Kevin MacDonald on Hellenism cf. Judaism, and the Jewish Role in the 60s Counterculture & New Left.
Selections by Peter Myers; my comments are shown {thus}, June 4, 2001; update July 26, 2007.
Write to me at contact.html.
You are at http://mailstar.net/macdonald.html.
Suppose the 50s be called Thesis, and the 60s Counterculture called Antithesis, then I advocate Synthesis, whereas MacDonald advocates a return to Thesis. But his books are cogently argued and deserve debate.
(1) Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone (2) Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique
(1) Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone (Praeger, Westport, CT, 1994):
{p. 58} From an evolutionary perspective, the uniqueness of the Jews lies in their being the only people to successfully remain intact and resist normal assimilative processes after living for very long periods as a minority in other societies. This unique resistance to assimilation dates from the period of the Babylonian exile and perhaps even the Egyptian sojourn described in Genesis. Bickerman (1988, 38; see also Cohen 1987) points out that in the ancient world there were voluntary diasporas of Greek, Aramaic, and Phoenician peoples, which eventually became assimilated into the surrounding societies. Moreover, it was a common practice of the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians to displace the peoples whom they had conquered, just as the Jews were displaced during the Babylonian exile. For considerable periods, it was common for these displaced peoples to live in separate communities and to continue to identify with the ethnic group and the religion that were left behind: "It could hardly be otherwise: the tribal organization of oriental peoples blocked the road to assimilation" (Bickerman 1988, 38). However, in the long run, these displaced peoples became assimilated, while the Jews did not.
{p. 59} During the period of Greek hegemony, the Jewish religion was unique in forcibly resisting Hellenizing influences (Schurer [1885] 1973, 146), and the Jewish struggle with Rome was the most prolonged and violent of any of the peoples in the Empire. Indeed, one of the major results of the development of the Roman Republic and Empire was that the great diversity of ethnic groups, which characterized Italy and the rest of the Mediterranean region, was largely assimilated. For example, in Italy during the fiflh century B.C., Etruscans Samnites, Umbrians, Latins, Romans, and a variety of other groups were assimilated into a larger culture in which these ethnic divisions disappeared
The Jews were the only ethnic group to survive intact after the upheavals that occurred at the end of antiquity. After the barbarian invasions and the collapse of the Roman Empire, there were further assimilative processes. The agricultural peoples of the Middle East, with the exception of the Jews, lost their identities in the early Islamic period (Goitein 1974). Moreover, Christianity steadily disappeared in parts of the Arab empire, but flourishing Jewish communities remained even after Jews were relegated to a subservient, humiliated status. Similarly, Lea (1906-07, 139ff) notes the existence of Ostragoths, Visigoths, Celt-Iberians, and Romans in seventh-century Spain, but only the Jews survived as an independent ethnic group - the others presumably becoming completely assimilated via intermarriage. In general, after the barbarian invasions, Western Europe was a mixture of Roman and Germanic peoples whose ethnic identities, with the exception of the Jews, were eventually lost (e.g., Brundage 1987, Geaty 1988). And there were a variety of national groups in medieval and post-medieval Poland besides the Poles and the Jews, particularly Scots, Germans, Armenians, and Tatars. Hundert (1986a) notes that by the end of the 18th century, these other groups had become assimilated and there were the beginnings of a Catholic bourgeoisie resulting from the amalgamation of these groups. The Jews, however, remained separate.
JEWISH CULTURAL SEPARATISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
[The rulers of Alexandria] set apart for them a particular place, that they might live without being polluted [by the gentiles]. (Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews. 2:487-488)
There is excellent evidence indicating that Jews actively maintained cultural separatism in the ancient world and that this cultural separatism acted to prevent exogamy. The following passage from 1 Maccabees (second century B.C.) illustrates the perceived connection between assimilation and intermarriage:
At that time there appeared in Israel a group of renegade Jews, who incited the people. 'Let us enter into a covenant with the Gentiles round about,' they
{p. 60} said, 'because disaster upon disaster has overtaken us since we segregated ourselves from them.' The people thought this a good argument, and some of them in their enthusiasm went to the king and received authority to introduce non-Jewish laws and customs. They built a sport stadium in the gentile style in Jerusalem. They removed their marks of circumcision and repudiated the holy covenant. They intemarried with Gentiles, and abandoned themselves to evil ways. (1 Macc. 1:11-15)
Assimilation was thus beginning to lead to intermarriage. However, the result of the Hasmonean victory and the end of Greek domination "was to set up anew walls of separation between Hebrew and heathen" (Epstein 1942, 168). The Book of Jubilees, written during this period, shows an extreme concem for intermarriage. "If there is any man in Israel who wishes to give his daughter or his sister to any man who is of the stock of the gentiles, he shall surely die, and they shall stone him with stones ... and they shall bum the woman with fire because she hath dishonored the name of the house of her father and she shall be rooted out of Israel" (Jub. 30:7). A variety of separatist practices derive from this period, including prohibitions on feasting with gentiles, using wine or oil from gentiles, and having any kind of sexual contact with gentiles. Although Epstein (1942, 170) notes that the racialism of Ezra was replaced by religious nationalism as the basis for erecting barriers against intermarriage, it goes without saying that the end result was the same from an evolutionary perspective: genetic segregation of the Jewish gene pool from the surrounding peoples. ...
{p. 231} Later, during the Roman period, Jews alone of all the subject peoples in the Roman Empire engaged in prolonged, even suicidal wars against the government in order to attain national sovereignty. Baron (1952b) notes that Titus's victory was the result of a very difficult campaign. Even after this, the Jews remained defiant and unassimilable, and there were two other rebellions: in Alexandria and other areas in Egypt, Cyprus, Cyrenaica, Libya, and possibly Mesopotamia and Judaea during the reign of Trajan (115-117 A.D.) and in Judaea during the reign of Hadrian (131-135 A.D.) under Simon Bar Kocheba. The latter held out for over three years against the best of Hadrian's generals, with many dying as martyrs. There were also rebellions during Constantine's rein in 326 and under Patricius in 351. There were also several very bloody revolts against Byzantine authority in Palestine during the fifth and sixth centuries (Avi-Yonah 1984, 251, 254; Bachrach 1984).
The Jews were by far the most vehement in their objection to Roman rule, compared to any of the many peoples of the Empire. Alon ([1980, 1984] 1989, 698) notes "the long, drawn-out stubborn refusal of the Jews to come to any kind of terms with Roman rule" and the fact that even after the thaw Jews never completely submitted to "the wicked kingdom" (p. 698). Many authors have noted the religious fanaticism of the Jews in the ancient world and their willingness to die rather than tolerate offenses to Israel or live under foreign
{p. 232} domination. For example, Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian and apologist, stated that
[We face] death on behalf of our laws with a courage which no other nation can equal. (Against Apion, 2:234)
And from these laws of ours nothing has had power to deflect us, neither fear of our masters, nor envy of the institutions esteemed by other nations. (Against Apion, 2:271 )
Although not all Jews were willing to die rather than betray the law, "story after story reveals that this generalization is true" (Sanders 1992, 42). "No other nation can be shown to have fought so often in defence of its own way of life, and the readiness of Jews to die for their cause is proved by example after example" (Sanders 1992, 239). Crossan (1991,103ff) shows that Jewish political activity against the Romans often included threats of martyrdom if external signs of Roman domination were not removed from Jerusalem and the Temple. Only the Jews, of all of Rome's subject peoples, were exempted from having to sacrifice to the Empire's gods, and they were the only group that was allowed to have their own courts and an ex officio government under the Patriarchate/Sanhedrin.
{p. 238} Bickerman (1988) notes the relatively greater sense of ethnic exclusiveness ong the Near Eastern peoples than was apparent in the Greek world of antiquity. The Greek view of cities in the ancient world was that they were open to any person and that any person who adopted the language and customs of these cities could feel at home. Indeed, there is considerable scholarly agreement that Greek anti-Semitism in the ancient world derived from the fact that Jews wanted political rights, but unwilling to adopt a common language and set of customs with the Greeks (see SAID, ch. 2). On the other hand, "[o]riental civilizations had no concept of naturalization and were averse to acculturation" (Bickerman 1987, 80). This general contrast is also compatible with Johnson's (1987, 134) point that the Greek conceptualization of a multi-racial, multi-national society strongly conflicted with Jewlsh separatism and unwillingness to respect the deities and practices of other peoples.
The Romans are generally viewed as being derived from an ethnically mixed group of Italians and other groups (McDonald 1966). Moreover, the long-term trend in the Roman Empire was for gradually increasing conferral of citizenship, culminating in the granting of virtually universal citizenship in 212 A.D. by Caracalla. There was also a gradual representation of provincials in the senate
{p. 239} and equestrian order, and provincials replaced Italians as emperors by the third century (Garnsey & Saller 1987, 9). Jordan (1989, 111) notes the general tolerance of "alien" groups in Roman society and the idealization of this tolerance in Roman jurisprudence.
Indeed, as Schurer (1885] 1986,132) notes, the Roman imperial government tended to protect the Jews from repeated outbreaks of hostility in cities throughout the Empire. And the Roman government repeatedly confirmed the right of Jews (unique among the subject peoples) to their own religious communities and their exemption from sacrifiing to the imperial cults and from service in the military. As a result, a major source of popular anti-Semitism in the ancient world derived from the Jewish unwillinness to participate in a homogeneous, assimilative culture: "Precisely at the time when through Roman world-rule and the levelling effect of Hellenism there was a general tendency for local cultures either to be submerged or to be absorbed in the overall Graeco-Roman culture, it must have been felt as doubly frustrating that only the Jews were unwilling to be thought of as taking part in the process of amalgamation" (Schurer [1885] 1986, 152-153; see also SAID, ch. 2).
The Greek and Roman pattern of conquest and empire-building, unlike that of the Israelites described in the Tanakh, did not involve genocide followed by the creation of an ethnically exclusive state that dominated the remnants of the conquered peoples (the Nethinim) and never assimilated them even after many centuries. Rather, the tendency was for conquest to be followed in the long run by genetic and cultural assimilation.
The paradigm for such assimilative behavior is Alexander the Great's intention of building a universalist state in which there would be complete genetic and cultural assimilation with the conquered peoples - the dream of a universal world-state based on universal brotherhood and partnership and on cooperation between conquerors and conquered (see Hegermann 1989). Alexander adopted many Persian cultural practices (e.g., type of dress and court ceremonies), and he married an Iranian princess and forced his men to do the same. In contrast, the whole point of historical Judaism has been to resist alien cultures. Moreover, Israelites who married foreign women in the period of conquest after the Exodus and in the resettlement after the Babylonian exile were condemned and excluded, and Joshua "destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD, the God of Israel, commanded" (Josh. 10:40).
Similarly, the Germanic conquerors of the Roman Empire in the fifth century took their places among their new subjects largely without displacing the former citizens of the Empire, so that in some areas people were quite unaware that they were no longer members of the Empire (see Geary 1988). Eventually, there was complete cultural and genetic assimilation among the conquerors and their new subjects.
{p. 241} The Christian Church, despite its obvious Jewish origins, is from an evolutionary perspective fundamentally opposed to Judaism in matters of interest to an evolutionist. Boyarin (1993, 6) contrasts the basic Jewish concern with sexuality, reproduction, genealogy, and a concept of historical peoplehood based on genetic relatedness with the denial of the importance of these quaiities in Christianity. Early Christian thinkers criticized the Jewish tendency to take these Biblical themes literally, while they themselves tended to allegorize these Biblical themes and created new cultural symbols such as the virgin birth and the cultural ideal of celibacy, which were diametrically opposed to these Jewish themes. ...
Moreover, while collectivist societies emphasize genealogy and degree of genetic relatedness in marriage, individualist societies tend to emphasize personal attraction (e.g., romantic love, common interests) (Triandis 1990). ...
{end of quotes}
(2) Kevin MacDonald, THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Praeger, Westport, CT, 1998).
