreme right, Jews are seen as impure—a faux-white race that has tainted America. And on the extreme left, Jews are seen as part of a white-majority establishment that seeks to dominate people of color. Taken together, these attacks raise an interesting question: Are Jews white?

“Jewish identity in American is inherently paradoxical and contradictory,” said Eric Goldstein, an associate professor of history at Emory University. “What you have is a group that was historically considered, and considered itself, an outsider group, a persecuted minority. In the space of two generations, they’ve become one of the most successful, integrated groups in American society—by many accounts, part of the establishment. And there’s a lot of dissonance between those two positions.”

There’s that weird, jewed history again. The tales jews tell only seem paradoxical and contradictory to those who refuse to accept their implication. Jews, as a group, see themselves as distinct from and at odds with Whites. The confusion on this point persists because jews foment and perpetuate it. While fewer jews may believe that masquerading as White is still what’s best for the jews, they all peddle a version of history which hinges on the same stark distinction: excusing jews, faulting Whites.

Green’s coy bit triggered a jewlash much like the one just a week earlier, and for the same reason – jews lash out in anger when their jewing gets exposed. Green responded with Jews and the Social Construction of Race. The first article rehashed the old jew narrative on race, “It’s complicated, goyim, trust me.” The second article taps a more up-to-date jew narrative, “It’s imaginary, goyim, trust me.”

“Race” is a historically contingent and subjective category that is used to justify violence against minority groups. I specifically wrote about American Jews because their experiences—which are incredibly diverse and varied—show the hypocrisies and limits of these racial categories. Looking at the historical experiences of this one particular group, and the present-day tensions its faces, is a means of critiquing the way “whiteness” is used to delineate who is and isn’t considered powerful and valuable in society.

A lot of people seem to feel strongly that talking about Jews in terms of race—even to challenge the notion that Jews could ever fit neatly into a single racial category, which is what my article is about—is thought-provoking or, at worst, dangerous.

Here’s what I’d say to these objections: Racial categories exist in American society. Everyone—including and especially Jews, a group that is arguably constructed not just around religious identity, but also ethnicity—has to grapple with their relationship to those racial categories. As I argue in the piece, racial categories are flawed, socially constructed, and ultimately premised on control and power. But ignoring questions about race is not a way of bringing about racial justice or overturning white supremacy. It’s a way of stifling understanding, debate, and awareness.

Many jews realize they can’t talk about race without contradicting themselves, so they try to forbid the subject to everyone. Many others instead embrace the sort of weaponized racial double-talk Green uses in her second article – an overtly anti-White narrative about “white supremacy” and “control and power”, constructed by jews inside universities and broadcast to the masses by their corporate media. Both of Green’s narratives hammer home the same point. Jews aren’t White, they’re anti-White.

Then there are some jews who speak relatively plainly about jew identity and their historic racial animus toward Whites, like Micha Danzig, an Israeli soldier and NYPD cop. Anti-Semitism in America is Nothing New. Don’t Deny Jewish History and Culture by Calling Us “White”:

Ruiz-Grossman also apparently believes that Jews in America have been hiding behind their “skin privilege” instead of being at the forefront of the civil rights movement. Perhaps Ruiz-Grossman never learned that Henry Moskowitz, an Ashkenazi Jew, was one of the founders of the NAACP in 1909, and that many, if not most, of the civil rights attorneys fighting for racial equality in the South in the 1950’s and 1960’s were Jewish. Maybe she never learned that half of the famous volunteer “freedom riders” in the early 1960’s were Jewish, or that it was the murder by the KKK of three such freedom riders, two Jews, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, along with an African-American, James Chaney, that helped galvanize the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

As if ignoring Jewish history in America is not enough, Ruiz-Grossman also disregards her own Jewish identity and Jewish history by characterizing herself and presumably all (Ashkenazi) Jews as “white.”

This is wrong and offensive. Anyone that understands Jewish history as well as the history of the entire development of the idea or construct of the “white race” should understand how that no Jew, Ashkenazi or otherwise, is “white.”

Ashkenazi Jews have been the victims of European and Western oppression and violence for centuries precisely because they were perceived as not being a part of the “white” world, beginning with the Roman colonialism of Judea and continuing through the 20th Century with arguably the worst genocide in history based on racial classification, the murder of more than 6 million, primarily Ashkenazi Jews, precisely because they were non-whites. The characterization of Jews as now somehow “white” and beneficiaries of “white privilege” is one of the main fallacies behind the relatively recent identification of some self-identified progressives with the demonization of Israel, a hateful cause to wipe off the map the world’s only Jewish state and to once again destroy the indigenous homeland of the Jewish people.

