(Comment by CL: It has taken almost a lifetime for me to learn many lessons - the biggest of all is that discovering truth is a process, not an end state - and even then, we 'see through the glass darkly'. (quote from Apostle Paul)
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Go to Part 2 of 3.
Jewish Ethnocentrism
Cofnas rests his argument against MacDonald on three grounds: (a) the evidence suggests Jews are not particularly ethnocentric, (b) liberal Jews typically advocate similar policies for Jews/Israel and gentiles/gentile countries, and (c) the West was on a liberal trajectory with or without Jews, and Jews were not responsible for mass immigration to the US. All three arguments are fundamentally flawed, and are characterized in Cofnas’s presentation by the very features he claims to have found in MacDonald’s work, especially omission of contradictory evidence.
In regards to Jewish ethnocentrism, Cofnas is almost exclusively concerned with the subject of intermarriage. This is an important but not exclusive aspect of ethnocentrism, and Cofnas demonstrates no awareness of either the history of Jewish intermarriage and its impact on Jewish ethnocentrism (for example, by referencing a text like Todd Endelman’s Princeton-published Leaving the Jewish Fold, which I’ve reviewed here), or any of the major sociological studies of contemporary Jewish demography (for example, Oxford’s very comprehensive 2014 The Social Scientific Study of Jewry: Sources, Approaches, Debates, or even Keren McGinty’s 2009 NYU-published Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America). In fact, Cofnas does not appear to have undertaken a serious survey of any of the relevant available scholarly literature, the most important of which is surely Bruce Phillips’s 2013 article in Contemporary Jewry “New Demographic Perspectives on Studying Intermarriage in the United States.”[1] Phillips examined intermarriage data like that cited by Cofnas and found that
The study of Jewish intermarriage has largely ignored the measurement conventions prevalent in the field of demography such as using first marriages (as opposed to current marriages) and not controlling for mixed parentage. I re-analyze the NJPS 2000–2001 using first marriages and controlling for parentage and find evidence that intermarriage has leveled off among single ancestry Jews [as opposed to mixed-ancestry Jews]. Jewish intermarriage is placed in an American context by (1) putting in Kalmijn’s conceptual schema and (2) using the odds-ratio to compare intermarriage in controlling for group size. Single ancestry Jews are surprisingly endogamous compared with other groups in America. [emphasis added]
Nor is Cofnas concerned with the actual lived experience of intermarriage and its relationship to ethnocentrism, since he focuses only on a limited set of raw numbers and ignores a number of pieces of research on intermarried Jews that essentially contradict his argument by insisting that Jewish continuity is certainly not in danger.[2] Cofnas, for example, argues that
The anti-Jewish narrative says that liberal Jews are highly ethnocentric compared to other groups, particularly white gentiles. This claim is not supported by Jews having an intermarriage rate that, combined with low fertility, will lead the liberal Jewish population to nearly disappear in another generation or two.
Essentially, the argument made by Cofnas is that (American, liberal) Jews cannot be ethnocentric to a stronger than average degree because they are manifestly breeding themselves out of existence. The first issue here is that MacDonald’s thesis of the transformative effects of Jewish influence documented in CofC depends on showing that particular intellectual or political movements were dominated by individuals who identified as Jews and saw their activities as advancing Jewish interests; he notes that ethnic networking (a proxy for ethnocentrism) was highly characteristic of these movements. The percentage of intermarrying Jews in 2021 or any other period is completely irrelevant to his thesis. Nor is it relevant to understanding ethnic commitments, including intermarriage, of the activist Jewish community at different historical periods which is what a serious account of Jewish influence would focus on. As Endelman has pointed out, in many contexts and periods, Jews have often witnessed “drift and defection” from Judaism and the Jewish community by sections of the community. Over historical time, however, it’s clear that this has not harmed Jewish continuity and may actually, by shedding less committed elements, have strengthened the ethnocentric core of the group.
Complaints about intermarriage aside, the overall demographic picture of the Jewish Diaspora is one of growth. With Israel acting as a magnet for the most ethnocentric Jews, it should come as no surprise that Pew estimate that “over the next few decades, Israel [where intermarriage is essentially outlawed] is projected to pass the United States and become, by a sizable margin, the country with the largest Jewish population.” Attempting to discuss Jewish intermarriage in the context of ethnocentrism without taking into consideration the Jews as a whole, or the role of Israel, is simply disingenuous. As MacDonald noted in his first reply to Cofnas, a major goal of Zionism during the early decades of the twentieth century was to prevent intermarriage and assimilation (Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 5), a program which has indeed been successful in Israel (e.g., Pew Research, 2016). Shulamit Reinharz, for example, in Jewish Intermarriage around the World, has stressed that, in the context of Jewish intermarriage, “the growth of Israeli society constitutes a significant factor in recreating a Jewish ‘ethnic core’ characterised by very low frequencies of intermarriage.”[3] And whatever American Reform Jews think about marriage, they constitute only around three percent of Israeli Jews.
