If you're a baseball fan, you're thrilled by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who sadly dropped the Devil from their name this year and have been rewarded by the deity; they've shocked baseball by leading the best division, the American League East. Last night they played a cliffhanger with the Red Sox for 14 innings, and won. (I dropped off in the 12th; conjugal responsibilities.) ESPN kept cutting to young Theo Epstein, the Red Sox wunderkind gm, in his Fenway box.
Well it turns out the Rays also have a wunderkind Jewish gm. I'm guessing that's the case from names here, but I think you'll agree. This St. Petersburg Times piece says after the Rays were bought by Stuart Sternberg a few years ago he turned to a kid he'd met at Goldman, Sachs: Matt Silverman.
graduated cum laude with an economics degree from Harvard; has written
some 60,000 words of a novel that's on indefinite hold;… in true bachelor
fashion, relies heavily on microwave cuisine and fast food; and, most
important, has the full trust of Sternberg.
"I couldn't have more confidence in anybody else at this point in my
life to run a business on a day-to-day basis," says Sternberg, 46. "His
sensibilities are pristine. His willingness to work is unparalleled.
His thoughts and compassion are A-plus. It's like a dream to me to have
Matt come down here."
Steve Sailer recently had a funny post about Saakashvili of Georgia making the calculation that Jews run the world, and so he had to get on the good side of the Jews and he could do anything.
This isn't purely a joke. You have to wonder about Jewish social networks, if you consider the rise of the neocons and the prominence of Jewish money in the political process.The question is, How much of the Jewish advance in the establishment is Pure Jewish Genius and how much of it is connection (or gonnegtions, as the antisemitic caricature Meyer Wolfsheim says in Gatsby).
Jews like to believe it's genius. I certainly thought so most of my life. We have the shtik, we have the book, what more could the information age want? Back when I was at the Harvard Crimson newspaper, Mary Ridge, an Irish girl from Watertown, MA, interrupted my tirade on the evils of the WASPy club system at Harvard to tell me that the Crimson was just a Jewish boys' club. And that we selected for one another. My jaw dropped. We were comfortable with one another's ways, she said. What were those ways? Urban, middle/uppermiddle class, fast-talking, funny, irreverent (used to be anyway), lovers of prestige, ambitious out the wazoo, and yes Jewishness. Haimishe, as they say in Yiddish. I remember non-Jews not feeling entirely welcome. But of course we were smarter than everybody else, so we deserved it!
I get some of that smug vibe from Sternberg's comments about why he chose Silverman, above. Like likes like. I'm not saying it's evil, but it's not entirely a glorious story of American freedom. Elites have always had social cohesion. E. Digby Baltzell wanted to destroy the last social order, the WASPs, back in the 60s, because he regarded them as an exclusive caste which wasn't interested in talent and energy. I sometimes wonder whether some of the new Jewish elite isn't exercising a similar type of bar, based on unconscious cultural prejudices. I've heard about gentile professors sensing prejudice in certain prestige institutions that will go unnamed.
These issues are even an element of Sarah Palin's splash. She is the Anti-Jew– in that she's outdoorsy, rural, kicked around in a bunch of colleges, is evangelical, didn't abort her Down's baby, doesn't care about prestige, has probably not read a serious book in 10 years, and egad, has a child in the military. There's a lot more to say about all this, obviously, I'm just biting off a piece. What is the world that successful Jews have made in the establishment? How cohesive is it? Do you have to be a philosemite to join? (My sister-in-law, who's successful in Hollywood, is a giant philosemite). Etc.
I'll be watching the Rays and the Red Sox go at it next week. Go Rays! Last year I blogged about all the Jewish owners and execs of professional baseball teams,
prompting Jerry Haber to note that he was related to the Indians'
general manager Mark Shapiro. I guess all Jewish gms aren't
geniuses.
"How much of the Jewish advance in the establishment is Pure Jewish genius and how much of it is social connection?"
There may be a third consideration.
But first let's note that even in cases of social connection there's got to be some genius involved. The incredible competition for the centers of power of the world's dominant economy guarantees that.
But genius (and I'm only speaking secondhand here) has its own built in constraints. Often easily bored, idealistic, self aware, it can be hard to harness real brains to the basically mundane tasks of power and wealth acquisition. Here's where I think Jewishness comes in. The sense of threat and of grievance can lend additional meaning to the materialist scramble.
I look at the output of Hollywood, for example, and I'm unable to explain it any other way.
Yesterday I walked past the big Calvary Baptist Church on W 57 St and saw the pastors name was Epstein. I guess the homeboy network has penetrated further than I realized.
"The sense of threat and of grievance can lend additional meaning to the materialist scramble."
This is a bull's eye. The difference between a smart goy and a smart jew: A perennial. The single instance the goy actually was equally tribal: Nazi Germany.
