Joachim has pointed me to a number of our coreligionists’ angry responses to the splendid Noah Feldman piece on marrying a gentile in the July 22 New York Times Magazine. Boy, religious Jews are pissed. One blogger calls Feldman a "whiny bitch."
My response to the Feldman piece is to think about the meritocracy. Harvard Law Prof Feldman’s a smart guy (even if he did stupidly rationalize the Iraqi occupation). I bet he was one of the smartest guys at Maimonides School, the alma mater that now shuns him because he married a Korean. I bet that, like me, Feldman grew up with a sense of Jewish intellectual superiority. My family cultivated this in me, and sought proofs of it everywhere in America. I still get emails about all the Jewish Nobelists (compared to how few Arab Nobelists there are. Prestige culture run amok). And indeed, not long ago, Commentary supported my lingering chauvinism with a fascinating article by the geneticist Charles Murray on the staggering Jewish over-representation in media and finance, etc.
Anyway, here’s my point. If you go in for intellectual elitism, as I still do in my black heart, and was taught to do in Jewish culture, then you soon come up against the fact that most of the smartest people in the world are gentiles. That happened to me. I sought out the company of independent thinkers; and lo and behold, a lot of my friends turned out to be Christians. Murray says just this in the current Commentary. In dismissing a letter by an Israeli writer, Shalom Friedman, who is upset about intermarriage watering the Jewish genius stock, Murray points out that "the great majority" of smart people are gentiles.
Jews are disproportionately represented in the ranks of outstanding achievers but, in raw terms, non-Jews are in the great majority… Mr. Freedman’s worries about intermarriage are justified if the question is the survival of a robust Jewish culture, but less so with respect to IQ. On average, Jews do not marry randomly selected Gentiles, but ones they meet in college or workplace, which in turn means spouses whose own mean IQ is also considerably above the Gentile mean. Increasing cognitive stratification independent of ethnicity or social origins is the ignored story of today’s evolving class structure—the story that the late Richard Herrnstein and I tried to bring to public attention in The Bell Curve (1994). [My emphasis]
What interests me here is how a lot of meritocratic Jews like me were hoist on the petard of superiority. If you bought into the ideology of intellectual excellence–the ideology of the meritocracy, which we Jews helped to build so we could get into the good schools (and which the WASPs then helped us to festoon with prestige, to disguise the fact that none of us would have to actually serve in Iraq)–then you would inevitably look around for smart people to socialize with, and most of them turned out to be gentiles. See, it’s my family’s fault.
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Related posts:
- Yes, Jews Are Smarter, But We’re Undergoing an IQ Drop by the Minute
- Chicago Judge Invokes Herzl in OK’ing Ban on Intermarried Heirs
- Jews aren’t smarter (I lift my curse, and yours)
- Take a look at the Israeli government ad that says intermarried Jews are ‘lost’
- Study: Intermarried American Jews With ‘Personalized’ Identity Are Abandoning Israel
{ 23 comments }
the geneticist Charles Murray
Not exactly.
Murray obtained an A.B. in history from Harvard in 1965 and a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(author)
Since then, he's mostly been a think tank hack. Not sure when his work was last peer reviewed; it may have been 1979. He's (arguably) competent at running regressions. He is not qualified to pronounce about genetics.
Philip – I am about as assimilated a jew as they get, who still calls himself a jew. I grew up in a metropolitan area with a lot of Asians. As a result many of my best friends were of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean descent, and many were wicked smart. Many of the Jews I knew dated their Asian peers. I never heard a peep about it from the families of those Jews, but almost all of them were fairly non-observant and quite liberal. What I did come across a lot was a fairly high degree of racism and chauvanism in the families of the Asian folks we were dating. They generally tolerated their kids dating Jews, because they tended to buy into the same stereotypes of Jews that Jews buy into. i.e., Jews are smart and hard working achievers. If their daughters came home with an African-American or Latino boyfriend there would be hell to pay, but jews were OK. Even within the Asian community there was a fairly rigid hierarchy: Japanese on top, followed by Korean, then Chinese, then Filipino. Dating a Jew was likely to be more accepted than dating a Filipino or possibly a Chinese person. My guess is this will be a non-issue within one generation.
