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Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and The New Left

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... While the foregoing are fundamentally defensive strategies aimed at deflecting recurrent bouts of anti-Semitism, Jewish groups have also gone on the offensive in an effort to create social, political, and intellectual environments conducive to Jewish interests, particularly combating anti-Semitism (MacDonald, 1998b). For example, Jews have figured prominently in movements of political radicalism beginning in the late nineteenth (Rothman & Lichter, 1996). While aimed at developing societies devoid of anti-Semitism, as indicated above, Jewish radicalism has been a potent source of anti-Semitism in the twentieth century and has resulted in a variety of defensive strategies aimed at dissociating Jews from radicalism, at least among non- Jews. ...
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I. INTRODUCTION: JUDAISM AS A GROUP EVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY Mainstream Darwinism has emphasized natural selection at the level of the gene or the individual, not the group. As a natural corollary of this model of individual selection, applications of evolutionary theory to human behavior have tended to focus on the individual. Individuals are viewed as free agents whose self-interested behavior has been shaped by evolutionary forces acting on psychological mechanisms. Human social relationships are viewed as permeated by conflicts of interest, but research has tended to focus on the individual actor confronting an infinitely fractionated social space. Within that social space, individual strategy is viewed as depending crucially on biological relatedness to other individuals (the result of kin selection theory [Hamilton 1964]), as well as on several other individual difference variables such as sex, age, and resource control. Within this individualist perspective the group is nothing more than a concatenation of self-interested individuals. Cooperation among individuals is understood as depending on perceived benefits to each individual. The result is that we have paid scant attention to groups and how they are able to structure themselves in order to become an important force so that it is meaningful and important to talk about the group as the vehicle of selection (Wilson & Sober 1995). Within this conceptualization there is no requirement that human group evolutionary strategies have evolved as the result of natural selection favoring altruistic groups. The idea is that humans are able to create and maintain groups that minimize the differences between group and individual interests. I argue that in some of the more interesting examples, the fundamental mechanisms involved rely ultimately on human abilities to monitor and enforce group goals and to create ideological structures that rationalize group aims both to group members and to outsiders. This perspective is consistent with the idea that natural selection has been most powerful at the individual level. The difficulty confronting those attempting to develop theories of groups is that there would always be natural selection within groups for selfish individuals. However, humans, presumably unlike other animals, are able to monitor the behavior of other members of the group and enforce sanctions against those who fail to adopt behaviors agreed to by other members of the group. In fact, traditional Jewish groups developed a wide range of sanctions against behaviors viewed as inimical to group goals (MacDonald 1994). Within this perspective, the evolved goals of humans, such as achieving social status, were determined by our evolutionary past. But there are few, if any, constraints on how humans can attempt to achieve these goals. Of critical importance for understanding human adaptation in uncertain and novel environments is the evolution of domain-general cognitive abilities (MacDonald 1991; MacDonald & Geary 2000). There is little doubt that humans have evolved a set of domain-specific psychological mechanisms designed to solve recurrent problems in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA)—the environment humans evolved in and
... 17. A number of researchers (e.g., Ginsberg, 1993, Patai and Patai, 1972, and Rothman & Lichter, 1982) have examined Jewish success in America. Specifically, it has been noted that while Jews make up less than 3 percent of the population in the United States they have achieved, particularly since the 1960s, much educational, professional and economic success. ...
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Jews and African-Americans have had a complex history of both collaboration and conflict. This paper examines, in an historical context, five phases in Jewish and black relations and reviews and discusses the causes of tensions between the two communities.
... Methods that have proved fruitful for the study of ideology include multidimensional scaling of rating or sorting data (e.g., Wish, Deutsch, & Biener, 1970), Q-method studies of conservatism (S. B. Brown & Taylor, 1972; S. R. Brown, 1970 ) and of both liberalism and conservatism (Kerlinger, 1984), projective tests such as the TAT (e.g. Rothman & Lichter, 1996), and, of course, life narrative interviews (McAdams et al., 2008) and in-depth interviewing generally. The approach to ideology we're advocating is nothing new. ...
... Despite the vast changes that might have occurred with this migration to sun-drenched conservative communities with few liberal traditions, the Jews of California have continued to be pillars of the Democratic party in state and national elections (Maller 1971; Sonenshein 1997). Many have tried to explain the phenomenon of Jewish liberalism (Fuchs 1956; Rothman and Lichter 1982; Glaser 1997), pointing to the Jewish history of victimization and discrimination, as well as the moral teachings of Judaism. Whatever the explanation for Jewish distinctiveness, the stance of the Jewish community in favor of human rights has had important consequences for the minority search for equality. ...