If the Jews were all that smart they might learn something from the Nazis fate.
Sometimes, you are such a friggin idiot, Phil. The stuff you say about Palin, although, to be honest, I don't care for the women, is just so friggin offensive to most Americans.
For example, how the f–k do you know whether she's not read a book before? And your comment about aborting a down's baby just shows how warped the thinking of the typical leftwinger is in this country. You acknowledge that a fetus is a baby, but you assume that any right-thinking, liberal-minded American would abort it in any case.
But the main problem is that, even as you critique it, your mind is so caught up in identity politics, so transfixed by it, that you don't even understand that most American Christians don't interact with others on the basis of identity politics. Most white Christian Americans first encounter identity politics when they have a Jewish friend, who constantly reminds them every half hour that they are Jewish.
Let's be honest about identity politics for once. Identity politics, or the idea that blacks, hispanics, Jews, gays should be loyal to their group idenity, is going to tear this country apart, and in my experience, the main pushers of identity politics have been the academic establishment. It's been such a mistake for the left, and such a mistake for the Democratic party to cater to this nonsense. We lose election after election because of it, and if I am reading the tea leaves correctly, we are going to lose this next one as well, even though it shouldn't even be close.
When white Christians in this country start to practice identity politics en masse, the country is finished.
One further comment:
What is especially offensive about this post is that it identifies the non-Jew, which for some idiotic reason you call the "anti-Jew", as someone who does not read books.
Let me give you a friggin clue about world history. The entire history of book learning, from the Illiad, to the Aenied, to the Church fathers, to the Canterbury's Tales, to all of Renaisssance drama and poetry, to Milton's Paradise Lost, to the entire tradition of European novel writing, was produced by non-Jews.
I don't mean to diminish Jewish book learning throughout history, which is also substantial, but your biases, even when you don't mean to be biased, shine through loud and clear.
Please try to do better next time.
Madrid is pretty dense. Anti-identity politics as practiced by Weiss is a rejection of identity politics.
It should be clear that the ancient Jews had a special talent for poetry and love of God, which underpins the Prophetic line which is the foundation of Western cultural identity. Jesus was a Jew and Muhammed may well have been. He thought he was until the Jewish establishment spurned him, as they did to Jesus. He was certainly a lover of the Bible.
As for the Greeks I would guess that they read the Bible too. And who knows how many of the great Greek authors were descended from Jews?
One of the most serious problems with the social conditioning applied to elites since 1960 or so, is that they tend to emerge from college with no ability to grapple with ideas outside a very narrow range of politically acceptable discourse.
If Jews were not ethnocentric, Jews would not exist. Altruism towards one's in-group and xenophobia towards an out-group is one of the most fundamental instincts of a social species. Without this instinct, even the smallest hunting and gathering community would not have held together. There would never have been city-states, let alone nation-states. Certainly, there would be no Jews.
Communism tried to reshape human nature into something more moral and aesthetically pleasing, but it didn't work out very well. Modern liberal democracy attempts the same thing, but likewise tends to fail spectacularly when applied to people who make no apologies for preferring their own bloodlines and culture over that of strangers.
Paul, Jewishness isn't a racial category. It's a set of ideas. You get to choose whether you accept the ideas or not.
Preference for one's culture is admirable, preference for one's bloodlines is tribalism, the conviction in superiority of one's bloodlines is racism.
In matters of individual effort, Jewish achievements are usually deserved. Witness the preponderance of Nobel prizes.
But when the achievements are dependent on social networks, I don't think they are as admirable.
In politics, the tribalism is intense, and to the detriment of the electorate.
In Hollywood…. Luke Ford says that two thirds of leading movie producers/directors are Jewish, and yet when you look at the all-time best and worst films –
link to metacritic.com
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link to metacritic.com
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then most of the top ten best are by non-Jews, yet most of the top ten worst are by Jews. This would suggest that Jewish tribalism is having a bad effect on Hollywood.
Paul:
Yes all the ancient Greek philosophers were crypto-Jews: Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Sophocles, Euripedes, etc all were secretly genuflecting readers of the Bible, while publically they incorporated references to the Greek pantheon for the ignorant masses.
Similarly, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes, all the great European writers were also secretly Jewish. Every European intellectual was a crypto-Jew, right?
I may have come off as offensive last night. YOu are right that Phil attempts to challenge identity politics in some posts, but then he turns around and promulgates the most offensive stereotypes about rural white Christians. Some of the greatest American writers like Melville, Thoreau, and Frost were rural white Christians.
"Preference for one's culture is admirable, preference for one's bloodlines is tribalism, the conviction in superiority of one's bloodlines is racism."
I don't disagree with you, but those morally loaded terms don't help in understanding why these tendencies exist, or how to deal with them realistically.
