The Luftmentshen of Jewcy
I have declined to comment on Foxman’s Armenian genocide scandal so far, though I am certainly no fan of Abe Foxman generally.
But Jewcy and others are attacking Abe for the wrong reasons. The problem with Foxman is that Foxman attacks and barks as if the Holocaust itself justifies his personal rule over the parameters of politically acceptable speech, and he does so on behalf of the general Jewish community, whether dead or alive. All who defy his will risk being deemed an “anti-Semite.� That’s the problem, not a need for Foxman consistency.
What is the benefit of “consistency� here? The benefit is that Joey Kurtzman and the whole Jewcy mishpacha get to look like badass idealists willing to challenge the Jewish “defense� organization status quo, and show they are very big universalists not confined to shtetl-like thinking.
This is, in and of itself, of some value, as the Jewish community needs to distance itself publicly from the ADL, who is usually creating much more harm than good, because the ADL’s interests are not our interests, but the interests of a narrow, specific type: his donor base.
But what is the cost of championing this specific cause? The cost is a further agitation to the Turkish-Israeli alliance, which is the most critical Muslim ally to Israel. Turkey is important in so many ways to the Jewish state. Emergency water supply plans, intelligence sharing, political shield from the EU, etc., etc. And yet, these punks have no qualms threatening that alliance, a relationship already under pressure. The new Turkish president, Abdullah Gul, has an Islamist past, and perhaps retains some of those ambitions. And he is not happy about what is happening with the U.S. Jewish community’s support of Armenian remembrance. I am going to go out on a limb that those in Turkey who resent Turkey’s alliance with the Jewish state just might be using this issue to further question the alliance generally.
You think the Armenians just want acknowledgement? I doubt that. I would suspect they want retribution. That means resolutions of condemnation, but it also may mean the right to sue Turkey. And I don’t blame them for that, but this is not our fight. And guess which genocide-centric community is going to be expected to back that also?
As the moderate-Left Forward (and no fan of Abe Foxman) notes in this week’s editorial,
As for the Armenian tragedy, as real as we know it to be, the fact is that Israel desperately needs the friendship of Turkey, its most important ally, and that friendship comes with a painful price tag. Remembering genocide is important, but not as important as saving lives today.
Foxman’s ADL is a problem. But Jewcy’s specific demand for Jewish communal support of the Armenian community carries an unfortunate byproduct, the implicit, concurrent attack on a crucial Israeli ally.
Jewcy and friends should have done a cost-benefit analysis before going apeshit. If they did, then they clearly harbor a most unsympathetic view towards consideration of the Jewish state’s needs. If they didn’t, then they are classic, irresponsible, Diaspora Luftmentshen.
Update: Joey Kurtman Responds.
13 comments
Funny. Earlier today I stumbled upon an article where Kurtzman was supporting Kevin MacDonald, the professor with the antisemitic theories from Long Beach, and was thinking that it was like reading an ongoing troll. But “luftmenchen” is a better description.
Perhaps I just don’t know enough about Turkey, but I fail to see how supporting the recognition of the Armenian genocide as genocide is necessarily anti-Turkey.
The Armenian genocide took place in the Ottoman Empire, which as I understand things had no more relationship to today’s Turkey than Nazi Germany had to today’s Germany.
The Germans seem to have done okay having acknowledged their troubled past. Why can’t Turkey do the same? Is it purely an economic concern (i.e., they don’t want to pay reparations)? Or is it a shame thing like the Japanese refusal to acknowledge their misdeeds in WW2?
Somebody please enlighten me.
Supporting, no. I never denied that MacDonald is an antisemite, I said that that’s not an adequate critique of his work. And I said that I couldn’t say where MacDonald was right and where he was wrong, because no one had delivered the academic critique of his work that John Tooby years ago promised to deliver. Meanwhile, prominent evolutionary psychologists have weighed in in support of some of his theories about group selection(e.g., David Sloan Wilson). And yes, despite plenty of honkingly dubious parts, I found his books very interesting, as have other marginal cranks like, say, Andrew Sullivan.
MacDonald’s trilogy has generated too much interest to hope he’ll just go away. If the books are pure antisemitism then we’re still waiting for the sunshine that will disinfect. That’s not a statement of support for MacDonald, it’s just reality.
themicah,
1) It’s the term “genocide” that they don’t want attached to their history, and their nation.
2) Correct, they don’t want to pay reparations.
3) They do not see how the Jewish community is treating them properly when they are the only Muslim country to ally with Israel so closely. They take a lot of heat from other Muslim countries for this, and they expect something back. The alliance with Israel is not for free.
Wow!!! Andrew Sullivan?! I’m impressed. He was, in my ever humble opinion, the worst editor I had ever read at TNR.
Kurtzman, not that anybody should take Wikipedia seriously but do you know that your Jewcy article is listed under “Praise for MacDonald?”
Please read this article, particularly the last page:
http://www.splcenter.org/intel.....ite_area=1
I’m not sure what you expect. You think that academics will drop their work and research and publish just so they can refute an antisemitic quack? You should re-read some of the comments on your own post about this on Jewcy, some are very clever and right on the mark.
