The Culture of Critique (hereafter, CofC) was originally published in 1998 by Praeger Publishers, an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. The thesis of the book is a difficult one indeed, not only because it is difficult to establish, but also because it challenges many fundamental assumptions about our contemporary intellectual and political existence.

CofC describes how Jewish intellectuals initiated and advanced a number of important intellectual and political movements during the 20th century. I argue that these movements are attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would neutralize or end anti-Semitism and enhance the prospects for Jewish group continuity either in an overt or in a semi-cryptic manner. Several of these Jewish movements (e.g., the shift in immigration policy favoring non-European peoples) have attempted to weaken the power of their perceived competitors - the European peoples who early in the 20th century had assumed a dominant position not only in their traditional homelands in Europe, but also in the United States, Canada, and Australia. At a theoretical level, these movements are viewed as the outcome of conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in the construction of culture and in various public policy issues. Ultimately, these movements are viewed as the expression of a group evolutionary strategy by Jews in their competition for social, political and cultural dominance with non-Jews.

Here I attempt to answer some typical criticisms that have been leveled against CofC. (See also my website: www.csulb.edu/~kmacd). I also discuss issues raised by several books that have appeared since the publication of CofC.

There have been complaints that I am viewing Judaism in a monolithic manner. This is definitely not the case. Rather, in each movement that I discuss, my methodology has been:

(1.) Find influential movements dominated by Jews, with no implication that all or most Jews are involved in these movements and no restrictions on what the movements are. For example, I touch on Jewish neo-conservatism which is a departure in some ways from the other movements I discuss. In general, relatively few Jews were involved in most of these movements and significant numbers of Jews may have been unaware of their existence. Even Jewish leftist radicalism - surely the most widespread and influential Jewish subculture of the 20th century - may have been a minority movement within Jewish communities in the United States and other Western societies for most periods. As a result, when I criticize these movements I am not necessarily criticizing most Jews. Nevertheless, these movements were influential and they were Jewishly motivated.

(2.) Determine whether the Jewish participants in those movements identified as Jews AND thought of their involvement in the movement as advancing specific Jewish interests. Involvement may be unconscious or involve self-deception, but for the most part it was quite easy and straightforward to find evidence for these propositions. If I thought that self-deception was important (as in the case of many Jewish radicals), I provided evidence that in fact they did identify as Jews and were deeply concerned about Jewish issues despite surface appearances to the contrary. (See also Ch. 1 of CofC.)

(3.) Try to gauge the influence of these movements on non-Jewish society. Keep in mind that the influence of an intellectual or political movement dominated by Jews is independent of the percentage of the Jewish community that is involved in the movement or supports the movement.

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

Several of the movements I discuss have been very influential in the social sciences. However, I do not argue that there are no Jews who do good social science, and in fact I provide a list of prominent Jewish social scientists who in my opinion do not meet the conditions outlined under (2) above (see Ch. 2 of CofC). If there was evidence that these social scientists identified as Jews and had a Jewish agenda in doing social science (definitely not in the case of most of those listed, but possibly true in the case of Richard Herrnstein - see below), then they would have been candidates for inclusion in the book. The people I cite as contributing to evolutionary/biological perspectives are indeed ethnically Jewish, but for most of them I have no idea whether they either identity as Jews or if they have a Jewish agenda in pursuing their research simply because there is no evidence to be found in their work or elsewhere. If there is evidence that a prominent evolutionary biologist identifies as a Jew and views his work in sociobiology or evolutionary psychology as advancing Jewish agendas, then he or she should have been in CofC as an example of the phenomenon under study rather than as simply a scientist working in the area of evolutionary studies.

Interestingly, in the case of one of those I mention, Richard J. Herrnstein, Alan Ryan (1994, 11) writes, "Herrnstein essentially wants the world in which clever Jewish kids or their equivalent make their way out of their humble backgrounds and end up running Goldman Sachs or the Harvard physics department." This is a stance that is typical, I suppose, of neo-conservatism, a Jewish movement I discuss in several places, and it is the sort of thing that, if true, would suggest that Herrnstein did perceive the issues discussed in The Bell Curve as affecting Jewish interests in a way that Charles Murray, his co-author, did not. (Ryan contrasts Murray's and Herrnstein's world views: ‘Murray wants the Midwest in which he grew up - a world in which the local mechanic didn't care two cents whether he was or wasn't brighter than the local math teacher.’) Similarly, 20th-century theoretical physics does not qualify as a Jewish intellectual movement precisely because it was good science and there are no signs of ethnic involvement in its creation: Jewish identification and pursuit of Jewish interests were not important to the content of the theories or to the conduct of the intellectual movement. Yet Jews have been heavily overrepresented among the ranks of theoretical physicists.

This conclusion remains true even though Einstein, the leading figure among Jewish physicists, was a strongly motivated Zionist (Fölsing 1997, 494-505), opposed assimilation as a contemptible form of ‘mimicry’ (p. 490), preferred to mix with other Jews whom he referred to as his ‘tribal companions’ (p. 489), embraced the uncritical support for the Bolshevik regime in Russia typical of so many Jews during the 1920s and 1930s, including persistent apology for the Moscow show trials in the 1930s (pp. 644-5), and switched from a high-minded pacifism during World War I, when Jewish interests were not at stake, to advocating the building of atomic bombs to defeat Hitler. From his teenage years he disliked the Germans and in later life criticized Jewish colleagues for converting to Christianity and acting like Prussians. He especially disliked Prussians, who were the elite ethnic group in Germany. Reviewing his life at age 73, Einstein declared his ethnic affiliation in no uncertain terms: ‘My relationship with Jewry had become my strongest human tie once I achieved complete clarity about our precarious position among the nations’ (in Fölsing 1997, 488). According to Fölsing, Einstein had begun developing this clarity from an early age, but did not acknowledge it until much later, a form of self-deception: ‘As a young man with bourgeois-liberal views and a belief in enlightenment, he had refused to acknowledge [his Jewish identity]’ (in Fölsing 1997, 488).

In other words, the issues of the ethnic identification and even ethnic activism on the part of people like Einstein are entirely separate from the issue of whether such people viewed the content of the theories themselves as furthering ethnic interests, and, in the case of Einstein, there is no evidence that he did so. The same cannot be said for Freud, the New York Intellectuals, the Boasians, and the Frankfurt School, in which ‘scientific’ theories were fashioned and deployed to advance ethnic group interests. This ideological purpose becomes clear when the unscientific nature of these movements is understood. Much of the discussion in CofC documented the intellectual dishonesty, the lack of empirical rigor, the obvious political and ethnic motivation, the expulsion of dissenters, the collusion among co-ethnics to dominate intellectual discourse, and the general lack of scientific spirit that pervaded them. In my view, the scientific weakness of these movements is evidence of their group-strategic function.

CofC was not reviewed widely. Indeed, only three reviews have appeared in mainstream publications, including a brief review by Kevin Hannan (2000) in Nationalities Papers. Hannan's review mostly describes the book, but he summarizes his impressions by noting, "[MacDonald's] iconoclastic evaluation of psychoanalysis, Marxism, multiculturalism, and certain schools of thought in the social sciences will not generate great enthusiasm for his work in academe, yet this book is well written and has much to offer the reader interested in ethnicity and ethnic conflict."

The other reviews have raised several important issues that bear discussion. Frank Salter's (2000) review in Human Ethology Bulletin discussed some of the controversy surrounding my work, particularly an acrimonious session at the 2000 conference of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society where I was accused of anti-Semitism by several participants. For me the only issue is whether I have been honest in my treatment of sources and whether my conclusions meet the usual standards of scholarly research in the social sciences. Salter notes that I based my research on mainstream sources and that the assertions that have infuriated some colleagues are not only true but truisms to those acquainted with the diverse literatures involved. Apart from the political sensitivity of the subject, much of the problem facing MacDonald is that his knowledge is often too far ahead of his detractors to allow easy communication; there are not enough shared premises for constructive dialog. Unfortunately the knowledge gap is closing slowly because some of his most hostile critics, including colleagues who make serious ad hominem accusations, have not bothered to read MacDonald's books.

Salter also notes that those, such as John Tooby and Steven Pinker, who have denigrated my competence as a researcher in the media, have failed to provide anything approaching a scholarly critique or refutation of my work. Sadly, this continues. While there have been a number of ringing denunciations of my work in public forums, there have been no serious scholarly reviews by these critics, although they have not retracted their scathing denunciations of my work.

Paul Gottfried (2000) raised several interesting issues in his review in Chronicles, the paleo-conservative intellectual journal. (I replied to Gottfried's review and Gottfried penned a rejoinder; see Chronicles, September, 2000, pp. 4-5). Gottfried questions my views on the role of Jewish organizations and intellectuals with strong Jewish identifications as agents of change in the cultural transformations that have occurred in Western societies over the last 50 years. In general, my position is that Jewish intellectual and political movements were a necessary condition for these changes, not a sufficient condition, as Gottfried supposes. In the case of the reversal in U.S. immigration policy, there simply were no other pressure groups that were pushing for liberalized, multi-racial immigration during the period under consideration (up to the enactment of the watershed immigration bill of 1965). Nor were there any other groups or intellectual movements besides the ones mentioned in CofC that were developing images of the U.S. as a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society rather than a European civilization. Gottfried attributes the sea change in immigration to ‘a general cultural change that beset Western societies and was pushed by the managerial state.’ I agree that multi-ethnic immigration resulted from a general cultural shift, but we still must develop theories for the origin of this shift.

A revealing development regarding Jewish attitudes toward immigration is an article by Stephen Steinlight (2001), former Director of National Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Jewish Committee (AJCommittee) and presently a Senior Fellow with the AJCommittee. Steinlight recommends altering ‘the traditional policy line [of the organized Jewish community] affirming generous - really, unlimited - immigration and open borders,’ even though for ‘many decent, progressive Jewish folk merely asking such fundamental questions is tantamount to heresy, and meddling with them is to conjure the devil.’

Steinlight believes that present immigration policy no longer serves Jewish interests because the new immigrants are less likely to be sympathetic to Israel and because they are more likely to view Jews as the wealthiest and most powerful group in the U.S. - and thus a potential enemy - rather than as victims of the Holocaust. He is particularly worried about the consequences of Islamic fundamentalism among Muslim immigrants, especially for Israel, and he condemns the ‘savage hatred for America and American values’ among the fundamentalists. Steinlight is implicitly agreeing with an important thesis of my trilogy on Judaism: Throughout history Jews have tended to prosper in individualistic European societies and have suffered in non-Western societies, most notably in Muslim cultures where there are strong ingroup-outgroup sensibilities (e.g., MacDonald 1998a, Ch. 2; the only exceptions to this generalization have been when Jews have constituted an intermediary group between an alien elite and oppressed native populations in Muslim societies.) Steinlight's fears of the effects of a Balkanized America on Judaism are indeed well-grounded.

Steinlight is exclusively concerned with Jewish interests an example of Jewish moral particularism which is a general feature of Jewish culture (see below). Indeed, his animosity toward the restrictionism of 1924-1965 shines through clearly. This ‘pause’ in immigration is perceived as a moral catastrophe. He describes it as ‘evil, xenophobic, anti-Semitic,’ ‘vilely discriminatory,’ a ‘vast moral failure,’ a ‘monstrous policy.’ Jewish interests are his only consideration, while the vast majority of pre-1965 Americans are described as a ‘thoughtless mob’ because they advocate a complete moratorium on immigration.

It seems fair to state that there is a communal Jewish memory about the period of immigration restriction as the high point of American anti-Jewish attitudes. Non-Jews have a difficult time fathoming Jewish communal memory. For strongly identified Jews, the ‘vilely discriminatory’ actions of immigration restrictionists are part of the lachrymose history of the Jewish people. Immigration restriction from 1924-1965 is in the same category as the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., the marauding Crusaders of the Middle Ages, the horrors of the Inquisition, the evil of the Russian Czar, and the rationally incomprehensible calamity of Nazism. These events are not just images drawn from the dustbin of history. They are deeply felt images and potent motivators of contemporary behavior. As Michael Walzer (1994, 4) noted, "I was taught Jewish history as a long tale of exile and persecution - Holocaust history read backwards." From this perspective, the immigration restriction of 1924-1965 is an important part of the Holocaust because it prevented the emigration of Jews who ultimately died in the Holocaust - a point that Steinlight dwells on at length.

And as Walter Benjamin (1968, 262) notes, "Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice ... are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren." This is important because whatever one's attitudes about the costs and benefits of immigration, a principal motivation for encouraging massive non-European immigration on the part of the organized Jewish community has involved a deeply felt animosity toward the people and culture responsible for the immigration restriction of 1924-1965. (As indicated in Ch. 7, another motivation has been to lessen the power of the European-derived majority of the U.S. in order to prevent the development of an ethnically homogenous anti-Jewish movement.) This deeply held animosity exists despite the fact that the liberated grandchildren have been extraordinarily prosperous in the country whose recent past is the focus of such venom. The welfare of the United States and certainly the welfare of European-Americans have not been a relevant consideration for Jewish attitudes on immigration. Indeed, as indicated in Chapter 7, it's easy to find statements of Jewish activists deploring the very idea that immigration should serve the interests of the United States. That is why the organized Jewish community did not settle for a token victory by merely eliminating the ethnically based quotas that resulted in an ethnic status quo in which Europeans retained their ethnic and cultural predominance. As indicated in Chapter 7, immediately after the passage of the 1965 law, activists strove mightily to increase dramatically the numbers of non-European immigrants, a pattern that continues to the present.

And, finally, that is why support for open immigration spans the Jewish political spectrum, from the far left to the neo-conservative right. Scott McConnell, former editorial page editor and columnist for the New York Post, commented on the intense commitment to open immigration among Jewish neo-conservatives (see also Ch. 7):1

Read some of Norman Podhoretz's writing, particularly his recent book -- the only polemics against anyone right of center are directed against immigration restrictionists. Several years ago I was at a party talking to Norman, and Abe Rosenthal came over, and Norman introduced us with the words ‘Scott is very solid on all the issues, except immigration.’ The very first words out of his mouth. This was when we were ostensibly on very good terms, and I held a job which required important people to talk to me. There is a complicated history between the neo-cons and National Review [NR], which John O'Sullivan could tell better than I, but it involved neo-con attacks on NR using language that equated modern day immigration restrictionism with the effort to send Jews back to Nazi death camps, a tone so vicious that [it] was really strange among ostensible Reaganite allies in 1995.... The Forward, a neo-connish Jewish weekly, used to run articles trying to link FAIR [Federation for American Immigration Reform], an immigration restriction group headed by former [Colorado governor] Richard Lamm, with neo-nazism, using ... crude smear techniques .... None of my neo-con friends (at a time when all my friends were Jewish neo-cons) thought there was anything wrong with this.... Read the Weekly Standard, read Ben Wattenberg. Read the [Podhoretzes]. Or don't. But if you were engaged on the issue, you couldn't help but being struck by this, particularly because it came as such a shock. One doesn't like to name names, because no one on the right wants to get on the bad side of the neo-cons, but I can think of one young scholar, who writes very temperately on immigration-related issues and who trained under a leading neo-con academic. He told me he was just amazed at the neo-cons' attachment to high immigration -- it seemed to go against every principle of valuing balance and order in a society, and being aware of social vulnerabilities, that they seemed to advocate. Perhaps it's worth some time, writing a lengthy article on all this, on how the American right lost its way after the Cold War. [Emphasis in text]

THE DECLINE OF ETHNIC CONSCIOUSNESS AMONG EUROPEAN-DERIVED PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES

Fundamental to the transformation of the United States as a result of massive non-European immigration was the decline of ethnic consciousness among European peoples. It is fascinating to contrast the immigration debates of the 1920s with those of the 1950s and 1960s. The restrictionists of the 1920s unabashedly asserted the right of European-derived peoples to the land they had conquered and settled. There were many assertions of ethnic interest -- that the people who colonized and created the political and economic culture of the country had a right to maintain it as their possession. This sort of morally self-assured nativism (even the word itself now has a pathological ring to it) can be seen in the statement of Representative William N. Vaile of Colorado, a prominent restrictionist, quoted in Chapter 7 of CofC.

By the 1940s and certainly by the 1960s it was impossible to make such assertions without being deemed not only a racist but an intellectual Neanderthal. Indeed, Bendersky (2000) shows that such rhetoric was increasingly impossible in the 1930s. One can see the shift in the career of racial theorist Lothrop Stoddard, author of books such as The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy and numerous articles for the popular media, such as Collier's, Forum, and The Saturday Evening Post. Stoddard viewed Jews as highly intelligent and as racially different from Europeans. He also believed that Jews were critical to the success of Bolshevism. However, he stopped referring to Jews completely in his lectures to the Army War College in the late 1930s. The Boasian revolution in anthropology had triumphed, and theorists who believed that race was important for explaining human behavior became fringe figures. Stoddard himself went from being a popular and influential writer to being viewed as a security risk as the Roosevelt administration prepared the country for war with National Socialist Germany.

Another marker of the change in attitude toward Jews was the response to Charles Lindbergh's remarks in Des Moines, Iowa on the eve of U.S. entry into World War II. Lindbergh's advocacy of non-intervention was shaped not only by his horror at the destructiveness of modern warfare -- what he viewed as the suicide of European culture, but also by his belief that a second European war would be suicidal for the White race. In an article published in the popular media in 1939 shortly after the outbreak of World War II, he stated that it was a war "among a dominant people for power, blind, insatiable, suicidal. Western nations are again at war, a war likely to be more prostrating than any in the past, a war in which the White race is bound to lose, and the others bound to gain, a war which may easily lead our civilization through more Dark Ages if it survives at all" (Lindbergh 1939, 65).

In order to maintain their dominance over other races, Lindbergh believed that whites should join together to fend off the teeming legions of non-whites who were the real long-term threat. Lindbergh was not a Nordicist. He took a long-term view that Russia would be a white bulwark against the Chinese in the East. He advocated a racial alliance among Whites based ‘on a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood; on an English fleet, a German air force, a French army, [and] an American nation’ (p. 66). However, the Soviet Union under Communism was abhorrent: "I tell you that I would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with England, or even with Germany with all of her faults, than with the cruelty, the godlessness, and the barbarism that exist in Soviet Russia. An alliance between the United States and Russia should be opposed by every American, by every Christian, and by every humanitarian in this country" (in Berg 1999, 422). Lindbergh clearly viewed the atrocities perpetrated by the Soviet Union to be worse than those of Nazi Germany.

Lindbergh's famous speech of September 11, 1941 stated that Jews were one of the principal forces attempting to lead the U.S. into the war, along with the Roosevelt administration and the British. Lindbergh noted that Jewish reaction to Nazi Germany was understandable given persecution ‘sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race.’ He stated that the Jews' "greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government." And, most controversially, he stated, "I am saying that the leaders of both the British and Jewish races, for reasons which are understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war" (in Berg 1999, 427).

America First Poster

Lindbergh's speech was greeted with a torrent of abuse and hatred unparalleled for a mainstream public figure in American history. Overnight Lindbergh went from cultural hero to moral pariah. Jewish influence on the media and government would be difficult to measure then as it is now, but it was certainly considerable and a common concern of anti-Jewish sentiment of the time. In a booklet published in 1936, the editors of Fortune magazine concluded that the main sources of Jewish influence on the media were their control of the two major radio networks and the Hollywood movie studios (Editors of Fortune 1936). They suggested that "at the very most, half the opinion-making and taste-influencing paraphernalia in America is in Jewish hands" (p. 62) -- a rather remarkable figure considering that Jews constituted approximately 2-3% of the population and most of the Jewish population were first or second generation immigrants. A short list of Jewish ownership or management of the major media during this period would include the New York Times (the most influential newspaper, owned by the Sulzberger family), the New York Post (George Backer), the Washington Post (Eugene Meyer), Philadelphia Inquirer (M. L. Annenberg), Philadelphia Record and Camden Courier-Post (J. David Stern), Newark Star-Ledger (S. I. Newhouse), Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Paul Block), CBS (the dominant radio network, owned by William Paley), NBC (headed by David Sarnoff), all of the major Hollywood movie studios, Random House (the most important book publisher, owned by Bennett Cerf), and a dominant position in popular music.2 Walter Winchell, who had an audience of tens of millions and was tied with Bob Hope for the highest rated program on radio, believed that opposition to intervention ‘was unconscionable, a form of treason’ (Gabler 1995, 294). Winchell, ‘the standard bearer for interventionism,’ was Jewish. He had close ties during this period to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which provided him with information on the activities of isolationists and Nazi sympathizers which he used in his broadcasts and newspaper columns (Gabler 1995, 294-298)

There is no question that the movie industry did indeed propagandize against Germany and in favor of intervention. In May, 1940, the Warner Brothers studio wired Roosevelt that "personally we would like to do all in our power within the motion picture industry and by use of the talking screen to show the American people the worthiness of the cause for which the free peoples of Europe are making such tremendous sacrifices" (in Gabler 1988, 343). Later in 1940 Joseph P. Kennedy lectured the Hollywood movie elite that they should stop promoting the war and stop making anti-Nazi movies or risk a rise in anti-Semitism. Immediately prior to Lindbergh's Des Moines speech, Senator Gerald Nye asserted that foreign-born owners of the Hollywood studies had "violent animosities toward certain causes abroad" (Gabler 1988, 344-345). Representatives of the movie industry, realizing that they had the support of the Roosevelt administration, aggressively defended making ‘America conscious of the national peril."3

Harvard historian William Langer stated in a lecture to the U.S. Army War College that the rising dislike of Nazi Germany in the U.S. was due to ‘Jewish influence’ in the media:

You have to face the fact that some of our most important American newspapers are Jewish-controlled, and I suppose if I were a Jew I would feel about Nazi Germany as most Jews feel and it would be most inevitable that the coloring of the news takes on that tinge. As I read the New York Times, for example, it is perfectly clear that every little upset that occurs (and after all, many upsets occur in a country of 70 million people) is given a great deal of prominence. The other part of it is soft-pedaled or put off with a sneer. So that in a rather subtle way, the picture you get is that there is no good in the Germans whatever. (In Bendersky 2000, 273)

It is also interesting that the Chicago Tribune was ‘circumspect on the Jewish question’ despite the personal sentiments of Robert McCormick, the Tribune's non-Jewish publisher, that Jews were an important reason behind America's anti-German policy (Bendersky 2000, 284). This suggests that concern with Jewish power -- quite possibly concern about negative influences on advertising revenue (see Editors of Fortune 1936, 57), was an issue for McCormick. On balance, it would seem reasonable to agree with Lindbergh that Jewish influence in the media was significant during this period. Of course, this is not to say that Jews dominated the media at this time or that other influences were not important.

It is also noteworthy that U.S. military officers often worried that Roosevelt was influenced to be anti-German by his Jewish advisors, Samuel I. Rosenman, Felix Frankfurter, and Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (Bendersky 2000, 274), and they worried that Jewish interests and the British would push the U.S. into a war with Germany. Both Frankfurter and Morgenthau were strongly identified Jews and effective advocates of Jewish interests within the Roosevelt Administration. Morgenthau actively promoted Zionism and the welfare of Jewish refugees (e.g., Bendersky 2000, 333ff, 354ff). Both supported U.S. involvement in the war against Germany, and Morgenthau became well-known as an advocate of extremely harsh treatment of the Germans during and after World War II.

Nevertheless, whatever the level of Jewish influence on the media during this period, commentators generally focused on denouncing the seeming implication in Lindbergh's speech that Jewish interests were ‘not American.’ I suppose that Lindbergh's statement could have been amended by a public-relations minded editor without distorting Lindbergh's intentions to read something like, ‘Jewish interests are not the same as the interests of most other Americans,’ or ‘Jewish interests are not the same as those of the country as a whole.’ However, I rather doubt that this alteration would have assuaged the outpouring of hatred that ensued. The simple facts that the vast majority of U.S. Jews were indeed in favor of intervention and that Jews did have a significant effect on public attitudes and public policy had become irrelevant. As Lindbergh himself said, the choice was "whether or not you are going to let your country go into a completely disastrous war for lack of courage to name the groups leading that country to war -- at the risk of being called ‘anti-Semitic’ simply by naming them" (as paraphrased by Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1980, 224; italics in text). America had entered into an era when it had become morally unacceptable to discuss Jewish interests at all. We are still in that era.4

The reaction of Lindbergh's wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, is particularly interesting because it illustrates the power of moral revulsion combined with hypocrisy that had enveloped any public discussion of Jewish interests.

September 11, 1941:

Then [he gave] his speech -- throwing me into black gloom. He names the ‘war agitators‘ -- chiefly the British, the Jews, and the Administration. He does it truthfully, moderately, and with no bitterness or rancor -- but I hate to have him touch the Jews at all. For I dread the reaction on him. No one else mentions this subject out loud (though many seethe bitterly and intolerantly underneath). C. [Charles], as usual, must bear the brunt of being frank and open. What he is saying in public is not intolerant or inciting or bitter and it is just what he says in private, while the other soft-spoken cautious people who say terrible things in private would never dare be as frank in public as he. They do not want to pay the price. And the price will be terrible. Headlines will flame ‘Lindbergh attacks Jews.’ he will be branded anti-Semitic, Nazi, Fuhrer-seeking, etc. I can hardly bear it. For he is a moderate .... September 13, 1941:

He is attacked on all sides -- Administration, pressure groups, and Jews, as now openly a Nazi, following Nazi doctrine.

September 14, 1941:
I cannot explain my revulsion of feeling by logic. Is it my lack of courage to face the problem? Is it my lack of vision and seeing the thing through? Or is my intuition founded on something profound and valid?

I do not know and am only very disturbed, which is upsetting for him. I have the greatest faith in him as a person -- in his integrity, his courage, and his essential goodness, fairness, and kindness -- his nobility really .... How then explain my profound feeling of grief about what he is doing? If what he said is the truth (and I am inclined to think it is), why was it wrong to state it? He was naming the groups that were pro-war. No one minds his naming the British or the Administration. But to name ‘Jew’ is un-American -- even if it is done without hate or even criticism. Why?

Because it is segregating them as a group, setting the ground for anti-Semitism.... I say that I would prefer to see this country at war than shaken by violent anti-Semitism. (Because it seems to me that the kind of person the human being is turned into when the instinct of Jew-baiting is let loose is worse than the kind of person he becomes on the battlefield.)

September 15, 1941:
The storm is beginning to blow up hard. America First is in a turmoil.... He is universally condemned by all moderates.... The Jews demand a retraction.... I sense that this is the beginning of a fight and consequent loneliness and isolation that we have not known before.... For I am really much more attached to the worldly things than he is, mind more giving up friends, popularity, etc., mind much more criticism and coldness and loneliness.

September 18, 1941:
Will I be able to shop in New York at all now? I am always stared at -- but now to be stared at with hate, to walk through aisles of hate! (A. M. Lindbergh 1980, 220-230; italics in text)5

Several issues stand out in these comments. Anne Morrow Lindbergh is horrified at having to walk through ‘aisles of hate,’ horrified at having to give up her friends, horrified at being a pariah where once she was idolized as the wife of the most popular man in the country. While she accepts the truth of what her husband said and its good intentions, she thinks it better left unsaid and does not dwell on the unfairness of the charges against her husband, in particular with calling him a Nazi. Truth is no defense if it leads to morally unacceptable actions, and slander and smear tactics are warranted and understandable if the goals are morally praiseworthy. She supposes that even a disastrous war that might kill hundreds of thousands of Americans (and, as her husband believed, might result in the destruction of European culture and the white race) is preferable to the possibility of an outbreak of violent anti-Semitism. The moral demeanor of Americans is more important than their survival as a nation or people. And all of this because Lindbergh simply stated that Jews had interests as a group that differed from those of other Americans. Their lesson learned, American politicians presumably realized that even rational, intelligent, and humane discussions of Jewish interests were beyond the boundaries of appropriate discussion. Jews had no interests as Jews that could be said to conflict with the interests of any other group of Americans.

By the time of Lindbergh's speech, Jews not only had a prominent position in the U.S. media, they had seized the intellectual and moral high ground via their control of the intellectual and political movements discussed in CofC. Not only were Jewish interests beyond the bounds of civilized political discussion, assertions of European ethnic interest became impermissible as well. Such assertions conflicted with the Boasian dogma that genetic differences between peoples were trivial and irrelevant; they conflicted with the Marxist belief in the equality of all peoples and the Marxist belief that nationalism and assertions of ethnic interests were reactionary; such assertions were deemed a sure sign of psychopathology within the frameworks of psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School; and they would soon be regarded as the babblings of country bumpkins by the New York Intellectuals and by the neo-conservatives who spouted variants of all of these ideologies from the most prestigious academic and media institutions in the society. There may indeed have been other forces that relegated a nativist mindset to the political and intellectual fringe -- Gottfried (2000) points a finger at liberal Protestantism and the rise of the managerial state, but it is impossible to understand the effectiveness of either of these influences in the absence of the Jewish movements I describe.

The rise of a de-ethnicized non-Jewish managerial elite that rejects traditional cultural institutions -- as exemplified by former President Bill Clinton and now Senator Hillary Clinton -- and interwoven with a critical mass of ethnically conscious Jews and other ethnic minorities is an enormously important fact of our current political life. My claim that Jewish intellectual and political activities were a necessary condition for the rise of such an elite, while obviously difficult to verify conclusively (as any other causal hypothesis would be) is also compatible with the work of others, most notably D. A. Hollinger's (1996) Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-20th-Century American Intellectual History and Carl Degler's (1991) In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought.

The rise of such a de-ethnicized elite is hardly an inevitable consequence of modernization or any other force of which I am aware. Such de-ethnicized managerial elites are unique to European and European-derived societies. Such elites are not found elsewhere in the world, including highly developed nations such as Japan and Israel or the undeveloped nations of Africa and elsewhere. Moreover, the cultural shifts under consideration have also occurred in traditionally Catholic countries like France and Italy, where Protestantism has not been a factor. France in particular has been very open to non-European immigration and its intellectual life has been deeply influenced by the movements discussed in CofC. Conversely, there are many examples where Protestantism has peacefully co-existed with or even rationalized nationalism and ethnocentrism.

Developing theories of why Western cultures provide such fertile ground for the theories and movements discussed in CofC is a very useful area for research. It is instructive to look at the way Europeans in the U.S. saw themselves a century ago.6 Americans of European descent thought of themselves as part of a cultural and ethnic heritage extending backward in time to the founding of the country. The Anglo-Saxon heritage of the British Isles was at the center of this self-conception, but Americans of German and Scandinavian descent also viewed themselves as part of this ethnic and cultural heritage. They had a great deal of pride in their accomplishments. They had conquered a vast territory and had achieved a high degree of economic progress. They saw themselves as having created a civilization with a strong moral fabric -- a country of farmers and small businessmen who had developed into a world economic power. They believed that their civilization was a product of their own unique ingenuity and skills, and they believed that it would not survive if other peoples were allowed to play too large a role in it. They saw themselves as exhibiting positive personality traits such as courage in the face of adversity, self-reliance, inventiveness, originality, and fair play -- the very virtues that allowed them to conquer the wilderness and turn it into an advanced civilization.

Americans at the turn of the 19th century looked out on the world and saw their own society as superior to others. They saw themselves and other European societies as reaping the rewards of political and economic freedom while the rest of the world suffered as it had from time immemorial -- the despotism of Asia, the barbarity and primitivism of Africa, and the economic and political backwardness of Russia and Eastern Europe.

They saw themselves as Christian, and they thought of Christianity as an essential part of the social fabric and their way of life. Christianity was seen as basic to the moral foundations of the society, and any threat to Christianity was seen as a threat to the society as a whole. When these people looked back on their own childhood, they saw ‘a simple, secure world of commonly accepted values and behavior’ (Bendersky 2000, 6) -- a world of cultural and ethnic homogeneity. They had a strong sense of family pride and regional identification: They had deep roots in the areas in which they grew up. They did not think of the U.S. as a Marxist hell of war between the social classes. Instead they thought of it as a world of harmony between the social classes in which people at the top of society earned their positions but felt a certain sense of social obligation to the lower social classes.

The early part of the 20th century was also the high water mark of Darwinism in the social sciences. It was common at that time to think that there were important differences between the races -- that races differed in intelligence and in moral qualities. Not only did races differ, but they were in competition with each other for supremacy. As described in Separation and Its Discontents (MacDonald 1998a), such ideas were part of the furniture of intellectual life -- commonplace among Jews as well as non-Jews.

That world has vanished. The rise of Jewish power and the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the real topics of CofC. The war to disestablish the specifically European nature of the U.S. was fought on several fronts. The main thrusts of Jewish activism against European ethnic and cultural hegemony have focused on three critical power centers in the United States: The academic world of information in the social sciences and humanities, the political world where public policy on immigration and other ethnic issues is decided, and the mass media where ‘ways of seeing’ are presented to the public. The first two are the focus of CofC.

At the intellectual level, Jewish intellectuals led the battle against the idea that races even exist and against the idea that there are differences in intelligence or cultural level between the races that are rooted in biology. They also spearheaded defining America as a set of abstract principles rather than an ethnocultural civilization. At the level of politics, Jewish organizations spearheaded the drive to open up immigration to all of the peoples of the world. Jewish organizations also played a key role in furthering the interests of other racial and ethnic minorities, and they led the legal and legislative effort to remove Christianity from public places.

The first bastion of the old American culture to fall was elite academic institutions and especially the Ivy League universities. The transformation of the faculty in the social sciences and humanities was well underway in the 1950s, and by the early 1960s it was largely complete. The new elite was very different from the old elite it displaced. The difference was that the old Protestant elite was not at war with the country it dominated. The old Protestant elite was wealthier and better educated than the public at large, but they approached life on basically the same terms. They saw themselves as Christians and as Europeans, and they didn't see the need for radically changing the society.

Things are very different now. Since the 1960s a hostile, adversary elite has emerged to dominate intellectual and political debate. It is an elite that almost instinctively loathes the traditional institutions of European-American culture: its religion, its customs, its manners, and its sexual attitudes. In the words of one commentator, ‘today's elite loathes the nation it rules’ (Gerlernter 1997). A good example is Stephen Steinlight's comments on the immigration restriction of 1924-1965 (see above).

This ‘hostile elite’ is fundamentally a Jewish-dominated elite whose origins and main lines of influence are described in CofC. The emergence of this hostile elite is an aspect of ethnic competition between Jews and non-Jews and its effect will be a long-term decline in the hegemony of European peoples in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.

Although European peoples are less prone to ethnocentrism and more prone to moral universalism and individualism (see below), they did not surrender their impending cultural and demographic eclipse without a fight. There is no evidence for internal WASP self-destruction, but a great deal of evidence that their active resistance was overcome by the movements I discuss in CofC. For example, Bendersky's (2000) recent The ‘Jewish Threat’ shows strong resistance to the decline of European hegemony among U.S. Army officers in the period from World War I to well into the Cold War era and shows that similar attitudes were widespread among the public at that time. But their resistance was nullified by the decline of the intellectual basis of European ethnic hegemony and by political events, such as the immigration law of 1965, which they were unable to control. In the end, the 1965 law passed because it was advertised as nothing more than a moral gesture that would have no long-term impact on the ethnic balance of the U.S. However, to its activist supporters, including the Jewish organizations who were critical to its passage, immigration reform was what it had always been: a mechanism to alter the ethnic balance of the United States (see Ch. 7).