This is not merely a semantic issue. Jews are not “white.” We are a tribal people from the Levant. Many of our people were forcibly exiled out of and into other nations, including in Europe, where we were taken in chains and often subjected to brutal and oppressive institutional racism based on our ethnicity, tribal affiliation, culture and faith. For thousands of years, including nearly 2000 years where the majority of the Jewish people lived without the protection or comfort of having a Jewish homeland, we still maintained our indigenous culture, passing on from generation to generation our traditions, our language, and our sacred texts, all of which are entirely based on our indigenous tribal faith and affiliation. To call us “white,” when the notion of a “white” race was created by indigenous Europeans as a basis for supporting the “White Man’s Burden” and European imperialism, which certainly persecuted and oppressed Jews, in addition to numerous other non-Europeans, is a gross travesty and distortion.

No one that wants to end anti-Semitism and to fight against bigotry and racism should be claiming that Jews are “white.” People who try to depict or describe Jews as “white” are (albeit likely unintentionally) nullifying Jewish history and identity, and they are (again albeit likely unintentionally) essentially supporting Western imperialism, or at least it’s cultural imperialism, by imposing an artificial European creation (of a “White people”) on Jews — who regardless of our shade or whether we are Ashkenazi, Sephardic, or Mizrahi — are genetic brothers and sisters who have more in common genetically with each other than with most ethnic Europeans or “whites.”

Read that last paragraph again. Same anti-White jew narrative, yet another form. This is the ordinary jew-sixpack’s take on the weaponized double-talk produced by more subtle, polished jews, though his point about genetics is something none of them would be foolish enough to mention.

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Are Jews People

23 November 2016 Tanstaafl 37 Comments

The jews have been screeching about Richard Spencer’s NPI conference in Washington DC this past weekend. Alot of it is just the usual jew normal wow-just-wowing that a handful of Whites still have the nerve to openly meet and speak positively about White identity and interests. The loudest wailing has to do with a bit of exuberant hailing at the end of Spencer’s closing speech, but there was a more telling response to a rhetorical question he asked at the beginning:

This was the year when random shitlords on Twitter, anonymous podcast hosts, and dissidents working deep within the beltway right proved that they objectively understood politics better than the “Republican strategists” and “political consultants” snarking at us every night on MSNBC. It’s not just that they are leftists and cucks. It’s not just the many are genuinely stupid. Indeed, one wonders if these people are people at all – or instead, soulless golem, animated by some dark power to repeat whatever talking point John Oliver stated the night before.

This twit, from one screechy jew organization to another, captures the gist of the reaction that immediately echoed throughout the Lügenpresse: “‘Alt-right’ Trump supporters are unsure if Jews are people. @jfederations, are you sure you want to support this admin? #JewishResistance”.

CNN pushed a similar line, which produced a swift jewlash and apoplectic apology. Of course, the apology was for offending jew sensibilities, not for distorting what Spencer said.

Spencer was speaking in terms of partisan political opposition, at the edge of the jew normal box – his alt-right and Trump versus the left and their cuck-right. His use of the term golem alludes to jews as the animators of the entrenched opposition, implying that the non-jews, the kikeservatives of whatever party affiliation, are behaving inhumanly, like robots.

It is telling that jews immediately reduced what Spencer said to being entirely about jews – as if nobody else matters, as if nobody but jews is human. Much the same occurred last month when Trump started speaking stridently against the elite globalist bankers and media. Jews flipped out exactly because they perceived this as a coded threat to themselves, not at all out of concern for anybody else, elite or otherwise.

CNN’s crime was to highlight Spencer’s reference to the jews’ golem tale, in which the jews are saved from the inhuman goyim of medieval Europe, while deploring a modern day meeting of inhuman White “racists” and “anti-semites”. The jews are screeching so loudly because they feel exposed. By crying out they seek to ensure that everyone understands the jews are not just people, part of “us”, but are that extra special part of “us” who defines who “them” are.

When some member of the jewed elite equates Trump to Hitler what they’re implying is that Trump (and his supporters) must be attacked, destroyed, and even killed. Never Trump. Never again. By any means necessary.

The toxic anti-White jew Tim Wise put it this way: “Nazis must be crushed. No co-existence…crushed. If the “alt-right” wants to play Nazi, we need to play the Allies, circa 1944 and 45″.

