Jews on the Right: A Critique of Kevin MacDonald

A guest post by Simon Maass

The following is a guest post on the old CofC debate by Simon Maass, who has written for a number of online publications.

Retired psychologist Kevin MacDonald is the author The Culture of Critique, a book originally published in 1998 and often abbreviated as CofC. Therein, MacDonald contends that there is a distinctive Jewish “group evolutionary strategy” which involves subverting the cultures of non-Jewish societies. MacDonald argues that this explains the prominence of Jews on the political left and in “environmentalist” academic movements (meaning movements that downplay the significance of genetic heredity in determining human behaviour).

Since 2018, philosopher Nathan Cofnas has emerged as a critic of MacDonald’s theory. In 2018, Cofnas contributed an article to the website Genetic Literacy Project wherein he presented some of his criticisms. MacDonald responded with a rebuttal, to which Cofnas wrote a rejoinder. While I consider that rejoinder a good refutation of MacDonald’s objections, I always thought Cofnas had not made all the points he could have. The present essay attempts to showcase additional problems with MacDonald’s article on the Genetic Literacy Project website.

This essay will cover several points. It will be shown that MacDonald understates the degree to which Jewish hereditarians and right-wingers have been committed to their Jewish roots. It will also be argued that MacDonald conflates the (misguided) idealism of anti-Israel Jews with ethnocentric self-interest. Finally, we will see that MacDonald’s discussion of Jewish intellectuals in his other writings has been similarly lacking.

Right-wing Jews and Their “Jewish Identities”

In his initial article, Cofnas mentions a number of Jews who seem to act counter to the Jewish “group evolutionary strategy” MacDonald describes. Thus, he points out that Jews have included “some of the most prominent defenders of the concept of human nature and hereditarianism (e.g., Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Hans Eysenck, Richard Herrnstein).” Cofnas also states that, “at the first conference of the one major non-anti-Semitic white nationalist organization―American Renaissance―in 1994, four-out-of-ten of the invited speakers were Jews (including an Orthodox rabbi).”

In response, MacDonald writes: “There is no evidence that Herrnstein or the other Jews mentioned are engaged in ethnic networking with regard to their intellectual work, nor do we know anything definitive about their Jewish identities or how they perceive Jewish interests.” Let us test this assertion with regards to a few of the individuals mentioned. My time is limited, so we will not go through every single one, but enough material will be presented to make the point that MacDonald has painted a misleading picture. We will begin with Richard Herrnstein, briefly touch on Pinker, continue with Eysenck, and finally take a look at some of the Jews who have spoken at American Renaissance conferences.

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“There is no evidence” is a bold claim by MacDonald. What about the five articles Herrnstein wrote for the Jewish magazine Commentary? These articles span a decade: the first was published in 1971, the last in 1980. Let us briefly look at each of them. (Alternatively, readers may skip the following section and go straight to my evaluation.)

• The first article, reviewing a book by Jacques Monod, is mostly uninteresting for the purposes of this discussion. However, we already see Herrnstein gently promoting his hereditarian approach: “people are not equally talented or motivated or psychically sound. Moreover, some of the limitations, predispositions, and differences are surely genetic.” (He also, however, chides Monod for ignoring environmental factors.)

• The second article criticises the “extreme, unrestrained environmentalism” of post-World War II thought. It proposes what became known as “Herrnstein’s syllogism”: “For if mental capacity is to any degree inherited, and if social standing reflects mental capacity, then social standing must be a mirror, albeit an imperfect one, of inherited ability.” Most of the essay details the backlash to Herrnstein’s 1971 article on IQ in the Atlantic Monthly; most of said backlash centred on racial implications which his detractors read into the piece. Still, Herrnstein leaves open the possibility of hereditary racial differences in intelligence: “I believe that racial and ethnic group differences are hard to pin down as regards inheritance.” Of course, he would later move towards the hereditarian side of the question in The Bell Curve. In this article, he mentions that “Jews bunch toward the top” of the hierarchy of social success, presumably in order to relate the subject of group differences to his predominantly Jewish target audience. Herrnstein’s chief purpose in this article seems to be to defend himself against misrepresentations by his critics. Herrnstein maintains that some of his colleagues agree with his “hereditarian” views, but have been intimidated into silence. He also likens those who have sought to silence him to Lysenkoites and deplores the fact that non-experts (including, presumably, most of his readers) are unaware of the strong heritability of intelligence.
  Herrnstein closes with some of the strongest rhetoric I have seen in any of his work:

The hostility of the radicals, the obscurantism of some academics, the public silence of other academics, the one-sided coverage in the news, the increasing reluctance of scientific periodicals to publish hereditarian findings or scientific agencies to support hereditarian research—these are all signs of a political orthodoxy on human equipotentiality, to which scholarship has become hostage.