The fact that the Jewish intellectuals and political operatives described in CofC did not lose their national/ethnic loyalties shows that there was no general trend to de-ethnicization. The broad trends toward de-ethnicization somehow occurred among the Europeans but spared the Jews who by all accounts continue to strongly support their ethnic homeland, Israel, and continue to have a strong sense of peoplehood -- propped up now by high-profile programs encouraging Jews to marry other Jews. My account would benefit from discussing the acceptance of Jews by the Protestant establishment after World War II. However, what I have seen thus far suggests Jewish involvement in the dramatic changes in Protestant sensibilities as well. Recently I have become aware of John Murray Cuddihy's (1978) book, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste. The chapter on Reinhold Niebuhr is particularly interesting in thinking about how to account for the acceptance of Jews and Judaism by the WASP establishment after W.W.II. Cuddihy focuses on the elevation of Judaism to the status of one of the ‘big three’ U.S. religions, to the point that a rabbi officiates at the presidential inauguration even though Jews constitute approximately 2-3% of the population. Cuddihy argues that this religious surface served as a protective coloring and led to a sort of crypto-Judaism in which Jewish ethnic identities were submerged in order to make them appear civilized to the goyim. As part of this contract, Niebuhr acknowledged ‘the stubborn will of the Jews to live as a peculiar people’ -- an acknowledgement by an important Protestant leader that the Jews could remain a people with a surface veneer of religion.

Both sides gave up something in this bargain. The Jews' posturing as a religion left them open to large-scale defection via intermarriage to the extent that they took seriously the idea that Judaism was akin to Protestantism, and to some extent this did occur. But recently, Jews have been mending the fences. There is an upsurge in more traditional forms of Judaism and an open rejection of intermarriage even among the most liberal wings of Judaism. Recent guidelines for Reform Judaism emphasize traditional practices of conversion, such as circumcision, that are likely to minimize converts, and proselytism is explicitly rejected.7 It would appear that Conservative religious forms of Judaism will be the rule in the Diaspora and there will be a self-conscious ethnic aspect to Jewish religiosity.

What the Protestants gave up was far more important because I think it has been a contributing factor in the more or less irreversible ethnic changes in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Western world. Judaism became unconditionally accepted as a modern religion even while retaining a commitment to its ethnic core. It conformed outwardly to the religious norms of the U.S., but it also continued to energetically pursue its ethnic interests, especially with regard to issues where there is a substantial consensus among Jews: support for Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties (Goldberg 1996, 5). What is remarkable is that a wealthy, powerful, and highly talented ethnic group was able to pursue its interests without those interests ever being the subject of open political discussion by mainstream political figures, for at least the last 60 years -- since Lindbergh's ill-fated Des Moines speech of 1941.

I suppose that Niebuhr thought that he was only giving up the prospect of converting Jews, but the implicit downgrading of the ethnic character of Judaism provided an invaluable tool in furthering Jewish ethnic aims in the U.S. The downgrading of the ethnic aspect of Judaism essentially allowed Jews to win the ethnic war without anyone even being able to acknowledge that it was an ethnic war. For example, during the immigration debates of the 1940s'1960s Jews were described by themselves and others as ‘people of the Jewish faith.’ They were simply another religion in an officially pluralistic religious society, and part of Jewish posturing was a claim to a unique universalistic moral-religious vision that could only be achieved by enacting legislation that in fact furthered their particularist ethnic aims. The universalistic moral-religious vision promoted by Jewish activists really amounted to taking the Protestants at their own word -- by insisting that every last shred of ethnic identity among Protestants be given up while Jews were implicitly allowed to keep theirs if they only promised to behave civilly.

The evidence provided by Cuddihy suggests that Niebuhr was socialized by the Jewish milieu of New York into taking the positions that he did -- that his position as a major Protestant spokesperson was facilitated by alliances he formed with Jews and because his writings fit well with the Jewish milieu of New York intellectual circles. Niebuhr's behavior is therefore more an indication of Jewish power and the ability of Jews to recruit non-Jews sympathetic to their causes than an indication of Protestant self-destruction. One cannot underestimate the importance of Jewish power in intellectual circles in New York at the time of Niebuhr's pronouncements (see CofC, passim). For example, Leslie Fiedler (1948, 873) noted that ‘the writer drawn to New York from the provinces feels ... the Rube, attempts to conform; and the almost parody of Jewishness achieved by the gentile writer in New York is a strange and crucial testimony of our time.’8

THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF EUROPEAN INDIVIDUALISM

Although there is much evidence that Europeans presented a spirited defense of their cultural and ethnic hegemony in the early- to mid-20th century, their rapid decline raises the question: What cultural or ethnic characteristics of Europeans made them susceptible to the intellectual and political movements described in CofC? The discussion in CofC focused mainly on a proposed nexus of individualism, relative lack of ethnocentrism, and concomitant moral universalism -- all features that are entirely foreign to Judaism. In several places in all three of my books on Judaism I develop the view that Europeans are relatively less ethnocentric than other peoples and relatively more prone to individualism as opposed to the ethnocentric collectivist social structures historically far more characteristic of other human groups, including -- relevant to this discussion -- Jewish groups. I update and extend these ideas here.

The basic idea is that European groups are highly vulnerable to invasion by strongly collectivist, ethnocentric groups because individualists have less powerful defenses against such groups. The competitive advantage of cohesive, cooperating groups is obvious and is a theme that recurs throughout my trilogy on Judaism. This scenario implies that European peoples are more prone to individualism. Individualist cultures show little emotional attachment to ingroups. Personal goals are paramount, and socialization emphasizes the importance of self-reliance, independence, individual responsibility, and ‘finding yourself’ (Triandis 1991, 82). Individualists have more positive attitudes toward strangers and outgroup members and are more likely to behave in a pro-social, altruistic manner to strangers. People in individualist cultures are less aware of ingroup/outgroup boundaries and thus do not have highly negative attitudes toward outgroup members. They often disagree with ingroup policy, show little emotional commitment or loyalty to ingroups, and do not have a sense of common fate with other ingroup members. Opposition to outgroups occurs in individualist societies, but the opposition is more ‘rational’ in the sense that there is less of a tendency to suppose that all of the outgroup members are culpable. Individualists form mild attachments to many groups, while collectivists have an intense attachment and identification to a few ingroups (Triandis 1990, 61). Individualists are therefore relatively ill-prepared for between-group competition so characteristic of the history of Judaism.

Historically Judaism has been far more ethnocentric and collectivist than typical Western societies. I make this argument in Separation and Its Discontents (MacDonald 1998a; Ch. 1) and especially in A People That Shall Dwell Alone (MacDonald 1994; Ch. 8), where I suggest that over the course of their recent evolution, Europeans were less subjected to between-group natural selection than Jews and other Middle Eastern populations. This was originally proposed by Fritz Lenz (1931, 657) who suggested that, because of the harsh environment of the Ice Age, the Nordic peoples evolved in small groups and have a tendency toward social isolation rather than cohesive groups. This perspective would not imply that Northern Europeans lack collectivist mechanisms for group competition, but only that these mechanisms are relatively less elaborated and/or require a higher level of group conflict to trigger their expression.

This perspective is consistent with ecological theory. Under ecologically adverse circumstances, adaptations are directed more at coping with the adverse physical environment than at competing with other groups (Southwood 1977, 1981), and in such an environment, there would be less pressure for selection for extended kinship networks and highly collectivist groups. Evolutionary conceptualizations of ethnocentrism emphasize the utility of ethnocentrism in group competition. Ethnocentrism would thus be of no importance at all in combating the physical environment, and such an environment would not support large groups.

European groups are part of what Burton et al. (1996) term the North Eurasian and Circumpolar culture area.9 This culture area derives from hunter-gatherers adapted to cold, ecologically adverse climates. In such climates there is pressure for male provisioning of the family and a tendency toward monogamy because the ecology did not support either polygyny or large

groups for an evolutionarily significant period. These cultures are characterized by bilateral kinship relationships which recognize both the male and female lines, suggesting a more equal contribution for each sex as would be expected under conditions of monogamy. There is also less emphasis on extended kinship relationships and marriage tends to be exogamous (i.e., outside the kinship group). As discussed below, all of these characteristics are opposite those found among Jews.

The historical evidence shows that Europeans, and especially Northwest Europeans, were relatively quick to abandon extended kinship networks and collectivist social structures when their interests were protected with the rise of strong centralized

governments. There is indeed a general tendency throughout the world for a decline in extended kinship networks with the rise of central authority (Alexander 1979; Goldschmidt & Kunkel 1971; Stone 1977). But in the case of Northwest Europe this tendency quickly gave rise long before the industrial revolution to the unique Western European ‘simple household’ type. The simple household type is based on a single married couple and their children. It contrasts with the joint family structure typical of the rest of Eurasia in which the household consists of two or more related couples, typically brothers and their wives and other members of the extended family (Hajnal 1983). (An example of the joint household would be the families of the patriarchs described in the Old Testament; see MacDonald 1994, Ch. 3)

Uniquely in Eurasia, age of first marriage for women was quite high, fluctuating around a mean of about 25 years of age. Age of marriage was flexible, rising in times of scarcity and declining in times of abundance, with the result that there was capital accumulation rather than a constant pressure of population on resources. During economically difficult times, women married late or not at all, whereas in the polygynous societies of the rest of Eurasia, women married early, often as concubines or secondary wives of wealthy men (MacDonald 1995b,c).

Before the industrial revolution, the simple household system was characterized by methods of keeping unmarried young people occupied as servants. It was not just the children of the poor and landless who became servants, but even large, successful farmers sent their children to be servants elsewhere. In the 17th and 18th centuries individuals often took in servants early in their marriage, before their own children could help out, and then passed their children to others when the children were older and there was more than enough help (Stone 1977).

This suggests a deeply ingrained cultural practice which resulted in a high level of non-kinship based reciprocity. The practice also bespeaks a relative lack of ethnocentrism because people are taking in non-relatives as household members whereas in the rest of Eurasia people tend to surround themselves with biological relatives. Simply put, genetic relatedness was less important in Europe and especially in the Nordic areas of Europe. The unique feature of the simple household system was the high percentage of non-relatives. Unlike the rest of Eurasia, the pre-industrial societies of northwestern Europe were not organized around extended kinship relationships, and it is easy to see that they are pre-adapted to the industrial revolution and modern world generally.10

This simple household system is a fundamental feature of individualist culture. The individualist family was able to pursue its interests freed from the obligations and constraints of extended kinship relationships and free of the suffocating collectivism of the social structures typical of so much of the rest of the world. Monogamous marriage based on individual consent and conjugal affection quickly replaced marriage based on kinship and family strategizing. (See Chs. 4 and 8 for a discussion of the greater proneness of Western Europeans to monogamy and to marriage based on companionship and affection rather than polygyny and collectivist mechanisms of social control and family strategizing.)

This relatively greater proneness to forming a simple household type may well be ethnically based. During the pre-industrial era, this household system was found only within Nordic Europe: The simple household type is based on a single married couple and their children and characterized Scandinavia (except Finland), British Isles, Low Countries, German-speaking areas, and northern France. Within France, the simple household occurred in areas inhabited by the Germanic peoples who lived northeast of ‘the eternal line’ running from Saint Malo on the English Channel coast to Geneva in French-speaking Switzerland (Ladurie 1986). This area developed large scale agriculture capable of feeding the growing towns and cities, and did so prior to the agricultural revolution of the 18th century. It was supported by a large array of skilled craftsmen in the towns, and a large class of medium-sized ploughmen who ‘owned horses, copper bowls, glass goblets and often shoes; their children had fat cheeks and broad shoulders, and their babies wore tiny shoes. None of these children had the swollen bellies of the rachitics of the Third World’ (Ladurie 1986, 340). The northeast became the center of French industrialization and world trade.

The northeast also differed from the southwest in literacy rates. In the early 19th century, while literacy rates for France as a whole were approximately 50%, the rate in the northeast was close to 100%, and differences occurred at least from the 17th century. Moreover, there was a pronounced difference in stature, with the northeasterners being taller by almost 2 centimeters in an 18th century sample of military recruits. Ladurie notes that the difference in the entire population was probably larger because the army would not accept many of the shorter men from the southwest. In addition, Laslett (1983) and other family historians have noted that the trend toward the economically independent nuclear family was more prominent in the north, while there was a tendency toward joint families as one moves to the south and east.

These findings are compatible with the interpretation that ethnic differences are a contributing factor to the geographical variation in family forms within Europe. The findings suggest that the Germanic peoples had a greater biological tendency toward a suite of traits that predisposed them to individualism -- including a greater tendency toward the simple household because of natural selection occurring in a prolonged resource-limited period of their evolution in the north of Europe. Similar tendencies toward exogamy, monogamy, individualism, and relative de-emphasis on the extended family were also characteristic of Roman civilization (MacDonald 1990), again suggesting an ethnic tendency that pervades Western cultures generally.

Current data indicate that around 80% of European genes are derived from people who settled in Europe 30-40,000 years ago and therefore persisted through the Ice Ages (Sykes 2001). This is sufficient time for the adverse ecology of the north to have had a powerful shaping influence on European psychological and cultural tendencies. These European groups were less attracted to extended kinship groups, so that when the context altered with the rise of powerful central governments able to guarantee individual interests, the simple household structure quickly became dominant. This simple family structure was adopted relatively easily because Europeans already had relatively powerful psychological predispositions toward the simple family resulting from its prolonged evolutionary history in the north of Europe.

Although these differences within the Western European system are important, they do not belie the general difference between Western Europe and the rest of Eurasia. Although the trend toward simple households occurred first in the northwest of Europe, they spread relatively quickly among all the Western European countries.

The establishment of the simple household freed from enmeshment in the wider kinship community was then followed in short order by all the other markers of Western modernization: limited governments in which individuals have rights against the state, capitalist economic enterprise based on individual economic rights, moral universalism, and science as individualist truth seeking. Individualist societies develop republican political institutions and institutions of scientific inquiry that assume that groups are maximally permeable and highly subject to defection when individual needs are not met.

Recent research by evolutionary economists provides fascinating insight on the differences between individualistic cultures versus collectivist cultures. An important aspect of this research is to model the evolution of cooperation among individualistic peoples. Fehr and Gächter (2002) found that people will altruistically punish defectors in a ‘one-shot’ game -- a game in which participants only interact once and are thus not influenced by the reputations of the people with whom they are interacting. This situation therefore models an individualistic culture because participants are strangers with no kinship ties. The surprising finding was that subjects who made high levels of public goods donations tended to punish people who did not even though they did not receive any benefit from doing so. Moreover, the punished individuals changed their ways and donated more in future games even though they knew that the participants in later rounds were not the same as in previous rounds. and Gächter suggest that people from individualistic cultures have an evolved negative emotional reaction to free riding that results in their punishing such people even at a cost to themselves -- hence the term ‘altruistic punishment.’

Essentially Fehr and Gächter provide a model of the evolution of cooperation among individualistic peoples. Their results are most applicable to individualistic groups because such groups are not based on extended kinship relationships and are therefore much more prone to defection. In general, high levels of altruistic punishment are more likely to be found among individualistic, hunter-gather societies than in kinship based societies based on the extended family. Their results are least applicable to groups such as Jewish groups or other highly collectivist groups which in traditional societies were based on extended kinship relationships, known kinship linkages, and repeated interactions among members. In such situations, actors know the people with whom they are cooperating and anticipate future cooperation because they are enmeshed in extended kinship networks, or, as in the case of Jews, they are in the same group.

Similarly, in the ultimatum game, one subject (the ‘proposer’) is assigned a sum of money equal to two days‘ wages and required to propose an offer to a second person (the ‘respondent’). The respondent may then accept the offer or reject the offer, and if the offer is rejected neither player wins anything. As in the previously described public goods game, the game is intended to model economic interactions between strangers, so players are anonymous. Henrich et al. (2001) found that two variables, payoffs to cooperation and the extent of market exchange, predicted offers and rejections in the game. Societies with an emphasis on cooperation and on market exchange had the highest offers -- results interpreted as reflecting the fact that they have extensive experience of the principle of cooperation and sharing with strangers. These are individualistic societies. On the other hand, subjects from societies where all interactions are among family members made low offers in the ultimatum game and contributed low amounts to public goods in similarly anonymous conditions.

Europeans are thus exactly the sort of groups modeled by Fehr and Gächter and Henrich et al: They are groups with high levels of cooperation with strangers rather than with extended family members, and they are prone to market relations and individualism. On the other hand, Jewish culture derives from the Middle Old World culture area characterized by extended kinship networks and the extended family. Such cultures are prone to ingroup-outgroup relationships in which cooperation involves repeated interactions with ingroup members and the ingroup is composed of extended family members.

This suggests the fascinating possibility that the key for a group intending to turn Europeans against themselves is to trigger their strong tendency toward altruistic punishment by convincing them of the evil of their own people. Because Europeans are individualists at heart, they readily rise up in moral anger against their own people once they are seen as free riders and therefore morally blameworthy -- a manifestation of their much stronger tendency toward altruistic punishment deriving from their evolutionary past as hunter gatherers. In making judgments of altruistic punishment, relative genetic distance is irrelevant. Free-riders are seen as strangers in a market situation; i.e., they have no familial or tribal connection with the altruistic punisher.

Thus the current altruistic punishment so characteristic of contemporary Western civilization: Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment. For Westerners, morality is individualistic -- violations of communal norms by free-riders are punished by altruistic aggression.

On the other hand, group strategies deriving from collectivist cultures, such as the Jews, are immune to such a maneuver because kinship and group ties come first. Morality is particularistic -- whatever is good for the group. There is no tradition of altruistic punishment because the evolutionary history of these groups centers around cooperation of close kin, not strangers (see below).

The best strategy for a collectivist group like the Jews for destroying Europeans therefore is to convince the Europeans of their own moral bankruptcy. A major theme of CofC is that this is exactly what Jewish intellectual movements have done. They have presented Judaism as morally superior to European civilization and European civilization as morally bankrupt and the proper target of altruistic punishment. The consequence is that once Europeans are convinced of their own moral depravity, they will destroy their own people in a fit of altruistic punishment. The general dismantling of the culture of the West and eventually its demise as anything resembling an ethnic entity will occur as a result of a moral onslaught triggering a paroxysm of altruistic punishment. And thus the intense effort among Jewish intellectuals to continue the ideology of the moral superiority of Judaism and its role as undeserving historical victim while at the same time continuing the onslaught on the moral legitimacy of the West.

Individualist societies are therefore an ideal environment for Judaism as a highly collectivist, group-oriented strategy. Indeed, a major theme of Chapter 5 is that the Frankfurt School of Social Research advocated radical individualism among non-Jews while at the same time retaining their own powerful group allegiance to Judaism. Jews benefit from open, individualistic societies in which barriers to upward mobility are removed, in which people are viewed as individuals rather than as members of groups, in which intellectual discourse is not prescribed by institutions like the Catholic Church that are not dominated by Jews, and in which mechanisms of altruistic punishment may be exploited to divide the European majority. This is also why, apart from periods in which Jews served as middlemen between alien elites and native populations, Middle Eastern societies were much more efficient than Western individualistic societies at keeping Jews in a powerless position where they did not pose a competitive threat (see MacDonald 1998a, Ch. 2).

THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF JEWISH COLLECTIVISM AND ETHNOCENTRISM

Jews originate in the Middle Old World cultural area11 and retain several of the key cultural features of their ancestral population. The Middle Old World culture group is characterized by extended kinship groups based on relatedness through the male line (patrilineal) rather than the bilateral relationships characteristic of Europeans. These male-dominated groups functioned as military units to protect herds, and between-group conflict is a much more important component of their evolutionary history. There is a great deal of pressure to form larger groups in order to increase military strength, and this is done partly by acquiring extra women through bridewealth.12 (Bridewealth involves the transfer of resources in return for marriage rights to a female, as in the marriages of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob recounted in the Old Testament.) As a result, polygyny rather than the monogamy characteristic of European culture is the norm. Another contrast is that traditional Jewish groups were basically extended families with high levels of endogamy (i.e., marriage within the kinship group) and consanguineous marriage (i.e., marriage to blood relatives), including the uncle-niece marriage sanctioned in the Old Testament. This is exactly the opposite of Western European tendencies toward exogamy. (See MacDonald 1994, Chs. 3 and 8 for a discussion of Jewish tendencies toward polygyny, endogamy, and consanguineous marriage.) Table 1 contrasts European and Jewish cultural characteristics.13

Table 1: Contrasts between European and Jewish Cultural Forms.

Whereas individualist cultures are biased toward separation from the wider group, individuals in collectivist societies have a strong sense of group identity and group boundaries based on genetic relatedness as a result of the greater importance of group conflict during their evolutionary history. Middle Eastern societies are characterized by anthropologists as ‘segmentary societies’ organized into relatively impermeable, kinship-based groups (e.g., Coon 1958, 153; Eickelman 1981, 157-174). Group boundaries are often reinforced through external markers such as hair style or clothing, as Jews have often done throughout their history. Different groups settle in different areas where they retain their homogeneity alongside other homogeneous groups. Consider Carleton Coon's (1958) description of Middle Eastern society:

There the ideal was to emphasize not the uniformity of the citizens of a country as a whole but a uniformity within each special segment, and the greatest possible contrast between segments. The members of each ethnic unit feel the need to identify themselves by some configuration of symbols. If by virtue of their history they possess some racial peculiarity, this they will enhance by special haircuts and the like; in any case they will wear distinctive garments and behave in a distinctive fashion. (Coon 1958, 153)

Between-group conflict often lurked just beneath the surface of these societies. For example, Dumont (1982, 223) describes the increase in anti-Semitism in Turkey in the late 19th century consequent to increased resource competition. In many towns, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in a sort of superficial harmony, and even lived in the same areas, ‘but the slightest spark sufficed to ignite the fuse’ (p. 222).

Jews are at the extreme of this Middle Eastern tendency toward hyper-collectivism and hyper-ethnocentrism -- a phenomenon that goes a long way toward explaining the chronic hostilities in the area. I give many examples of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism in my trilogy and have suggested in several places that Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism is biologically based (MacDonald 1994, Ch. 8; 1998a, Ch. 1). It was noted above that individualist European cultures tend to be more open to strangers than collectivist cultures such as Judaism. In this regard, it is interesting that developmental psychologists have found unusually intense fear reactions among Israeli infants in response to strangers, while the opposite pattern is found for infants from North Germany.14 The Israeli infants were much more likely to become ‘inconsolably upset‘ in reaction to strangers, whereas the North German infants had relatively minor reactions to strangers. The Israeli babies therefore tended to have an unusual degree of stranger anxiety, while the North German babies were the opposite -- findings that fit with the hypothesis that Europeans and Jews are on opposite ends of scales of xenophobia and ethnocentrism.

I provide many examples of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism in my trilogy on Judaism. Recently, I have been much impressed with the theme of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism in the writings of Israel Shahak, most notably his co-authored Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999). In their examination of current Jewish fundamentalists and their influence in Israel, Shahak and Mezvinsky argue that present-day fundamentalists attempt to recreate the life of Jewish communities before the Enlightenment (i.e., prior to about 1750). During this period the great majority of Jews believed in Cabbala -- Jewish mysticism. Influential Jewish scholars like Gershom Scholem ignored the obvious racialist, exclusivist material in the Cabbala by using words like ‘men’, ‘human beings’, and ‘cosmic’ to suggest the Cabbala has a universalist message. The actual text says salvation is only for Jews, while non-Jews have ‘Satanic souls’ (p. 58).

The ethnocentrism apparent in such statements was not only the norm in traditional Jewish society. It remains a powerful current of contemporary Jewish fundamentalism, with important implications for Israeli politics. For example, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, describing the difference between Jews and non-Jews:

We do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather we have a case of ... a totally different species.... The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world ... The difference of the inner quality [of the body], ... is so great that the bodies would be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is an halachic15 difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to the bodies of Jews] ‘their bodies are in vain‘.... An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness. (In Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999, 59-60) This claim of Jewish uniqueness echoes Holocaust activist Elie Wiesel's (1985, 153) claim that ‘everything about us is different.’ Jews are ‘ontologically’ exceptional. The Gush Emunim and other Jewish fundamentalist sects described by Shahak and Mezvinsky are thus part of a long mainstream Jewish tradition that considers Jews and non-Jews as completely different species, with Jews absolutely superior to non-Jews and subject to a radically different moral code. Moral universalism is thus antithetical to the Jewish tradition.

Within Israel, these Jewish fundamentalist groups are not tiny fringe groups, mere relics of traditional Jewish culture. They are widely respected by the Israeli public and by many Jews in the Diaspora. They have a great deal of influence on the government, especially the Likud governments and the recent government of national unity headed by Ariel Sharon. The members of Gush Emunim constitute a significant percentage of the elite units of the Israeli army, and, as expected on the hypothesis that they are extremely ethnocentric, they are much more willing to treat the Palestinians in a savage and brutal manner than are other Israeli soldiers. All together, the religious parties make up about 25% of the Israeli electorate (Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999, 8) -- a percentage that is sure to increase because of their high fertility and because intensified troubles with the Palestinians tend to make other Israelis more sympathetic to their cause. Given the fractionated state of Israeli politics and the increasing numbers of the religious groups, it is unlikely that future governments can be formed without their participation. Peace in the Middle East therefore appears unlikely absent the complete capitulation of the Palestinians.

The point here is not so much about the fundamentalists in contemporary Israel but that traditional Jewish communities were intensely ethnocentric and collectivist -- a major theme of all three of my books on Judaism. A thread throughout CofC is that Jewish intellectuals and political activists strongly identified as Jews and saw their work as furthering specific Jewish agendas. Their advocacy of intellectual and political causes, although often expressed in the language of moral universalism, was actually moral particularism in disguise.

Given that ethnocentrism continues to pervade all segments of the Jewish community, the advocacy of the de-ethnicization of Europeans -- a common sentiment in the movements I discuss in CofC -- is best seen as a strategic move against peoples regarded as historical enemies. In Chapter 8 of CofC, I called attention to a long list of similar double standards, especially with regard to the policies pursued by Israel versus the policies Jewish organizations have pursued in the U.S. As noted throughout CofC, Jewish advocates addressing Western audiences have promoted policies that satisfy Jewish (particularist) interests in terms of the morally universalist language that is a central feature of Western moral and intellectual discourse. These policies include church-state separation, attitudes toward multi-culturalism, and immigration policies favoring the dominant ethnic groups. This double standard is fairly pervasive.16

A principal theme of CofC is that Jewish organizations played a decisive role in opposing the idea that the United States ought to be a European nation. Nevertheless, these organizations have been strong supporters of Israel as a nation of the Jewish people. Consider, for example, a press release of May 28, 1999 by the ADL:

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today lauded the passage of sweeping changes in Germany's immigration law, saying the easing of the nation's once rigorous naturalization requirements "will provide a climate for diversity and acceptance. It is encouraging to see pluralism taking root in a society that, despite its strong democracy, had for decades maintained an unyielding policy of citizenship by blood or descent only," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. "The easing of immigration requirements is especially significant in light of Germany's history of the Holocaust and persecution of Jews and other minority groups. The new law will provide a climate for diversity and acceptance in a nation with an onerous legacy of xenophobia, where the concept of ‘us versus them’ will be replaced by a principle of citizenship for all."17 There is no mention of analogous laws in place in Israel restricting immigration to Jews and the long-standing policy of rejecting the possibility of repatriation for Palestinian refugees wishing to return to Israel or the occupied territories. The prospective change in the ‘us versus them’ attitude alleged to be characteristic of Germany is applauded, while the ‘us versus them’ attitude characteristic of Israel and Jewish culture throughout history is unmentioned. Recently, the Israeli Ministry of Interior ruled that new immigrants who have converted to Judaism will no longer be able to bring non-Jewish family members into the country. The decision is expected to cut by half the number of eligible immigrants to Israel.18 Nevertheless, Jewish organizations continue to be strong proponents of multi-ethnic immigration to the United States.19 This pervasive double standard was noticed by writer Vincent Sheean in his observations of Zionists in Palestine in 1930: "how idealism goes hand in hand with the most terrific cynicism; ... how they are Fascists in their own affairs, with regard to Palestine, and internationalists in everything else."20

My view is that Judaism must be conceived primarily as an ethnic rather than a religious group. Recent statements by prominent Jewish figures show that an ethnic conceptualization of Judaism fits with the self-images of many Jews. Speaking to a largely Jewish audience, Benjamin Netanyahu, prominent Likud Party member and until recently prime minister of Israel, stated, ‘If Israel had not come into existence after World War II then I am certain the Jewish race wouldn't have survived.... I stand before you and say you must strengthen your commitment to Israel. You must become leaders and stand up as Jews. We must be proud of our past to be confident of our future.’21 Charles Bronfman, a main sponsor of the $210 million ‘Birthright Israel’ project which attempts to deepen the commitment of American Jews, expresses a similar sentiment: ‘You can live a perfectly decent life not being Jewish, but I think you're losing a lot -- losing the kind of feeling you have when you know [that] throughout the world there are people who somehow or other have the same kind of DNA that you have.’22 (Bronfman is co-chairman of the Seagram company and brother of Edgar Bronfman, Sr., president of the World Jewish Congress.) Such sentiments would be unthinkable coming from European-American leaders. European-Americans making such assertions of racial pride would quickly be labeled haters and extremists.

A revealing comment by AJCommittee official Stephen Steinlight (2001) illustrates the profound ethnic nationalism that has pervaded the socialization of American Jews continuing into the present:

I'll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months for 10 formative years during my childhood and adolescence I attended Jewish summer camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting its colors, sang a foreign national anthem, learned a foreign language, learned foreign folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the true homeland. Emigration to Israel was considered the highest virtue, and, like many other Jewish teens of my generation, I spent two summers working in Israel on a collective farm while I contemplated that possibility. More tacitly and subconsciously, I was taught the superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us. We were taught to view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people from whom sudden gusts of hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive, intelligent, and moral than ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson of our dark history is that we could rely on no one.... [I]t must be admitted that the essence of the process of my nationalist training was to inculcate the belief that the primary division in the world was between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Of course we also saluted the American and Canadian flags and sang those anthems, usually with real feeling, but it was clear where our primary loyalty was meant to reside.23 Assertions of Jewish ethnicity are well-founded. Scientific studies supporting the genetic cohesiveness of Jewish groups continue to appear, most notably Hammer et al. (2000). Based on Y-chromosome data, Hammer et al. conclude that 1 in 200 matings within Jewish communities were with non-Jews over a 2000 year period. This is a link to a report discussing the article by Hammer et al., "Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences May 9, 2000:

In general, the contemporary organized Jewish community is characterized by high levels of Jewish identification and ethnocentrism. Jewish activist organizations like the ADL and the AJCommittee are not creations of the fundamentalist and Orthodox, but represent the broad Jewish community, including non-religious Jews and Reform Jews. In general, the more actively people are involved in the Jewish community, the more committed they are to preventing intermarriage and retaining Jewish ethnic cohesion. And despite a considerable level of intermarriage among less committed Jews, the leadership of the Jewish community in the U.S. is not now made up of the offspring of intermarried people to any significant extent. Jewish ethnocentrism is ultimately simple traditional human ethnocentrism, although it is certainly among the more extreme varieties. But what is so fascinating is the cloak of intellectual support for Jewish ethnocentrism, the complexity and intellectual sophistication of the rationalizations for it -- some of which are reviewed in Separation and Its Discontents (Chs. 6-8), and the rather awesome hypocrisy of it, given Jewish opposition to ethnocentrism among Europeans.

JEWISH INVOLVEMENT IN COMMUNISM AND THE RADICAL LEFT

Beat them, Red Fighters, clobber them to death, if it is the last thing you do! Right away! This minute! Now! ... Slaughter them, Red Army Fighters, Stamp harder on the rising lids of their rancid coffins! (Isaac Babel, described by Cynthia Ozick (2001, 3) as ‘an acutely conscious Jew,’ propagandizing for the Bolshevik Revolution; in Ozick 2001, 4) Another recent development related to the issues raised in CofC was the publication of The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Courtois et al. 1999). Reading this book has caused me to expand on some of the ideas in Chapter 3 of CofC. I didn't emphasize enough the truly horrific nature of the Soviet regime, nor did I place sufficient emphasis on the consequences of Jewish involvement in the rise and maintenance of Communism. The Soviet government killed over 20 million of its own citizens, the vast majority in the first 25 years of its existence during the height of Jewish power. It was a ‘state against its people’ (Werth 1999), mounting murderous campaigns of collective punishment (usually involving deportation or forced starvation) against a great many ethnic groups, including Great Russian peasants, Ukrainians, Cossacks, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, Moldavians, Kalmyks, Karachai, Balkars, Ingush, Greeks, Bulgars, Crimean Armenians, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Khemshins as groups (Courtois 1999, 10; Werth 1999, 219ff). Although individual Jews were caught up in the Bolshevik violence, Jews were not targeted as a group.24

In CofC (Ch. 3), I noted that Jews were prominently involved in the Bolshevik Revolution and formed an elite group in the Soviet Union well into the post-World War II-era. It is interesting that many of the non-Jewish Bolsheviks were members of non-Russian ethnic groups or, as noted in CofC, were married to Jewish women. It was a common perception during the early stages of the Soviet Union that the government was dominated by ‘a small knot of foreigners’ (Szajkowski 1977, 55). Stalin, Beria, and Ordzhonikidze were Georgians; Dzerzhinsky, the ruthless head of the Checka (Secret Police) during the 1920s, was a Pole with strong pro-Jewish attitudes. The original Cheka was made up largely of non-Russians, and the Russians in the Cheka tended to be sadistic psychopaths and criminals (Werth 1999, 62; Wolin & Slusser 1957, 6) -- people who are unlikely to have any allegiance to or identification with their people.

The Bolshevik revolution therefore had a pronounced ethnic angle: To a very great extent, Jews and other non-Russians ruled over the Russian people, with disastrous consequences for the Russians and other ethnic groups that were not able to become part of the power structure. For example, when Stalin decided to deport the Chechens, he placed an Ossetian -- a group from which he himself was partly derived and an historic enemy of the Chechens -- in charge of the deportation. Ossetians and Georgians, Stalin's own ancestral groups, were allowed to expand at the expense of other ethnic groups.

While Stalin favored the Georgians, Jews had their own ethnic scores to settle. It seems likely that at least some of the Bolshevik mass murder and terror was motivated by revenge against peoples that had historically been anti-Jewish. Several historians have suggested that Jews joined the security forces in such large numbers in order to get revenge for their treatment under the Czars (Rapoport 1990, 31; Baron 1975, 170). For example, the Cossacks served the Czar as a military police force, and they used their power against Jewish communities during the conflicts between the government and the Jews. After the Revolution, the Cossacks were deported to Siberia for refusing to join the collective farms. During the 1930s, the person in charge of the deportations was an ethnic Jew, Lazar Kaganovich, nicknamed the ‘wolf of the Kremlin’ because of his penchant for violence. In his drive against the peasants, Kaganovich took ‘an almost perverse joy in being able to dictate to the Cossacks. He recalled too vividly what he and his family had experienced at the hands of these people.... Now they would all pay -- men, women, children. It didn't matter who. They became one and the same. That was the key to [Kaganovich's] being. He would never forgive and he would never forget’ (Kahan 1987, 164). Similarly, Jews were placed in charge of security in the Ukraine, which had a long history of anti-Semitism (Lindemann 1997, 443) and became a scene of mass murder in the 1930s.

