I expect that I will be hearing about this for a week, which is OK. But for the record - I don't recognize hate crimes as a legitimate quantifiable category because the definitions are always ideological and depend upon the whims of the people who do the categorizing. The point for me is that Black people are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime, especially homicide, and that this is what matters because this is not ideological. And in the more capacious definition of safe environments and access to health care, the disparity cuts even deeper against Black people.
Of course, the whole piece is premised on the idea that the oppression of Jewish people will still be ugly, powerful, and pernicious even though it is more likely to be corporate and clinical than violent and ugly, but people will focus on what they choose.
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.
I mean, I'd like to think that integration would protect Jewish Americans. But there were a lot of blond-haired, blue-eyed Jews in Germany, and they went to the camps too.
A painful truth, but does it translate? The Nazis had explicit records of who was Jewish. Doesn’t seem that university admissions and HR departments do.
The Nazis needed to get Jewish newspapers to hand over their list of subscribers in some cases. They also needed IBM to build a proto-Facebook of Jews in order to keep track of them. If they had actual Facebook they wouldn't have needed to. HR and admissions departments incidentally have access to Facebook.
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.
I expect that I will be hearing about this for a week, which is OK. But for the record - I don't recognize hate crimes as a legitimate quantifiable category because the definitions are always ideological and depend upon the whims of the people who do the categorizing. The point for me is that Black people are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime, especially homicide, and that this is what matters because this is not ideological. And in the more capacious definition of safe environments and access to health care, the disparity cuts even deeper against Black people.
Of course, the whole piece is premised on the idea that the oppression of Jewish people will still be ugly, powerful, and pernicious even though it is more likely to be corporate and clinical than violent and ugly, but people will focus on what they choose
Totally reasonable. I definitely agree that hate crimes are a pretty poor proxy for actual violence (for whatever definition that word has these days), but one for which statistics are relatively available.
I think your point on the systemic issues and disparities in access is totally valid though. Cheers!
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.
:-/ Did not expect people in this neck of the internet woods to get hung up on something so trivial. Does nobody have something to say in response to the substance of my comment?
Look man I'm not trying to play vice principal. The fact is that refusing to capitalize the word "Jew" is a common practice in far right spaces on the internet. I don't think you're trying to do that here, but I also don't like the symbolism and I'm politely asking you not to do it.
I use a really light hand in the comments here, I think, but I would like to be respect on this issue.
I would just put forward to you that the "internet consensus" on this issue -- where something which is likely to mean many, many other things besides being a far right shibboleth has been reduced, via internet purity-spiraling dynamics, to the narrow status of "far right shibboleth" -- is seriously suspect. This dynamic is how we got delayed by 16 months in taking the lab leak theory as seriously as it clearly deserved. FWIW I'm Jewish, though that should not matter.
From the site you sent it looks like "gentile" can be capitalized or not, generally capitalized when specifically used as non-Jew, but I think this is completely besides the point here. This is not a grammar course. My comments are riddled with typos, grammatical errors and probably inadvertent politically incorrect faux-pas. My opinion FWIW is to give people the benefit of the doubt unless a comment is overtly and intentionally offensive.
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.
I second this comment. Freddie, do you have any more thoughts on why the negative consequences for Jews as a result of HR-style diversity initiatives are likely to be worse than the consequences for non-Jewish white people?
“The question isn’t whether the Jewish elite will stay elite; they will. The question is whether the median Jewish student will face systematic “de-emphasizing” in academic and professional affairs, not out-and-out exclusion but the kind of policies in admissions and hiring that weigh Jewish identity as a negative and might prevent them from entering institutions and having the chance to excel.”
For example, I think you could replace “Jewish” with “white” in the paragraph above and it would be equally valid. The same is true of much of the rest of this piece.
Is the claim that Jewish people *should* be given some kind of advantage relative to non-Jewish whites to compensate for historical oppression, and so putting them in the same tier as whites is actually unfair to them? Or do you think that the median Jewish person will actually fare worse than the median non-Jewish white person under the new system, all else being equal?
I find it hard to comprehend that the two of you could really believe that Jews face no additional persecution for being Jewish compared to being white, but... you're wrong.
For the record: ANY group whose sheer numbers in these elite contexts makes them appear "overrepresented" will be hurt by this general dynamic. But Jews face wholly unique historical vulnerabilities that cause me extra concern.
I mean, I don’t doubt that many Americans still harbor prejudice towards Jews. But I would also guess that that prejudice is far less prevalent in the elite institutions that are the focus of this article, since it seems like a lot of Western anti-Semitism has been driven by (Christian) religious beliefs, and the “elite” circles today are much more secular than they used to be.