Crucially, however, Pew insist that at least 37% of the world’s Jews will continue to live in North America — hardly the near disappearance suggested by Cofnas. In fact, Pew predict only a modest decline for Jews in America: “both in total number (from 6 million in 2010 to 5.9 million in 2050) and as a share of the region’s population (from 1.8% in 2010 to 1.4% in 2050).” For the sake of comparison, the White share of the youth population in America has declined 70% since 1990. Although not quite at replacement level, the fertility level of Jewish women in America (1.9), remains higher than that of White women (1.6). Pew note that even in Europe, “Jews have a slightly higher fertility rate than Europeans overall.” The correct way of looking at the bigger picture of Jewish intermarriage may be that while ethnic drift and miscegenation are becoming increasingly common for all ethnic groups under the weight of globalism, Jews have been remarkably insulated from its most damaging effects through cultural cohesion, the nature of Jewish identity, and their possession of an ethnically defined nation-state.
It should be added that intermarriage eludes simple or generalized interpretations, such as that offered by Cofnas. At the risk of falling into Cofnas’s habit of using anecdotes, one need only look at the intermarriage of Sacha Baron-Cohen and Isla Fisher on the one hand, and that of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan on the other. In the first instance, Baron-Cohen is a strongly identified Orthodox and Zionist Jew, who married an ethnically European woman. Fisher, however, was made to undergo the full conversion process, with the understanding that any children in the marriage would be raised as strongly identified Jews. Baron-Cohen continues to maintain an active role with the ADL, and to lobby for speech laws and the censorship of technology. One of the ADL and Baron-Cohen’s frequent targets is Mark Zuckerberg, who is presumably viewed as a weakly identified Jew because of his Reform upbringing and his marriage to an Asian Buddhist who did not undergo a conversion process, as well as Zuckerberg’s perceived laxity in suppressing pro-White content on Facebook and associated platforms. The point here is that intermarriage can have very different real-life expressions, ranging from a relaxing of Jewish identification to the continuity of very intensive Jewish identity. It is also worth pointing out that in both cases, Jewish males have taken non-Jewish wives, a direction that dominates the overall picture of intermarriage in North America.[4] Since Jewish identity is traditionally perceived as following the maternal line, it should be clear that this tendency is yet another factor mitigating intermarriage somewhat from the perspective of Jewish ethnocentrism.
It goes without saying that Cofnas omits almost every other aspect of ethnocentrism, perhaps most important of which is a sense of ethnic pride. Pew, for example, found that “94% of U.S. Jews (including 97% of Jews by religion and 83% of Jews of no religion) say they are proud to be Jewish. Three-quarters of U.S. Jews (including 85% of Jews by religion and 42% of Jews of no religion) also say they have “a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people.””
To conclude this section, we can only disagree with Cofnas’s assertion that “the evidence suggests Jews are not particularly ethnocentric,” because his evidence is either thin or non-existent. Rather, we must agree with Phillips, and MacDonald for that matter, that “single ancestry Jews are surprisingly endogamous compared with other groups in America,” and, furthermore, that Jews are surprisingly endogamous and ethnocentric compared with other groups globally.
Hypocrisy
Cofnas’s rhetorical footing on the issue of liberal Jewish hypocrisy seems equally unsteady. It’s worth reflecting first on the fact that Gallup have identified American Jews as “the most liberal of any major religious group we identify.” As discussed above, American Jews have been dominant in leading the cause of multiculturalism and immigration, abortion, and gay marriage. By contrast, however, these same Jews have overwhelmingly supported Israel, despite its oppressive actions against minorities, and also despite immigration policies that uniquely favor the migration of those with Jewish ancestry. Gallup point out that
The available data shows that about nine in 10 American Jews are more sympathetic to Israel than to the Palestinians. (That compares to about six in 10 of all Americans.) Additionally, 95% of Jews have favorable views of Israel, while 10% have favorable views of the Palestinian Authority — significantly more pro-Israel than the overall national averages of 71% favorable views of Israel and 21% favorable views of the Palestinian Authority. Research conducted in 2013 by Pew showed that 76% of Jews (identified by religion) said they were at least somewhat emotionally attached to Israel. In addition, almost half said that caring about Israel is an essential part of being Jewish (with most of the rest saying it is important although not essential) and nearly half reported that they had personally traveled to Israel.
