Racist violence against Jews has escalated to the highest levels in a century even in America, long one of the safest places in the Diaspora. Since leftist radicals turned “anti-racism” into its antonym, black/colored/minorities became the latest neo-Marxist equivalent of the exploited, an “intersectional” coalition defined by their ongoing violent “struggle” against their exploiters: the white/rich/oppressors. Ironically, but unsurprisingly, the latter include the oldest, most systematically terrorized scapegoat in history: the Jews.
Unfortunately, Jews themselves have too often helped muddy the conceptual waters. Most opted for “white,” others chose “Jews of color.” In fact, as psychologist Jeremy Sheer noted in a conversation asking “Are Jews White?”, the real issue is not skin color. It’s about “access to social, economic, educational, and other resources and opportunities that, until fairly recently, were available more or less exclusively to members of the white, Anglo-Saxon majority in America.”
Discrimination had been the traditional experience of Jews everywhere – déjà vu all over again. The question was always how to navigate the treacherous waters. Race or no race? America seemed, and was, different. But how different?
Survival of the whitest
There is no doubt that Jews encountered greater freedom of expression and commerce in all the American colonies and after the War of Independence; social acceptance, not so much. Still, “[b]y the last few decades of the 19th century,” observes Sheer, “many American Jews whose families had come to the United States, mostly from central and Western Europe, particularly German Jews, were fairly well integrated into white Anglo-Saxon society.” But then came the Civil War, and concepts of race and privilege were thrust into the foreground as never before, with inevitably mixed implications for Jews.
The North-South peace had silenced the gunshots, but tranquility was still elusive, even if no one could yet foresee that another devastating conflagration was about to liquidate much of the European elite, inaugurating the most barbarous century in history. That was still in the future, however, and the good news predominated in the immediate aftermath of America’s war with itself. Despite a near-brush with suicide, the nation had survived, emerging from its trauma even stronger in some respects. For ultimately, observes Harvard Professor Louis Menand in The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, “the outcome of the Civil War was a validation, as Lincoln had hoped it would be, of the American experiment.”
But in other ways, continues Menand, the war seemed to many to have “discredited the beliefs and assumptions of the era that preceded it.” Even the meaning of “meaning” was changing, alongside “truth” and “morality.” A utilitarian-pragmatist-instrumentalist model developed by William James, Charles S. Peirce, and John Dewey was emerging in the new, albeit not unequivocally improved America, revealing skepticism about ideas in general, and truth in particular. “They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals – that ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment…[T]heir survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.”
What is thereby becomes synonymous with what should be: history is thus indistinguishable from morality – an idea that was gaining preeminence in German universities. “Within a generation after the Civil War,” writes J. Bradley Thompson, “American intellectuals, particularly in the North, came to reject not only the Declaration’s self-evident truths but the very idea of ‘truth’ itself – truth as absolute, certain, universal, and permanent. … The moral and political principles of the old liberalism, or the Founders’ liberalism, disappeared almost overnight from American universities.”
The newfound cavalier attitude toward truth, especially severe after the Great War, may also have reflected the kind of depression and anxiety that mass carnage is bound to elicit. No doubt it affected future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935), who had seen his closest friends slaughtered in that war and was himself seriously wounded. To be sure, his occasional callousness also reflected a character flaw. On one occasion, he declared casually to a friend: “All I mean by truth is the path I have to travel.” No sentimentalist, he saw the natural order of things as utterly amoral. Truth and goodness seemed equally relative to the cynical patrician. In the ruthless struggle of history, rights are just another social weapon.
Already in 1873, in one of his first law review articles, Holmes had stated that democratic means should be used in the evolution of society to allow every “social gene,” as it were, to fight for survival. Everyone, of course, pursues his own (narrow) interest – “this is as true in legislation as in any other form of corporate action. All that can be expected from modern improvements is that legislation should easily and quickly, yet not too quickly, modify itself in accordance with the will of the de facto supreme power in the community….”
De facto power comes first, becoming de jure when that power becomes officially enforceable. Its legitimacy, in sociological terms, is cemented by the “supreme power” of the majority. Holmes reiterated this idea in his magnum opus, The Common Law, published in 1881: “It seems to me clear that the ultima ratio, not only regum, but of private persons, is force.”