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This report was produced with the help of a 1998-99 contract from the California State University Faculty Research Fellows program for the California Assembly Speaker's Office of Member Services. Luke Breit, Deputy Director of the Speaker's Office, assisted in the production of this report. The opinions taken in this report do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the California Assembly Speaker's Office of Member Services on this topic. The Coordinator of Faculty Research Fellows Program is Professor Robert Wassmer, Center for California Studies, California State University, Sacramento. Information on the faculty research fellows program, and a list of all previous reports, can be found at http://www. csus. edu/indiv/w/wassmerr/facfelou. htm
... It should be noted that this individual difference is not the same as political interest or political expertise (Duncan, 2005); instead, this measure assesses the attachment of personal meaning—self relevance—to political or social-level events. Stewart, Settles, and Winter summarized the different emphasis in political science and psychological research on political participation, with political scientists emphasizing proximate effects with direct political content (attitudes, information , party identification; see, e.g., Rosenstone & Hansen, 1993; Verba & Nie, 1972; Verba, Schlozman, & Brady, 1995), and psychologists emphasizing broader personality dispositions (see, e.g., Block, Haan, & Smith, 1973; Rothman & Lichter, 1982; Stone & Schaffner, 1988). However, the two traditions overlap in their arguments that " social resources, personality, and attitudes, skills and experience accumulated over the life course are important predictors of political participation " (1998, p. 65). ...
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Personal political salience (PPS) is proposed as a personality characteristic that assesses individuals' linkage of political events with their personal identities. Its role in facilitating the development of politicized collective identity and action is examined. In four samples of midlife and activist women, we show that PPS was consistently related both to politicized gender identity and political participation. Further analyses show similar results for PPS, politicized racial identity, and political participation. Politicized gender identity mediated the relationship between PPS and women's rights activism, and politicized racial identity mediated the relationship between PPS and civil rights activism. PPS is demonstrated to independently predict political action and also to provide a personality link between group memberships, politicized collective identity, and political participation.
... They argued that socioeconomic status influences who participates, but that mobilization by political elites drives when and how they participate. Finally, psychologists more often view political participation as an outcome of personality dispositions (e.g., efficacy) or attitudes (e.g., political identity, gender, racial/ethnic or " minority " consciousness; see, e.g., Block, Haan, & Smith, 1969; Rothman & Lichter, 1982; Stone & Schaffner, 1988). The socioeconomic model, as originally formulated, was static; it sought to explain participation in terms of the characteristics of the individual (e.g., education , income, political efficacy) at that moment. ...
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Many women in the generation that attended college during the 1960s have reported that they were influenced by the social movements of that era, even women who did not participate in them. In addition to political activists, social movements also appear to include “engaged observers”—individuals who are attentive to movement writings and activities, and express moral and even financial support for them, but who take no other action. Although activism in a movement may be the best predictor of future political action, engaged observation may be related to other indicators of political socialization, such as a powerful felt impact of the movement and well-developed political attitudes. Evidence to support this notion is drawn from studies of three samples of college-educated white and black women.
... In addition, The Freiheit, which was an unofficial organ of the Communist Party from the 1920s to the 1950s " stood at the center of Yiddish proletarian institutions and subculture . . . [which offered] identity, meaning, friendship, and understanding " (Liebman, 1979, pp Jewish leaders probably does not adequately indicate the extent of Jewish influence in the CPUSA, since active efforts were made to recruit gentiles as a sort of " window dressing " to conceal the extent of Jewish influence in the movement (Klehr, 1978, p. 40; Rothman & Lichter, 1982, p. 99). Klehr (1978) estimates that from 1921 to 1961, Jews constituted 33.5% of the Central Committee members and the representation of Jews was often above 40% (Klehr, 1978, p. 46). ...
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This paper discusses Jewish involvement in shaping United States immigration policy. In addition to a periodic interest in fostering the immigration of co-religionists as a result of anti-Semitic movements, Jews have an interest in opposing the establishment of ethnically and culturally homogeneous societies in which they reside as minorities. Jews have been at the forefront in supporting movements aimed at altering the ethnic status quo in the United States in favor of immigration of non-European peoples. These activities have involved leadership in Congress, organizing and funding anti-restrictionist groups composed of Jews and gentiles, and originating intellectual movements opposed to evolutionary and biological perspectives in the social sciences.