I guess I just find it hard to believe that a millenial, probably non-white and probably non-religious diversity officer in Google’s hiring department is going to look at Jewish candidate’s application and reject it *specifically* because she doesn’t like Jews. It seems much more likely that the candidate gets passed over for not improving her diversity quotas, in the same way that a non-Jewish white or Asian candidate would. But who knows! I’m not Jewish so I have no personal experience with anti-Semitism at these institutions.
That diversity officer is quite likely to be concerned about Palestine, likely to endorse the anti-Israel BDS movement, likely to worry that a Jewish employee might commit microaggressions against Muslim employees, and so maybe there shouldn't be too many of them.
In my general experience, college admissions and HR people have a very-near stated dislike for anyone who gets into a space on the basis of performing necessary work for that space to function. The stereotype of the "greasy grind" or outright nerd-bashing is still around, and in fact does originate in ways of discriminating against, yep, Jewish and Chinese immigrants.
I think this is a really well-reasoned argument. I think the only caveat here is that there is a thread of anti-semitism on the left that is separate from the sin of being white. A part of it is that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict bleeds into anti-semitism b/c it automatically pits Jews against Muslims. So, for example look at the quote that Freddie includes from "The Hedgehog Review" article:
"Moreover, because there were 60 students at Shabbat and only a handful of Muslim students on campus, the Jewish group should not exist."
Note that the comment above was not specifically about the lack of Muslim students, but specifically the lack *as compared to Jewish students* (as if these are natural antagonists). And b/c Muslims are considered a protected group by the left, Jews are an enemy separate from being white.
The other issue is that, plain and simple, there is anti-semitism at least tolerated (possibly encouraged) among the "woke." The NYT has become the leader in carefully crafted anti-racist speech. Remember the furor over the Tom Cotton op-ed that made people feel unsafe? But the NYT goes on to promote, for example, Alice Walker including her Walker's promotion of extreme, overt anti-semitic ideology. Personally, I think this is fine; people are complex and flawed and Alice Walker may be an amazing writer. But either you have a policy of free speech and tolerance of ideas, or you have a policy of carefully crafted "safe speech." And if, like the NYT, your goal is safe speech and promotion of "equity," it sends a message loud and clear that certain prejudice is allowed, while others isn't. And anti-semitism is clearly allowed.
I agree that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict contributes to prejudice in woke circles. In particular, I’ve seen the push to ban Israel flags from pride bleed into suspicion of Jewish groups participating because they might bring Israel stuff or not support the cause.
Also worth noticing that letting Jewish kids gather for Shabbat isn't actually "Israel/Palestine" related at all. What's bleeding over is the assumption that the existence and activity of Jewish life is ipso facto harmful to "Muslims", even when no Muslims are actually there to complain about it and no Zionist activities are undertaken.
As Elana said, this is well-reasoned, but I think it also misses an important beat. Generally (Jared Kushner blatantly excepted), Jews are closer to being either "merit admits" (of the standard kind) or "diversity admits" (lmfao) than legacies or other forms of bribery/nobility admits. If you reject a Jewish kid for "diversity" reasons, that doesn't actually mandate you, in admissions terms, to give that specific seat to someone diverse -- just so long as the overall diversity numbers are made.
So you can definitely get an actually-existing diversity campaign that reduces the number of Jewish merit admits, increases the number of legacy admits (some of whom may even be Jewish -- but fewer, most likely), and thus engages, in some sense, in both explicit classism and explicit antisemitism. But from the point of view of HR, all the quotas were met - maybe it's like Princeton, with a 68% "non-white-male" freshman class - so the explicitly discriminatory preferences were Good, Actually.
Or maybe Jewish kids just learn to discover how gay they all are as teenagers before applying to college. Who knows.
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.
At some point the Hanukkah celebration will be deemed a microaggression by one of your diversity-enhancing hires, and a complaint lodged with your firm's HR dept. HR will declare that those celebrations should be curtailed, and top management will go along, because fighting it would only bring more trouble (and possibly outside scrutiny, especially if the aggrieved employee has turned to social media to complain publicly). It will go downhill from there.
>"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).
Interesting you mention the one-drop rule. I’ve been wondering how reparations could be distributed. I am for the payment of reparations. But then you come to the brass tacks of who gets what. There’s a town in the Chicago area that paid reparations to the descendants of people denied housing loans for being Black. That’s cool. But what about all the other Black people (excluding recent immigrants) who don’t have knowledge or documentation of specific discriminatory practices against their ancestors? How does a government identify people based on a racial identity to pay reparations without running into the gross colorism that led to designations like quadroon and octoroon? How “Black” would someone have to be to qualify (and by that I mean what if you had one Black grandparent? Or both your parents are biracial? Or.... or.... ) And then we’ve arrived at the Department of Solving the Problem.