{p. 1 Chapter 1} {quote} For 1,500 years Jewish society had been designed to produce intellectuals. ... Jewish society was geared to support them.... Rich merchants married sages' daughters; . . . Quite suddenly, around the year 1800, this ancient and highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals began to shift its output. Instead of pouring all its products into the closed circuit of rabbinical studies, . . . it unleashed a significant and ever-growing proportion of them into secular life. This was an event of shattering importance in world history. {end quote} (A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson 1988, 340-341)
An important theme of Separation and Its Discontents (hereafter SAID) {volume 2 in this trilogy} was the manipulation of ideology in the service of rationalizing specific forms of Judaism, interpreting history, and combating anti-Semitism. The present volume is in many ways an extension of these phenomena. However, the intellectual movements and political activity discussed in this volume have typically occurred in the wider intellectual and political world and have not been designed to rationalize specific forms of Judaism. Rather, they may be characterized in the broadest sense as efforts at cultural criticism and at times as attempts to influence the wider culture of the society in a manner that conforms to specific Jewish interests.
There is no implication here of a unified Jewish "conspiracy" to undermine gentile culture, as portrayed in the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Since the Enlightenment, Judaism has never been a unified, monolithic movement, and there has clearly been a great deal of disagreement among Jews as to how to protect themselves and attain their interests during this period. The movements discussed in this volume (Boasian anthropology, political radicalism, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and the New York Intellectuals) were advanced by relatively few individuals
{p. 8} Anti-Semitism among university professors during the Weimar period was partially fueled by the perception that "the Jew represented the critical or 'negative' aspects of modern thought, the acids of analysis and skepticism that helped to dissolve the moral certainties, patriotic commitment, and social cohesion of modern states" (Ringer 1983, 7). Reflecting this perception, National Socialist propaganda during the period claimed that Jews attempted to undermine the social cohesion of gentile society while remaining committed to a highly cohesive group themselves -- an intellectual double standard in which the basis of social cohesion among gentiles was subjected to intense criticism while the Jews "would retain their international cohesiveness, blood ties, and spiritual unity" (Aschheim 1985, 239). Viewed from this perspective an important goal of Jewish intellectual effort may be understood as attempting to undermine cohesive gentile group strategies while continuing to engage in their own highly cohesive group strategy. This issue re-emerges in the discussion of Jewish involvement in radical political movements and the Frankfurt School of Social Research in Chapters 3 and 5.
This phenomenon was not restricted to Germany. Gilson (1962, 31-32), in discussing his Jewish professors at the turn of the century in France, states:
The doctrines of these university professors were really quite different from one another. Even the personal philosophy of Levy-Bruhl did not coincide exactly with that of Durkheim, while Frederic Rauh was going his own way.... The only element common to their doctrines is a negative one, but nonetheless real and very active in its own order. One might describe it as a radical defiance of all that which is social conceived as a constraint from which to be liberated. Spinoza and Bmnschvieg achieved this liberation through metaphysics. Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl through science and sociology, Bergson through intuition.
Jews have also been at the forefront of the adversarial culture in the United States, England, and France since the mid-1960s, especially as defenders of the adversary culture in the media and the academic world (Ginsberg 1993 125ff; Rothman & Isenberg 1974a, 66 67).4 Stein (1979, 28; see also Lichter et al. 1994; Powers et al. 1996) shows that his sample of predominantly Jewish writers and producers of television shows in the 1970s had very negative attitudes toward what they viewed as a gentile-dominated cultural establishment, although their most negative comments were elicited in informal conversation rather than during formal interviews. Television portrayals of gentile establishment figures in business and the military tended to be very negative. For example, "the writers clearly thought of military men as clean-shaven blond, and of completely WASP background. In the minds of a few of the people I interviewed, these blond officers were always a hair's breadth away from becoming National Socialists. They were thought of as part of an Aryan
{p. 9} ruling class that actually or potentially repressed those of different ethnic backgrounds" (pp. 55-56).
Indeed, Glazer and Moynihan (1963/1970) credit the emergence of the adversary culture in the United States as a triumph of the New York Jewish cultural-political perspective. Jewish writers and visual artists (including E. L. Doctorow, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller,5 Frederick Wiseman, and Norman Lear) were disproportionately involved in attempts to portray American society as "sick" (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 120). A common technique of cultural subversion "involves an attack upon genuine inequities or irrationalities. Since all societies abound in both, there is never an absence of targets. However, the attack is generally not directed at the particular inequity or irrationality per se. Rather, such inequities or irrationalities are used as a means for achieving a larger purpose: the general weakening of the social order itself" (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 120).
In this volume I will concentrate on Jewish involvement in movements opposed to evolutionary, biological, and genetic findings in the social sciences, radical political ideology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and the New York Intellectuals. These movements are not specifically Jewish in the sense that they are not intended to rationalize specific aspects of Judaism such as cultural and genetic separatism. A major point will be that Jews were vastly overrepresented in these movements, that a strong sense of Jewish identity characterized the great majority of these individuals, and that all involved alienation from and rejection of gentile culture.
The discussion therefore reflects Sorkin's (1985, 102) description of nineteenth-century German-Jewish intellectuals as constituting an "invisible community of acculturating German Jews who perpetuated distinct cultural forms within the majority culture." The Jewish cultural contribution to the wider gentile culture was therefore accomplished from a highly particularistic perspective in which Jewish group identity continued to be of paramount importance despite its "invisibility." Even Berthold Auerbach (b. 1812), the exemplar of the assimilated Jewish intellectual, "manipulate[d] elements of the majority culture in a way peculiar to the German-Jewish minority" (Sorkin 1985, 107). Auerbach became a model, for secular Jewish intellectuals, of the assimilated Jew who did not renounce his Judaism. For the most part, these secular Jewish intellectuals socialized exclusively with other secular Jews and viewed their contribution to German culture as a secular form of Judaism - thus the "invisible community" of strongly identified Jewish intellectuals. This cultural manipulation in the service of group interests was a common theme of anti-Semitic writings. Thus, Heinrich Heine's critique of German culture was viewed as directed at the pursuit of power for his group at the expense of the cohesiveness of gentile society (see Mosse 1970, 52).
In several of the movements discussed in the following chapters it is of considerable importance that their propagators have attempted to clothe their rhetoric in the garb of science - the modem arbiter of truth and intellectual
{p. 10} respectability. As White (1966, 2) notes with respect to the Boasian school of anthropology. the aura of science is deceptive: "They would make it appear and would have everyone believe that their choice of premises and goals has been detelmined by scientific considerations. This is definitely not the case.... They are obviously sincere. Their sincerity and group loyalty tend, however, to persuade and consequently to deceive."
The comment is an excellent illustration of Robert Trivers's (1985) evolutionary theory of self-deception: The best deceivers are those who are self-deceived. At times the deception becomes conscious. Charles Liebman (1973, 213 ) describes his unselfconscious acceptance of universalist ideologies (behaviorism and liberalism) in his work as a social scientist and suggests that he was engaged in self-deception regarding the role of Jewish identification in his beliefs: "As a behaviorist (and a liberal) I can testify to having been quite unselfconscious about my academic methodology, but I suspect that this would have to be the case. Otherwise I would be defeating the very universalism I espouse."
CONCEPTUALIZING THE JEWISH RADICAL CRITICISM OF GENTILE SOCIETY
The foregoing has documented a general tendency for Jewish intellectuals in a variety of periods to be involved with social criticism, and I have hinted at an analysis in terms of social identity theory. More formally, two quite different types of reasons explain why Jews might be expected to advocate ideologies and political movements aimed at undermining the existing gentile social order.
First, such ideologies and movements may be directed at benefiting Jews economically or socially. Clearly one of the themes of post-Enlightenment Judaism has been the rapid upward mobility of Jews and attempts by gentile power structures to limit Jewish access to power and social status. Given this rather conspicuous reality, practical reasons of economic and political selfinterest would result in Jews being attracted to movements that criticized the gentile power structure or even advocated overthrowing it entirely.
Thus the czarist government of Russia enforced restrictions on Jews mainly out of fear that Jews would overwhelm gentile Russians in free economic competition (Lindemann 1991; SAID, Ch. 2). These czarist restrictions on Jews were a prominent rallying point for Jews around the world, and it is not at all unreasonable to suppose that Jewish participation in radical movements in Russia was motivated by perceived Jewish interest in overthrowing the czarist regime. Indeed, Arthur Liebman (1979, 29ff) notes that Jewish political radicalism in czarist Russia must be understood as resulting from economic restrictions on Jews that were enforced by the government in the context of considerable Jewish poverty and a very rapid Jewish demographic increase. Similarly, well into the 1930s the Jewish socialist labor movement in the
{p. 11} United States aimed at bettering the working conditions of its predominantly Jewish membership (Liebman 1979, 267).
Another practical goal of Jewish political and intellectual movements has been to combat anti-Semitism. For example, Jewish attraction to socialism in many countries in the 1930s was motivated partly by communist opposition to fascism and anti-Semitism (Lipset 1988, 383; Marcus 1983). The general association between anti-Semitism and conservative political views has often been advanced as an explanation for Jewish involvement with the left, including the leftist tendencies of many wealthy Jews (e.g., Lipset 1988, 375ff). Combating anti-Semitism also became a prime goal of Jewish radicals in the United States after Jews had predominantly moved into the middle class (Levin 1977, 211). Rising anti-Semitism and consequent restrictions on Jewish upward mobility during the 1930s also resulted in an attraction of Jews to the left (Liebman 1979, 420ff, 507).
It will be apparent in Chapter 2 that the cultural determinism of the Boasian school of anthropology functioned to combat anti-Semitism by combating racialist thinking and eugenic programs advocated mainly by gentiles. Psychoanalysis (Ch. 4) and the Frankfurt School (Ch. 5) have also been instrumental in developing and propagating theories of anti-Semitism which attribute anti-Semitism to irrational projections of gentiles. In the case of the Frankfurt School, the theory also functioned to pathologize gentile group allegiances as a symptom of a psychiatric disorder while ignoring Jewish group cohesion.
Second, Jewish involvement in social criticism may be influenced by social identity processes independent of any practical goal such as ending antiSemitism. Research in social identity processes finds a tendency for displacement of ingroup views away from outgroup norms (Hogg & Abrams 1988). In the case of Jewish-gentile contact, these outgroup norms would paradigmatically represent the consensus views of the gentile society. Moreover, individuals who identify themselves as Jews would be expected to develop negative attributions regarding the outgroup, and for Jews the most salient outgroup is the gentile power structure and indeed the gentile-dominated social structure generally.
Jewish ingroup status vis-a-vis the gentile world as an outgroup would be expected to lead to a generalized negative conceptualization of the gentile outgroup and a tendency to overemphasize the negative aspects of gentile society and social structure. From the social identity perspective, the Jewish tendency to subvert the social order is thus expected to extend beyond developing ideologies and social programs that satisfy specific Jewish economic and social interests and extend to a general devaluation and critique of gentile culture - "the sheer destructive power of Jewish rationalism once it escaped the restraints of the traditional community" (Johnson 1988, 291-292).
The social identity perspective also pledicts that such negative attributions are especially likely if the gentile power stluchlre is anti-Semitic or perceived
{p. 14} affiliation (i.e., group identity) rather than from individual effort: "In the sixteenth century the scale of values became ever more unbalanced, resulting in the concept that it was more important to establish who the person was rather than evaluate his capacity for work or thought" (Castro 1971, 581; italics in text). The ideology of individual merit as the basis of value promoted by the Converso intellectuals may thus be seen as an instance of combating categories of social identity in which one is devalued.9
The other side of the coin is that Jews have often reacted quite negatively to Jewish writers who portray Jewish characters as having negative or disapproved traits. For example, Philip Roth has been extensively criticized by Jews and Jewish organizations for portraying such characters, or at least for portraying such characters in America, where his work could be read by anti-Semites (see Roth 1963). While the ostensible reason for this concern was the possibility that such portrayals might lead to anti-Semitism, Roth (1963, 452) suggests also that "what is really objected to, what is immediately painful . . . is its direct effect upon certain Jews. 'You have hurt a lot of people's feelings because you have revealed something they are ashamed of.'" The implication of Roth's critics is that the ingroup should be portrayed in positive terms; and indeed, the most common type of Jewish literary activity has portrayed Jews as having positive traits (Alter 1965, 72). The quote also reflects the discussion of Jewish self-deception in SAID (Ch. 8): The shame resulting from awareness of actual Jewish behavior is only half-conscious, and any challenge to this self-deception results in a great deal of psychological conflict.