• The third article is a review of Stanley Milgram’s volume Obedience to Authority. Fittingly for an essay in a Jewish magazine, Herrnstein starts by briefly summarising Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the banality of evil” and its relation to the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He makes a passing reference to “Arendt’s genius.” The rest of the text deals with Milgram’s findings, and implies that they confirm Arendt’s idea. Herrnstein’s hereditarian standpoint shines through once again, as he comments that “the burden of proof falls on those who think they know a way to make people better than they have ever been.”

• The fourth article is a review of a popular science book by Carl Sagan. Although it lacks any direct relevance, Herrnstein manages to work in a reference to “A. R. Jensen’s assessments of individual differences in cognitive ability.” Jensen was a pioneer of hereditarianism.

• The fifth article bears the self-explanatory title “In Defense of Intelligence Tests.” Herrnstein laments the widespread opposition to intelligence tests and the intimidation of academics with contrary views on the subject. He also suggests that the flames of controversy may be further fanned by “the publication of Arthur R. Jensen’s new book, Bias in Mental Testing.” He notes that Jensen previously “raised the possibility of racial differences in mental capacity” and received considerable backlash for it. After defending Jensen from his critics, Herrnstein provides an overview of the topics covered in Jensen’s new book. Inter alia, he contends that IQ in the US is roughly 60-75% heritable. He also states that intelligence tests are not “limited to specialized vocabulary or knowledge” or “to particular cognitive skills” and that they do not “explicitly” favour “any subculture in our society.” Both income and socioeconomic status, he further remarks, are correlated with IQ. For Herrnstein, one factor behind the opposition to IQ testing is political: “Marxists and egalitarians dislike evidence that individual differences can be socially significant.” Herrnstein notes the frequent claim that IQ tests are unfair to certain groups; for instance, “Judge Robert F. Peckham recently decided . . . that intelligence-test scores . . . are biased against black schoolchildren.” However, he relays, and agrees with, Jensen’s rebuttals to such critiques.

Note that three of Herrnstein’s five articles for Commentary are reviews, and two of those three are reviews of books by Jewish authors. Although Herrnstein did sometimes contribute to other non-specialist publications, I am unaware of any other for which he wrote as many articles as for Commentary, America’s foremost right-leaning Jewish magazine.

Let us sum up. Here we have a Jewish scientist writing for a Jewish magazine, reviewing books by other Jews, and bringing up Hannah Arendt and the Holocaust in between articles defending his ideas on IQ and heredity. Doesn’t this qualify as “ethnic networking with regard to [his] intellectual work”? And isn’t it fairly “definitive” evidence that Herrnstein had a solid Jewish identity? Additionally, judging by fellow psychologist William M. Baum’s obituary for Herrnstein, the two of them bonded over their Jewishness. “Maybe it was just luck that our paths crossed,” recalls Baum, “but here we were in a sea of WASPish culture, two Jewish boys from New York.”

Contra MacDonald, it seems quite possible to get an idea of “how [Herrnstein] perceive[d] Jewish interests.” In particular, he seems to have regarded affirmative action as a potential threat to Jews. From this it would follow that documenting a genetic basis for group differences in achievement would advance Jewish interests by undermining the rationale for affirmative action. Anti-Jewish quotas are mentioned repeatedly in Chapter 19 of The Bell Curve, which deals with affirmative action. Thus, we read:

If it is admissible to augment the presence of some racial or ethnic minorities . . . , is it not also appropriate to limit the presence of minorities . . . ? It is a relevant question, for, while limits for Jews may be largely behind us, limits for Asians may be upon us.

Later, it is again argued that the logic of affirmative action could be used to justify discriminating against certain minorities. Once more, this is accompanied by a reference to “early in this century, when colleges were discriminating against Jews.” Soon after, for a third time, anti-Jewish quotas are used as a cautionary tale of what affirmative action could lead to: “[T]he rationale for affirmative action is not fully satisfactory. Looking back to the time when the numbers of Jews or women on a campus were strictly limited, most people feel uncomfortable with the rationale.” These excerpts testify to a view of affirmative action as something that can, at least potentially, entail anti-Jewish discrimination.

