Ashkenazi Jews are Not White

Kevin MacDonald
Occidental Observer
December 10, 2014

In Steve Sailer’s blog about Aaron Sorkin, he quotes a New York Times article:

And Libby Hill, writing for the AV Club, said: “Aaron Sorkin doesn’t understand who the victim is. He doesn’t understand how empathy works. And he, as a rich, powerful, white man in the United States, doesn’t understand that he is among the most privileged people in the world.” [Sailer’s emphasis]

So, according to Ms Hill, Aaron Sorkin is a White man. As Sailer points out, referring to him as “a rich, powerful, Jewish” would be career-ending.

It’s a nice example where Jews are considered to be White when they benefit from it — calling attention to Jewish, as opposed to White, power is definitely not a good career move.

Here’s another one: Sony Pictures Entertainment was recently hacked, yielding a list of all their top-paid employees. Stories about this incident invariably deplored the race and gender gap at the top of this Hollywood company:

Normally, this wouldn’t be particularly enlightening information for anyone but industry gossips and voyeurs. But when I sorted the list by “annual rate,” I noticed something notable: a stark homogeneity among the people earning the most. Based on the spreadsheet (and bear in mind that these numbers are unconfirmed – Sony Pictures didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment), the employees of Sony Pictures with the highest annual rates appear to be nearly entirely white men. (“Hacked Documents Reveal a Hollywood Studio’s Stunning Gender and Race Gap“)

However, it you look at the salary list, you see that at least the top four earners are Jews and quite a few of the rest have Jewish surnames. There is indeed homogeneity, but it has little to do with White men.

Of course, referring to the people who run Hollywood as “White” is pervasive:

The LA Times understands how the game is played. Every year around Oscar time they put out editorials and articles bemoaning the “overwhelmingly white male membership of the academy” [i.e., the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences] and that “film, TV diversity doesn’t look like America’s.” Then the next year, they do it all over again because nothing changes. (“Gary Oldman becomes a pariah“)

Another very important example has to do with Ivy League admissions. Unlike the universities, Ron Unz disaggregated Whites and Jews and found that there is egregious discrimination against Whites.

Based on reported statistics, Jews approximately match or even outnumber non-Jewish whites at Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools, which seems wildly disproportionate. Indeed, the official statistics indicate that non-Jewish whites at Harvard are America’s most under-represented population group, enrolled at a much lower fraction of their national population [18%] than blacks or Hispanics, despite having far higher academic test scores.

But if you aggregate Whites and Jews together, viola, the only argument left is that Ivy League universities are discriminating against Asians by favoring Whites—which completely fits the anti-White narrative and which seems to have been the take home message of Unz’s article for many.  As I noted in my comment on Unz’s article:

An argument that Jews should not be considered Whites could be made, highlighting the following points:

• Population genetic data indicate that Jews are a Middle Eastern group and that there is substantial genetic distance between Europeans and Jews.
• Jews typically do not identify with the people and culture of Christian Europe and its offshoots; traditional Jewish attitudes conceptualize Judaism as separate from White, Christian society; partly because of their lack of identification with non-White Christian culture, Jewish groups have led the campaign to remove Christianity from the public square;
• there is a long history of very mainstream Jewish activism and identity that sees Christian Europe as an evil outgroup responsible for a long history of persecuting Jews; an important aspect of Jewish self-conception in America—apparent in much of the material reviewed by Unz, such as Jerome Karabel’s work—is that Jews were subjected to quotas at Ivy League universities until after World War II;
• Jews are a relatively powerful group that has often been in competition with non-Jewish Europeans [the theme of Jews as a hostile elite]; Ivy League enrollments may be seen as one aspect of that competition;
• Jewish ethnic activism typically excludes non-Jewish Whites and favors Jews, as in the appointment of Elena Kagan and the Jewish campaign to increase Jewish enrollment in Ivy League universities mentioned above;
• As a result, the distinction between Jew and non-Jewish White is of considerable real world importance.

Given this (and of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg), I was glad to see an article by Hila Hershkovitz in the Jerusalem Post stating many of the same arguments (“Ashkenazi Jews are not White“). (A citation would have been nice.) She concludes:

Jews are not white. People who try to argue otherwise are not only abrogating history and denying our people’s authentic identity, they are in fact (even if unintentionally) also practicing a form of Western imperialism, as nobody has the right to superimpose an artificial Western identity on a people with an ancient Middle Eastern-tribal identity.

Believe me, it’s not a matter of “Western imperialism.” Jews are more than happy to be considered White when it suits them, as the above examples illustrate.

In the comments section of the article “Freddie Weisse” brings up the famous quote from Susan Sontag and relates it to The Culture of Critique:

The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. (Partisan Review, Winter 1967, p. 57)

He’s quite right to bring up this quote in this context. Sontag lived her intellectual life entirely within a Jewish world. Like the other Jewish intellectuals reviewed in The Culture of Critique, she did not identify as a White European and she saw them as an evil outgroup. Freud comes to mind:

Hannibal . . . had been the favourite hero of my later school days. . . . And when in the higher classes I began to understand for the first time what it meant to belong to an alien race . . . the figure of the semitic general rose still higher in my esteem. To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organisation of the Catholic Church. (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams; in Rothman & Isenberg 1974a, 64)

And when neocon Ben Wattenberg  famously asserted that “The non-Europeanization of America is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality” [The Good News Is The Bad News Is Wrong, p. 84.], I rather doubt that he included himself among the Europeans.

The fact that people like these constitute a dominant intellectual elite in the West is a disaster for the peoples of Europe.