In Cof C (Ch. 3), I noted that Jews were very prominently involved in the Soviet secret police and that they played similar roles in Communist Poland and Hungary. In addition to many lower ranking security personnel, prominent Jews included Matvei Berman and Naftali Frenkel, who developed the slave labor system which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. (The construction of a canal between the Baltic and the White Sea claimed many thousands of lives. The six overseers of the project were Jews: Firin, Berman, Frenkel, Kogan, Rappoport, Zhuk.) Other Jews who were prominent in carrying out the Red Terror included Genrik Yagoda (head of the secret police), Aron Soltz, Lev Inzhir (chief accountant of the Gulag Archipelago), M. I. Gay (head of a special secret police department), A. A. Slutsky and his deputy Boris Berman (in charge of terror abroad), K. V. Pauker (secret police Chief of Operations), and Lazar Kaganovich (most powerful government official behind Stalin during the 1930s and prominently involved in the mass murders that took place during that period) (Rapoport 1990, 44-50). In general, Jews were not only prominent in the leadership of the Bolsheviks, but they "abounded at the lower levels of the party machinery -- especially, in the Cheka, and its successors the GPU, the OGPU and the NKVD" (Schapiro 1961, 165). The special role of Jews in the Bolshevik government was not lost on Russians: "For the most prominent and colourful figure after Lenin was Trotsky, in Petrograd the dominant and hated figure was Zinoviev, while anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with, and possibly shot by, a Jewish investigator" (Schapiro 1961, 165). Beginning in 1917 it was common for Russians to associate Jews with the revolution (Werth 1999, 86). Even after the German invasion in 1941, it was common for many Russians to hope for German victory to rid the country of ‘Jews and Bolsheviks’ -- until the brutality of the invaders became apparent (Werth 1999, 215).

The discussion of Jewish power in the Soviet Union in CofC notes that in stark contrast to the campaigns of mass murder against other peoples, Stalin's efforts against a relative handful of high-ranking Jewish Communists during the purges of the 1930s were very cautious and involved a great deal of deception intended to downplay the Jewish identity of the victims. Jewish power during this period is also indicated by the fact that the Soviet government established a Jewish autonomous region (Birobidzhan) in 1934, at least partly to curry favor with foreign Jewish organizations (Gitelman 1988). During the 1920s and throughout the 1930s the Soviet Union accepted aid for Soviet Jews from foreign Jewish organizations, especially the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee which was funded by wealthy American Jews (Warburg, Schiff, Kuhn, Loeb, Lehman, Marshall).

Another revealing incident occurred when Stalin ordered the murder of two Polish-Jewish leaders of the international socialist movement, Henryk Ehrlich and Victor Alter. These murders created an international incident, and there were protests by leftists around the world (Rapoport 1990, 68). The furor did not die down until the Soviets established a Jewish organization, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), dedicated to winning the favor of American Jews. American Jewish leaders, such as Nahum Goldmann of the World Jewish Congress and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress), helped quell the uproar over the incident and shore up positive views of the Soviet Union among American Jews. They, along with a wide range of American Jewish radicals, warmly greeted JAC representatives in New York during World War II.

Again, the contrast is striking. The Soviet government killed millions of Ukrainian and Russian peasants during the 1920s and 1930s, executed hundreds of thousands of people who were purged from their positions in the party and throughout the economy, imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people in appalling conditions that produced incredibly high mortality and without any meaningful due process, drafted hundreds of thousands of people into forced labor with enormous loss of life, and ordered the collective punishment and deportation of Cossacks and other ethnic groups, resulting in mass murder of these groups. At the same time, actions against a handful of Jewish Communists were taken cautiously and performed with reassurances that the government still had very positive views of Jews and Judaism.

A major theme of Chapter 3 of CofC is that in general Jewish leftists, including supporters of Bolshevism, continued to identify as Jews and that Jewish support for these causes waxed or waned depending on their congruence with specific Jewish issues. However, I should have emphasized more just how much specifically Jewish issues mattered, that indeed Jewish involvement with Bolshevism is perhaps the most egregious example of Jewish moral particularism in all of history. The horrific consequences of Bolshevism for millions of non-Jewish Soviet citizens do not seem to have been an issue for Jewish leftists -- a pattern that continues into the present. In CofC, I noted that Ilya Ehrenberg's silence about Soviet brutalities involving the murder of millions of its citizens during the 1930s may have been motivated largely by his view that the Soviet Union was a bulwark against fascism (Rubenstein 1996, 143-145). This moral blindspot was quite common. During the 1930s, when millions of Soviet citizens were being murdered by the Soviet government, the Communist Party USA took great pains to appeal to specific Jewish interests, including opposing anti-Semitism, supporting Zionism, and advocating the importance of maintaining Jewish cultural traditions. During this period, "the American radical movement glorified the development of Jewish life in the Soviet Union.... The Soviet Union was living proof that under socialism the Jewish question could be solved" (Kann 1981, 152-153). Communism was perceived as ‘good for Jews.’ Radical Jews -- a substantial percentage of the entire Jewish community at that time -- saw the world through Jewish lenses.

A fascinating example of an American Jewish radical who extolled the virtues of the Soviet Union is Joe Rapoport (Kann 1981, 20-42, 109-125) -- mentioned briefly in CofC, but his example bears a deeper examination. Rapoport joined a Jewish detachment of the Red Army that was fighting the Ukrainian nationalists in the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Like many other Jews, he chose the Red Army because it opposed the anti-Jewish actions of the Ukrainian nationalists. Like the vast majority of Russian Jews, he greeted the revolution because it improved the lives of the Jews.

After emigrating to the U.S., Rapoport visited the Ukraine in November of 1934, less then one year after the famine created by Soviet government actions that killed 4 million Ukrainian peasants (Werth 1999, 159ff ). The peasants had resisted being forced to join collective farms and were aided by local Ukrainian authorities. The response of the central government was to arrest farmers and confiscate all grain, including reserves to be used for next year's harvest. Since they had no food, the peasants attempted to leave for the cities but were prevented from doing so by the government. The peasants starved by the millions. Parents abandoned starving children before starving themselves; cannibalism was rampant; remaining workers were tortured to force them to hand over any remaining food. Methods of torture included the ‘cold’ method where the victim was stripped bare and left out in the cold, stark naked. Sometimes whole brigades of collective workers were treated in this fashion. In the ‘hot’ method, the feet and the bottom of the skirt of female workers were doused with gasoline and then set alight. The flames were put out, and the process was repeated (Werth 1999, 166). During the period when the famine claimed a total of 6 million lives throughout the country, the government exported eighteen million hundredweight of grain in order to obtain money for industrialization.

These horrors are unmentioned by Rapoport in his account of his 1934 visit. Instead, he paints a very positive portrait of life in the Ukraine under the Soviets. Life is good for the Jews. He is pleased that Yiddish culture is accepted not only by Jews but by non-Jews as well, a clear indication of the privileged status of Judaism in the Soviet Union during this period. (For example, he recounts an incident in which a Ukrainian worker read a story in Yiddish to the other workers, Jews and non-Jews alike.) Young Jews were taking advantage of new opportunities not only in Yiddish culture but ‘in the economy, in the government, in participation in the general life of the country‘ (Kann 1981, 120). Older Jews complained that the government was anti-religious, and young Jews complained that Leon Trotsky, ’the national pride of the Jewish people,‘ had been removed. But the message to American radicals was upbeat: ‘It was sufficient to learn that the Jewish young people were in higher positions and embraced the Soviet system’ (Kann 1981, 122). Rapoport sees the world through Jewish-only eyes. The massive suffering in which a total of nearly 20 million Soviet citizens had already died because of government actions is irrelevant. When he looks back on his life as an American Jewish radical, his only ambivalence and regrets are about supporting Soviet actions he saw as not in the Jewish interest, such as the non-aggression pact with Germany and failure to consistently support Israel.

Rapoport was thus an exemplar of the many defenders of Communism in the U.S. media and intellectual circles (see below and Ch. 3). A prominent example of malfeasance by the media was the New York Times, owned by a Jewish family and much on the mind of those concerned about Jewish media influence (see above). During the 1930s, while it was highlighting German persecution of Jews and pushing for intervention into World War II against Germany, the Times whitewashed the horrors of Soviet rule, including the Ukrainian famine, even though the story was covered extensively by the Hearst newspapers and even though the leadership of the Times had been informed on numerous occasions that its correspondent was painting a false picture of Stalin's actions.25

Peter Novick's recent book, The Holocaust in American Life (Novick 1999), contributes to scholarship on the involvement of Jews in the radical left during the 20th century. He shows that Jewish organizations in the U.S. were well aware of Jewish involvement in Communism, but they argued that only a minority of Jews were involved and downplayed the fact that a majority of Communists were Jews, that an even greater majority of Communist leaders were Jews, that the great majority of those called up by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940s and 1950s were Jews, and that most of those prosecuted for spying for the Soviet Union were Jews (see also Chapter 3 of CofC and MacDonald 1998a, 200-201).

Indeed, the proposal that leftist radicalism represented a minority of the American Jewish community is far from obvious. In fact, the immigrant Jewish community in the U.S. from 1886 to 1920 can best be described as ‘one big radical debating society’ (Cohn 1958, 621). Long after this period, leftist sympathies were widespread in the AJCongress -- by far the largest organization of American Jews, and Communist-oriented groupswere affiliated with the AJCongress until being reluctantly purged during the McCarthy era (Svonkin 1997, 132, 166). Recently no less a figure than Representative Samuel Dickstein, discussed in Chapter 7 as a strong Congressional proponent of immigration and certainly a prominent and mainstream figure in the Jewish community, was revealed as a Soviet spy. Dickstein was motivated at least partly by his sympathy with Soviet anti-fascism (Weinstein & Vassiliev 1999, 140-150).

Novick notes that Jewish organizations made sure that Hollywood movies did not show any Communist characters with Jewish names. Newspapers and magazines such as Time and Life, which were at that time controlled by non-Jews, agreed not to publish letters on the Jewishness of American Communists at the behest of a staff member of the AJCommittee (Novick 1999, 95).

Novick also notes that Jewish Communists often used the Holocaust as a rhetorical device at a time when mainstream Jewish organizations were trying to keep a low profile. This fits well with the material in CofC indicating a strong Jewish identification among the vast majority of Jewish Communists. Invocations of the Holocaust ‘became the dominant argument, at least in Jewish circles, for opposition to Cold War mobilization’ (Novick 1999, 93). Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, often invoked the Holocaust in rationalizing their actions. Julius testified that the USSR ‘contributed a major share in destroying the Hitler beast who killed 6,000,000 of my co-religionists’ (p. 94). Public demonstrations of support for the Rosenbergs often invoked the Holocaust.

Although Bendersky (2000) presents an apologetic account in which Jewish involvement in radical leftism is seen as nothing more than the paranoia of racist military officers, he shows that U.S. military intelligence had confirmation of the linkage from multiple independent sources, including information on financial support of revolutionary activity provided by wealthy Jews like Jacob Schiff and the Warburg family. These sources included not only its own agents, but also the British government and the U.S. State Department Division of Russian Affairs. These sources asserted that Jews dominated the Bolshevik governments of the Soviet Union and Hungary and that Jews in other countries were sympathetic to Bolshevism. Similarly, Szajkowski (1977) shows that the view that Jews dominated the Bolshevik government was very widespread among Russians and foreigners in the Soviet Union, including American and British military and diplomatic personnel and administrators of relief agencies. He also shows that sympathy for the Bolshevik government was the norm within the Eastern European immigrant Jewish community in the U.S. in the period from 1918-1920, but that the older German-Jewish establishment (whose numbers were dwarfed by the more recent immigrants from Eastern Europe) opposed Bolshevism during this period.

While the Jewish Holocaust has become a moral touchstone and premier cultural icon in Western societies, the Jewish blind spot about the horrors of Bolshevism continues into the present time. Jewish media figures who were blacklisted because of Communist affiliations in the 1940s are now heroes, honored by the film industry, praised in newspapers, their work exhibited in museums.26 For example, an event commemorating the blacklist was held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in October 1997. Organized by the four guilds -- the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), Directors Guild of America (DGA), Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and Writers Guild of America, west (WGAw), the event honored the lives and careers of the blacklisted writers and condemned the guilds' lack of response fifty years earlier.27 At the same time, the Writers Guild of America has been restoring dozens of credits to movies written by screenwriters who wrote under pseudonyms or used fronts while blacklisted. Movies on the topic paint a picture of innocent Jewish idealists hounded by a ruthless, oppressive government, and critics like Bernheimer (1998, 163-166) clearly approve this assessment. In the same vein, the 1983 movie Daniel, based on a novel by E. L. Doctorow and directed by Sydney Lumet, portrayed the conviction of the Rosenbergs as "a matter of political expediency. The persecution is presented as a nightmarish vision of Jewish victimization, senseless and brutal" (Bernheimer 1998, 178).

A nostalgic and exculpatory attitude toward the Jewish Old Left is apparent in recent accounts of the children of ‘red diaper babies,‘ including those who have come to reject their leftist commitments. For example, Ronald Radosh's (2001a) Commies describes the all-encompassing world of Jewish radicalism of his youth. His father belonged to a classic Communist Party front organization called the Trade Union Unity League. Radosh was a dutiful son, throwing himself fervently into every cause that bore the party's stamp of approval, attending a party-inspired summer camp and a New York City red-diaper high school (known as ‘the Little Red Schoolhouse for little Reds’), and participating in youth festivals modeled on Soviet extravaganzas. It says a lot about the Jewish milieu of the Party that a common joke was: ‘What Jewish holidays do you celebrate?’ ‘Paul Robeson's birthday and May Day.’ Radosh only questioned the leftist faith when he was rejected and blackballed by his leftist comrades for publishing a book that established the guilt of Julius Rosenberg. Radosh shows that academic departments of history remain a bastion of apologia for the far left. Many academic historians shunned Radosh because of his findings, including Eric Foner, another Red Diaper Baby, who was a president of the American Historical Association. Radosh writes of the ‘reflexive hatred of the American system’ that pervades the left. It was indeed a ‘reflexive hatred’ -- a hatred that, as discussed in CofC, was due far more to their strong Jewish identifications than to anything objectively wrong with American society. Nevertheless, despite his reservations about the leftism of his past, he presents the motivations of Jewish communists as idealistic even as they provided "the ideological arguments meant to rationalize Soviet crimes and gain the support by Americans for Soviet foreign policy" (Radosh 2001b).

Despite the massive evidence for a very large Jewish involvement in these movements, there are no apologies from Jewish organizations and very few mea culpas from Jewish intellectuals. If anything, the opposite is true, given the idealization of blacklisted writers and the continuing tendency to portray U.S. Communists as idealists who were crushed by repressive McCarthyism. Because many Communist societies eventually developed anti-Jewish movements, Jewish organizations portray Jews as victims of Communism, not as critical to its rise to power, as deeply involved in the murderous reign of terror unleashed by these regimes, and as apologists for the Soviet Union in the West. Forgotten in this history are the millions of deaths, the forced labor, the quieting of all dissent that occurred during the height of Jewish power in the Soviet Union. Remembered are the anti-Jewish trends of late Communism.

The 20th century in Europe and the Western world, like the 15th century in Spain, was a Jewish century because Jews and Jewish organizations were intimately and decisively involved in all of the important events. If I am correct in asserting that Jewish participation was a necessary condition for the Bolshevik Revolution and its murderous aftermath, one could also argue that Jews thereby had a massive influence on later events. The following is an ‘alternative history’; i.e., a history of what might have happened if certain events had not happened. For example, alternative historian Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War makes a plausible case that if England had not entered World War I, Germany would have defeated France and Russia and would have become the dominant power in Europe. The Czar's government may well have collapsed, but the changes would have led to a constitutional government instead of the Bolshevik regime. Hitler would not have come to power because Germans would have already achieved their national aspirations. World War II would not have happened, and there would have been no Cold War.

But of course these things did happen. In the same way, one can then also ask what might have happened in the absence of Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik Revolution. The argument would go as follows:

(1) Given that World War I did occur and that the Czar's government was drastically weakened, it seems reasonable that there would have been major changes in Russia. However, without Jewish involvement, the changes in Russia would have resulted in a constitutional monarchy, a representative republic, or even a nationalist military junta that enjoyed broad popular support among the Great Russian majority instead of a dictatorship dominated by ethnic outsiders, especially Jews and ‘jewified non-Jews,’ to use Lindemann's (1997) term. It would not have been an explicitly Marxist revolution, and therefore it would not have had a blueprint for a society that sanctioned war against its own people and their traditional culture. The ideology of the Bolshevik revolution sanctioned the elimination of whole classes of people, and indeed mass murder has been a characteristic of communism wherever it has come to power (Courtois et al. 1999). These massacres were made all the easier because the Revolution was led by ethnic outsiders with little or no sympathy for the Russians or other peoples who suffered the most.

(2) Conservatives throughout Europe and the United States believed that Jews were responsible for Communism and the Bolshevik Revolution (Bendersky 2000; Mayer 1988; Nolte 1965; Szajkowski 1974). The Jewish role in leftist political movements was a common source of anti-Jewish attitudes, not only among the National Socialists in Germany, but among a great many non-Jewish intellectuals and political figures. Indeed, in the years following World War I, British, French, and U.S. political leaders, including Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Lord Balfour, believed in Jewish responsibility, and such attitudes were common in the military and diplomatic establishments in these countries (e.g., Szajkowski 1974, 166ff; see also above and Ch. 3). For example, writing in 1920, Winston Churchill typified the perception that Jews were behind what he termed a ‘world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization.’ The role of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution ‘is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others.’ Churchill noted the predominance of Jews among Bolshevik leaders (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Litvinoff, Krassin, Radek) and among those responsible for ‘the system of [state] terrorism.’ Churchill also noted that Jews were prominent in revolutionary movements in Hungary, in Germany, and in the United States. The identification of Jews with revolutionary radicalism became a major concern of the military and political leaders throughout Western Europe and the United States (Bendersky 2000; Szajkowski 1974). Moreover, as noted above, the deep involvement of Jews in Bolshevism was privately acknowledged within Jewish activist organizations. Lucien Wolf, a fixture in the Anglo-Jewish establishment, noted that, "I know the political history of the Jews in Europe and the part played by Jews in Bolshevism much too well not to realise the danger that we run in pretending that they always did hold aloof from revolution. There would have been no progress in Europe without revolution and I have often written and lectured -- and I shall do so again -- in praise of the Jews who have helped the good work" (in Szajkowski 1974, 172).

(3) In Germany, the identification of Jews and Bolshevism was common in the middle classes and was a critical part of the National Socialist view of the world. For middle-class Germans, "the experience of the Bolshevik revolution in Germany was so immediate, so close to home, and so disquieting, and statistics seemed to prove the overwhelming participation of Jewish ringleaders so irrefutably," that even many liberals believed in Jewish responsibility (Nolte 1965, 331). Hitler was also well aware of the predominance of Jews in the short-lived revolutions in Hungary and in the German province of Bavaria in 1919. He had experienced the Jewish involvement in the Bavarian revolution personally, and this may well have been a decisive moment in the development of his anti-Jewish ideas (Lindemann 2000, 90).

Jewish involvement in the horrors of Communism was therefore an important ingredient in Hitler's desire to destroy the USSR and in the anti-Jewish actions of the German National Socialist government. Ernst Nolte and several other historians have argued that the Jewish role in the Bolshevik Revolution was an important cause of the Holocaust. Hitler and the National Socialists certainly believed that Jews were critical to the success of the Bolshevik Revolution. They compared the Soviet Union to a man with a Slavic body and a Jewish-Bolshevik brain (Nolte 1965, 357-358). They attributed the mass murders of Communism -- ‘the most radical form of Jewish genocide ever known’ -- to the Jewish-Bolshevik brain (Nolte 1965, 393). The National Socialists were well aware that the Soviet government committed mass murder against its enemies and believed that it was intent on promoting a world revolution in which many more millions of people would be murdered. As early as 1918 a prominent Jewish Bolshevik, Grigory Zinoviev, spoke publicly about the need to eliminate ten million Russians -- an underestimate by half, as it turned out. Seizing upon this background, Hitler wrote:-

‘Now begins the last great revolution. By wrestling political power for himself, the Jew casts off the few remaining shreds of disguise he still wears. The democratic plebeian Jew turns into the blood Jew and the tyrant of peoples. In a few years he will try to exterminate the national pillars of intelligence and, by robbing the peoples of their natural spiritual leadership, will make them ripe for the slavish lot of a permanent subjugation. The most terrible example of this is Russia. (In Nolte 1965, 406).’

This line of reasoning does not imply that there were no other critical factors. If World War I had not occurred and if the Czar hadn't entered that war, then the Czar could have stayed in power much longer. Russia might have been transformed gradually into a modern Western state rather than be subjected to the horrors of Communism. In the same way, Hitler may not have come to power if there had been no Great Depression or if Germany had won World War I. Such events also would have altered things enormously.

(4) The victory over National Socialism then set the stage for the tremendous increase in Jewish power in the post-World War II Western world. This new-found power facilitated the establishment of Israel, the transformation of the United States and other Western nations in the direction of multi-racial, multi-cultural societies via large-scale non-white immigration, and the consequent decline in European demographic and cultural pre-eminence. The critical details of these and other consequences of Jewish rise to international elite status and power are described in CofC.

FROM THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE TO THE CULTURE OF THE HOLOCAUST

While CofC describes the ‘culture of critique’ dominated by Jewish intellectual and political movements, perhaps insufficient attention was given to the critical elements of the new culture that has replaced the traditional European cultural forms that dominated a century ago. Central to the new culture is the elevation of Jewish experiences of suffering during World War II, collectively referred to as ‘the Holocaust’, to the level of the pivotal historico-cultural icon in Western societies. Since the publication of CofC, two books have appeared on the political and cultural functions of the Holocaust in contemporary life -- Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life, and Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry. Novick's book, the more scholarly of the two, notes that the Holocaust has assumed a preeminent status as a symbol of the consequences of ethnic conflict. He argues that the importance of the Holocaust is not a spontaneous phenomenon but stems from highly focused, well-funded efforts of Jewish organizations and individual Jews with access to the major media:6

We are not just ‘the people of the book,’ but the people of the Hollywood film and the television miniseries, of the magazine article and the newspaper column, of the comic book and the academic symposium. When a high level of concern with the Holocaust became widespread in American Jewry, it was, given the important role that Jews play in American media and opinion-making elites, not only natural, but virtually inevitable that it would spread throughout the culture at large. (Novick 1999, 12)

The Holocaust was originally promoted to rally support for Israel following the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars: "Jewish organizations ... [portrayed] Israel's difficulties as stemming from the world's having forgotten the Holocaust. The Holocaust framework allowed one to put aside as irrelevant any legitimate ground for criticizing Israel, to avoid even considering the possibility that the rights and wrongs were complex" (Novick 1999, 155). As the threat to Israel subsided, the Holocaust was promoted as the main source of Jewish identity and in the effort to combat assimilation and intermarriage among Jews. During this period, the Holocaust was also promoted among non-Jews as an antidote to anti-Semitism. In recent years this has involved a large scale educational effort (including mandated courses in the public schools of several states) spearheaded by Jewish organizations and staffed by thousands of Holocaust professionals aimed at conveying the lesson that ‘tolerance and diversity [are] good; hate [is] bad’, the overall rubric [being] ‘man's inhumanity to man’ -- (pp. 258-259). The Holocaust has thus become an instrument of Jewish ethnic interests not only as a symbol intended to create moral revulsion at violence directed at minority ethnic groups -- prototypically the Jews, but also as an instrument to silence opponents of high levels of multi-ethnic immigration into Western societies. As described in CofC, promoting high levels of multi-ethnic immigration has been a goal of Jewish groups since the late 19th century.

Jewish Holocaust activists insisted on the ‘incomprehensibility and inexplicability of the Holocaust’ (Novick 1999, 178) -- an attempt to remove all rational discussion of its causes and to prevent comparisons to numerous other examples of ethnic violence. Even many observant Jews are often willing to discuss the founding myths of Judaism naturalistically -- subject them to rational, scholarly analysis. But they're unwilling to adopt this mode of thought when it comes to the ‘inexplicable mystery’ of the Holocaust, where rational analysis is seen as inappropriate or sacrilegious‘ (p. 200). Holocaust activist Elie Wiesel sees the Holocaust as "‘equal to the revelation at Sinai’ in its religious significance; attempts to ‘desanctify’ or ‘demystify’ the Holocaust are, he says, ‘a subtle form of anti-Semitism’" (p. 201).

Because the Holocaust is regarded as a unique, unknowable event, Jewish organizations and Israeli diplomats cooperated to block the U.S. Congress from commemorating the Armenian genocide. "Since Jews recognized the Holocaust's uniqueness -- that it was ‘incomparable,’ beyond any analogy -- they had no occasion to compete with others; there could be no contest over the incontestable" (p. 195). Abe Foxman, head of the ADL, noted that the Holocaust is ‘not simply one example of genocide but a near successful attempt on the life of God's chosen children and, thus, on God himself’ (p. 199) -- a comment that illustrates well the intimate connection between Holocaust promotion and the more extreme forms of Jewish ethnocentrism at the highest levels of the organized Jewish community.

A result was that American Jews were able to define themselves ‘as the quintessential victim’ (Novick 1999, 194). As an expression of this tendency, Holocaust activist Simon Wiesenthal compiled a calendar showing when, where and by whom Jews were persecuted on every day of the year. Holocaust consciousness was the ultimate expression of a victim mentality. The Holocaust came to symbolize the natural and inevitable terminus of anti-Semitism. "There is no such thing as overreaction to an anti-Semitic incident, no such thing as exaggerating the omnipresent danger. Anyone who scoffed at the idea that there were dangerous portents in American society hadn't learned ‘the lesson of the Holocaust’" -- (p. 178).

While Jews are portrayed as the quintessential victim in Holocaust iconography, the vast majority of non-Jews are portrayed as potential or actual anti-Semites. ‘Righteous Gentiles’ are acknowledged, but the criteria are strict. They must have risked their lives, and often the lives of the members of their families as well, to save a Jew. ‘Righteous Gentiles’ must display ‘self-sacrificing heroism of the highest and rarest order’ (Novick 1999, 180). Such people are extremely rare, and any Jew who discusses ‘Righteous Gentiles’ for any other reason comes under heavy criticism. The point is to shore up the fortress mentality of Jews -- ‘promoting a wary suspicion of gentiles’ (p. 180). A prominent Jewish feminist exemplifies this attitude: "Every conscious Jew longs to ask her or his non-Jewish friends, ‘would you hide me?’ -- and suppresses the question for fear of hearing the sounds of silence" (p. 181).

Consciousness of the Holocaust is very high among Jews. A 1998 survey found that ‘remembrance of the Holocaust’ was listed as ‘extremely important’ or ‘very important’ to Jewish identity -- far more often than anything else, such as synagogue attendance and travel to Israel. Indeed, Jewish identity is far more important than American identity for many American Jews: "In recent years it has become not just permissible but in some circles laudable for American Jews to assert the primacy of Jewish over American loyalty" (Novick 1999, 34). (See, e.g., the comments by AJCommittee official Stephen Steinlight above.)

However, consciousness of the Holocaust is not confined to Jews but has become institutionalized as an American cultural icon. Besides the many Holocaust memorial museums that dot the country and the mushrooming of mandated courses about the Holocaust in public schools, a growing number of colleges and universities now have endowed chairs in Holocaust Studies. "Considering all the Holocaust institutions of one kind or another in the United States, there are by now thousands of full-time Holocaust professionals dedicated to keeping its memory alive" (Novick 1999, 277).

The effort has perhaps been even more effective in Germany where "critical discussion of Jews ... is virtually impossible. Whether conservative or liberal, a contemporary German intellectual who says anything outside a narrowly defined spectrum of codified pieties about Jews, the Holocaust, and its postwar effects on German society runs the risk of professional and social suicidequot; (Anderson 2001). Discussions of the work of Jewish intellectuals have come to dominate German intellectual life to the almost complete exclusion of non-Jewish Germans. Many of these intellectuals are the subjects of CofC, including Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, and Sigmund Freud. ‘Shoah business’ "has become a staple of contemporary German cultural and political life. Germans thrive on debates about the Holocaust and their ongoing responsibility to preserve its memory, campaigning to erect a gigantic memorial to the Jewish dead in the historic center of Berlin, or flocking to hear the American scholar Daniel Goldhagen's crude and unhistorical diatribes against the German national character" (Anderson 2001). Scholars have lost all sense of normal standards of intellectual criticism and have come to identify more or less completely with the Jewish victims of Nazism.

For example, Holocaust poet Paul Celan has become a central cultural figure, superceding all other 20th-century poets. His works are now beyond rational criticism, to the point that they have become enveloped in a sort of stultifying mysticism: "Frankly, I find troubling the sacred, untouchable aura that surrounds Celan's name in Germany; troubling also the way in which his name functions like a trump card in intellectual discussions, closing off debate and excluding other subjects" (Anderson 2001). Jewish writers like Kafka are seen as intellectual giants who are above criticism; discussions of Kafka's work focus on his Jewish identity and are imbued by consciousness of the Holocaust despite the fact that he died in 1924. Even minor Jewish writers are elevated to the highest levels of the literary canon while Germans like Thomas Mann are discussed mainly because they held views on Jews that have become unacceptable in polite society. In the U.S., German scholars are constrained to teach only the works of Germans of Jewish background, their courses dwelling on persecution, and genocide.

Indeed, it is not too far fetched to suppose that German culture as the culture of Germans has disappeared entirely, replaced by the culture of the Holocaust. The Holocaust has not only become a quasi-religion capable of eradicating the remnants of German culture, Jews have become sanctified as a people. As Amos Elon noted in describing the German response to a new Jewish museum in Berlin, "With so much hyperbole, so many undoubtedly sincere expressions of guilt and regret, and of admiration for all things Jewish, one could not help feeling that fifty years after the Holocaust, the new republic was, in effect, beatifying the German Jews" (Elon 2001).

Like Novick, Finkelstein (2000) takes a functionalist view of ‘the Holocaust Industry,’ arguing that it serves as a vehicle for obtaining money for Jewish organizations from European governments and corporations, and for justifying the policies of Israel and U.S. support for Israeli policy (p. 8). Finkelstein also argues that embracing the Holocaust allows the wealthiest and most powerful group in the U.S. to claim victim status. The ideology of the Holocaust states that it is unique and inexplicable -- as also noted by Novick. But Finkelstein also emphasizes how the Holocaust Industry promotes the idea that anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior stem completely from irrational loathing by non-Jews and have nothing to do with conflicts of interest. For example, Elie Wiesel: "For two thousand years ... we were always threatened.... For what? For no reason" (in Finkelstein 2000, 53). (By contrast, the basic premise of my book, Separation and Its Discontents [MacDonald 1998a] is precisely that anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior throughout history are firmly rooted in conflicts of interest). Finkelstein quotes Boas Evron, an Israeli writer, approvingly: ‘Holocaust awareness’ is "an official, propagandistic indoctrination, a churning out of slogans and a false view of the world, the real aim of which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the present" (p. 41).

Finkelstein notes the role of the media in supporting the Holocaust Industry, quoting Elie Wiesel, ‘When I want to feel better, I turn to the Israeli items in the New York Times‘ (p. 8). The New York Times, which is owned by the Sulzberger family (see below), ‘serves as the main promotional vehicle of the Holocaust Industry. It is primarily responsible for advancing the careers of Jerzy Kosinski, Daniel Goldhagen, and Elie Wiesel. For frequency of coverage, the Holocaust places a close second to the daily weather report. Typically, The New York Times Index 1999 listed fully 273 entries for the Holocaust. By comparison, the whole of Africa rated 32 entries‘ (Finkelstein 2001). Besides a receptive media, the Holocaust Industry takes advantage of its power over the U.S. government to apply pressure to foreign governments, particularly the governments of Eastern Europe (pp. 133ff).

In a poignant allusion to the pervasive double standard of contemporary Jewish ethical attitudes (and reflecting a similar ethical double standard that pervades Jewish religious writing throughout history), Finkelstein describes a January 2000 Holocaust education conference attended by representatives of 50 countries, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel. The conference declared that the international community had a ‘solemn responsibility’ to oppose genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, and xenophobia. A reporter afterward asked Barak about the Palestinian refugees. ‘On principle’, Barak replied, he was against even one refugee coming to Israel: ‘We cannot accept moral, legal, or other responsibility for refugees’ -- (p. 137).

JEWS AND THE MEDIA: SHAPING ‘WAYS OF SEEING’

I noted above that Jewish movements opposing European domination of the U.S. focused on three critical areas of power: The academic world of information in the social sciences and humanities, the political world where public policy on immigration and other ethnic issues are decided, and the mass media where ‘ways of seeing’ are presented to the public. CofC focused on the first two of these sources of power, but little attention was given to the mass media except where it served to promote Jewish intellectual or political movements, as in the case of psychoanalysis. This lack of attention to the cultural influence of the mass media is a major gap. The following represents only a partial and preliminary discussion.

By all accounts, ethnic Jews have a powerful influence in the American media -- far larger than any other identifiable group. The extent of Jewish ownership and influence on the popular media in the United States is remarkable given the relatively small proportion of the population that is Jewish.28 In a survey performed in the 1980s, 60 percent of a representative sample of the movie elite were of Jewish background (Powers et al. 1996, 79n13). Michael Medved (1996, 37) notes that "it makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture. Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names. This prominent Jewish role is obvious to anyone who follows news reports from Tinsel Town or even bothers to read the credits on major movies or television shows."

Media ownership is always in flux, but the following is a reasonably accurate portrait of current media ownership in the United States by ethnic Jews:

The largest media company in the world was recently formed by the merger of America On Line and Time Warner. Gerald M. Levin, formerly the head of Time Warner, is the Chief Executive Officer of the new corporation. AOL-Time Warner has holdings in television (e.g., Home Box Office, CNN, Turner Broadcasting), music (Warner Music), movies (Warner Brothers Studio, Castle Rock Entertainment, and New Line Cinema), and publishing (Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Fortune).

The second largest media company is the Walt Disney Company, headed by Michael Eisner. Disney has holdings in movies (Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, under Walt Disney Studios, includes Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Caravan Pictures, Miramax Films); television (Capital Cities/ABC [owner of the ABC television network], Walt Disney Television, Touchstone Television, Buena Vista Television, ESPN, Lifetime, A&E Television networks) and cable networks with more than 100 million subscribers; radio (ABC Radio Network with over 3,400 affiliates and ownership of 26 stations in major cities); publishing (seven daily newspapers, Fairchild Publications [Women's Wear Daily], and the Diversified Publishing Group).

The third largest media company is Viacom, Inc., headed by Sumner Redstone, who is also Jewish. Viacom has holdings in movies (Paramount Pictures); broadcasting (the CBS TV network; MTV [a particular focus of criticism by cultural conservatives], VH-1, Nickelodeon, Showtime, the National Network, Black Entertainment Television, 13 television stations; programming for the three television networks); publishing (Simon & Schuster, Scribner, The Free Press, and Pocket Books), video rentals (Blockbuster); it is also involved in satellite broadcasting, theme parks, and video games.

Another major media player is Edgar Bronfman, Jr., the son of Edgar Bronfman, Sr., president of the World Jewish Congress and heir to the Seagram distillery fortune. Until its merger with Vivendi, a French Company, in December 2000, Bronfman headed Universal Studios, a major movie production company, and the Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company (including Polygram, Interscope Records, Island/Def Jam, Motown, Geffen/DGC Records). After the merger, Bronfman became the Executive Vice-Chairman of the new company, Vivendi Universal, and the Bronfman family and related entities became the largest shareholders in the company.29 Edgar Bronfman, Sr. is on the Board of Directors of the new company.

Other major television companies owned by Jews include New World Entertainment (owned by Ronald Perelman who also owns Revlon cosmetics), and DreamWorks SKG (owned by film director Steven Spielberg, former Disney Pictures chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, and recording industry mogul David Geffen). DreamWorks SKG produces movies, animated films, television programs, and recorded music. Spielberg is also a Jewish ethnic activist. After making Schindler's List, Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Foundation with the aid of a grant from the U.S. Congress. He also helped fund Professor Deborah Lipstadt's defense against a libel suit brought by British military historian and Holocaust revisionist David Irving.