Hypothetically, since this is a co-authored volume, these passages could have been included by Murray without Herrnstein’s involvement. However, this is unlikely. Since Herrnstein also raises concerns about quotas in his earlier writings, these sections of The Bell Curve seem to bear his fingerprints. In I.Q. in the Meritocracy, published in 1973, Herrnstein already writes (p. 187):

While prejudice doubtless does hold people back unfairly, not to mention illegally, the use of such equalizing quotas may, in time, create unfairness of its own. Only if it is indeed true that all groups of people have essentially equal talents and capacities can we justly use quotas. [Otherwise,] the presumption of equality, when translated into quotas, is bound eventually to discriminate against the qualified individual from time to time.

In the same volume, Herrnstein shows awareness of the fact (which, in any case, is obvious) that “the qualified individual” is often Jewish. In America, he says, “blacks bunch towards the lower end of the social scale,” whereas “Jews bunch towards the top” (p. 14). Since Herrnstein did not believe that all groups had equal potential, the logic of I.Q. in the Meritocracy dictates that challenging “the presumption of equality” serves Jewish interests.

Herrnstein’s apparent opinion of affirmative action as a menace to Jewish flourishing would have been in keeping with common Jewish attitudes. As Steven Silbiger explains in The Jewish Phenomenon, “[q]uotas have traditionally worked against Jews.” Consequently, many Jews have opposed affirmative action, resulting in tensions with the black community. Silbiger recounts the representative case of Allan Bakke:

In 1974 Allan Bakke, a white Christian, claimed that the University of California at Davis did not admit him to medical school because less-qualified minorities were admitted ahead of him. . . . In Bakke’s 1978 Supreme Court victory, three of the largest Jewish organizations filed briefs on Bakke’s behalf. All opposed the African-American leadership’s position.

Overall, it seems that Herrnstein had a pronounced Jewish identity, engaged in “ethnic networking” to propound his ideas about heredity and IQ, and saw his advocacy of hereditarianism as rectifying an intellectual error that threatened to have baneful consequences for Jews.

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Herrnstein’s fellow psychologist Steven Pinker advances a similar perspective in The Blank Slate, where he insists that the blank-slatist vision of the human mind, which he is attempting to refute, can have dangerous implications:

But if people in different stations are mistakenly thought to be the same, then we might envy them the rewards they’ve earned fair and square. . . . Educated and entrepreneurial minorities who have prospered in their adopted regions, such as the Indians in East Africa and Oceania, the Ibos in Nigeria, the Armenians in Turkey, the Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia, and the Jews almost everywhere [emphasis added], have been expelled from their homes or killed in pogroms because their visibly successful members were seen as parasites and exploiters.

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Now let us move on to another psychologist, Hans Eysenck. A German-born émigré to Britain, Eysenck gained infamy through his hereditarian approach to racial differences in intelligence.

One wonders what MacDonald would accept as “definitive” information about the “Jewish identities” of the persons listed by Cofnas. Hans Eysenck’s attitude toward his half-Jewish ancestry is indeed a little mysterious: for a large part of his life, for unclear reasons, Eysenck denied that he was Jewish. Nevertheless, researchers Andrew M. Colman and Caren Frosch note that “he was strongly and consistently pro-Semitic throughout his life.” The authors point to a passage in Eysenck’s autobiography which reads:

Certainly at school and later on in life most of my friends were Jewish, as is my second wife. So were many of my colleagues at the Institute of Psychiatry. When it is remembered that only about one person in a hundred in England is Jewish, it is obvious that the Jews have an attractive quality for me.

Isn’t this pretty “definitive” confirmation that Eysenck had a potent and lasting Jewish identity? MacDonald has certainly accepted weaker evidence in support of his own theory.

Colman and Frosch propose several plausible explanations for Eysenck’s concealment of his Jewish roots, none of which involves suggesting that he did not feel firmly connected to his Jewishness. The authors also contend that Eysenck “hired many Jews to work with him at the Institute of Psychiatry.” Doesn’t that smack of “ethnic networking with regard to [Eysenck’s] intellectual work”? Or would MacDonald dismiss it because it has not been shown that this networking was directly related to the issue of race and IQ?

A PDF file of Eysenck’s autobiography is available on the memorial website dedicated to him. A search for the word “jew” in the document returns over 90 results, indicating that the author was far from indifferent to this subject. The relevant passages include one which suggests that Jews may be “cleverer and wittier than non-Jews.” Eysenck also comes out in favour of Zionism, mentioning “the horror of the Holocaust which should always be in the memory of anyone who feels like criticizing Jewish national aspirations.”

