This is such a good and important piece. So many people (often maliciously, often innocently) conflate criticizing the specific efforts to address a problem like racial or gender inequality with denial of the existence of the problem. But, the key point that you've identified is that however real and important a problem is, once you create a Department of Solving the Problem and employ a dozen people whose income, health insurance, and retirement savings are tied to being employed by the Department of Solving the Problem, you've created a perverse set of incentives to prioritize identifying new iterations of the problem over doing anything to actually solve it.
I’ll be curious to see whether Jews indeed get discriminated against in the “nothing personal” way you describe not just because they are white (seems inevitable) but specifically because they are Jews. It does seem complicated by the fact that there’s so much intermarriage. For instance, I was raised Jewish, my kids are being raised Jewish, and none of us have names that mark us. Most of us are blue-eyed blonds.
Thanks for this piece, which, unfortunately, needs to be called brave at this moment. (And yes... I would love to know how many women with Jewish names who marry men with less Jewish names are happy to be able to change their name - and not for entirely wholesome reasons. )
Fantastic Piece. My one quibble is with "But any objective consideration of the facts, and comparison to vulnerable populations like the Black and the poor, tells us that being Jewish in America is not dangerous".
I think most people find it surprising how high the baseline level of physical violence against jews actually is. In 2019 (the last year the FBI hate crime stats are out for), weighted by population, your average Jew is over twice as likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a black person. My intuition of what this number was certainly very off, and I suspect many others is too.
It's been interesting in the last month to hear about the "uptick" via various sources, but with very little contextualizing of the baseline. For example, anti-Asian hate violence has a very very low baseline (100-200 hate crimes/year across ~20 million people) so an extra dozen or two is notable.
Great article. I have always felt like Jews like myself and the the Asian-Americans I know are in a similar boat, but never could put my finger on it... I think that Freddie's description here is part of it.
Based on the premises Freddie establishes here, I think you could also provide a good explanation for people missing out on jobs and admissions for class reasons. And not the type of microaggression-based class discrimination that liberals are more fond of... eg judging someone for (gasp) wearing sneakers.
Anyway, the toxic fetishization of diversity and its intersection with employers' deranged search for the perfect employee is a big topic that Freddie's always right about, and the example of Jewish and Asian-Americans getting passed over in favor of both the "normal" Americans and the "officially more oppressed" Americans, I think, maybe the clearest and most illustrative case of how this happens.
The position of jews in the corporate-intersectional victimhood rankings is seriously in flux. I wouldn't bet the farm on the idea that HR and admissions administrators will be discriminating against the name Schulman, though I guess it's possible. My view is that too much of the intersectional ethos is philosophically derived from and relies upon memory of jewish experience for the ethos to pivot to "actually jewish suffering doesn't matter." Another possibility is that the social justice industrial complex will basically re-categorize jews as "the whites who *dont* have any 'privilege' strikes against them"--in turn making the white representation at elite institutions increasingly jewish. In that scenario, tension between jews and all other ethnic/religious groups within "whites" will get a lot worse.
I'm a little confused by the argument when it comes to college admissions. Sometimes it sounds like the problem is simply that Jews are considered white, and it's bad to be white (or Asian) in this game. But then you write that gentiles will be preferred:
"Of course, the seats vacated by those excluded Jews will still exist, but this is an enlightened culture, so admissions staff will choose the kind of affluent white gentiles who write paeans to diversity in their admissions essays. (And whose parents will donate.)"
So, this administrator wants to increase the number of Muslim / nonwhite students in the name of antiracism, but when that fails he will increase white Christians?
Anyway, it’s not clear what happened at that particular school. But in general, I'm not sure why a Jewish kid would be any less likely to write about diversity and have rich parents -- unless the argument is that admission officers are antisemitic and looking for an excuse to throw Jewish names in the trash.
I tried to look at some data. The % of students who are Jewish has been declining at elite universities (but it's still higher than % in the US population) -- but % white has also been declining, so it’s hard to say what’s going on.
Same with hiring -- if they won't promote Shulman, will they promote a non-Jewish white person? Probably not, because they won't get any diversity points for that (unless the white gentile uses they/them pronouns).
But maybe they would discriminate in favor of white gentiles -- I don't know. Antisemitism certainly still exists. I'm just not sure how much of an additional penalty you get in woke world for a Jewish name verses simply being white.
Is there really a conservative position in America or is what we call conservative just a rejection of the silliness, the insane overreact of the managed state? You have to be rich to be this stupid.
I work in high finance, and I'm pretty interested to see how this will play out in my world. Many of my Jewish coworkers and friends are watching with curiosity and puzzlement as well.