The importance of social identity processes in Jewish intellectual activity was recognized some time ago by Thorstein Veblen (1934). Veblen described the preeminence of Jewish scholars and scientists in Europe and noted their tendency to be iconoclasts. He noted that the Enlightenment had destroyed the ability of Jewish intellectuals to find comfort in the identity provided by religion, but they do not therefore simply accept uncritically the intellectual structures of gentile society. By engaging in iconoclasm, Veblen suggests, Jews are in fact subjecting to criticism the basic social categorization system of the gentile world - a categorization system with which the gentile, but not the Jew, is comfortable. The Jew "is not . . . invested with the gentile's peculiar heritage of conventional preconceptions which have stood over, by inertia of habit, out of the gentile past, which go, on the one hand, to make the safe and sane gentile conservative and complacent, and which conduce also, on the other hand, to blur the safe and sane gentile's intellectual vision, and to leave him intellectually sessile" (Veblen 1934, 229).10
Indeed, Jewish social scientists have at least sometimes been aware of these linkages: Peter Gay (1987, 137) quotes the following from a 1926 letter written by Sigmund Freud, whose antipathy to Western culture is described in Chapter 4: "Because I was a Jew, I found myself free from many prejudices which limited others in the employment of their intellects, and as a Jew I was prepared to go into opposition and to do without the agreement of the
{p. 15} 'compact majority.'" In a later letter, Freud stated that to accept psychoanalysis "called for a certain measure of readiness to accept a situation of solitary opposition - a situation with which nobody is more familiar than a Jew" (in Gay 1987, 146).11
There is a sense of alienation vis-a-vis the surrounding society. The Jewish intellectual, in the words of New York Intellectual and political radical Irving Howe, tends "to feel at some distance from society; to assume, almost as a birthright, a critical stance toward received dogmas, to recognize oneself as not quite at home in the world" (1978, 106).
From Solomon Maimon to Normon Podhoretz, from Rachel Varnhagen to Cynthia Ozick, from Marx and Lassalle to Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel, from Herzl and Ereud to Harold Laski and Lionel Trilling, from Moses Mendelssohn to J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, and Reich I and 11 (Wilhelm and Charles), one dominating structure of an identical predicament and a shared fate imposes itself upon the consciousness and behavior of the Jewish intellectual in Galut [exile]: with the advent of Jewish Emancipation, when ghetto walls crumble and the shtetlach [small Jewish towns] begin to dissolve, Jewry - like some wide-eyed anthropologist - enters upon a strange world, to explore a strange people observing a strange halakah (code). They examine this world in dismay, with wonder, anger, and punitive objectivity. This wonder, this anger, and the vindictive objectivity of the marginal nonmember are recidivist; they continue unabated into our own time because Jewish Emancipation continues into our own time. (Cuddihy l974, 68)
Although intellectual criticism resulting from social identity processes need not be functional in attaining any concrete goal of Judaism, this body of theory is highly compatible with supposing that Jewish intellectual activity may be directed at influencing social categorization processes in a manner that benefits Jews. Evidence will be provided in later chapters that Jewish intellectual movements have advocated universalist ideologies for the entire society in which the Jew-gentile social category is reduced in salience and is of no theoretical importance. Thus, for example, within a Marxist analysis social conflict is theorized to result solely from economically based conflict between social classes in which resource competition between ethnic groups is irrelevant. Social identity research predicts that the acceptance of such a theory would lessen anti-Semitism because within the universalist ideology the Jew-gentile social categorization is not salient.
Finally, there is good reason to suppose that minority perspectives are able to have a strong influence on the attitudes of the majority (e.g., Perez & Mugny 1990). Social identity research indicates that a minority viewpoint, especially when possessing a high degree of internal consistency, is able to have an impact
because it introduces the possibility of an alternative tO the taken-for-granted, unquestioned, consensual majority perspective. Suddenly people can discern cracks in the facade of majority consensus. New issues, problems, and questions arise which
{p. 16} demand attention. The status quo is no longer passively accepted as an immutable and stable entity which is the sole legitimate arbiter of the nature of things. People are free to change their beliefs, views, customs, and so forth. And where do they turn? One direction is to the active minority. It (by definition and design) furnishes a conceptually coherent and elegantly simple resolution of the very issues which, due to its activitics, now plague the public consciousness. In the language of 'ideology' . . ., active minorities seek to replace the dominant ideology with a new one. (Hogg & Abrams 1988, 181)
A critical component of minority group influence is intellectual consistency (Moscovici 1976), and an important theme in the following will be that Jewish-dominated intellectual movements have had a high degree of internal group cohesion and have often been typified by high levels of ingroup-outgroup thinking - a traditional aspect of Judaism. However, because these movements were intended to appeal to gentiles, they were forced to minimize any overt indication that Jewish group identity or Jewish group interests were important to the participants.
Such a result is also highly compatible with social identity theory: The extent to which individuals are willing to be influenced depends on their willingness to accept the social category from which the divergent opinion derives. For Jews intent on influencing the wider society, overt Jewish group identity and overtly stated Jewish interests could only detract from the ability of these movements to influence their intended targets. As a result, Jewish involvement in these movements was often actively concealed, and the intellectual structures themselves were phrased in universalist terms to minimize the importance of the social category of Jew-gentile.
Moreover, since one's willingness to accept influence depends on one's willingness to identify with the stereotypical qualities of an ingroup, the movements not only were conceptualized in universalist terms, rather than Jewish particularist terms; they were also depicted as motivated only by the highest moral and ethical standards. As Cuddihy (1974, 66n) notes, Jewish intellectuals developed a sense that Judaism had a "mission to the West" in which corrupt Western civilization would be confronted by a specifically Jewish sense of morality. To a considerable extent these movements constitute concrete examples of the ancient and recurrent Jewish self-conceptualization as a "light of the nations," reviewed extensively in S~ID (Ch. 7). This rhetoric of moral condemnation of the outgroup thus represents a secular version of the central pose of post-Enlightenment Jewish intellectuals that Judaism represents a moral beacon to the rest of humanity. But to exert their influence, they ¥vere forced to deny the importance of specifically Jewish identity and interests at the heart of the movement.
The high degree of internal group cohesion characteristic of the movements considered in this volume was accompanied by the development of theories that not only possessed a great deal of internal intellectual consistency but also, as in the case of psychoanalysis and radical political theory, could take
{p. 17} the form of hermeneutic systems able to accommodate any and all events into their interpretive schemas. And although these movements sought the veneer of science, they inevitably controverted the fimdamental principles of science as an individualistic inquiry into the nature of reality (see Ch. 6). Although the extent to which these intellectual and political movements influenced gentile society cannot be assessed with certainty, the material presented in the following chapters is highly compatible with supposing that Jewish-dominated intellectual movements were a critical factor (necessary condition) for the triumph of the intellectual left in late twentieth-century Western societies.
No evolutionist should be surprised at the implicit theory in all this, namely, that intellectual activities of all types may at bottom involve ethnic warfare, any more than one should be surprised at the fact that political and religious ideologies typically reflect the interests of those holding them. The truly doubtful proposition for an evolutionist is whether real social science as a disinterested attempt to understand human behavior is at all possible.
This does not imply that all strongly identified Jewish social scientists participated in the movements discussed in the following chapters. It implies only that Jewish identification and perceived Jewish interests were a powerful motivating force among those who led these movements and among many of their followers. These scientist-activists had very strong Jewish identities. They were very concerned with anti-Semitism and self-consciously developed theories aimed at showing that Jewish behavior was irrelevant to antiSemitism while at same time (in the case of psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School) showing that gentile ethnocentrism and participation in cohesive antiSemitic movements were indications of psychopathology.
Collectively, these movements have called into question the fundamental moral, political, cultural, and economic foundations of Western society. It will be apparent that these movements have also served various Jewish interests quite well. It will also become apparent, however, that these movements have often conflicted with the cultural and ultimately genetic interests of important sectors of the non-Jewish, European-derived peoples of late-twentieth-century European and North American societies.
NOTES
1. As indicated in SAID (p. 261), the AJCommittee's endeavor to portray Jews as not overrepresented in radical movcments involved deception and perhaps selfdeception. Thc AJCommittec cngaged in intensive efforts to changc opinion within the Jewish community to attcmpt to show that Jewish intcrests werc morc compatiblc with advocating Amcrican democracy than Sovict communism (e.g.. emphasizing Soviet anti-Scmitism and So~ iet support of nations opposed to lsracl in the period after World War 11) (Cohen 1972, 347ff).
{p. 18} 2. A similar phenomenon is apparent in the American movie industry, where anecdotal evidence indicates that gentiles sometimes attempt to present themselves as Jews in order to advance their careers in a Jewish-dominated environment (see Cash 1994).
3. As anti-Semitism increased during the Weimar period, Jewish-owned liberal newspapers began to suffer economic hardship because of public hostility to the ethnic composition of the editorial boards and staffs (Mosse 1987, 371). The response of Hans Lachman-Mosse was to "depoliticize his newspapers by firing large numbers of Jewish editors and correspondents. Eksteins ( 1975, 229) suggests that the response was an attempt to deflect right-wing categorizations of his newspapers as part of the Judenpresse.
4. A recent, perhaps trivial, example of this type of intellectual ethnic warfare is the popular movie Addams Family Values (released in November 1993), produced by Scott Rudin, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and written by Paul Rudnick. The bad guys in the movie are virtually anyone with blond hair (the exception being an overweight child), and the good guys include two Jewish children wearing yarmulkes. (Indeed, having blond hair is viewed as a pathology, so that when the dark-haired Addams baby temporarily becomes blond, there is a family crisis.) The featured Jewish child has dark hair, wears glasses, and is physically frail and nonathletic. He often makes precociously intelligent comments, and he is severely punished by the blond-haired counselors for reading a highly intellectual book. The evil gentile children are the opposite: blond, athletic, and unintellectual. Together with other assorted dark-haired children from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and white gentile children rejected by their peers (for being overweight, etc.), the Jewish boy and the Addams family children lead a very violent movement that succeeds in destroying the blond enemy. The movie is a parable illustrating the general thrust of Jewish intellectual and political activity relating to immigration and multi-culturalism in Western societies (see Ch. 7). It is also consistent with the general thrust of Hollywood movies. SAID (Ch. 2) reviews data indicating Jewish domination of the entertainment industry in the United States. Powers, Rothman and Rothman (1996, 207) characterize television as promoting liberal, cosmopolitan values, and Lichter, Lichter and Rothman (1994, 251) find that television portrays cultural pluralism in positive terms and as easily achieved apart from the activities of a few ignorant or bigoted miscreants.
5. Heller combines social criticism with a strong Jewish identity. In a talk described in The Economist (March 18, 1995, p. 92), Heller is quoted as saying that "being Jewish informs everything I do. My books are getting more and more Jewish."
6. The ellipsis is as follows: "Destruction of the Semitic principle, extirpation of the Jewish religion, whether in the Mosaic or in the Christian form, the natural equality of man and the abrogation of property, are proclaimed by the secret societies who form, provisional governments, and men of Jewish race are found at the head of every one of them." Rather (1986) notes that anti-Semites who believed in Jewish conspiracies often cited this passage as well as the Protocols in support of their theories. He also points out, citing Roberts (1972), that Disraeli's view that events were controlled by vast international conspiracies was commonplace in the nineteenth century. Rather links these beliefs with the secret society at the center of the psychoanalytic movement (see Ch. 4) as well as with a secret society named "the sons of Moshe" organized by the Zionist Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginsberg) whose work is discussed in SAID (Ch. 5).