At one point, Eysenck recalls the moment when he supposedly learned of his partially Jewish parentage, though Colman and Frosch maintain that he had already known about it long before. He writes: “I could not escape the thought that in view of the disproportionately large number of Jews among Nobel Prize-winners and outstanding scientists generally, perhaps a little of that creative genius had touched my life!” I find this passage especially interesting because, in context, it seems to imply that Eysenck’s later endeavours as a scientific maverick―including on the issue of race―were linked to his self-image as someone able to make trailblazing discoveries partly by virtue of of his Jewish ancestry. Of course, this does not definitively prove that Eysenck’s work on race and IQ resulted from his Jewishness, but there are two more passages which suggest that he at least saw the former in light of the latter. In one, he observes that “IQ testing” was “banned” in Nazi Germany for being a “Jewish” concept. In the other, he compares left-wing hysteria about supposed racism (some of which he himself faced) to antisemitism: “It is popular to concentrate on a single enemy who is responsible for all our ills. Hitler found such an enemy in the Jew; the Ku Klux Klan found such an enemy in the negro; modern left-wingers find him in the ‘racist’.”

In sum, by far the most plausible reading of the evidence is that, despite his peculiar temporary denial of his Jewish origins, Eysenck remained a strongly-identified crypto-Jew. In addition, it seems highly likely that this aspect of his identity resulted in, or at least solidified, his determination to pursue the issue of race and intelligence. In Eysenck’s imagination, the image of the brilliant and persecuted Jew seems to have shaded over into that of the trailblazing and persecuted scientist.

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Now let us turn to the Jews who participated in the white nationalist organisation American Renaissance. We will begin with Rabbi Mayer Schiller, since Cofnas singles him out.

On this topic, it pays to consult a 2006 article in the Forward, a progressive Jewish magazine, written by journalist Jonathan Tilove. Tilove reports: “The after-dinner speaker that year [1994] was Rabbi Mayer Schiller, a teacher at Yeshiva University High School for Boys who believes in racial separatism. Schiller brought a cadre of yeshiva students with him. Kosher dinners were provided.” That certainly has the appearance of “ethnic networking.”

“Ethnic networking” is the general theme of Jewish participation in American Renaissance as recounted by Tilove. The author describes the Jewish attendees as a “small, hardy band of right-wing Jews.” He also relates an exchange between the prominent Jewish white nationalist Michael Hart and a Jewish “first-time attendee” named Herschel Elias. In that discussion, Hart sought to assuage Elias’s concerns over antisemitism at the conference.

At one point, Tilove offers the interesting assessment that the audience at the 2006 conference was “no more than 5% Jewish.” If it was even three or four percent Jewish, that means Jews were overrepresented relative to their share of the total population. But we shouldn’t make too much of one reporter’s estimate.

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Another Jewish speaker at the 1994 American Renaissance Conference was Michael Levin, who shall be examined next.

Levin clearly has a pronounced sense of Jewish identity. In his book Why Race Matters, he brings up Jews numerous times, mostly in the context of discussing their outsize achievements. While justifying the use of stereotypes, Levin acknowledges a possible retort: “Would I like to be judged on the basis of generalizations about Jews?” He responds that there would, in fact, be nothing wrong with such a judgment (p. 353). In other words, he proactively, and without needing to, invites his readers to think of him as a Jew.

In addition, Levin evidently perceives his work on race as aligned with Jewish interests. There are several facets to this.

In The New White Nationalism, Carol Swain states, based on interviews with leading white nationalists, that Jews including “Michael Hart and Michael Levin” have been driven to join the movement by their consternation over affirmative action (p. 236). Hart makes this explicit:

I am Jewish, and in my earlier years I was frequently discriminated against. Some institutions had quotas against Jews; others did not hire Jews at all. But later, when I became older, I was told that in order to make up for the privileges I had in the past there should be a new set of quotas and preferences put in operation against me.

He continues in a similar vein. Likewise, explains Swain, “Michael Levin first became interested in issues of race and ethnicity as a result of the controversies surrounding issues of racial preferences and affirmative action” (p. 237). As regards Levin, Swain’s notion that he was so concerned about affirmative action because he was Jewish is not substantiated from the horse’s mouth as explicitly as in Hart’s case, but it certainly seems likely.

To understand more thoroughly how Levin views “Jewish interests,” we can look at his 1996 article “Capitalism, Envy, and the Inner City,” published in the Mises Institute’s newsletter The Free Market. Therein, Levin explains that “Jewish businesses . . . have been a conspicuous presence in black neighborhoods for more than a century.” However, their presence has often been met with resentment by the local majority:

Many blacks bitterly resent this Jewish (and lately Asian and Levantine) presence. The burning of Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem was foreshadowed by marches and protests. “Kill the Jew bastards,” local blacks shouted. “Burn down the Jew store!” This resentment was given clear and full expression by Louis Farrakhan . . . .