There is no real way to dismiss this theory since…Jews are a group. Round up a bunch of business, scientific or political successes and voila, a theory is born! I guess we could point out that “gentiles” are also a bunch of groups and would have their own survival tactics which might be at least as pernicious as those for which he blames Jews. In MacDonald’s universe, WE are are the gentiles’ natural enemy but he doesn’t see the absurdity of this claim in light of the gentiles’ vaster numbers and yes, power.
I guess we could point out that you and I don’t know each other, don’t give money to AIPAC or the ADL, and write from very different points of view on our blogs. Oh crap, it must be the blogging, that must be our group evolutionary tactic. I mean, really, who can take this seriously except for people who are predisposed to believing in conspiracies where Jews take an active role?
I don’t see that his work has received favorable interest. It received angry interest for a while and since he’s a tenured professor who edited a peer-reviewed journal, nobody could do anything to shut him down. That does not indicate that his theories have received any traction among fellow academics. The SPLC article specifies that his Jewish theories are not, in fact, being quoted by peers.
It’s hard enough to fight the multiple sources that make it their life’s mission to attack Jews, the Jewish community, Jewish organizations and Israel without watching a Jewish website actually provide a positive review and forum for an academic who has devised a hateful theory targeting Jews. Flighty stuff there - Luftmentchenish, if you will.
TM,
I hear your issues, and thought you would find it interesting that the pro-Jewish race realist breakoff of Amren, Inverted-World, lost its Jewish editor because of the editor-in-chief’s insistence on a serious treatment of Kevin MacDonald, albeit a negative one. http://inverted-world.com/inde.....ews_do_it/
Never the less, I personally enjoyed that article on Jewcy, even if I wasn’t comfortable with *others* who enjoyed it.
TM…hmm…the problem is that my first comment is still a perfectly adequate response to your own comment.
“[N]o one ha[s] delivered the academic critique of his work that John Tooby years ago promised to deliver.”
John Tooby is an extremely influential evolutionary psychologist, a sort of mentor to Steven Pinker, and the former head of the HBES. He responded to Judith Shulevitz’s pleadings in Slate by promising that he would rebut MacDonald’s theories. He then promised on his website that the rebuttal was forthcoming. Tons of people were waiting eagerly for that promised rebuttal, including me. It never came. Meanwhile, David Sloan Wilson, another extremely influential evolutionary psychologist, is one of those who has spoken favorably of MacDonald’s Jewish trilogy, or at least of the first book, A People that Shall Dwell Alone. My own impression is that a real critique will find that the trilogy declines drastically in academic quality between the first book and the third. And his later political screeds just strike me as rubbish, no longer even interesting.
Go ahead and shoot the messenger, if you wish, but I tell you this: dismissing MacDonald as an “antisemitic quack” and hoping that this is the end of it is a *bad* idea. Too many non-Jew-haters have found the books interesting, and enough prominent academic colleagues have made positive remarks about his work or expressed support in other ways. It’s no longer enough just to call him an antisemite. The work needs to be addressed. And if the SPLC has persuaded you that the trilogy is merely garden variety Judenhassy gibberish that can be suppressed, then they’ve done you a disservice.
http://www.ideajournal.com/articles.php?id=18
Professor MacDonald’s treatment of some very crucial figures is brief and glib enough to border on caricatures. Here, the very profound, often anguished, concerns of Heinrich Heine, Berthold Auerbach, and Moses Hess must be mentioned. Also, his notion of the significance of the word “chosen” is skewed. From the prophets on, Jewish critics have upbraided their unhappy cohorts for not living up to such a designation and, because of this, being justifiably subject to divine opprobrium. But, perhaps this was due to the emergence of a few “recessive” genes in that awesome pool presumably rendered secure by strict eugenic practices. In any event that “racialism” which developed out of the notion of “chosenness” was not “mirror-imaged” by that of the Nazis or their ideological predecessors who saw Aryanism as not merely providing an example for the rest of humanity, but in a non-transcendent world dominated by racial mysticism, calling for, if not proscribing, domination. Professor MacDonald seems to think that if a people, whatever successes enjoyed by some, nonetheless confronted traumas imposed by persecution, expulsion and exile on a fairly regular basis, learned to live by its wits, it amounted to a kind of cheating. Indeed, it would seem that Jewish interest, at least those acceptable to MacDonald, would best have been served if Jews had remained kind of witless. But then, of course, they wouldn’t have been Jews.
Joey, I’m interested in how you came to the conclusion that MacDonald’s ideas are taken seriously. I did a search on JSTOR and did not find this to be the case. The above review is one example but there are plenty of others (see below).
Can you point to any other legit. scholars in their fields who who cite Macdonald as a factual source? To the best of my knowledge, David Sloan Wilson is the only one.
“[T]he book is controversial, not only because of its theoretical approach, but also, and perhaps primarily, because of sloppy scholarship.â€?