7. This passage was invoked by Lucien Wolf, secretary of the Conjoint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association, to rationalize Jewish support for Russian revolutionary movementts (see Szajkowski 1967, 9).
{p. 19} 8. The New Christian ideology implies that members of a highly cohesive, economically successful group are seeking to be judged as individuals rather than as members of a group by the surrounding society. It is of interest that the moral imperative of judging on the basis of individual merit was also a theme in the work of nineteenth-century Jewish writer Michael Beer (see Kahn 1985, 122) and is a major theme of the contemporary neoconservative movement of Jewish intellectuals. Beer was forced to disguise the identity of his protagonist (as a lower-caste Hindu) because his audience was unlikely to view an explicitly Jewish protagonist positively.
9. Castro's thesis is that economic and intellectual backwardness was the heavy price Spain paid for its successful resistance to the ideology of individual merit. As noted in SAID (Ch. 1), maladaptive ideologies can develop in the context of group conflict because they provide a positive social identity in opposition to an outgroup. Thus Spain was unlikely to move toward an individualist, post-Enlightenment society when the advocates of individualism were viewed as covertly having allegiance to a highly cohesive group.
10. Paul Johnson (1988, 408) takes the view that Jewish iconoclasm simply speeded up "changes that were coming anyway. The Jews were natural iconoclasts. Like the prophets, they set about smiting and overturning all the idols of the conventional modes with skill and ferocious glee." Because it essentially trivializes the ultimate effects of Jewish intellectual efforts, such a view is inconsistent with Johnson's claim that the emergence of Jews into the mainstream of Western intellectual discourse was "an event of shattering importance to world history" (pp. 340-341). Johnson offers no evidence for his view that the changes advocated by Jewish intellectuals were inevitable. Surely traditional Judaism did not encourage iconoclasm within the Jewish community (witness Spinoza's fate and the generally authoritarian nature of community controls in traditional Jewish society [PTSDA Ch. 8]). Nor did traditional Jewish scholarship eneourage iconoclasm. Although Talmudic studies definitely encouraged argumentation (pilpul; see PTSDA Ch. 7), these diseussions were performed within a very narrowly prescribed range in whieh the basic assumptions were not questioned. In the post-Enlightenment world, Jewish iconoclasm has clearly been much more directed at gentile culture than at Judaism, and evidence provided here and in the following chapters indicates that the iconoclasm was often motivated by hostility toward gentile culture. By Johnson's own account, both Marxism and psychoanalysis are unlikely to have arisen from gentiles, since they both contain strong overtones of Jewish religious thinking, and I would argue that psychoanalysis especially is unlikely to have arisen except as a tool in the war on gentile culture. The results are much more plausibly due to the generally higher verbal IQ among Jews and their ability to form cohesive groups now directed at critiquing gentile culture rather than at comprehending the Torah and thereby achieving good marriages, financial success, and status within the Jewish community.
11. The comment referring to "solitary opposition" is disingenuous, since psychoanalysis from its origins was characterized by a strong group consciousness emanating from a committed core of members. Psychoanalysis itself energetically cultivated the image of Freud as a solitary hero-scientist battling for truth against a biased intellectual establishment. See Chapter 4.
{More of MacDonald's Culture of Critique: the Jewish Communists of Poland}
{p. 69 Chater 3 Jews and the Left} Radicalism and Jewish Identification in the United States and England
From the origins of the movement in the late nineteenth century, a strong sense of Jewish identification also characterized American Jewish radicals (e.g., the Union of Hebrew Trades and the Jewish Socialist Federation; see Levin 1977; Liebman 1979). In Sorin's (1985) study of Jewish radicals who immigrated to the United States early in the twentieth century, only 7 percent were hostile to any form of Jewish separatism. Over 70 percent "were imbued with positive Jewish consciousness. The great majority were significantly caught up in a web of overlapping institutions, affiliations, and Jewish social formations" (p. 119). Moreover, "at the very most" 26 of 95 radicals were in Sorin's "hostile, ambivalent, or assimilationist" categories, but "in some if not all of the cases, these were persons struggling, often creatively, to synthesize new identities" (p. 115). A major theme of this chapter is that a great many avowedly "de-racinated" Jewish radicals had self-deceptive images of their lack of Jewish identification.
The following comment about a very prominent American Jewish radical, Emma Goldman, illustrates the general trend:
The pages of the magazine Mother Earth that Emma Goldman edited from 1906 to 1917 are filled with Yiddish stories, tales from the Talmud, and translations of Morris Rosenfeld's poetry. Moreover, her commitment to anarchism did not divert her from speaking and writing, openly and frequently, about the parficular burdens Jews faced in a world in which antisemitism was a living enemy. Apparently, Emma Goldman's faith in anarchism, with its emphasis on universalism, did not result from and was not dependent on a casting off of Jewish identity. (Sorin 1985, 8; italics in text)
Twentieth-century American Jewish radicalism was a specifically Jewish subculture, or "contraculture" to use Arthur Liebman's (1979, 37) term. The American Jewish left never removed itself from the wider Jewish community, and, indeed, membership of Jews in the movement fluctuated depending on whether these movements clashed with specifically Jewish interests.
Fundamentally, the Jewish Old Left, including the unions, the leftist press, and the leftist fraternal orders (which were often associated with a synagogue [Liebman 1979, 284]), were part of the wider Jewish community, and when the Jewish working class declined, specifically Jewish concerns and identity gained increasing prominence as the importance of radical political beliefs declined. This tendency for Jewish members of leftist organizations to concern themselves with specifically Jewish affairs increased after 1930 primarily because of recurring gaps between specific Jewish interests and universalist
{p. 70} leftist causes at that time. 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, 267ff).
Jewish separatism in leftist movements was facilitated by a very traditional aspect of Jewish separatism - the use of an ingroup language. Yiddish eventually became highly valued for its unifying effect on the Jewish labor movement and its ability to cement ties to the wider Jewish community (Levin 1977, 210; Liebman 1979, 259-260). "The landsmanshaften [Jewish social clubs], the Yiddish press and theatre, East Side socialist cafes, literary societies and fereyns, which were so much a part of Jewish socialist culture, created an unmistakable Jewish milieu, which the shop, union, or Socialist party could not possibly duplicate. Even the class enemy - the Jewish employer - spoke Yiddish" (Levin 1977, 210).
Indeed, the socialist educational program of the Workman's Circle (the largest Jewish labor fraternal order in the early twentieth century) failed at first (prior to 1916) because of the absence of Yiddish and Jewish content: "Even radical Jewish parents wanted their children to learn Yiddish and know something about their people" (Liebman 1979, 292). These schools succeeded when they began including a Jewish curriculum with a stress on Jewish peoplehood. They persisted through the 940s as Jewish schools with a socialist ideology which stressed the idea that a concern for social justice was the key to Jewish survival in the modern world. Clearly, socialism and liberal politics had become a form of secular Judaism. The organization had been transformed over its history "from a radical labor fraternal order with Jewish members into a Jewish fraternal order with liberal sentiments and a socialist heritage" (Liebman 1979, 295).
Similarly, the communist-oriented Jewish subculture, including organizations such as the International Workers Order (IWO), included Yiddishspeaking sections. One such section, the Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order (JPFO), was an affiliate of the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress) and was listed as a subversive organization by the U.S. Attorney General. The JPFO had 50,000 members and was the financial and organizational "bulwark" of the CPUSA after World War II; it also provided critical funding for the Daily Worker and the Morning Freiheit (Svonkin 1997, 166). Consistent with the present emphasis on the compatibility of communism-radicalism and Jewish identity, it funded children's educational programs that promulgated a strong relationship between Jewish identity and radical concerns. The IWO Yiddish schools and summer camps, which continued into the 1960s, stressed Jewish culture and even reinterpreted Marxism not as a theory of class struggle but as a theory of struggle for Jewish freedom from oppression. Although the AJCongress eventually severed its ties with the JPFO during the cold war period and stated that communism was a threat, it was "at best a reluctant and unenthusiastic participant" (Svonkin 1997, 132) in the Jewish
{p. 71} effort to develop a public image of anti-communism - a position reflecting the sympathies of many among its predominantly second- and third-generation Eastern European immigrant membership. David Horowitz (1997, 42) describes the world of his parents who had joined a "shul" run by the CPUSA in which Jewish holidays were given a political interpretation. Psychologically these people might as well have been in eighteenth-century Poland:
What my parents had done in joining the Communist Party and moving to Sunnyside was to return to the ghetto. There was the same shared private language, the same hermetically sealed universe, the same dual posturing revealing one face to the outer world and another to the tribe. More importantly, there was the same conviction of being marked for persecution and specially ordained, the sense of moral superiority toward the stronger and more numerous goyim outside. And there was the same fear of expulsion for heretical thoughts, which was the fear that riveted the chosen to the faith.
A strong sense of Jewish peoplehood was also characteristic of the leftist Yiddish press. Thus a letter writer to the radical Jewish Daily Forward complained that his nonreligious parents were upset because he wanted to marry a non-Jew. "He wrote to the Forward on the presumption that he would find sympathy, only to discover that the socialist and freethinking editors of the paper insisted . . . that it was imperative that he marry a Jew and that he continue to identify with the Jewish community.... [T]hose who read the Forward knew that the commitment of Jews to remain Jewish was beyond question and discussion" (Hertzberg 1989, 211-212). The Forward had the largest circulation of any Jewish periodical in the world into the 1930s and maintained close ties to the Socialist Party. Werner Cohn (1958, 621) describes the general milieu of the immigrant Jewish community from 1886 to 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 Smgle Tax. Erom then on 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 Intemational 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.
{p. 72} 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, 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. Choosing the former, by the late 1960s it was justifying not returning the Israeli-occupied territories in opposition to the line of the CPUSA.
The relationship of Jews and the CPUSA is particularly interesting because the party often adopted anti-Jewish positions, especially because of its close association with the Soviet Union. Beginning in the late 1920s Jews played a very prominent role in the CPUSA (Klehr 1978, 37ff). Merely citing percentages of Jewish leaders does not adequately indicate the extent of Jewish influence, however, because it fails to take account of the personal characteristics of Jewish radicals as a talented, educated and ambitious group (see pp. 5, 95-96), but also because efforts were made to recruit gentiles as "window dressing" to conceal the extent of Jewish dominance (Klehr 1978, 40; Rothman & Lichter 1982, 99). Lyons (1982, 81) quotes a gentile Communist who said that many working-class gentiles felt that they were recruited in order to "diversify the Party's ethnic composition." The informant recounts his experience as a gentile representative at a communist-sponsored youth conference:
It became increasingly apparent to most partic!pants that virtually all of the speakers were Jewish New Yorkers. Speakers with thick New York accents would identify themselves as "the delegate from the Lower East Side" or "the comrade from Brownsville." Finally the national leadership called a recess to discuss what was becoming an embarrassment. How could a supposedly national student organization bc so totally dominated by New York Jews? Finally, they resolved to intervene and remedy the situation by asking the New York caucus to give "out-of-towners" a chance to speak. The convention was held in Wisconsin.
Klehr (1978, 40) estimates that from 1921 to 1961, Jews constituted 33.5 percent of the Central Committee members, and the representation of Jews was often above 40 percent (Klehr 1978, 46). Jews were the only native-bom ethnic group from which the party was able to recruit. Glazer (1969, 129) states that at least half of the CPUSA membership of around 50,000 were Jews into the 1950s and that the rate of turnover was very high; thus perhaps ten 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 1920s, Buhle (1980, 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."
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, exemplify the powerful sense of Jewish identification among many
{p. 73} Jews on the left. Svonkin (1997, 158) shows that they viewed themselves as Jewish martyrs. Like many other Jewish leftists, they perceived a strong link between Judaism and their communist sympathies. Their prison correspondence, in the words of one reviewer, was filled with a "continual display of Judaism and Jewishness," including the comment that "in a couple of days, the Passover celebration of our people's search for freedom will be here. This cultural heritage has an added meaning for us, who are imprisoned away from each other and our loved ones by the modern Pharaohs" (pp. 158-159). (Embarrassed by the self-perceptions of the Rosenbergs as Jewish martyrs, the Anti-Defamation League [ADL] interpreted Julius Rosenberg's professions of Jewishness as an attempt to obtain "every possible shred of advantage from the faith that he had repudiated" [Svonkin 1997, 159] - another example of the many revisionist attempts, some recounted in this chapter, to render incompatible Jewish identification and political radicalism and thus completely obscure an important chapter of Jewish history.)