This article shows an undeniable preoccupation with the welfare of Jewish Americans. Levin argues that inner-city blacks often resent successful minorities such as Jews because they fail to understand economics, and therefore wrongly think that Jews’ success comes at blacks’ expense. Levin’s work on race has the same main thrust: to argue that differences in achievement between groups are not unjust and do not require penalties for the more successful groups. In his racial writings, his argument centres on hereditary differences in intelligence and temperament rather than on free-market economics, but the conclusion is the same. Violent crime among black Americans is also a problem Levin frequently highlights in his writings on race―and the 1996 article indicates that he thinks of it as a threat to Jews in particular. (Note also that, in Why Race Matters, Levin mentions the Crown Heights killing and the killing of a Jewish landlord in a black neighbourhood among other examples of black-on-white violence on pp. 329-330.)

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A third Jewish speaker at the 1994 conference was the late Lawrence Auster, a prolific journalist and blogger. While Auster certainly had a weaker Jewish identity than the other individuals examined here―due in part, no doubt, to his Christian faith―he acknowledged his Jewish ethnicity in many of his blog posts. He also frequently criticised what he perceived as antisemitism, including MacDonald’s ideas. Furthermore, Auster unequivocally believed that the interests of Jews in Western countries would be served by white nationalism, as well as by Christian traditionalism in the surrounding majority populations. Thus, he wrote in an article for FrontPage Magazine that “the American Christian majority . . . are in fact the Jews’ best friends in the world”¹ and that Jews should “look at mass Third-World and Moslem immigration . . . as a danger to themselves.” The support of some American Jews for such immigration, Auster contended, was “suicidal.” In later comments on that thesis, he added:

Jews have functioned harmoniously and productively as a minority in Western societies for over 2,000 years and can do so again. All that’s needed for this to happen is a self-confident and morally sound majority that firmly stands for its own culture without retreating into resentment and hatred in order to do so.

Obviously, Auster’s career as a proponent of traditionalism and white identitarianism was directed towards the creation of just such a majority.

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The fourth Jewish speaker at the 1994 American Renaissance Conference was Eugene Valberg, a philosopher and former philosophy teacher. Valberg’s Jewish identity and motives are glaringly apparent in his writings on race, which were published under the pseudonym “Gedaliah Braun.” In his magnum opus on the subject, a treatise entitled Racism, Guilt, Self-Hatred, and Self-Deceit, Valberg twice cites Meir Kahane, including in the following passage (p. 158):

In short, a liberal will always take the side of his adversary, even when the adversary literally wants to kill him. If he's a Jew, he'll take the side of the Arabs; if he's white, he'll take the side of blacks . . . . And amongst whites, Jews seem worst afflicted. (See, e.g., Why Be Jewish?, by Rabbi Meir Kahane.)

For Valberg, Jewish self-hatred is exemplified by Israeli forces’ excessive restraint in combat, by Jews’ tendency to intermarry and by “their malignant hatred of religion, especially Judaism” (ibid.). Visibly, Valberg’s white nationalism is bound up with his Jewish identitarianism, with the latter being, in a sense, a microcosm of the former. In his estimation, Jews face the same problems as other whites, but with greater severity. Other tidbits in the book further complete the image of Valberg as an author whose thinking on race was inseparable from his concern for the Jewish people.

The impression conveyed by the book jibes with an article published by American Renaissance, wherein Braun―meaning Valberg―states: “Whenever I taught ethics I used the example of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army who was convicted of treason in 1894 even though the authorities knew he was innocent.” Valberg adds: “To my amazement, an entire class in Kenya said without hesitation that [Dreyfus] should not be freed. Call me dense if you want, but it was 20 years before the full significance of this began to dawn on me.” This passage suggests that Valberg’s concern for Jewish safety may have fed into his nascent white nationalism, as he feared that blacks would be likelier than whites to justify persecuting Jews for some perceived greater good. Even if this is not what happened, Valberg’s consistent use of the story of Dreyfus in his teaching is further evidence of his strong Jewish identity.

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One can easily come up with further examples of white nationalist and/or hereditarian Jewish intellectuals whose political work was obviously bound up with Jewish motives.