Ultimately, “the key to all his jurisprudence,” argues Menand, “is that he thought only in terms of aggregate social forces; he had no concern for the individual.” Opposed to the concept of the individual on the level of theory, he also lacked faith in the notion of individual human agency. He accepted that some people must be sacrificed for the sake of group survival. In fact, Holmes’s reputation as a civil libertarian, argues Menand, must be placed in perspective. When he ruled favorably in cases that involved civil liberties, his defense “had nothing to do… with the notion that such liberties were owed to people merely by the fact of their being human.” Strikingly callous, Holmes “exhibited complete indifference to the suffering of, for example, Southern blacks victimized by de facto discrimination.” True, “he disliked the selfrighteous [sic], but he had no sympathy for the weak. He reversed, in effect, the priorities of his youth: he took the Constitution for his text and rejected the Declaration of Independence.”
None of Holmes’s rulings better illustrated his antipathy to the principles of the Declaration than his infamous decision to uphold a Virginia law, Buck v. Bell (1927), which promoted sterilization of the “feeble-minded,” on the ground that such impaired human beings would “sap the strength of the State.” Frankly speaking, wrote Holmes, sterilization is far and away the most humane course of action. For “[i]t is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”
The measure was all in the name of progress, shorthand for the good of the state. To justify his decision to permit and even encourage sterilization, he then proceeds to utter one of the most cold-hearted public statements in American history: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Never mind that the young woman whose case was before the high court for having been sterilized against her will, Carrie Buck was neither feeble-minded nor handicapped! It had all been a travesty, and its perpetrators, including Holmes, knew it. But eugenics had by then become widely accepted throughout the nation, specifically among the academic and professional elite.
Eugenics: Not so eu for the Jews
“Eugenics,” rooted in “well-born” (from the Greek, eu, “good” and genos, “birth”), refers to the (pseudo)science of improving a human population by controlled breeding, designed to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. While originating in England, it really took off in the United States, starting with Indiana, which legalized the practice of forced sterilization in 1907. During the next six years, eleven additional states would adopt legislation authorizing sterilization of “undesirables,” especially those of low intelligence. The glaringly untechnical word “feebleminded” was widely used despite having “no precise medical description. A catchall term that covered a wide range of purported deficiencies,” writes bestselling author Adam Cohen in his carefully documented Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, it basically meant that “he or she behaved in ways that offended the middle-class sensibilities of judges and social workers.”
This proto-fascist practice would serve as a model for the Nazis, who were seeking to justify liquidating the mentally ill, a dress rehearsal for the obscene “race-cleansing” Holocaust. It also served the purposes of Soviet political torture-psychiatry. Such practices, inconceivable in any society that dared to call itself liberal, reflect how science can degenerate into vulgar scientism. As physicist Ian Hutchinson defines it, scientism amounts to a cult of “science, modeled on the natural sciences, [as]… the only source of real knowledge.” Disciplines thus “modeled” included social science, sociology, psychology, and related fields such as physiology, neurobiology, and statistics.
As science was fast gaining in prestige in the early 1800s, American colleges were eager to catch up with the times. Hallowed Harvard, for example, had been seeking to establish a school of science since 1845. At the same time, the country’s frontier was pushing westward, and a nation on the move needed moving ideas, moving machines, not to mention moving rhetoric.
To the rescue came the charismatic Swiss-born naturalist Louis Agassiz, whose Boston lectures delivered in 1846, boldly titled “The Plan of Creation in the Animal Kingdom,” mesmerized crowds numbering in the thousands. When Harvard made him an offer, in 1847, to establish the first school of science in the United States, he accepted enthusiastically. It inaugurated the professionalization of American science.
His career really took off after meeting the most famous American anthropologist of his time, Samuel George Morton. A specialist in fossils, Morton had become fascinated by the bounty Lewis and Clark had retrieved from their Western expedition. His main passion was human skulls, which he measured and compared by “race.” His methodology, however, was risibly flawed. It involved correlating measurements of some six hundred crania with platitudes about “national traits” found in popular travel literature, on which he based his generalizations. Agassiz proved just as casual about evidential scarcity, and as mesmerized by the illusion that mere numbers guarantee precision as his newfound skull-obsessed, bigoted friend. Equally bigoted, in 1847, Agassiz confidently declared to an awe-struck audience in Charleston, South Carolina: “[T]he brain of the Negro is that of the imperfect brain of a 7 months’ infant in the womb of a White.” Evidence? None.