Leaving aside the percentage heritage issue (which is huge), I’ve thought that we could leverage our sin of closing immigration by requiring proof of ancestry with citizenship in the United States before 1965. Technically this would still qualify VP Harris, but no system is going to be perfect.
The reparations program you describe is in Evanston, and it’s $25k per family, out of a pot of $10M (with tax revenues from, er, pot), so that’s 400 families total, and instead of a check, it’s for real estate (down payment, improvement, maybe refinancing? Etc). The claim from the local government is that a check would be taxed, and there is a symmetry of the reparation redressing the specific wrong, but when it’s decades later I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume the family wants to buy property anymore.
So it’s far from perfect, even from my half-baked 1965 idea.
(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.
Btw didn't know about you till recently. I read your detailed letters about whatever brouhaha you had with another Twitter person. In it, you often used the word "shame" to describe your feelings.
Do you know the difference between Guilt and Shame? Guilt is when you feel you've done something bad, while Shame means you feel like you're a bad person. We all make mistakes. It's understandable to feel guilt, but you're clearly not a bad person so please don't feel shame.
As you perceptively pointed out (at least I think it was you) in a subsequent substack on agreeing/disagreeing on politics, the people trying to shame you for what you did aren't doing so because of what you did, but because they just don't like you.
Yeah, it's fine to say that the definition of a hate-crime, and the collection of statistics, is ideological. But at some point you have to give up the ghost and say, yeah, smashing up synagogues or engaging in hit-and-run beatings on random Jewish passersby are ... *something*. If "hate crime" is too nebulous a category, we still need something that encompasses these very central examples of "fuck those people let's get em boyz".
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.
I expect that I will be hearing about this for a week, which is OK. But for the record - I don't recognize hate crimes as a legitimate quantifiable category because the definitions are always ideological and depend upon the whims of the people who do the categorizing. The point for me is that Black people are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime, especially homicide, and that this is what matters because this is not ideological. And in the more capacious definition of safe environments and access to health care, the disparity cuts even deeper against Black people.
Of course, the whole piece is premised on the idea that the oppression of Jewish people will still be ugly, powerful, and pernicious even though it is more likely to be corporate and clinical than violent and ugly, but people will focus on what they choose.
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.
I mean, I'd like to think that integration would protect Jewish Americans. But there were a lot of blond-haired, blue-eyed Jews in Germany, and they went to the camps too.
A painful truth, but does it translate? The Nazis had explicit records of who was Jewish. Doesn’t seem that university admissions and HR departments do.
The Nazis needed to get Jewish newspapers to hand over their list of subscribers in some cases. They also needed IBM to build a proto-Facebook of Jews in order to keep track of them. If they had actual Facebook they wouldn't have needed to. HR and admissions departments incidentally have access to Facebook.
Besides which, screw assimilation.
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.
I expect that I will be hearing about this for a week, which is OK. But for the record - I don't recognize hate crimes as a legitimate quantifiable category because the definitions are always ideological and depend upon the whims of the people who do the categorizing. The point for me is that Black people are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime, especially homicide, and that this is what matters because this is not ideological. And in the more capacious definition of safe environments and access to health care, the disparity cuts even deeper against Black people.
Of course, the whole piece is premised on the idea that the oppression of Jewish people will still be ugly, powerful, and pernicious even though it is more likely to be corporate and clinical than violent and ugly, but people will focus on what they choose
Totally reasonable. I definitely agree that hate crimes are a pretty poor proxy for actual violence (for whatever definition that word has these days), but one for which statistics are relatively available.
I think your point on the systemic issues and disparities in access is totally valid though. Cheers!
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.
We will capitalize the "J" in the word "Jew" and its derivatives in this space, please.
But it looks weird to capitalize "gentile" and that sentence looks odd if one is capitalized and the other isnt.
It may look weird to you, but it's standard to capitalize "gentile" when it's used as a noun. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/53627/should-the-word-gentile-be-capitalized/464211
:-/ Did not expect people in this neck of the internet woods to get hung up on something so trivial. Does nobody have something to say in response to the substance of my comment?
Look man I'm not trying to play vice principal. The fact is that refusing to capitalize the word "Jew" is a common practice in far right spaces on the internet. I don't think you're trying to do that here, but I also don't like the symbolism and I'm politely asking you not to do it.