In the world of print media, the Newhouse media empire owns 26 daily newspapers, including several large and important ones, such as the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Newark Star-Ledger, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Newhouse Broadcasting, consisting of 12 television broadcasting stations and 87 cable-TV systems, including some of the country's largest cable networks; the Sunday supplement Parade, with a circulation of more than 22 million copies per week; some two dozen major magazines, including the New Yorker, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Bride's, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Self, House & Garden, and all the other magazines of the wholly owned Conde Nast group.

The newsmagazine, U.S. News & World Report, with a weekly circulation of 2.3 million, is owned and published by Mortimer B. Zuckerman. Zuckerman also owns New York's tabloid newspaper, the Daily News, the sixth-largest paper in the country, and is the former owner of the Atlantic Monthly. Zuckerman is a Jewish ethnic activist. Recently he was named head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella organization for major Jewish organizations in the U.S.30 Zuckerman's column in U.S. News and World Report regularly defends Israel and has helped to rejuvenate the America-Israeli Friendship League, of which he is president.31

Another Jewish activist with a prominent position in the U.S. media is Martin Peretz, owner of The New Republic (TNR) since 1974. Throughout his career Peretz has been devoted to Jewish causes, particularly Israel. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, he told Henry Kissinger that his ‘dovishness stopped at the delicatessen door,’ and many among his staff feared that all issues would be decided on the basis of what was ‘good for the Jews’ (Alterman 1992, 185, 186). Indeed, one editor was instructed to obtain material from the Israeli embassy for use in TNR editorials. "It is not enough to say that TNR's owner is merely obsessed with Israel; he says so himself. But more importantly, Peretz is obsessed with Israel's critics, Israel's would-be critics, and people who never heard of Israel, but might one day know someone who might someday become a critic" (Alterman 1992, 195).

The Wall Street Journal is the largest-circulation daily newspaper in the U.S. It is owned by Dow Jones & Company, Inc., a New York corporation that also publishes 24 other daily newspapers and the weekly financial paper Barron's. The chairman and CEO of Dow Jones is Peter R. Kann. Kann also holds the posts of chairman and publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

The Sulzberger family owns the New York Times Co., which owns 33 other newspapers, including the Boston Globe. It also owns twelve magazines (including McCall's and Family Circle, each with a circulation of more than 5 million), seven radio and TV broadcasting stations; a cable-TV system; and three book publishing companies. The New York Times News Service transmits news stories, features, and photographs from the New York Times by wire to 506 other newspapers, news agencies, and magazines.

Jewish ownership of the New York Times is particularly interesting because it has been the most influential newspaper in the U.S. since the start of the 20th century. As noted in a recent book on the Sulzberger family (Tifft & Jones 1999), even at that time, there were several Jewish-owned newspapers, including the New York World (controlled by Joseph Pulitzer), the Chicago Times-Herald and Evening Post (controlled by H. H. Kohlsaat), and the New York Post (controlled by the family of Jacob Schiff). In 1896 Adolph Ochs purchased the New York Times with the critical backing of several Jewish businessmen, including Isidor Straus (co-owner of Macy's department stores) and Jacob Schiff (a successful investment banker who was also a Jewish ethnic activist). Schiff and other prominent Jews like ... Straus had made it clear they wanted Adolph to succeed because they believed he ‘could be of great service to the Jews generally’ -- (Tifft & Jones 1999, 37-38). Ochs's father-in-law was the Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of Reform Judaism in the United States.

There are some exceptions to this pattern of media ownership, but even in such cases ethnic Jews have a major managerial role.32 For example, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation owns Fox Television Network, 20th Century Fox Films, Fox 2000, and the New York Post. However, Peter Chernin is president and CEO of Fox Group, which includes all of News Corporation's film, television, and publishing operations in the United States. Murdoch is deeply philosemitic and deeply committed to Israel, at least partly from a close relationship he developed early in his career with Leonard Goldenson, who founded the American Broadcasting Company. (Goldenson was a major figure in New York's Jewish establishment and an outspoken supporter of Israel.) Murdoch's publications have taken a strongly pro-Israel line, including The Weekly Standard, the premier neo-conservative magazine, edited by William Kristol.

Murdoch ... as publisher and editor-in-chief of the New York Post, had a large Jewish constituency, as he did to a lesser degree with New York magazine and The Village Voice. Not only had the pre-Murdoch Post readership been heavily Jewish, so, too, were the present Post advertisers. Most of Murdoch's closest friends and business advisers were wealthy, influential New York Jews intensely active in pro-Israel causes. And he himself still retained a strong independent sympathy for Israel, a personal identification with the Jewish state that went back to his Oxford days. (Kiernan 1986, 261) Murdoch also developed close relationships with several other prominent Jewish figures in the New York establishment, including attorney Howard Squadron, who was president of the AJCongress and head of the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, and investment banker Stanley Schuman.

Another exception is NBC which is owned by General Electric. However, the President of NBC is Andrew Lack and the President of NBC News is Neal Shapiro, both of whom are Jewish. In addition, the Bertelsmann publishing group is a Germany-based company that is the largest publisher of trade books in the world and also owns magazines, newspapers, and music. Most of Bertelsmann's influence is outside the United States, although it recently purchased the Random House Publishing Company.

Even granting the exceptions, it is clear that Jews enjoy a very powerful position in U.S. media, a position that is far more powerful than any other racial/ethnic group. The phenomenal concentration of media power in Jewish hands becomes all the more extraordinary when one notes that Jews constitute approximately 2.5% of the U.S. population. If the Jewish percentage of the American media elite is estimated at 59% (Lichter et al. 1983, 55) -- probably an underestimate at the present time, the degree of disproportionate representation may be calculated as greater than 2000%. The likelihood that such an extraordinary disparity could arise by chance is virtually nil. Ben Stein, noting that about 60% of the top positions in Hollywood are held by Jews, says ‘Do Jews run Hollywood? You bet they do -- and what of it?’33 Does Jewish ownership and control of the media have any effect on the product? Here I attempt to show that the attitudes and opinions favored by the media are those generally held by the wider Jewish community, and that the media tends to provide positive images of Jews and negative images of traditional American and Christian culture.

As many academics have pointed out, the media have become more and more important in creating culture (e.g., Powers et al. 1996, 2). Before the 20th century, the main creators of culture were the religious, military, and business institutions. In the course of the 20th century these institutions became less important while the media have increased in importance (for an account of this transformation in the military, see Bendersky 2000). And there is little doubt that the media attempt to shape the attitudes and opinions of the audience (Powers et al. 1996, 2-3). Part of the continuing culture of critique is that the media elite tend to be very critical of Western culture. Western civilization is portrayed as a failing, dying culture, but at worst it is presented as sick and evil compared to other cultures (Powers et al. 1996, 211). These views were common in Hollywood long before the cultural revolution of the 1960s, but they were not often expressed in the media because of the influence of non-Jewish cultural conservatives.

Perhaps the most important issue Jews and Jewish organizations have championed is cultural pluralism -- the idea that the United States ought not to be ethnically and culturally homogeneous. As described in CofC, Jewish organizations and Jewish intellectual movements have championed cultural pluralism in many ways, especially as powerful and effective advocates of an open immigration policy. The media have supported this perspective by portraying cultural pluralism almost exclusively in positive terms -- that cultural pluralism is easily achieved and is morally superior to a homogeneous Christian culture made up mainly of white non-Jews. Characters who oppose cultural pluralism are portrayed as stupid and bigoted (Lichter et al. 1994, 251), the classic being the Archie Bunker character in Norman Lear's All in the Family television series. Departures from racial and ethnic harmony are portrayed as entirely the result of white racism (Powers et al. 1996, 173).

Since Jews have a decisive influence on television and movies, it is not surprising that Jews are portrayed positively in the movies. There have been a great many explicitly Jewish movies and television shows with recognizable Jewish themes. Hollywood has an important role in promoting ‘the Holocaust Industry,’ with movies like Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) and the four-part television miniseries Holocaust (1978), written by Gerald Green, directed by Marvin Chomsky, and produced by Herbert Brodkin and Robert Berger. Both of these films were lavishly promoted by Jewish groups. The promotion for Holocaust in 1978 was remarkable (Novick 1999, 210). The ADL distributed ten million copies of its sixteen-page tabloid The Record for this purpose. Jewish organizations pressured major newspapers to serialize a novel based on the script and to publish special inserts on the Holocaust. The Chicago Sun-Times distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of its insert to local schools. The AJCommittee, in cooperation with NBC, distributed millions of copies of a study guide for viewers; teachers' magazines carried other teaching material tied to the program so that teachers could easily discuss the program in class. Jewish organizations worked with the National Council of Churches to prepare other promotional and educational materials, and they organized advance viewings for religious leaders. The day the series began was designated ‘Holocaust Sunday’; various activities were scheduled in cities across the country; the National Conference of Christians and Jews distributed yellow stars to be worn on that day. Study guides for Jewish children depicted the Holocaust as the result of Christian anti-Semitism. The material given to Jewish children also condemned Jews who did not have a strong Jewish identity. This massive promotion succeeded in many of its goals. These included the introduction of Holocaust education programs in many states and municipalities, beginning the process that led to the National Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a major upsurge of support for Israel.

In general, television portrays Jewish issues "with respect, relative depth, affection and good intentions, and the Jewish characters who appear in these shows have, without any doubt, been Jewish -- often depicted as deeply involved in their Judaism" (Pearl & Pearl 1999, 5). For example, All in the Family (and its sequel, Archie Bunker's Place) not only managed to portray working class Europeans as stupid and bigoted, it portrayed Jewish themes very positively. By the end of its 12-year run, even archenemy Archie Bunker had raised a Jewish child in his home, befriended a black Jew (implication: Judaism has no ethnic connotations), gone into business with a Jewish partner, enrolled as a member of a synagogue, praised his close friend at a Jewish funeral, hosted a Sabbath dinner, participated in a bat mitzvah ceremony, and joined a group to fight synagogue vandalism. These shows, produced by liberal political activist Norman Lear, thus exemplify the general trend for television to portray non-Jews as participating in Jewish ritual, and ‘respecting, enjoying, and learning from it. Their frequent presence and active involvement underscores the message that these things are a normal part of American life’ (Pearl & Pearl 1999, 16). Jewish rituals are portrayed as ‘pleasant and ennobling, and they bestow strength, harmony, fulfillment, and sense of identity upon those who observe them’ (p. 62).

Television presents images of Jewish issues that conform to the views of mainstream Jewish organizations. Television ‘invariably depicts anti-Semitism as an ugly, abhorrent trait that must be fought at every turn’ (p. 103). It is seen as metaphysical and beyond analysis. There is never any rational explanation for anti-Semitism; anti-Semitism is portrayed as an absolute, irrational evil. Positive, well-liked, non-Jewish characters, such as Mary Tyler Moore, often lead the fight against anti-Semitism -- a pattern reminiscent of that noted in CofC in which non-Jews become high-profile spokespersons for Jewish dominated movements. There is also the implication that anti-Semitism is a proper concern of the entire community.

Regarding Israel, "on the whole, popular TV has conveyed the fact that Israel is the Jewish homeland with a strong emotional pull upon Diaspora Jews, that it lives in perpetual danger surrounded by foes, and that as a result of the constant and vital fight for its survival, it often takes extraordinary (sometimes rogue) measures in the fields of security and intelligence" (Pearl & Pearl 1999, 173). Non-Jews are portrayed as having deep admiration and respect for Israel, its heroism and achievements. Israel is seen as a haven for Holocaust survivors, and Christians are sometimes portrayed as having an obligation to Israel because of the Holocaust.

In the movies, a common theme is Jews coming to the rescue of non-Jews, as in Independence Day, where Jeff Goldblum plays a ‘brainy Jew’ who rescues the world, and in Ordinary People, where Judd Hirsch plays a Jewish psychiatrist who rescues an uptight WASP family (Bernheimer 1998, 125-126). The movie Addams Family Values, discussed in CofC (Ch. 1, Note 4) is another example of this genre. Bernheimer (1998, 162) notes that "in many films, the Jew is the moral exemplar who uplifts and edifies a gentile, serving as a humanizing influence by embodying culturally ingrained values." As discussed in CofC, this ‘Jews to the Rescue’ theme also characterizes psychoanalysis and Jewish leftist radicalism: Psychoanalytic Jews save non-Jews from their neuroses, and radical Jews save the world from the evils of capitalism.

On the other hand, Christianity is typically portrayed as evil, even going so far as depicting Christians as psychopaths. Michael Medved describes Hollywood's cumulative attacks in recent years on the traditional American family, patriotism, and traditional sexual mores -- the Hollywood version of the culture of critique. But the most obvious focus of attack is on the Christian religion:

In the ongoing war on traditional values, the assault on organized faith represents the front to which the entertainment industry has most clearly committed itself. On no other issue do the perspectives of the show business elites and those of the public at large differ more dramatically. Time and again, the producers have gone out of their way to affront the religious sensibilities of ordinary Americans. (Medved 1992/1993, 50)34. Medved fails to find even one film made since the mid-1970s where Christianity is portrayed positively apart from a few films where it is portrayed as an historical relic -- a museum piece. Examples where Christianity is portrayed negatively abound. For example, in the film Monsignor (1982), a Catholic priest commits every imaginable sin, including the seduction of a glamorous nun and then is involved in her death. In Agnes of God (1985), a disturbed young nun gives birth in a convent, murders her baby, and then flushes the tiny, bloody corpse down the toilet. There are also many subtle anti-Christian scenes in Hollywood films, such as when the director Rob Reiner repeatedly focuses on the tiny gold crosses worn by Kathy Bates, the sadistic villain in Misery.

Another media tendency is to portray small towns as filled with bigots and anti-Semites. Media commentator Ben Stein records the hostility of the media toward rural America:

The typical Hollywood writer ... is of an ethnic background from a large Eastern city -- usually from Brooklyn [i.e., they have a Jewish background]. He grew up being taught that people in small towns hated him, were different from him, and were out to get him [i.e., small town people are anti-Semites]. As a result, when he gets the chance, he attacks the small town on television or the movies....

The television shows and movies are not telling it ‘like it is’; instead they are giving us the point of view of a small and extremely powerful section of the American intellectual community -- those who write for the mass visual media.... What is happening, as a consequence, is something unusual and remarkable. A national culture is making war upon a way of life that is still powerfully attractive and widely practiced in the same country.... Feelings of affection for small towns run deep in America, and small-town life is treasured by millions of people. But in the mass culture of the country, a hatred for the small town is spewed out on television screens and movie screens every day.... Television and the movies are America's folk culture, and they have nothing but contempt for the way of life of a very large part of the folk.... People are told that their culture is, at its root, sick, violent, and depraved, and this message gives them little confidence in the future of that culture. It also leads them to feel ashamed of their country and to believe that if their society is in decline, it deserves to be. (Stein 1976, 22)

This is a good example of social identity processes so important in both Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews and non-Jewish attitudes toward Jews: Outgroups are portrayed negatively and ingroups are portrayed positively (see CofC passim and MacDonald 1998a, Ch. 1). Influence on the media undoubtedly has a major influence on how Israel is portrayed -- a major theme of Finkelstein's (2000) The Holocaust Industry. Ari Shavit, an Israeli columnist, described his feelings on the killings of a hundred civilians in a military skirmish in southern Lebanon in 1996, "We killed them out of a certain naive hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own."35

The election of Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister of Israel provides another study in contrast. There was a huge difference in the media reaction to Sharon and the response to the situation in Austria when J??rg Haider's Freedom Party won enough seats in parliament to have a role in the Austrian government. Several countries, including Israel, recalled their ambassadors in response to the election of Haider. Politicians around the world condemned Austria and announced that they would not tolerate Haider's participation in any Austrian government. Trade embargoes against Austria were threatened. The cause of these actions was that Haider had said that there had been many decent people fighting on the German side during World War II, including some in the SS. He had also said that some of Hitler's economic policies in the 1930s had made good sense. And he had called for a cutoff of immigration into Austria. Haider apologized for these statements, but the electoral success of his party resulted in the ostracism of Austria and a continuous barrage of alarmist media attacks against him personally.

Contrast this with the treatment of Ariel Sharon's election as prime minister of Israel in 2001. Sharon was Israel's Minister of Defense in September 1982 during the slaughter of 700-2000 Palestinians, including women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps just outside Beirut, Lebanon. New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman saw "groups of young men in their twenties and thirties who had been lined up against walls, tied by their hands and feet, and then mowed down gangland style."36 Radio communications among Israeli military commanders were monitored in which they talked about carrying out ‘purging operations’ in the refugee camps. While the actual killing was done by Lebanese Christians supported by Israel, the Israeli army kept the camps sealed for two days while the slaughter went on. The Kahan Commission, an Israeli commission formed to investigate the incident, concluded that Sharon was indirectly responsible for the massacre, and it went on to say that Sharon bears personal responsibility.37

The reaction to the election of Sharon in the U.S. media has been subdued to say the least. No trade embargoes were threatened, no ambassadors were recalled. The Los Angeles Times dutifully printed a column in which Sharon was portrayed as having ‘learned from his mistakes.’38 In June, 2001, Sharon was indicted as a war criminal in Belgium on the basis of affidavits provided by survivors of the slaughter. It is also noteworthy that Rehavam Zeevi, a close associate of Sharon and Israel's Minister of Tourism as well as a member of the powerful Security Cabinet until his assassination in October, 2001, described Palestinians as ‘lice’ and advocated the expulsion of Palestinians from Israeli controlled areas. Zeevi said Palestinians were living illegally in Israel and "We should get rid of the ones who are not Israeli citizens the same way you get rid of lice. We have to stop this cancer from spreading within us."39

As another indication of the very large Jewish influence on the U.S. media, Eric Alterman notes that "in most of the world, it is the Palestinian narrative of a dispossessed people that dominates. In the United States, however, the narrative that dominates is Israel's: ‘a democracy under constant siege.’ (E. Alterman, "Intractable foes, warring narratives: While much of the world sees Mideast conflict through Palestinian eyes, in America, Israel's view prevails;http://www.msnbc.com/news/730905.asp; March 28, 2002). A critical source of support for Israel is the army of professional pundits "who can be counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification.’ Alterman lists 60 prominent media personalities in this camp (including a long list of Jewish writers: William Safire, A. M. Rosenthal, Charles Krauthammer, Martin Peretz, Daniel Pipes, Andrea Peyser, Dick Morris, Lawrence Kaplan, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Mortimer Zuckerman, David Gelertner, John Podhoretz, Mona Charen, Yossi Klein Halevi, Sidney Zion, Norman Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg, Jeff Jacoby, Seth Lipsky, Irving Kristol, Ben Wattenberg, Lawrence Kudlow, Alan Dershowitz, David Horowitz, Jacob Heilbrun, Michael Ledeen, Uri Dan, Paul Greenberg). These writers have access to virtually all of the major media in the United States.

This contrasts with a much smaller group of five columnists "likely to be reflexively anti-Israel and/or pro-Palestinian regardless of circumstance."6; These include Patrick Buchanan, Christopher Hitchens, Edward Said, Alexander Cockburn, and Robert Novak. Three of these columnists are associated with the far left journal, The Nation (Cockburn, Hitchens, Said), and only Novak is presently affiliated with a major media organization (The Washington Post).

Alterman points to another small group classified as "columnists likely to criticize both Israel and the Palestinians, but view themselves to be critically supporters of Israel, and ultimately would support Israeli security over Palestinian rights"; this group includes the editorial Boards of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Another columnist who should be included in the intermediate category is Michael Lind, who noted the following in a column in Newsweek International (http://www.msnbc.com/news/731882.asp, April 3, 2002): "What passes in the United States as an evenhanded stance is perceived, not only in the Middle East but in Europe and throughout the world, as unquestioning American support of bully tactics by Israel.... (F)or more than a decade, U.S. policy toward Israel has been shaped as much by domestic politics as by grand strategy: the pro-Israel lobby is the most powerful one in Washington. This support for Israel -- no matter what its policies -- has given license to Israel's hard right to employ savage means of oppression against the Palestinians, and even against their own Arab citizens. While it is rarely noted in the American media, Israel has now occupied Palestinian lands for 35 years, denying 3 million people rights, and ruling over them with brutality."

There can be little doubt that the U.S. media is dominated by a pro-Israeli perspective ultimately deriving from Jewish influence on the media. What is perhaps most interesting is the long list of non-Jews who are in the first category -- those who support Israel reflexively and without qualification. These include George Will, William Bennett, Andrew Sullivan, Allan Keyes, Brit Hume, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Barone, Ann Coulter, Linda Chavez, and Rush Limbaugh. The fact that reflexive support for Israel is not characteristic of non-Jews in other societies with less Jewish influence on the media strongly suggests that unconditional support for Israel is a critical litmus test of acceptability by the major media in the U.S. -- that prospective pundits ‘earn their stripes’ by showing their devotion to Israel (and, one might infer, other Jewish issues, such as immigration; none of these pundits is a critic of massive non-European immigration into Western societies). After all, reflexive, uncritical support for anything is rare enough for any issue, and we know that the media in other countries are not so one-sided. So it seems difficult to explain the huge tilt toward Israel as the result of individual attitudes in the absence of some enormous selective factor. And there is the obvious suggestion that while the Jews on this list must be seen as ethnic actors, the non-Jews are certainly making an excellent career move in taking the positions they do. This litmus test for prospective opinion makers is further supported by the fact that Joe Sobran was fired from National Review because he had the temerity to suppose that U.S. foreign policy should not be dictated by what's best for Israel -- an event that was accompanied by charges by Norman Podhoretz that Sobran was an ‘anti-Semite’ (see Buckley 1992; Podhoretz, 1986).

JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS AND CENSORSHIP OF THE INTERNET

In CofC (Ch. 8) I wrote, "one may expect that as ethnic conflict continues to escalate in the United States, increasingly desperate attempts will be made to prop up the ideology of multiculturalism ... with the erection of police state controls on nonconforming thought and behavior." As noted above, there has been a shift from ‘the culture of critique’ to what one might term ‘the culture of the Holocaust’ as Jews have moved from outsiders to the consummate insiders in American life. Coinciding with their status as an established elite, Jewish organizations are now in the forefront of movements to censor thought crimes.40

The Internet is a major gap in control of the major media, but Jewish organizations have taken the lead in attempting to censor the Internet. The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) distributes a compact disc titled ‘Digital Hate 2001‘ that lists over 3000 ‘hate sites on the Internet.’ Both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ADL have attempted to pressure Internet service providers (ISP's) like AOL and popular websites like Yahoo into restricting subscriber access to disapproved websites. Recently Yahoo removed 39 Internet clubs originally identified as ‘hate sites‘ by the SWC.41 Internet auction sites have been subjected to protests for selling Nazi memorabilia.42 Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com have come under fire for selling Hitler's Mein Kampf. The ADL also published a report, Poisoning the Web: Hatred Online, and has urged the U.S. Congress to initiate a ‘comprehensive study of the magnitude and impact of hate on the Internet.’43

Online services in the U.S. are also under pressure from foreign governments, including France, Germany, Austria, and Canada, where there are no constitutional guarantees of free speech. For example, a judge in France ruled that Yahoo was violating French law by delivering Nazi memorabilia to people in France via the company's online auctions, even though the service is based in the United States. Yahoo was acting illegally, the judge said, even though the company has created a separate French site that, unlike the broader Yahoo service, follows French law. The company was ordered to use filtering technology to block politically sensitive material from appearing on computers in France or face fines equivalent to $13,000 a day. In Germany, a court found that German law applies even to foreigners who post content on the Web in other countries -- so long as that content can be accessed by people inside Germany. In this case, the court ruled that an Australian citizen who posted Holocaust revisionist material on his Australian website could be jailed in Germany. Theoretically it would be possible for Germany to demand that this person be extradited from Australia so that he could stand trial for his crime.44

Jewish organizations have been strong advocates of laws in European countries that criminalize the distribution of anti-Jewish material. For example, the ADL pressured the German government to arrest a U.S. citizen who distributed anti-Jewish materials. Gary Lauck was arrested in Denmark and extradited to Germany on the warrant of a Hamburg prosecutor. He was sentenced to four years in jail, served his sentence, and was deported.45

This sort of government-imposed censorship is effective in countries like France and Germany, but is not likely to succeed in the United States with its strong tradition of constitutionally protected free speech. As a result, the major focus of the Jewish effort to censor the Internet in the United States has been to pressure private companies like AOL and Yahoo to use software that blocks access to sites that are disapproved by Jewish organizations. The ADL developed voluntary filter software (ADL HateFilter) that allows users to screen out certain websites. However, while AOL -- the largest ISP by far -- has proved to be compliant in setting standards in line with ADL guidelines, the ADL notes that other ISP's, such as Earthlink, have not cooperated with the ADL, and independent web hosting sites have sprung up to serve websites rejected by AOL.46

The ADL and the SWC have an uphill road because the Internet has long been touted as a haven for free speech by the high-tech community. One senses a certain frustration in the conclusion of a recent ADL report on the Internet:

Combating online extremism presents enormous technological and legal difficulties .... Even if it were electronically feasible to keep sites off the Internet, the international nature of the medium makes legal regulation virtually impossible. And in the United States, the First Amendment guarantees the right of freedom of speech regardless of what form that speech takes. As a result, governments, corporations and people of goodwill continue to look for alternative ways to address the problem.47 Clearly Jewish organizations are making every effort to censor anti-Jewish writing on the Internet. They are far from reaching their goal of removing anti-Jewish material from the Internet, but in the long run the very high political stakes involved ensure that great effort will be expended. I suspect that in the U.S., if pressuring existing ISP's by organizations like the ADL and the SWC fails, these companies may become targets of buyouts by Jewish-owned media companies who will then quietly remove access to anti-Jewish websites. AOL has just recently merged with Time Warner, a Jewish-controlled media company, and it had already merged with Compuserve, a large, nationwide ISP. As indicated above, AOL-Time Warner has complied with pressures exerted by Jewish activist organizations to restrict expressions of political opinion on the Internet. I suppose that the only option for prohibited websites will be to develop their own Internet service providers. These providers -- perhaps subsidized or relatively expensive -- would then fill the niche of serving people who are already committed to ethnic activism among non-Jewish Europeans and other forms of politically incorrect expression. The situation would be similar to the current situation in the broadcast and print media. All of the mainstream media are effectively censored, but small publications that essentially preach to the converted can exist if not flourish.

But such publications reach a miniscule percentage of the population. They are basically ignored by the mainstream media, and they mainly preach to the choir. The same will likely happen to the Internet: The sites will still be there, but they will be out of sight and out of mind for the vast majority of Internet users. The effective censorship of the Internet by large corporations does not violate the First Amendment because the government is not involved and any policy can be justified as a business decision not to offend existing or potential customers.

THE QUESTION OF BIAS

I have several times been called an ‘anti-Semite’ for the tone of some of my writings, both in CofC and my comments on various Internet discussion lists. To be perfectly frank, I did not have a general animus for organized Jewry when I got into this project. I was a sort of ex-radical turned moderate Republican fan of George Will. Before even looking at Judaism I applied the same evolutionary perspective to the ancient Spartans and then to the imposition of monogamy by the Catholic Church during the middle ages (see MacDonald 1988a, 1995b). There are quite a few statements in my books that attempt to soften the tone and deflect charges of anti-Jewish bias. The first page of my first book on Judaism, A People that Shall Dwell Alone (MacDonald 1994), clearly states that the traits I ascribe to Judaism (self-interest, ethnocentrism, and competition for resources and reproductive success) are by no means restricted to Jews. I also write about the extraordinary Jewish IQ and about Jewish accomplishments (e.g., Nobel prizes) in that book. In the second book, Separation and Its Discontents (MacDonald 1998a), I discuss the tendency for anti-Semites to exaggerate their complaints, to develop fantastic and unverifiable theories of Jewish behavior, to exaggerate the extent of Jewish cohesion and unanimity, to claim that all Jews share stereotypically Jewish traits or attitudes, especially in cases where in fact Jews are over-represented among people having certain attitudes (e.g., political radicalism during most of the 20th century). And I describe the tendency of some anti-Semites to develop grand conspiracy theories in which all historical events of major or imagined importance, from the French Revolution to the Tri-lateral Commission are linked together in one grand plot and blamed on the Jews. All of this is hardly surprising on the basis of what we know about the psychology of ethnic conflict. But that doesn't detract in the least from supposing that real conflicts of interest are at the heart of all of the important historical examples of anti-Semitism. Most of this is in the first chapter of Separation and Its Discontents -- front and center as it were, just as my other disclaimers are in the first chapter of A People that Shall Dwell Alone.

It must be kept in mind that group evolutionary strategies are not benign, at least in general and especially in the case of Judaism, which has often been very powerful and has had such extraordinary effects on the history of the West. I think there is a noticeable shift in my tone from the first book to the third simply because (I'd like to think) I knew a lot more and had read a lot more. People often say after reading the first book that they think I really admire Jews, but they are unlikely to say that about the last two and especially about CofC. That is because by the time I wrote CofC I had changed greatly from the person who wrote the first book. The first book is really only a documentation of theoretically interesting aspects of group evolutionary strategies using Judaism as a case study (how Jews solved the free-rider problem, how they managed to erect and enforce barriers between themselves and other peoples, the genetic cohesion of Judaism, how some groups of Jews came to have such high IQ's, how Judaism developed in antiquity). Resource competition and other conflicts of interest with other groups are more or less an afterthought, but these issues move to the foreground in Separation and Its Discontents, and in CofC I look exclusively at the 20th century in the West. Jews have indeed made positive contributions to Western culture in the last 200 years. But whatever one might think are the unique and irreplaceable Jewish contributions to the post-Enlightenment world, it is naive to suppose they were intended for the purpose of benefiting humanity solely or even primarily. In any case I am hard pressed to think of any area of modern Western government and social organization (certainly) and business, science, and technology (very probably) that would not have developed without Jewish input, although in some cases perhaps not quite as quickly. In general, positive impacts of Jews have been quantitative rather than qualitative. They have accelerated some developments, for example in finance and some areas of science, rather than made them possible.

On the other hand, I am persuaded that Jews have also had some important negative influences. I am morally certain that Jewish involvement in the radical left in the early to middle part of the last century was a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for many of the horrific events in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. (About this, of course, one can disagree. I am simply saying that I find the evidence compelling.) But the main point is that I came to see Jewish groups as competitors with the European majority of the U.S., as powerful facilitators of the enormous changes that have been unleashed in this country, particularly via the successful advocacy of massive non-European immigration into the U.S. I found that I was being transformed in this process from a semi-conservative academic who had little or no identification with his own people into an ethnically conscious person -- exactly as predicted by the theory of social identity processes that forms the basis of my theory of anti-Semitism (see MacDonald 1998a). In fact, if one wants to date when I dared cross the line into what some see as proof that I am an ‘anti-Semite,’ the best guess would probably be when I started reading on the involvement of all the powerful Jewish organizations in advocating massive non-European immigration. My awareness began with my reading a short section in a standard history of American Jews well after the first book was published. The other influences that I attributed to Jewish activities were either benign (psychoanalysis?) or reversible -- even radical leftism, so they didn't much bother me. I could perhaps even ignore the towering hypocrisy of Jewish ethnocentrism coinciding as it does with Jewish activism against the ethnocentrism of non-Jewish Europeans. But the long-term effects of immigration will be essentially irreversible barring some enormous cataclysm.

I started to realize that my interests are quite different from prototypical Jewish interests. There need to be legitimate ways of talking about people who oppose policies recommended by the various Jewish establishments without simply being tarred as ‘anti-Semites’. Immigration is only one example where there are legitimate conflicts of interest. As I write this (November, 2001), we are bogged down in a war with no realizable endgame largely because of influence of the Jewish community over one area of our foreign policy and because of how effectively any mention of the role of Israel in creating friction between the U.S. and the Arab world -- indeed the entire Muslim world -- is muzzled simply by the cry of anti-Semitism. And at home we have entered into an incalculably dangerous experiment in creating a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society in which the intellectual elite has developed the idea that the formerly dominant European majority has a moral obligation to allow itself to be eclipsed demographically and culturally -- the result, at least at its inception and to a considerable degree thereafter, of the influence of Jewish interest groups on immigration policy and the influence of Jewish intellectual movements on our intellectual and cultural life generally. As noted above, the rise of Jewish power and the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the real topics of CofC.

I agree that there is bias in the social sciences and I certainly don't exempt myself from this tendency. It is perhaps true that by the time I finished CofC I should have stated my attitudes in the first chapter. Instead, they are placed in the last chapter of CofC -- rather forthrightly I think. In a sense putting them at the end was appropriate because my attitudes about Jewish issues marked a cumulative, gradual change from a very different world view.

It is annoying that such disclaimers rarely appear in writing by strongly identified Jews even when they see their work as advancing Jewish interests. A major theme of the CofC is that Jewish social scientists with a strong Jewish identity have seen their work as advancing Jewish interests. It is always amazing to me that media figures like the Kristols and Podhoretzes and foreign policy experts like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle do not feel an obligation to precede their remarks on issues affected by their solicitude for Israel by saying, "you should be wary of what I say because I have a vested ethnic interest in advancing the interests of Israel." But the same thing goes for vast areas of anthropology (the Boasian school and racial differences research), history (e.g., obviously apologetic accounts of the history and causes of anti-Semitism or the role of Jews in the establishment of Bolshevism), psychology (the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis), and contemporary issues (immigration, church-state relations). The point of CofC that really galls people is the idea that we should simply acknowledge this bias in (some) Jewish researchers as we do in others. There are a great many books on how Darwin and Galton were influenced by the general atmosphere of Victorian England, but writing of a Jewish bias immediately results in charges of ‘anti-Semitism.’

But the deeper point is that, whatever my motivations and biases, I would like to suppose that my work on Judaism at least meets the criteria of good social science, even if I have come to the point of seeing my subjects in a less than flattering light. In the end, does it really matter if my motivation at this point is less than pristine? Isn't the only question whether I am right?

CONCLUSION

CofC is really an attempt to understand the 20th century as a Jewish century -- a century in which Jews and Jewish organizations were deeply involved in all the pivotal events. From the Jewish viewpoint it has been a period of great progress, though punctuated by one of its darkest tragedies. In the late 19th century the great bulk of the Jewish population lived in Eastern Europe, with many Jews mired in poverty and all surrounded by hostile populations and unsympathetic governments. A century later, Israel is firmly established in the Middle East, and Jews have become the wealthiest and most powerful group in the United States and have achieved elite status in other Western countries. The critical Jewish role in radical leftism has been sanitized, while Jewish victimization by the Nazis has achieved the status of a moral touchstone and is a prime weapon in the push for large-scale non-European immigration, multi-culturalism and advancing other Jewish causes. Opponents have been relegated to the fringe of intellectual and political discourse and there are powerful movements afoot that would silence them entirely.

The profound idealization, the missionary zeal, and the moral fervor that surround the veneration of figures like Celan, Kafka, Adorno, and Freud characterize all of the Jewish intellectual movements discussed in CofC (see Ch. 6 for a summary). That these figures are now avidly embraced by the vast majority of non-Jewish intellectuals as well shows that the Western intellectual world has become Judaized -- that Jewish attitudes and interests, Jewish likes and dislikes, now constitute the culture of the West, internalized by Jews and non-Jews alike. The Judaization of the West is nowhere more obvious than in the veneration of the Holocaust as the central moral icon of the entire civilization. These developments constitute a profound transformation from the tradition of critical and scientific individualism that had formed the Western tradition since the Enlightenment. More importantly, because of the deep-seated Jewish hostility toward traditional Western culture, the Judaization of the West means that the peoples who created the culture and traditions of the West have been made to feel deeply ashamed of their own history -- surely the prelude to their demise as a culture and as a people.