It was therefore unsurprising that he would vigorously oppose social equality among the races, even if he did not go so far as to support slavery. But he did think the government ought “to put every possible obstacle to the crossing of the races, and the increase of halfbreeds [sic].” He explained the rationale:
It is immoral and destructive of social equality as it creates unnatural relations and multiplies the differences among members of the same community in the wrong directions. … I am convinced also that no efforts should be spared to check that which is abhorrent to our better nature, and inconsistent with the progress of higher civilization and a purer morality.
The logic seemed to him self-evident: progress meant higher civilization, which necessarily entailed a “purer” morality and thus purer genes. His conception of “social equality” was predicated on not multiplying differences “in the wrong direction.” Progressivism should promote both eugenics and equity. To achieve maximum equity, i.e., social equality, e.g., social justice, the population should be as homogeneous as possible, thus legitimating eugenic measures on utilitarian grounds. Agassiz thereby helped make racist eugenics respectable, notwithstanding the patently fraudulent “evidence” adduced in its defense.
Social Darwinism Uber Alles, Goyishe Comrades and Gentlemen
While Agassiz thought that each species had evolved separately, others thought diverse species had derived from one common root that later branched out. But in either case, the idea of biological evolution took hold long before Darwin published his ambitiously titled On the Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859. Unlike any prior study, the book offered a treasure-trove of archeological data documenting evolutionary development throughout the natural world, catapulting it to oracular status almost instantly. As Richard Hofstadter wrote in Social Darwinism in American Thought (1945), the book rose being “consulted with the reverence usually reserved for Scripture.” The temptation to draw normative conclusions from Darwin’s data was irresistible.
Among the awe-struck, writes Hofstadter, was Charles Loring Brace, a leading social worker and reformer, who after reading it thirteen times concluded that “if the Darwinian theory be true, the law of natural selection applies to all the moral history of mankind, as well as the physical. Evil must die ultimately as the weaker element, in the struggle with good.” Progress is but another way of describing evolution: both aim upward, ineluctably, toward the Good. Is and ought coalesce. Tailor-made ideological fodder.
Notwithstanding that, contrary to widespread popular opinion, the word itself, “evolution,” whose normative connotations are manifest, hardly appears in Darwin, no one could not deny the political implications of intimating that humans were basically less-hirsute bipedal apes. As to the theological fallout, Darwin did not need to spell it out, others would do it for him, notably, his most effective admirer, fellow-Englishman Herbert Spencer (1820-1903).
Author of the infamous slogan “survival of the fittest,” also erroneously assumed to have been coined by Darwin, Spencer’s own evolutionary theory of mind and behavior had already been developed by 1855. Like Darwin, Spencer’s reputation was especially great in America. In this country, writes Hofstadter, Spencer was seen to have drawn out evolutionary theory’s “ultimate purpose … of finding for the principles of right and wrong in conduct at large, a scientific basis,” and it resonated with a public primed to believe.
Misunderstanding Darwin seemed to have become a tempting, equal opportunity pastime. Hofstadter observes that
if there were, in Darwin’s writings, texts for rugged individualists and ruthless imperialists, those who stood for social solidarity and fraternity could [also]… match them text for text with some to spare [with others on the left. Thus] … Orthodox Marxian socialists in the early years of the twentieth century felt quite at home in Darwinian surroundings.
Marx himself had reputedly told Friedrich Engels that The Origin of Species “contains the natural-historical basis of our outlook.” Who had it right? Both political wings did, albeit each in its own way. Hofstadter, a self-described progressive critical of all opportunistic normative extrapolations by social Darwinists from both ideological camps, castigates all American “evolutionary” sociologists: “Only when biology seemed to agree with their social preconceptions were they ready to build a sociology upon it. They were willing to use the struggle for existence to validate the class struggle, but not individualistic competition.”
Racism was only the tip of the eugenicist fixation with genetic perfectibility, which had thoroughly permeated the academy by the 1920s. No fewer than 376 colleges and universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and University of California-Berkeley, taught courses on the subject. Nor did they shun activism. The chairman of Harvard’s anthropology department, writes Cohen, temporarily dispensing with academic restraint, called for a “biological purge,” lest Americans sold “their biological birthright for a mess of morons.”
