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Kevin MacDonald's Response with Comments by Nathan Cofnas

March 2018

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1 Kevin MacDonald (kevin.macdonald@csulb.edu) is Professor Emeritus of psychology at

California State University–Long Beach.

2 For example, cultural group selection is a commonly held view of members of the Cultural

Evolution Society. My theorizing going back to the early 1980s has always emphasized cultural

factors, particularly social controls and ideology in regulating behavior, beginning with work on

the maintenance of monogamy in European culture (e.g, here). This progressed to a discussion of

the Spartans as exhibiting what I later termed a group evolutionary strategy (in Chapter 8 of Social

and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis (New York: Plenum, 1988). I then

decided to do a similar treatment of Judaism and began research on it in 1991.

3 Cofnas makes the following claim:

The strategy employed 18 years ago—declaring his work to be anti-Semitic and/or to

not reach the threshold to warrant scholarly attention—had the doubly unfortunate effect

of intimidating scholars with a legitimate interest in the topic of Jewish evolution and

behavior, and creating a perception among some laypeople—even if it was false—that

MacDonald was being persecuted by the academic community.

Kevin MacDonald's Response with Comments by

Nathan Cofnas

Hold your cursor over the highlighted text to see my replies. If the reply is too long

to display, click the highlighted text.

REPLY TO NATHAN COFNAS

KEVIN MACDONALD1

_____________________________

After 20 years of silence from academics, Nathan Cofnas has written a

comprehensive critical review of The Culture of Critique in an academic venue.

I have been waiting for this to happen and was beginning to think it never would.

Academics want their work to be taken seriously, and honest academics value the

rough and tumble of academic debate. But what I got was silence, or comments like

that of Steven Pinker, who is listed in the Acknowledgements section of Cofnas’s

review, saying that it was below the threshold of academic interest—and that he

hadn’t read it.

My book was incendiary, and I knew that. What had begun as a theoretical idea

on how human groups could become vehicles of natural selection (rank heresy at

the time and still controversial but increasingly respectable2) had turned into a life-

changing project. As a result of the silence, my response was to continue to

expand on my ideas and to keep them out there so people could judge

for themselves. I would have much preferred to be a respectable academic with a

solid reputation, attending conferences and writing only academic papers and

books. But respectability was impossible, so I decided to continue writing in this

area outside the academic realm.

Thus I became something of an activist intellectual—following in the

footsteps, one might say, of the many Jewish intellectuals discussed in my work, but

completely outside the academic system. Hounded out of the Human

Behavior and Evolution Society and ostracized at my university,3 I decided to

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

push the envelope. I started by writing a few blogs on my website related to my

three books on Judaism and other topics related to evolutionary psychology.

Then, in 2008, I started The Occidental Observer where I could get other writers

involved. A few years later, I took over editing The Occidental Quarterly and am

proud to have published a great many academic-quality articles over the years,

many by Ph.Ds. Sadly most of the writers for both TOO and TOQ have had to

remain anonymous because of the reign of terror at universities (and in the private

sector) against anyone who dissents from the status quo on race and ethnicity.

A major reason for my activism was because of the reading I had done in

writing the trilogy, particularly CofC. A People that Shall Dwell Alone was about

how Judaism operated in traditional societies, and Separation and Its Discontents

was essentially about anti-Semitism in traditional societies. This is water over the

dam, one might say, however one might analyze causes of anti-Semitism in times

past. But that changed in reading about the role of Jewish activism on the left

over the past century. Misguided intellectual movements like psychoanalysis may

be successfully rebutted and eventually fall by the wayside—as psychoanalysis

has. Disastrous political ventures such as Communism may eventually self-

destruct after wreaking untold horror and dysgenic mass murder. However, the

effects of immigration policy are of immediate and critical concern for the entire

West. As I noted at the outset of Chapter 7 of CofC:

Immigration policy is a paradigmatic example of conflicts of interest

between ethnic groups because immigration policy determines the future

demographic composition of the nation. Ethnic groups unable to influence

immigration policy in their own interests will eventually be displaced by

groups able to accomplish this goal. Immigration policy is thus of

fundamental interest to an evolutionist.

