bobbyw24
08-08-2010, 02:45 PM
by John Derbyshire on August 04, 2010
israelusa
The Alternative Right website has posted an interesting symposium on the topic: Is the traditional Right anti-Jewish?
Taki starts it off with a fiery rant against the vindictiveness of neoconservatives like Podhoretz and Kristol, presumably the senior ones. They have, Taki says, called him a fascist (a thing they surely would not have done if they had read Taki’s memoir Nothing to Declare, with its heartfelt tributes to heroes of the WW2 Greek anti-Nazi resistance—people like Taki’s own father).
Srdja Trifkovic then takes a constructive line, arguing that while there is historical justification for anti-Jewish feeling on the Old Right, if we and the Jews do not hang together, we shall hang separately. There is some overlap here with my TakiMag piece of June 17.
Paul Gottfried then added his own perspective as a lifetime student of American conservatism and also as, whatever Gertrude Himmelfarb may have thought, a Jew.
In a follow-up piece, Richard Spencer modifies Trifkovic’s argument by pointing out that as American multiculturalism lurches out of control, things could get very Bad For The Jews. Israeli hardliners, if not liberal American Jews, might look with horror on the prospect of our colossal nuclear arsenal being in the hands of powerful political coalitions who regard Jews “as a particularly annoying version of Whitey.”
Spencer has, I think, grasped a key point: “World Jewry isn’t as monolithic as some anti-Semites and philo-Semites like to imagine; and indeed, the factions within it can be extremely mutually hostile.”
That’s right. In the postings so far, there have been four different groups of Jews under discussion.
* Assimilated pre-Hitler Central-European Jews with ancestral roots in Germany and the Hapsburg Empire. This is the subgroup Paul Gottfried grew up amongst and most easily identifies with. (It is also the one from whom I took my own first formative impression of Jewry.)
* Twentieth-century American Jews, mainly drawn from the Ostjuden of the Russian Empire. Having been driven from their homes by the Tsar’s Cossacks, they were inclined to a favorable view of the regime that shot the Tsar; and those to whom the tribal, commercial, and religious life of the shtetl was a bitter memory turned in reaction to universalist humanism, socialism, and agnosticism.
“That there is anti-Jewish feeling on the Old Right is therefore not surprising. That the Old Right can afford to continue indulging it, I do not believe.”
* The Jewish intellectuals who joined with disillusioned Gentile liberals in the late 1970s to support Ronald Reagan—the highbrow component of the “Reagan Democrats.” Great verbal agility was needed to reconcile any kind of conservatism with an elaborate welfare state and huge military budgets. Because practically all American Jews had been liberal up to this point, even a trickle of defectors was numerically important; and because Jews are the world-historical champions of verbal agility, they were soon dominant in the neoconservative movement.
More
http://www.takimag.com/article/the_old_rights_jewish_problem/
israelusa
The Alternative Right website has posted an interesting symposium on the topic: Is the traditional Right anti-Jewish?
Taki starts it off with a fiery rant against the vindictiveness of neoconservatives like Podhoretz and Kristol, presumably the senior ones. They have, Taki says, called him a fascist (a thing they surely would not have done if they had read Taki’s memoir Nothing to Declare, with its heartfelt tributes to heroes of the WW2 Greek anti-Nazi resistance—people like Taki’s own father).
Srdja Trifkovic then takes a constructive line, arguing that while there is historical justification for anti-Jewish feeling on the Old Right, if we and the Jews do not hang together, we shall hang separately. There is some overlap here with my TakiMag piece of June 17.
Paul Gottfried then added his own perspective as a lifetime student of American conservatism and also as, whatever Gertrude Himmelfarb may have thought, a Jew.
In a follow-up piece, Richard Spencer modifies Trifkovic’s argument by pointing out that as American multiculturalism lurches out of control, things could get very Bad For The Jews. Israeli hardliners, if not liberal American Jews, might look with horror on the prospect of our colossal nuclear arsenal being in the hands of powerful political coalitions who regard Jews “as a particularly annoying version of Whitey.”
Spencer has, I think, grasped a key point: “World Jewry isn’t as monolithic as some anti-Semites and philo-Semites like to imagine; and indeed, the factions within it can be extremely mutually hostile.”
That’s right. In the postings so far, there have been four different groups of Jews under discussion.
* Assimilated pre-Hitler Central-European Jews with ancestral roots in Germany and the Hapsburg Empire. This is the subgroup Paul Gottfried grew up amongst and most easily identifies with. (It is also the one from whom I took my own first formative impression of Jewry.)
* Twentieth-century American Jews, mainly drawn from the Ostjuden of the Russian Empire. Having been driven from their homes by the Tsar’s Cossacks, they were inclined to a favorable view of the regime that shot the Tsar; and those to whom the tribal, commercial, and religious life of the shtetl was a bitter memory turned in reaction to universalist humanism, socialism, and agnosticism.
“That there is anti-Jewish feeling on the Old Right is therefore not surprising. That the Old Right can afford to continue indulging it, I do not believe.”
* The Jewish intellectuals who joined with disillusioned Gentile liberals in the late 1970s to support Ronald Reagan—the highbrow component of the “Reagan Democrats.” Great verbal agility was needed to reconcile any kind of conservatism with an elaborate welfare state and huge military budgets. Because practically all American Jews had been liberal up to this point, even a trickle of defectors was numerically important; and because Jews are the world-historical champions of verbal agility, they were soon dominant in the neoconservative movement.
More
http://www.takimag.com/article/the_old_rights_jewish_problem/