It should therefore come as no surprise that segregation-sympathizer Woodrow Wilson, during his tenure as New Jersey governor, signed into law in 1911 the state’s promoting sterilization of “certain categories of adult feeble minds.” (Later struck down as unconstitutional, it was eventually upheld by Holmes in 1927.) Far from reluctant, writes James Trent, Wilson’s support for that law was reputed to have been “enthusiastic.” Small wonder that in 1915, he applauded the pro-Ku Klux Klan, scurrilously racist and xenophobic movie The Birth of a Nation, which inspired a resurgence of that monstrous organization five years later. The reincarnated Medusa had merrily acquired a few additional heads: anti-Catholicism, nativism, and, of course, antisemitism.
A “survival of the fittest” policy assumes that undesirable “defectives” may be deemed unworthy of citizenship, and are even expendable altogether, since they allegedly harm society. Economists Art Carden and Steven Horwitz argue that this “advent and broad acceptance of Darwinism in the late nineteenth century, combined with a more general belief in the power of science and scientific management to solve social problems, led to a fascination with eugenics and the possibility of using public policy to ensure the “survival of the fittest” and the purity and strength of the human race. In the hands of many thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century, Darwinian theory became a rationale for using the power of government.
Did any of this affect Jews? Don’t ask; did it ever.
To worry or not to worry?
Jews always worry. Despite having been treated better in American than anywhere else, there were no assurances that the gentile majority would continue to welcome them. It didn’t help that especially after 1863, poor Russian as well as other Eastern European Jews were fleeing pogroms on an unprecedented scale, flooding the U.S., mostly New York’s East Side. It seemed wise for those already here to simultaneously champion the rights of the destitute and downtrodden while proclaiming the purity of Jewish blood.
It seemed like a good idea to echo the pious evolutionary egalitarianism of the Protestant variety that comingled justice and economic equality, also appropriated by many Catholics. Lasting through the Great War, the hybrid concept at last congealed in what would become formally known as the Social Gospel movement, providing a spiritual foundation for progressivist “liberalism.” It turned John Dewey’s philosophical underpinnings to the rhetoric of Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt into electoral dynamite.
The major spokesman for that movement was theologian Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), who advocated “socializing property” to advance social goals. Convinced that true Christianity eschewed attachment to property, he explained why social action was not only a political but a religious imperative:
By “socializing property,” we mean, then, that it is made to serve the public good, either by the service its uses render to the public welfare or by the income it brings to the public treasury. … [As a result,] instead of serving the welfare of a small group directly, and the public welfare only indirectly, it will be made more directly available for the service of all.
To carry out this task, far from opposing government action, he applauded it. After all, “[t]he whole institution of private property exists because it is for the public good that it shall exist.” He called for the public ownership of essential industries, and the “cooperative ownership of other businesses.” Explains Ronald J. Pestritto in America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism: “For these revolutionary economic policies, Rauschenbusch laid the foundation in a social Christianity which necessitated throwing off traditional theology and concentrating on the achievement of God’s kingdom here on earth.”
Economist Richard T. Ely (1854-1954), another major figure of the Social Gospel movement, meanwhile, urged the church to exceed its spiritual function and take up the abolition of poverty as a central element of its earthly mission to establish a general system of social welfare. The new movement “at its core was quite radical,” writes Pestritto, for “it crossed the line into matters of economic justice.” It “turned part of the Protestant church against capitalism” no less deliberately and effectively than its secular counterparts, if not more. A new collectivism had apparently replaced classical liberalism.
Yet most Jewish leaders proved sympathetic. Romanian-born Rabbi Solomon Schechter (1847-1915), president of the Jewish Theological Seminary, agreed with the aspirations of the Social Gospel movement. For “man to work towards establishing the visible Kingdom of God in the present world,” argued Schechter, was “the highest goal religion can strive to reach.” He offered similarly political solutions: “All-wise legislation in this respect must help towards its speedy advent.”
How did this affect the community? On the one hand, “[l]iberal American Jews, it would appear at first glance, could hardly have felt themselves estranged during the era of social gospel,” observes Egal Feldman. The most enthusiastic Judeophile among the Social Gospel leaders was the influential editor of a popular magazine, Lyman Abbott, who offered this assessment of America’s debt to the Hebrew tradition: “Every legislative hall, every courthouse… to say nothing of less visible and tangible manifestations of our national life and temper are monuments of our indebtedness to this ancient people,” he wrote in 1905.