Consider political scientist Robert Weissberg. Weissberg has repeatedly addressed the American Renaissance Conference. It is apparent that he considers mass immigration―as well as multiculturalism, anti-colonialism, and anti-white sentiment―a threat to Jews in particular, not just whites in general. Moreover, Swain highlights Weissberg’s view “that blacks and Jews are locked in an abusive relationship” wherein blacks promote “anti-Semitism by supporting anti-Jewish leaders such as Louis Farrakhan and others.” Weissberg’s 2000 speech at that year’s American Renaissance Conference is full of references to what might be called “ethnic networking.” Thus, he recalls conversations he had with other Jews in which he sought to convince them of his racial attitudes. He also mentions that the thesis he is presenting has been proofread by a different Jewish individual who previously spoke at the conference.

The late economist Nathaniel Weyl is another obvious example. Weyl’s vocal advocacy for white nationalism, and for hereditarianism on race differences, was intimately bound up with punditry in defence of Jewish interests (as he saw them). In The Jew in American Politics, Weyl proposes that American Jews should favour “white rule” in “South Africa and Rhodesia” (p. 300). In the same paragraph, he recommends “that Israeli Jews preserve their genetic heritage and their society against mixture with either Arabs or the descendants of Arab converts to Judaism.” For Weyl, the same hereditarian reasoning should lead one to both these policies. In Weyl’s paper “Israel and South Africa: Two Beleaguered Elites,” the parallel is drawn even more explicitly.

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Having said all that, I think MacDonald’s approach is flawed anyway. The people who speak at the white nationalist American Renaissance Conference, or engage in similarly ethnocentric, white-identitarian behaviours, are obviously motivated by what they perceive as “white interests.” Insofar as those individuals are Jewish, it’s safe to assume that they believe Jews like themselves are white. To them, their Jewish ethnic interests are part and parcel of white ethnic interests. In other words, these people support white nationalism because they are Jewish, and therefore white. But MacDonald disregards such people if he sees no strong evidence that they support white nationalism in service to the interests of Jews specifically, apart from those of other whites. Thus, the more overlap a Jewish activist sees between “Jewish interests” and “white interests,” the greater the likelihood that MacDonald will simply define him into irrelevance.

Morality Equals Self-Interest?

The following is a minor part of MacDonald’s article, but it strikes me as a typical example of the sloppiness and/or verbal sleight of hand that characterises his writings on Jews.

According to Cofnas, MacDonald’s theory fails to predict the fact that Jews are overrepresented among the leaders of conflicting ideological movements. MacDonald replies that, to a large extent, this is merely due to disagreements over how best to advance Jewish interests. Thus, the Jews involved “may rationally perceive Jewish interests differently (e.g., the Israel Lobby versus Jews who believe that Israeli actions are reckless and suicidal in the long run or simply immoral).”

Notice the last three words: “or simply immoral.” MacDonald’s argument here, supposedly, is that the existence of Jews at the forefront of the anti-Israel movement does not contradict his theory because Jews who oppose Israel are also motivated by Jewish interests, which they merely perceive differently from pro-Israel Jews. Yet what MacDonald says with those last three words is that Jews who oppose Israel for purely idealistic reasons are to be included in the category of Jews who oppose Israel in service to Jewish interests. This is obviously a contradiction in terms, and it speaks volumes about how much evidence MacDonald actually thinks he has for the proposition that anti-Israel Jews are driven by Jewish interests.

A More Comprehensive Look at What MacDonald Has Written

In his response to Cofnas, MacDonald writes the following, which has already been quoted near the outset of this essay: “There is no evidence that Herrnstein or the other Jews mentioned are engaged in ethnic networking with regard to their intellectual work, nor do we know anything definitive about their Jewish identities or how they perceive Jewish interests.”

This is a point he takes care to emphasise; in the same article, he states:

Thus, in Chapter 2 [of The Culture of Critique] I mentioned Jews who were not on board with the Jewish intellectual movements I discuss and noted that these Jews did good science―Jews such as Richard Herrnstein. . . . These were scientists acting as individuals who may or may not have been attempting to advance Jewish interests (more likely the latter).

In light of the material discussed above, that assessment of likelihood seems untenable.

MacDonald also plays down the Jewish element in American Renaissance, describing the movement as characterised merely by “the participation of individual Jews.” As we have seen, that depiction is quite misleading. The organisation’s conferences were in fact marked by the presence of a tightly-networked cadre of Jews who saw themselves as promoting Jewish interests.

So much for what MacDonald says on the Genetic Literacy Project’s website. However, it is also interesting to consider what MacDonald has written elsewhere about the Jewish individuals discussed here. What follows is an overview of what I have been able to glean from his other writings. Admittedly, it is possible that I have overlooked some reference or other, as MacDonald is quite prolific. The “Culture of Critique” trilogy is examined here in reverse chronological order, because one would expect to find more coverage of this material in a later book than in an earlier one.