Another toxic jew, jewsmedia editor Michael Hirsh, screeched his thirst for goy blood more explicitly: “Stop whining about Richard B. Spencer, Nazi, and exercise your rights as decent Americans. Here are his two addresses. …”

Are the jews people? In fact their definitive concern is for themselves, for their own peoplehood. As a parasitic people they not only organize around this exclusive sense of “us” as jews, but actively seek to co-opt, control, and ultimately destroy any similar sense among the goyim host “them” they feed upon.

One thing is certain. The jews aren’t White people. They are empirically collectively anti-White, the enemies of Whites. Indeed, when jews attack Whites while screeching about “anti-semitism” it is because they are drawing a clear distinction and expressing a truly racial animus.

Age of Treason Radio

Race and Jews – Part 7

Audio 2 December 2014 Tanstaafl 7 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Concluding this brief series with some odds and ends, reviewing and connecting what has been covered with a few new points.

Eric Goldstein’s book, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity, documents and tries to explain, from a jewish point of view, the complete about face in attitudes about race which occurred during the 20th century, specifically the shift jews made among themselves. Our concern is how they have since manipulated Whites to toe their “anti-racist” line.

During the 19th century and into the 20th Whites were just beginning to appreciate the depth and breadth of their roots, their biological relationship with each other, but also to recognize their common parasite. They were beginning to appreciate just how biologically and psychologically distinct and implacably alien and hostile the jews are and have always been. How the jews have in fact insisted upon being and remaining this way.

This growing understanding of their roots, this racial consciousness, was not fabricated out of nothing, but was based on evidence gathered from study and research – archeology, linguistics, biology. It was spreading not only among the elite, the intelligensia, but was beginning to trickle out to the masses too.

In the first half of the 20th century Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race and Lothrop Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color were popular books. White understanding of race was increasing.

In 1933 the national socialists took power in Germany, and for the first time a White European government officially and definitively answered the question, “who is us”, and pursued policies guided by the principle, “what’s best for us”, racially. Expressing a collective group-consciousness that for the first time approximated (and took into account the competitive and adversarial nature of) the kind of collective awareness of identity and interests that the jews had been practicing for millenia among Europeans.

Even before this, before this racial consciousness had fully coallesced into a national socialist government, those jews most aware of their collective interests recognized this burgeoning understanding among their host as a threat to the jews. They saw that jews embracing race was not going to be good for the jews in the long run.

Their efforts to thwart this rising consciousness pre-date the founding of national socialism. We’ve mentioned Franz Boas and Maurice Fishberg, whom were just two of the more prominent names among the many jews who ultimately co-opted and derailed race science.

By the time national socialism rose to power in Germany the jews had come to the consensus that race was definitely bad for the jews, and they were throwing all their efforts into an idea, a movement that would eventually be called “anti-racism”.

“Anti-racism” is a jewish contruct, though they have tried to generalize it and otherwise obscure this. As many Whites are beginning to realize, “anti-racism” is really just anti-Whitism. It is a movement, a perverse way of thinking about race that doesn’t abolish the idea of race, but simply inverts White consciousness – making White bad and non-White good. It was inspired and continues to be led and driven by jews who think that this is what’s best for the jews.

Let’s return one last time to Goldstein’s book, where he describes jewish attitudes in America during the first decade of the 20th century. Unlike their “anti-racism” today, back then jews openly identified themselves as a race, because they thought that was what was best for the jews. As Goldstein put it, race “fit the needs of jews” “in the larger white world”.

This bit, from page 107, is part of the discussion of Simon Wolf’s (the jew lobbyist who knew every president between Lincoln and Wilson) appearance before the Immigration Commission in 1909, where he was questioned by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge on the issue of whether jews are a race or religion. Wolf infamously denied their racial nature and instead conflated jewishness with religion.

In the wake of the hearing jews sympathetic to a racial view of jewishness denounced Wolf for what they saw as an abandonment of jewish pride before the commission, and took advantage of his poor performance to argue that his case had no defensible foundation. One rabbi wrote to the Jewish Exponent of Philadelphia that Senator Lodge was a better jew than Wolf, because he did not try to deny the existence of the jewish race. Zionists especially attacked Wolf’s efforts, arguing that if anything could stimulate anti-jewish sentiment, it was not the affirmation of racial identity but the “shifting, unmanly and undignified pretense of representatives of a people, who against fact and history, and against their own private convictions, disown the racial and national birthright.”