Yet even Abbott expressed serious reservations about the actual Jews of his own time, whom he considered overly absorbed in commerce, oblivious to the teachings of the prophets. Similarly, Rauschenbush, describing Judaism as “fixed, monotonous, shut off from the spontaneity and naturalness of the general life,” attributed lingering anti-social elements in Christianity to Jewish influence. Concludes Feldman:
If social reform and human betterment were earnest objectives of the social gospel, there is little evidence that the elimination of bigotry and prejudice against the Jew was a significant part of their goal…. In examining the pious utterances of that age, one might even conclude that they succeeded.
Social Justice-Judaism
Already in 1885, the Pittsburgh Protocol, which emerged from a meeting that symbolized the merger of the Eastern U.S. and Germanic-oriented constituencies, declared “Judaism a progressive religion, ever striving to be in accord with the postulates of reason.” Jews saw their “duty to participate in the great task of modern times, to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.” And in the spirit of progress, the community proclaimed that “the modern discoveries of scientific research in the domain of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism.”
The infinitesimally small number of American Jews notwithstanding – a mere 3.5 million by 1914 – they were disproportionately vocal in the public sphere. And one of the best known was Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941), who would become the first Jew on the U.S. Supreme Court as an Associate Justice, from 1916 till 1939. It would fall to him to veer discourse in a progressive direction after 1910 while simultaneously arguing in favor of Zionism. It was during the 1910s and 1920s, writes Rabbi Evan Moffic, that Brandeis “introduced an ideology focusing on the cohesion between American values and Zionist aspirations.” He had understood the need for a Jewish refuge against antisemitic violence.
Although he “de-emphasized anti-Semitism and the need for Aliyah [emigrating to Israel] in favor of the social idealism and progressive values he saw at the heart of the Zionist movement,” he considered Zionism to be in perfect sync with his longstanding commitment to social-progressive values. “There is an untold story of the Zionism of Brandeis,” writes Moffic. “His earliest statements reflect the social ideals of the American Progressive movement. He envisioned the creation of a small state with publicly owned land and ‘employer-employee democracy.’”
The seminal year for his full adoption of Zionism was 1912. In 1914, Brandeis was elected president of the Provisional Executive Committee for Zionist Affairs and embarked on a year-long speaking tour around the country to spread the word about what had become known as “the Jewish problem.” In 1915, he would address the Conference of Eastern Council of Reform rabbis in a spirit fully consistent with the Protocol. He noted specifically that the Jewish “teaching of brotherhood and righteousness has, under the name of democracy and social justice, become the twentieth century striving of America and of western Europe.”
Brandeis conceded that “manifestations of the Jewish Problem vary in the different countries, and at different periods in the same country,” he insisted that “the differences, however wide, are merely in degree and not in kind. The Jewish Problem is single and universal.” In the United States, even the occasional exceptions seemed to be on the wane. As recently as “half a century ago the belief was still general that Jewish disabilities would disappear before growing liberalism,” reflected Brandeis. Equality before the law seemed sufficient to guarantee it.
That the hope had proved unwarranted was “because the liberal movement has not yet brought full liberty.” The solution, he argued, was not to abandon liberalism but to change it. Individualism no longer seemed sufficient; in its place, Brandeis advocated securing group rights: “Jews collectively should likewise enjoy the same right and opportunity to live and develop as do other groups of people.” All that was left was deciding what makes someone a Jew.
During the heyday of eugenics, which celebrated hematic purity, Brandeis would opt for showcasing the manifest homogeneity of “Jewish blood.” While “Jews are not an absolutely pure race,” he conceded, “the percentage of foreign blood in the Jews of today is very low. Probably no important European race is as pure,” he not-so-subtly reminded his fellow non-black Americans. He figured that had to count for a great deal. Genetic similarity aside, moreover, just think of the group’s assets: “Has any a nobler past? Does any possess common ideas better worth expressing? Has any marked traits worthier of development?… Never before has the value of our contribution been so generally recognized.”