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion > Vol. 34, No. 3
Eugen Schoenfeld
Georgia State University
“Though MacDonald may be seen as a scholar provocateur…his point is that criticism of Jews and their ways might be harsh or not polite but it is within the protected sphere of legitimate research and speech. Nonetheless, a rambling who-is-who-isn’t roundup of Jews responsible for the “Jewish Problem� borders on the irrational and is conducive to misrepresentation.�
American Jewish Society Review Vol. 25 No. 1 (2000)
Zev Garber
Los Angeles Valley College
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/000545.html
Gene Expression:
Two short and sweet questions about KMD.
Central to his illustration about the malign influence of Jews, and to their supposedly invidious tribal profile, is
(a) Jewish control of pro-immigration (that is, ruinous) lobby of the US and
(b) Jewish racial purity laws.
(a) I’d like to point out that he’s all wrong about Jews controlling the pro-immigration lobby. Quite apart from the whole issue of whether immigration is good or bad (we can discuss that at length somewhere else, and we should) I would say that the Catholic Church has been much more decisive an influence in promoting massive immigration to the US. And what kind of immigration? Need I say. The major Jewish orgs have been reliably pro-immigration, yes, but they’ve only reacted to an environment that waxes and wanes on the subject of immigration depending on the economic environment. In short: KMD is engaging in what he would call crypsis, a subterranean effort to introduce his own agenda into a discussion. What’s his agenda? That of the lapsed and bitter Catholic, who is angry at Protestant/Jewish usurpation.
b. I e-mailed KMD a citation of the Goldberg study which proved that Jewish maternal lineages are local. To his credit he responded that the study surprised him, he was not a geneticist, and he would have to study it further. In his response was a quotation from somewhere in the OT warning Jews against the evils of foreign women. I wrote to him that the rabbis wouldn’t have had to warn so much if the Jews hadn’t been outmarrying so much…he never wrote back.
At least he wrote me back, Jared Diamond never did.
In short, KMD is a scientist in drag.
Wow. Let me just point to the irony of attacking Jewcy on McDonald, when the deniers of the Armenian Genocide can all be linked as having praises or in many cases worked directly with outright racists.
Lewis, Lewey, Shaw and Mango have all cited, collaborated with and praised racist Yusuf Halacoglu who sounds like he belongs in the Nazi school: http://www.bianet.org/english/.....nts-racist
Let’s get back to the central theme of the posting. Whether engaging in, or to be more precise as anyone in Washington knows, leading, this obscene denial of the Armenian genocide is a good position for us to be in?
It isn’t. We are talking about a historic fact that is only contested by two groups. 1) Nationalist Turkish academics in an environment where people who disagree or even mention the genocide as massacres have been fired, had their lives and liberty threatened, where the government has no hesitation to arrest even high profile people like Orham Pamuk, or targeted them for killing by naming them as enemies by the deep state; and 2) Some Jewish American and Israeli academics, who are exceptionalists (Lewey), tied directly to the Turkish nationalists (lewis) or whose families are Turkish (Shaw).
Do we realize how hollow the critisism of Mearsheimer and Walt sound given what has occurred here? The whole nine yards of the process they asserted occurred on this issue.
I will also sharply disagree with role of Turkey as our ally. I served as a captain in the IDF and I follow developments quite closely and keep in contact with quite a number of former and current officers. Nobody serious thinks that Turkey under this government, any future government, including the dictators Lewis has such a fondness for, is going to lift a single finger to help us.
As Bostom and Bat Yo’er have documented, revisionists like Lewis have written out some of the salient facts of Turkish history: namely that when the Ottoman Empire was Turkish and had no minorities guiding its policies, it slaughtered its Jewish population. The Jewish populations of Anatolia and elsewhere in the Byzantine Empire kept growing dispite persecutions and even worse depredations by the Catholic Crusaders. It grew all the time. It disappeared nearly completely exactly concurrent with the Turkish invasion. Whole populations were slaughtered. The Ottoman leadership which did except us from Spain was by that point as much run by Greeks and Armenians as by Turks.
There is no question this entire episode is a vast moral stain on these “leaders” of our community and on the policy makers in Jerusalem who decided to push us to be out front on it. It also does not make strategic sense for Israel.
Having unfortunately read a lot of Kurtzman recently I think its fair to label him an anti-semite. Simply because he also happens to be Jewish does not immediately get him off the hook. His Jewish ancestry is not an instant get out of jail free card. The following statement by Kurtzman, in his MacDonald series no less, should make this painfully clear:
“Jews were once made to confront some of the more distasteful aspects of our scripture because European Christians called us on them during medieval disputations between rabbis and priests.”
Really Joey?
BP,
Gotta disagree. Kurtzman is no antisemite. And his point holds true for all religions. Including ours.
To DovB,
armenians and greeks never ruled the Ottoman empire, they were irrelevant, albanians and bosnians were more prevalent in the Ottoman empire but armenians and greek not. The greeks and armenians hated the jews in the Ottoman empire they were jealous of the jews. The Turks saved the Jews from Spain and eastern europe many times. The Turkish Khazar empire was jewish, the turkish jewish relationship goes long way back. Halacoglu did not lie he told the truth.
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