Cofnas makes much of literature produced by the Union for Reform Judaism, and claims that it is working to “diversify” the Jewish community. As one example he quotes the following:
We’re a global, multiracial people that’s growing more racially and ethnically diverse through interfaith and interracial marriage, conversion, and adoption. In the United States, February is Black History Month. It is one among many opportunities for us to acknowledge and reflect upon our collective racial and ethnic diversity, and learn more about the experiences of Jews of African-American descent in particular.
The problem, of course, is that this is simply rhetoric, and Jews of all denominations have for centuries tried to present themselves as a religious rather than an ethnic group. The simple fact of the matter is that Jews promoting diversity in the United States, or Europe, will first and foremost have their greatest impact in that locality. Quite frankly, what they have to say about Israel, whether sincere or not, is of little consequence to Israel, and is unlikely to have serious effects there. This is especially the case when their financial, political, and moral support for Israel remains, for all intents and purposes, unconditional. To put it another way, Jews universally promoting diversity, so long as they are in a society they want to see ethically diluted and not Israel itself; this will produce more gains than losses.
Cofnas disputing the issue of hypocrisy, highlights some American Jewish support the case of the Ethiopian Jews in Israel, and refuses MacDonald’s contention that since the Ethiopians “constitute only a little over 2% of the population … [they] may not be seen as a serious threat to the demographic status quo.” Cofnas insists that this would be like “a Jewish organization want[ing] to bring seven million Ethiopians to the US. … Seven million constitute only a little over 2% of the US population, and thus may not be seen as a serious threat to the demographic status quo.” Certainly, if looked at purely in terms of percentages, one could make some kind of argument of equivalence, though it’s clear that in any context an influx of seven million and an influx of around 125,000 are still significantly different in short-term and long-term consequences. Even aside from that, however, Cofnas ignores certain crucial aspects of the issue under discussion. First, American Jews have not been as supportive of Ethiopian Jews as Cofnas suggests [it’s also worth remarking he produces no numerical or polling data at all on this subject]. The Jerusulem Post, for example, has pointed out that “the 14,000 Beta Israel remaining in Ethiopia … have not received one penny from Jewish Federations to help them resist the onslaught of the coronavirus. Not one penny. And it is impossible to ignore race as a factor.” The piece continues,
The Jewish Federations has not had a serious discussion of the community at its general assembly for the past 10 years. The Conference of Presidents travels all over the world on its yearly jaunts; it has yet to visit Ethiopia. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, American Jewry’s institutional relief organization, says it runs programs for Jews in 70 countries. But there is not a single dollar, not a single program for the Beta Israel, even though JDC provides assistance in Ethiopia to non-Jews. (By way of contrast, the Jewish Agency recently donated funds to for anti-coronavirus activities in Ethiopia). No official representative of the major Orthodox, Conservative or Reform communal or rabbinic organization organizations visit Ethiopia over the past two decades, a stunning contrast to the many rabbinic figures who visited Soviet Jews in the 70s and 80s.
Again, the point here is that, rhetoric aside, in terms of tangible action American Jews are intensely involved in lobbying for migration and liberalism within the United States (“a nation of immigrants!”) where Jewish activism has played a major role in around 65 million immigrants having arrived since the 1965 immigration law— while being completely unconcerned with ensuring the same “values” are embraced in Israel (“the Jewish nation!”). American Jews overwhelmingly support Israel even when it embodies those things most hated when expressed among Whites (ethnocentrism, patriotism, militarism, protectionism, and pride of history and identity). American Jews are not dominating migration bodies dedicated to opening Israel’s borders to refugees. American Jews are not creating organizations everywhere with the goal of disarming Israel’s citizens. American Jews are not pressuring tech giants to restrict the ability of Israelis to speak their minds freely. All of these actions are taking place in America, and as long as this disparity in action remains in place, not even the most flowing rhetoric will disguise the hypocrisy of America’s ‘liberal’ Jews.