The present Judaized cultural imperium in the West is maintained by a pervasive thought control propagated by the mass media and extending to self-censorship by academics, politicians, and others well aware of the dire personal and professional consequences of crossing the boundaries of acceptable thought and speech about Jews and Jewish issues. It is maintained by zealously promulgated, self-serving, and essentially false theories of the nature and history of Judaism and the nature and causes of anti-Semitism.

None of this should be surprising. Jewish populations have always had enormous effects on the societies where they reside because of two qualities that are central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy: High intelligence (including the usefulness of intelligence in attaining wealth) and the ability to cooperate in highly organized, cohesive groups (MacDonald 1994). This has led repeatedly to Jews becoming an elite and powerful group in societies where they reside in sufficient numbers -- as much in the 20th-century United States and the Soviet Union as in 15th-century Spain or Alexandria in the ancient world. History often repeats itself after all. Indeed, recent data indicate that Jewish per capita income in the United States is almost double that of non-Jews, a bigger difference than the black-white income gap. Although Jews make up less than 3 percent of the population, they constitute more than a quarter of the people on the Forbes magazine list of the richest four hundred Americans. A remarkable 87 percent of college-age Jews are currently enrolled in institutions of higher education, as compared with 40 percent for the population as a whole (Thernstrom & Thernstrom 1997). Jews are indeed an elite group in American society (see also Chapter 8).

My perception is that the Jewish community in the U.S. is moving aggressively ahead, ignoring the huge disruptions Jewish organizations have caused in the West (now mainly via successful advocacy of massive non-European immigration) and in the Islamic world (via the treatment of Palestinians by Israel). Whatever the justification for such beliefs, U.S. support for Israel is by all accounts an emotionally compelling issue in the Arab world. A true test of Jewish power in the United States will be whether support for Israel is maintained even in the face of the enormous costs that have already been paid by the U.S. in terms of loss of life, economic disruption, hatred and distrust throughout the Muslim world, and loss of civil liberties at home. As of this writing, while Jewish organizations are bracing for a backlash against Jews in the U.S. and while there is considerable concern among Jews about the Bush Administration's pressure on Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians in order to placate the Muslim world (e.g., Rosenblatt 2001), all signs point to no basic changes in the political culture of the United States vis-??vis Israel as a result of the events of 9-11-01.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I acknowledge the critical comments of James C. Russell in the preparation of this preface.

NOTES

1. McConnell's comments were made on an email discussion list, September 30, 2001.

2. This listing is based on several sources: Editors of Fortune (1936); To Bigotry No Sanction. A Documented Analysis of Anti-Semitic Propaganda. Prepared by the Philadelphia Anti-Defamation Council and the American Jewish Committee. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Anti-Defamation Council (1941); Gabler 1988; Kantor 1982; http://www.psu.edu/dept/inart10_110/inart10/radio.html.

3. Ben Hecht, who was a prominent Hollywood screenwriter and staunch Zionist, included pro-interventionist ideas in movies at this time (Authors Calendar, http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bhecht.htm). For example, in Angels over Broadway (1940), Hecht has the Douglas Fairbanks Jr. character ask, "What happened to the Poles, the Finns, the Dutch? They're little guys. They didn't win...." Rita Hayworth replies, "They will, some day." Hecht also made some uncredited additions to Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940). When Hitchcock was asked ab6ut the anti-Nazi and pro-Britain message of the film, he said that it was all the doing of Walter Wanger and Ben Hecht. (Wanger was also Jewish; his birth name was Walter Feuchtwanger.) In the film a character says, "Keep those lights burning, cover them with steel, build them in with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them and, hello, America, hang on to your lights, they're the only lights in the world."

4. The only exception in recent years -- albeit relatively minor -- was Pat Buchanan's 1990 column in which he referred to Israel's ‘Amen Corner’ in the United States advocating war with Iraq. (Indeed, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee had been lobbying Congress behind the scenes to declare war on Iraq [Sobran 1999]). Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary, promptly labeled Buchanan an ‘anti-Semite’ without feeling the need to address the question of whether or not American Jews were indeed pressing for war with Iraq in order to benefit Israel. As in the case of Lindbergh's remarks a half century earlier, truth was irrelevant. While this incident has not altered the taboo on discussing Jewish interests in the same way that it is common to discuss the interests of other ethnic groups, it has resulted in a long-term problem for Buchanan's political career. When Buchanan ran for president in 2000, a hostile columnist writing in a prominent Jewish publication stated, "Out of the slime of the sewers and into the filth of the gutter a desperate Patrick J. Buchanan, the neo-Nazi, has crawled into the political arena using anti-Semitism as his principal device to secure a future for himself" (Adelson 1999). The columnist went on to claim that Buchanan ‘always was a neo-Nazi’ and that he "reveals the shallow quality of his tortured, sick, defective mind." Not to be outdone, Alan Dershowitz (1999) wrote, "Let there be no mistake about it. Pat Buchanan is a classic anti-Semite with fascist leanings who hates Israel and loves Nazi war criminals." The example illustrates that Jews continue to exert immense pressure, including smear tactics, to keep Jewish interests off limits in American political discussion. As with Lindbergh in an earlier generation, Buchanan's experience is a grim reminder to politicians who dare raise the issue of Jewish interests in public debate. Buchanan became completely marginalized within the Republican Party and eventually left it for a spectacularly unsuccessful run as the Reform Party presidential candidate in 2000.

5. In a conversation with his wife on November 24, 1941, Charles Lindbergh was pessimistic about establishing a Jewish state:

C. and I get into an argument apropos of an article in the paper, a speech of a rabbi at a Jewish conference in which he said that the first thing that would have to be done at the peace table after the war was that a large indemnity would have to be paid to the Jews for their sufferings. Also speaks about having a piece of land of their own -- which I am sympathetic with.... [C.] says it isn't as simple as all that. Whose land are you going to take? ... He is very pessimistic of its being solved without great suffering. (A. M. Lindbergh 1980, 239)

6. The following is based on Bendersky's (2000, 2-46) study of U.S. military officers but is representative of commonly held attitudes in the early 20th century.

7. ‘Reform Judaism Nears a Guide to Conversion.’ New York Times, June 27, 2001.

8. Jewish pressure for altering traditional Roman Catholic attitudes on Jewish responsibility for deicide are recounted in Lacouture (1995, 440-458) and Roddy (1966). Pope John XXIII deleted the ‘perfidious Jews’ reference from the Holy Week liturgy (Lacouture 1995, 448). He then solicited the opinions of the world's 2,594 bishops on the Church's relations with the Jews. Virtually all of the respondents wished to maintain the status quo. The Pope was ‘bitterly disappointed by the response of the episcopate’ (p. 449).

9. Burton, M. L., Moore, C. C., Whiting, J. W. M., & Romney, A. K. (1996). Regions based on social structure. Current Anthropology, 37: 87-123.

10. Laslett (1983) further elaborates this basic difference to include four variants ranging from West, West/central or middle, Mediterranean, to East.

11. Burton, M. L., Moore, C. C., Whiting, J. W. M., & Romney, A. K. (1996). Regions based on social structure. Current Anthropology, 37: 87-123.

12. Barfield, T. J. (1993). The Nomadic Alternative. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

13. Support for this classification comes from several places in my trilogy on Judaism and in turn depends on the work of many scholars. Besides the sources in this preface, special note should be made of the following: Evolutionary history: MacDonald 1994, Ch. 8; Marriage practices: MacDonald 1994 (Chs. 3 and 8); Marriage psychology: CofC (Chs. 4, 8); Position of women CofC (Ch. 4); Attitude toward outgroups and strangers: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 8), MacDonald 1998a (Ch. 1); Social structure: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 8), MacDonald 1998a (Chs. 1, 3-5), CofC (Chs. 6, 8, and passim as feature of Jewish intellectual movements); Socialization: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 7), CofC (Ch. 5); Intellectual stance: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 7), CofC (Ch. 6 and passim); Moral stance: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 6), CofC (Ch. 8).

14. Grossman et al. and Sagi et al., in I. Bretherton & E. Waters (Eds.), Growing Points in Attachment Theory and Research. Monographs for the Society for Research in Child Development, 50(1-2), 233-275. Sagi et al. suggest temperamental differences in stranger anxiety may be important because of the unusual intensity of the reactions of many of the Israeli infants. The tests were often terminated because of the intense crying of the infants. Sagi et al. find this pattern among both Kibbutz-reared and city-reared infants, although less strongly in the latter. However, the city-reared infants were subjected to somewhat different testing conditions: They were not subjected to a pre-test socialization episode with a stranger. Sagi et al. suggest that the socialization pre-test may have intensified reactions to strangers among the Kibbutz-reared babies, but they note that such pre-tests do not have this effect in samples of infants from Sweden and the U.S. This again highlights the difference between Israeli and European samples.

15. A halachic difference refers to a distinction based on Jewish religious law.

16. The following comment illustrates well the different mindset that many strongly identified Jews have toward America versus Israel:

While walking through the streets of Jerusalem, I feel Jewish identity is first and foremost about self-determination and, by extension, the security and power that comes with having a state. I am quite comfortable in Israel with the sight of soldiers standing with machine guns and the knowledge that even a fair number of the civilians around me are probably packing heat. The seminal event in my Zionist consciousness, despite my being born after 1967 and having serious misgivings about Israel's control over the territories, is still the dramatic victory of a Jewish army in the Six-Day War. Put me in New York, however, and sud-denly the National Rifle Association symbolizes this country's darkest side. It's as if my subconscious knows instinctively that the moment we land at JFK Airport, it becomes time to stash away those images of Israeli soldiers taking control of Jerusalem's Old City, of Moshe Dayan standing at the Western Wall, and to replace them with the familiar photograph of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching by the side of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (A. Eden, ‘Liberalism in Diaspora.’ The Forward, Sept. 21, 2001)

17. www.adl.org/presrele/dirab%5F41/3396%5F41.asp

18. Jerusalem Post, March 5, 2001.

19. See, e.g., the ADL Policy Report on the prospects of immigration legislation in the George W. Bush administration and the 107th Congress:
www.adl.org/issue%5Fgovernment/107/immigration.html.

20. In, Boyle (2001), p. 160. As recounted by Boyle, Sheean was hired by the Zionist publication, New Palestine, in 1929 to write about the progress of Zionism in that country. He went to Palestine, and after studying the situation, returned the money the Zionists had paid him. He then wrote a book (Personal History; New York: Literary Guild Country Life Press, 1935) -- long out of print -- describing his negative impressions of the Zionists. He noted, for example, "how they never can or will admit that anybody who disagrees with them is honest" (p. 160). This comment reflects the authoritarian exclusion of dissenters noted as a characteristic of Jewish intellectual and political movements in CofC (Ch. 6). His book was a commercial failure and he passed quietly into oblivion. The subject of Boyle's book, George Antonius, was a Greek Orthodox Arab from what is today Lebanon. His book, The Arab Awakening (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938) presented the Arab case in the Palestinian-Zionist dispute. The appendices to his book include the Hussein-McMahon correspondence of October 24, 1915, between Sharif Hussein (who authorized the Arab revolt against the Turks) and Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt. The correspondence shows that the Arabs were promised independence in the whole area (including Palestine) after the war. Also in the appendices are the Hogarth Memorandum of January 1918 and the Declaration to the Seven of June 16, 1918, both of which were meant to reassure the Arabs that England would honor its earlier promises to them when the Arabs expressed concern after the Balfour Declaration. Britain kept these documents classified until Antonius published them in The Arab Awakening. Antonius was pushed out of the Palestine Mandate Administration by British Zionists and died broken and impoverished.

21. Daily Pilot, Newport Beach/ Costa Mesa, California, Feb. 28, 2000,

22. ‘Project Reminds Young Jews of Heritage.’ Washington Post, Jan. 17, 2000, p. A19.

23. Steinlight tempers these remarks by noting the Jewish commitment to moral universalism, including the attraction to Marxism so characteristic of Jews during most of the 20th century. However, as indicated in Chapter 3, Jewish commitment to leftist universalism was always conditioned on whether leftist universalism conformed to perceived Jewish interests, and in fact Jewish leftist universalism has often functioned as little more than a weapon against the traditional bonds of cohesiveness of Western societies.

24. In the early 1950s Stalin appears to have planned to deport Jews to a Jewish area in Western Siberia, but he died before this project was begun. During their occupation of Poland in 1940, the Soviets deported Jews who were refugees from Nazi-occupied Western Poland. However, this action was not anti-Jewish as such because it did not involve either Jews from the Soviet Union or from Eastern Poland. This deportation is more likely to have resulted from Stalin's fear of anyone or any group exposed to Western influence.

25. Taylor, S. J. (1990). Stalin's Apologist, Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow. New York: Oxford University Press; R. Radosh (2000). From Walter Duranty to Victor Navasky: The New York Times' Love Affair with Communism. FrontPageMagazine.com, October 26; W. L. Anderson (2001), The New York Times Missed the Wrong Missed Story http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson45.html, November 17, 2001. Radosh's article shows that the Times' sympathy with communism continues into the present. The Times has never renounced the Pulitzer Prize given to Walter Duranty for his coverage of Stalin's Five-Year Plan.

26. Hamilton, D. (2000). ‘Keeper of the Flame: A Blacklist Survivor.’ Los Angeles Times, October 3.

27. See www.otal.umd.edu/~rccs/blacklist/.

28. Discussions of Jewish ownership of the media include: Ginsberg 1993, 1; Kotkin 1993, 61; Silberman 1985, 147.

29. www.economictimes.com/today/31tech22.htm

30. The Forward, April 27, 2001, pp. 1, 9.

31. The Forward, November 14, 1997, p. 14.

32. A partial exception is the Washington Post Co. Until her recent death, the Washington Post was run by Katherine Meyer Graham, daughter of Eugene Meyer, who purchased the paper in the 1930s. Ms. Graham had a Jewish father and a Christian mother and was raised as an Episcopalian. Katherine's husband, the former publisher of the Post, Phil Graham, was not Jewish. The Post's publisher, since 1991, is Donald Graham, the son of Katherine and Phil Graham. This influential publishing group is thus less ethnically Jewish than the others mentioned here. The Washington Post Co. has a number of other media holdings in newspapers (The Gazette Newspapers, including 11 military publications), television stations, and magazines, most notably the nation's number-two weekly newsmagazine, Newsweek. The Washington Post Co.'s various television ventures reach a total of about 7 million homes, and its cable TV service, Cable One, has 635,000 subscribers. In a joint venture with the New York Times, the Post publishes the International Herald Tribune, the most widely distributed English language daily in the world.

33. www.eonline.com/Features/Specials/Jews/

34. Cones (1997) provides a similar analysis:

This analysis of Hollywood films with religious themes or characters reveals that in the last four decades Hollywood has portrayed Christians as sexually rigid, devil worshipping cultists, talking to God, disturbed, hypocritical, fanatical, psychotic, dishonest, murder suspects, Bible quoting Nazis, slick hucksters, fake spiritualists, Bible pushers, de-ranged preachers, obsessed, Catholic schoolboys running amok, Adam & Eve as pawns in a game between God and Satan, an unbalanced nun accused of killing her newborn infant, dumb, manipulative, phony, outlaws, neurotic, mentally unbalanced, unscrupulous, destructive, foul mouthed, fraudulent and as miracle fabricators. Few, if any, positive portrayals of Christians were found in Hollywood films released in the last four decades.

35. Reprinted in the New York Times May 27, 1996.

36. James Ron, ‘Is Ariel Sharon Israel's Milosevic?’ Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2001.

37. From the Kahan Commission Report (www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ign0):

We shall remark here that it is ostensibly puzzling that the Defense Minister did not in any way make the Prime Minister privy to the decision on having the Phalangists enter the camps. It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for having disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists entry into the camps. These blunders constitute the non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged.

38. Yossi Klein Halevi, ‘Sharon has learned from his mistakes.’ Los Angeles Times, February 7, 2001.

39. Washington Post, July 3, 2001; Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2001.

40. Jewish organizations have also been strong advocates of ‘hate crime’ legislation. For example, in 1997 the ADL published Hate Crimes: ADL Blueprint for Action, which provides recommendations on prevention and response strategies to crimes of ethnic violence, such as penalty enhancement laws, training for law enforcement and the military, security for community institutions, and community anti-bias awareness initiatives. In June 2001 the ADL announced a program designed to assist law enforcement in the battle against ‘extremists and hate groups.’ A major component of the Law Enforcement Initiative is the development of specialized hate crime, extremism, and anti-bias curricula for training programs designed for law enforcement.

41. SWC Press Information, July 15, 1999; www.wiesenthal.com.

42. E.g., SWC Press Information, November 29, 1999; January 26, 2001; www.wiesenthal.com.

43. ADL Press Release, September, 14, 1999; www.adl.org.

44. AFP Worldwide News Agency, April 4, 2001; www.afp.com.

45 . ADL Press Release, August 22, 1996; www.adl.org.

46. C. Wolf. Racists, Bigots and the Law on the Internet. www.adl.org.

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Contact Information:
Kevin MacDonald
Department of Psychology
CSU-Long Beach
Long Beach, CA 90840-0901
Phone: (562) 985-8183
Fax: (562) 985-8004
http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/
Email:kmacd@csulb.edu

Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy, 1881-1965: A Historical Review

http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/immigration.htm

WEBPAGE:

Based on Chapter 7 of The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements.

MacDonald, K. B. (1998/2002). Westport, CT: Praeger; paperback version: Bloomington, IN: 1stbooks Library, 2002. Also available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

MacDonald, K. B. (1998). Jewish involvement in influencing United States immigration policy, 1881-1965: A historical review. Population and Environment, 19, 295-355.

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ABSTRACT

This paper discusses Jewish involvement in shaping United States immigration policy. In addition to a periodic interest in fostering the immigration of co-religionists as a result of anti-Semitic movements, Jews have an interest in opposing the establishment of ethnically and culturally homogeneous societies in which they reside as minorities. Jews have been at the forefront in supporting movements aimed at altering the ethnic status quo in the United States in favor of immigration of non-European peoples. These activities have involved leadership in Congress, organizing and funding anti-restrictionist groups composed of Jews and gentiles, and originating intellectual movements opposed to evolutionary and biological perspectives in the social sciences.

INTRODUCTION

Ethnic conflict is of obvious importance for understanding critical aspects of American history, and not only for understanding Black/White ethnic conflict or the fate of Native Americans. Immigration policy is a paradigmatic example of conflict of interest between ethnic groups because immigration policy influences the future demographic composition of the nation. Ethnic groups unable to influence immigration policy in their own interests will eventually be displaced or reduced in relative numbers by groups able to accomplish this goal.

This paper discusses ethnic conflict between Jews and gentiles in the area of immigration policy. Immigration policy is, however, only one aspect of conflicts of interest between Jews and gentiles in America. The skirmishes between Jews and the gentile power structure beginning in the late nineteenth century always had strong overtones of anti-Semitism. These battles involved issues of Jewish upward mobility, quotas on Jewish representation in elite schools beginning in the nineteenth century and peaking in the 1920s and 1930s, the anti-Communist crusades in the post-World War II era, as well as the very powerful concern with the cultural influences of the major media extending from Henry Ford's writings in the 1920s to the Hollywood inquisitions of the McCarthy era and into the contemporary era. That anti-Semitism was involved in these issues can be seen from the fact that historians of Judaism (e.g., Sachar 1992, p. 620ff) feel compelled to include accounts of these events as important to the history of Jews in America, by the anti-Semitic pronouncements of many of the gentile participants, and by the self-conscious understanding of Jewish participants and observers.

The Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy in the United States is especially noteworthy as an aspect of ethnic conflict. Jewish involvement has had certain unique qualities that have distinguished Jewish interests from the interests of other groups favoring liberal immigration policies. Throughout much of this period, one Jewish interest in liberal immigration policies stemmed from a desire to provide a sanctuary for Jews fleeing from anti-Semitic persecutions in Europe and elsewhere. Anti-Semitic persecutions have been a recurrent phenomenon in the modern world beginning with the Czarist persecutions in 1881, and continuing into the post-World War II era in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. As a result, liberal immigration has been a Jewish interest because "survival often dictated that Jews seek refuge in other lands" (Cohen 1972, p. 341). For a similar reason, Jews have consistently advocated an internationalist foreign policy for the United States because "an internationally-minded America was likely to be more sensitive to the problems of foreign Jewries" (Cohen 1972, p. 342).

However, in addition to a persistent concern that America be a safe haven for Jews fleeing outbreaks of anti-Semitism in foreign countries, there is evidence that Jews, much more than any other European-derived ethnic group in America, have viewed liberal immigration policies as a mechanism of ensuring that America would be a pluralistic rather than a unitary, homogeneous society (e.g., Cohen 1972). Pluralism serves both internal (within-group) and external (between-group) Jewish interests. Pluralism serves internal Jewish interests because it legitimates the internal Jewish interest in rationalizing and openly advocating an interest in Jewish group commitment and non-assimilation, what Howard Sachar (1992, p. 427) terms its function in "legitimizing the preservation of a minority culture in the midst of a majority's host society." The development of an ethnic, political, or religious monoculture implies that Judaism can survive only by engaging in a sort of semi-crypsis. As Irving Louis Horowitz (1993, 86) notes regarding the long-term consequences of Jewish life under Communism, "Jews suffer, their numbers decline, and emigration becomes a survival solution when the state demands integration into a national mainstream, a religious universal defined by a state religion or a near-state religion." Both Neusner (1987) and Ellman (1987) suggest that the increased sense of ethnic consciousness seen in Jewish circles recently has been influenced by this general movement within American society toward the legitimization of minority group ethnocentrism.

More importantly, ethnic and religious pluralism serves external Jewish interests because Jews become just one of many ethnic groups. This results in the diffusion of political and cultural influence among the various ethnic and religious groups, and it becomes difficult or impossible to develop unified, cohesive groups of gentiles united in their opposition to Judaism. Historically, major anti-Semitic movements have tended to erupt in societies that have been, apart from the Jews, religiously and/or ethnically homogeneous (MacDonald, 1994; 1998). Conversely, one reason for the relative lack of anti-Semitism in America compared to Europe was that "Jews did not stand out as a solitary group of [religious] non-conformists (Higham 1984, p. 156). It follows also that ethnically and religiously pluralistic societies are more likely to satisfy Jewish interests than are societies characterized by ethnic and religious homogeneity among gentiles.

Beginning with Horace Kallen, Jewish intellectuals have been at the forefront in developing models of the United States as a culturally and ethnically pluralistic society. Reflecting the utility of cultural pluralism in serving internal Jewish group interests in maintaining cultural separatism, Kallen personally combined his ideology of cultural pluralism with a deep immersion in Jewish history and literature, a commitment to Zionism, and political activity on behalf of Jews in Eastern Europe (Sachar 1992, p. 425ff; Frommer 1978).

Kallen (1915; 1924) developed a ‘polycentric’ ideal for American ethnic relationships. Kallen defined ethnicity as deriving from one's biological endowment, implying that Jews should be able to remain a genetically and culturally cohesive group while nevertheless participating in American democratic institutions. This conception that the United States should be organized as a set of separate ethnic/cultural groups was accompanied by an ideology that relationships between groups would be cooperative and benign: "Kallen lifted his eyes above the strife that swirled around him to an ideal realm where diversity and harmony coexist" (Higham 1984, p. 209). Similarly in Germany, the Jewish leader Moritz Lazarus argued in opposition to the views of the German intellectual Heinrich Treitschke that the continued separateness of diverse ethnic groups contributed to the richness of German culture (Schorsch 1972, p. 63). Lazarus also developed the doctrine of dual loyalty which became a cornerstone of the Zionist movement.

Kallen wrote his 1915 essay partly in reaction to the ideas of Edward A. Ross (1914). Ross was a Darwinian sociologist who believed that the existence of clearly demarcated groups would tend to result in between-group competition for resources. Higham's comment is interesting because it shows that Kallen's romantic views of group co-existence were contradicted by the reality of between-group competition in his own day. Indeed, it is noteworthy that Kallen was a prominent leader of the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress). During the 1920s and 1930s the AJCongress championed group economic and political rights for Jews in Eastern Europe at a time when there was widespread ethnic tensions and persecution of Jews, and despite the fears of many that such rights would merely exacerbate current tensions. The AJCongress demanded that Jews be allowed proportional political representation as well as the ability to organize their own communities and preserve an autonomous Jewish national culture. The treaties with Eastern European countries and Turkey included provisions that the state provide instruction in minority languages and that Jews have the right to refuse to attend courts or other public functions on the Sabbath (Frommer 1978, p. 162).

Kallen's idea of cultural pluralism as a model for America was popularized among gentile intellectuals by John Dewey (Higham 1984, p. 209), who in turn was promoted by Jewish intellectuals: "If lapsed Congregationalists like Dewey did not need immigrants to inspire them to press against the boundaries of even the most liberal of Protestant sensibilities, Dewey's kind were resoundingly encouraged in that direction by the Jewish intellectuals they encountered in urban academic and literary communities" (Hollinger, 1996, p. 24).

Kallen's ideas have been very influential in producing Jewish self-conceptualizations of their status in America. This influence was apparent as early as 1915 among American Zionists, such as Louis D. Brandeis. Brandeis viewed America as composed of different nationalities whose free development would "spiritually enrich the United States and would make it a democracy par excellence" (Gal 1989, p. 70). These views became "a hallmark of mainstream American Zionism, secular and religious alike" (Gal 1989, p. 70). But Kallen's influence extended really to all educated Jews:

Legitimizing the preservation of a minority culture in the midst of a majority's host society, pluralism functioned as intellectual anchorage for an educated Jewish second generation, sustained its cohesiveness and its most tenacious communal endeavors through the rigors of the Depression and revived anti-semitism, through the shock of Nazism and the Holocaust, until the emergence of Zionism in the post-World War II years swept through American Jewry with a climactic redemptionist fervor of its own. (Sachar 1992, p. 427)

Explicit statements linking immigration policy to a Jewish interest in cultural pluralism can be found among prominent Jewish social scientists and political activists. In his review of Kallen's (1956) Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea appearing in Congress Weekly (published by the AJCongress), Joseph L. Blau (1958, p. 15) noted that "Kallen's view is needed to serve the cause of minority groups and minority cultures in this nation without a permanent majority"-the implication being that Kallen's ideology of multi-culturalism opposes the interests of any ethnic group in dominating America. The well-known author and prominent Zionist Maurice Samuel (1924, p. 215) writing partly as a negative reaction to the immigration law of 1924, wrote that "If, then, the struggle between us [i.e., Jews and gentiles] is ever to be lifted beyond the physical, your democracies will have to alter their demands for racial, spiritual and cultural homogeneity with the State. But it would be foolish to regard this as a possibility, for the tendency of this civilization is in the opposite direction. There is a steady approach toward the identification of government with race, instead of with the political State."

Samuel deplored the 1924 legislation and in the following quote he develops the view that the American state as having no ethnic implications.

We have just witnessed, in America, the repetition, in the peculiar form adapted to this country, of the evil farce to which the experience of many centuries has not yet accustomed us. If America had any meaning at all, it lay in the peculiar attempt to rise above the trend of our present civilization-the identification of race with State. . . . America was therefore the New World in this vital respect-that the State was purely an ideal, and nationality was identical only with acceptance of the ideal. But it seems now that the entire point of view was a mistaken one, that America was incapable of rising above her origins, and the semblance of an ideal-nationalism was only a stage in the proper development of the universal gentile spirit. . . . To-day, with race triumphant over ideal, anti-Semitism uncovers its fangs, and to the heartless refusal of the most elementary human right, the right of asylum, is added cowardly insult. We are not only excluded, but we are told, in the unmistakable language of the immigration laws, that we are an ‘inferior’ people. Without the moral courage to stand up squarely to its evil instincts, the country prepared itself, through its journalists, by a long draught of vilification of the Jew, and, when sufficiently inspired by the popular and "scientific" potions, committed the act. (pp. 218-220)

A congruent opinion is expressed by prominent Jewish social scientist and political activist Earl Raab1 who remarks very positively on the success of American immigration policy in altering the ethnic composition of the United States since 1965. Raab notes that the Jewish community has taken a leadership role in changing the Northwestern European bias of American immigration policy (1993a, p. 17), and he has also maintained that one factor inhibiting anti-Semitism in the contemporary United States is that "(a)n increasing ethnic heterogeneity, as a result of immigration, has made it even more difficult for a political party or mass movement of bigotry to develop" (1995, p. 91). Or more colorfully:

The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country.

We [i.e., Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible-and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever. (Raab 1993b, p. 23).2

Indeed, the ‘primary objective’ of Jewish political activity after 1945 "was . . . to prevent the emergence of an anti-Semitic reactionary mass movement in the United States" (Svonkin 1997, 8). Charles Silberman (1985, 350) notes that "American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief-one firmly rooted in history-that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of American Jews to endorse ‘gay rights’ and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called ‘social’ issues."3 Silberman's comment that Jewish attitudes are ‘firmly rooted in history’ is quite reasonable: There has indeed been a tendency for Jews to be persecuted by a culturally and/or ethnically homogeneous majority that come to view Jews as a negatively evaluated outgroup.

Similarly, in listing the positive benefits of immigration, Diana Aviv, director of the Washington Action Office of the Council of Jewish Federations states that immigration "is about diversity, cultural enrichment and economic opportunity for the immigrants" (quoted in Forward, March 8, 1996, p. 5). And in summarizing Jewish involvement in the 1996 legislative battles a newspaper account stated that "Jewish groups failed to kill a number of provisions that reflect the kind of political expediency that they regard as a direct attack on American pluralism" (Detroit Jewish News; May 10, 1996).

It is noteworthy also that there has been a conflict between predominantly Jewish neo-Conservatives and predominantly gentile paleo-conservatives over the issue of Third World immigration into the United States. Many of these neo-conservative intellectuals had previously been radical leftists,4 and the split between the neo-conservatives and their previous allies resulted in an intense internecine feud (Gottfried 1993; Rothman & Lichter 1982, p. 105). Neo-conservatives Norman Podhoretz and Richard John Neuhaus reacted very negatively to an article by a paleo-conservative concerned that such immigration would eventually lead to the United States being dominated by such immigrants (see Judis 1990, p. 33). Other examples are neo-Conservatives Julian Simon (1990) and Ben Wattenberg (1991), both of whom advocate very high levels of immigration from all parts of the world, so that the United States will become what Wattenberg describes as the world's first "Universal Nation." Based on recent data, Fetzer (1996) reports that Jews remain far more favorable to immigration to the United States than any other ethnic group or religion.

It should be noted as a general point that the effectiveness of Jewish organizations in influencing American immigration policy has been facilitated by certain characteristics of American Jewry. As Neuringer (1971, p. 87) notes, Jewish influence on immigration policy was facilitated by Jewish wealth, education, and social status. Reflecting its general disproportionate representation in markers of economic success and political influence, Jewish organizations have been able to have a vastly disproportionate effect on United States immigration policy because Jews as a group are highly organized, highly intelligent, and politically astute, and they were able to command a high level of financial, political, and intellectual resources in pursuing their political aims. Similarly, Hollinger (1996, p. 19) notes that Jews were more influential in the decline of a homogeneous Protestant Christian culture in the United States than Catholics because of their greater wealth, social standing, and technical skill in the intellectual arena. In the area of immigration policy, the main Jewish activist organization influencing immigration policy, the American Jewish Committee (AJCommittee), was characterized by "strong leadership [particularly Louis Marshall], internal cohesion, well-funded programs, sophisticated lobbying techniques, well-chosen non-Jewish allies, and good timing" (Goldstein 1990, p. 333).

In this regard, the Jewish success in influencing immigration policy is entirely analogous to their success in influencing the secularization of American culture. As in the case of immigration policy, the secularization of American culture is a Jewish interest because Jews have a perceived interest that America not be a homogeneous Christian culture. "Jewish civil rights organizations have had an historic role in the postwar development of American church-state law and policy" (Ivers 1995, p. 2). Unlike the effort to influence immigration, the opposition to a homogeneous Christian culture was mainly carried out in the courts. The Jewish effort in this case was well funded and was the focus of well-organized, highly dedicated Jewish civil service organizations, including the AJCommittee, the AJCongress, and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). It involved keen legal expertise both in the actual litigation but also in influencing legal opinion via articles in law journals and other forums of intellectual debate, including the popular media. It also involved a highly charismatic and effective leadership, particularly Leo Pfeffer of the AJCongress:

‘No other lawyer exercised such complete intellectual dominance over a chosen area of law for so extensive a period as an author, scholar, public citizen, and above all, legal advocate who harnessed his multiple and formidable talents into a single force capable of satisfying all that an institution needs for a successful constitutional reform movement. . . . That Pfeffer, through an enviable combination of skill, determination, and persistence, was able in such a short period of time to make church-state reform the foremost cause with which rival organizations associated the AJCongress illustrates well the impact that individual lawyers endowed with exceptional skills can have on the character and life of the organizations for which they work. . . . As if to confirm the extent to which Pfeffer is associated with post-Everson [i.e., post-1946] constitutional development, even the major critics of the Court's church-state jurisprudence during this period and the modern doctrine of separationism rarely fail to make reference to Pfeffer as the central force responsible for what they lament as the lost meaning of the establishment clause.’ (Ivers 1995, pp. 222-224)

Similarly, Hollinger (1996, p. 4) notes "the transformation of the ethnoreligious demography of American academic life by Jews" in the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, as well as the Jewish influence on trends toward the secularization of American society and in advancing an ideal of cosmopolitanism (p. 11). The pace of this influence was very likely influenced by immigration battles of the 1920s. Hollinger notes that the "the old Protestant establishment's influence persisted until the 1960s in large measure because of the Immigration Act of 1924: had the massive immigration of Catholics and Jews continued at pre-1924 levels, the course of American history would have been different in many ways, including, one may reasonably speculate, a more rapid diminution of Protestant cultural hegemony. Immigration restriction gave that hegemony a new lease of life" (p. 22). It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the immigration battles from 1881 to 1965 have been of momentous historical importance in shaping the contours of American culture in the late twentieth century.

The ultimate success of Jewish attitudes on immigration was also influenced by intellectual movements that collectively resulted in a decline of evolutionary and biological thinking in the academic world. Although playing virtually no role in the restrictionist position in the Congressional debates on the immigration (which focused mainly on the fairness of maintaining the ethnic status quo; see below), a component of the intellectual zeitgeist of the 1920s was the prevalence of evolutionary theories of race and ethnicity (Singerman 1986), particularly the theories of Madison Grant. In The Passing of the Great Race, Grant (1921) argued that the American colonial stock was derived from superior Nordic racial elements and that immigration of other races would lower the competence level of the society as a whole as well as threaten democratic and republican institutions. Grant's ideas were popularized in the media at the time of the immigration debates (see Divine 1957, pp. 12ff) and often provoked negative comments in Jewish publications such as The American Hebrew (e.g., March 21, 1924, pp. 554, 625).5

The debate over group differences in IQ was also tied to the immigration issue. C. C. Brigham's study of intelligence among United States army personnel concluded that Nordics were superior to Alpine and Mediterranean Europeans, and Brigham (1923, p. 210) concluded that "(i)mmigration should not only be restrictive but highly selective." In the Foreword to Brigham's book, Harvard psychologist Robert M. Yerkes stated that "The author presents not theories but facts. It behooves us to consider their reliability and meaning, for no one of us as a citizen can afford to ignore the menace of race deterioration or the evident relation of immigration to national progress and welfare" (in Brigham 1923, pp. vii-viii).