The Zionist source is reprinted in a book I mentioned briefly in Part 1 of this series, Jews and Race: Writings on Identity and Difference, 1880-1940. It covers roughly the same period and attitudes as Goldstein’s book, but offers less narrative and more in the way of original sources. Among them is an article from a 1910 issue of Maccabaean, There is No Jewish Race!, which contains the criticism of Wolf quoted above, and more, including this:

We believe we speak in the name of the entire jewish people when we say that the jewish people, native-born and naturalized in this country, are not ashamed to have themselves or their brethren classified as racial jews

As previously mentioned, the authors of Henry Ford’s The International Jew – The World’s Foremost Problem also discussed Wolf’s testimony. In October 1920 they wrote:

From the extracts given in this article, four matters become very clear:

First, the Jew is opposed to any restrictive legislation against his entrance into a country.

Second, the Jew is opposed to any racial classification of himself after he has entered a country.

Third, the Jewish argument to the Gentile authorities is that the Jew represents religion and not race.

Fourth, that at least one indication has appeared in which the Jew has one view to present to the Gentiles, and another which he cherishes among his own people, on this question of Race.

Another point might be made, as this: when the authorities disregard as untenable the argument of “religion, not race,” the Jewish spokesmen fall back on the fact that their organizations don’t want certain things and won’t have certain things—argument or no argument, commission or no commission.

The Jewish lobbyists had their way. There is no enumeration of Jews in the United States. There are 46 other classifications, but none for the Jew. The Northern Italians are distinguished in the records from the Southern Italians; the Moravians are distinguished from the Bohemians; the Scotch from the English; the Spanish-American from the Spanish-European; the West Indians from the Mexicans—but the Jew is not distinguished at all.

None of the other races made objection.

They were noticing certain consistent traits of the jews.

First, how the jews demand and often get special, unique, exceptional treatment. Contra Goldstein, there is no liability, no price connected to their privilege.

Jews demand that there be no restrictions on jews, effectively imposing restrictions on their host.

What seems to be duality, hypocrisy, or double standards, one story or standard for non-jews, another for themselves, is really just one standard: what’s best for the jews.

The International Jew was a well-known and popular book in 1920s America. It is valuable because it documents the White attitude about race and the jews at that time. But in many respects Ford and his TIJ writers were too optimistic, too conciliatory. They regarded the jews as peers, social and political equals, or at least saw them as having the potential to be so.

They maintained a pretense that they were trying to appeal to and influence the jews, and called for them to step forward and challenge their leaders. This was a weak rhetorical device that was more likely actually aimed at stirring their more “liberal”-minded White readers to resent the fact that jews were not showing any interest in participating in their “liberal” American project as peers, but were instead well aware of and committed to pursuing their own narrow identity and interests.

At that point in time Ford and Americans in general believed the Anglo-Saxon founding stock still ruled America, but were also generally unaware of the threat posed to them by the jews. A half-year after the piece above was published, the TIJ writers seemed to have come to realize that the conflict and its stakes were more dire than they had at first let on. In May of 1921 they wrote:

Yes, let it be agreed; if the Jewish idea is the stronger, if the Jewish ability is greater, let them conquer; let Anglo-Saxon principles and Anglo-Saxon power go down in ruins before the Tribe of Judah. But first let the two ideas struggle under their own banners; let it be a fair struggle. It is not a fair fight when in the movies, in the public schools, in the Judaized churches, in the universities, the Anglo-Saxon idea is kept away from Anglo-Saxons on the plea that it is “sectarian” or “clannish” or “obsolete” or something else. It is not a fair fight when Jewish ideas are offered as Anglo-Saxon ideas, because offered under Anglo-Saxon auspices. Let the heritage of our Anglo-Saxon-Celtic fathers have free course among their Anglo-Saxon-Celtic sons, and the Jewish idea can never triumph over it, in university forum or in the marts of trade. The Jewish idea never triumphs until first the people over whom it triumphs are denied the nurture of their native culture.

Judah has begun the struggle. Judah has made the invasion. Let it come. Let no man fear it. But let every man insist that the fight be fair. Let college students and leaders of thought know that the objective is the regnancy of the ideas and the race that have built all the civilization we see and that promise all the civilization of the future; let them also know that the attacking force is Jewish.

That is all that will be necessary. And it is against this that the Jews protest. “You must not identify us,” they say, “you must not use the term ‘Jew'” Why? Because unless the Jewish idea can creep in under the assumption of other than Jewish origin, it is doomed. Anglo-Saxon ideas dare proclaim themselves and their origin. A proper proclamation is all that is necessary today. Compel every invading idea to run up its flag!

Throughout TIJ we find not only various aspects of jewish influence described but also jewish personality traits. They identified the jews as a race with persistent, collective, racial traits.

