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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