ICYMI: Bret Stephens, "The Secrets of Jewish Genius"
David Shasha
The Ashkenazi Jewish Genius Scam and the “Idiot Sephardim”: What Bret Stephens Has Wrought
I recently posted, without comment, the deeply offensive New York Times column by The Tikvah Fund macher Bret Stephens, “The Secrets of Jewish Genius”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/kyX5EqjLwY8
The complete SHANDA follows this note.
The original article contains a reference to a 2005 paper on IQ by three University of Utah anthropology professors, who are apparently smitten by the racist Eugenics bug:
https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf
Here is what they say about Sephardim and Ashkenazim:
There are several key observations that motivate our hypothesis. The first is that the Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group, combined with an unusual cognitive profile, while no similar elevation of intelligence was observed among Jews in classical times nor is one seen in Sephardic and Oriental Jews today.
Later in the paper they tellingly cite Bernard Lewis (more about whom below) with the usual racist flourishes that characterize his work:
The Ashkenazi occupational pattern was different from that of the Jews living in the Islamic world. The Jews of Islam, although reproductively isolated, did not have the concentration of occupations with high IQ elasticity. Some had such jobs in some of the Arab world, in some periods, but it seems it was never the case that most did. In part this was because other minority groups competed successfully for these jobs-Greek Christians, Armenians, etc., in part because Moslems, at least some of the time, took many of those jobs themselves, valuing non-warrior occupations more highly than did medieval Christians. In fact, to a large extent, and especially during the last six or seven hundred years of relative Moslem decline, the Jews of Islam tended to have “dirty” jobs (Lewis, 1984). These included such tasks as cleaning cesspools and drying the contents for use as fuel—a common Jewish occupation in Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia. Jews were also found as tanners, butchers, hangmen, and other disagreeable or despised occupations. Such jobs must have had low IQ elasticity; brilliant tanners and hangmen almost certainly did not become rich.
The Jews of Islam tended to have “dirty” jobs!
This is the academic source that Stephens decided to base his argument on.
It is the usual scientific gobbledygook claptrap replete with incomprehensible graphs and taxonomies that also informed Charles Murray’s infamous The Bell Curve; a book notorious for its generalizations about non-Whites which were designed to affect policy in the benighted Reagan Era:
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/10/17182692/bell-curve-charles-murray-policy-wrong
Stephens also uses the Ashkenazi IQ paper for socio-political reasons that exposes his link to Murray and the Neo-Cons who so diligently cited him for their own nefarious purposes:
https://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/charles-murray-ii-transcript/
Indeed, Stephens and Bill Kristol are joined at the hip:
The debased arguments are thus firmly linked via the Neo-Con network that now spans generations.
One of the Ashkenazi IQ paper’s authors, Henry Harpending, is listed as a White Extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center:
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/henry-harpending
We should note that Charles Murray has also made the SPLC White Extremist list:
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/charles-murray
The New York Times was alerted by its readers to Stephens’ racism and soon posted a cleaned-up version of the article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/opinion/jewish-culture-genius-iq.html
Here is the added disclaimer:
An earlier version of this Bret Stephens column quoted statistics from a 2005 paper that advanced a genetic hypothesis for the basis of intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews. After publication Mr. Stephens and his editors learned that one of the paper’s authors, who died in 2016, promoted racist views. Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors’ views, but it was a mistake to cite it uncritically. The effect was to leave an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens was arguing that Jews are genetically superior. That was not his intent. He went on instead to argue that culture and history are crucial factors in Jewish achievements and that, as he put it, “At its best, the West can honor the principle of racial, religious and ethnic pluralism not as a grudging accommodation to strangers but as an affirmation of its own diverse identity. In that sense, what makes Jews special is that they aren’t. They are representational.” We have removed reference to the study from the column.
The disclaimer is utter CYA nonsense and only proves that The New York Times not only harbors a Tikvah Fund White Jewish Supremacist, nicely pairing off with Bari Weiss, but that it is proud to have him on their staff.
No “Cancel Culture” here!
To its credit, JTA did call Stephens out:
We will see if The Tikvah Fund will do the same.
I do not suppose we should hold our breath waiting for that!