One of those characteristic traits is how jews alternate between openly announcing themselves and bragging about their influence, and yet also disguise themselves and deny their powerful influence. This is no mystery. They do whichever is good for the jews in a given situation.

Another characteristic trait is how the jews swarm collectively to self-righteously attack those who take notice of their activities and oppose them. Ford too was subjected to this treatment, and it continues to this day. Some examples of jewish attitudes are attached as “Editorial Reviews” to the bookseller Amazon’s page for The International Jew:

A Message from the Anti-Defamation League

The International Jew, authored by Henry Ford, is blatant anti-Semitism. It portrays Jews as monolithic, malicious schemers plotting to control the planet. “If there is one quality that attracts Jews, it is power,” the book states. “Wherever the seat of power may be, thither they swarm obsequious.” It does not portray Jews as individuals but as a single-minded, calculating cabal. Conflict among Jews, no matter how real, is painted as a sly trick, part of the Jewish plot. The book blames nearly all the troubles it saw in American society of the time on Jews. “Whichever way you turn to trace the harmful streams of influence that flow through society, you come upon a group of Jews,” it claims. Even problems with the “national pastime” are attributed to Jewish influence: “If … fans … wish to know the trouble with American baseball, they have it in three words … too much Jew.”

Never mind baseball. The trouble with America, then and now, is too much jew.

Note how jews seem to relish criticism, how they so eagerly repeat it, without denial. Instead they embellish and distort their critics in a telling way that reflects their own view of the world around them. Theirs is a world populated not with individuals but with jews mindlessly antagonized by “anti-semites”, a single-minded, calculating cabal of malicious schemers plotting to control the planet.

The jews blame all the troubles of jews then, now, and into the future on “anti-semitism”. And yet what they call “anti-semitism” is simply anti-parasitism, the host’s recognition and resentment of jewish infiltration, manipulation and exploitation. It is a reaction to the harm caused by the jews pursuing their own interests.

Interestingly, jewish anti-“anti-semitism”, combating their host’s anti-parasitism, pre-dates their “anti-racism”. Today these two things are seen as connected, with “anti-semitism” being a special form of “racism”, a specific awareness of the jews as racially distinct and hostile.

A second review at Amazon is more of the same. Because the jews ultimately prevailed over the fair-minded Anglo-Saxons with fraud they still can’t be honest about what they did. Instead they malign Ford, faulting him for thinking and behaving as they actually do:

The best lesson one can draw from this book is that being a great industrialist does not necessarily convey expertise in other subjects. The International Jew began as a four-volume set of pamphlets, published by Henry Ford in the 1920s, in which he attempted to justify his anti-Semitic views by couching his beliefs not as racism but as “fact.”

What follows is an unwieldy and meandering set of essays in which Ford uses pseudo-science and third-rate sociology (as well as talk of conspiracy and “ancient prophecy”) in an attempt to scientifically prove that “the Jew” is the biggest problem holding the world back.

If something nice can be said about this book, it’s that Ford is absolutely thorough in his accusations–perhaps an illustration of the kind of attention to detail that made him rise to such heights as a businessman. In his essays, he accuses the Jewish people of just about everything under the sun: fomenting Communism, gambling on baseball, making “Jewish Jazz” our national music, even conspiring with Benedict Arnold. Ford may have done as much as anyone in history to propel American industry into the future, but his anti-Semitic ramblings would have us stepping back into the Dark Ages.

Here at the end I’d like to take the opportunity to point you to two brief but authoritative and well-presented explanations of the jews and race.

The first is a ten-minute video presentation by David Duke. Duke approach comes across as a contemporary version of the early TIJ, at least in his laying out of the facts and can’t-we-all-just-get-along attitude. Duke primariliy cites jews on the religion versus race question, and points out jewish hypocrisy in their attitudes about race and racial purity.

Kevin Strom’s recent podcast, Jewish Weakness, also discusses the jewish race and religion, but lays them out and puts them together in a way that provides a more complete understanding.

Strom asks, “Who are these people? And why do they do the things they do to us? The answer can be found in Jewish genes and Jewish memes.” He notes:

Thus we see that the memes of Jewish peoplehood began with lies — and it is my contention that these memes, these lies, have had a race-formation effect on those who adopted them, and that this race-formation effect has continued to operate even after the incorporation of non-Semitic genes into the Jewish gene pool.

No, the essence of Jewishness is the special “us versus them” mentality which is formalized in their Chosen People myth and which was necessary for their survival as a tiny group among the teeming masses of Egypt, Babylon, Rome, and America.