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After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the foreign-born Jewish intellectual then directing American foreign policy paid his first visit to Saudi Arabia, where Henry Kissinger was obliged to listen to what was widely known as King “Faisal’s standard speech. Its basic proposition was that Jews and Communists were working in parallel, now together, to under-mine the civilized world as we knew it.” The Secretary of State wondered whether Faisal was “oblivious to my ancestry — or [was] delicately putting me into a special category”. But in any event, “Faisal insisted than an end had to be put once and for all to the dual conspiracy of Jews and Communists”. A later meeting allowed the king to repeat his warning to Kissinger, who concluded that Faisal’s absorption in “the epic conflict between good and evil” made issues like an armistice on Israel’s northern front seem trivial by comparison.1
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During the 1960s, social scientists tended to view the young people who comprised the new left as part of a liberated or postmaterialist generation which was likely to bring about a far better world. These young people were favorably contrasted with their more "Authoritarian" peers in study after study. In the 1970s this image was partially replaced by one which suggested that "late capitalism" was producing a generation of narcissists. Following a critique of both views, I report on a series of studies which throw a rather different light on developments in those two decades. Our data indicate that the "liberated" young people so praised in the 1960s were, in fact, the narcissists who were so disparaged in the 1970s. After discussing our findings, I attempt to place them in a broader historical and theoretical context.
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Democratic theorists devote much attention to citizenship. What might it mean, though, to theorize citizenship specifically from the margins? The presumption made here is that working from the margins indicates a concern for, and a sensitivity to, the views, needs and aspirations of those on the margins of society and attempts to attend to these. As the focus for this article is citizenship, the particular experimenting with such work done here is rooted in the experience of marginalization of certain groups in their exclusion from the formal relationships within the spheres of citizenship. The paper describes other spheres in which these groups have always been active. The experiences of many women and marginalized minorities in these other spheres suggest alternative possibilities for an “integrated” view of citizenship. After demonstrating this, I seek to articulate some of the concrete obstacles feminists face in enacting this “integrated” form of democratic citizenship.
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There is a complex relationship between Burkeian and Freudian theory. By making explicit some of the Freudian theory implicit in Burke's writings while preserving the proportionality of motives in Burkeian theory, we can better understand the symbolic functions of the presidency, in particular their role in Gary Hart's failed reentry into the 1988 Presidential campaign.
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Responses to prominent reputations provide a framework for understanding the growth and decline of group prejudice. In the 1930s, the connection between American Jews and Communism was both an empirical and cognitive reality—Jews constituted a significant portion of the American Communist Party and many Americans stereotyped them as such. However, by mid-century, the perceptual linkage between Jew and Communist had largely vanished. We explain the change in public attitudes by treating prejudice as a cultural framework for collective memory. Building on Blumer (1958) and the empirical conclusions of other prominent sociologists of the period, we argue that group prejudice depends on a group's distinctiveness, its perceived moral imbalance, and the discursive utility of attacks. When components of this three-part frame weaken, prejudice dissipates. Specifically, we claim that the specificity of reputations serves as a concrete stand-in for more diffuse images of social groups. While group position is not only the result of the reputation of prominent figures, the public images of these figures help to shape prejudice and its decline. As an empirical case, we examine the cultural framework for interpreting the linkage of American Jews and Communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s through the reputations of Alger Hiss, Roy Cohn, and Adolf Hitler. Presented by reputational entrepreneurs, these images emphasize American Communists who were decidedly non-Jewish, underline the prominence of anti-Communist American Jews, and delegitimize public anti-Semitism.
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Free markets and liberalism in Europe both emerged as the result of a particular combination of structural, cultural and personality variables. Both functioned relatively successfully because they operated within the framework of certain assumptions about the nature and acceptable limits of self-interest. These assumptions are now collapsing, in part as a function of internal contradictions in liberal capitalism itself, and, in part, as a function of the challenge of new elites which have become increasingly significant in advanced capitalist societies.
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This study examined the correlates of midlife political participation among 64 Black and 107 White women of the college classes of 1967–1973. Compared with White women, Black women scored higher on political participation, generativity, power discontent, and politicization. Factor analysis of personality and political attitude variables yielded three factors labeled Political Identity, Power Discontent, and Social Responsibility. Adult political participation was regressed on level of student activism and index scores of political identity, power discontent, and social responsibility. For both racial groups, social responsibility was associated with midlife political participation. For White women, political identity was also related; for Black women, student activism bore a significant relationship. The findings suggest that Black and White women's historical and political contexts imbued their political activities with different meanings.
Point and counterpoint in the literature on student unrest In The Dynamics of Uni-versity Protest
  • M Levin
  • J Spiegel
Levin, M. and J. Spiegel, 1979 "Point and counterpoint in the literature on student unrest." In The Dynamics of Uni-versity Protest, edited by D. Light and J. Spiegel. Chigago: Nelson-Hall. References Allerbeck, K. 1973 Soziologie radikaler Studentenbewegungen. Munich and Vienna: R. Oldenbourg Verlag.
Point and counterpoint in the literature on student unrest
  • M Levin
  • J Spiegel
Levin, M. and J. Spiegel, 1979 "Point and counterpoint in the literature on student unrest." In The Dynamics of Uni-versity Protest, edited by D. Light and J. Spiegel. Chigago: Nelson-Hall.