Nevertheless, as Samelson (1975) points out, the drive to restrict immigration originated long before IQ testing came into existence and restriction was favored by a variety of groups, including organized labor, for reasons other than those related to race and IQ, including especially the fairness of maintaining the ethnic status quo in the United States. Moreover, although Brigham's IQ testing results did indeed appear in the statement submitted by the Allied Patriotic Societies to the House hearings,6 the role of IQ testing in the immigration debates has been greatly exaggerated (Snyderman & Herrnstein, 1983). Indeed, IQ testing was never even mentioned in either the House Majority Report or the Minority Report, and "there is no mention of intelligence testing in the Act; test results on immigrants appear only briefly in the committee hearings and are then largely ignored or criticized, and they are brought up only once in over 600 pages of congressional floor debate, where they are subjected to further criticism without rejoinder. None of the major contemporary figures in testing . . . were called to testify, nor were their writings inserted into the legislative record" (Snyderman & Herrnstein 1983, 994).

It is also very easy to over-emphasize the importance of theories of Nordic superiority as an ingredient of popular and Congressional restrictionist sentiment. As Singerman (1986, 118-119) points out, "racial anti-Semitism" was employed by only "a handful of writers;" and "the Jewish ‘problem‘ . . . was a minor preoccupation even among such widely-published authors as Madison Grant or T. Lothrop Stoddard and none of the individuals examined [in Singerman's review] could be regarded as professional Jew-baiters or full-time propagandists against Jews, domestic or foreign." As indicated below, arguments related to Nordic superiority, including supposed Nordic intellectual superiority, played remarkably little role in Congressional debates over immigration in the 1920s, the common argument of the restrictionists being that immigration policy should reflect equally the interests of all ethnic groups currently in the country.

Nevertheless, it is probable that the decline in evolutionary/biological theories of race and ethnicity facilitated the sea change in immigration policy brought about by the 1965 law. As Higham (1984) notes, by the time of the final victory in 1965 which removed national origins and racial ancestry from immigration policy and opened up immigration to all human groups, the Boasian perspective of cultural determinism and anti-biologism had become standard academic wisdom. The result was that "it became intellectually fashionable to discount the very existence of persistent ethnic differences. The whole reaction deprived popular race feelings of a powerful ideological weapon" (Higham 1984, pp. 58-59).

Jewish intellectuals were prominently involved in the movement to eradicate the racialist ideas of Grant and others (Degler 1991, p. 200). Indeed, even during the earlier debates leading up to the immigration bills of 1921 and 1924, restrictionists perceived themselves to be under attack from Jewish intellectuals. In 1918, Prescott F. Hall, secretary of the Immigration Restriction League, wrote to Grant that "What I wanted . . . was the names of a few anthropologists of note who have declared in favor of the inequality of the races. . . . I am up against the Jews all the time in the equality argument and thought perhaps you might be able offhand to name a few (besides Osborn) whom I could quote in support" (in Samelson 1975, p. 467).

Grant also believed that Jews were engaged in a campaign to discredit racial research. In the Introduction to the 1921 edition of Passing of the Great Race, Grant complained that "(i)t is well-nigh impossible to publish in the American newspapers any reflection upon certain religions or races which are hysterically sensitive even when not mentioned by name. The underlying idea seems to be that if publication can be suppressed the facts themselves will ultimately disappear. Abroad, conditions are fully as bad, and we have the authority of one of the most eminent anthropologists in France that the collection of anthropological measurements and data among French recruits at the outbreak of the Great War was prevented by Jewish influence, which aimed to suppress any suggestion of racial differentiation in France."

Particularly important was the work of Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas and his followers. "Boas' influence upon American social scientists in matters of race can hardly be exaggerated" (Degler 1991, p. 61). He engaged in a "life-long assault on the idea that race was a primary source of the differences to be found in the mental or social capabilities of human groups. He accomplished his mission largely through his ceaseless, almost relentless articulation of the concept of culture" (p. 61). "Boas, almost single-handedly, developed in America the concept of culture, which, like a powerful solvent, would in time expunge race from the literature of social science" (p. 71).

Throughout this explication of Boas's conception of culture and his opposition to a racial interpretation of human behavior, the central point has been that Boas did not arrive at the position from a disinterested, scientific inquiry into a vexed if controversial question. Instead, his idea derived from an ideological commitment that began in his early life and academic experiences in Europe and continued in America to shape his professional outlook. . . . there is no doubt that he had a deep interest in collecting evidence and designing arguments that would rebut or refute an ideological outlook-racism-which he considered restrictive upon individuals and undesirable for society. . . . there is a persistent interest in pressing his social values upon the profession and the public. (Degler 1991, pp. 82-83)

There is evidence that Boas strongly identified as a Jew and viewed his research as having important implications in the political arena and particularly in the area of immigration policy. Boas was born in Prussia to a "Jewish-liberal" family in which the revolutionary ideals of 1848 remained influential (Stocking 1968, p. 149). Boas developed a "left-liberal posture which . . . is at once scientific and political" (Stocking 1968, p. 149) and was intensely concerned with anti-Semitism from an early period in his life (White 1966, p. 16). Moreover, Boas was deeply alienated from and hostile toward gentile culture, particularly the cultural ideal of the Prussian aristocracy (Degler 1991, p. 200; Stocking 1968, p. 150). For example, when Margaret Mead was looking for a way to persuade Boas to let her pursue her research in the South Sea islands, "she hit upon a sure way of getting him to change his mind. "I knew there was one thing that mattered more to Boas than the direction taken by anthropological research. This was that he should behave like a liberal, democratic, modern man, not like a Prussian autocrat." The ploy worked because she had indeed uncovered the heart of his personal values" (Degler 1991, p. 73).

Boas was greatly motivated by the immigration issue as it occurred early in the century. Carl Degler (1991, p. 74) notes that Boas' professional correspondence "reveals that an important motive behind his famous head-measuring project in 1910 was his strong personal interest in keeping America diverse in population." The study, whose conclusions were placed into the Congressional Record by Representative Emanuel Celler during the debate on immigration restriction (Cong. Rec., April 8, 1924, pp. 5915-5916), concluded that the environmental differences consequent to immigration caused differences in head shape. (At the time, head shape as determined by the ‘cephalic index’ was the main measurement used by scientists involved in racial differences research.) Boas argued that his research showed that all foreign groups living in favorable social circumstances had become assimilated to America in the sense that their physical measurements converged on the American type. Although he was considerably more circumspect regarding his conclusions in the body of his report (see also Stocking 1968, p. 178), Boas (1911, p. 5) stated in his Introduction that "all fear of an unfavorable influence of South European immigration upon the body of our people should be dismissed." As a further indication of Boas' ideological commitment to the immigration issue, Degler makes the following comment regarding one of Boas' environmentalist explanations for mental differences between immigrant and native children: "Why Boas chose to advance such an adhoc interpretation is hard to understand until one recognizes his desire to explain in a favorable way the apparent mental backwardness of the immigrant children" (p. 75).

Boas and his students were intensely concerned with pushing an ideological agenda within the American anthropological profession (Degler 1991; Freeman 1991; Torrey 1992). In this regard it is interesting that Boas and his associates had a much more highly developed sense of group identity, a commitment to a common viewpoint, and an agenda to dominate the institutional structure of anthropology than did their opponents (Stocking 1968, pp. 279-280). The defeat of the Darwinians "had not happened without considerable exhortation of ‘every mother's son’ standing for the ‘Right.’ Nor had it been accomplished without some rather strong pressure applied both to staunch friends and to the ‘weaker brethren’-often by the sheer force of Boas' personality" (Stocking 1968, 286). By 1915 the Boasians controlled the American Anthropological Association and held a two-thirds majority on the Executive Board (Stocking 1968, 285). By 1926 every major department of anthropology in the United States was headed by a student of Boas, the majority of whom were Jewish. According to White (1966, p. 26), Boas' most influential students were Ruth Benedict, Alexander Goldenweiser, Melville Herskovits, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead, Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, and Leslie Spier. All of this "small, compact group of scholars . . . gathered about their leader" (White 1966, p. 26) were Jews with the exception of Kroeber, Benedict and Mead. Indeed, Herskovits (1953, p. 91), whose hagiography of Boas qualifies as one of the most worshipful in intellectual history, noted that (t)he four decades of the tenure of [Boas'] professorship at Columbia gave a continuity to his teaching that permitted him to develop students who eventually made up the greater part of the significant professional core of American anthropologists, and who came to man and direct most of the major departments of anthropology in the United States. In their turn, they trained the students who . . . have continued the tradition in which their teachers were trained.

By the mid-1930s the Boasian view of the cultural determination of human behavior had a strong influence on social scientists generally (Stocking 1968, p. 300).

The ideology of racial equality was an important weapon on behalf of opening immigration up to all human groups. For example, in a 1951 statement to Congress, the AJCongress stated that "The findings of science must force even the most prejudiced among us to accept, as unqualifiedly as we do the law of gravity, that intelligence, morality and character, bear no relationship whatever to geography or place of birth."7 The statement went on to cite some of Boas' popular writings on the subject as well as the writings of Boas' protégé Ashley Montagu, perhaps the most visible opponent of the concept of race during this period. Montagu, whose original name was Israel Ehrenberg, theorized that humans are innately cooperative (but not innately aggressive) and there is a universal brotherhood among humans (see Shipman 1994, p. 159ff).

And in 1952 another Boas' protégé, Margaret Mead, testified before the President's Commission on Immigration and Naturalization (PCIN) (1953, p. 92) that "all human beings from all groups of people have the same potentialities. . . . Our best anthropological evidence today suggests that the people of every group have about the same distribution of potentialities." Another witness stated that the executive board of the American Anthropological Association had unanimously endorsed the proposition that "(a)ll scientific evidence indicates that all peoples are inherently capable of acquiring or adapting to our civilization" (PCIN 1953, p. 93). By 1965 Senator Jacob Javits (Cong. Rec., 111, 1965, p. 24469) confidently announced to the Senate during the debate on the immigration bill that "(b)oth the dictates of our consciences as well as the precepts of sociologists tell us that immigration, as it exists in the national origins quota system, is wrong, and without any basis in reason or fact for we know better than to say that one man is better than another because of the color of his skin." The intellectual revolution and its translation into public policy had been completed.

JEWISH ANTI-RESTRICTIONIST POLITICAL ACTIVITY

Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity up to 1924.

While Jewish involvement in altering the intellectual discussion of race and ethnicity appears to have had long term repercussions on United States immigration policy, Jewish political involvement was ultimately of much greater significance. Jewish opinion is not monolithic. Nevertheless, although there have been dissenters, Jews have been "the single most persistent pressure group favoring a liberal immigration policy" in the United States in the entire immigration debate beginning in 1881 (Neuringer 1971, p. ii):

In undertaking to sway immigration policy in a liberal direction, Jewish spokesmen and organizations demonstrated a degree of energy unsurpassed by any other interested pressure group. Immigration had constituted a prime object of concern for practically every major Jewish defense and community relations organization. Over the years, their spokesmen had assiduously attended congressional hearings, and the Jewish effort was of the utmost importance in establishing and financing such non-sectarian groups as the National Liberal Immigration League and the Citizens Committee for Displaced Persons.

As recounted by Nathan C. Belth (1979, p. 173) in his history of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL), "In Congress, through all the years when the immigration battles were being fought, the names of Jewish legislators were in the forefront of the liberal forces: from Adolph Sabath to Samuel Dickstein and Emanuel Celler in the House and from Herbert H. Lehman to Jacob Javits in the Senate. Each in his time was a leader of the Anti-Defamation League and of major organizations concerned with democratic development." The Jewish congressmen who are most closely identified with anti-restrictionist efforts in Congress have therefore also been leaders of the group most closely identified with Jewish ethnic political activism and self-defense.

Throughout the entire period of almost 100 years prior to achieving success with the immigration law of 1965, Jewish groups opportunistically made alliances with other groups whose interests temporarily converged with Jewish interests (e.g., a constantly changing set of ethnic groups, religious groups, pro-Communists, anti-Communists, the foreign policy interests of various presidents, the political need for president's to curry favor with groups influential in populous states in order to win national elections, etc.). Particularly noteworthy was the support of a liberal immigration policy from industrial interests wanting cheap labor, at least in the period prior to the 1924 temporary triumph of restrictionism. Within this constantly shifting set of alliances, Jewish organizations persistently pursued their goals of maximizing the number of Jewish immigrants and opening up the United States to immigration from all of the peoples of the world. As indicated in the following, the historical record supports the proposition that making the United States into a multicultural society has been a major goal of organized Jewry beginning in the nineteenth century.

The ultimate Jewish victory on immigration is remarkable because it was waged in different arenas against a potentially very powerful set of opponents. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, leadership of the restrictionists was provided by Eastern patricians such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. However, the main political basis of restrictionism from 1910 to 1952 (in addition to the relatively ineffectual labor union interests) derived from "the common people of the South and West" (Higham 1984, p. 49) and their representatives in Congress. Fundamentally, the clashes between Jews and gentiles in the period between 1900 and 1965 were a conflict between Jews and this geographically centered group. "Jews, as a result of their intellectual energy and economic resources, constituted an advance guard of the new peoples who had no feeling for the traditions of rural America" (Higham 1984, pp. 168-169).

Although often concerned that Jewish immigration would fan the flames of anti-Semitism in America, Jewish leaders fought a long and largely successful delaying action against restrictions on immigration during the period from 1891-1924, particularly as they affected the ability of Jews to immigrate. These efforts continued despite the fact that by 1905, there was "a polarity between Jewish and general American opinion on immigration" (Neuringer 1971, p. 83). In particular, while other religious groups such as Catholics and ethnic groups such as the Irish remained divided and ambivalent on their attitudes toward immigration and were poorly organized and ineffective in influencing immigration policy, and while labor unions opposed immigration in their attempt to diminish the supply of cheap labor, Jewish groups engaged in an intensive and sustained effort against attempts to restrict immigration.

As recounted by Cohen (1972, p. 40ff), the AJCommittee's efforts in opposition to immigration restriction in the early twentieth century constitute a remarkable example of the ability of Jewish organizations to influence public policy. Of all the groups affected by the immigration legislation of 1907, Jews had the least to gain in terms of numbers of possible immigrants, but they played by far the largest role in shaping the legislation (Cohen 1972, p. 41). In the subsequent period leading up to the relatively ineffective restrictionist legislation of 1917, when restrictionists again mounted an effort in Congress, "only the Jewish segment was aroused" (Cohen 1972, p. 49).

Nevertheless, because of the fear of anti-Semitism, efforts were made to prevent the perception of Jewish involvement in anti-restrictionist campaigns. In 1906, Jewish anti-restrictionist political operatives were instructed to lobby Congress without mentioning their affiliation with the AJCommittee because of "the danger that the Jews may be accused of being organized for a political purpose" (comments of Herbert Friedenwald, AJCommittee secretary; in Goldstein 1990, p. 125). Beginning in the late nineteenth century, anti-restrictionist arguments developed by Jews were typically couched in terms of universalist humanitarian ideals, and as part of this universalizing effort, gentiles from old line Protestant families were recruited to act as window dressing for their efforts and Jewish groups such as the AJCommittee funded pro-immigration groups composed of non-Jews (Neuringer 1971, p. 92).

As was the case in later pro-immigration efforts, much of the activity was behind-the-scenes personal interventions with politicians in order to minimize public perception of the Jewish role and provoke activities of the opposition. Opposing politicians, such as Henry Cabot Lodge, and organizations like the Immigration Restriction League were kept under close scrutiny and pressured by lobbyists. Lobbyists in Washington also kept a daily scorecard of voting tendencies as immigration bills wended their way through Congress and engaged in intense and successful efforts to convince Presidents Taft and Wilson to veto restrictive immigration legislation. Catholic prelates were recruited to protest the effects of restrictionist legislation on immigration from Italy and Hungary. When restrictionist arguments appeared in the media, the AJCommittee made sophisticated replies, based on scholarly data and typically couched in universalist terms as benefiting the whole society (e.g., Neuringer 1971, p. 44). Articles favorable to immigration were published in national magazines and letters to the editor were published in newspapers. And efforts were made to minimize the negative perceptions of immigration by attempting to distribute Jewish immigrants around the country and by getting Jewish aliens off public support. Legal proceedings were filed to prevent the deportation of Jewish aliens. And eventually the Committee organized mass protest meetings.

Indeed, writing in 1914, the sociologist Edward A. Ross had a clear sense that liberal immigration policy was exclusively a Jewish issue. Ross provides the following quote from prominent author and Zionist pioneer Israel Zangwill as clearly articulating the idea that America is an ideal place to achieve Jewish interests.

America has ample room for all the six millions of the Pale [i.e., the Pale of Settlement, home to most of Russia's Jews]; any one of her fifty states could absorb them. And next to being in a country of their own, there could be no better fate for them than to be together in a land of civil and religious liberty, of whose Constitution Christianity forms no part and where their collective votes would practically guarantee them against future persecution (Israel Zangwill, in Ross 1914, p. 144).

Jews therefore have a powerful interest in immigration policy:

Hence the endeavor of the Jews to control the immigration policy of the United States. Although theirs is but a seventh of our net immigration, they led the fight on the Immigration Commission's bill. The power of the million Jews in the Metropolis lined up the Congressional delegation from New York in solid opposition to the literacy test. The systematic campaign in newspapers and magazines to break down all arguments for restriction and to calm nativist fears is waged by and for one race. Hebrew money is behind the National Liberal Immigration League and its numerous publications. From the paper before the commercial body or the scientific association to the heavy treatise produced with the aid of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, the literature that proves the blessings of immigration to all classes in America emanates from subtle Hebrew brains (Ross 1914, pp. 144-145).

Ross (1914, p. 150) also reported that immigration officials had "become very sore over the incessant fire of false accusations to which they are subjected by the Jewish press and societies. United States senators complain that during the close of the struggle over the immigration bill they were overwhelmed with a torrent of crooked statistics and misrepresentations of Hebrews fighting the literacy test." It is also noteworthy that Zangwill's views on immigration were highly salient to restrictionists in the debates over the 1924 immigration law (see below). In an address reprinted in The American Hebrew (Oct. 19, 1923, p. 582), Zangwill noted that "There is only one way to World Peace, and that is the absolute abolition of passports, visas, frontiers, custom houses, and all other devices that make of the population of our planet not a co-operating civilization but a mutual irritation society."

It is noteworthy that, despite elaborate and deceptive attempts to present the pro-immigration movement as broad-based, Jewish activists were well aware of the lack of enthusiasm of other groups. During the fight over restrictionist legislation at the end of the Taft administration, Herbert Friedenwald, AJCommittee secretary, wrote that it was "very difficult to get any people except the Jews stirred up in this fight" (in Goldstein 1990, p. 203). The AJCommittee also contributed heavily to staging anti-restrictionist rallies in major American cities, but allowed other ethnic groups to take credit for the events, and it organized groups of non-Jews from the West to influence President Taft to veto restrictionist legislation (Goldstein 1990, pp. 216, 227). Later, during the Wilson Administration, Louis Marshall stated that "We are practically the only ones who are fighting [the literacy test] while a ‘great proportion’ [of the people] is "indifferent to what is done" (in Goldstein 1990, p. 249).

The forces of immigration restriction were temporarily successful with the immigration laws of 1921 and 1924 which passed despite the intense opposition of Jewish groups. Divine (1957, p. 8) notes that "Arrayed against [the restrictionist forces] in 1921 were only the spokesmen for the southeastern European immigrants, mainly Jewish leaders, whose protests were drowned out by the general cry for restriction." Similarly during the 1924 congressional hearings on immigration, "the most prominent group of witnesses against the bill were representatives of southeastern European immigrants, particularly Jewish leaders" (Divine 1957, 16).

Neuringer (1971, p. 164) notes that Jewish opposition to the 1921 and 1924 legislation was motivated less by a desire for higher levels of Jewish immigration than by opposition to the implicit theory that America should be dominated by individuals with northern and western European ancestry. The Jewish interest was thus to oppose the ethnic interests of the peoples of northwestern Europe in maintaining an ethnic status quo or increasing their percentage of the population. However, even prior to this period Jewish organizations were adamantly opposed to any restrictions on immigration based on race or ethnicity, indicating that they had a very different view of the ideal racial/ethnic composition of the United States than did the non-Jewish European-derived peoples.

Thus in 1882 the Jewish press was unanimous in its condemnation of the Chinese Exclusion Act (Neuringer 1971, p. 23) even though this act had no direct bearing on Jewish immigration. In the early twentieth century the AJCommittee at times actively fought against any bill that restricted immigration to white persons or non-Asians, and only refrained from active opposition if it judged that AJCommittee support would threaten the immigration of Jews (Cohen 1972, p. 47; Goldstein 1990, p. 250). In 1920 the Central Conference of American Rabbis passed a resolution urging that "the Nation . . . keep the gates of our beloved Republic open . . . to the oppressed and distressed of all mankind in conformity with its historic role as a haven of refuge for all men and women who pledge allegiance to its laws" (in The American Hebrew, Oct. 1, 1920, p. 594). The American Hebrew (Feb. 17, 1922; p. 373), a publication founded in 1867, that represented the German-Jewish establishment of the period, reiterated its long-standing policy that it "has always stood for the admission of worthy immigrants of all classes, irrespective of nationality." And in his testimony in the 1924 hearings before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, the AJCommittee's Louis Marshall stated that the bill echoed the sentiments of the Ku Klux Klan and characterized it as being inspired by the racialist theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. At a time when the population of the United States was over 100,000,000, Marshall stated that "we have room in this country for ten times the population we have" (p. 309), and advocated admission of all of the peoples of the world without quota limit, excluding only those who "were mentally, morally and physically unfit, who are enemies of organized government, and who are apt to become public charges;"8 similarly Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, representing the AJCongress and a variety of other Jewish organizations, asserted "the right of every man outside of America to be considered fairly and equitably and without discrimination."9

By prescribing that immigration be restricted to 3% of the foreign born as of the 1890 census, the 1924 law prescribed an ethnic status quo approximating the 1920 census. The House Majority Report emphasized the idea that prior to the legislation, immigration was highly biased in favor of Eastern and Southern Europeans and that this imbalance had been continued by the 1921 legislation in which quotas were based on the numbers of foreign born as of the 1910 census. The expressed intention was that the interests of other groups to pursue their ethnic interests by expanding their percentage of the population should be balanced against the ethnic interests of the majority in retaining their ethnic representation in the population.

The 1921 law gave 46% of quota immigration to Southern and Eastern Europe even though these areas constituted only 11.7% of the United States population as of the 1920 census. The 1924 law prescribed that these areas would get 15.3% of the quota slots-a figure that was actually higher than their present representation in the population. "The use of the 1890 census is not discriminatory. It is used in an effort to preserve as nearly as possible, the racial status quo of the United States. It is hoped to guarantee as best we can at this late date, racial homogeneity in the United States The use of a later census would discriminate against those who founded the Nation and perpetuated its institutions." (House Rep. 350, 1924, p. 16). After 3 years, quotas were derived from a national origins formula based on 1920 census data for the entire population, not only the foreign born. While there is no doubt that this legislation represented a victory for the northwestern European peoples of the United States, there was no attempt to reverse the trends in the ethnic composition of the country but rather to preserve the ethnic status quo.

While motivated by a desire to preserve an ethnic status quo, these laws may also have been motivated partly by anti-Semitism, since during this period opposition to immigration was perceived as mainly a Jewish issue (see above). This certainly appears to have been the perception of Jewish observers: for example, prominent Jewish writer Maurice Samuel (1924), writing in the immediate aftermath of the 1924 legislation, wrote that "it is chiefly against the Jew that anti-immigration laws are passed here in America as in England and Germany (p. 217)," and such perceptions continue among historians of the period (e.g., Hertzberg 1989, 239).

This perception was not restricted to Jews. In remarks before the Senate, the anti-restrictionist Senator Reed of Missouri noted that "Attacks have likewise been made upon the Jewish people who have crowded to our shores. The spirit of intolerance has been especially active as to them" (Cong. Rec. Feb. 19, 1921; p. 3463), and during World War II Secretary of War Robert Stimson stated that it was opposition to unrestricted immigration of Jews that resulted in the restrictive legislation of 1924 (Breitman & Kraut, 1987, p. 87). Moreover, the House Immigration Committee Majority Report (House Report #109, Dec. 6, 1920) stated that "by far the largest percentage of immigrants (are) peoples of Jewish extraction," (p. 4), and it implied that the majority of the expected new immigrants would be Polish Jews. The report "confirmed the published statement of a commissioner of the Hebrew Sheltering and Aid Society of America made after his personal investigation in Poland, to the effect that ‘If there were in existence a ship that could hold 3,000,000 human beings, the 3,000,000 Jews of Poland would board it to escape to America’" (p. 6).

The Majority Report also included a report by Wilbur S. Carr, head of the United States Consular Service, that stated that the Polish Jews were "abnormally twisted because of (a) reaction from war strain; (b) the shock of revolutionary disorders; (c) the dullness and stultification resulting from past years of oppression and abuse. . . ; Eighty-five to ninety percent lack any conception of patriotic or national spirit. And the majority of this percentage are unable to acquire it" (p. 9; see also Breitman and Kraut [1987, 12] for a discussion of Carr's anti-Semitism). Consular reports warned that "many Bolshevik sympathizers are in Poland" (p. 11). Similarly in the Senate, Senator McKellar cited the report that if there were a ship large enough, 3,000,000 Poles would immigrate. He also stated that "the Joint Distribution Committee, an American committee doing relief work among the Hebrews in Poland, distributes more than $1,000,000 per month of American money in that country alone. It is also shown that $100,000,000 a year is a conservative estimate of money sent to Poland from America through the mails, through the banks, and through the relief societies. This golden stream pouring into Poland from America makes practically every Pole wildly desirous of going to the country from which such marvelous wealth comes" (Cong. Rec., Feb. 19, 1921, p. 3456).

As a further indication of the salience of Polish-Jewish immigration issues, the letter on alien visas submitted by the State Department in 1921 to Albert Johnson, Chairman of the Committee on Migration and Naturalization, devoted over four times as much space to the situation in Poland as it did to any other country. The report emphasized the activities of the Polish-Jewish newspaper Der Emigrant in promoting emigration to the United States of Polish Jews, the activities of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Society and wealthy private citizens from the United States in facilitating immigration by providing money and performing the paperwork. (There was indeed a large network of agents in Eastern Europe who, in violation of United States law, "did their best to drum up business by enticing as many emigrants as possible" [Nadell 1984, 56].) The report also noted the poor condition of the prospective immigrants: "At the present time it is only too obvious that they must be subnormal, and their normal state is of very low standard. Six years of war and confusion and famine and pestilence have racked their bodies and twisted their mentality. The elders have deteriorated to a marked degree. Minors have grown into adult years with the entire period lost in their rightful development and too frequently with the acquisition of perverted ideas which have flooded Europe since 1914 [presumably a reference to radical political ideas that were common in this group; see below]" (Cong. Rec., April 20, 1921, p. 498).

The report also stated that articles in the Warsaw press had reported that "propaganda favoring unrestricted immigration" is being planned, including celebrations in New York aimed at showing the contributions of immigrants to the development of the United States. The reports for Belgium (whose emigrants originated in Poland and Czechoslovakia) and Romania also highlighted the importance of Jews as prospective immigrants. In response, Representative Isaac Siegel stated that the report was "edited and doctored by certain officials" and commented that the report did not mention countries with larger numbers of immigrants than Poland. (For example, there was no mention of Italy in the report.) Without explicitly saying so ("I leave it to every man in the House to make his own deductions and his own inferences therefrom" (Cong. Rec., April 20, 1921, p. 504), the implication was that the focus on Poland was prompted by anti-Semitism.

The House Majority report (signed by 15 of its 17 members with only Reps. Dickstein and Sabath not signing) also emphasized the Jewish role in defining the intellectual battle in terms of Nordic superiority and "American ideals" rather than in the terms of an ethnic status quo actually favored by the committee:

The cry of discrimination is, the committee believes, manufactured and built up by special representatives of racial groups, aided by aliens actually living abroad. Members of the committee have taken notice of a report in the Jewish Tribune (New York) February 8, 1924, of a farewell dinner to Mr. Israel Zangwill which says:

Mr. Zangwill spoke chiefly on the immigration question, declaring that if Jews persisted in a strenuous opposition to the restricted immigration there would be no restriction. "If you create enough fuss against this Nordic nonsense," he said, "you will defeat this legislation. You must make a fight against this bill; tell them they are destroying American ideals. Most fortifications are of cardboard, and if you press against them, they give way."

The Committee does not feel that the restriction aimed to be accomplished in this bill is directed at the Jews, for they can come within the quotas from any country in which they were born. The Committee has not dwelt on the desirability of a "Nordic" or any other particular type of immigrant, but has held steadfastly to the purpose of securing a heavy restriction, with the quota so divided that the countries from which the most came in the two decades ahead of the World War might be slowed down in order that the United States might restore its population balance. The continued charge that the Committee has built up a "Nordic" race and devoted its hearing to that end is part of a deliberately manufactured assault for as a matter of fact the committee has done nothing of the kind (House Rep. 350, 1924, p. 16).

Indeed, one is struck in reading the 1924 Congressional debate by the rarity with which the issue of Nordic racial superiority is raised by those in favor of the legislation, while virtually all of the anti-restrictionists raised this issue.10 After a particularly colorful comment in opposition to the theory of Nordic racial superiority, restrictionist leader Albert Johnson remarked that "I would like very much to say on behalf of the committee that through the strenuous times of the hearings this committee undertook not to discuss the Nordic proposition or racial matters" (Cong. Rec., April 8, 1924; p. 5911). Earlier, during the hearings on the bill, Johnson remarked in response to the comments of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise representing the AJCongress that "I dislike to be placed continually in the attitude of assuming that there is a race prejudice, when the one thing I have tried to do for 11 years is to free myself from race prejudice, if I had it at all."11 Several restrictionists explicitly denounced the theory of Nordic superiority, including Senators Bruce (p. 5955) and Jones (p. 6614) and Representatives Bacon (p. 5902), Byrnes (p. 5653), Johnson (p. 5648), McLoed (p. 5675-6), McReynolds (p. 5855), Michener (p. 5909), Miller (p. 5883), Newton (p. 6240); Rosenbloom (p. 5851), Vaile (p. 5922), Vincent (p. 6266), White, (p. 5898), and Wilson (p. 5671; all references to Cong. Rec., April 1924).

It is noteworthy that there are indications in the Congressional debate that representatives from the far West were concerned about the competence and competitive threat presented by Japanese immigrants, and their rhetoric suggested they viewed the Japanese as racially equal or superior, not inferior. For example, Senator Jones stated that "we admit that [the Japanese] are as able as we are, that they are as progressive as we are, that they are as honest as we are, that they are as brainy as we are, and that they are equal in all that goes to make a great people and nation" (Cong. Rec., April 18, 1924, p. 6614); Representative MacLafferty emphasized Japanese domination of certain agricultural markets (Cong. Rec. April 5, 1924, p. 5681), and Representative Lea noted their ability to supplant "their American competitor" (Cong. Rec. April 5, 1924, p. 5697). Representative Miller described the Japanese as "a relentless and unconquerable competitor of our people wherever he places himself" (Cong. Rec. April 8, 1924, p. 5884); See also comments of Representatives Gilbert (Cong. Rec. April 12, 1924, p. 6261) Raker (Cong. Rec. April 8, 1924, p. 5892 and Free (Cong. Rec. April 8, 1924, p. 5924ff).

Moreover, while the issue of Jewish/gentile resource competition was not raised during the Congressional debates, quotas on Jewish admissions to Ivy League universities were a highly salient issue among Jews during this period. The quota issue was highly publicized in the Jewish media and the focus of activities of Jewish self-defense organizations such as the ADL (see, e.g., the ADL statement published in The American Hebrew, Sept. 29, 1922, p. 536). Jewish/gentile resource competition may therefore have been on the minds of some legislators. Indeed, President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard was the national vice-president of the Immigration Restriction League as well as a proponent of quotas on Jewish admission to Harvard (Symott 1986, 238), suggesting that resource competition with an intellectually superior Jewish group was an issue for at least some prominent restrictionists.

It is probable that anti-Jewish animosity related to resource competition issues were widespread. Higham (1984, 141) writes of "the urgent pressure which the Jews, as an exceptionally ambitious immigrant people, put upon some of the more crowded rungs of the social ladder" (Higham 1984, 141). Beginning in the nineteenth century there were fairly high levels of covert and overt anti-Semitism in patrician circles resulting from the very rapid upward mobility of Jews and their competitive drive. In the period prior to World War I, the reaction of the gentile power structure was to construct social registers and emphasize genealogy as mechanisms of exclusion-"criteria that could not be met my money alone" (Higham 1984, 104ff, 127). During this period Edward A. Ross (1914, 164) described gentile resentment for "being obliged to engage in a humiliating and undignified scramble in order to keep his trade or his clients against the Jewish invader"-suggesting a rather broad-based concern with Jewish economic competition. Attempts at exclusion in a wide range of areas were increased in the 1920s and reached their peak during the difficult economic situation of the Great Depression (Higham 1984, 131ff).

However, in the 1924 debates the only Congressional comments suggesting a concern with Jewish/gentile resource competition (as well as a concern that the interests of Jewish intellectuals are not the same as their gentile counterparts) that I have been able to find are the following from Representative Wefald:

I for one am not afraid of the radical ideas that some might bring with them. Ideas you cannot keep out anyway, but the leadership of our intellectual life in many of its phases has come into the hands of these clever newcomers who have no sympathy with our old-time American ideals nor with those of northern Europe, who detect our weaknesses and pander to them and get wealthy through the disservices they render us.

Our whole system of amusements has been taken over by men who came here on the crest of the south and east European immigration. They produce our horrible film stories, they compose and dish out to us our jazz music, they write many of the books we read, and edit our magazines and newspapers (Cong. Rec., April 12, 1924, p. 6272).

The immigration debate also occurred amid discussion in the Jewish media of Thorsten Veblen's famous essay "The Intellectual Pre-eminence of Jews in Modern Europe" (serialized in The American Hebrew beginning September 10, 1920). In an editorial of July 13, 1923 (p. 177), The American Hebrew noted that Jews were disproportionately represented among the gifted in Louis Terman's study of gifted children and commented that "this fact must give rise to bitter, though futile, reflection among the so-called Nordics." The editorial also noted that Jews were overrepresented among scholarship winners in competitions sponsored by the state of New York. The editorial pointedly noted that "perhaps the Nordics are too proud to try for these honors. In any event the list of names just announced by the State Department of Education at Albany as winners of these coveted scholarships is not in the least Nordic; it reads like a confirmation roster at a Temple." There is indeed evidence that Jews, like East Asians, have higher IQ's than Caucasians (Lynn, 1987; MacDonald, 1994; Rushton, 1995).

The most common argument made by those favoring the legislation, and the one reflected in the majority report, is the argument that in the interests of fairness to all ethnic groups, the quotas should reflect the relative ethnic composition of the entire country. Restrictionists noted that the census of 1890 was chosen because the percentages of the foreign born of

different ethnic groups in that year approximated the general ethnic composition of the entire country in 1920. Senator Reed of Pennsylvania and Representative Rogers of Massachusetts proposed to achieve the same result by directly basing the quotas on the national origins of all people in the country as of the 1920 census, and this was eventually incorporated into the law. Representative Rogers argued that "Gentlemen, you can not dissent from this principle because it is fair. It does not discriminate for anybody and it does not discriminate against anybody" (Cong. Rec. April 8, 1924; p. 5847). Senator Reed noted, "The purpose, I think, of most of us in changing the quota basis is to cease from discriminating against the native born here and against the group of our citizens who come from northern and western Europe. I think the present system discriminates in favor of southeastern Europe (Cong. Rec., April. 16, 1924; p. 6457) (i.e., because 46% of the quotas under the 1921 went to Eastern and Southern Europe when they constituted less than 12% of the population).