In other words, I began to see myself as having a dog in this fight. What was

happening was, from an evolutionary perspective, a disaster for the White people

of the West. Ethnic displacement is like reducing an extended family or other

In fact, I was being persecuted by the academic community by any ordinary meaning of the

term. Following the Shulevitz controversy mentioned by Cofnas, I was on a panel devoted to my

work at the 2000 meetings of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. It was quite raucous,

with a lot of very vocal opposition to my work, followed by cold shoulders from other officers

and other prominent members of the society (I held the office of Secretary at the time). I never

felt welcome thereafter. And although I was blackballed at least once at a prestigious academic

journal, I did manage to continue to publish my work on personality, developmental psychology,

evolutionary theory of culture, and the evolution of intelligence in reputable, even prominent

academic venues. More painful were events at my university beginning in 2006–07 following a

visit by Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, later joined by a representative of the

Anti-Defamation League. This began a process of ostracism and intense hostility from many

CSULB faculty, expressed on faculty email listservs maintained by the university, as well as

condemnatory resolutions by academic departments and the Academic Senate.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

lineage—a drastic loss of fitness, as Frank Salter has shown,

and really no

different from displacement on one species or subspecies by another in the natural

world. This is natural selection in action (although one hesitates to call a

consciously engineered process “natural”), as the gene frequencies, genetic

combinations and bio-cultures characteristic of other peoples increase relative to

those of the indigenous people of Western European countries as well as their

descendants in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

So I was highly motivated to continue my work, even outside the academic

setting. And, as Cofnas notes, the books became influential—particularly CofC.

I think a lot of that was because of my newfound activism aimed at building an

audience and continuing to expand on the trilogy, but also because there hadn’t

been any noteworthy critiques of it. The lack of credible criticism created

something of an anomaly: What is now called the Alt Right—a movement that is

vilified by all sectors of the establishment, from left to right—was embracing an

academic book on Jewish activism published by a mainstream academic

publisher that had never received a proper hearing in the academic world. One

would think that the academic establishment would come down hard on such a

book, bringing all its prestige and media access to eradicate this heresy. But

nothing. So, it continued to fester and gain popularity.

Whatever one thinks of this reply, I welcome the opportunity to respond.

Frankly, a reasoned exchange is long overdue.

* * *

My procedure here is to respond to each of Cofnas’s substantive points in the

same order as they appear in his review. I do not respond to the ad hominem

attacks. Nevertheless, there are several general points to be made.

1. Much of Cofnas’s critique depends on the claim that I conceive of the

Jewish community as monolithic. As a result, he repeatedly brings up

examples of Jews who dissent from various intellectual and political views

that are common among Jews or those participating in the Jewish

movements I discuss (e.g., Jewish critics of Israel, Jewish critics of the

left). On the contrary and as will be apparent below, I see the Jewish

community as having important diversity of viewpoint. However, the

purpose of my book is to study movements that have been influential and

to determine the Jewish role in these movements. This is entirely

compatible with dissent by some Jews.

As a result, although the theory is falsifiable (e.g., by showing that these

movements were not in any interesting sense Jewish or that they didn’t

really have any power or influence), it cannot be falsified by providing

individual counterexamples.

Frank K Salter, On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Kinship in an Age of Mass

Migration (London: Routledge, 2006).

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

2. Cofnas in several places characterizes my view as stating that the fact that

some non-Jews have participated in Jewish movements implies Jewish

manipulation, Machiavellianism, or that they have been blindly

indoctrinated (e.g., Margaret Mead as a “puppet” of Franz Boas). These

are misrepresentations. My view is that non-Jews who participate in

Jewish movements may have a variety of motivations, ranging from

sincere belief (perhaps motivated by their own, independently derived

hostility to the cultural norms being attacked by the movement) to naked

self-interest (non-Jews who see career opportunities by participating). A

good example of the latter not discussed in CofC is the neoconservative

infrastructure composed of well-funded think tanks and lobbying groups,

with multiple opportunities for access to careers, not only in these think

tanks and lobbying groups, but in government, the media, and universities

(here, pp. 11–12). But even when participating in such a movement has

material rewards, there is no implication that the non-Jews involved don’t

sincerely hold their beliefs.

3. In general, Jewish support for any particular idea or cause will be sensitive

to each generation's perceived interests given changing circumstances.

Cofnas has a static, ahistorical conception of Jewish interests, assuming,

e.g., that supporting Zionism is essential to Jewish group interests and self-

identity since the origins of political Zionism or perhaps since the origins

of the Diaspora (the traditional Jewish phrase: “Next year in Jerusalem”).

On the contrary, as discussed in several places here, Jewish support for

causes like Zionism, radical leftism, or particular governments have a

history—a beginning, a middle, and often an end. If it’s one thing that has

characterized Jews throughout their history, it’s that they have been what

evolutionary biologist Richard Alexander termed “flexible strategizers.”