I use a really light hand in the comments here, I think, but I would like to be respect on this issue.
Sure, it's your substack. I can't reedit my comment.
I would just put forward to you that the "internet consensus" on this issue -- where something which is likely to mean many, many other things besides being a far right shibboleth has been reduced, via internet purity-spiraling dynamics, to the narrow status of "far right shibboleth" -- is seriously suspect. This dynamic is how we got delayed by 16 months in taking the lab leak theory as seriously as it clearly deserved. FWIW I'm Jewish, though that should not matter.
From the site you sent it looks like "gentile" can be capitalized or not, generally capitalized when specifically used as non-Jew, but I think this is completely besides the point here. This is not a grammar course. My comments are riddled with typos, grammatical errors and probably inadvertent politically incorrect faux-pas. My opinion FWIW is to give people the benefit of the doubt unless a comment is overtly and intentionally offensive.
Nevertheless, people who consistently don't capitalize "Jew" will be warned and then receive a 24-hour commenting ban.
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.
I second this comment. Freddie, do you have any more thoughts on why the negative consequences for Jews as a result of HR-style diversity initiatives are likely to be worse than the consequences for non-Jewish white people?
“The question isn’t whether the Jewish elite will stay elite; they will. The question is whether the median Jewish student will face systematic “de-emphasizing” in academic and professional affairs, not out-and-out exclusion but the kind of policies in admissions and hiring that weigh Jewish identity as a negative and might prevent them from entering institutions and having the chance to excel.”
For example, I think you could replace “Jewish” with “white” in the paragraph above and it would be equally valid. The same is true of much of the rest of this piece.
Is the claim that Jewish people *should* be given some kind of advantage relative to non-Jewish whites to compensate for historical oppression, and so putting them in the same tier as whites is actually unfair to them? Or do you think that the median Jewish person will actually fare worse than the median non-Jewish white person under the new system, all else being equal?
I find it hard to comprehend that the two of you could really believe that Jews face no additional persecution for being Jewish compared to being white, but... you're wrong.
For the record: ANY group whose sheer numbers in these elite contexts makes them appear "overrepresented" will be hurt by this general dynamic. But Jews face wholly unique historical vulnerabilities that cause me extra concern.
I mean, I don’t doubt that many Americans still harbor prejudice towards Jews. But I would also guess that that prejudice is far less prevalent in the elite institutions that are the focus of this article, since it seems like a lot of Western anti-Semitism has been driven by (Christian) religious beliefs, and the “elite” circles today are much more secular than they used to be.
I guess I just find it hard to believe that a millenial, probably non-white and probably non-religious diversity officer in Google’s hiring department is going to look at Jewish candidate’s application and reject it *specifically* because she doesn’t like Jews. It seems much more likely that the candidate gets passed over for not improving her diversity quotas, in the same way that a non-Jewish white or Asian candidate would. But who knows! I’m not Jewish so I have no personal experience with anti-Semitism at these institutions.
That diversity officer is quite likely to be concerned about Palestine, likely to endorse the anti-Israel BDS movement, likely to worry that a Jewish employee might commit microaggressions against Muslim employees, and so maybe there shouldn't be too many of them.
And since identity declaration seems to be essential these days, I am not Jewish, and to the best of my knowledge, have no Jewish ancestors.
In my general experience, college admissions and HR people have a very-near stated dislike for anyone who gets into a space on the basis of performing necessary work for that space to function. The stereotype of the "greasy grind" or outright nerd-bashing is still around, and in fact does originate in ways of discriminating against, yep, Jewish and Chinese immigrants.
I think this is a really well-reasoned argument. I think the only caveat here is that there is a thread of anti-semitism on the left that is separate from the sin of being white. A part of it is that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict bleeds into anti-semitism b/c it automatically pits Jews against Muslims. So, for example look at the quote that Freddie includes from "The Hedgehog Review" article:
"Moreover, because there were 60 students at Shabbat and only a handful of Muslim students on campus, the Jewish group should not exist."
Note that the comment above was not specifically about the lack of Muslim students, but specifically the lack *as compared to Jewish students* (as if these are natural antagonists). And b/c Muslims are considered a protected group by the left, Jews are an enemy separate from being white.
The other issue is that, plain and simple, there is anti-semitism at least tolerated (possibly encouraged) among the "woke." The NYT has become the leader in carefully crafted anti-racist speech. Remember the furor over the Tom Cotton op-ed that made people feel unsafe? But the NYT goes on to promote, for example, Alice Walker including her Walker's promotion of extreme, overt anti-semitic ideology. Personally, I think this is fine; people are complex and flawed and Alice Walker may be an amazing writer. But either you have a policy of free speech and tolerance of ideas, or you have a policy of carefully crafted "safe speech." And if, like the NYT, your goal is safe speech and promotion of "equity," it sends a message loud and clear that certain prejudice is allowed, while others isn't. And anti-semitism is clearly allowed.