But our friends at The Algemeiner did their White Jewish Supremacist duty and defended the indefensible:
Of course, it is sheer PILPUL: What we thought we read we really didn’t read:
To say that something obscures more than it illuminates is a criticism. So it is not accurate to say that Stephens was uncritical of the study. Maybe the Stephens critics are themselves so low-I.Q., as a result of either genetics or environment, that they don’t understand the words “obscure” or “illuminate.” Or maybe their attention spans are so short that they couldn’t sustain the concentration needed to get from the paragraph where Stephens linked to an MIT version of the intelligence study to the sentence just a bit father down in the column where he said that approach obscures more than it illuminates.
Stephens is not approving the study – he is criticizing it.
Take that!
I was thrilled to see that the full-throated defense was written by former Forward editor Ira Stoll.
It is good to know that The Forward’s editorial history is filled with racists.
Consistency is a very important thing.
What I enjoyed most about the piece was its pompously false moral equivalence:
The “editors’ note” is also a double standard. The Times has published far more egregious columns than Stephens’ latest without appending editors’ notes or publishing bowdlerized revisions of those other ones. A Times opinion columnist named Michelle Alexander, for example, published a column cheering as an example of “moral clarity” the United Methodist Church pension fund’s boycott of the five largest Israeli banks. That’s not a columnist being misunderstood for quoting and then disagreeing with a paper by someone who wants to boycott Israeli banks; that’s an actual Times columnist herself endorsing a boycott of Israeli banks. No Times “editors’ note” or revised and redacted version of that column.
And the Times has published eight op-ed pieces by Mohammad Javad Zarif, the foreign minister of the terror-sponsoring, Holocaust-denying, political-prisoner executing, Jew-killing, woman-oppressing government of Iran. No “editors’ note” has yet described Zarif as promoting views that go beyond the limits of what is acceptable on the Times op-ed page.
It is good to know that Jewish racism is excusable because of Iran!
The Sephardim are definitely comforted by that one.
And just to show that they meant business, The Algemeiner doubled-down on their full-throated PILPUL defense of Stephens with the following article by fellow Neo-Con radical Jonathan Tobin:
https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/01/01/why-talking-about-jewish-genius-is-controversial/
Naturally, the JNS article was also reposted by Sheldon Adelson’s Israel Hayom:
https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/why-talking-about-jewish-genius-is-controversial/
Here is Tobin’s defense of Stephens’ racism:
The ostensible reason for this dubious outrage was that one of the three authors of the study proposed theories about the reasons for the advancement of human civilization that have been embraced by white supremacists. That caused editors at the Times to issue a correction apologizing for mentioning the study, even though Stephens had not endorsed its findings or the authors’ views. The editor’s note went on to say that his column had left “an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens was arguing that Jews are genetically superior,” an assertion that is not backed up by a fair reading of the piece.
Never criticize Ashkenazim when they are demeaning others, you will be accused of “dubious outrage.”
But wait, there is more:
What is especially interesting about this controversy is that any discussion of Jewish achievements makes a lot of people (including many Jews) deeply uncomfortable. The only conclusion to be drawn from this debate is that the only acceptable approach is “don’t go there,” so as to avoid offending the sensibilities of those who believe that saying some people have done extraordinary things is an insult to everyone else. Indeed, many Jews fear that any mention of their achievements will be used to justify antisemitic conspiracy theories or vile racist concepts about others’ supposed inferiority.
“Inferiority” is not “supposed” by Stephens and the White Jewish Supremacists, it is simply a fact of (Ashkenazi) Jewish life today that they continue to promote.
Tobin never mentions the Sephardim in his unhinged racist rant, but more than this he does not confront the “science” upon which this claim for “Genius” rests. Stephens cited the eugenics-based racist study because it served his thesis that Ashkenazim are “superior” to others. The study is central to his argument and is tacitly “endorsed” in the article.
Indeed, it is all part of the delusion that has infected the Neo-Con Jews which insists that they can be even Whiter than the White Christians. It is all very Trumpworld.
This comes at the very time that the New Trumpworld Anti-Semitism is kicking the White Jewish Supremacists in the proverbial behind:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/tEP6RAoaqLk
Maybe the Ashkenazim are not as “White” as they think they are!
And then, of course, there are the “Idiot Sephardim” – because where would we be without them?