There is no reason to suppose that will not continue in the future.

* * *

INTRODUCTORY MATERIAL

1. Cofnas claims that if he is successful in refuting CofC, he would have in

effect refuted the first two books as well (here and here). This is incorrect. In fact,

the three books are quite separate theoretically and discuss entirely different data

sets. A People That Shall Dwell Alone develops a theory of Judaism in traditional

societies based on the idea that humans are able to create “experiments in living”

that can, e.g., erect barriers between themselves and the surrounding society,

structure mating opportunities in a eugenic manner, and structure relationships

Richard Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs (Seattle: University of Washington Press,

1979; as applied to Jewish groups, see here, p. 5 and Chapter 1 of A People That Shall Dwell

Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

within the Jewish community and between Jews and non-Jews. CofC could be

completely misguided but all the claims made in A People That Shall Dwell Alone

true.

The same may be said about Separation and Its Discontents whose value

depends on the adequacy of the theoretical framework (social identity theory

which, although mentioned in CofC, is hardly essential to that work and certainly

not disputed by Cofnas) and the accuracy of my use of the historical sources.

Again, CofC could be completely misguided while Separation and Its

Discontents was entirely valid.

2. Cofnas proposes a “default hypothesis” of Jewish involvement in

twentieth-century liberal movements, namely: Because of Jewish intelligence

and geography—particularly intelligence—Jews are likely to be

overrepresented in any intellectual movement or activity that is not overtly anti-

Semitic.” I accept the idea of high average Ashkenazi IQ, especially verbal IQ,

although I defer to Richard Lynn’s research on the mean; my critique of

Cochran and Harpending is here. I therefore expect Jews to be overrepresented

in intellectual movements, and we could leave it at that. However, there is

nothing wrong with attempting something more ambitious, such as exploring

how these intellectuals perceived their actions (motivation) and exploring the

dynamics of the movements by asking questions like whether ethnic networking

was important (as it has been throughout Jewish history) and whether any

generalizations could be made about the leaders of these movements (the guru

phenomenon) and how they dealt with dissent. I agree that in general and for

obvious reasons, Jews won’t be attracted to theories that cast Jews in a bad light;

indeed, a major point regarding Jewish motivation for the theories discussed is to

oppose anti-Semitism. Moreover, as mentioned below, Jews have been

underrepresented in some theories and cultural trends that do not cast Jews in a

bad light or at least do not necessarily do so—e.g., populism, paleoconservatism,

and promotion of European national cultures.

This is the general framework (from the Preface to the paperback edition of

Culture of Critique, 2002):

(1.) Find influential movements dominated by Jews, with no implication

that all or most Jews are involved in these movements and no restrictions

on what the movements are. For example, I touch on Jewish neo-

conservatism which is a departure in some ways from the other movements

I discuss [later expanded into a chapter-length essay using the same

framework as CofC]. In general, relatively few Jews were involved in most

of these movements and significant numbers of Jews may have been

unaware of their existence. Even Jewish leftist radicalism—surely the most

widespread and influential Jewish sub-culture of the twentieth century—

may have been a minority movement within Jewish communities in the

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

United States and other Western societies for most periods. As a result,

when I criticize these movements I am not necessarily criticizing most

Jews. Nevertheless, these movements were influential and they were

Jewishly motivated.

(2.) Determine whether the Jewish participants in those movements

identified as Jews and thought of their involvement in the movement as

advancing specific Jewish interests. Involvement may be unconscious or

involve self-deception, but for the most part it was quite easy and

straightforward to find evidence for these propositions. If I thought that

self-deception was important (as in the case of many Jewish radicals), I

provided evidence that in fact they did identify as Jews and were deeply

concerned about Jewish issues despite surface appearances to the contrary.

…

(3.) Try to gauge the influence of these movements on gentile society.

Keep in mind that the influence of an intellectual or political movement

dominated by Jews is independent of the percentage of the Jewish

community that is involved in the movement or supports the movement.

[For example, Zionism is a Jewish movement that, until the establishment

of Israel, was not a majority view within the Jewish community. It was

nevertheless influential (e.g., obtaining the Balfour Declaration, pressuring

President Truman to recognize Israel).]

(4.) Try to show how non-Jews responded to these movements—for

example, were they a source of anti-Semitism?

Several of the movements I discuss have been very influential in the

social sciences. However, I do not argue that there are no Jews who do good

social science, and in fact [in Chapter 2] I provide a list of prominent Jewish

social scientists who in my opinion do not meet the conditions outlined

under (2) above.

