How not to judge a group: The distraction of anti-semitism

When I lived in China, some white foreigner groped a young woman publicly in Beijing. Other Chinese guys beat him up immediately, as was justified. It made the rounds on the internet. The other white foreigners I talked to were worried that the other Chinese would watch this and become hostile toward foreigners in China. It bothered me if foreigners were rude or dishonest because I was worried that other Chinese would dislike me. As a minority in China, I was dependent on the goodwill and cooperation of the larger society for my livelihood and even safety. Also, since I looked different from other people, I couldn’t hide.

I remember watching black comedians making jokes that I didn’t understand about watching the local news. Apparently, when they watch the news and hear reports on some break-in or shooting or other crime, it’s not uncommon for black people to say out loud, “Please don’t be another black guy.” I found this odd before living in China. Why would some criminal sharing your level of melanin matter? I thought. But I got it when I lived in China. Being a visible minority does entail feeling a certain level of pressure that I was unaware of. You also notice negative representation much more than positive orientation.

It was an informative experience.

Though worried about the detrimental parts of stereotypes, I could not help but notice group patterns. Foreigners from Spain behaved a little different than foreigners from Mexico or other Latin American countries. There were even some cultural differences between Canadians and Americans. So I wasn’t against stereotypes per se, but sensitive to their abuse.

Recently, I published two essays arguing that some negative stereotypes are indeed justified, though they should not be harshly applied to every individual of that group. There are many fans of anime, for example, who bathe regularly and have decent social graces. But that stereotype exists for a reason, and it would be willful blindness to ignore that group pattern. (Anyone who has attended an anime convention will understand.)

On a much more serious note, anti-semitic stereotypes have been rising. Perhaps you’ve noticed.

The most common anti-semitic trope is that Jews who advocate for open borders from Muslim countries somehow represent all Jews everywhere. Somehow. And anti-semities tend to be selective in noticing Jewish influence. As Charlie Kirk noted, it was Jews who led the way in defeating tuberculosis in the West. Though he didn’t mention it, it was a Jew who also led the way in ending polio. But to anti-semites, such Jews don’t represent Jews or Judaism.

As Douglas Murray has noted, the last pope and the current pope are both open borders lefties, but almost no one stereotypes Catholics based on these two. Alternatively, Gad Saad and Dennis Prager are about as Jewish as a statue of Maimonides made out of Matzah. Both of them were border hawks for decades before Trump. But these Jews don’t count because it doesn’t fit anti-semitic narratives.

Now it is true that many who are Jewish by birth are open borders fanatics. Jews who are actually religious and study Hebrew tend not to be for open borders. However, if every person of Jewish heritage becomes a border restrictionist overnight, there would still be a huge Woke left that wants to do away with borders as a concept. Logically, border hawks should side with conservative Jews and reach out to any Jew that will listen that illegal immigration is not going to end well for America — especially for American Jewry.

This is where some on the alternative right go crazy. They would rather give the borders to the cartels and blame the Jews than team up with them.

Among normal isolationist conservatives, they would ally with Ben Shapiro about limiting legal immigration and cracking down on illegal immigration. Then, when it comes to international policy, they would disagree with Ben Shapiro and want to cut funding to Israel. A pretty standard coalition friction. Yet as others have noted, a minority of people on the right are so obsessed with Israel that they can’t talk about anything else. (Hint, it’s not the people who wear small hats and don’t work on Saturday.)

The absurdity of the anti-semitic right and left is the belief that Jews are a monolithic group that all agree on advancing international Jewry to the disadvantage of everyone else. Have they ever been with a group of Jews? As the saying goes, when two Jews go out for dinner, they have three opinions on any given topic. But apparently pro-Israel, immigrant-hawkish Orthodox Jews are exactly the same as the BDS Jews who volunteer for Mamdani and share recipes for the best Chinese pork on social media.*

It would be like comparing Hong Kong Christians who left Hong Kong over concerns about religious freedom to Guangzhou princelings of the CCP and saying that they are the same.

In both World Wars, many whites in the American Midwest were about as racially German as the German army. American-Germans fought with bravery and skill for America, as Thomas Sowell has noted.

I could go on, but I think you get it. The differences between subgroups within a population can be vast. Non-alcoholic beer, Budweiser and IPAs are all technically beer, but they might as well be entirely different beverages. Same with different Jews. Milton Friedman, Jonas Salk and Karl Marx all had high verbal I.Q. and similar ancestry. That’s about all they had in common.

Anti-semitism has three powerful attractions. One is that it is a unifier. The world is a complicated place and the problems that face us are complicated and multifaceted. Why does America have increasing depression and drug abuse? You have to talk about the breakdown of the family, the decline of religion** and innumerable other things. It’s more intellectually comprehensible to blame the Zios who own drug companies or worship Molech (or whatever nonsense is topical).

More important than the initial attraction is man's tendency toward a deep need to blame something evil that benefits from their misery. Whether Jews are condemned for being evil corporate sharks, communists or worshippers of ancient pagan demons, the stories all have the through point that the Jews are all collectively benefiting from whatever bad policy has been enacted.

Leftist Jews being open to immigration from Muslim countries is about the clearest example of Jews not following their self-interest. Queers for Palestine was at least promoting people who want to kill them in a faraway country. Open immigration from Muslim countries will directly make Jews unsafe in America as it has in Britain, Australia and Canada.** I cannot think of any clearer example of Jews being against a collective self-interest than those who worked for Mamdani.

The third and most important reason for the rise of anti-semitism is that it gives a scapegoat in equal measure to the left and right. The Woke left can graft their ideology of victim and victimizer onto the Israel-Palestinian conflict without having to do any research. The alternative right can repackage all the leftist demonization of white men and project it onto Jews. Unlike non-Hispanic whites, Jews are a fraction of the population in any country outside of Israel, so disparaging them works much better electorally.

The modern West, for all its immense material success, is depressed psychologically, disordered spiritually and its elites cannot summon the will to enforce the basics that underpin order. The same problem is happening in Germany, the British Commonwealth and Minnesota. Britain could bring back the death penalty and start killing rapists if it wanted. Germany could cease all importations of people from countries with high crime rates. Maybe Minnesota could actually prosecute people who commit fraud? Admittedly, woke Jews do make all of this harder to do. But there are almost no Jews in Germany, and they are having all the same problems that the rest of Europe is having

I don’t know why the West is weak, but I doubt that Jews are a causal factor. Woke Western Jews are following the pattern of the elites and the upper middle class that refuse to deal with hard realities.*** The West cannot assimilate high numbers of Muslims immigrants. European societies are now altering their societies around their Muslims populations. For example, there are ugly roadblocks at European Christmas markets to prevent terrorists from committing car attacks. Many would rather distract themselves and play six degrees of Jew and find some Jewish investor in the company that assembled the ugly roadblocks to prevent terrorism. I would prefer the West become less weak and team up with Jews like Gad Saad but that would require more work than merely blaming them.

*If anybody has a black bean pork recipe please let me know. It’s not important to me if your Jewish or Goy. (However, l will be more inclined to try your recipe if you are of Sichuan-Chinese origin because I notice patterns in groups.)

**This is based on anecdotes from Gad Saad but I trust that his anecdotes are representative of a broader pattern.

***Connor Tommolison has covered the contributions that Jews have made to leftism in America. The Civil Rights Act was good and even some of the garment Unions might have benefited the common working man. Communism was sadly popular among a significant minority of Jews.