As in the case of the Soviet Union in the early years, the CPUSA had separate sections for different ethnic groups, including a Yiddish-speaking Jewish Federation. When these were abolished in 1925 in the interests of developing a party that would appeal to native Americans (who tended to have a low level of ethnic consciousness), there was a mass exodus of Jews from the party, and many of those who remained continued to participate in an unofficial Yiddish subculture within the party.
In the following years Jewish support for the CPUSA rose and fell depending on party support for specific Jewish issues. During the 1930s the CPUSA changed its position and took great pains to appeal to specific Jewish interests, including a primary focus against anti-Semitism, supporting Zionism and eventually Israel, and advocating the importance of maintaining Jewish cultural traditions. As in Poland 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 thus perceived as "good for Jews." Despite temporary problems caused by the Soviet-German nonaggression pact of 1939, the result was an end to the CPUSA's isolation from the Jewish community during World War II and the immediate postwar years .
Interestingly, the Jews who remained within the party during the period of the nonaggression pact faced a difficult conflict between divided loyalties, indicating that Jewish identity was still important to these individuals. The nonaggression pact provoked a great deal of rationalization on the part of Jewish CPUSA members, often involving an attempt to interpret the Soviet Union's actions as actually benefiting Jewish interests - clearly an indication that these individuals had not given up their Jewish identities. 1l Others continued to be members but silently opposed the party's line because of their Jewish loyalties. Of great concem for all of these individuals was that the
{p. 74} nonaggression pact was destroying their relationship with the wider Jewish community.
At the time of the creation of Israel in 1948, part of the CPUSA's appeal to Jews was due to its support for Israel at a time when Truman was waffling on the issue. In 1945 the CPUSA even adopted a resolution advocating the continuation of the Jewish people as an ethnic entity within socialist societies. Arthur Liebman describes CPUSA members during the perioc' as being elated because of the congruity of their Jewish interests and membership in the party. Feelings of commonality with the wider Jewish community were expressed, and there was an enhanced feeling of Jewishness resulting from interactions with other Jews within the CPUSA: During the postwar period "Communist Jews were expected and encouraged to be Jews, to relate to Jews, and to think of the Jewish people and the Jewish culture in a positive light. At the same time, non-Communist Jews, with some notable exceptions [in the noncommunist Jewish left] . . . accepted their Jewish credentials and agreed to work with them in an all-Jewish context" (Liebman 1979, 514). As has happened so often in Jewish history, this upsurge in Jewish self-identity was facilitated by the persecution of Jews, in this case the Holocaust.
This period of easy compatibility of Jewish interests with CPUSA interests evaporated after 1948, especially because of the altered Soviet position on Israel and revelations of state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Many Jews abandoned the CPUSA as a result. Once again, those who remained in the CPUSA tended to rationalize Soviet antiSemitism in a way that allowed them to maintain their Jewish identification. Some viewed the persecutions as an aberration and the result of individual pathology rather than the fault of the communist system itself. Or the West was blamed as being indirectly responsible. Moreover, the reasons for remaining in the CPUSA appear to have typically involved a desire to remain in the self-contained Yiddish communist subculture. Liebman (1979, 522) describes an individual who finally resigned when the evidence on Soviet anti-Semitism became overwhelming: "In 1958, after more than 25 years with the Communist party, this leader resigned and developed a strong Jewish identity which encompassed a fierce loyalty to Israel." Alternatively, Jewish CPUSA members simply failed to adopt the Soviet party line, as occurred on the issue of support for Israel during the 1967 and 1973 wars. Eventually, there was virtually a complete severing of Jews from the CPUSA.
Lyons's (1982, 180) description of a Jewish-Communist club in Philadelphia reveals the ambivalence and self-deception that occurred when Jewish interests clashed with communist sympathies.
The club . . . faced rising tension over Jewishness, especially as it related to Israel. In the mid-sixties conflict erupted over the club's decision to criticize Soviet treatment of Jews. Some orthodox pro-Soviet club members resigned; others disagrccd but staved. Meanwhile the club continued to change, becoming less Marxist and morc Zionist. During the 1967 Middle East War, "we got dogmatic, for one week" as Ben Green, a
{p. 75} club leader, puts it. They allowed no discussion on the merits of supporting Israel, but simply raised funds to show their full support. Nevertheless, several members insist that the club is not Zionist and engages in "critical support" of Israel.
As in the case of Poland, there is every reason to suppose that American Jewish Communists regarded the USSR as generally satisfying Jewish interests at least until well into the post-World War II era. Beginning in the 1920s the CPUSA was financially supported by the Soviet Union, adhered closely to its positions, and engaged in a successful espionage effort against the United States on behalf of the Soviet Union, including stealing atomic secrets (Klehr, Haynes & Firsov 1995) 12 In the 1930s Jews "constituted a substantial majority of known members of the Soviet underground in the United States" and almost half of the individuals prosecuted under the Smith Act of 1947 (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 100).
Although all party functionaries may not have known the details of the special relationship with the Soviet Union, 'special work' [i.e., espionage] was part and parcel of the Communist mission in the United States, and this was well known and discussed openly in the CPUSA's Political Bureau.... [I]t was these ordinary Communists whose lives demonstrate that some rank-and-file members were willing to serve the USSR by spying on their own country. There but for the grace of not being asked went other American Communists. The CPUSA showered hosannas on the USSR as the promised land. In Communist propaganda the survival of the Soviet Union as the one bright, shining star of humankind was a constant refrain, as in the 1934 American Communist poem that described the Soviet Union as "a heaven . . . brought to earth in Russia." (Klehr et al. 1995, 324)
Klehr et al. (1995, 325) suggest that the CPUSA had important effects on U.S. history. Without excusing the excesses of the anti-communist movement, they note that "the peculiar and particular edge to American anticommunism cannot be severed from the CPUSA's allegiance to the Soviet Union; the belief that American communists were disloyal is what made the communist issue so powerful and at times poisonous."
Communists lied to and deceived the New Dealers with whom they were allied. Those liberals who believed the denials then denounced as mudslingers those anti-Communists who complained of concealed Communist activity. Furious at denials of what they knew to be true, anti-Communists then suspected that those who denied the Communist presence were themselves dishonest. The Communists' duplicity poisoned normal political relationships and contributed to the harshness of the anti-Communist reaction of the late 1940s and 1950s. (Klehr et al. 1995, 106)
The liberal defense of communism during the Cold War era also raises issues related to this volume. Nicholas von Hoffman ( 1996) notes the role of the liberal defenders of communism during this period, such as the editors of The Ne~ Repl(blic and Harvard historian Richard Hofstadter (1965) who attributed
{p. 76} the contemporary concem with communist infiltration of the U.S. government to the "paranoid style of American politics." (Rothman and Lichter [1982, 105] include The New Republic as among a group of liberal and radical publications with a large presence of Jewish writers and editors.) The official liberal version was that American Communists were sui generis and unconnected to the Soviet Union, so there was no domestic communist threat. The liberals had seized the intellectual and moral high ground during this period. Supporters of McCarthy were viewed as intellectual and cultural primitives: "In the ongoing kulturkampf dividing the society, the elites of Hollywood, Cambridge and liberal thank-tankery had little sympathy for bow-legged men with their American Legion caps and their fat wives, their yapping about Yalta and the Katyn Forest. Catholic and kitsch, looking out of their picture windows at their flock of pink plastic flamingos, the lower middles and their foreign policy anguish were too infra dig to be taken seriously" (von Hoffman 1996, C2).
However, besides poisoning the atmosphere of domestic politics, communist espionage had effects on foreign policy as well:
It is difficult to overstate the importance of Soviet atomic espionage in shaping the history of the Cold War. World War Il had ended with Americans confident that the atomic bomb gave them a monopoly on the ultimate weapon, a monopoly expected to last ten to twenty years. The Soviet explosion of a nuclear bomb in 1949 destroyed this sense of physical security. America had fought in two world wars without suffering serious civilian deaths or destruction. Now it faced an enemy led by a ruthless dictator who could wipe out any American city with a single bomb. Had the American nuclear monopoly lasted longer, Stalin might have refused to allow North Korean Communists to launch the Korean War, or the Chinese Communists might have hesitated to intervene in the war. Had the American nuclear monopoly lasted until Stalin's death, the restraint on Soviet aggressiveness might have alleviated the most dangerous years of the Cold War. (Klehr et al. 1995, 106)
The Jewish "contraculture" continued to sustain a radical, specifically Jewish subculture into the 1950s - long after the great majority of Jews were no longer in the working class (Liebman 1979, 206, 289ff). The fundamentally Jewish institutions and families that constituted the Old Left then fed into the New Left (Liebman 1979, 536ff). The original impetus of the 1960s student protest movement "almost necessanly began with the scions of the relatively well-to-do, liberal-to-left, disproportionately Jewish intelligentsia the largest pool of those ideologically disposed to sympathize with radical student action in the population" (Lipset 1971, 83; see also Glazer 1969). Flacks (1967, 64) found that 45 percent of students involved in a protest at the University of Chicago were Jewish, but his original sample was "'adjusted' to obtain better balance" (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 82). Jews constituted 80 percent of the students signing a petition to end ROTC at Harvard and 30-50 percent of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) - the central organization of student
{p. 77} radicals. Adelson (1972) found that 90 percent of his sample of radical students at the University of Michigan were Jewish, and it would appear that a similar rate of participation is likely to have occurred at other schools, such as Wisconsin and Minnesota. Braungart (1979) found that 43 percent of the SDS membership in his sample of ten universities had at least one Jewish parent and an additional 20 percent had no religious affiliation. The latter are most likely to be predominantly Jewish: Rothrnan and Lichter (1982, 82) found that the "overwhelming majority" of the radical students who claimed that their parents were atheists had Jewish backgrounds.
Jews also tended to be the most publicized leaders of campus protests (Sachar 1992, 804). Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Rennie Davis achieved national fame as members of the "Chicago Seven" group convicted of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Cuddlhy (1974, 193ff) notes the overtly ethnic subplot of the trial, particularly the infighting between defendant Abbie Hoffman and Judge Julius Hoffman, the former representing the children of the Eastern European immigrant generation that tended toward political radicalism, and the latter representing the older, more assimilated German-Jewish establishment. During the trial Abbie Hoffman ridiculed Judge Hoffman in Yiddish as "Shande fur de Goyim" (disgrace for the gentiles) - translated by Abbie Hoffman as "Front man for the WASP power elite." Clearly Hoffman and Rubin (who spent time on a Kibbutz in Israel) had strong Jewish identifications and antipathy to the white Protestant establishment. Cuddihy (1974, 191-192) also credits the origins of the Yippie movement to the activities of the underground journalist Paul Krassner (publisher of The Realist, a "daring, scatological, curiously apolitical" journal of "irreverent satire and impolite reportage") and the countercultural sensibility of comedian Lenny Bruce. As a group, radical students came from relatively well-to-do families, whereas conservative students tended to come from less affluent families (Gottfried 1993, 53). The movement was therefore initiated and led by an elite, but it was not aimed at advancing the interests of the unionized lower middle class. Indeed, the New Left regarded the working class as "fat, contented, and conservative, and their trade unions reflected them" (Glazer 1969, 123).