The point I was trying to make is that we wouldn't be here if our ancestors weren't extremely ethnocentric. Consider Joshua and the Canaanites, or the Greeks in the Persian War.
I think of ethnocentrism as a kind of yetzer hara. Whether we like it or not, it is a necessary part of humanity. It is destructive if not controlled, but can also motivate good actions when guided with reason and ethics.
I pretty much agree with Madrid, except for the part about possible white Christian cohesion destroying the nation. I guess he means that as soon as whites start playing the game like every other group (as they must eventually!) the game is over.
I don't know that much about Biblical history, but it is my understanding that the Bible was largely written by Greeks in the second and third centuries A.D., and that the writers were not speakers of Aramaic. I'm also under the impression that there was no particularly Greek way of thinking any more than there was a particularly Hebrew or Semitic way of thought, and that each belonged to a much older eastern civilization. Maybe I was taught wrong?
Phil probably does have a little fun with his posts, but I believe that he doesn't understand, or like, Middle America. I don't believe that the two opposing nations within a nation can or should be forced to live together.
I think that the Jewish genius bit is wearing thin. What group doesn't project when in power? Are Jews the real supermen that the Nazis claimed to be? I doubt it. For every actual Jewish genius, numerous networkers and fellow-travelers seem to follow. Anyone with eyes can see that.
One of the reasons I think Phil keeps switching around about identity politics is that he keeps trying to reconcile Jewish ethics, in which ethnocentrism is a virtue, to the contradictory political morality of modern liberalism, in which an elite decides which groups are permitted to express an ethnic identity.
Yesterday I walked past the big Calvary Baptist Church on W 57 St and saw the pastors name was Epstein. I guess the homeboy network has penetrated further than I realized.
:-) Wonderful.
I am puzzled with Phil's obsession with Jewish names. But then he is an assimiliationist American Jew with an obsession for the "tribe". So is it any wonder? ;)
I was studying matters over here. The 19th century extreme right and later the Nazis tried to use this myth.
To cut things short: after emancipation the Prussian king ordered his clerks to make Jewish names recognizable. Once you didn't recognize them any more, another stigma was needed. But his administrative servants noticed this was not so easy, since on the average the names were not much different from other German names, they had simply kept older forms due to the apartness in the Ghettoes. Over long periods the clerks thus simply ignored the orders …
The myth survived anyway. It gained much momentum under the Nazis. …
But e.g. "Weiss" would be a perfectly German name, and a rather frequent one, meaning white. And if I check the Cologne victims names on the Stumbling Stones of a friend, many, many of the names are very typicially German.
"One of the reasons I think Phil keeps switching around about identity politics is that he keeps trying to reconcile Jewish ethics, in which ethnocentrism is a virtue, to the contradictory political morality of modern liberalism, in which an elite decides which groups are permitted to express an ethnic identity."
You may be right, but it doesn't take a genius to understand that a very small minority can't hold down a much larger founding culture without negative consequences of some sort. It's even worse when it's denied.
Very interesting. I have met a lot of Jewish folk in academia. I have noticed three important things about American Jewry:
1. They are often the only folks drawn to the sort of esoteric subjects I prefer, which makes me rather fond of many of them.
2. Despite their apparent smarts, they are painting themselves into a demographic corner from which they might not escape (you need to have at least three kids all you Jewish geniuses!)
3. Though all are very different in their likes, dislikes, ethics, etc., they (almost) all harbor an unfair distrust of Christian America and seem to lack any deep loyalty to the pre-Lincoln storyline of our country.
I think this Christian-hating bias stems not from any recent generations' hurt over no Christmas presents; rather, I think that American Jews (at least the Ashkenazim) failed to change attitudes once they left Eastern Europe. White Baptists from Alabama have become their tsarist elite, though I can't find any good reason for their fear.
It's sad, I think, that the Ashkenazim chose the Anglo-Saxon stock as their primary target. There could have been more of an effort to work within the group.
The number of surprising places where Jews have spent their time and money, many of which are pointed out by supposedly racist (and stupid) Southern WASPs, are suspicious at best. A lot of people I know are shocked by the ethnicities of the founding members of the NAACP. Also, once you've lived in Europe, where Jews do not fill every slot in a video program, you realize how much effort is put into planting both overt Jews and covert Jews into every sitcom and movie in the US. Often, the covert Jews (those that don't get identified as being officially Jews in the script) are paired up with a black sidekick. The message, I guess, is one of "it's good to have us around, wink, wink".
I don't think the Jews are in any way organized in their pursuit of power and influence, but MANY of the Jewish folk I've met are extremely racist, which is their right, I guess. I imagine the more subtle racism, ethnocentrism if you will, also pervades other Jews' choices of employees and business partners.
I fear there will be a reckoning before too long. I hope it is a peaceful one.