14 Comments

Was interested to see the discussion of administrative cronyism in the DC public schools. My mother, who was a librarian in the Detroit public schools, watched the same thing happen.

Expand full comment

The problem with discussions of racism is that most persons, liberal or conservative, resort to finger pointing, bromides, or swift adoption of whatever attitude seems most likely to win the room. As a White guy who has spent my entire adult life as a very active member of the African-American community (to the extent of having Christmas parties where all the guests were Black excepting a couple White people invited by my Black friends) I can testify that only once, in fifty years, have I ever encountered any hostility based on my race. I would urge all my fellow Caucasions to venture out into the African-American community. There is love and fellowship to be had and manifold pleasures to be shared. Be bold. Live life. Embrace the world and you will be richly rewarded as I surely have been.

Expand full comment

I agree that woke ideology harms jewish people.

They should fight back hard against affirmative action, for example, because Jews are ~25% of Harvard students but only ~2% of the general population. Affirmative action would impose a quota on their Harvard enrollment.

Which is why I find it so weird that Jewish people are the loudest proponents of affirmative action.

Expand full comment

American Reform Judaism consists of the High Holidays plus the Democratic Party platform. (sorry, is an old joke)

Expand full comment

The great irony for me in all this is that the Social Justice religion, which now posits Jews as White oppressors, was almost entirely constructed by Jewish thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries.

First of course there are its Marxist roots, the Oppressor/Oppressed binary, where we all get labeled either Good or Evil and where Justice can't exist until our places are swapped, till the last become first; then came the Frankfurt School, which was basically entirely Jewish, and which eventually migrated to America and replaced the proletariat with Marcuse's "coalition of the marginalized", all in the service of some sort of "socialist liberation"; then of course the famous anti-American leftists of the 60s, everyone from Howard Zinn to Shulamith Firestone and Susan "the white race is the cancer of history" Sontag, who equated America with either the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, depending upon which point they needed to make; and then fast-forward to today and there is Whiteness Studies and which is the creation of people like Judith Katz, Noel Ignatiev, and Tim Wise, who express a deep racial animus that would have them denounced and banished if their hatred was targeted at any other group.

So this golem is a Jewish production and I think in most golem stories the monster turns on its creator.

Expand full comment

Yes the Marxists are Jewish. And, btw, so are the capitalists. Wokeness was created by “The Jews” but so was anti-wokeness, with its Bari Weiss, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt etc etc . Jews are on all sides because, well, they are disproportionately educated and outsiders so is it any wonder?

Expand full comment

yes 100% true, Jews are so verbally and intellectually gifted that you can usually find them leading both sides (or more) of every argument.

but I think my point still stands, Critical Social Justice was created for the most part by Jewish thinkers and activists, and now the golem has turned on its creator.

I think esp all the famous Jewish leftists of the 60s and post-60s (those I included in my comment plus even people like Noam Chomsky, Allen Ginsberg, Mark Rudd etc) often got so carried away that their "passion for justice" led them to saw off the branch they were sitting on (the branch being America, liberal democracy, and our history of religious tolerance).

But pls don't interpret any of this as being anti-Jewish, I admire Jews greatly and consider them the most fascinating, accomplished and consequential tribe in all of human history.

Expand full comment

I appreciate that clarification . I’m actually very slow to label individuals antisemitic and def see your point about the Golem. I have received less nuanced comments than this to my my book i.e you Jews created wokeness so stop whining about it.

Expand full comment

I couldn't get past the sentence near the beginning that liberals wanted to join with the Black people. Conservatives (as in Republicans) have always fought for the Black community.

Expand full comment

Outstanding commentary and prescient perspective. Many thanks!

Expand full comment

To be fair, when Republicans started and funded the Civil War to free millions of black slaves, they were called radical liberals back then. I am not sure what the Republicans in Congress were called when they passed the civil rights acts, but I think it was conservative.

Expand full comment

What did the author mean by "liberals" wanted to link with Black people?

Expand full comment

Liberal Jews... I would have also said American Jews more broadly

Expand full comment