Moreover, although mild forms of Jewish anti-Semitism and rebellion against parental hypocrisy did occur among Jewish New Left radicals, the predominant pattern was a continuity with parental ideology (Flacks 1967; Glazer 1969, 12; Lipset 1988, 393; Rothman & Lichter 1982, 82). (Similarly, during the Weimar period the Frankfurt School radicals rejected their parents' commercial values but did not personally reject their family. Indeed, their families tended to provide moral and financial support for them in their radical political activities [Cuddihy 1974, 154].) Many of these "red diaper babies" came from "families which around the breakfast table, day after day in Scarsdale~ Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an
{p. 78} awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is. Many Jewish parents live in the lily-white suburbs, go to Miami Beach in the winter, belong to expensive country clubs, arrange Bar Mitzvahs costing thousands of dollars - all the while espousing a left-liberal ideology" (Lipset 1988, 393). As indicated above, Glazer (1969) estimates that approximately 1 million Jews were members of the CPUSA or were socialists prior to 1950. The result was that among Jews there was "a substantial reservoir of present-day parents for whose children to be radical is not something shocking and strange but may well be seen as a means of fulfilling the best drives of their parents" (Glazer 1969, 129).
Moreover, the "American Jewish establishment never really distanced itself from these young Jews" (Hertzberg 1989, 369). Indeed, establishment Jewish organizations, including the AJCongress, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (a lay Reform group), and the Synagogue Council of America (Winston 1978), were prominent early opponents of the war in Vietnam. The anti-war attitudes of official Jewish organizations may have resulted in some anti-Semitism. President Lyndon Johnson was reported to be "disturbed by the lack of support for the Vietnam war in the American Jewish community at a time when he is taking new steps to aid Israel" (in Winston 1978, 198), and the ADL took steps to deal with an anti-Jewish backlash they expected to occur as a result of Jews tending to be hawks on military matters related to Israel and doves on military matters related to Vietnam (Winston 1978).
As with the Old Left, many of the Jewish New Left strongly identified as Jews (Liebman 1979, 536ff). Chanukah services were held and the "Hatikvah" (the Israeli national anthem) was sung during an important sit-in at Berkeley (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 81). The New Left lost Jewish members when it advocated positions incompatible with specific Jewish interests (especially regarding Israel) and attracted members when its positions coincided with these interests (Liebman 1979, 527ff). Leaders often spent time at Kibbutzim in Israel, and there is some indication that New Leftists consciously attempted to minimize the more overt signs of Jewish identity and to minimize discussion of issues on which Jewish and non-Jewish New Leftists would disagree, particularly Israel. Eventually the incompatibility of Jewish interests and the New Left resulted in most Jews abandoning the New Left, with many going to Israel to join kibbutzim, becoming involved in more traditional Jewish religious observances, or becoming involved in leftist organizations with a specifically Jewish identity. After the 1967 Six-Day War, the most important issue for the Jewish New Left was Israel, but the movement also worked on behalf of Soviet Jews and demanded Jewish studies programs at universities (Shapiro 1992, 225). As SDS activist, Jay Rosenberg, wrote, "From this point on I shali join no movement that does not accept and support my people's struggle. If I must choose between the Jewish cause and a 'progressive' anti-Israel SDS, I shall choose the Jewish cause. If barricades are erected, I will fight as a Jew" (in Sachar 1992, 808).
{p. 79} Jews were also a critical component of the public acceptance of the New Left. Jews were overrepresented among radicals and their supporters in the media, the university, and the wider intellectual community, and Jewish leftist social scientists were instrumental in conducting research that portrayed student radicalism in a positive light (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 104). However, in their recent review of the literature on the New Left, Rothman and Lichter ( 1996, ix, xiii) note a continuing tendency to ignore the role of Jews in the movement and that when the Jewish role is mentioned, it is attributed to Jewish idealism or other positively valued traits. Cuddihy (1974, 194n) notes that the media almost completely ignored the Jewish infighting that occurred during the Chicago Seven trial. He also describes several evaluations of the trial written by Jews in the media (New York Times, New York Post, Village Voice) that excused the behavior of the defendants and praised their radical Jewish lawyer, William Kunstler.
Finally, a similar ebb and flow of Jewish attraction to communism depending on its convergence with specifically Jewish interests occurred also in England. During the 1930s the Communist Party appealed to Jews partly because it was the only political movement that was stridently anti-fascist. There was no conflict at all between a strong Jewish ethnic identity and being a member of the Communist Party: "Communist sympathy among Jews of that generation had about it some of the qualities of a group identification, a means, perhaps, of ethnic self-assertion" (Alderrnan 1992, 317-318). In the post-World War II period, virtually all the successful communist political candidates represented Jewish wards. However, Jewish support for communism declined with the revelation of Stalin's anti-Semitism, and many Jews left the Communist Party after the Middle East crisis of 1967 when the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with Israel (Alderrnan 1983, 162).
The conclusion must be that Jewish identity was generally perceived to be highly compatible with radical politics. When radical politics came in conflict with specific Jewish interests, Jews eventually ceased being radical, although there were often instances of ambivalence and rationalization.
SOCIAL IDENTITY PROCESSES, PERCEIVED JEWISH GROUP INTERESTS, AND JEWISH RADICALISM
One view of Jewish radicalism emphasizes the moral basis of Judaism. This is yet another example of the attempt to portray Judaism as a universalist, morally superior movement - the "light of the nations" theme that has repeatedly emerged as an aspect of Jewish self-identity since antiquity and especially since the Enlightenment (S~ID, Ch. 7). Thus Fuchs (1956, 190 191) suggests that the Jewish involvement in liberal causes stems from the unique moral nature of Judaism in inculcating charity towards the poor and needy. Involvement in these causes is viewed as simply an extension of traditional Jewish religious practices. Similarly, Hertzberg (1985, 22) writes of "the echo of a
{p. 80} unique moral sensibility, a willingness to act in disregard of economic interest when the cause seems just." {Yet Benjamin Ginsberg writes in The Fatal Embrace, "That fully three-fourths of America's foreign aid budget is devoted to Israel's security interests is a tribute in considerable measure to the lobbying prowess of AIPAC and the importance of the Jewish community in American politics" (p. 2). Jews are either deceiving themselves about their unique moral sensibility, or deceiving Gentiles.}
As indicated in PTSDA (Chs. 5, 6), there is every indication that traditional Jewish concern for the poor and needy was confined within Jewish groups, and in fact Jews have often served oppressive ruling elites in traditional societies and in post-World War II Eastern Europe. Ginsberg (1993, 140) describes these putative humanistic motivations as "a bit fanciful," and notes that in different contexts (notably in the postrevolutionary Soviet Union) Jews have organized "ruthless agencies of coercion and terror," including especially a very prominent involvement in the Soviet secret police from the postrevolutionary period into the 1930s (see also Baron 1975, 170; Lincoln 1989; Rapoport 1990, 30-31). Similarly, we have seen that Jews were very prominent in the domestic security forces in Poland (see Schatz 1991, 223-228) and Hungary (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 89).
Pipes (1993, 112) theorizes that although it is "undeniable" that Jews were overrepresented in the Bolshevik party and the early Soviet government as well as communist revolutionary activities in Hungary, Germany, and Austria in the period from 1918 to 1923, Jews were also overrepresented in a variety of other areas, including business, art, literature, and science. As a result, Pipes argues that their disproportionate representation in communist political movements should not be an issue. Pipes couples this argument with the assertion that Jewish Bolsheviks did not identify as Jews - an issue that, as we have seen, is questionable at best.
However, even assuming that these ethnically Jewish communists did not identify as Jews, such an argument fails to explain why such "de-ethnicized" Jews (as well as Jewish businessmen, artists, writers and scientists) should have typically been overrepresented in leftist movements and underrepresented in nationalist, populist, and other types of rightist political movements: Even if nationalist movements are anti-Semitic, as has often been the case, anti-Semitism should be irrelevant if these individuals are indeed completely deethnicized as Pipes proposes. Jewish prominence in occupations requiring high intelligence is no argument for understanding their very prominent role in communist and other leftist movements and their relative underrepresentation in nationalist movements.
Social identity theory provides a quite different perspective on Jewish radicalism. It stresses that perceived Jewish group interests are fundamental to Jewish political behavior, and that these perceived group interests are importantly influenced by social identity processes. If indeed radical politics resulted in a strong sense of identification with a Jewish ingroup, then Jewish involvement in these movements would be associated with very negative and exaggerated conceptions of the wider gentile society, and particularly the most powerful elements of that society, as an outgroup. In conformity with this expectation, Liebman (1979, 26) uses the term "contraculture" to describe the American Jewish left because "conflict with or antagonism toward society is a
{p. 81} central feature of this subculture and . . . many of its values and cultural patterns are contradictions of those existing in the surrounding society." For example, the New Left was fundamentally involved in radical social criticism in which all elements that contributed to the cohesive social fabric of midcentury America were regarded as oppressive and in need of radical alteration.
The emphasis here on social identity processes is compatible with Jewish radicalism serving particular perceived Jewish group interests. Anti-Semitism and Jewish economic interests were undoubtedly important motivating factors for Jewish leftism in czarist Russia. Jewish leaders in Western societies, many of whom were wealthy capitalists, proudly acknowledged Jewish overrepresentation in the Russian revolutionary movement; they also provided financial and political support for these movements by, for example, attempting to influence U.S. foreign policy (Szajkowski 1967). Representative of this attitude is financier Jacob Schiff's statement that "the claim that among the ranks of those who in Russia are seeking to undermine governmental authority there are a considerable number of Jews may perhaps be true. In fact, it would be rather surprising if some of those so terribly afflicted by persecution and exceptional laws should not at last have turned against their merciless oppressors" (in Szajkowski 1967, 10).
Indeed, at the risk of oversimplification, one might note that anti-Semitism and economic adversity combined with the Jewish demographic explosion in Eastern Europe were of critical importance for producing the sheer numbers of disaffected Jewish radicals and therefore the ultimate influence of Jewish radicalism in Europe and its spillover into the United States. Jewish populations in Eastern Europe had the highest rate of natural increase of any European population in the nineteenth century, with a natural increase of 120,000 per year in the 1880s and an overall increase within the Russian Empire from 1 to 6 million in the course of the nineteenth century (Alderman 1992, 112; Frankel 1981, 103; Lindemann 1991, 28-29, 133-135). Despite the emigration of close to 2 million Jews to the United States and elsewhere, many Eastern European Jews were impoverished at least in part because of czarist anti-Jewish policies that prevented Jewish upward mobility.
As a result, a great many Jews were attracted to radical political solutions that would transform the economic and political basis of society and would also be consistent with the continuity of Judaism. Within Russian Jewish communities, the acceptance of radical political ideology often coexisted with messianic forms of Zionism as well as intense commitment to Jewish nationalism and religious and cultural separatism, and many individuals held various and often rapidly changing combinations of these ideas (see Frankel 1981).
Religious fanaticism and messianic expectations have been a typical Jewish response to anti-Semitic persecutions throughout history (e.g., Scholem 1971; PTSD~, Ch. 3). Indeed, one might propose that messianic forms of political radicalism may be viewed as secular forms of this Jewish response to persecution, different from traditional forms only in that they also promise a utopian
{p. 84} Even successful Jewish capitalists have tended to adopt political beliefs to the left of the beliefs of their gentile counterparts. For example, German-Jewish capitalists in the nineteenth century "tended to take up positions distinctly to the 'left' of their Gentile peers and thus to place themselves in isolation from them" (Mosse 1989, 225). Although as a group they tended to be to the right of the Jewish population as a whole, a few even supported the Social Democratic Party and its socialist program. Among the plausible reasons for this state of affairs suggested by Mosse is that anti-Semitism tended to be associated with the German Right. Consistent with social identity theory, Jewish capitalists did not identify with groups that perceived them negatively and identified with groups that opposed an outgroup perceived as hostile. Social identity processes and their influence on perception of ethnic (group) interests rather than economic self-interest appears to be paramount here.
The association between Jews and liberal political attitudes is therefore independent of the usual demographic associations. In a passage that shows that Jewish cultural and ethnic estrangement supersedes economic interests in explaining Jewish political behavior, Silberman (1985, 347-348) 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 [presidential candidate Walter] 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,' a well-known author told me."
The suggestion is that in general Jewish political motivation is influenced by non-economic issues related to perceived Jewish group interests, the latter influenced by social identity processes. Similarly in the politically charged area of cultural attitudes, Silberman (1985, 350) notes "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." A perceived Jewish group interest in cultural pluralism transcends negative personal attitudes regarding the behavior in question.
