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At least since the unthinking attacks on Harvard’s E.O. Wilson in the 1970s, the self-appointed enforcers of political correctness have leveled charges of “racism” at scholars of evolutionary psychology. For the most part, the object of scorn has done little more than challenge unscientific presumptions about the inherent goodness and equality of mankind. Every once in a while, however, even the braying PC brigades get it right.  

A case in point is Kevin MacDonald, a tenured professor of psychology at the California State University at Long Beach, who has been denounced as an anti-Semite by, among others, the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization notoriously keen to pronounce anything inconsistent with its far-Left assumptions as “hate” speech. But MacDonald is indeed an anti-Semite -- even if the SPLC says so. 
 

Professional Anti-Semitism  
 

For an academic, MacDonald has trod an usual path. An anti-war student radical at the University of Wisconsin in the sixties, MacDonald has since migrated to the opposite end of the political spectrum becoming a passionate spokesman for his pseudo-scholarly thesis that Judaism must be regarded as a self-interested “evolutionary strategy” created and used by Jews to deprive non-Jews of resources in an ongoing, zero-sum Kulturkampf. (Although MacDonald identifies himself as a “conservative,” one can’t help but note the similarities between his writings on Jews and Karl Marx’s “On the Jewish Question.”) That the thesis owes no debt to serious scholarship has not deterred a gallery of anti-Semites from David Duke to Israel Shamir from applauding it as an empirical confirmation of the innate wickedness of the Jews. 
 

The source of their enthusiasm is not far to seek. MacDonald’s writings are distinguished by their scarcely disguised subtext that Jews are the enemies of Western civilization. Reading through MacDonald’s books and articles one finds that they bristle with indignation at what he sees as a calibrated Jewish strategy for “destroying Europeans,” part and parcel of “the deep-seated Jewish hostility toward traditional Western culture.” Indeed, the “Western intellectual world has become Judaized,” merely one instance of Jewish “cultural imperium in the West.” But the West is merely the latest target of the Jewish cultural onslaught. Historically, MacDonald argues, Jews have been a “hostile elite--hostile to the traditional people and cultures…they came to dominate.” Far from assimilated, they nurse “historically conditioned hatreds.”  

MacDonald’s conspiratorial claims about the dangers of Jews, especially Jewish intellectuals, find their most febrile exposition in his 1998 book, The Culture of Critique, where he asserts that Jewish cognitive elites have worked in an “overt and semi-cryptic manner” throughout the twentieth century to achieve “cultural dominance” over “the European peoples.” As in Europe, so in America, MacDonald avers: “Jews were unique as an American immigrant group in their hostility toward American Christian culture and in their energetic, aggressive efforts to change that culture.”

In line with these views, MacDonald is determined to portray anti-Semitism as a rational defense mechanism against the all-too-real threat of Jewish domination. “Western anti-Jewish movements have tended to be in response to intense competition from Jews,” he assures readers in his 1994 book on Jews, tellingly titled A People That Shall Dwell Alone. MacDonald also sees much of value in anti-Semitic propaganda. In Separation and its Discontents (1998), MacDonald states that “[w]hile anti-Semitic attitudes and behaviors have undoubtedly often been influenced by myths and fantasies about Jews, there is a great deal of anti-Jewish writing that reflects the reality of between-group completion.” [Laksin states below that "Even the most elemental scholarly task -- faithfully quoting one’s sources -- is beyond him." But he himself produces a howler of a misquote here. Obviously, I wrote about competition, not completion.]  In other words, anti-Semites are right to see Jews as an existential threat. 