The Culture of Critique

Herrnstein is surely the counter-example whom MacDonald has discussed most thoroughly―and even he has received scant attention. In The Culture of Critique, MacDonald makes ample use of Herrnstein’s work to support his own arguments, such as his criticism of Steven Jay Gould. In contrast, the fact that Herrnstein seems to defy MacDonald’s theory of Jewish behaviour is discussed only briefly. MacDonald admits that it is “possibly” the case that Herrnstein “identified as [a Jew] and had a Jewish agenda in doing social science” (p. 12 in the 2013 Kindle edition). He quotes Alan Ryan, a professor of politics, on the matter: “Herrnstein essentially wants the world in which clever Jewish kids or their equivalent make their way out of their humble backgrounds and end up running Goldman Sachs or the Harvard physics department” (quoted ibid.).

This passage by Ryan is uncritically repeated later in the book, and MacDonald even uses it to argue―unconvincingly―that there is some inherent “friction” between the ambitions of Jews and the interests of surrounding non-Jewish societies (p. 505). Thus, MacDonald apparently finds the notion that Herrnstein was Jewishly motivated quite probable rather than merely “possible.” It is therefore surprising that he strikes a different tone in his 2018 rebuttal to Cofnas, where he writes: “There is little evidence to suppose that Herrnstein was motivated by his Jewish identity and a perspective on Jewish interests.” Little evidence? Then why does CofC portray that as likely true? Later in that article, MacDonald writes that “Jews such as Richard Herrnstein . . . may or may not have been attempting to advance Jewish interests (more likely the latter).” Again, whereas parts of CofC seem to take it for granted that Herrnstein was motivated by Jewish interests, MacDonald now insists that this is the less likely interpretation.

In the same book, MacDonald cites Lawrence Auster’s work on the history of American immigration policy. Yet Auster―again, unless I have missed something―is not mentioned as a counterexample to MacDonald’s theory. Likewise, Hans Eysenck is cited for his critique of psychoanalysis, but not as a counterexample. In fairness, perhaps Eysenck’s Jewish ancestry was not yet widely known when CofC was published, though it must have been public knowledge since the man’s autobiography had already been released.

Michael Levin and Michael Hart are not mentioned at all, and neither is Eugene Valberg. Rabbi Mayer Schiller does not appear in the main text, but the bibliography mentions him as “Schiller, M..” He is credited as the author of the article “We are not alone in the world,” which appeared in the 1996 issue of Tikkun. The article in question argues that, in Judaism, ethnocentrism among non-Jews is pleasing to God. This proves that there is a specific Jewish motivation behind Schiller’s white nationalist activism, so it’s unclear why MacDonald would think that this article helped his case. Nevertheless, he has repeated his citation of the essay in various places over the years, with “Tikkun” consistently misspelled as “Tikhun.”

Nathaniel Weyl appears in CofC insofar as MacDonald cites a volume he co-authored. Weyl is not discussed as a counterexample to MacDonald’s theory. Robert Weissberg is not mentioned, but this is to be expected since he only became known as a white nationalist after the book’s publication. Steven Pinker is excoriated in the preface as a critic of MacDonald. In the main text, Pinker is cited for his criticism of Gould, but not discussed as a counterexample to MacDonald’s theory.

Separation and Its Discontents

This is based on the 2004 edition. Herrnstein comes up once, as co-author of The Bell Curve, with no mention of his Jewish identity. Eysenck, Pinker, Auster, Levin, Hart, Weyl and Valberg are absent.

Mayer Schiller actually figures quite prominently, and we learn why MacDonald likes Schiller’s article in Tikkun. He quotes a snippet from the article in which Schiller states: “Sadly it is . . . the granting of humanity to the Gentile either as an individual or as a people . . . that is so often lacking in Orthodox circles. Suffering from a kind of moral blindness, we find it difficult to see the non-Jew as anything more than a bit player in our own drama” (quoted on p. 6; the ellipses are MacDonald’s). This quotation is used to substantiate the idea that―these are MacDonald’s words, not Schiller’s―“at the extreme, when there is very powerful commitment to the Jewish ingroup, the world becomes divided into two groups, Jews and gentiles” (p. 5).

However, MacDonald’s quoting of Schiller is misleadingly selective. In the same Tikkun essay, Schiller remarks that “Orthodoxy . . . sees non-Orthodox Jews as errant.” He then spends a paragraph trying to explain how “Orthodox Jews can approach the non-Orthodox without abandoning their basic, absolute assumptions, while still granting the non-Orthodox metaphysical value.” Clearly, Schiller’s overall point is not that Jews struggle to respect non-Jews, but that certain Orthodox Jews look down on anyone who does not share their religion, including both non-Jews and non-Orthodox Jews. Similar criticisms have often been leveled at members of other religious groups, such as Evangelical Christians.