Silberman's comment that Jewish attitudes are "firmly rooted in history" is particularly relevant: A consistent tendency has been for Jews to be persecuted as a minority group within a culturally or ethnically homogeneous society. A discussion of the politlcal, religious, and cultural pluralism as a very rational motivation for American Jews will be highlighted in Chapter 7, which dis-
{p. 85} cusses Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy. The point here is that the perceived Jewish group interest in developing a pluralistic society is of far more importance than mere economic self-interest in determining Jewish political behavior. Similarly Earl Raab ( 1996, 44) explains Jewish political behavior in terms of security issues related in part to a long memory of the Republican Party as linked to Christian fundamentalism and its history of being "resolutely nativist and anti-immigrant." The pattern of supporting the Democratic Party is therefore an aspect of ethnic conflict between Jews and sectors of the European-derived Caucasian population in the United States, not economic issues. Indeed, economic issues appear to have no relevance at all, since support for the Democratic Party among Jews does not differ by social status (Raab 1996, 45).
Nevertheless, there is evidence that recent Jewish voting behavior increasingly separates the traditional economic left-liberalism from issues related to cultural pluralism, immigration, and church-state separation. Recent polls and data on Jewish voting patterns indicate that Jews continue to view the right wing of the Republican Party as "a threat to American cosmopolitanism" because it is perceived as advocating a homogeneous Christian culture and is opposed to immigration (Beinart 1997, 25). However, Jewish voters were more supportive of conservative fiscal policies and less supportive of government attempts to redistribute wealth than either African Americans or other white Americans. Recent Jewish political behavior is thus self-interested both economically and in its opposition to the ethnic interests of white Americans to develop an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society.
In addition to the pursuit of specific group interests, however, social identity processes appear to make an independent contribution to explaining Jewish political behavior. Social identity processes appear to be necessary for explaining why the Jewish labor movement was far more radical than the rest of the American labor movement. In a passage that indicates Jewish radicals' profound sense of Jewish identity and separatism as well as complete antipathy to the entire gentile social order, Levin (1977, 213) notes that "their socialist ideas . . . created a gulf between themselves and other American workers who were not interested in radical changes in the social order. Although Jewish trade unions joined the AFL, they never felt ideologically at home there, for the AFL did not seek a radical transformation of society, nor was it internationalist in outlook." We have also noted that the New Left completely abandoned the aims and interests of the lower middle working class once that group had essentially achieved its social aims with the success of the trade union movement.
Again, there is the strong suggestion that social criticism and feelings of cultural estrangement among Jews have deep psychological roots that reach far beyond particular economic or political interests. As indicated in Chapter 1, one critical psychological component appears to involve a very deep antipathy to the entire gentile-dominated social order, which is viewed as anti-
{p. 86} Semitic - the desire for "malignant vengeance" that Disraeli asserted made many Jews "odious and so hostile to mankind." Recall Lipset's (1988, 393) description of the many Jewish "families which around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is." These families clearly perceive themselves as separate from the wider culture of the United States; they also view conservative forces as attempting to maintain this malignant culture. As in the case of traditional Judaism vis-a-vis gentile society, the traditional culture of the United States - and particularly the political basis of cultural conservatism that has historically been associated with anti-Semitism - is perceived as a manifestation of a negatively evaluated outgroup.
This antipathy toward gentile-dominated society was often accompanied by a powerful desire to avenge the evils of the old social order. For many Jewish New Leftists "the revolution promises to avenge the sufferings and to right the wrongs which have, for so long, been inflicted on Jews with the permission or encouragement, or even at the command of, the authorities in prerevolutionary societies" (Cohen 1980, 208). Interviews with New Left Jewish radicals revealed that many had destructive fantasies in which the revolution would result in "humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors" (Cohen 1980, 208) combined with the belief in their own omnipotence and their ability to create a nonoppressive social order - findings that are reminiscent of the motivating role of revenge for anti-Semitism among the Jewish-dominated security forces in communist Poland discussed above. These findings are also entirely consistent with my experience among Jewish New Left activists at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s (see note 13).
The social identity perspective predicts that generalized negative attributions of the outgroup would be accompanied by positive attributions regarding the Jewish ingroup. Both Jewish communists in Poland and Jewish New Left radicals had a powerful feeling of cultural superiority that was continuous with traditional Jewish conceptions of the superiority of their ingroup (Cohen 1980, 212; Schatz 1991, 119). Jewish self-conceptualizations of their activity in developing an adversarial culture in the United States tended to emphasize either the Jew as the historical victim of gentile anti-Semitism or the Jew as moral hero, but "in both cases the portrait is the obverse of that of the antiSemite. Jews lack warts. Their motives are pure, their idealism genuine" (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 112). Studies of Jewish radicals by Jewish social scientists have tended to gratuitously attribute Jewish radicalism to a "free choice of a gifted minority" (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 118) when economic explanations failed - yet another example where Jewish group status appears to affect social science research in a manner that serves Jewish group interests.
Moreover, a universalist utopian ideology such as Marxism is an ideal vehicle for serving Jewish attempts to develop a positive self-identity while still retaining their positive identity as Jews and their negative evaluation of gentile
{p. 87} power structures. First, the utopian nature of radical ideology in contrast to existing gentile-dominated social systems (which are inevitably less than perfect) facilitates development of a positive identity for the ingroup. Radical ideology thus facilitates positive group identity and a sense of moral rectitude because of its advocacy of universalist ethical principles. Psychologists have found that a sense of moral rectitude is an important component of self-esteem (e.g., Harter 1983), and self-esteem has been proposed as a motivating factor in social identity processes (SAID, Ch. 1).
As was also true of psychoanalysis, leftist political movements developed redemptive-messianic overtones highly conducive to ingroup pride and loyalty. Members of the Russian Jewish Bund and their progeny in the United States had intense personal pride and a powerful sense that they were "part of a moral and political vanguard for great historical change. They had a mission that inspired them and people who believed in them" (Liebman 1979, 133).
This sense of ingroup pride and messianic fervor is undoubtedly a critical ingredient of Judaism in all historical eras. As Schatz (1991, 105) notes in his description of the underground Jewish communist revolutionaries in Poland during the interwar period, "The movement was ... part of a worldwide, international struggle for nothing less than the fundamental change of the very foundations of human society. The joint effect of this situation was a specific sense of revolutionary loneliness and mission, an intense cohesion, a feeling of brotherhood, and a readiness for personal sacrifice on the altar of struggle." What distinguished Jewish communists from other communists was not only their desire for a postrevolutionary world without anti-Semitism, but also their "distinct [emotional] intensity with roots in messianic longings" (Schatz 1991, 140). As one respondent said, "I believed in Stalin and in the party as my father believed in the Messiah" (in Schatz 1991, 140).
Reflecting traditional Jewish social structure, these Jewish radical groups were hierarchical and highly authoritarian, and they developed their own private language (Schatz 1991, 109-112). As in traditional Judaism, continuing study and self-education were viewed as very important features of the movement: "To study was a point of honor and an obligation" (p. 117). The discussions replicated the traditional methods of Torah study: memorization of long passages of text combined with analysis and interpretation carried out in an atmosphere of intense intellectual competition quite analogous to the traditional pilpul. In the words of a novice to these discussions, "We behaved like yeshiva bukhers [students] and they [the more experienced intellectual mentors] like rabbis" (p. 139).
As expected on the basis of social identity theory, there was also a high level of ingroup-outgroup thinking characterized by a lofty sense of moral rectitude among the ingroup combined with an implacable hostility and rejection of the outgroup. In the period after World War II, for example, the Polish-Jewish communists viewed the new economic plan in truly mystical terms. [It was] a scientifically conceived, infallible scheme that would totally
{p. 88} restructure societal relations and prepare the country for socialism" (Schatz 1991, 249). The economic difficulties that befell the population merely resulted in transferring their hopes to the future, while at the same time they developed "an uncompromising attitude toward those who might not be willing to accept the hardships of the present and a merciless hostility toward those perceived as the enemy. Thus the burning will to produce general harmony and happiness was married to distrust and suspiciousness regarding its objects and a hatred toward its actual, potential, or imagined opponents" (p. 250).
Clearly, to be a communist revolutionary was to develop an intense commitment to a cohesive authoritarian group that valued intellectual accomplishments and exhibited intense hatred against enemies and outgroups while having very positive feelings toward an ingroup viewed as morally and intellectually superior. These groups operated as embattled minorities that viewed the surrounding society as hostile and threatening. Being a member of such a group required a great deal of personal sacrifice and even altruism. All these attributes can be found as defining features of more traditional Jewish groups.
Further evidence of the importance of social identity processes may be found in Charles Liebman's (1973, 153ff) suggestion that leftist universalist ideology allows Jews to subvert traditional social categorizations in which Jews are viewed in negative terms. The adoption of such ideologies by Jews is an attempt to overcome Jewish feelings of alienation "from the roots and the traditions of [gentile] society" (p. 153). "The Jew continues his search for an ethic or ethos which is not only universal or capable of universality, but which provides a cutting edge against the older traditions of the society, a search whose intensity is compounded and reinforced by the Gentile's treatment of the Jew" (Liebman 1973, 157). Such attempts at subverting negative social categorizations imposed by an outgroup are a central aspect of social identity theory (Hogg & Abrams 1988; see SAID, Ch. 1).
The universalist ideology thus functions as a secular form of Judaism. Sectarian forms of Judaism are rejected as "a survival strategy" (Liebman 1973, 157) because of their tendency to produce anti-Semitism, their lack of intellectual appeal in the post-Enlightenment world, and their ineffectiveness in appealing to gentiles and thereby altering the gentile social world in a manner that furthers Jewish group interests. Indeed, while the universalist ideology is formally congruent with Enlightenment ideals, the retention of traditional Jewish separatism and patterns of association among those espousing the ideology suggest an element of deception or self-deception:
{quote} Jews prefer to get together with other Jews to promote ostensibly non-Jewish enterprises (which assist Jewish acceptance), and then to pretend the whole matter has nothing to do with being Jewish But this type of activity is most prevalent among Jews who are the most estranged from their own traditions and hence most concerned with finding a value that supports Jewish acceptance without overtly destroying Jewish group ties. (Liebman 1973, 159) {endquote}
{p. 89} The universalist ideology therefore allows Jews to escape their alienation or estrangement from gentile society while nevertheless allowing for the retention of a strong Jewish identity. Institutions that promote group ties among gentiles (such as nationalism and traditional gentile religious associations) are actively opposed and subverted, while the structural integrity of Jewish separatism is maintained. A consistent thread of radical theorizing since Marx has been a fear that nationalism could serve as a social cement that would result in a compromise between the social classes and result in a highly unified social order based on hierarchical but harmonious relationships between existing social classes. This is only this type of highly cohesive gentile social organization that is fundamentally at odds with Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy (see Chs. 5, 7, 8). Both the Old Left and the New Left, as noted, actively attempted to subvert the cohesiveness of gentile social structure, including especially the modus viveni achieved between business and labor by the 1960s {Trotskyists branded this "Capitalism", and instead promoted Free Trade}. And we have seen that the Jewish-dominated Polish communist government campaigned actively against Polish nationalism, and they campaigned against the political and cultural power of the Catholic Church, the main force of social cohesion in traditional Polish society.
Finally, as emphasized by Rothman and Lichter (1982, 119), Marxism is particularly attractive as the basis for an ideology that subverts the negative social categorizations of the gentile outgroup because within such an ideology the Jewish-gentile categorization becomes less salient while Jewish group cohesion and separatism may nevertheless persist: "By adopting variants of Marxist ideology, Jews deny the reality of cultural or religious differences between Jews and Christians. These differences become 'epiphenomenal,' compared to the more fundamental opposition of workers and capitalists. Thus Jews and non-Jews are really brothers under the skin. Even when not adopting a Marxist position, many Jews have tended toward radical environmentalist positions which serve a similar function" (p. 119).