Multiculturalism
We come finally to the issue of multiculturalism and liberalism. Cofnas insists that “the West was on a liberal trajectory with or without Jews, and Jews were not responsible for mass immigration to the US.” He denies that “Jews were a “necessary condition” (to use MacDonald’s phrase) for the triumph of liberal multiculturalism.” Rather, Cofnas insists that “many of the ideas [MacDonald] attributes to Jews were given their modern formulation by Rousseau and other gentile intellectuals in the eighteenth century, and first implemented in the (gentile-led) French Revolution. The origins of race denial, blank slatism, Noble Savage envy, and socialism go back centuries or even millennia.”
This represents a general confusion of concepts and a kind of counter-factual history. A “liberal trajectory” need not have resulted in mass immigration or mass demographic decline on one’s own nation, for example. The Enlightenment may have given rise to hostility towards monarchy, but it also gave rise to race science. The modern multicultural state that we see today cannot be neatly traced to the ideas of Rousseau, or to socialism; indeed, any serious analysis of the trajectory of American liberalism must deal with the period of ethnic defense from around 1890 through the 1924 and 1952 immigration laws (the latter law passed over President Truman’s veto by well over two-thirds of Congress) (pp. 291–304 of MacDonald’s Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition). And it must evaluate the effectiveness of the intense Jewish opposition to those laws and the role of Jewish activism in enacting the 1965 law.
Rather, there have been successive legal as well as philosophical changes across the West over a number of centuries which have cumulatively resulted in the widening of the concept of citizenship, the end point of which has been the emergence of the bureaucratic state in which belonging is dictated solely by a passport. The historical record is fairly clear that in terms of these legal changes, Jews have very often been the cause or instigators of legal changes designed to introduce “tolerance” into the law. Following the French Revolution, for example, the most radical change in the make-up of French society was the admission of the Jews to French citizenship. This admission followed a period of assessment during which a ‘Grand Sanhedrin’ of Jewish notables gave dishonest answers to Napoleon’s chief advisor.[5] Overnight, what constituted a “Frenchman” suddenly changed, with repercussions first throughout the French Empire and, later, through Europe and America.
Similarly, in relation to nineteenth-century Britain, Dennis Grube remarks on “how strongly the conservative British establishment clung on to what it considered to be the Protestant national character. To make British laws, one had to be British in more than citizenship.”[6] This changed fundamentally with Lionel de Rothschild’s attempt to enter Parliament in 1847. When the attempt created a national debate about the desirability of Jews having full legal rights on a par with Englishmen, the Anglo-Jewish elite threw its weight and influence behind “Dissenter” groups and lobbied for “Catholic Emancipation” in an effort to broaden the concept of citizenship enough that “Jewish Emancipation” would be brought a step closer. Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), often held up as the first “assimilated” European Jew, was one of the first true open borders advocates when he asked, “For how long, for how many millennia, must this distinction between the owners of the land and the stranger continue? Would it not be better for mankind and culture to obliterate this distinction?”[7] But it was the method of the Anglo-Jewish elite in the middle of the nineteenth century that began in earnest a pattern of Jewish support for what would become known as “multiculturalism” in order to smooth their own access to influence and to improve their feeling of security. Nowhere is this more starkly apparent than in the case of the British-Jewish politician Barbara Roche, “a descendant of East End Jews,” described by Douglas Murray in The Strange Death of Europe as a chief architect of multicultural Britain under Tony Blair. Roche dismissed all her critics as “racists,” “criticised colleagues for being too white,” and “believed that immigration was only ever a good thing.” After ten years of her highly influential immigration reforms, Roche beamed to an interviewer: “I love the diversity of London. I just feel comfortable.”
Kevin MacDonald’s work has clearly demonstrated that Jewish groups organized, funded and performed most of the work aimed at combating America’s 1924 and 1952 immigration laws, toppling them finally in 1965. Brenton Sanderson has shown that Jewish intellectual movements and ethno-political activism were pivotal in ending the White Australia policy — a policy change opposed by the vast majority of the Australian population. Jews were conspicuous in the dramatic changes in Britain’s citizenship, race, and speech laws from the 1950s to the 1980s. A Jewish Minister for Justice transformed Ireland’s citizenship process, opening the country up to Africans and Pakistanis. Today, Jews dominate the mass migration NGO scene, demonstrably holding executive roles at the International Rescue Committee, International Refugee Assistance Project, the Immigrant’s Rights division of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), National Immigration Justice Center, Equal Justice Works, The Immigrant Defense Project, National Immigration Law Center, Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, Northwest Immigrants Rights Project, the Asylum Advocacy Project, Refugee Council USA, the New York Civil Liberties Union, American Immigration Council, The Immigrant Learning Center, the Open Avenues Foundation, the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation (PAIR) Project, Central American Legal Assistance, Halifax Refugee Clinic, and the UK Refugee Law Initiative. The migration policy advisor for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (Sara Feldman) is not a Catholic, but a Jewish woman.
