The late Joe Sobran once observed that denying that Jews are powerless can bring swift retribution. That is precisely because the Jewish community is anything but powerless. The professionally conscious intellectual is also expected to stress the supposed agonies of the American Jewish experience—for example, the virulently anti-Semitic past for which American Christians are considered responsible.
This unpleasantness is, of course, much exaggerated. American Jews suffered far less prejudice in the US than most other immigrant groups, including ethnic Catholics. Before the arrival at the beginning of the twentieth century of masses of Eastern European Jews, who struck even the very tolerant historian Frederick Jackson Turner as “hard to assimilate”, the German and Sephardic Jews who were already here encountered mostly good will from Christians. Were it not for the Jewish newcomers, this older Jewish minority would have totally melted away through intermarriage with upper-class Protestants.
The problem was those Eastern European Jews, who tended to come from unemancipated shtetls in much less modernized societies, generally didn’t like the bourgeois Christian society they encountered. They found it to be alien, threatening or just disagreeable. And, as Kevin MacDonald accurately shows in The Culture of Critique, these Jews have played a decisive role in subverting once-established culture.
The current guilt trip that liberal and neoconservative Jews have disproportionately encouraged must be undone in the name of freedom. The social engineering and forced ideological instruction that American Jews in the public sphere have pushed for decades is incompatible with true liberal ideals of intellectual inquiry and freedom of association.