It is on the basis of that conviction that MacDonald takes an understanding view of the Nazi Holocaust. Nazism, he explains, was only a “mirror image of Judaism, with its emphasis on creating a master race.” [The quotation used by Laksin is actually a slightly reworded passage from Judith Shulevitz’s critique of my work, where she wrote, “Even the most extreme forms of anti-Semitism, such as Nazism, can be seen not as aberrations but as ‘a mirror image’ of Judaism, with its emphasis on creating a master race.” The fact is that I did not state that Judaism had an emphasis on creating a master race, but by moving the quotation marks, Laksin makes his readers think I did. (Again, even the most elemental scholarly task of quoting sources accurately is beyond him, although in this case, it's reasonable to suspect malice on his part.) This was Shulevitz’s attribution, and I reject it as an oversimplification of my views. My comment to Laksin is the same as the one I made to Shulevitz in January, 2000:  I describe several ways in which Nazism was a mirror image of Judaism, including a powerful concern with socializing group members into accepting group goals and with the importance of within-group cooperation in attaining these goals. An important part of my view is that anti-Semites often envied Jews’ ethnic cohesiveness. For example, I cite historian Steven A. Aschheim, who noted “the perception that Jews maintained their cohesiveness and sense of identity under all conceivable circumstances was a source of both fear and envy. Indeed, for many antisemites this racial perseverance and historical continuity provided a kind of mirror-image model worthy of emulation.”(Aschheim, S. E.. (1985). “The Jew within”: The myth of “Judaization” in Germany. In The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. J. Reinharz & W. Schatzberg. Hanover and London: University Press of New England for Clark University, p. 239.)]

As for Hitler, the worst MacDonald can bring himself to say is that the Führer’s murderous hatred of Jews, “although clearly having a basis in reality, may well have been exaggerated.” Bearing in mind MacDonald’s relentless depiction of Jews agents of cultural subversion, one can’t help but marvel at his restraint. [Once again, Laksin fails to provide the context for the quote. This is the entire quote, from footnote 25 of Chapter 5 of A People That Shall Dwell Alone: "There is no question that Hitler's perception that Jews and 'Aryans'  were locked in an intense competition was central to his world view (Bracher 1970; Gordon 1984; see discussion in SAID [ch. 3]). These perceptions of economic competition and Jewish economic domination, although clearly having a basis in reality, may well have been exaggerated—a not uncommon aspect of anti‑Semitism and one that is highly compatible with an evolutionary perspective (see SAID, ch. 1)." Obviously, I was not talking about  Hitler's murderous hatred for  Jews but his perceptions of economic competition and domination. I have a more extended discussion of Hitler’s views on Jews in Chapter 5 of Separation and Its Discontents.  The exaggeration of negative views of outgroups combined with some real elements is a well-known consequence of psychological mechanisms of social identity discussed in Chapter 1 of Separation and Its Discontents, but there is no way that I am rationalizing or condoning genocidal ideology.]

MacDonald’s empathy for the Nazi genocide has led him into natural alliances with those who deny its occurrence. Although he does not question that the Holocaust took place, MacDonald was happy to testify, in January of 2000, on behalf of David Irving, when the disgraced historian sued author Deborah Lipstadt on libel charges for naming him in her 1993 history of Holocaust denial as one of its leading exponents. (Irving lost.) MacDonald allows that Irving is “not an ideal person.” As always, however, MacDonald is eager to shift the blame onto the real culprits: the Jews. Thus he maintains that Irving’s attraction to Holocaust denial can be seen in part as “a reaction to his demonization by Jewish activist organizations.” [My reasons for testifying for Irving are discussed here. I do not mention Irving's views on the Holocaust in that context, only his political views. This is what I actually wrote in the passage quoted by Laksin: "David Irving is in many ways not an ideal person. There is no doubt in my mind that he has strongly held political views — although the extent to which this is a reaction to his demonization by Jewish activist organizations is at least open to conjecture."] 

Portrait of a Pseudo-Scholar

With its unambiguous animus against Jews and Judaism, MacDonald’s work has unsurprisingly drawn charges of anti-Semitism. MacDonald replies that he is a serious scholar. “For me the only issue is whether I have been honest in my treatment of sources and whether my conclusions meet the usual standards of scholarly research in the social sciences,” MacDonald has written. By his own standards, however, MacDonald’s writings on Jews and Judaism are a spectacular failure. 