When I marry there is a good chance it will be a non-Jew. My friends are quite varied in their backgrounds and I meet a lot more non-Jews than Jews so chances are I'm going to fall in love with a non-Jew, but you never know. My family will only be upset if the person I marry is not fairly liberal and not a good cook. I think they would enjoy having a jewish daughter-in-law, and it would make child rearing a bit simpler, but I have no doubt they would be fine with a great person who wasn't Jewish.
As for Jewish intellectual superiority, I have found the following to be true.
Most of the brilliant people in the world are not Jewish.
Most of the idiots out there are not Jewish.
Jews are disproportionately represented amongst the smarter folks, but there really aren't that many of us.
There are quite a few stupid Jews that I know, but they have college degrees so they are less likely to end up homeless.
When I go to a party I think about 3 or 4 atrributes of people before getting to whether they are Jewish or not.
Last thing I know:
Non-Jews love to talk about jews.
But not as much as jews love to talk about themselves!
Shalom Philip.
One last point. This one about Israel and inter-marriage.
My Asian friends were fairly well identified with their culture. They attended Japanese or Korean school on the weekend. They learned their history. They visited their ancestral lands. Not particularly different than the Jewish kids who were going to Hebrew school.
Based on on conversations I had with my Asian peers I surmised that while they felt a duty to make their parents happy, they did not tend to feel a need to keep the Korean bloodline or Chinese bloodline going. They also did not believe that their ancestral lands may one day be destroyed.
My Jewish friend, myself included, tended to feel an obligation to look out for the Jews since there weren't many of us around and Israel seemed to be constantly in danger. I have a feeling that if China, Japan, Korea(s) or the Philipines were in a similar position my friends would have taken a similar level of interest.
ironicly, the reactions to that article show why assimiliation is such a good thing.
Assimilation
______________
Looking back 2 000 years in 'our area' from Persia to Portugal – assimilation by intermarriage is the norm. At the time of Jesus there were some hundreds of ethnic-tribal groups, kingdoms, chiefdoms etc. Now there are some dozen states. Assimilation, the merging of ethnic groups is the historic norm not the exception. To resist assimilation/intermarrige is an anomaly. You may be proud of it but you are not normal.
off topic but amusing as a typical example of combined officiousness and stupidity where matters of jewish esprit de corps are concerned : I just received an email from my Hebrew teacher, in which she says "I did however just come across a piece written by you about which I feel very angry and upset and insulted and am determined that at this point our paths must part."
She offers a snapshot of the glove puppet dialogue from here:
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2007/01/david_gregory_p.html
I am sure you have all experienced this glove puppetry, where people post garbage in your name.
Better link for Noah Feldman article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/magazine/22yeshiva-t.html?ex=1186027200&en=4277230fa9e0780a&ei=5070 .
"My Jewish friend, myself included, tended to feel an obligation to look out for the Jews since there weren't many of us around and Israel seemed to be constantly in danger. I have a feeling that if China, Japan, Korea(s) or the Philipines were in a similar position my friends would have taken a similar level of interest."
Have you asked your friends about it? Most second or third generation Chinese Americans I know consider themselves American and not Chinese. Chinese in other countries such as Thailand don't consider themselves Chinese at all. Singapore — majority of its citizens are Chinese and ruled by Chinese — has not been that friendly with China. And Chinese in China generally see oversea Chinese as foreigners as most of the second and third generation diaspora don't speak the native tongue. http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/07/22/immigrant_parents_struggle_to_keep_their_children_bilingual/
The Chinese government, Japanese and Korean government don't have close ties with their diaspora, whose loyalty often lies with their host countries. For example: Japanese-American lawmaker Michael Honda introduced resolution calling on Tokyo to apologize for forcing women to serve as sex slaves during World War Two. The resolution angered the Japanese lawmakers to no end.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070714/pl_nm/japan_sexslaves_dc
The all-Japanese-American 100th/442nd Regimental Combat Team (RCT) is the most decorated military unit in U.S. history. They were fighting the Nazis while the U.S.was at war with Japan.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45180
Klaus wrote:
"Assimilation, the merging of ethnic groups is the historic norm not the exception"
Yes, but so was the separation into ethnic groups. When homo sapiens started on its long journey from Africa into the various parts of our world humankind was probably pretty uniform. Different geographic environments led to ethnic diversity. The remerging process started about five hundred years ago with Europeans moving into other parts of the world. Today we see, partly as a late consequence of European colonialism, a reverse movement with Asians and Africans moving into "Western" parts of the world.