As an example illustrating the fundamental argument asserting a legitimate ethnic interest in maintaining an ethnic status quo without claiming racial superiority, consider the following statement from Representative William N. Vaile of Colorado, one of the most prominent restrictionists:

Let me emphasize here that the restrictionists of Congress do not claim that the "Nordic" race, or even the Anglo-Saxon race, is the best race in the world. Let us concede, in all fairness that the Czech is a more sturdy laborer, with a very low percentage of crime and insanity, that the Jew is the best businessman in the world, and that the Italian has a spiritual grasp and an artistic sense which have greatly enriched the world and which have, indeed, enriched us, a spiritual exaltation and an artistic creative sense which the Nordic rarely attains. Nordics need not be vain about their own qualifications. It well behooves them to be humble. What we do claim is that the northern European, and particularly Anglo-Saxons made this country. Oh, yes; the others helped. But that is the full statement of the case. They came to this country because it was already made as an Anglo-Saxon commonwealth. They added to it, they often enriched, but they did not make it, and they have not yet greatly changed it. We are determined that they shall not. It is a good country. It suits us. And what we assert is that we are not going to surrender it to somebody else or allow other people, no matter what their merits, to make it something different. If there is any changing to be done, we will do it ourselves (Cong. Rec. April 8, 1924; p. 5922).

The debate in the House also illustrated the highly salient role of Jewish legislators in combating restrictionism. Representative Robison singled out Representative Sabath as the leader of anti-restrictionist efforts, and, without mentioning any other opponent of restriction, he also focused on Reps. Jacobstein, Celler, and Perlman as being opposed to any restrictions on immigration (Cong. Rec. April 5, 1924, p. 5666). Representative Blanton, complaining of the difficulty of getting restrictionist legislation through Congress, noted "When at least 65 per cent of the sentiment of this House, in my judgment, is in favor of the exclusion of all foreigners for five years, why do we not put that into law? Has Brother Sabath such a tremendous influence over us that he holds us down on this proposition?" (Cong. Rec. April 5, 1924, p. 5685). Representative Sabath responded that "There may be something to that." In addition, the following comments of Representative Leavitt clearly indicate the salience of Jewish congressmen to their opponents during the debate:

The instinct for national and race preservation is not one to be condemned, as has been intimated here. No one should be better able to understand the desire of Americans to keep America American than the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Sabath], who is leading the attack on this measure, or the gentlemen from New York, Mr. Dickstein, Mr. Jacobstein, Mr. Celler, and Mr. Perlman. They are of the one great historic people who have maintained the identity of their race throughout the centuries because they believe sincerely that they are a chosen people, with certain ideals to maintain, and knowing that the loss of racial identity means a change of ideals. That fact should make it easy for them and the majority of the most active opponents of this measure in the spoken debate to recognize and sympathize with our viewpoint, which is not so extreme as that of their own race, but only demands that the admixture of other peoples shall be only of such kind and proportions and in such quantities as will not alter racial characteristics more rapidly than there can be assimilation as to ideas of government as well as of blood. (Cong. Rec., April 12, 1924; pp. 6265-6266)

The view that Jews had a strong tendency to oppose genetic assimilation with surrounding groups occurred among other observers as well and was a component of contemporary anti-Semitism (see Singerman 1986, pp. 110-111). Jewish avoidance of exogamy certainly had a basis in reality (MacDonald 1994, Ch. 2-4). Indeed, it is noteworthy that there was powerful opposition to intermarriage even among the more liberal segments of early twentieth-century American Judaism and certainly among the less liberal segments represented by the great majority of Orthodox immigrants from Eastern Europe who had come to constitute the great majority of American Jewry. For example, the prominent nineteenth-century Reform leader David Einhorn was a lifelong opponent of mixed marriages and refused to officiate at such ceremonies, even when pressed to do so (Meyer 1988, 247). Einhorn was also a staunch opponent of conversion of gentiles to Judaism because of the effects on the "racial purity" of Judaism (Levenson 1989, 331). Similarly, the influential Reform intellectual Kaufman Kohler was also an ardent opponent of mixed marriage. In a view that is highly compatible with Horace Kallen's multi-culturalism, Kohler concluded that Israel must remain separate and avoid intermarriage until it leads mankind to an era of universal peace and brotherhood among the races (Kohler 1918, 445-446). The negative attitude toward intermarriage was confirmed by survey results. A 1912 survey indicated that only seven of 100 Reform rabbis had officiated at a mixed marriage, and a 1909 resolution of the Central Council of American Rabbis declared that "mixed marriages are contrary to the tradition of the Jewish religion and should be discouraged by the American Rabbinate" (Meyer 1988, 290). Gentile perceptions of Jewish attitudes on intermarriage therefore had a strong basis in reality.

The Involvement of Jewish Immigrants in Radical Politics. The Congressional debates of 1924 reflected a highly charged context in which Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were widely perceived to not only avoid intermarriage but also to retain a separatist culture and to be disproportionately involved in radical political movements. The perception of radicalism among Jewish immigrants was common in Jewish as well as gentile publications. The American Hebrew editorialized that "we must not forget the immigrants from Russia and Austria will be coming from countries infested with Bolshevism, and it will require more than a superficial effort to make good citizens out of them" (in Neuringer 1971, p. 165). The fact that Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were viewed as "infected with Bolshevism . . . unpatriotic, alien, unassimilable" resulted in a wave of anti-Semitism in the 1920s and contributed to the restrictive immigration legislation of the period (Neuringer 1971, p. 165). In Sorin's (1985, 46) study of immigrant Jewish radical activists, over half had been involved in radical politics in Europe before emigrating, and for those immigrating after 1900, the percentage rose to 69%. Jewish publications warned of the possibilities of anti-Semitism resulting from the leftism of Jewish immigrants, and the official Jewish community engaged in "a near-desperation . . . effort to portray the Jew as one hundred per cent American" by, e.g., organizing patriotic pageants on national holidays and by attempting to get the immigrants to learn English (Neuringer, 1971, p. 167).

Similarly, in England, the immigration of Eastern European Jews into England after 1880 had a transformative effect on the political attitudes of British Jewry in the direction of socialism, trade-unionism, and Zionism, often combined with religious orthodoxy and devotion to a highly separatist traditional lifestyle (Alderman, 1983; p. 47ff). The more established Jewish organizations fought hard to combat the well-founded image of Jewish immigrants as Zionist, religiously orthodox political radicals who refused to be conscripted into the armed forces during World War I in order to fight the enemies of the officially anti-Semitic Czarist government (Alderman, 1992, p. 237ff).

The Jewish Old Left, including the unions, the leftist press, and the leftist fraternal orders (which were often associated with a synagogue), was a part of the wider Jewish community, and Jewish members typically retained a strong Jewish ethnic identity (Howe 1976; Liebman 1979; Buhle 1980). This phenomenon occurred within the entire spectrum of leftist organizations, including organizations such as the Communist Party and the Socialist Party whose membership also included gentiles (Liebman, 1979, p. 267ff; Buhle 1980).

Werner Cohn (1958, p. 621) describes the general milieu of the immigrant Jewish community in the period from 1886-1920 as "one big radical debating society":

By 1886 the Jewish community in New York had become conspicuous for its support of the third-party (United Labor) candidacy of Henry George, the theoretician of the Single Tax. From then Jewish districts in New York and elsewhere were famous for their radical voting habits. The Lower East Side repeatedly picked as its congressman Meyer London, the only New York Socialist ever to be elected to Congress. And many Socialists went to the State Assembly in Albany from Jewish districts. In the 1917 mayoralty campaign in New York City, the Socialist and anti-war candidacy of Morris Hillquit was supported by the most authoritative voices of the Jewish Lower East Side: The United Hebrew Trades, the International Ladies' Garment Workers‘ Union, and most importantly, the very popular Yiddish Daily Forward. This was the period in which extreme radicals-like Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman-were giants in the Jewish community, and when almost all the Jewish giants-among them Abraham Cahan, Morris Hillquit, and the young Morris R. Cohen-were radicals. Even Samuel Gompers, when speaking before Jewish audiences, felt it necessary to use radical phrases.

In addition, The Freiheit, which was an unofficial organ of the Communist Party from the 1920s to the 1950s "stood at the center of Yiddish proletarian institutions and subculture . . . [which offered] identity, meaning, friendship, and understanding" (Liebman, 1979, pp. 349-350). The newspaper lost considerable support in the Jewish community in 1929 when it took the Communist party position in opposition to Zionism, and by the 1950s it essentially had to choose between satisfying its Jewish soul or its status as a Communist organ. It chose the former, and by the late 1960s it was justifying not returning the Israeli occupied territories in opposition to the line of the American Communist Party.

The relationship of Jews and the American Communist Party (CPUSA) is particularly interesting because a concern with Communist subversion under the direction of the Soviet Union was a feature of the immigration debates of the 1920s and because a substantial proportion of the CPUSA were foreign born.12 Beginning in the 1920s Jews whose backgrounds derived from Eastern Europe played a very prominent and disproportionate role in the CPUSA (Klehr, 1978, p. 37ff). Merely citing percentages of Jewish leaders probably does not adequately indicate the extent of Jewish influence in the CPUSA, since active efforts were made to recruit gentiles as a sort of ‘window dressing’ to conceal the extent of Jewish influence in the movement (Klehr, 1978, p. 40; Rothman & Lichter, 1982, p. 99).

Klehr (1978, p. 40) estimates that from 1921 to 1961, Jews constituted 33.5% of the Central Committee members and the representation of Jews was often above 40% (Klehr, 1978, p. 46). In the 1920s a majority of the members of the Socialist Party were immigrants and that an "overwhelming" (Glazer 1961, 38, 40) percentage of the CPUSA consisted of recent immigrants, a substantial percentage of whom were Jews. In Philadelphia in the 1930's, fully 72.2% of the CP members were the children of Jewish immigrants who came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Lyons 1982, 71). As late as 1929, 90% of the members of the Communist Party in Philadelphia were foreign born and in June of 1933 the national organization of the CPUSA was still 70% foreign born (Lyons 1982, 72-73). Jews were the only native-born ethnic group from which the party was able to recruit. Glazer (1969; p. 129) states that at least half of the CPUSA membership of around 50,000 were Jews into the 1950s and that there was a very high rate of turnover, so that perhaps 10 times that number of individuals were involved in the Party and there were "an equal or larger number who were Socialists of one kind or another." Writing of the 1920's, Buhle (1980, p. 89) notes that "most of those favorable to the party and the Freiheit simply did not join-no more than a few thousand out of a following of a hundred times that large."

There was also great concern within the Jewish community that the overrepresentation of Jews within the CPUSA would lead to anti-Semitism from the 1920s through the Cold War period: "The fight against the stereotype of Communist-Jew became a virtual obsession with Jewish leaders and opinion makers throughout America" (Liebman 1979, p. 515), and indeed, the association of Jews with the CPUSA was a focus of anti-Semitic literature (e.g., Henry Ford's [1920] International Jew; John Beaty's [1951] The Iron Curtain Over America). As a result, the AJCommittee engaged in intensive efforts to change opinion within the Jewish community by showing that Jewish interests were more compatible with advocating American democracy than Soviet Communism (e.g., emphasizing Soviet anti-Semitism and Soviet support of nations opposed to Israel in the period after World War II) (Cohen, 1972, p. 347ff).

Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity, 1924-1945.

The saliency of Jewish involvement in United States immigration policy continued after the 1924 legislation. Particularly objectionable to Jewish groups was the national origins quota system. For example, a writer for the Jewish Tribune stated in 1927, "we . . . regard all measures for regulating immigration according to nationality as illogical, unjust, and un-American" (in Neuringer, 1971, p. 205). During the 1930s the most outspoken critic of further restrictions on immigration (motivated now mainly by the Great Depression) was Representative Samuel Dickstein, and Dickstein's assumption of the chairmanship of the House Immigration Committee in 1931 marked the end of the ability of restrictionists to enact further reductions in quotas (Divine, 1957, pp. 79-88). Jewish groups were the primary opponents of restriction and the primary supporters of liberalized regulations during the 1930s while their opponents emphasized the economic consequences of immigration during a period of high unemployment (Divine, 1957, pp. 85-88). Between 1933 and 1938, Representative Dickstein introduced a number of bills aimed at increasing the number of refugees from Nazi Germany and supported mainly by Jewish organizations, but the restrictionists prevailed (Divine, 1957, p. 93).

During the 1930s, concerns about the radicalism and unassimilability of Jewish immigrants as well as the possibility of Nazi subversion were the main factors influencing the opposition to changing the immigration laws (Breitman & Kraut, 1987). Moreover, "(c)harges that the Jews in America were more loyal to their tribe than to their country abounded in the United States in the 1930s" (Breitman & Kraut, 1987, p. 87). There was a clear perception among all parties that the public opposed any changes in immigration policy and that the public was particularly opposed to Jewish immigration. The 1939 hearings on the proposed legislation to admit 20,000 German refugee children therefore minimized the Jewish interest in the legislation. The bill referred to people "of every race and creed suffering from conditions which compel them to seek refuge in other lands."13 The bill did not mention that Jews would be the main beneficiaries of the legislation, and witnesses in favor of the bill emphasized that only approximately 60% of the children would be Jewish. The only person identifying himself as "a member of the Jewish race" who testified in favor of the bill was "one-fourth Catholic and three-quarters Jewish" with Protestant and Catholic nieces and nephews, and from the South which was a bastion of anti-immigration sentiment.14

On the other hand, opponents of the bill threatened to publicize the very large percentage of Jews already being admitted under the quota system-presumably an indication of the powerful force of a "virulent and pervasive" anti-Semitism among the American public (Breitman & Kraut, 1987, p. 80). Opponents noted that the immigration permitted by the bill "would be for the most part of the Jewish race," and a witness testified "that the Jewish people will profit most by this legislation goes without saying" (in Divine, 1957, p. 100). The restrictionists argued in economic terms, e.g., by frequently citing President Roosevelt's statement in his second inaugural speech "one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished" and citing large numbers of needy children already in the United States. However, the main restrictionist concern was that the bill was yet another in a long history of attempts by anti-restrictionists to develop precedents that would eventually undermine the 1924 law. For example, Francis Kinnecutt, President of the Allied Patriotic Societies, emphasized that the 1924 law had been based on the idea of proportional representation based on the ethnic composition of the country. The legislation would be a precedent "for similar unscientific and favored-nation legislation in response to the pressure of foreign nationalistic or racial groups, rather than in accordance with the needs and desires of the American people."15

Wilbur S. Carr and other State Department officials were important in minimizing the entry of Jewish refugees from Germany during the 1930s. Undersecretary of State William Phillips was an ardent anti-Semite with considerable influence on immigration policy between 1933-1936 (Breitman & Kraut, 1987, p. 36). Throughout the period until the end of World War II attempts to foster Jewish immigration, even in the context of knowledge that the Nazis were persecuting Jews, were largely unsuccessful because of an unyielding Congress and the activities of bureaucrats, especially those in the State Department. Public discussion in periodicals such as The Nation (Nov. 19, 1938), and The New Republic (Nov. 23, 1938) charged that the restrictionism was motivated by anti-Semitism, while opponents of admitting large numbers of Jews argued that admission would result in an increase in anti-Semitism. Henry Pratt Fairchild (1939, p. 344), who was a restrictionist and was highly critical of the Jews (see Fairchild, 1947), emphasized the "powerful current of anti-foreignism and anti-Semitism that is running close to the surface of the American public mind, ready to burst out into violent eruption on relatively slight provocation." Public opinion remained steadfast against increasing the quotas for European refugees: a 1939 poll in Fortune (April, 1939) magazine showed that 83% answered "no" to the following question: "If you were a member of Congress would you vote yes or no on a bill to open the doors of the United States to a larger number of European refugees than now admitted under our immigration quotas?" Less than 9% replied "yes" and the remainder had no opinion.

Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity, 1946-1952.

Although Jewish interests were defeated by the 1924 legislation, "the discriminatory character of the Reed-Johnson Act continued to rankle all sectors of American Jewish opinion" (Neuringer, 1971, 196). During this period, an article by Will Maslow (1950) in Congress Weekly reiterated the belief that the restrictive immigration laws intentionally targeted Jews: "Only one type of law, immigration legislation which relates to aliens outside the country, is not subject to constitutional guarantees, and even here hostility toward Jewish immigration has had to be disguised in an elaborate quota scheme in which eligibility was based on place of birth rather than religion."

The Jewish concern to alter the ethnic balance of the United States is apparent in the debates over immigration legislation during the post World War II era. In 1948 the AJCommittee submitted a statement to the Senate subcommittee which simultaneously denied the importance of the material interests of the United States as well as affirmed its commitment to immigration of all races:

Americanism is not to be measured by conformity to law, or zeal for education, or literacy, or any of these qualities in which immigrants may excel the native-born. Americanism is the spirit behind the welcome that America has traditionally extended to people of all races, all religions, all nationalities (in Cohen 1972, p. 369).

In 1945 Representative Emanuel Celler introduced a bill ending Chinese exclusion by establishing token quotas for Chinese, and in 1948 the AJCommittee condemned racial quotas on Asians (Divine, 1957, p. 155). On the other hand, Jewish groups had an attitude of indifference or even hostility toward immigration of non-Jews from Europe (including Southern Europe) in the post-World War II era (Neuringer, 1971, pp. 356, 367-369, 383). Thus Jewish spokesmen did not testify at all during the first set of hearings on emergency legislation which allowed immigration of a limited number of German, Italian, Greek, and Dutch immigrants, escapees from Communism, and a small number of Poles, Orientals, and Arabs. When Jewish spokesmen eventually testified (partly because a small number of the escapees from Communism were Jews), they took the opportunity to once again focus on their condemnation of the national origins provisions of the 1924 law.

Jewish involvement in opposing restrictions during this period was motivated partly by attempts to establish precedents in which the quota system was bypassed and partly by attempts to increase immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe. The Citizen's Committee on Displaced Persons, which advocated legislation to admit 400,000 refugees as nonquota immigrants over a period of 4 years, was funded mainly by the AJCommittee and other Jewish contributors (See Cong. Rec., October 15, 1949, pp. 14647-14654; Neuringer 1971, p. ii) and maintained a staff of 65 people. Witnesses opposing the legislation complained that the bill was an attempt to subvert the ethnic balance of the United States established by the 1924 legislation (Divine 1957, p. 117). In the event, the bill that was reported out of the subcommittee did not satisfy Jewish interests because it established a cut-off date that excluded Jews who had migrated from Eastern Europe after World War II, including Jews fleeing Polish anti-Semitism. The Senate subcommittee "regarded the movement of Jews and other refugees from eastern Europe after 1945 as falling outside the scope of the main problem and implied that this exodus was a planned migration organized by Jewish agencies in the United States and in Europe" (Senate Report No. 950 [1948], pp. 15-16).

Jewish representatives led the assault on the bill (Divine 1957, p. 127), Representative Emanuel Celler terming it as "worse than no bill at all. All it does is exclude . . . Jews" (in Neuringer, 1971, p. 298; see also Divine, 1957, p. 127). In reluctantly signing the bill, President Truman noted that the 1945 cutoff date "discriminates in callous fashion against displaced persons of the Jewish faith" (Interpreter Releases, 25 [July 21, 1948], pp. 252-254). On the other hand, Senator Chapman Revercomb stated that "there is no distinction, certainly no discrimination, intended between any persons because of their religion or their race, but there are differences drawn among those persons who are in fact displaced persons and have been in camp longest and have a preference" (Cong. Rec. May 26, 1948, p. 6793). In his analysis, Divine (1957, p. 143) concludes that the expressed motive of the restrictionists, to limit the program to those people displaced during the course of the war, appears to be a valid explanation for these provisions. The tendency of Jewish groups to attribute the exclusion of many of their coreligionists to anti-Semitic bias is understandable; however, the extreme charges of discrimination made during the 1948 presidential campaign lead one to suspect that the northern wing of the Democratic party was using this issue to attract votes from members of minority groups. Certainly Truman's assertion that the 1948 law was anti-Catholic, made in the face of Catholic denials, indicates that political expediency had a great deal to do with the emphasis on the discrimination issue.

In the aftermath of this bill, the Citizens Committee on Displaced Persons released a report labeling the bill as characterized by "hate and racism" and Jewish organizations were unanimous in denouncing the law (Divine, 1957, p. 131). After the 1948 elections resulted in a Democratic Congress and a sympathetic President Truman, Representative Celler introduced a bill without the 1945 cutoff date, but the bill, after passing the House, failed in the Senate because of the opposition of Senator Pat McCarran. During the hearings, McCarran noted that the Citizens Committee had spent over $800,000 lobbying for a liberalized bill, with the result that "there has been disseminated over the length and breadth of this nation a campaign of misrepresentation and falsehood which has misled many public-spirited and well-meaning citizens and organizations" (Cong. Rec., April 26, 1949, pp. 5042-5043). After defeat, the Citizen's Committee increased expenditures to over $1,000,000 and succeeded in passing a bill, introduced by Representative Celler, with a 1949 cutoff date that did not discriminate against Jews but largely excluded ethnic Germans who had been expelled from Eastern Europe. In an odd twist in the debate, restrictionists now accused the anti-restrictionists of ethnic bias (e.g., Senator Eastland, Cong. Rec. April 5, 1950, p. 2737; Senator McCarran, Cong. Rec. April 5, 1950, p. 4743).

At a time when there were no outbreaks of anti-Semitism in other parts of the world creating an urgent need for Jewish immigration and with the presence of Israel as a safe haven for Jews, Jewish organizations still vigorously objected to the continuation of the national origins provisions of the 1924 law in the McCarran-Walter law of 1952 (Neuringer 1971, p. 337ff). Indeed, when District Court of Appeals Judge Simon H. Rifkind testified on behalf of a wide range of Jewish organizations against the McCarran-Walter bill he noted emphatically that because of the international situation and particularly the existence of Israel as a safe haven for Jews, Jewish views on immigration legislation were not predicated on the "plight of our co-religionists but rather the impact which immigration and naturalization laws have upon the temper and quality of American life here in the United States."16 The argument was now typically couched in terms of "democratic principles and the cause of international amity" (Cohen 1972, p. 368)-the implicit theory being that the principles of democracy required ethnic diversity and the theory that the good will of other countries depended on American willingness to accept their citizens as immigrants. Rifkind noted that "(T)he enactment of [the McCarran-Walter bill] will gravely impair the national effort we are putting forth. For we are engaged in a war for the hearts and minds of men. The free nations of the world look to us for moral and spiritual reinforcement at a time when the faith which moves men is as important as the force they wield."17

The McCarran-Walter law explicitly included racial ancestry as a criterion in its provision that Orientals would be included in the token Oriental quotas no matter where they were born. Herbert Lehman, a senator from New York and the most prominent senatorial opponent of immigration restriction during the 1950s (Neuringer 1971, p. 351), argued during the debates over the McCarran-Walter bill that immigrants from Jamaica of African descent should be included in the quota for England and stated that the bill would cause resentment among Asians (Neuringer 1971, pp. 346, 356). Representative Emanuel Celler and Representative Jacob Javits, the leaders of the anti-restrictionists in the House, made similar arguments (Cong. Rec., April 23, 1952, pp. 4306, 4219). As was also apparent in the battles dating back to the nineteenth century (see above), the opposition to the national origins legislation went beyond its effects on Jewish immigration to include advocacy of immigration into the United States of all of the racial/ethnic groups of the world.

Reflecting a concern for maintaining the ethnic status quo as well as the salience of Jewish issues during the period, the hearings of the subcommittee considering the McCarran immigration law noted that "The population of the United States has increased three-fold since 1877, while the Jewish population has increased twenty-one fold during the same period" (Senate Report No. 1515 [1950], pp. 2-4). The bill also included a provision that naturalized citizens automatically lost citizenship if they resided abroad continuously for 5 years. This provision was viewed by Jewish organizations as motivated by anti-Zionist attitudes: "Testimony by Government officials at the hearings . . . made it clear that the provision stemmed from a desire to dissuade naturalized American Jews from subscribing to a deeply held ideal which some officials in contravention of American policy regarded as undesirable . . . ."18

Reaffirming the logic of the 1920s restrictionists, the subcommittee report emphasized that a purpose of the 1924 law was "the restriction of immigration from southern and eastern Europe in order to preserve a predominance of persons of northwestern European origin in the composition of our total population" but noted that this purpose did not imply "any theory of Nordic supremacy" (Senate Report, No. 1515, [1950], pp. 442, 445-446). The argument was sometimes phrased in terms of an emphasis on the "similarity of cultural background" of prospective immigrants, but again the underlying logic was that ethnic groups already in the country had legitimate interests in maintaining the ethnic status quo.

It is important to note that Jewish spokesmen differed from other liberal groups in their motives for opposing restrictions on immigration during this period. In the following I emphasize the Congressional testimony of Judge Simon H. Rifkind who represented a very broad range of Jewish agencies in the hearings on the McCarran-Walter bill in 1951.19

1.) Immigration should come from all racial/ethnic groups:

We conceive of Americanism as the spirit behind the welcome that America has traditionally extended to people of different races, all religions, all nationalities. Americanism is a tolerant way of life that was devised by men who differed from one another vastly in religion, race background, education, and lineage, and who agreed to forget all these things and ask of a new neighbor not where he comes from but only what he can do and what is his spirit toward his fellow men (p. 566).

2.) The total number of immigrants should be maximized within very broad economic and political constraints: "(T)he regulation [of immigration] is the regulation of an asset, not of a liability" (p. 567). Rifkind emphasized several times that unused quotas had the effect of restricting total numbers of immigrants, and he viewed this very negatively (e.g., p. 569).

3.) Immigrants should not be viewed as economic assets and imported only to serve the present needs of the United States:

Looking at [selective immigration] from the point of view of the United States, never from the point of view of the immigrant, I say that we should, to some extent, allow for our temporary needs, but not to make our immigration problem an employment instrumentality. I do not think that we are buying economic commodities when we allow immigrants to come in. We are admitting human beings who will found families and raise children, whose children may reach the heights--t least so we hope and pray. For a small segment of the immigrant stream I think we are entitled to say, if we happen to be short of a particular talent, "Let us go out and look for them," if necessary, but let us not make that the all-pervading thought. (p. 570)

The opposition to needed skills as the basis of immigration was consistent with the prolonged Jewish attempt to delay the passage of a literacy test as a criterion for immigration beginning in the late nineteenth century until a literacy test was finally passed in 1917.

While Rifkind's testimony was free of the accusation that present immigration policy was based on the theory of Nordic superiority, Nordic superiority continued to be a prominent theme of other Jewish groups advocating immigration from all ethnic groups, particularly the AJCongress. The statement of the AJCongress at these hearings focused a great deal of attention on the importance of the theory of Nordic supremacy as motivating the 1924 legislation, but also noted the previous history of ethnic discrimination that existed long before these theories were developed, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the gentlemen's agreement with Japan of 1907 which limited immigration of Japanese workers, and the exclusion of other Asians in 1917. The statement noted that the 1924 legislation had succeeded in its aim of preserving the ethnic balance of the U.S. as of the 1920 census. However, it noted that "the objective is valueless. There is nothing sacrosanct about the composition of the population in 1920. It would be foolish to believe that we reached the peak of ethnic perfection in that year."20 Moreover, in an explicit statement of Horace Kallen's multicultural ideal, the AJCongress statement advocated "the thesis of cultural democracy which would guarantee to all groups ‘majority and minority alike . . . the right to be different and the responsibility to make sure that their differences do not conflict with the welfare of the American people as a whole.‘"21

During this period, the Congress Weekly, the journal of the AJCongress, regularly denounced the national origins provisions as based on the "myth of the existence of superior and inferior racial stocks" (Oct. 17, 1955; p. 3) and advocated immigration on the basis of "need and other criteria unrelated to race or national origin" (May 4, 1953, p. 3). Particularly objectionable from the perspective of the AJCongress was the implication that there should be no change in the ethnic status quo prescribed by the 1924 legislation (e.g., Goldstein, 1952a, p. 6). The national origins formula "is outrageous now . . . when our national experience has confirmed beyond a doubt that our very strength lies in the diversity of our peoples" (Goldstein, 1952b, p. 5).

As indicated above, there is some evidence that the 1924 legislation and the restrictionism of the 1930s was motivated partly by anti-Semitic attitudes. Anti-Semitism and its linkage with anti-Communism was also apparent in the immigration arguments during the 1950s preceding and following the passage of the McCarran-Walter act. Restrictionists often pointed to evidence that over 90% of American Communists had backgrounds linking them to Eastern Europe and a major thrust of their efforts was to prevent immigration from this area and to ease deportation procedures to prevent Communist subversion. Since Eastern Europe was also the origin of most Jewish immigration and because Jews were disproportionately represented among American Communists, these issues became linked and the situation lent itself to broad anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the role of Jews in American politics (e.g., Beaty, 1951). In Congress, the notorious anti-Semite Representative John Rankin, without making explicit reference to Jews, stated that

They whine about discrimination. Do you know who is being discriminated against? The white Christian people of America, the ones who created this nation. . . . I am talking about the white Christian people of the North as well as the South. . . .

Communism is racial. A racial minority seized control in Russia and in all her satellite countries, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and many other countries I could name.

They have been run out of practically every country in Europe in the years gone by, and if they keep stirring race trouble in this country and trying to force their communistic program on the Christian people of America, there is no telling what will happen to them here" (Cong. Rec., April 23, 1952, p. 4320).

Reinforcing these links, the position of mainstream Jewish organizations such as the AJCommittee, which opposed communism, often coincided with the position of the CPUSA on issues of immigration. For example, both the AJCommittee and the CPUSA condemned the McCarran-Walter act while, on the other hand, the AJCommittee had a major role in influencing the recommendations of President Truman's Commission on Immigration and Naturalization (PCIN) for relaxing the security provisions of the McCarran-Walter act, and these recommendations were warmly greeted by the CPUSA at a time when a prime goal of the security provisions was to exclude communists (Bennett, 1963, p. 166). Jews were disproportionately represented on the PCIN as well as in the organizations viewed by Congress as Communist front organizations involved in immigration issues, and this was undoubtedly highly salient to anti-Semites. The Chairman of the PCIN was Philip B. Perlman and the staff of the commission contained a high percentage of Jews, headed by Harry N. Rosenfield (Executive Director) and Elliot Shirk (Assistant to the Executive Director), and its report was wholeheartedly endorsed by the AJCongress (see Congress Weekly, Jan. 12, 1952, p. 3). The proceedings were printed as the report Whom We Shall Welcome with the cooperation of Representative Emanuel Celler.

In Congress, Senator McCarran accused the PCIN of containing communist sympathizers, and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) released a report stating that "some two dozen Communists and many times that number with records of repeated affiliation with known Communist enterprises testified before the Commission or submitted statements for inclusion in the record of the hearings. . . . Nowhere in either the record of the hearings or in the report is there a single reference to the true background of these persons" (House Report No. 1182, 85th Congress, 1st Session, p. 47). The report referred particularly to Communists associated with the American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born (ACPFB) headed by Abner Green. Green, who was Jewish, figured very prominently in these hearings, and Jews were generally disproportionately represented among those singled out as officers and sponsors of the ACPFB (pp. 13-21). HUAC provided evidence that ACPFB had close ties with the CPUSA and noted that 24 of the individuals associated with the ACPFB had signed statements incorporated into the printed record of the PCIN.

The AJCommittee was also heavily involved in the deliberations of the PCIN, including providing testimony and distributing data and other material to individuals and organizations testifying before the PCIN (Cohen, 1972, p. 371). All of its recommendations were incorporated into the final report (Cohen, 1972, p. 371) (including a de-emphasis on economic skills as criteria for immigration, scrapping the national origins legislation, and opening immigration to all the peoples of the world on a "first come, first served basis"), the only exception being that the report recommended a lower total number of immigrants than recommended by the AJCommittee and other Jewish groups. The AJCommittee thus went beyond merely advocating the principle of immigration from all racial/ethnic groups (token quotas for Asians and Africans had already been included in the McCarran-Walter act) to attempt to maximize the total number of immigrants from all parts of the world within the current political climate.

Indeed, the Commission (PCIN, 1953, p. 106) pointedly noted that the 1924 legislation had succeeded in maintaining the racial status quo and that the main barrier to changing the racial status quo was not the national origins system (because there were already high levels of non-quota immigrants and because the countries of Northern and Western Europe did not fill their quotas) but the total number of immigrants allowed into the United States. The Commission thus viewed changing the racial status quo of the United States as a desirable goal, and to that end made a major point of the desirability of increasing the total amount of immigration (PCIN, 1953, p. 42). As Bennett (1963, p. 164) notes, in the eyes of the PCIN, the 1924 legislation reducing the total number of immigrants "was a very bad thing because of its finding that one race is just as good as another for American citizenship or any other purpose."

Correspondingly, the defenders of the 1952 legislation conceptualized the issue as fundamentally one of ethnic warfare. Senator McCarran stated that subverting the national origins system "would, in the course of a generation or so, tend to change the ethnic and cultural composition of this nation" (in Bennett, 1963, p. 185), and Richard Arens, a Congressional staff member who had a prominent role in the hearings on the McCarran-Walter bill as well as in the activities of the HUAC, stated that "these are the critics who do not like America as it is and has been. They think our people exist in unfair ethnic proportions. They prefer that we bear a greater resemblance or ethnic relationship to the foreign peoples whom they favor and for whom they are seeking disproportionately greater immigration privileges" (in Bennett, 1963, 186). As Divine (1957, p. 188) notes, ethnic interests predominated on both sides; the charges of racism made against the restrictionists who were advocating the ethnic status quo were balanced against the attempts by anti-restrictionists to alter the ethnic status quo in a manner that conformed to their own perceived ethnic interests.

The salience of Jewish involvement in immigration during this period is also apparent in several other incidents. In 1950 the representative of the AJCongress testified that the retention of national origins in any form would be "a political and moral catastrophe" ("Revision of Immigration Laws" Joint Hearings, 1950, pp. 336-337). The national origins formula implies that "persons in quest of the opportunity to live in this land are to be judged according to breed like cattle at a country fair and not on the basis of their character fitness or capacity" (Congress Weekly 21, 1952, pp. 3-4). Divine (1957, p. 173) characterizes the AJCongress as representing "the more militant wing" of the opposition because of its principled opposition to any form of the national origins formula, whereas other opponents merely wanted to be able to distribute unused quotas to Southern and Eastern Europe.

Representative Francis Walter noted the "propaganda drive that is being engaged in now by certain members of the American Jewish Congress opposed to the Immigration and Nationality Code" (Cong. Rec. Mar, 13, 1952, p. 2283), noting particularly the activities of Dr. Israel Goldstein, president of the AJCongress, who had been reported in the New York Times as having stated that the Immigration and Nationality law would place "a legislative seal of inferiority on all persons of other than Anglo-Saxon origin." Representative Walter then noted the special role that Jewish organizations had played in attempting to foster family reunion rather than special skills as the basis of United States immigration policy. After Representative Jacob Javits stated that opposition to the law was "not confined to the one group the gentleman mentioned" (Congressional Record, March 13, 1952, p. 2284), Walter responded as follows:

I might call your attention to the fact that Mr. Harry N. Rosenfield, Commissioner of the Displaced Persons Commission and incidentally a brother-in-law of a lawyer who is stirring up all this agitation, in a speech recently said:

The proposed legislation is America's Nuremberg trial. It is "racious" and archaic, based on a theory that people with different styles of noses should be treated differently.

Representative Walter then went on to note that during the hearings on the bill, the only two organizations that were hostile to the entire bill were the AJCongress and the Association of Immigration and Nationality Lawyers, the latter "represented by an attorney who is also advising and counseling the American Jewish Congress." (Indeed, Goldstein [1952b] himself noted that "at the time of the Joint House-Senate hearings on the McCarran bill, the American Jewish Congress was the only civic group which dared flatly to oppose the national origins quota formula.")