Not the least of the problems is his thesis. Stripped of its serious-sounding academese, MacDonald’s claim boils down to this: Highly intelligent Jewish leaders have continuously sought to advance Jewish ethnic interest at the expense of, and indeed to the detriment of, non-Jewish Europeans and Americans. But as MacDonald himself acknowledges, “Jewish intellectuals led the battle against the idea that races even exist and against the idea that there are differences in intelligence or cultural level between the races that are rooted in biology.” To account for this contradiction, which makes a mockery of his work, MacDonald has had to invent a decidedly conspiratorial account of Jewish motives. Jews, he explains, are in “denial” about their aims, or else have succumbed to “self-deception.” Elsewhere MacDonald laments that Jews “can’t see their ethnic commitments even when they are obvious to everyone else.” Or, more accurately, to Kevin MacDonald. 

[I do argue that strongly identified Jews were the backbone of the battle against the concept of race in Chapter 2 of The Culture of Critique. I also wrote about Jewish self-deception in Chapter 8 of Separation and Its Discontents, and I give some evidence for self-deception among Jewish leftists regarding their ethnic commitments in Chapter 3 of Culture of Critique.  Nevertheless, I do not deal with issues of self-deception among the Boasians, although, I must say, it sounds like a great topic. Ironically given that Laksin's piece appeared on http://www.FrontPageMag.com/,  Exhibit A of self-deception among radical Jews in The Culture of Critique comes from David Horowitz's memoir of his radical parents in his book, Radical Son. Here's one quote:

What my parents had done in joining the Communist Party and moving to Sunnyside was to return to the ghetto. There was the same shared private language, the same hermetically sealed universe, the same dual posturing revealing one face to the outer world and another to the tribe. More importantly, there was the same conviction of being marked for persecution and specially ordained, the sense of moral superiority toward the stronger and more numerous goyim outside. And there was the same fear of expulsion for heretical thoughts, which was the fear that riveted the chosen to the faith.

If these people thought that they had ceased being Jews when the joined the CPUSA, self-deception certainly seems to be just about the only plausible explanation for it. As historian Paul Lyons notes, during the period 1936–1956 “most Jewish Communists wear their Jewishness very casually but experience it deeply. It is not a religious or even an institutional Jewishness for most; nevertheless, it is rooted in a subculture of identity, style, language, and social network. . . . In fact, this second-generation Jewishness was antiethnic and yet the height of ethnicity. The emperor believed that he was clothed in transethnic, American garb, but Gentiles saw the nuances and details of his naked ethnicity.” Lyons, P. (1982). Philadelphia Communists, 1936–1956. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, p. 73.]

It hardly helps MacDonald’s case that his modus operandi is essentially polemical rather than scholarly. He deliberately strives to paint a negative picture of Jews, a fact he does not deny. “In the end, does it really matter if my motivation at this point is less than pristine?” MacDonald asks. [Laksin leaves out the next line: "Isn't the only question whether I am right?" The point is that motives have nothing to do with truth.]  Similarly, in explaining why he penned a new introduction to The Culture of Critique, his assault on Jewish intellectuals, MacDonald notes that the new introduction “tilts the balance in my writing even more on the side of the negative.” That this has led him to exclude all evidence that may reflect positively on Jews is something MacDonald readily admits. There may be good Jews, he allows, but “my book has no interest in recording fond memories of individual Jews.” A scholar of integrity might have considered evidence at odds with his thesis. MacDonald’s only concern is to disparage Jews. [All I am saying is that I am trying to understand Jewish influence and paint an accurate picture of that. Obviously, individual fond memories are irrelevant to this question.]