I agree that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict contributes to prejudice in woke circles. In particular, I’ve seen the push to ban Israel flags from pride bleed into suspicion of Jewish groups participating because they might bring Israel stuff or not support the cause.
Also worth noticing that letting Jewish kids gather for Shabbat isn't actually "Israel/Palestine" related at all. What's bleeding over is the assumption that the existence and activity of Jewish life is ipso facto harmful to "Muslims", even when no Muslims are actually there to complain about it and no Zionist activities are undertaken.
As Elana said, this is well-reasoned, but I think it also misses an important beat. Generally (Jared Kushner blatantly excepted), Jews are closer to being either "merit admits" (of the standard kind) or "diversity admits" (lmfao) than legacies or other forms of bribery/nobility admits. If you reject a Jewish kid for "diversity" reasons, that doesn't actually mandate you, in admissions terms, to give that specific seat to someone diverse -- just so long as the overall diversity numbers are made.
So you can definitely get an actually-existing diversity campaign that reduces the number of Jewish merit admits, increases the number of legacy admits (some of whom may even be Jewish -- but fewer, most likely), and thus engages, in some sense, in both explicit classism and explicit antisemitism. But from the point of view of HR, all the quotas were met - maybe it's like Princeton, with a 68% "non-white-male" freshman class - so the explicitly discriminatory preferences were Good, Actually.
Or maybe Jewish kids just learn to discover how gay they all are as teenagers before applying to college. Who knows.
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.
Canada is much worse.
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.
At some point the Hanukkah celebration will be deemed a microaggression by one of your diversity-enhancing hires, and a complaint lodged with your firm's HR dept. HR will declare that those celebrations should be curtailed, and top management will go along, because fighting it would only bring more trouble (and possibly outside scrutiny, especially if the aggrieved employee has turned to social media to complain publicly). It will go downhill from there.
Ernest albeit silly question: is there a low finance? How does it differ from high finance?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/high-finance
Huh, neat. Thanks! 🙏
>"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.
Interesting you mention the one-drop rule. I’ve been wondering how reparations could be distributed. I am for the payment of reparations. But then you come to the brass tacks of who gets what. There’s a town in the Chicago area that paid reparations to the descendants of people denied housing loans for being Black. That’s cool. But what about all the other Black people (excluding recent immigrants) who don’t have knowledge or documentation of specific discriminatory practices against their ancestors? How does a government identify people based on a racial identity to pay reparations without running into the gross colorism that led to designations like quadroon and octoroon? How “Black” would someone have to be to qualify (and by that I mean what if you had one Black grandparent? Or both your parents are biracial? Or.... or.... ) And then we’ve arrived at the Department of Solving the Problem.
Leaving aside the percentage heritage issue (which is huge), I’ve thought that we could leverage our sin of closing immigration by requiring proof of ancestry with citizenship in the United States before 1965. Technically this would still qualify VP Harris, but no system is going to be perfect.
The reparations program you describe is in Evanston, and it’s $25k per family, out of a pot of $10M (with tax revenues from, er, pot), so that’s 400 families total, and instead of a check, it’s for real estate (down payment, improvement, maybe refinancing? Etc). The claim from the local government is that a check would be taxed, and there is a symmetry of the reparation redressing the specific wrong, but when it’s decades later I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume the family wants to buy property anymore.
So it’s far from perfect, even from my half-baked 1965 idea.
(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.
Btw didn't know about you till recently. I read your detailed letters about whatever brouhaha you had with another Twitter person. In it, you often used the word "shame" to describe your feelings.
Do you know the difference between Guilt and Shame? Guilt is when you feel you've done something bad, while Shame means you feel like you're a bad person. We all make mistakes. It's understandable to feel guilt, but you're clearly not a bad person so please don't feel shame.
As you perceptively pointed out (at least I think it was you) in a subsequent substack on agreeing/disagreeing on politics, the people trying to shame you for what you did aren't doing so because of what you did, but because they just don't like you.
Yeah, it's fine to say that the definition of a hate-crime, and the collection of statistics, is ideological. But at some point you have to give up the ghost and say, yeah, smashing up synagogues or engaging in hit-and-run beatings on random Jewish passersby are ... *something*. If "hate crime" is too nebulous a category, we still need something that encompasses these very central examples of "fuck those people let's get em boyz".
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.