Such a strategy makes excellent sense from the standpoint of social identity theory: A consistent finding in research on intergroup contact is that making the social categories that define groups less salient would lessen intergroup differentiation and would facilitate positive social interactions between members from different groups (Brewer & Miller 1984; Doise & Sinclair 1973; Miller, Brewer & Edwards 1985). At the extreme, acceptance of a universalist ideology by gentiles would result in gentiles not perceiving Jews as in a different social category at all, while nonetheless Jews would be able to maintain a strong personal identity as Jews.
These features of Jewish radicalism together constitute a very compelling analysis of the role of social identity processes in this phenomenon. The last mechanism is particularly interesting as an analysis of both the tendency for Jewish political overrepresentation in radical causes and the Jewish tendency to adopt radical environmentalist ideologies noted as a common characteristic of Jewish social scientists in Chapter 2. The analysis implies that the Jews
{p. 90} involved in these intellectual movements are engaged in a subtle process of deception of gentiles (and, perhaps, self-deception), and that these movements essentially function as a form of crypto-Judaism.
In the language of social identity theory, an ideology is created in which the social categorization of Jew-gentile is minimized in importance, and there are no negative attributions regarding Jewish group membership. The importance of ethnic group membership is minimized as a social category, and, because of its lack of importance, ethnic self-interest among gentiles is analyzed as fundamentally misguided because it does not recognize the priority of class conflict between gentiles. Jews can remain Jews because being a Jew is no longer important. At the same time, traditional institutions of social cohesiveness within gentile society are subverted and gentile society itself is viewed as permeated by conflicts of interest between social classes rather than by commonalities of interest and feelings of social solidarity among different social classes {and the sexes}.
Rothman and Lichter (p. I 19ff) support their argument by noting that the adoption of universalist ideologies is a common technique among minority groups in a wide range of cultures around the world. Despite the veneer of universalism, these movements are most definitely not assimilationist, and in fact Rothman and Lichter view assimilation, defined as complete absorption and loss of minority group identity, as an alternative to the adoption of universalist political movements. Universalist ideologies may be smoke screens that actually facilitate the continued existence of group strategies while promoting the denial of their importance by ingroup and outgroup members alike. Judaism as a cohesive, ethnically based group strategy is able to continue to exist but in a cryptic or semi-cryptic state.
Corroborating this perspective, Levin (1977, 105) states, "Marx's analysis [of Judaism as a caste] gave socialist thinkers an easy way out - to ignore or minimize the Jewish problem." In Poland, the Jewish-dominated Communist Party decried worker and peasant participation in anti-Semitic pogroms during the 1930s because such individuals were not acting on behalf of their class interests (Schatz 1991, 99), an interpretation in which ethnic conflicts result from capitalism and will end after the communist revolution. One reason little anti-Semitism existed within the Social Democratic movement in late-nineteenth-century Germany was that Marxist theory explained all social phenomena; Social Democrats "did not need anti-Semitism, another allembracing theory, to explain the events of their lives" (Dawidowicz 1975, 42). The Social Democrats (and Marx) never analyzed Judaism as a nation or as an ethnic group but as a religious and economic community (Pulzer 1964, 269).
In theory, therefore, anti-Semitism and other ethnic conflicts would disappear with the advent of a socialist society. It is possible that such an interpretation actually served to lower anti-Semitism in some cases. Levy (1975, 190) suggests that anti-Semitism was minimized among the gentile working-class constituency of the German Social Democrats by the activities of party leaders
{p. 91} and socialist theoreticians who framed the political and economic problems of this group in terrns of class conflict rather than Jewish-gentile conflict and actively opposed any cooperation with anti-Semitic parties.
Trotsky and other Jews in the Russian Socialist Democratic Labor Party considered themselves as representing the Jewish proletariat within the wider socialist movement (see note 4), but they were opposed to the separatist, nationalist program of the Russian Jewish Bund. Arthur Liebman (1979, 122 123) suggests that these assimilationist socialists consciously conceptualized a postrevolutionary society in which Judaism would exist, but with a lessened social salience: "For them, the ultimate solution of the Jewish problem would be an internationalist socialist society that paid no heed to distinctions between Jews and non-Jews. To hasten the establishment of such a society, it became necessary, in the view of these assimilationist socialists, for Jews to consider ethnic and religious distinctions between them and non-Jews as irrelevant."
Similarly, after the revolution, "Having abandoned their own origins and identity, yet not finding, or sharing, or being fully admitted to Russian life (except in the world of the party), the Jewish Bolsheviks found their ideological home in revolutionary universalism. They dreamt of a classless and stateless society supported by Marxist faith and doctrine that transcended the particularities and burdens of Jewish existence" (Levin 1988, 49). These individuals, along with many highly nationalist ex-Bundists, ended up administrating programs related to Jewish national life in the Soviet Union. Apparently, although they rejected the radical Jewish separatism of either the Bundists or the Zionists, they envisioned the continuity of secular Jewish national life in the Soviet Union (e.g., Levin 1988, 52).
This belief in the invisibility of Judaism in a socialist society can also be found among American Jewish radicals. American Jewish socialists of the 1890s, for example, envisioned a society in which race played no part (Rogoff 1930, 1l5), apparently a proposal in which Jews and non-Jews would remain in their separate spheres in a class-based workers movement. In the event, even this level of assimilation was not attained; these organizers worked in a completely Jewish milieu and retained strong ties with the Jewish community. "Their actions continued to be at variance with their ideology. The more deeply they moved into the field of organizing Jewish workers, the more loudly they insisted on their socialist universalism" (Liebman 1979, 256 257).
The gap between rhetoric and reality strongly suggests the importance of deception and self-deception in these phenomena. Indeed, these socialist labor organizers never abandoned their universalistic rhetoric, but actively resisted incorporating their unions into the wider American labor movement even after the decline of Yiddish among their members left them without any excuses for failing to do so. Within the unions they engaged in ethnic politics aimed at keeping their own ethnic group in power (Liebman 1979, 270ff), actions obviously at odds with socialist rhetoric. In the end, the attachment of many of
{p. 92} these individuals to socialism declined and was replaced by a strong sense of Jewish ethnicity and peoplehood (Liebman 1979, 270).
The result was that the veneer or universalism covered up a continued separatism of radical Jewish intellectuals and political organizers:
[Gentile intellectuals] really are not totally accepted into even the secularist humanist liberal company of their quondam Jewish friends. Jews continue to insist in indirect and often inexplicable ways on their own uniqueness. Jewish universalism in relations between Jews and non-Jews has an empty ring.... Still, we have the anomaly of Jewish secularists and atheists writing their own prayer books. We find Jewish political reformers breaking with their local parties which stress an ethnic style of politics, and ostensibly pressing for universal political goals - while organizing their own political clubs which are so Jewish in style and manner that non-Jews often feel unwelcome. (Liebman 1973, 158)
Universalism may thus be viewed as a mechanism for Jewish continuity via crypsis or semi-crypsis. The Jewish radical is invisible to the gentile as a Jew and thereby avoids anti-Semitism while at the same time covertly retains his or her Jewish identity. Lyons (1982, 73) finds that "most Jewish Communists wear their Jewishness very casually but experience it deeply. It is not a religious or even an institutional Jewishness for most; nevertheless, it is rooted in a subculture of identity, style, language, and social network.... In fact, this second-generation Jewishness was antiethnic and yet the height of ethnicity. The emperor believed that he was clothed in transethnic, American garb, but Gentiles saw the nuances and details of his naked ethnicity."
These remarks indicate an element of crypsis - a self-deceptive disjunction between private and public personas - "a dual posturing revealing one face to the outer world and another to the tribe" (Horowitz 1997, 42). But this pose has a cost. As Albert Memmi (1966, 236), notes, "The Jew-of-the-Left must pay for this protection by his modesty and anonymity, his apparent lack of concern for all that relates to his own people.... Like the poor man who enters a middle-class family, they demand that he at least have the good taste to make himself invisible." Because of the nature of their own ideology, Jews on the left were forced to deemphasize specifically Jewish issues, such as the Holocaust and Israel, despite their strong identification as Jews (Wisse 1987). It is precisely this feature of the Jewish leftist intellectual movements that are most repellent to ethnically committed Jews (see, e.g., Wisse 1987). Ethnic identification was often unconscious, suggesting self-deception. Lyons ( 1982, 74) finds that among his sample of Jewish American communists,
evidence of the importance of ethnicity in general and Jewishness in particular permeates the available record. Many Communists, for example, state that they could never have married a spouse who was not a leftist. When Jews were asked if they could have married Gentiles, many hesitated, surprised by the question, and found it difficult to answer. Upon reflection, many concluded that they had always taken marriage to
{p. 93} someone Jewish for granted The alternative was never really considered, particularly among Jewish men.
Moreover, there were conscious attempts at deception directed at making Jewish involvement in radical political movements invisible by placing an American face on what was in reality largely a Jewish movement (Liebman 1979, 527ff). Both the Socialist Party and the CPUSA took pains to have , and the CPUSA actively encouraged Jewish members to take gentile-sounding names. (This phenomenon also occurred in Poland jsee above] and the Soviet Union [see p. 97].) Despite representing over half the membership in both the Socialist Party and the CPUSA during some periods, neither party ever had Jews as presidential candidates and no Jew held the top position in the CPUSA after 1929. Gentiles were brought from long distances and given highly visible staff positions in Jewish-dominated socialist organizations in New York. Jewish domination of these organizations not uncommonly led gentiles to leave when they realized their role as window dressing in a fundamentally Jewish organization.
Liebman (1979, 561) notes that New Left radicals often took pains to ignore Jewish issues entirely. The New Left deemphasized ethnicity and religion in its ideology while emphasizing social categories and political issues such as the Vietnam War and discrimination against blacks which were very divisive for white gentiles but for which Jewish identity was irrelevant; moreover, these issues did not threaten Jewish middle-class interests, especially Zionism. Jewish identity, though salient to the participants, was publicly submerged. And as noted above, when the New Left began adopting positions incompatible with Jewish interests, Jews tended to sever their ties with the movement.
In a remarkable illustration of the perceived invisibility of the group dynamics of Jewish involvement in radical political movements, Liebman (1979, 167) describes 1960s student activists as completely unaware that their actions could lead to anti-Semitism because Jews were overrepresented among the activists. (Liebman shows that in fact other Jews were concerned that their actions would lead to anti-Semitism.) From their own perspective, they were successfully engaging in crypsis: They supposed that their Jewishness was completely invisible to the outside world while at the same time it retained a great deal of subjective salience to themselves. At a theoretical level, this is a classic case of self-deception, considered in SAID (Ch. 8) as an essential feature of Jewish religious ideology and reactions to anti-Semitism.
In the event, the deception appears to have generally failed, if not for the New Left, at least for the Old Left. There was a general lack of rapport between Jewish radical intellectuals and non-Jewish intellectuals within Old Left radical organizations (C. Liebman 1973, 158 159). Some gentile intellectuals found the movement attractive because of its Jewish dominance, but for the most part the essentially Jewish milieu was a barrier (Liebman 1979, 530ff).
{p. 110 (Chapter 4: Jewish Involvement in the Psychoanalytic Movement)} In addition to constituting the core of the leadership and the intellectual vanguard of the movement, Jews have also constituted the majority of the movement's members. In 1906 all 17 members of the movement were Jewish, and they strongly identified as Jews (Klein 1981). In a 1971 study, Henry, Sims and Spray found that 62.1 percent of their sample of American psychoanalysts identified themselves as having a Jewish cultural affinity, compared with only 16.7 percent indicating a Protestant affinity and 2.6 percent a Catholic affinity. An additional 18.6 percent indicated no cultural affinity, a percentage considerably higher than the other categories of mental health professional and suggesting that the percentage of psychoanalysts with a Jewish background was even higher than 62 percent (Henry, Sims & Spray 1971,27)
We have seen that a common component of Jewish intellectual activity since the Enlightenment has been to criticize gentile culture. Freud's ideas have often been labeled as subversive. Indeed, "[Freud] was convinced that it was in the very nature of psychoanalytic doctrine to appear shocking and subvers