We are well aware that non-profit organizations raise money off of certain controversies, so it came as no surprise to receive the following Bret Stephens schnorring e-mail from the Ashkenzi-run American Sephardi Federation:
https://mailchi.mp/asf/jewishunity2020-784005?e=9f39c396e1
This is how they put it:
Did Passover come early this year? On Friday, a New
York Times op-ed
limited Jewish genius exclusively to Ashkenazim, passing over millennia of
Sephardic scholarship, history, culture, and contributions to
civilization.
The ASF champions the Sephardi Voice and fights for Jewish Unity!
The fundraising request neglected to note that the ASF’s two leaders, Director Jason Guberman and Publications Editor Aryeh Tepper, are both Ashkenazim, the latter is Tikvah Fund Neo-Con – just like Stephens and the rest of the Straussian radicals:
https://tikvahfund.org/faculty/aryeh-tepper/
https://www.amazon.com/Progressive-Minds-Conservative-Politics-Maimonides/dp/1438448449
Guberman heads a group called DIARNA which is part of the Israeli government’s attempt to promote the Arab Jewish Refugee issue as a counterweight to Palestinian claims for restitution:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/diarna/davidshasha/O9Ksx0OZ5qU/26xfanllBQAJ
Yehouda Shenhav, one of the many Arab Jewish scholars not welcome in the ASF world, has written persuasively on the matter in his article “Spineless Bookkeeping: The Use of Mizrahi Jews as Pawns Against Palestinian Refugees”:
Reading that article, it becomes clear how Ashkenazim and Sephardim clash when it comes to Zionism and HASBARAH politics.
The “Jewish Unity” so arrogantly trumpeted by the ASF thus means that Ashkenazim lead and Sephardim are dragged along by the proverbial leash.
At their recent “Dead Arab Jews” HASBARAH conference, the ASF declined to invite any of the notorious anti-Zionist Mizrahi scholars like Shenhav, but they did lead off with Sephardi-hater and Islamophobe Norman Stillman:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/tx3nIc6cMeM
We should recall that Stillman is a devoted disciple of the late Bernard Lewis who helped pioneer the very White Jewish Supremacy touted by Stephens and The Tikvah Fund Neo-Con crowd:
In my Huffington Post article “The Arab Jewish Tradition and the Past and Future Promise of Peace” I make reference to Lewis’ toxic racism:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-jewish-voice-left-silen_b_487586
Here is Lewis from his 2002 best-seller What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response:
The conflict, coexistence, or combination of these two traditions [i.e. the Judeo-Christian and the Judeo-Islamic] within a single small state, with a shared religion and a common citizenship and allegiance, should prove illuminating. For Israel, this issue may have an existential significance, since the survival of the state, surrounded, outnumbered, and outgunned by neighbors who reject its very right to exist, may depend on its largely Western-derived qualitative edge.
The ASF’s programming at the Center for Jewish History is dedicated to Zionist HASBARAH of the Lewis/Stillman variety, and the White Jewish Hegemony that is characteristic of academic Judaic Studies and the Jewish institutional world. Everything the ASF presents has that HASBARAH seal of approval.
Sephardim are forced to follow, or shown the door.
It is thus worthwhile to note that Dovid Efune, The Algemeiner Editor-in-Chief, is another close ally of the ASF:
https://programs.cjh.org/archive/from-daniel-pearl-2017-11-19
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqlqGks4r0s
The ASF fully confirms Stephens’ thesis about Sephardim being inferior – they cannot even run their own organizations!
But they will take your money, if it is green.
And finally, we must mention the “Idiot Sephardim” and their direct connection to Stephens.
When I first read the racist Stephens article it occurred to me that he had been invited by the Sephardic division of AIPAC last August to give a talk at the summer vacation spot of the Brooklyn Syrian Jews in Deal, New Jersey:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JVdjcnEWwsUorXn7kAgQ9F1cQqGtKMkg/view?ths=true
The gathering brought together members of the wealthy SY elite in a show of AIPAC Ashkenazi HASBARAH solidarity.
As we have seen with the ASF, Sephardim are quite content to follow while the Ashkenazim lead them by the nose.
The AIPAC Sephardic event with Stephens is yet another example of how the “Idiot Sephardim” are complicit in their own humiliation and cultural destruction.