So far there has been mainly empty gesturing at lower levels, but nothing of significance yet. The path to get one of these positions is pretty standardized. You go to one of a few specific universities, work at one of a few specific companies, then do an MBA at a one of a few specific business schools. At each step having the appropriate contacts is very helpful. The other route is graduate work in math/physics from a top school, but I'll ignore that for now.
I'm having trouble imagining how anything that could be deemed anti-Semitic would ever subvert this process. Bah and bat mitvahs are a big deal in my office. Rosh Hashanah and Hanukkah are celebrated. And very importantly, the gifted endowments are large. But who knows, maybe I'll be eating my words in ten years.
>"Eugene Chung is a bellwether, and I don’t know how liberals could complain about his situation with a straight face. This is the world you created."
Please, Freddie, terminology matters, and "liberals" is highly misleading here. I am a classical Liberal and Democrat. I strongly oppose the racism against Eugene Chung. And there are plenty of people like me. In the 2020 election in California, Biden won 63% to 34%, and in the same election, a proposition to restore affirmative action failed, 56% to 44%. This means that at least 30% of Biden voters voted against affirmative action. I was one of them.
I did so because of the pernicious and growing politicization of race preferences. If racial preferences continue, at some point we will need precise legal definitions of "black", etc. What are those definitions going to be, exactly? Will we see the return of the one-drop rule?
The only way out, in my view, is a full-on embrace of classical race-blind, sex-blind, gender-blind, every-person-is-unique-with-individual-rights, Liberalism. That's what this political philosophy is called. It utterly rejects the social-justice-warrior racism (cleverly rebranded as "anti-racism", a bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu that Orwell would surely regard as paradigmatic).
(I paid $5 just to comment, tho my Glenn Greenwald subscription just ended...but if he's not going to do his podcasts, I'm not as interested). I like the way you write, it's amazingly concise for the amount of ideas/content.
I agree with the overall sentiment...Jews are not white enough for Aryans, and not dark enough for Liberals.
I disagree with " The likely future isn’t mobs terrorizing Borough Park" - I'd argue that's because it's already occurring. During this latest Israel/Hamas fracas, (Arab?) gangs literally went around beating up Jews in Manhattan and LA. As recent as two months ago, Synagogues in Riverdale (Bronx, NY) were smashed up. Synagogues and Jews in Crown Heights are CONSTANTLY attacked and it ain't white supremacists driving up from the sticks of West Virginia who are doing it. It's just become so common, nobody cares. The Shomrim (private Jewish security in Crown Heights) exist EXACTLY because NYPD can't protect Jews in Borough Park.
I agree the sky isn't falling, but it's raining worse in the US than American Jews ever thought it would. It's not surprising Anti-Jewish and Anti-Asian sentiment is on the rise as woke leftists impress/imbue upon other minorities that Jews & Asians are keeping them out of colleges and jobs. Jews & Asians were thoroughly convinced by leftist MSM hate-violence would end if Trump was removed...they're finding not only was that misleading, but the violence is getting worse.
I hope it reverses but it will take the will of many who are currently silent/silenced.
Some of you may be familiar with Dr. Glenn Loury, economist at Brown University, who hosts a podcast along with Dr. John McWhorter, Columbia University.
Loury has shared with his audience correspondence from lawyers (other professions) in highly prestigious firms have initiated diversity efforts. But in order to fill those slots, individuals who are not at the level of their usual hires are being brought in. And the lawyer was especially concerned about such individuals being made partnered, given their performance abilities.
I know from reading that both Jews and Asians have been able to break through and become "over-represented" by dint of great academic achievement. Yet we know that for other people (including legacies), concession, from tests scores to grades, are made again and again. What you are getting is a leveling down in terms of quality of performance. And this leveling down is happening from the performing arts to academia to business.
Below are links to 2 articles which may interest you.
"What Happens When Doctors Can't Tell the Truth?
Whole areas of research are off-limits. Top physicians treat patients based on their race. An ideological 'purge' is underway in American medicine."
Observation: In sum, "wokeness" is a top-to-bottom attack on competence and excellence, and on those who exemplify it.....especially if their identity is a small part of the population, but their representation in prestige positions (Supreme Court) is way high.
Relatively new here, can u link to past column on this? Thx. “ I absolutely believe that we can theoretically build admissions systems that increase diversity and inclusion, including specifically for Black and Hispanic applicants, without perpetuating other kinds of injustice.”
You mentioned that Palestinians are a tiny minority without much representation, but breezed right along without stopping to ask why, if this is so, that the Diversity clique is so singularly invested in their cause. It seems relevant in a piece about anti-Semitism.
This is such a good and important piece. So many people (often maliciously, often innocently) conflate criticizing the specific efforts to address a problem like racial or gender inequality with denial of the existence of the problem. But, the key point that you've identified is that however real and important a problem is, once you create a Department of Solving the Problem and employ a dozen people whose income, health insurance, and retirement savings are tied to being employed by the Department of Solving the Problem, you've created a perverse set of incentives to prioritize identifying new iterations of the problem over doing anything to actually solve it.