This framework will be useful in the ensuing discussion. In any case, a default

position is just that. Simplifying theory certainly has its advantages, but quite

often much more can be said. Of course, the burden is on me to show that a more

complex theory gives a deeper explanation of what we see.

3. Cofnas claims that I haven’t provided evidence that Jews involved in

particular intellectual movements have often gone out of their way to recruit non-

Jews as visible leaders of the movement. I will discuss this as it arises in his

detailed comments on Boas where I also mention Freud, and leftist radicalism.

However, this phenomenon goes far beyond the intellectual and political

movements discussed in CofC. In Chapter 6 of Separation and Its Discontents

(pp. 193–196) I discuss several historical examples, beginning with the New

Christians during the period of the Inquisition in fifteenth-century Spain. Jewish

organizations had an active role in establishing and maintaining gentile-

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

dominated organizations opposed to anti-Semitism in Germany in the period

from 1870 to 1933 and in supplying materials without any indication of their

source to anti-fascist candidates in the U.K. in the 1930s. In the U.S., I cite

historian Howard Sachar for his discussion of “non-Jewish ‘front’ committees at

which Jews would prove exceptionally adept in future years.” including areas

such as opposition to Czarist Russia, support for liberal immigration policies,

removing Christianity from the public square, and socialist and communist

movements (the latter of which is expanded on in Chapter 3 of CofC). In the same

vein, I also cite research indicating that in the ancient world there was an entire

apologetic literature written by Jews masquerading as gentiles.

As I note in Separation and Its Discontents, such a strategy makes excellent

psychological sense:

From an evolutionary perspective the intent is to make the Jewish cause

appear to be in the interests of others as well. When goals are cast in ethnic

or national terms, they are not likely to appeal to those outside the group.

Indeed, such obviously self-interested goals would be likely to alert

outsiders to conflicts of interest between ingroup and outgroup. On the

other hand, a standard finding in social psychology is that people are more

likely to respond positively when goals are advocated by similar others, or

when the goal is cast as being in the interests of all rather than in the

interests of an outgroup, as predicted by social identity theory and genetic

similarity theory (see Chapter 1).

4. Cofnas claims that I cherry-pick examples and ignore examples that do not

fit my theory, pointing to examples like Noam Chomsky and Karl Marx.

However, as noted above, there is no implication that all Jews (or all famous

Jews) fit into a particular mold. There was in fact strong opposition to Zionism

within the Jewish community during the early decades of the twentieth century

motivated by fears, based firmly in Jewish history, that Zionism among Diaspora

Jews would be seen as disloyalty by their fellow citizens (see the sections titled

“Zionism as a Risky Strategy” and “Zionist Extremism Becomes Mainstream” in

“Zionism and the Internal Dynamics of Judaism,” 220–228). Chomsky’s position

has been outside the Jewish mainstream, although quite recently segments of

liberal Jews have actively opposed central features of Zionism as it exists in Israel

today (e.g., Philip Weiss (editor of Mondoweiss), Jewish Voice for Peace, J

Street).

Like Chomsky, these Jews tend to be on the left, generally perceiving a

conflict between contemporary leftist ideals of multicultural harmony (which

they support) and the reality of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. Support