We will presumably end up with the type of ethnic mix in which Brasil is the forerunner. After the separation that mainly took place in the last thirty thousand years humankind is coming together again.
I cannot judge what this means for average intelligence though I suspect that this mixing of gene pools is all to the good. As far as physical appearance is concerned: I have seen the offspring of many mixed marriages between 'Caucasians' and Asians and it always struck me that generally they were better looking than their respective parents.
Speaking of assimilation and intermarriage:
Last month, "the youngest of Al Gore's three daughters, Sarah Gore, 28, married businessman Bill Lee in Beverly Hills on Saturday, family spokesperson Kalee Kreider confirms to PEOPLE.
The bride, who is taking her husband's last name, wore a gown by Monique Lhuillier at the wedding, which took place at the Beverly Hills Hotel."
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20046345,00.html
Bill Lee's parents are Chinese immigrants from Taiwan. Now his father is a professor teaching anesthesiology in UCLA. Bill Lee was born and raised in California.
Incidentally, Al Gore's eldest daughter is married to Drew Schiff, whose great-grandfather was Jacob Schiff, one of the most famous/wealthy American Jews.
Jack – I wasn't clear in my comments. Most of my Asian friends growing up had strong cultural ties to being Chinese/Japanese/Korean, etc., but did not take a major interest in China, Japan, etc.. Especially the 2nd or 3rd generation ones. Quite a few of my friends were first generation. The point I meant to make is that when there are 1 billion Chinese, 130 million Japanese, 60 million Koreans, and aside from Taiwan none of the countries are in danger of being destroyed, it's easy to not be concerned about them and a lot easier to assimilate. When your ethnic group's "homeland" is in danger of being destroyed and your assimilating at a rate which will wipe out your "group" in 100 years, it is not bizarre to be conflicted about it. i.e., give Phil a break. If Ireland was under constant threat of being nuked by England and members of the Irish diaspora were assimilating at a high rate, you can bet the Irish in America would start to make even greater efforts to preserve Irish culture. Most groups can't relate to this because they have always had a homeland somewhere with plenty of their kind left. Perhaps the closest parallel we find today is with those Europeans who are concerned about intermarriage, particularly with Muslims, radically changing the demographic landscape of Europe. They sound outright isolationist.
Indeed Arie – My multi-racial friends tend to be really good looking.
As for Brazil – they might be mixed, but they go to great lengths to differentiate on the type of mix
brancarao –a very light-skinned mulatto, so light as to appear almost white;
caboclo/a — literally means copper-colored; applied to Indian or mestizo;
mameluco/a — offspring of white and Indian, sometimes including black;
cabore — offspring of black and Indian;
cafuso — offspring of Indian and black parents;
cariboca — a mestizo, part black and part Indian;
cabrocha — a feminine dark-skinned mestizo type; and
cabra — a brave mestizo of African, white and Indian ancestry.
Other terms indicated the prejudice against blacks, one of the most objectionable referring to bodily functions. Such is the case with budum and catinga (referring to the body odor reputed to characterize the African). Other terms indicating great social discrepancies are:
cria — a young black, born and reared in the Big House;
ladino/a — a slave who spoke Portuguese, had some Christian teaching, and worked around the house or field;
mae preta — black mammy;
malungo –a young black playmate of the whites lads of the Big House;
mucama — a favorite black maid employed as house servant and personal attendant;
muleca — a young black maid in the Big House;
mulecote — a sturdily built muleque, or black lad;
muleque — a young black; now a wag or a blackguard; and
mulequinho — pickaninny; small black lad
http://www.vernonjohns.org/plcooney/brazil.html
re Assimilated Jew Bob's notion of one's 'homeland' being destroyed. Most Jews were not born in Israel so what is this guff about 'homeland'?