The modern Open Borders movement is demonstrably Jewish in leadership and origins, beginning in the early 2000s with the publication of British-Jewish intellectual Steve Cohen’s No One Is Illegal: Asylum and Immigration Control, Past and Present (2003). Cohen, who died in 2009, had by then worked for three decades as an immigration lawyer in Manchester, where he set up the Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit, and participated in Anti-Deportation Campaigns. He was a member of the International Marxist Group (IMG) from 1968 until the end of 1974, though he appears to have been very publicly engaged in Far Left politics until he was beaten unconscious by British Nationalists who broke up one of his meetings in 1976. Thereafter his public involvement appears to have lessened and took on a more reclusive aspect. Cohen was a member of the Jewish Socialist Group for most of his life, and he was a quintessential Jewish intellectual in that he was both prolific and intense, writing books, manifestos, and pamphlets about anti-Semitism, socialism, immigration, borders and the welfare state. In his 2003 No One Is Illegal manifesto Cohen asserted that immigration controls “are inherently racist in that they are based on the crudest of all nationalisms — namely the assertion that the British have a franchise on Britain.” Far from declining with the death of Steve Cohen, the Jewish prominence in the Open Borders movement has perhaps become even more acute in recent years. The range of theory underpinning the effort has also slightly diversified. George Mason University professor Bryan Caplan is the founder of openborders.info and is the most visible North American figure calling for an end to immigration control. Caplan even wrote an article for TIME in which he argued that “instead of redoubling our efforts to curtail immigration, we should return to the historic American policy of open borders—admitting everyone eager to come build a better life for themselves.”
Did Cohen or Caplan ever advise the same things for Israel that they recommended for Britain and America? Not once.
Conclusion
Much more can be said about Nathan Cofnas’s errors, omissions, and distortions, but they all more or less follow the patterns outlined above. We should remember, of course, that Cofnas is an ethnocentric Jew engaged in the denial of ethnocentrism in an effort to defend his people. He claims, in his own way, to represent a kind of authentic ‘race realism.’ Like so many antecedents, however, he’s just a familiar fly in the ointment whose defense of his group ultimately boils down to blaming White oppression for the political peculiarities of his co-ethnics. As far as Jewish apologetics go, his work is far from the best I’ve encountered, and its repetitiveness is probably due more to an attempt to improve his publication count in the hopes of securing academic employment rather than genuine conviction. And what easier way to get published than bashing “anti-Jewish narratives” in an Israeli journal? I suppose we should congratulate him, though, on finally getting his doctorate. A newly minted Jewish PhD making his mark by condemning anti-Semitism — just what the world needs.
[1] Phillips, B.A. New Demographic Perspectives on Studying Intermarriage in the United States. Cont Jewry 33, 103–119 (2013).
[2] See, for example, Sasson, T., Aronson, J.K., Chertok, F. et al. Millennial Children of Intermarriage: Religious Upbringing, Identification, and Behavior Among Children of Jewish and Non-Jewish Parents. Cont Jewry 37, 99–123 (2017).
[3] Sergio DellaPergola (ed), Jewish Intermarriage Around the World (Routledge, 2017).
[4] See, for example, Brym, R., & Lenton, R. (2020). Jewish Religious Intermarriage in Canada. Canadian Jewish Studies / Études Juives Canadiennes, 30, 67–82. See also, Sergio DellaPergola (ed), Jewish Intermarriage Around the World (Routledge, 2017).
[5] E. Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2001), p.89
[6] Grube, D. (2007), Religion, Power and Parliament: Rothschild and Bradlaugh Revisited. History, 92: 21-38. On this topic see also, Jarin, Alexander W. “Granting of Political and Human Rights: A Comparison of Jewish and Catholic Emancipation in the United Kingdom.” (2015); Wendehorst, Stephan, ed. The emancipation of Catholics, Jews and Protestants: minorities and the nation state in nineteenth-century Europe. Manchester University Press, 1999.
[7] M. Mendelssohn, “Anmerkung zu des Ritters Michaelis Beurtheilung des ersten Teils von Dohm, über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden,” (1783), Moses Mendelssohn gesammelte Schriften, ed. G. B. Mendelssohn (Leipzig, 1843), vol. 3, 367.
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