Did everyone agree? Hardly. And not just his co-religionists. “Although Brandeis’ arguments carried the day for hundreds of thousands of American Jews,” write Drs. Paul Finkelman and Lance J. Sussman, “Brandeis’ secular arguments failed to counter Reform Judaism’s deep belief in the redemptive purpose of the Diaspora.” At the turn of the 20th century, notwithstanding their relative prosperity, American Jews were still uneasy about their place in the hierarchy: “Brandeis’ Zionism aggravated the political insecurities of many Reform Jews.”
Did Brandeis really believe that racial purity was scientifically defensible? Or was it rather a political decision of questionable validity? The fact is, Brandeis voted alongside Holmes in favor of sterilization to reduce the number of people carrying traits less “worthy of development” – implying a value judgment that varies by ideology, racial and political hatreds, or pure power-grab.
The same year, 1914, saw the publication of a book by the psychologist Henry Goddard titled Feeble-Mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences, meant to give scientific veneer to “idiots,” “imbeciles,” and “morons” – language commonly used by such icons of progressivism as Margaret Sanger (1879-1966). And while it would be an exaggeration to call her an outright white racist, in 1926, Sanger accepted to address the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, later writing in her autobiography that her speech went over so well she received a dozen invitations from other similar groups. Her magazine “Birth Control Review,” moreover, published avowed racists, some of whom were even invited to help lead her organization. One notable example was the pro-Nazi historian Lothrop Stoddard, and author of the 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy.
The Jewish answer is neither
As George Mason Law School professor David E. Bernstein explains in his brilliant history of racial classification in America, eventually “Jewish organizations helped develop the idea of ‘ethnic groups.’” This implied they “could retain ‘ethnic’ ties to their ancestral cultures while still integrating into American society.” But is this any better for the Jews? Not insofar as it feeds into a toxic political culture whose effects have been growing for decades. For the source of such violent antisemitism as has exploded globally since October 7, 2023, according to Bernstein, is
judging people by their origins rather than their actions. And then the question is, well, how do you judge people by their origins? Well, you’re basically dividing society, really the world, into victims and oppressors. And there’s no really logical way of doing this except to decide, for political reasons, who do we want to include in the oppressor class and who we want to include in the victim class.
No wonder some began to self-identify as “Jews of Color,” which sociologist Mijal Bitton calls a kind of self-defeating “socio-political gymnastics.” It didn’t help: the new political category merely reinforced the latter as pejorative. The desperate efforts that many progressive Jews are making to maintain their ties with the radical Democratic Socialists of America and the likes of Students for Justice in Palestine member Zohran Mamdani, the projected winner of the upcoming New York mayoral race, are frankly bizarre.
But wait: what are we even talking about? As John Early reveals in the WSJ of October 24, 2025, the Biden-era (though still-operational) Office of Management and Budget’s Directive 15 indicating what race and ethnicity data government agencies must collect, there are 6,676 detailed racial categories within the seven major races.” The putative rationale is this: “Foremost consideration should be given to data . . . useful for statistical analysis, program administration and assessment, and enforcement.” Useful for undermining what has made America the single most pluralist nation in history, repudiating its founding Declaration and its sacred creed.
The National Institute of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute captures succinctly the essence of this inexplicably resilient, highly dangerous concept:
Race is a social construct used to group people. Race was constructed as a hierarchal human-grouping system, generating racial classifications to identify, distinguish and marginalize some groups across nations, regions and the world. Race divides human populations into groups often based on physical appearance, social factors and cultural backgrounds.
As its quintessential victims, Jews should be the first to repudiate racism in all its aspects, but no one is safe. The latest expression of that “lethal obsession,” fueled by a conversion of jihadism and multi-faceted totalitarianisms, it should recall Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s words from a decade ago:
God, said the rabbis, makes everyone in His image, yet He makes everyone different to teach us to respect difference. And since difference is constitutive of humanity, a world that has no space for difference has no space for humanity. That is why a resurgence of anti-Semitism has always been an early warning of an assault on freedom itself. It is so today.
And so, it will be tomorrow. It behooves the Jews to remember, for everyone’s sake.
This monthly series is presented by George Violin
Juliana Geran Pilon is a Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, where she directs AHI’s Washington Program on National Security. Born in Romania, she received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago, and has taught at several universities, including the National Defense University, George Washington University, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and the Institute of World Politics. Pilon is the author of over 250 articles and reviews. Her most recent books are An Idea Betrayed: Jews, Liberalism, and the American Left (2023) and The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom (2019).