The key is this: In the first place, early Jews were those Semites to whom the ethnocentric and genocidal memes of what we now call the Old Testament were attractive. So even at the very earliest period at which Jews appear, we have a select, distinct, and peculiar group. Then, for thousands of years, the Jews were subjected to a rigorous process of genetic selection.

The Jews perceive any reaction against their presence in the host nations as persecution, and from their point of view perhaps it is persecution, since our reaction is against the only way of life they know, that of a parasite attached to a host. Our interests are irreconcilable.

To protect themselves from any reaction from the host population, the Jews promote the doctrine that there is no difference among the races, although among themselves they cherish the doctrine of not only the superiority but the actual divinity of their race.

The key, I think, is perception, which is to say consciousness. Strom’s conclusion:

The difference is that today the venue for Jewish exploitation and overt and covert rule is not just France or England or Palestine, but half or more of the civilized world. It is a global phenomenon and the burgeoning reaction to it is also global. There will be nowhere to “disappear to” this time. It’s probably true that “the 1%” is 99% Jewish, but that’s a lot less of an advantage when everyone knows it.

Joe Sobran observed in 1996 that:

Jewish control of the major media in the media age makes the enforced silence both paradoxical and paralyzing. Survival in public life requires that you know all about it, but never refer to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don’t respect their victimhood, they’ll destroy you. It’s a phenomenal display not of wickedness, really, but of fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism.

“Paralyzing”, and other such words people choose when they describe the jewish problem, indicate the host-parasite nature of the problem, even when it is not consciously acknowledged.

The furtive power of the jews is the apparent paradox to which Sobran refers. The two concepts – furtiveness and power – seem at odds, but are not really. Furtive power is another way of saying illegitimate or unpopular power. A power whose strength lies in remaining unrecognized and thus unopposed. The most pliable host is an unwitting host. The jews control the media because they must in order to survive as a collective, in order to put their ideas, their consciousness of their interests into their hosts’ heads. Also, to ensure that their host remains otherwise unaware, unconscious of its own interests. Unconscious of the manipulation and exploitation. Unconscious of the grievous harm being done by the jews.

Age of Treason Radio

Race and Jews – Part 6

Audio 18 November 2014 Tanstaafl 1 Comment

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The jews have infiltrated, manipulated, exploited and outlived every nation, empire and civilization in Europe and the Middle East for millennia. The jewish problem is an old problem. The racial character and nature of the jews is not something Europeans only first noticed in the 15th century with the Purity of Blood Statutes in Spain. We’ve previously addressed what contemporary twits have to say. This time we’ll review some observations of jewish racial character – the personality traits characteristic of the collective – which date back more than two thousands years into the past.

Cicero, a Roman statesman during the 1st century BC, remarked:

The Jews belong to a dark and repulsive force. One knows how numerous this clique is, how they stick together and what power they exercise through their unions. They are a nation of rascals and deceivers.

Tacitus was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire during the 1st century AD. In The Works of Tacitus, Volume 4, published in 1752, Thomas Gordon wrote:

Concerning the jews, he followed the tradition and accounts current amongst the Romans. He tells you what different relations there were, and neither adds any thing, nor misrepresents things maliciously. It was an obscure State; generally enslaved by some greater power; to the Assyrians, Egyptians, Grecians and then to the Romans, and condemned by all, as much as they themselves hated all. They had not common mercy or charity toward the Gentiles and uncircumcised; and being persuaded that the Almighty loved only themselves, they fancied that he abhorred, and therefore they abhorred, the whole human race besides : So that it was said by Tacitus too truly, “adversus omnes alios hostile odium.”

This is a well known phrase amongst scholars, and has appeared in many variations since. What Tacitus was saying was, “they hate and are hostile to all others”.

Notices of the Jews by the Classic Writers of Antiquity, published in 1870, John Gill notes that Tacitus had described the laws of the jews as “hostile to men, and calculated to inspire the jew with hatred and opposition to the rest of mankind”.

Strabo, a Greek geographer during the 1st century BC was another ancient observer who noticed the jews. I found Strabo’s wisdom embedded in a broader account provided by William Pierce in 1998, How It Fits Together:

The world’s 14 million Jews think and act like one big family — even though, like most families, they do a lot of arguing and squabbling among themselves. They go to different synagogues — Orthodox and Conservative and Reform — or to no synagogue at all. There are atheist Jews, and there are Jews who have converted to Christianity. There are capitalist Jews and communist Jews, homosexual Jews and heterosexual Jews. There are rich Jews and middle-class Jews and even a few poor Jews, but despite this apparent diversity they do a better job of cooperating with each other and looking out for their common interests than any other ethnic group in the world.