Representative Emanuel Celler then stated that Walter "should not have overemphasized as he did the people of one particular faith who are opposing the bill" (p. 2285). Representative Walter agreed with Celler's comments, noting that "there are other very fine Jewish groups who endorse the bill." Nevertheless, the principle Jewish organizations, including the AJCongress, the AJCommittee, the ADL, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, did indeed oppose the bill (Cong. Rec., April 23, 1952, p. 4247), and when Judge Simon Rifkind testified against the bill in the Joint Hearings, he emphasized that he represented a very wide range of Jewish groups, "the entire body of religious opinion and lay opinion within the Jewish group, religiously speaking, from the extreme right and extreme left" (p. 563).22 Rifkind represented a long list of national and local Jewish groups, including in addition to the above, the Synagogue Council of America, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Jewish War Veterans of the United States, and 27 local Jewish councils throughout the United States. Moreover, the fight against the bill was led by Jewish members of Congress, including especially Celler, Javits, and Lehman, all of whom, as indicated above, were prominent members of the ADL.

Albeit by indirection, Representative Walter was clearly calling attention to the special Jewish role in the immigration conflict of 1952. The special role of the AJCongress in opposing the McCarran-Walter act was a source of pride within the group: on the verge of victory in 1965, the Congress bi-Weekly editorialized that it was "a cause of pride" that Rabbi Israel Goldstein had been "singled out by Rep. Walter for attack on the floor of the House of Representatives as the prime organizer of the campaign against the measures he co-sponsored" (Feb. 1, 1965; p. 3).

The perception that Jewish concerns were an important feature of the opposition to the McCarran-Walter act can also be seen in the following exchange between Representative Celler and Representative Walter. Celler noted that "The national origin theory upon which our immigration law is based . . . [mocks] our protestations based on a question of equality of opportunity for all peoples, regardless of race, color, or creed." Representative Walter replied that "a great menace to America lies in the fact that so many professionals, including professional Jews, are shedding crocodile tears for no reason whatsoever" (Cong. Rec. Jan. 13, 1953, p. 372). And in a comment referring to the peculiarities of Jewish interests in immigration legislation, Richard Arens, Staff Director of the Senate subcommittee that produced the McCarran-Walter act, pointedly noted that "one of the curious things about those who most loudly claim that the 1952 act is ‘discriminatory’ and that it does not make allowance for a sufficient number of alleged refugees, is that they oppose admission of any of the approximately one million Arab refugees in camps where they are living in pitiful circumstances after having been driven out of Israel" (in Bennett, 1963, p. 181).

The McCarran-Walter Act was passed over President Truman's veto, and Truman's "alleged partisanship to Jews was a favorite target of anti-Semites" (Cohen, 1972, p. 377). Prior to the veto, Truman was intensively lobbied, "particularly [by] Jewish societies" opposed to the bill, while government agencies, including the State Department urged Truman to sign the bill (Divine, 1957, p. 184). Moreover, individuals with openly anti-Semitic attitudes, such as John Beaty (1951), often focused on Jewish involvement in the immigration battles during this period.

Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity, 1953-1965.

During this period, the Congress Weekly regularly noted the role of Jewish organizations as the vanguard of liberalized immigration laws: For example, in its editorial of Feb. 20, 1956 (p. 3), it congratulated President Eisenhower for his "unequivocal opposition to the quota system which, more than any other feature of our immigration policy, has excited the most widespread and most intense aversion among Americans. In advancing this proposal for ‘new guidelines and standards’ in determining admissions, President Eisenhower has courageously taken a stand in advance of even many advocates of a liberal immigration policy and embraced a position which had at first been urged by the American Jewish Congress and other Jewish agencies."

The AJCommittee made a major effort to keep the immigration issue alive during a period of widespread apathy among the American public between the passage of the McCarran-Walter act and the early 1960s. Jewish organizations intensified their effort during this period (Cohen, 1972, pp. 370-373; Neuringer, 1971, p. 358), with the AJCommittee helping to establish the Joint Conference on Alien Legislation and the American Immigration Conference (organizations representing pro-immigration forces) as well as providing most of the funding and performing most of the work of these groups. In 1955 the AJCommittee organized a group of influential citizens as the National Commission on Immigration and Citizenship "in order to give prestige to the campaign" (Cohen, 1972, p. 373). "All these groups studied immigration laws, disseminated information to the public, presented testimony to Congress, and planned other appropriate activities. . . . There were no immediate or dramatic results; but AJC's dogged campaign in conjunction with like-minded organizations ultimately prodded the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to action" (Cohen, 1972, p. 373).

An article by Oscar Handlin (1952), the prominent Harvard historian of immigration, is a fascinating microcosm of the Jewish approach to immigration during this period. Writing in Commentary (a publication of the AJCommittee) almost 30 years after the 1924 defeat and in the immediate aftermath of the McCarran-Walter act, Handlin entitled his article "The immigration fight has only begun: Lessons of the McCarran-Walter setback." The title is a remarkable indication of the tenacity and persistence of Jewish commitment to this issue. The message is to not be discouraged by the recent defeat which occurred despite "all the effort toward securing the revision of our immigration laws" (p. 2).

Handlin attempts to cast the argument in universalist terms as benefiting all Americans and as conforming to American ideals that "all men, being brothers, are equally capable of being Americans" (p.7). Current immigration law reflects "racist xenophobia" (p. 2) by its token quotas for Asians and its deprivation of the right of West Indian Blacks to take advantage of British quotas. Handlin ascribes the restrictionist sentiments of Pat McCarran to "the hatred of foreigners that was all about him in his youth and by the dim, recalled fear that he himself might be counted among them" (p. 3)-a sort of psychoanalytic identification-with-the-aggressor argument (McCarran was Catholic).

In his article Handlin repeatedly uses the term "we" (as in "if we cannot beat McCarran and his cohorts with their own weapons, we can do much to destroy the efficacy of those weapons (p. 4)," suggesting Handlin's belief in a unified Jewish interest in liberal immigration policy and presaging a prolonged "chipping away" of the 1952 legislation in the ensuing years. Handlin's anti-restrictionist strategy included altering the views of social scientists to the effect "that it was possible and necessary to distinguish among the ‘races‘ of immigrants that clamored for admission to the United States" (p. 4). Handlin's proposal to recruit social scientists in the immigration battles is congruent with the political agenda of the Boasian school of anthropology discussed above. And as Higham (1984) notes, the ascendancy of such views was as an important component of the ultimate victory over restrictionism.

In an arguably tendentious rendering of the logic of preserving the ethnic status quo that underlay the arguments for restriction in the period from 1921-1952, Handlin stated:

‘The laws are bad because they rest on the racist assumption that mankind is divided into fixed breeds, biologically and culturally separated from each other, and because, within that framework, they assume that Americans are Anglo-Saxons by origin and ought to remain so. To all other peoples, the laws say that the United States ranks them in terms of their racial proximity to our own ‘superior‘ stock; and upon the many, many millions of Americans not descended from the Anglo-Saxons, the laws cast a distinct imputation of inferiority’(p. 5).

Handlin then deplored the apathy of other "hyphenated Americans" to share the enthusiasm of the Jewish effort: "Many groups failed to see the relevance of the McCarran-Walter Bill to their own position;" he suggested that they ought to act as groups to assert their rightful interests: "The Italian American has the right to be heard on these issues precisely as an Italian American" (p. 7; italics in text). The implicit assumption is that America ought to be composed of cohesive subgroups with a clear sense of their group interests in opposition to the peoples deriving from Northern and Western Europe or of the United States as a whole. And there is the implication that Italian-Americans have an interest in furthering immigration of Africans and Asians and in creating such a multiracial and multicultural society.

Shortly after Handlin's article, William Petersen (1955), also writing in Commentary, argued that pro-immigration forces should be explicit in their advocacy of a multicultural society, and that the importance of this goal transcended the importance of achieving any self-interested goal of the United States, such as obtaining needed skills or improving foreign relations. In making his case he cited a group of predominantly Jewish social scientists whose works, beginning with Horace Kallen's plea for a multicultural, pluralistic society, "constitute the beginning of a scholarly legitimization of the different immigration policy that will perhaps one day become law" (p. 86), including, besides Kallen, Melville Herskovits, Geoffrey Gorer, Samuel Lubell, David Riesman, Thorsten Sellin, and Milton Konvitz.

These social scientists did indeed contribute to the immigration battles. For example, the following quotation from a scholarly book on immigration policy by Milton Konvitz of Cornell University reflects the rejection of national interest as an element of United States immigration policy-a hallmark of the Jewish approach to immigration:

To place so much emphasis on technological and vocational qualifications is to remove every vestige of humanitarianism from our immigration policy. We deserve small thanks from those who come here if they are admitted because we find that they are "urgently" needed, by reason of their training and experience, to advance our national interests. This is hardly immigration; it is the importation of special skills or know-how, not greatly different from the importation of coffee or rubber. It is hardly in the spirit of American ideals to disregard a man's character and promise and to look only at his education and the vocational opportunities he had the good fortune to enjoy (Konvitz, 1953, p. 26).

Handlin wrote that the McCarran-Walter law was only a temporary setback and he was right. Thirty years after the triumph of restrictionism, only Jewish groups remained as persistent and tenacious advocates of a multicultural America. Forty-one years after the 1924 triumph of restrictionism and the national origins provision and only 13 years after its reaffirmation with the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, Jewish organizations successfully supported ending the geographically based national origins basis of immigration intended to result in an ethnic status quo in what was now a radically altered intellectual and political climate.

Particularly important is the provision in the Immigration Act of 1965 that expanded the number of non-quota immigrants. Beginning in their testimony on the 1924 law, Jewish spokesmen had been in the forefront in attempts to admit family members on a nonquota basis (Neuringer, 1971, p. 191). During the House debates on immigration surrounding the McCarran-Walter Act, Representative Walter (Cong. Rec., p. 2284, March 13, 1952) noted the special focus that Jewish organizations had on family reunion rather than on special skills. Responding to Representative Javits who had complained that under the bill 50% of the quota for ‘Negroes’ from the British West Indies colonies would be reserved for people with special skills, Walter noted that "I would like to call the gentleman's attention to the fact that this is the principle of using 50 percent of the quota for people needed in the United States. But, if that entire 50 percent is not used in that category, then the unused numbers go down to the next category which replies to the objections that these Jewish organizations make much of, that families are being separated."

Prior to the 1965 law, Bennett (1963, p. 244), commenting on the family unification aspects of the 1961 immigration legislation, noted that the "relationship by blood or marriage and the principle of uniting families have become the ‘open Sesame’ to the immigration gates." Moreover, despite repeated denials by the anti-restrictionists that their proposals would affect the ethnic balance of the country, Bennett (1963, p. 256) commented that the "repeated, persistent extension of nonquota status to immigrants from countries with oversubscribed quotas and flatly discriminated against by [the McCarran-Walter act] together with administrative waivers of inadmissibility, adjustment of status and private bills, is helping to speed and make apparently inevitable a change in the ethnic face of the nation" (p. 257)-a reference to the ‘chipping away’ of the 1952 law recommended as a strategy in Handlin's article. Indeed, a major argument apparent in the debate over the 1965 legislation was that the 1952 law had been so weakened that it had largely become irrelevant and there was a need to overhaul immigration legislation to legitimize a de facto situation.

Bennett also noted that "(t)he stress on the immigration issue arises from insistence of those who regard quotas as ceilings, not floors [opponents of restriction often referred to unused quotas as ‘wasted’], who want to remake America in the image of small-quota countries and who do not like our basic ideology, cultural attitudes and heritage. They insist that it is the duty of the United States to accept immigrants irrespective of their assimilability or our own population problems. They insist on remaining hyphenated Americans" (1963, p. 295).

The family-based emphasis of the quota regulations of the 1965 law (e.g., the provision that at least 24% of the quota for each area be set aside for brothers and sisters of citizens) has resulted in a multiplier effect which ultimately subverted the quota system entirely by allowing for a "chaining" phenomenon in which endless chains of the close relatives of close relatives are admitted outside the quota system:

Imagine one immigrant, say an engineering student, who was studying in the U. S. during the 1960's. If he found a job after graduation, he could then bring over his wife [as the spouse of a resident alien], and six years later, after being naturalized, his bothers and sisters [as siblings of a citizen]. They, in turn, could bring their wives, husbands, and children. Within a dozen years, one immigrant entering as a skilled worker could easily generate 25 visas for in-laws, nieces, and nephews (McConnell 1988, p. 98).

The 1965 law also de-emphasized the criterion that immigrants should have needed skills. (In 1986, less than 4% of immigrants were admitted on the basis of needed skills, while 74% were admitted on the basis of kinship [see Brimelow, 1995].) As indicated above, the rejection of a skill requirement or other tests of competence in favor of "humanitarian goals" and family unification had been an element of Jewish immigration policy at least since debate on the McCarran-Walter act of the early 1950s and extending really to the long opposition to literacy tests dating from the end of the nineteenth century.

Senator Jacob Javits played a prominent role in the Senate hearings on the 1965 bill, and Emanuel Celler, who fought for unrestricted immigration for over 40 years in the House of Representatives, introduced similar legislation in that body. Jewish organizations (American Council for Judaism Philanthropic Fund; Council of Jewish Federations & Welfare Funds; B'nai B'rith Women) filed briefs in support of the measure before the Senate Subcommittee, as did organizations such as the ACLU and the Americans for Democratic Action with a large Jewish membership.

Indeed, it is noteworthy that well before the ultimate triumph of the Jewish policy on immigration, Javits (1951) authored an article entitled "Let's open the gates" that proposed immigration level of 500,000 per year for 20 years with no restrictions on national origin. In 1961 Javits proposed a bill that "sought to destroy the [national origins quota system] by a flank attack and to increase quota and nonquota immigration" (Bennett, 1963, p. 250). In addition to provisions aimed at removing barriers due to race, ethnic and national origins, included in this bill was a provision that brothers, sisters, and married sons or daughters of United States citizens and their spouses and children who had become eligible under the quota system in legislation of 1957 be included as nonquota immigrants-an even more radical version of the provision whose incorporation in the 1965 law facilitated non-European immigration into the United States. Although this provision of Javit's bill was not approved at the time, the bill's proposals for softening previous restrictions on Asian and Black immigration as well as removing racial classification from visa documents (thus allowing unlimited nonquota immigration of Asians born in the Western Hemisphere) were approved.

It is also interesting that the main victory of the restrictionists in 1965 was that Western Hemisphere nations were included in the new quota system thus ending the possibility of unrestricted immigration from those regions. In speeches before the Senate, Senator Javits (Cong. Rec. 111, 1965, p. 24469) bitterly opposed this extension of the quota system, arguing that placing any limits on immigration of all of the people of the Western Hemisphere would have severely negative implications on United States foreign policy. In a highly revealing discussion of the bill before the Senate, Senator Sam Ervin (Cong. Rec. 89th Congress, 1st session, pp. 24446-51, 1965) noted that "those who disagree with me express no shock that Britain, in the future, can send us 10,000 fewer immigrants than she has sent on an annual average in the past. They are only shocked that British Guyana cannot send us every single citizen of that country who wishes to come." Clearly the forces of liberal immigration really wanted unlimited immigration into the United States.

The pro-immigrationists also failed to prevent a requirement that the Secretary of Labor determine that there are insufficient Americans able and willing to perform the labor which the aliens intend to perform, and that the employment of such aliens will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of American workers. Writing in the American Jewish Year Book, Liskofsky (1966, 174) notes that pro-immigration groups opposed these regulations but agreed to them in order to get a bill that ended the national origins provisions. After passage "they became intensely concerned. They voiced publicly the fear that the new, administratively cumbersome procedure might easily result in paralyzing most immigration of skilled and unskilled workers as well as of non-preference immigrants." Reflecting the long Jewish opposition to the idea that immigration policy should be in the national interest, the economic welfare of American citizens was irrelevant; securing high levels of immigration had become an end in itself.

The 1965 law is having the effect that it seems reasonable to suppose had been intended by its Jewish advocates all along: the Census Bureau projects that by the year 2050, European-derived peoples will no longer be a majority of the population of America. Moreover, multiculturalism has already become a powerful ideological and political reality (Brimelow, 1995). Although the proponents of the 1965 legislation continued to insist that the bill would not affect the ethnic balance of the United States or even impact its culture, it is difficult to believe that at least some of the proponents were unaware of the eventual implications. Opponents, certainly, were quite clear that it would indeed affect the ethnic balance of the United States. Given the intense involvement of organizations such as the AJCommittee in the details of immigration legislation and their very negative attitudes toward the North-Western European bias of pre-1965 United States immigration policy and very negative attitudes toward the idea of an ethnic status quo embodied, e.g., in the PCIN document Whom We Shall Welcome, it appears unlikely to suppose that these organizations were unaware of the inaccuracy of the projections of the effects of this legislation that were made by its supporters. Given the clearly articulated interests in ending the ethnic status quo evident in the arguments of anti-restrictionists throughout the period from 1924-1965, the 1965 law would not have been perceived by its proponents as a victory unless they viewed it as ultimately changing the ethnic status quo.

Revealingly, the 1965 law was viewed as a victory by the anti-restrictionists, and it is noteworthy that after regularly condemning United States immigration law and championing the eradication of the national origins formula precisely because it had produced an ethnic status quo, The Congress bi-Weekly completely ceased publishing articles on this topic.

Moreover, Lawrence Auster (1990, p. 31ff) shows that the supporters of the legislation repeatedly glossed over the distinction between quota and non-quota immigration and failed to mention the effect that the legislation would have on non-quota immigration. Projections of the number of new immigrants failed to take account of the well-known and often commented-upon fact that the old quotas favoring Western European countries were not being filled. Moreover, continuing a tradition of over 40 years, the rhetoric of those in favor of the bill presented the legislation of 1924 and 1952 as based on theories of racial superiority and as involving racial discrimination rather than in terms of an attempt to create an ethnic status quo.

Even in 1952, Senator McCarran was well aware of the high stakes at risk in immigration policy:

‘I believe that this nation is the last hope of Western civilization and if this oasis of the world shall be overrun, perverted, contaminated or destroyed, then the last flickering light of humanity will be extinguished. I take no issue with those who would praise the contributions which have been made to our society by people of many races, of varied creeds and colors. America is indeed a joining together of many streams which go to form a mighty river which we call the American way. However, we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies. Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain. The solution of the problems of Europe and Asia will not come through a transplanting of those problems en masse to the United States. . . . I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the enemies of this legislation succeed in riddling it to pieces, or in amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed more to promote this nation's downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence as a nation.’ (Senator Pat McCarran, Cong. Rec., March 2, 1953, p. 1518.)

CONCLUSION

The defeats of 1924 and 1952 did not prevent the ultimate victory of the Jewish interest in combating the cultural, political, and demographic dominance of the European-derived peoples of the United States. What is truly remarkable is the tenacity with which Jewish ethnic interests were pursued for a period of close to 100 years. Also remarkable was the ability to frame the argument of immigration-restrictionists in terms of racial superiority in the period from 1924-1965 rather than in such positive terms as the ethnic interests of the peoples of northern and western Europe in maintaining a status quo as of 1924.

During the period between 1924 and 1965 Jewish interests were largely thwarted, but this did not prevent the ultimate triumph of the Jewish perspective on immigration. In a very real sense the result of the immigration changes fostered by Jewish intellectual and political activity have constituted a long term victory over the political, demographic, and cultural representation of "the common people of the South and West" (Higham 1984, 49) whose congressional delegates were in the forefront of the restrictionist forces. Former Secretary of the Navy James Webb (1995) notes that it is the descendants of those WASPS who settled the West and South who "by and large did the most to lay out the infrastructure of this country, quite often suffering educational and professional regression as they tamed the wilderness, built the towns, roads and schools, and initiated a democratic way of life that later white cultures were able to take advantage of without paying the price of pioneering. Today they have the least, socioeconomically, to show for these contributions. And if one would care to check a map, they are from the areas now evincing the greatest resistance to government practices." Webb's ideas are not new but reflect the sentiments a great many congressmen voiced during the immigration debates of the 1920's.

It is instructive to consider the possible long term effects of this sea change in American immigration policy combined with the current emphasis on multi-culturalism. The shift to multiculturalism has coincided with an enormous growth of immigration from non-European-derived peoples beginning with the Immigration Act of 1965 which favored immigrants from non-European countries. Many of these immigrants come from non-Western countries where cultural, gender, and genetic segregation are the norm. Within the context of multicultural America, they are encouraged to retain their own languages and religions and encouraged to marry within the group.

The movement toward ethnic separatism is highly problematic. Historically, ethnic separatism has been an extremely divisive force within societies. At the present time there are ethnically based conflicts on every continent, and formerly multi-ethnic societies are breaking away and establishing ethno-states based on ethnic homogeneity (Tullberg & Tullberg, 1997). These results confirm the expectation that indeed ethnicity is important in human affairs. People appear to be extremely aware of group membership, and ethnicity remains a common source of group identity. Individuals are also keenly aware of the relative standing of their own group in terms of resource control and social status. And they are willing to take extraordinary steps in order to achieve and retain economic and political power in defense of these group imperatives.

It is instructive to think of the circumstances which could minimize group conflict given the assumption of ethnic separatism. Theorists of cultural pluralism, such as Horace Kallen, envision the possibility that different ethnic groups would retain their distinctive identity in the context of complete political equality and economic opportunity. The difficulty with this scenario is that no provision is made for the results of competition for resources within the society.

In the best of circumstances one might suppose that the separated ethnic groups would engage in absolute reciprocity with each other, so that there would be no differences in terms of any measure of success in the society, including social class membership, economic role (e.g., producer versus consumer; creditor versus debtor; manager versus worker), or fertility between the separated ethnic groups. All groups would have approximately equal numbers and equal political power, or if there were different numbers there would be provisions ensuring that minorities could retain equitable representation in terms of the markers of success. Such conditions would minimize hostility between the groups because it would be difficult to attribute one's status to the actions of the other group.

However, given the existence of ethnic separatism, it would still be in the interests of each group to advance its own interests at the expense of the other groups. All things being equal, a given ethnic group would be better off if it ensured that the other group had fewer resources, a lower social status, lower fertility, and proportionately less political power than itself. (Indeed, lowering the political and demographic power of the European-derived peoples of the United States has clearly been the aim of the Jewish political and intellectual activities discussed here.) The hypothesized steady state of equality therefore implies a set of balance of power relationships-each side constantly checking to make sure that the other is not cheating; each side constantly looking for ways to obtain dominance and exploitation by any possible means; each side willing to compromise only because of the threat of retaliation by the other side; each side willing to cooperate in a manner which involves a cost only if forced to do so by, e.g., the presence of external threat. Clearly any type of cooperation which would involve true altruism toward the other group would not be expected.

Thus the ideal situation of absolute equality would certainly require a great deal of monitoring and undoubtedly be characterized by a great deal of mutual suspicion. However, in the real world even this rather grim ideal is highly unlikely. In the real world, ethnic groups differ in their talents and abilities; they differ in their numbers, fertility, and the extent to which they encourage parenting practices conducive to resource acquisition; and they differ in the resources held at any point in time and in their political power. Equality or proportionate equity would be extremely difficult to attain, or to maintain after it has been achieved, without extraordinary levels of monitoring and without extremely intense social controls which would enforce ethnic quotas on the accumulation of wealth, admission to universities, obtaining high status jobs, etc.

Because of differing talents and abilities and differing parenting styles between ethnic groups, there would be a need to have different criteria for qualifying and retaining jobs depending on ethnic group membership.23 In the real world, therefore, there would have to be extraordinary efforts made to attain this steady state of ethnic balance of power and resources. It is of great interest that the ideology of Jewish-gentile co-existence has sometimes included the idea that the different ethnic groups develop a similar occupational profile and (implicitly) control resources in proportion to their numbers. The dream of the German assimilationists during the nineteenth-century was that the occupational profile of the Jews after emancipation would be highly similar to that of the gentiles-a "utopian expectation . . . shared by many, Jews and non-Jews alike" (Katz, 1986, p. 67). Efforts were made to decrease the percentage of Jews involved in trade and increase the percentages involved in agriculture and artisanry. In the event, however, the result of emancipation was that Jews were vastly overrepresented among the economic and cultural elite of the society, and this overrepresentation was a critical feature of German anti-Semitism from 1870-1933.

Similarly, during the 1920s plans were proposed in which each ethnic group received a percentage of placements at Harvard and other universities reflecting the percentage of racial and national groups in the United States. These plans certainly reflect the importance of ethnicity in human affairs, but surely a society based on this type of ethnic special interest is not one which a social engineer in the manner of Lycurgus, Moses, Plato, or the American Founding Fathers would design as a blueprint for an entire society. The levels of social tension are bound to be chronically high. Moreover, there is a considerable chance that ethnic warfare would occur even if precise parity had been achieved via intensive social controls: as indicated above, it would always be in the interests of any ethnic group to obtain hegemony over the others.

If one adopts a cultural pluralism model in which there is free competition for resources and reproductive success, differences between ethnic groups are inevitable, and history suggests that such differences would result in animosity from the groups that are losing out. The Tutsi/Hutu struggle in Rwanda and its neighbors is only the latest of many tragic examples. Assuming that there are ethnic differences in talents and abilities, the supposition that ethnic separatism could be a stable situation without ethnic animosity requires either a balance of power situation maintained with powerful social controls, as described above, or it requires that at least some ethnic groups be unconcerned that they are losing in the competition.

I regard this last possibility as remote at best. The proposition that an ethnic group should or would be unconcerned with its own eclipse and domination is certainly not expected by any theoretical or ideological perspective of which I am aware. The present immigration policy essentially places America "in play" as an arena of ethnic competition in a sense which does not apply in the non-Western nations of the world where the implicit assumption is that territory is held by its historically-dominant people. Under present policies, each racial/ethnic group in the world is encouraged to press its interest in expanding its demographic and political presence in America and can be expected to do so if given the opportunity.

Contrary to policies they advocate for the United States, American Jews have had no interest at all in proposing that immigration to Israel should be similarly multi-ethnic or that Israel should have an immigration policy that would threaten the hegemony of Jews in Israel. Indeed, the very deep ethnic conflict within Israel is an excellent example of the failure of multi-culturalism. Similarly, while Jews have been on the forefront of movements to separate church and state in the United States and often protested lack of religious freedom in the Soviet Union, the control of religious affairs by the Orthodox in Israel has received only belated and half-hearted opposition by American Jewish organizations (Cohen, 1972, 317) and has not prevented the all-out support of Israel by American Jews, despite the fact that Israel's policy regarding immigration is quite the opposite of that of Western democracies.

At present the interests of non-European-derived peoples to expand demographically and politically in the United States are widely perceived as a moral imperative, while the attempts of the European-derived peoples to retain demographic, political, and cultural control are represented as "racist" and patently immoral. From the perspective of these European-derived peoples, the prescribed morality entails altruism and self-sacrifice, and it is unlikely to be viable in the long run. And, as we have seen, the viability of such a morality of self-sacrifice is especially problematic in the context of a multicultural society in which everyone is highly conscious of group membership and there is between-group competition for resources.

Although the success of the anti-restrictionist effort is an indication that people can be induced to be altruistic toward other groups, I rather doubt such altruism will continue to occur if there are obvious signs that the status and political power of the European-derived group is decreasing while the power of other groups increases as a result of immigration and other social policies. The prediction, both on common sense grounds and on the basis of psychological research on social identity process (e.g., Hogg & Abrams, 1987), is that as other groups become increasingly powerful and salient in a multicultural society, the European-derived peoples of the United States will become increasingly unified and that contemporary divisive influences among the European-derived peoples of the United States (e.g., issues related to gender and sexual orientation; social class differences; religious differences) will be increasingly perceived as unimportant. Eventually these groups will develop greater cohesion and a sense of common interest in their interactions with the other ethnic groups with profound consequences on the future history of America and the West.

NOTES

1. Raab is associated with the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL), and is executive director emeritus of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University. He is also a columnist for the San Francisco Jewish Bulletin. Among other works, he is co-author, with Seymour Lipset of The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing-Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (Lipset & Raab 1970), a volume in a series of books on anti-Semitism in the United States sponsored by the ADL.

2. In Australia, Miriam Faine, an editorial committee member of the Australian Jewish Democrat stated that "The strengthening of multicultural or diverse Australia is also our most effective insurance policy against anti-semitism. The day Australia has a Chinese Australian Governor General I would feel more confident of my freedom to live as a Jewish Australian" (in McCormack 1994, p. 11).

3. Moreover, a deep concern that an ethnically and culturally homogeneous America would compromise Jewish interests can be seen in Silberman's comments on the attraction of Jews to "the Democratic party . . . with its traditional hospitality to non-WASP ethnic groups. . . . A distinguished economist who strongly disagreed with Mondale's economic policies voted for him nonetheless. "I watched the conventions on television," he explained, "and the Republicans did not look like my kind of people." That same reaction led many Jews to vote for Carter in 1980 despite their dislike of him; "I'd rather live in a country governed by the faces I saw at the Democratic convention than by those I saw at the Republican convention&#quot; a well-known author told me" (pp. 347-348).

4. Goldberg (1996, 160) notes that the future neo-conservatives were disciples of Trotskyist theoretician Max Schachtman. A good example is Irving Kristol's (1983) "Memoirs of a Trotskyist."

5. Grant's letter to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization emphasized the principle argument of the restrictionists, i.e., that the use of the 1890 census of the foreign born as the basis of the immigration law was fair to all ethnic groups currently in the country, and that the use of the 1910 census discriminated against the "native Americans whose ancestors were in this country before its independence." He also argued in favor of quotas from Western Hemisphere nations because these countries "in some cases furnish very undesirable immigrants. The Mexicans who come into the United States are overwhelmingly of Indian blood, and the recent intelligence tests have shown their very low intellectual status. We have already got too many of them in our Southwestern States, and a check should be put on their increase" (p. 571). Grant was also concerned about the unassimilability of recent immigrants. He included with his letter a Chicago Tribune editorial commenting on a situation in Hamtramck, Michigan in which recent immigrants were described as demanding "Polish rule," the expulsion of non-Poles, and that only the Polish language be spoken even by federal officials. Grant also argued that differences in reproductive rate would result in displacement of groups that delayed marriage and had fewer children-clearly a concern that as a result of immigration his ethnic group would be displaced by ethnic groups with a higher rate of natural increase. (Restriction of Immigration; Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization House of Representatives, sixty-eighth Congress, First Session, Jan. 5, 1924; p. 570.)

6. Restriction of Immigration; Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization House of Representatives, sixty-eighth Congress, First Session, Jan. 5, 1924; p. 580-581.

7. Statement of the AJCongress, Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Congress, first session, on S. 716, H. R. 2379, and H. R. 2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, p. 391.

8. Restriction of Immigration; Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization House of Representatives, sixty-eighth Congress, First Session, Jan. 3, 1924; p. 303.

9. Restriction of Immigration; Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization House of Representatives, sixty-eighth Congress, First Session, Jan. 3, 1924; p. 341.

10. For example, in the Senate debates of April 15-19, 1924, Nordic superiority was not mentioned by any of the proponents of the legislation but was mentioned by the following opponents of the legislation: Senators Colt (p. 6542), Reed (p. 6468), Walsh (p. 6355). In the House debates of April 5, 8, and 15, virtually all of the opponents of the legislation raised the racial inferiority issue, including Reps. Celler (p. 5914-5915), Clancy (p. 5930), Connery (p. 5683), Dickstein (p. 5655-5656, 5686), Gallivan (p. 5849), Jacobstein (p. 5864), James (p. 5670), Kunz (p. 5896), LaGuardia (p. 5657), Mooney (p. 5909-5910), O'Connell (p. 5836), O'Connor (p. 5648), Oliver (p. 5870), O'Sullivan (p. 5899), Perlman (p. 5651); Sabath (p. 5651, 5662), and Tague (p. 5873). Several representatives (e.g., Reps. Dickinson [p. 6267), Garber [pp. 5689-5693] and Smith [p. 5705]) contrasted the positive characteristics of the Nordic immigrants with the negative characteristics of more recent immigrants without distinguishing genetic from environmental reasons as possible influences. They, along with several others, noted especially the lack of assimilation of the recent immigrants and their tendencies to cluster in urban areas. Rep. Allen argued that there is a "necessity for purifying and keeping pure the blood of America" (p. 5693). Rep. McSwain, who argued for the need to preserve Nordic hegemony, did not do so on the basis of Nordic superiority but on the basis of legitimate ethnic self-interest (pp. 5683-5; see also comments of Reps. Lea and Miller). Rep. Gasque introduced a newspaper article that referred to the "laws of heredity" and to the swamping of the race that had built America (p. 6270).

11. Restriction of Immigration. Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization House of Representatives, sixty-eighth Congress, First Session, Jan. 3, 1924; p. 351.

12. See, e.g., Restriction of Immigration; Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization House of Representatives, sixty-eighth Congress, First Session, Jan. 5, 1924; p. 733ff.

13. Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, May 24-June 1, 1939: Joint Resolutions to Authorize the Admission to the United States of a Limited Number of German Refugee Children, p. 1.

14. Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, May 24-June 1, 1939: Joint Resolutions to Authorize the Admission to the United States of a Limited Number of German Refugee Children, p. 78.

15. Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, May 24-June 1, 1939: Joint Resolutions to Authorize the Admission to the United States of a Limited Number of German Refugee Children, p. 140.

16. Statement of the AJCongress, Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Congress, first session, on S. 716, H. R. 2379, and H. R. 2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, p. 565.

17. Statement of the AJCongress, Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Congress, first session, on S. 716, H. R. 2379, and H. R. 2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, p. 566. See also statement of Rabbi Bernard J. Bamberger, President of the Synagogue Council of America; See also the statement of the AJCongress, pp. 560-561.

18. Statement of Will Maslow representing the AJCongress, Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Congress, first session, on S. 716, H. R. 2379, and H. R. 2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, p. 394.

19. Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Congress, first session, on S. 716, H. R. 2379, and H. R. 2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, pp. 562-595.

20. Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Congress, first session, on S. 716, H. R. 2379, and H. R. 2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, p. 410.

21. Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Congress, first session, on S. 716, H. R. 2379, and H. R. 2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, p. 404.

22. Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittees of the Committees on the Judiciary, 82nd Congress, first session, on S. 716, H. R. 2379, and H. R. 2816. March 6-April 9, 1951, p. 563.

23. Moreover, achieving parity between Jews and other ethnic groups would entail a very high level of discrimination against individual Jews for admission to universities or employment opportunities, and would even entail a large taxation on Jews in order to prevent the present Jewish advantage in the possession of wealth, since at present Jews are vastly over-represented among the wealthy and the successful in the United States (e.g., Ginsberg, 1994; Lipsett & Raab, 1995). Beginning in the 1920s, studies have repeatedly shown that Ashkenazi Jews have a full-scale IQ of approximately 117 and a verbal IQ in the range of 125 (see MacDonald, 1994 for a review). By 1988, Jews constituted about 40% of admissions to Ivy League colleges and Jewish income was at least double that of gentiles (Shapiro (1992, p. 116). Shapiro also shows that Jews are overrepresented by at least a factor of nine on indexes of wealth, but that this is a conservative estimate because much Jewish wealth is in real estate which is difficult to determine and easy to hide. While constituting approximately 2.4% of the population of the United States, Jews represented one half of the top 100 Wall Street executives. Lipset and Raab (1995) note that Jews contribute between one-quarter and one-third of all political contributions in the United States, including one-half of Democratic Party contributions and one-fourth of Republican contributions. Indeed, many Jewish intellectuals (including "neo-conservatives" such as Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, and Earl Raab) as well as Jewish organizations (including the ADL, the AJCommittee, and the AJCongress) have been eloquent opponents of affirmative action and quota mechanisms for distributing resources (see Sachar 1992, p. 818ff).

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