I’ll be curious to see whether Jews indeed get discriminated against in the “nothing personal” way you describe not just because they are white (seems inevitable) but specifically because they are Jews. It does seem complicated by the fact that there’s so much intermarriage. For instance, I was raised Jewish, my kids are being raised Jewish, and none of us have names that mark us. Most of us are blue-eyed blonds.
Thanks for this piece, which, unfortunately, needs to be called brave at this moment. (And yes... I would love to know how many women with Jewish names who marry men with less Jewish names are happy to be able to change their name - and not for entirely wholesome reasons. )
Fantastic Piece. My one quibble is with "But any objective consideration of the facts, and comparison to vulnerable populations like the Black and the poor, tells us that being Jewish in America is not dangerous".
I think most people find it surprising how high the baseline level of physical violence against jews actually is. In 2019 (the last year the FBI hate crime stats are out for), weighted by population, your average Jew is over twice as likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a black person. My intuition of what this number was certainly very off, and I suspect many others is too.
It's been interesting in the last month to hear about the "uptick" via various sources, but with very little contextualizing of the baseline. For example, anti-Asian hate violence has a very very low baseline (100-200 hate crimes/year across ~20 million people) so an extra dozen or two is notable.
Great article. I have always felt like Jews like myself and the the Asian-Americans I know are in a similar boat, but never could put my finger on it... I think that Freddie's description here is part of it.
Based on the premises Freddie establishes here, I think you could also provide a good explanation for people missing out on jobs and admissions for class reasons. And not the type of microaggression-based class discrimination that liberals are more fond of... eg judging someone for (gasp) wearing sneakers.
Anyway, the toxic fetishization of diversity and its intersection with employers' deranged search for the perfect employee is a big topic that Freddie's always right about, and the example of Jewish and Asian-Americans getting passed over in favor of both the "normal" Americans and the "officially more oppressed" Americans, I think, maybe the clearest and most illustrative case of how this happens.
The position of jews in the corporate-intersectional victimhood rankings is seriously in flux. I wouldn't bet the farm on the idea that HR and admissions administrators will be discriminating against the name Schulman, though I guess it's possible. My view is that too much of the intersectional ethos is philosophically derived from and relies upon memory of jewish experience for the ethos to pivot to "actually jewish suffering doesn't matter." Another possibility is that the social justice industrial complex will basically re-categorize jews as "the whites who *dont* have any 'privilege' strikes against them"--in turn making the white representation at elite institutions increasingly jewish. In that scenario, tension between jews and all other ethnic/religious groups within "whites" will get a lot worse.
I'm a little confused by the argument when it comes to college admissions. Sometimes it sounds like the problem is simply that Jews are considered white, and it's bad to be white (or Asian) in this game. But then you write that gentiles will be preferred:
"Of course, the seats vacated by those excluded Jews will still exist, but this is an enlightened culture, so admissions staff will choose the kind of affluent white gentiles who write paeans to diversity in their admissions essays. (And whose parents will donate.)"
So, this administrator wants to increase the number of Muslim / nonwhite students in the name of antiracism, but when that fails he will increase white Christians?
Anyway, it’s not clear what happened at that particular school. But in general, I'm not sure why a Jewish kid would be any less likely to write about diversity and have rich parents -- unless the argument is that admission officers are antisemitic and looking for an excuse to throw Jewish names in the trash.
I tried to look at some data. The % of students who are Jewish has been declining at elite universities (but it's still higher than % in the US population) -- but % white has also been declining, so it’s hard to say what’s going on.
Same with hiring -- if they won't promote Shulman, will they promote a non-Jewish white person? Probably not, because they won't get any diversity points for that (unless the white gentile uses they/them pronouns).
But maybe they would discriminate in favor of white gentiles -- I don't know. Antisemitism certainly still exists. I'm just not sure how much of an additional penalty you get in woke world for a Jewish name verses simply being white.
Is there really a conservative position in America or is what we call conservative just a rejection of the silliness, the insane overreact of the managed state? You have to be rich to be this stupid.
I work in high finance, and I'm pretty interested to see how this will play out in my world. Many of my Jewish coworkers and friends are watching with curiosity and puzzlement as well.
So far there has been mainly empty gesturing at lower levels, but nothing of significance yet. The path to get one of these positions is pretty standardized. You go to one of a few specific universities, work at one of a few specific companies, then do an MBA at a one of a few specific business schools. At each step having the appropriate contacts is very helpful. The other route is graduate work in math/physics from a top school, but I'll ignore that for now.
I'm having trouble imagining how anything that could be deemed anti-Semitic would ever subvert this process. Bah and bat mitvahs are a big deal in my office. Rosh Hashanah and Hanukkah are celebrated. And very importantly, the gifted endowments are large. But who knows, maybe I'll be eating my words in ten years.