The other reference to Schiller in this volume is the following passage (p. 315):

Yeshiva University students were asked about the double standard in which they support immigration of all peoples into the United States while Israel only admits Jews (Rabbi Mayer Schiller, personal communication, December 27, 1995). . . . When pressed to develop a reason, they tended to say that . . . Western culture had been anti-Semitic . . . .

Obviously, this is far from a scientific study, not least because it sounds as though the students were asked a loaded question. “Why do you support a double standard for immigration?” can be likened to “When did you stop beating your wife?”

In Separation and Its Discontents, Mayer Schiller is not discussed as a counterexample to MacDonald’s theory.

A People That Shall Dwell Alone

This is based on the 2002 edition of the book. Herrnstein, Eysenck, Pinker, Auster, Levin, Hart, Schiller and Valberg are absent. Two of Weyl’s works are cited, and MacDonald calls him a eugenicist, but his Jewish identity is not discussed.

The Occidental Observer

In addition to his literary efforts, MacDonald edits the website The Occidental Observer. MacDonald may have written things, or published things others have written, in TOO which are relevant to the material covered here. However, I can hardly be expected to comb through all of TOO for any mention of one of the aforementioned Jewish intellectuals. Instead, I have simply done a Google search for “site:theoccidentalobserver.net herrnstein” to find anything relevant that may have been published on TOO regarding Richard Herrnstein, whom MacDonald has at least kind of acknowledged as a counterexample to his theory.

The search yields ten results as of today (23 May 2025). Most of these are merely posts which reference Herrnstein’s work, such as The Bell Curve. However, one of the results does include an attempt to refute Cofnas’s argument. The post in question was written not by MacDonald himself, but by “Andrew Joyce, Ph.D,” who has this to say:

Cofnas writes that “two out of seven of the most prominent hereditarians were Jewish (Hans Eysenck and Richard Herrnstein), making Jews extremely overrepresented in this group relative to their numbers in the general population.” Eysenck was half-Jewish, and Herrnstein married outside his group. Neither appear to have lived in any kind of sustained Jewish milieu, and Eysenck made a point of explicitly denying any affinity or connection to Jewishness. It is interesting that Cofnas does not place his contention in any kind of context . . . .

Obviously, this is an asinine response. Joyce does what he accuses Cofnas of doing: he leaves out context in a way that borders on lying by omission. As mentioned, Colman and Frosch do not interpret Eysenck’s denial of his Jewishness as suggesting that it meant little to him. Joyce points out that Eysenck denied his Jewish descent, but fails to mention that he later reversed the denial by according a prominent place to his Jewish origins in his autobiography. I don’t know if Eysenck ever denied his “affinity” for Jews, but in the autobiography, he professes it full-throatedly.

It’s unclear what Joyce means by “sustained Jewish milieu” or why that should be required for counting these two scientists as Jewish for the purposes of the discussion. It’s equally unclear why one should even expect this aspect of their lives to be documented. After all, while there is a fair bit of information available on Eysenck’s personal life, there is much less to be had about Herrnstein’s. In any event, we have seen that Eysenck constantly surrounded himself with Jews, while Herrnstein wrote for a Jewish magazine and apparently formed a bond with his colleague William M. Baum over their shared Jewish identity.

I have also searched in some of MacDonald’s replies to Cofnas outside of TOO and not found any discussion of the Jewish intellectuals discussed above―at least, any that goes beyond what has already been presented here. Of course, I may have overlooked something.

Conclusion

Overall, my impression is that MacDonald’s analyses of Jewish history are far too biased to be useful. This essay ends here because my time is limited, but let it be restated that this is not an exhaustive discussion of everything that is wrong with MacDonald’s article for the Genetic Literacy Project. This is merely the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

Yet even when focussing only on the points made in this essay, it is impressive just how wrong MacDonald is. He claims that the intellectuals whom Cofnas mentions as counterexamples to his theory had no clear Jewish identities or Jewish motives for doing the work they did. When I first read that assertion, I expected it to be wrong in a few cases, but not to be blatantly wrong in every case I examined.

It can only be concluded that MacDonald has made no good-faith attempt to research the Jewish identities of the people Cofnas mentioned. He may be a former scientist, but when it comes to promoting his theories about Jews, he is all too willing to skip the crucial step of checking for conflicting evidence.

1. Other Jewish conservatives have made the same point.