Here we have Stephens, a man who has the utmost contempt for Sephardim, having the proverbial red carpet rolled out for him by the very people that he is demeaning!
The Ashkenazi “Genius” wins again!
For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon of the “Idiot Sephardim,” here is how it works:
Sadly, with the Ashkenazim at the ASF and Bret Stephens we have the perfect examples of why the Sephardic heritage is in a dying state.
David Shasha
From SHU 938, March 18, 2020
The Secrets of Jewish Genius
By: Bret Stephens
An eminent Lithuanian rabbi is annoyed that his yeshiva students devote their lunch breaks to playing soccer instead of discussing Torah. The students, intent on convincing their rav of the game’s beauty, invite him to watch a professional match. At halftime, they ask what he thinks.
“I have solved your problem,” the rabbi says.
“How?”
“Give one ball to each side, and they will have nothing to fight over.”
I have this (apocryphal) anecdote from Norman Lebrecht’s new book, “Genius & Anxiety,” an erudite and delightful study of the intellectual achievements and nerve-wracked lives of Jewish thinkers, artists, and entrepreneurs between 1847 and 1947. Sarah Bernhardt and Franz Kafka; Albert Einstein and Rosalind Franklin; Benjamin Disraeli and (sigh) Karl Marx — how is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?
The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper. “During the 20th century, they made up about 3 percent of the U.S. population but won 27 percent of the U.S. Nobel science prizes and 25 percent of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions.”
But the “Jews are smart” explanation obscures more than it illuminates. Aside from the perennial nature-or-nurture question of why so many Ashkenazi Jews have higher I.Q.s, there is the more difficult question of why that intelligence was so often matched by such bracing originality and high-minded purpose. One can apply a prodigious intellect in the service of prosaic things — formulating a war plan, for instance, or constructing a ship. One can also apply brilliance in the service of a mistake or a crime, like managing a planned economy or robbing a bank.
But as the story of the Lithuanian rabbi suggests, Jewish genius operates differently. It is prone to question the premise and rethink the concept; to ask why (or why not?) as often as how; to see the absurd in the mundane and the sublime in the absurd. Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different.
Where do these habits of mind come from?
There is a religious tradition that, unlike some others, asks the believer not only to observe and obey but also to discuss and disagree. There is the never-quite-comfortable status of Jews in places where they are the minority — intimately familiar with the customs of the country while maintaining a critical distance from them. There is a moral belief, “incarnate in the Jewish people” according to Einstein, that “the life of the individual only has value [insofar] as it aids in making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful.”
And there is the understanding, born of repeated exile, that everything that seems solid and valuable is ultimately perishable, while everything that is intangible — knowledge most of all — is potentially everlasting.
“We had been well off, but that was all we got out,” the late financier Felix Rohatyn recalled of his narrow escape, with a few hidden gold coins, from the Nazis as a child in World War II. “Ever since, I’ve had the feeling that the only permanent wealth is what you carry around in your head.” If the greatest Jewish minds seem to have no walls, it may be because, for Jews, the walls have so often come tumbling down.
These explanations for Jewish brilliance aren’t necessarily definitive. Nor are they exclusive to the Jews.
At its best, the American university can still be a place of relentless intellectual challenge rather than ideological conformity and social groupthink. At its best, the United States can still be the country that respects, and sometimes rewards, all manner of heresies that outrage polite society and contradict established belief. At its best, the West can honor the principle of racial, religious and ethnic pluralism not as a grudging accommodation to strangers but as an affirmation of its own diverse identity. In that sense, what makes Jews special is that they aren’t. They are representational.
The West, however, is not at its best. It’s no surprise that Jew hatred has made a comeback, albeit under new guises. Anti-Zionism has taken the place of anti-Semitism as a political program directed against Jews. Globalists have taken the place of rootless cosmopolitans as the shadowy agents of economic iniquity. Jews have been murdered by white nationalists and black “Hebrews.” Hate crimes against Orthodox Jews have become an almost daily fact of life in New York City.
Jews of the late 19th century would have been familiar with the hatreds. Jews of the early 21st century should recognize where they could lead. What’s not secret about Jewish genius is that it’s a terribly fragile flower.
From The New York Times, December 27, 2019