Even the most elemental scholarly task -- faithfully quoting one’s sources -- is beyond him. On the academic website H-Net.org, David Lieberman has extensively demonstrated how MacDonald has misrepresented the work of author Jaff Schatz in order to portray Jewish communists as the “core” members of Communist Poland’s brutal security service. For MacDonald, the supposed prevalence of Jews “reinforced the popular image of Jews as servants of foreign interests and enemies of ethnic Poles” and therefore anti-Semitism was in some measure a logical reaction to Jewish sins against Polish culture. But in fact Schatz noted that Jews made up only a small share of the security service and moreover there was a malicious campaign to inflate the number of Jews in the security service. MacDonald, typically, was willing to fudge facts to cast Jews in an unflattering light. More recently, he has taken to distorting the work of historian Yuri Slezkine, author of The Jewish Century. Asked about MacDonald’s use of his work to further his anti-Jewish theories, Slezkine told FrontPageMag.com that he had “much to disagree with” in MacDonald’s interpretation. 

I deny any misquoting or misinterpretation and have replied at length to Lieberman and Schatz on my website. Laksin focuses on Lieberman’s complaints about my claim that Jews had an exaggerated role in the security service. My argument, citing Schatz, was that Jewish communists who identified as Jews formed the core of the security service, at least until the mid-1950s, and that efforts were made to minimize the appearance of Jewish involvement in the government generally by, for example, changing their names to Polish-sounding names. The exaggerated role of Jews in the Polish security service from 1944–1956 is also discussed in the November 2005 issue of the Bulletin of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. A translation of some of this material is available on my website.

Laksin also cites historian Yuri Slezkine as having “much to disagree with” in my review of his book but provides no specifics. I also have a lot of disagreements with Slezkine, although his general point that Jews were an elite in the USSR is quite correct and a welcome addition to the literature. In light of the disagreement about the involvement of Jews in the security forces in Communist Poland, it's interesting that Slezkine emphasizes the special role of Jews in the security service in the USSR. For example, Slezkine notes that “even in the Cheka, Bolsheviks of Jewish origin combined ideological commitment with literacy in ways that set them apart and propelled them upward” (p. 177). And he writes that Leonard Schapiro is “probably justified” in his comment that “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator” (p. 177). Are those misquotes?

On other occasions, he has invented evidence out of whole cloth. MacDonald has claimed, for example, that Jews are exceptionally “aggressive” people, though he concedes that there is a “dearth of scientific studies on this aspect of Jewish personality.” But the absence of anything so banal as evidence has not prevented MacDonald from putting forth his own theory about Jewish aggressiveness as the basis for everything from “Jewish economic domination” to the “personal aggressiveness of Israeli society,” and affixing them with footnotes to lend them an air of respectability. This is another tactic that MacDonald favors, apparently believing that an excess of footnotes will compensate for a conspicuous deficit of facts. [I do indeed claim that there is a pattern whereby Jews have behaved aggressively towards the peoples they have lived among. I acknowledge the thinness of controlled psychological evidence, but that does not mean there is no evidence at all. And it certainly doesn’t imply that I invented evidence. I have marshaled a reasonably convincing (I think) array of examples, including Jewish self-perceptions and the perceptions of their critics in different times and places. To provide a comparison, I also cite evidence that Overseas Chinese have in general been far less aggressive towards the people they have lived among. The argument is not necessarily about the psychological traits of individual Jews that might be revealed by a psychological study, but rather how the Jewish community as a whole has acted. A theme of Jewish life is that there are major differences between Jewish activist organizations and the rest of the Jewish population, with the former far more committed, more intense, and more aggressive than the latter. This is a theme of my article "Zionism and the Internal Dynamics of Judaism" and is also a prominent theme in my analysis of neoconservatism as a Jewish intellectual and political movement. The point is that there is a pattern in which the Jewish community tends to be led by its most aggressive, radical elements. It's also interesting that this issue has become a point of contention between Mearsheimer and Walt and their critics, such as Alan Dershowitz. Mearsheimer and Walt emphasize the aggressive nature of Israel since its beginnings (e.g., the writing and comments of David Ben Gurion and the circumstances of  the creation of Israel), the aggressive nature of Israel's spying against the United States, and the aggressive response of the Lobby to "take back the campuses" by preventing criticism of Israel in the academic world. (Added evidence on the relatively greater aggressiveness of Jews comes from this recent New York Times article on the behavior of Jews, Muslims, and Hindus who are employees of Wal-Mart in Bentonville, Arkansas. Only the Jews agitated for religious neutrality in the county.)]