Why is this? Why are Jews more racially conscious than anyone else? Why are they so much more ready to collaborate with each other than members of other groups? Part of the reason is in their religion. It is an ethnocentric religion, a racist religion. Whereas Christianity and Islam, for example, are universalist religions, religions for anyone who chooses to believe in them, Judaism is not. Judaism is a religion only for the Chosen People, only for the circumcised sons of Abraham. Jews are defined in terms of their bloodline, not in terms of their faith, which is why non-religious Jews like Freud or Trotsky or even Marx, the father of atheistic communism, are considered just as much Jews as the most pious synagogue-goer, with sidelocks and yarmulke. The non-religious Jews don’t believe the hocus-pocus in their Torah, or Old Testament, but they nevertheless are steeped in the folklore and traditions of Judaism. They are as familiar as their religious cousins are with the claims that Jews are a Chosen People, destined to own all of the world’s wealth and be waited on hand and foot by non-Jews. And they are familiar with the tales of persecution, from the time of the pharaohs until the time of Hitler: with the tradition of being universally hated by all the other peoples of the world — which is why they believe they are justified in avenging themselves on non-Jews whenever they have the opportunity.

This tendency of the Jews to stick together, always to favor their fellow Jews over non-Jews, and to work for the interests of their tribe instead of just for their individual interests is a fact: a very enviable fact. It is the primary reason for their extraordinary level of wealth and power through the ages.

You know, there are clubby little groups of White men who cooperate with each other to advance their interests. But those interests are personal and individual, not racial or even tribal. And virtually all of the really influential groups of this sort — the Council on Foreign Relations, for example, or groups of very rich and powerful men, corporate bosses or bankers, are in fact heavily larded with Jews. They’re not racial groups at all, even if they don’t have any Blacks or Chinamen in them. They’re simply special-interest groups, whereas the 14 million Jews of the world form a huge, self-conscious racial-interest group. They really are unique in this regard.

I wish that our people had the same degree of racial consciousness the Jews do. The Jews understand the power of togetherness. Most of our people don’t. And this is largely the reason why we’re in the mess we’re in today.

The second thing for us to understand about the Jews is their very unusual mode of existence, living nearly everywhere as a small minority among other peoples. If one looks at their history in the Biblical period, they were at most times a people on the move, living as strangers and aliens among other peoples, getting kicked out of one place after another, always on terms of enmity with the Gentile host population. Only for a little over 400 years, from approximately the time of King David until the Babylonian conquest, did they really have a national existence in the ordinary sense of the word, with geographical borders.

When the Babylonians dispersed the Jews throughout the Middle Eastern and the Mediterranean world in the middle of the sixth century BC, the Jews adapted amazingly well to being a minority everywhere and a majority nowhere. Five hundred years later, in the first century BC, the Greek writer Strabo commented: “The Jews have penetrated every country, so that it is difficult to find any place in the world where their tribe has not entered and become dominant.” Note those words: “There is no place where they have not become dominant.” The great geographer and historian Strabo was not the only scholar of the ancient world to make that observation about the Jews. The Jews became dominant by accumulating a substantial portion of the wealth of every country that they infiltrated. And they accumulated their wealth by collaborating with each other and preying on the host population. Their collaboration was based on their racial consciousness, on their conviction that they were a distinct and unique people, superior to the people among whom they lived and deserving of whatever they could take away from their hosts. The Jews in Rome did not think of themselves as Romans who happened to believe in Judaism, but as Jews who happened to live in Rome. And the same for every other country where they lived.

With the sort of attitude and behavior the Jews had they were bound to be hated by everyone — and they reciprocated. The Jews regarded the hatred they had for their hosts as justified, just as they considered deceiving and exploiting their hosts to be justified; but their hosts’ hatred of the Jews they regarded as “bigotry” and “persecution.” Their history is a chronicle of one “persecution” after another, right down to modern times. During the Middle Ages they were kicked en masse out of every country in Europe, repeatedly. They pretend today that this supposed “persecution” was the result of religious bigotry on the part of their hosts, but in fact it was simply self-defense on the part of their hosts, the same sort of reaction to their presence that the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans and everyone else in pre-Christian times had had. And it was this barrier of hatred between the Jews and the rest of the world which made it possible for them to maintain their identity and their sense of racial self-consciousness.