for Israel is definitely slipping on the left. For example, the 2018 AIPAC

convention had a host of prominent politicians—as usual, but with a greater than

Reply to Nathan Cofnas 
 
8 
 
usual emphasis on Democratic politicians—presumably an attempt to shore up 
support for Israel within the Democratic Party (see Philip Weiss, “Schumer and 
Dems Outdo Trump at AIPAC—There’s No Peace Because ‘Palestinians Don’t 
Believe  in  Torah’”).  Nevertheless,  opposition  to  Israel  within  the  party  is 
growing, with more voices than ever willing to reject the AIPAC line. Opposition 
to Israel has also become quite important in the UK Labour Party (often vilified 
as “anti-Semitism”)  
It's  also  worth  noting  that  although  there  has  always  been  a  substantial 
consensus on Israel since its establishment by American Jews, the Israel Lobby 
has  maintained  this  consensus  partly  by  policing  the Jewish  community  by 
punishing dissenters  (see  here, here,  here)—a very traditional  mechanism of 
control within the Jewish community discussed in Chapter 7 of A People That 
Shall  Dwell  Alone.  Nevertheless,  dissent  is  growing  within  the  Jewish 
community.  
But the important question, as always, is not counting heads—even prominent 
ones like Chomsky—but in  determining where the influence lies,  and at  this 
writing there is no indication for a diminishing influence of the Israel Lobby and 
major  Jewish donors  on  American political  elites.  These donors  collectively 
contribute vastly out of proportion to their numbers and many of them are well-
known to be strong supporters of Israel. In the U.S., donors like Haim Saban (“a 
one-note person whose  one  note  is  Israel”) and  Sheldon Adelson,  prominent 
donors to the Democrat and Republican parties respectively, come to mind as 
primarily motivated to support pro-Israel policies. But they are not alone. On a 
list of “the top 50 donors to 527’s and super-PACs, eight of the 36 Republican 
bigs  were Jewish,  and of  the  14 Democrats,  only one  was not Jewish.”  The 
Democrats are basically funded by Jews, and Jewish donations to the GOP are 
too large to be ignored by politicians seeking higher office. President Trump’s 
largest  donor  was  Sheldon  Adelson  (at  least  $25  million),  “who  has  long 
prioritized  Israel  in  his  political  calculations.”  Adelson  is  reputed  to  have 
influenced the move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, and has recently offered 
to fund  the move. Philip Weiss  suggests that Adelson’s money  is behind the 
recent appointment of Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. 
Regarding Marx, I have a brief discussion of the perception that Marx was an 
anti-Semite at the beginning of Chapter 3 whose topic is “whether acceptance of 
radical,  universalist  ideologies  and  participation  in  radical,  universalist 
movements are compatible with Jewish identification.” As I note there, whatever 
Marx’s views, they are not important for understanding Jewish participation on 
the left over the time span covered in the book (~1900–1970), and in general the 
point  of  that  chapter  is  that  Jewish  leftists  tended  to  have  strong  Jewish 
identifications and were quite concerned about anti-Semitism (perhaps not the 
case with Marx). These leftists were not in any sense anti-Semites. 

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

Nevertheless, it is worth noting that John Murray Cuddihy, whose The Ordeal

of Civility is cited repeatedly in CofC, provides what one might term a deep

Jewish structure to Marx’s work.

For example:

The “final triumph” of Marxism is Marx's refusal to give a remedial and

apologetic reading of the economic behavior of the Jews, describing it with

unembarrassed bluntness, only to turn around and made this crude

Judentum the very stuff (Unterbau) of the bourgeois civilization of the

goyim. It is a failure of understanding that seeds in Marx's conviction—

that stripped of his sublimations and refinements a Gentile is as avaricious

as a Jew—an offense only to Jews. “Christianity,” Marx writes, “overcame

real Judaism only in appearance. It was too refined, too spiritual, to

eliminate the crudeness of practical need except by elevating it into the

blue. Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism, and Judaism is the

vulgar practical application of Christianity.”

Like theodicies, the sociodicies of the Diaspora giants cope with the

problem of pain, suffering, and evil. Each bestows meaning, and thus

“solves” the tsuris of Galut, the status-loss of Emancipation, the

humiliations of “assimilation” (“imitation”), the embarrassment of being

defined as “primitive.” If, as E. M. Forster said, “Coarseness

reveals; vulgarity conceals,” Freud, Marx, and Lévi-Strauss struggle to

redefine Ostjude: He becomes—like Rousseau's “natural” man—an

instrument of critique of the Jewish (and Gentile) parvenu. He may be a

“primitive” and crude; he is not hypocritical (Freud's “ethnic of honesty”).

… When Jewry was physically peripheral to Europe, locked into its

shtetlach in the pale, this provincial assertion of moral superiority, of moral

purism, was that of a spatial outsider, a geographical provincial. With

Emancipation into Europe, the axis of this moralism shifted from a

horizontal to a vertical plane, splitting into the toplofty “mission to the

Gentiles” of Reform Judaism on the one hand and, on the other, into Marx's

underclass of society and Freud's underside of personality. In each case,

proletariat and id were invested with a subversively pure moral critique of

the hypocritical, if superior, civilization of the West.

…

John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish

Struggle with Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1974). I corresponded with Cuddihy toward

the end of his life. He was very happy to see that I had found his work useful, which I interpreted

as suggesting that he felt that his book had been ignored and hadn’t received the attention it

deserved. Perhaps the fact that he had written a brilliant book on post-Emancipation Jewry only

to see it essentially ignored by later scholars had a role in my decision to continue to promote my

work outside an academic setting.

Ibid., 160–161.