Seen against this background it is little wonder that scholars worthy of the distinction dismiss MacDonald as an anti-Semitic crank and an academic pretender. John Tooby, the director of the Center of Evolutionary Biology at the University of California has said that “MacDonald’s ideas--not just on Jews--violate fundamental principles of the field.” The eminent MIT cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has pointed out that MacDonald’s work lacks the basic components of scholarship, such as a control group and a comparison with alternative hypotheses. Pinker has further noted that MacDonald’s theory about the genetic cohesiveness of ethnic groups -- in this case Jews -- are refuted by a wealth of data while his theses “collectively add up to a consistently invidious portrayal of Jews, couched in value-laden, disparaging language.” [See my replies to Tooby and Pinker. Regarding the alternate hypotheses issue, the concept of a control group does not apply to group evolutionary strategies because they are open-ended and therefore able to creatively meet environmental demands. Critics like Pinker fail to appreciate the power and capabilities of human intelligence. Humans are indeed unique in the animal kingdom, and theory must accommodate their uniqueness. Evolutionary psychologists have erected the image of a mythical human brain composed of modules designed to solve specific problems. It just didn't happen that way. However, I have compared a number of group strategies in the Diaspora Peoples preface to the paperback edition of A People That Shall Dwell Alone. For example, I contrast the relatively aggressive behavior of Jews in America with the relatively passive behavior of the Overseas Chinese. Such differences are doubtless a complex result of preexisting psychological traits interacting with specific environmental contexts. My work differs from standard dogma in much of evolutionary psychology because I take into account well-documented mean group differences in intelligence (Ashkenazi Jews are a high-IQ group) and personality (Jews are high in group cohesiveness), and I discuss how these traits influence economic performance and interact with unique events in history. The importance of the environmental context is illustrated by the differing reactions to Jews by, for example, European and Muslim societies. This issue is discussed in Separation and Its Discontents.] To these criticisms it might be added that the supposed authorities that are frequently referenced in his work -- like DePaul professor Norman Finkelstein, columnist Joseph Sobran, and former Republican Congressman Paul Findley -- are mere polemicists and anti-Israel activists with no special expertise about Jews or Judaism and a history of disdain for both. [This is a textbook example of argumentum ad hominem. I have dozens of sources, and my only criterion in using them is whether I think them reliable on the points I am citing them for. An adequate argument against my position would have to show that my sources are wrong on these points.]

At Home in Modern Academia  

Curiously for someone passionately convinced of the dangers of all things Jewish, MacDonald is reluctant to defend his views in public. In 2000, when MacDonald’s colleagues called on him to publicly do just that, the professor begged off, assenting instead to a private e-mail exchange among faculty members. [Written responses are far more formal and one can do a bit of thinking and trying to get one's ideas and facts straight. Frankly, I'm not much of a talker. The written word rather than public debate is also the tactic that John Mearshiemer and Stephen Walt are pursuing in defending their work  on the Israel lobby against Dershowitz despite Dershowitz's desire for a public debate. Indeed, I feel honored that Dershowitz makes the same point about Mearsheimer and Walt that Laksin makes about me: We cite Finkelstein.] The whole experience left MacDonald embittered. “I'm done with Jews. I don't think I have any more to say about them,” he sniffed to the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2000. [Sniffed??]