We return again to Eric Goldstein’s book, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. We left off last time in CHAPTER 4: “WHAT ARE WE?”: JEWISHNESS BETWEEN RACE AND RELIGION, page 110. Goldstein describes the private communications between jewish leaders in America. In 1909 these leaders feared that race scientists were close to declaring the jews a non-White race, and so they conspired to:

enlist the help of an anthropologist in order to get “a very strongly worded declaration as to the practical identity of the white race,” one that would presumably leave no doubt as to the whiteness of Jews.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Columbia University Processor Franz Boas was the best known anthropologist of Jewish origin in the United States. Boas shared the concern of the Jewish communal elite about racial nativism, but his preference to identify as a German American rather than as a Jew prevented him from engaging too directly in Jewish defense efforts during these years. Instead, Boas worked to discredit the centrality of race in evaluating human capabilities, arguing that differences between groups–including those between blacks and whites–were heavily influenced by environmental factors. Because these ideas contradicted the overwhelming consensus about the importance of racial differences in the United States, however, they offered little to Jewish leaders hoping to win acceptance for their group in white America. As a scholar who was well integrated into the non-Jewish world, Boas could freely advance such oppositional theories. But for Jews struggling to overcome their uncertain racial status, it was much harder to build their case for inclusion on ideas that undermined the basic assumptions of the larger society. To soothe white Americans’ doubts about the “Jewish race,” they would have to affirm the basic distinction between black and white.

The scientist who took up this challenge was Maurice Fishberg, one of the leading scholars of Jewish physical anthropology at the turn of the century, and the only American to devote himself significantly to such research.

I’ve examined Franz Boas in some detail previously. What Boas and his disciples did was adopt the mantle and authority as objective scientists while replacing research with outright fraud and just-so stories about culture.

Fishberg laid out his line of argument in a book titled, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment, published in 1911. The jews did not see it as good for the jews. Page 114:

In denying any far-reaching racial distinctiveness and identifying Jews with other American whites, Fishberg had provided a scientific basis for the claims of Jewish leaders. Unlike other Jewish spokesmen, however, he pursued his conclusions with a rigid scientific consistency that was unable to make room for any lingering attachment to the notion of a Jewish race. In fact, because he had made the argument for the temporary, artificial nature of Jewish difference so rigorously, he discounted not only the Jewish racial distinctiveness but almost every form of Jewish particularity.

By taking the denial of Jewish racial difference to its logical conclusion, Fishberg failed at satisfying the contradictory needs of American Jews, most of whom ultimately wanted to be accepted in white America without giving up their own distinctive racial identity. This failure was apparent in the almost universal condemnation the book received in Jewish circles.

Fishberg argued that the jews were not a “race, creed or nation” but simply a “social phenomenon”. Page 115:

Horace Wolf, a Reform rabbi in Chicago, scoffed at Fishberg’s argument that the term “Jewish race” was a scientific misnomer. “What do we care that the laboratory masters have dubbed us in error,” he asked, “so long as our lives reflect our implicit belief in the continued existence of the Jewish people?”

If Jews found that race was an increasing liability and threatened to lump them with nonwhites, they also found themselves unable to break the emotional commitment they had to a racial self-understanding. The result was a constant stuggle with these two powerful impulses for inclusion and distinctiveness, one that led many acculturated Jews to assert their status as a religious group in public while privately clinging to a much broader racial understanding of Jewishness. In 1910, addressing the question “What Are We?” for a Jewish reading audience, historian Max Margolis summed up the collective frustration of American Jews by concluding that the Jews were “a great anomaly which cannot be classified according to accepted rules of definition.” In finding satisfactory terms for Jewish self-definition, complained another Jewish writer the same year, “we succeed to about the same extent as the man who sets out to square the circle or to prove that twice two are five.”

These “two powerful impulses for inclusion and distinctiveness” are exactly what parasitism needs to succeed. The parasite must infiltrate, manipulate and exploit its host, while being mindful enough not to attack or destroy itself.

The jews see themselves as a racially related group. They always have and always will. The euphemism they use for race today is “peoplehood”.

When the reality of race was something everyone acknowledged the jews openly talked about themselves in those terms. But as scientists began to understand the deep, biological nature of race, thus threatening to expose the jews, the jews came up with a two-pronged plan to meet the challenge. Both prongs involved co-opting race science (infiltrating and manipulating it) to make their seemingly contradictory case for inclusion and distinctiveness.

In the end the jews settled on Boas’ path – hijacking and derailing race science – first to minimize the significance of race, and eventually to banish any understanding of race as rooted, relatively immutably, in biology.

Politics + Technology = Nonsense at the Speed of Light