American Jews

In 2010 Sailer wrote the following words that explain the current unpleasantness experienced by US Jews:

Jewish leaders typically exhort Jews with one of three arguments, all based around feelings of communal self-pity:
1. “We Jews have suffered, so we should be acutely sensitive to others’ suffering…”;
2. “As God liberated the Jews from captivity in Egypt, … we have a religious obligation as Jews to help the oppressed”;
3. “Jews should be aware of our collective vulnerability, historical and continuing, and therefore for our own good always take the other side of the kinds of groups, movements and individuals who have victimized us in the past, and who could threaten us again in the future.”

The problem with this positioning, says Sailer, is that, with 35% of Forbes 400 list being Jewish, 50% of the Atlantic 50 most influential pundits being ditto, and all major film studios run by Jewish men,* nobody buys into the “sad, marginalized Jew” narrative. It only annoys people. And then when the wolf you kept crying for decades finally shows up, nobody takes you seriously anymore.

But that’s not the worst part. An elite group that doesn’t perceive itself as such will not work for the preservation of the society that allowed it to reach this elite status. Instead, it will try to smash such a society and the (utterly invented) oppressions this groups imagines itself to suffer in it:

American Jews should start thinking of themselves less as oppressed outcasts who need to go for whatever they can get while the getting is good, and start more accurately thinking of themselves as belonging to the best-connected inner circle of the contemporary American Establishment. American Jews should realize that, like the Protestant elite of yore, their privileged position as a de facto leadership caste bestows upon themselves corresponding duties to conserve the long-term well-being of the United States…

A group self-image of victimization, combined with a penchant for ideological intensity and powerful ethnocentric lobbies, can lead to bizarre political manifestations-such as the dominant Jewish assumption that proper veneration of their Ellis Island ancestors requires opposition to immigration restriction today.

This is as true of groups as it is of individuals. Victim thinking clouds people’s minds. An enormous amount of Jewish energy in America has gone into the destruction of the very institutions that made it possible for US Jews to thrive. Universities are one example. “We are sad and pathetic just like those actual sad pathetics,” Jewish intellectuals declaimed for 60 years. Finally, the actual sad pathetics turned around and said, “No, you aren’t, dude. You have everything that we want and we’ll take it now, thanks a bunch.”

Daily pleas** by Jewish intellectuals on social media – “we fought for your rights, why do you hurt us now?” – remind me of the academic quit-lit genre from a decade ago. They are embarrassingly cringe because their authors deny any agency in their own lives. Given that these authors are invariably very successful people, it’s impossible to take their complaints seriously. “But why, why did he do it to me?” is a perennial plea of a dumped girlfriend, and this unenviable role is nothing I would recommend in a moment of crisis.

* At the time of the article’s publication, of course.

** The most recent one I saw is from yesterday.