>"Eugene Chung is a bellwether, and I don’t know how liberals could complain about his situation with a straight face. This is the world you created."
Please, Freddie, terminology matters, and "liberals" is highly misleading here. I am a classical Liberal and Democrat. I strongly oppose the racism against Eugene Chung. And there are plenty of people like me. In the 2020 election in California, Biden won 63% to 34%, and in the same election, a proposition to restore affirmative action failed, 56% to 44%. This means that at least 30% of Biden voters voted against affirmative action. I was one of them.
I did so because of the pernicious and growing politicization of race preferences. If racial preferences continue, at some point we will need precise legal definitions of "black", etc. What are those definitions going to be, exactly? Will we see the return of the one-drop rule?
The only way out, in my view, is a full-on embrace of classical race-blind, sex-blind, gender-blind, every-person-is-unique-with-individual-rights, Liberalism. That's what this political philosophy is called. It utterly rejects the social-justice-warrior racism (cleverly rebranded as "anti-racism", a bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu that Orwell would surely regard as paradigmatic).
So: don't call the SJWs "liberals". They are not.
(I paid $5 just to comment, tho my Glenn Greenwald subscription just ended...but if he's not going to do his podcasts, I'm not as interested). I like the way you write, it's amazingly concise for the amount of ideas/content.
I agree with the overall sentiment...Jews are not white enough for Aryans, and not dark enough for Liberals.
I disagree with " The likely future isn’t mobs terrorizing Borough Park" - I'd argue that's because it's already occurring. During this latest Israel/Hamas fracas, (Arab?) gangs literally went around beating up Jews in Manhattan and LA. As recent as two months ago, Synagogues in Riverdale (Bronx, NY) were smashed up. Synagogues and Jews in Crown Heights are CONSTANTLY attacked and it ain't white supremacists driving up from the sticks of West Virginia who are doing it. It's just become so common, nobody cares. The Shomrim (private Jewish security in Crown Heights) exist EXACTLY because NYPD can't protect Jews in Borough Park.
I agree the sky isn't falling, but it's raining worse in the US than American Jews ever thought it would. It's not surprising Anti-Jewish and Anti-Asian sentiment is on the rise as woke leftists impress/imbue upon other minorities that Jews & Asians are keeping them out of colleges and jobs. Jews & Asians were thoroughly convinced by leftist MSM hate-violence would end if Trump was removed...they're finding not only was that misleading, but the violence is getting worse.
I hope it reverses but it will take the will of many who are currently silent/silenced.
Some of you may be familiar with Dr. Glenn Loury, economist at Brown University, who hosts a podcast along with Dr. John McWhorter, Columbia University.
Loury has shared with his audience correspondence from lawyers (other professions) in highly prestigious firms have initiated diversity efforts. But in order to fill those slots, individuals who are not at the level of their usual hires are being brought in. And the lawyer was especially concerned about such individuals being made partnered, given their performance abilities.
I know from reading that both Jews and Asians have been able to break through and become "over-represented" by dint of great academic achievement. Yet we know that for other people (including legacies), concession, from tests scores to grades, are made again and again. What you are getting is a leveling down in terms of quality of performance. And this leveling down is happening from the performing arts to academia to business.
Below are links to 2 articles which may interest you.
"What Happens When Doctors Can't Tell the Truth?
Whole areas of research are off-limits. Top physicians treat patients based on their race. An ideological 'purge' is underway in American medicine."
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-doctors-cant-speak?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo5MjE3NTgsInBvc3RfaWQiOjM3MTQ0ODIwLCJfIjoiQ3ZSVXciLCJpYXQiOjE2MjI5MjIzMzksImV4cCI6MTYyMjkyNTkzOSwiaXNzIjoicHViLTI2MDM0NyIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.mcdeLonnEMrNSxXMIu7ceurBcaq2JyxV3GO8L00Wxfg
"The Revolution Comes to Juilliard
Racial hysteria is consuming the school; unchecked, it will consume the arts."
https://www.city-journal.org/racial-hysteria-is-consuming-juilliard
Observation: In sum, "wokeness" is a top-to-bottom attack on competence and excellence, and on those who exemplify it.....especially if their identity is a small part of the population, but their representation in prestige positions (Supreme Court) is way high.
Relatively new here, can u link to past column on this? Thx. “ I absolutely believe that we can theoretically build admissions systems that increase diversity and inclusion, including specifically for Black and Hispanic applicants, without perpetuating other kinds of injustice.”
You mentioned that Palestinians are a tiny minority without much representation, but breezed right along without stopping to ask why, if this is so, that the Diversity clique is so singularly invested in their cause. It seems relevant in a piece about anti-Semitism.