But it turned out that he did. Having previously endorsed Charles Lindbergh’s position that “leaders of both the British and Jewish races” were responsible for driving America to war against Nazi Germany, MacDonald has become an avid publicist of the claim that the “neoconservatives,” who supposedly plotted the war against Iraq, were motivated by a “Jewish commitment.” In the distinctly conspiratorial manner that pervades his work, MacDonald dismisses the inconvenient fact that the senior figures in the Bush administration are not Jewish, explaining that it “makes excellent psychological sense to have the spokespeople for any movement resemble the people they are trying to convince.” Such is MacDonald’s idea of scholarship. [The accusation of wild-eyed conspiracy mongering doesn’t even have surface credibility, especially since the well-publicized work of  Mearsheimer and Walt , although of course their article has often been compared to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In my article (which is also part of a monograph on Jewish influence), I go to special pains to deal with the roles and motives of non-Jews in neoconservatism and I pay special attention to the Jewish commitments of key neocons involved in the push for the Iraq war, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith. The role of non-Jews in Jewish intellectual and political movements is also a theme of The Culture of Critique and is discussed in Chapter 6 of Separation and Its Discontents as a general aspect of post-enlightenment Judaism’s attempts to manage anti-Semitism. Laksin is particularly irritated with my comment that it “makes excellent psychological sense to have the spokespeople for any movement resemble the people they are trying to convince.” This is merely the psychological basis of a very widespread phenomenon that goes well beyond Jewish issues to areas like advertising and public relations generally. The need for the involvement of non-Jews is especially acute for neoconservatism as a political movement: Because neoconservative Jews constitute a tiny percentage of the electorate, they need to make alliances with non-Jews whose perceived interests dovetail with theirs. Non-Jews have a variety of reasons for being associated with Jewish interests, including career advancement, close personal relationships or admiration for individual Jews, and deeply held personal convictions.Regarding Lindbergh, Laksin leaves out from my summary that Lindbergh also included the Roosevelt administration as a major force leading the U.S. into war. My effort was to show that Lindbergh was correct in his claim that Jews were a force. I never claimed that Jews were the only force or that they were all powerful.] 

That seems to suit the administration at California State just fine. Although the university has had little to say about his work on Jews, it has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to MacDonald’s First Amendment rights, ignoring altogether the question of why it considers the manufacture of stylized bigotry [!!!] an appropriate avocation for a tenured scholar. MacDonald has not exactly returned the compliment, inveighing against modern universities for their hostility to “traditional institutions of European-American culture.” [I can't find this quote. The transformation of American universities along the lines mentioned by Laksin is a general theme of The Culture of Critique.] For this, as for most social phenomena he finds disagreeable, MacDonald faults the Jews. 

MacDonald’s unabashed anti-Semitism may set him apart from most of the extremists in modern academia, but he fully shares in their delusions about being a persecuted truth-teller. In The Culture of Critique, he bemoaned the plight of those who focused on the “critical Jewish role” in destroying the traditional foundations of Western countries, observing with dismay that they “have been relegated to the fringe of intellectual and political discourse.” Unfortunately, in MacDonald’s case, that fringe is a university, where his presence continues to sully the reputations of genuine scholars who must suffer an association with a common anti-Semite. Then again, there is no shortage of anti-Semitic activists posing as scholars in Middle Eastern Studies Departments, who would probably make him feel at home. [Neocons like Daniel Pipes are leading the charge to put pressure on academics to prevent criticism of Israel. Laksin obviously wants to extend this to any criticism of Jews. This attempt to rid the academy of criticisms of Israel is featured in both Mearsheimer and Walt's work on the Israel Lobby and in my article on neoconservatism as a Jewish intellectual and political movement.]

What’s needed is to bring the entire discussion of Jewish influence out of the closet into the light of day. The shock waves of the Mearsheimer and Walt piece are still reverberating, but there is a realization, at least by some, that open discussion is long overdue. And if this ever does come about, it would be edifying for all concerned if it could be accomplished without all the invective and guilt by association.