Two points: First it's disappointing to see Phil using Charles Murray to marshal an argument, even an apparent egalitarian argument. Murray is a pseudo-geneticist, and an author who isn't taken seriously by actual geneticists. That has nothing to do with political correctness. It's because he's a weak social scientist (with a priori conclusions), and non-existent as a natural scientist.
Re achievement and Jews: As I get older it's more and more apparent how much expectation plays in achievement. I'm talking about expectations from family and friends primarily — these expectation seep in and become unconscious. And most Jews are given the message very early and repeatedly that high achievement is expected. This factor, combined with the fact that many Jews have the means to achieve, goes a long way to help understand Jewish achievement. Of course there are many mitigating factors and variables that hinder many Jews who have big expectations placed upon them from achievement. But the self-confidence and demand for accomplishment present in Jewish societies is a huge factor in Jewish success.
Bob, Jack,
Taiwan is not much different from Israel, with an alien invader from another place migrating over and and taking over the land of the native people. There are the true natives, not unlike the Arabs of Palestine, and the migrated natives, similar to the non-zionist jews that had been around for many years.
Also, last I knew, the Japanese in Peru seem to be pretty aligned with their motherland. Ruling that country economically not unlike the Chinese are doing in Southeast Asia or the Jews in various regions of the world. War criminal Fujimori was welcomed back by Japan with open arms. When Suharto was overthrown, chinese women in Indonesia were buying metal chastity belts because they know how corrupt they themselves were in looting the country with the dictator at the expense of the natives in the country.
Well. that of those chastity belts might be true for some isolated cases but I doubt whether it had anything to do with a Chinese feeling of 'guilt' about having 'looted' the country.
Anti-Cinese riots occurred before the Suharto era. After the Second World War some of the worst of these occurred in the so-called 'bersiap' time when nationalist war bands roamed the country after the collapse of Japanese control. The Chinese were suspected of being pro-Dutch and became a target.
Other riots occurred after the failed coup of September 1965 that was blamed on the communists.Beying was suspected of having had a hand in this.However, the main victims were then indigenous Indonesians of whom up to a million were slaughtered.
In colonial times there has been at least one great anti-Chinese progrom, that of 1740 in Batavia (now Jakarta) when in three days time in between 5000 – 10.000 Chinese were murdered by the Dutch inhabitants and their underlings. This pogrom was preceded by a long period of tension and a rebellion by Chinese coolies.
Trading minorities who do somewhat better than the indigenous population easily become the target of violence, especially when tensions are exploited by political entrepreneurs for their own ends.
There are large Chinese trading minorities in all parts of South East Asia (the largest being that in Malaysia) but anti-Chinese aggression has been most intense in Malaysia and Indonesia. Religious differences might have played a role here as well. There are many Chinese Christians and Buddhists which makes their assimilation easier in the christian Philippines and Buddhist Thailand. There are, however, very few Chinese Moslems.
WM, you're right about Taiwan. Although politically they would like to think of themselves as Taiwanese, most of the Taiwanese actually are Chinese whose ancestors came from Fujian, China over the last 500 years. There aren't many indigenous people left.
As for Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia, they don't have much political power, although many of them have been there for a few generations and don't consider China as homeland. A few of them are super-rich, but most of them are just your average middle class. The racial discrimination against Chinese (and Indians and other peoples) is prevalent and accepted. There are many discriminatory laws limited what Chinese can or can't do. (e.g. what kind of civil service jobs they can, what kind of business they can own, what kind of school they can go, etc) Chinese are convenient scapegoats whenever someone is pissed at the government or having a financial problem. But the fact is that Chinese financial power in Malaysia and Indonesia is greatly exaggerated. Foreign powers like America or other European countries play a more important role in their economy. Samuel Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations" describes how wealthy Chinese in Southeast Asia would organize themselves and align themselves with China. Well, Chinese simply don't think or work that way. If they have any political power, they would probably be indifferent to China. one good example is Singapore.
More on the conflict of American with Jewish or Zionist values
http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/103396.html
Orthodox group favors JNF bill
Published: 08/02/2007
The National Council of Young Israel is supporting a Knesset bill that has generated significant opposition from many American Jewish groups.
In a letter dated July 30, the executive director and president of the council defended a proposal that permits the Israel Lands Authority to maintain its longstanding policy of refusing to lease to non-Jews Israeli land owned by the Jewish National Fund.
"Yes, Israel is a democracy; a bastion of freedom," wrote President Shlomo Mostofsky and Executive Director Rabbi Pesach Lerner. "But a democracy doesn’t have to prove itself by forfeiting its right to its national purpose."
Among those speaking out against the measure are the Union for Reform Judaism, the Anti-Defamation League and Ameinu, the American affiliate of the World Labor Zionist Movement. JNF's American fund-raising arm and the Zionist Organization of America both support it.
Jack, speaking of Singapore, that's another state that's created with racist intentions. With all the native fearing chinese banding together into this single location and seperating itself from the rest of the brownskins of Malaysia. Any Malays that weren't kicked out has pretty much lost all their rights as citizens in side Singapore. Does that country sound familiar?
WM, Everything you said about Singapore is incorrect. Malays(14%),Indians(9%), Peranakans(offsprings of Malays and Chinese. 2.5%) are minorities, but they enjoy the same right as the Chinese majority. The official language of Singapore is: English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil. Unlike the United States of America, the founding of Singapore wasn't born on guns and murders or ethnic cleansing. No natives were killed and no guns were fired. (I won't go over the details, but here is what happened in a nutshell.)
"
On August 7, 1965, Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman, seeing no alternative to avoid further bloodshed, advised the Parliament of Malaysia that it should vote to expel Singapore from Malaysia. Despite last ditch attempts by PAP leaders, including Lee Kuan Yew, to keep Singapore as a state in the union, the Parliament on August 9, 1965 voted 126-0 in favour of the expulsion of Singapore, with members of Parliament from Singapore not present. On that day, a tearful Lee Kuan Yew announced that Singapore was a sovereign, independent nation and assumed the role of prime minister of the new nation. His speech included this quote: "For me, it is a moment of anguish. All my life, my whole adult life, I have believed in merger and unity of the two territories." Hence, Singapore became the only country in the history of the modern world to gain independence against its own will."
Jack, lets just say history differs depending on who you ask, with many Chinese, Malay or Indians of that vicinity not disagreeing with what I said. In fact, to many Chinese people I know, this might be the only subject in which it is not of direct interest to them that they don't take it as an insult to their people (I could bring up Taiwan's occupation by Chinese, but I am perceived to be taking up their side (except when I bring up Independence for the natives)).
Obviously, you'll get a different historical perspective if you ask the Chinese in Singapore.
Even Singapore gov't at the top level suspects the Malays:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Malay_racism
"Singapore. He stated that the Malays might have conflict when it comes to loyalty.[4] Earlier, former Indonesian President Habibie's alleged that the Singaporean armed force discriminate against the Malays.[5]"
Sounds familiar to some country?
WM, I didn't say inter-ethnic conflict in Singapore doesn't exist. What I said was that your history on the founding of Singapore and Malays are wrong. What you posted doesn't contradict what I said. The racism against Malays was rampant in the 70s, mainly because most of the Malays were uneducated and poor. But there was never institutionalized racism against Malays, i.e. laws that prevented Malays having the full right as citizen. As a matter of fact, the Singapore government installed "affirmative action" to help the Malays, because the prejudice against Malays was more of classism than racism. And gradually Malays closed the "income gap". Today their education and income level are very much on a par with the Chinese. The racism against Malays is almost non-existent today.
'Mondoweiss' or Philip Weiss should read more carefully and accurately. That too is a sign of a certain Intelligence. He wrongly restates the essence of Charles Murray's article. Murray is trying to understand the disproportionate contribution of Jews to the creative achievement record of mankind. He makes a wide- ranging historical survey in doing so.
I might note that the contribution the Jews have made to Mankind is first and above all a religious and ethical one. Here we are not talking about 'intelligence' primarily but rather about being good human beings, and serving a personal and moral God. i.e. Ethical Monotheism.
"Do Justice, Love Mercy and Walk Humbly with one's God' is the ideal summary of what the Jewish contribution to Mankind is all about.
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