Ibid., 184.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

To learn the nature of the civilization of the West we must go...to the

great unassimilated, implacable Jews of the West, to a Marx, to a Freud, to

a Lévi-Strauss, to a Harry Wolfson, to those who exhibit a principled and

stubborn resistance to the whole Western “thing.” These proud pariahs

experience Western civilization as an incognito or secularized form of

Christianity, and they therefore openly resist it as such.

Again, nothing really hinges on whether Marx identified as a Jew or saw

himself as advancing Jewish interests. However, I agree with Cuddihy’s

assessment, and conclude that Marx’s writing does suggest at least an implicit

congruence with the main themes of CofC.

Regarding Soros, he was not mentioned for two reasons: during the mid-1990s

when the book was written, he had not become the iconic funder of the left that

he is today. Moreover, Soros’s actions are consistent with those of many Jewish

activists on the left these days: strong support for immigration and

multiculturalism throughout the Diaspora and critical of Israel (see above). I have

never read anything on Soros’s Jewish identification and how he sees his actions

in light of being Jewish but would be interested in doing so. Whatever one finds

on this, it would not impact the material on Jewish intellectual and political

movements—particularly the Jewish role in altering US immigration policy and

promoting multiculturalism, and certainly including the other movements

discussed in CofC. Again, I never assume Jews are monolithic on any issue.

Cofnas: “Just as problematically, in a number of cases MacDonald fails to

report that Jews whom he identifies as ethnic activists took stands against Israel

and other Jewish interests (again, defining ‘Jewish interests’ in MacDonald’s

terms as ethnic self-preservation).”

Again, support for Israel is not synonymous with how Jews see their ethnic

interests at any particular time, and there has likely never been a time when it

was unanimous. Jewish support for a Jewish ethnostate was a minority view

among Jews prior to the end of World War II, and today Jewish support for

Israel in the Diaspora is declining—particularly noticeable among liberal/left

Jews. There may be many reasons for this, ranging from lofty idealism to

concern that Israeli policies will be disastrous for Israel and Jewish interests in

the long run.

5. Cofnas: “Many twentieth-century Jews ostensibly abandoned their Jewish

identity and sought to assimilate. MacDonald points out that these Jews often

did not support gentile nationalist movements—which he acknowledges were

anti-Semitic—and he argues that this is evidence that these Jews were insincere

in their desire to assimilate and were actually engaging in ‘Jewish crypsis’ (his

term).”

Ibid., 231; emphasis in original.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

Cofnas gives no examples of this, either from CofC or my other writing,

although in a later passage he claims that I attribute crypsis to the Frankfurt

School luminaries (discussed below). As a result, I can’t rebut it. However, in

2016 I wrote an article on how Jews should be treated if they express interest in

aiding the Alt Right (see section titled “Jews and the Alt Right” in “The Alt

Right and the Jews“), and I have several Jewish writers who write for The

Occidental Observer (e.g., Dr. Marcus Alethia: “As an American (first) and Jew

(second) who supports Trump and Trumpism, the European New Right, and

anyone concerned with the long-term impacts of mass immigration, I want to see

more Jews, particularly younger, Generation Z Jews move to our ideological

side.” I am more than happy to welcome such individuals.

6 Cofnas claims that I misrepresent sources but defers examples. I will

discuss these as they come up in his specific comments.

7. Cofnas claims that my theory can’t be falsified because “no evidence is

ever provided that is acknowledged to count against the theory.” Cofnas asserts

this because he does not really grasp what I am saying. Again, there are different

groups of Jews. He brings up affirmative action which I discuss briefly in

Chapter 8. However, the point I am making in Chapter 8 that in a multicultural

society, there will be disagreements on issues like affirmative action because

different ethnic groups have different talents and abilities. In general in CofC I

attempted to describe different factions regarded as influential and attempted to

understand if Jewish influence is important in particular areas. But in the case

of affirmative action, I have never done an examination of the relative

importance of different strands of Jewish activism and voting have been in the

affirmative action debate and so don’t care to comment. The individual Jews

and even Jewish organizations that I list there as opposing affirmative action

may or may not be representative of the Jewish community as a whole.

Similarly, in the lead up to the Iraq war, there was considerable (I think decisive:

here, here, here) influence from neoconservatives and Jewish organization like

AIPAC, but polls indicated most Jews opposed the war.

As noted above, what would count against what I am arguing is to show that

I am wrong about specific claims—that, e.g., there is no interesting sense in

which psychoanalysis was a Jewish movement, or that Jews and the organized

Jewish community (not all Jews) were not at all decisive in influencing U.S.

immigration policy, or I am mistaken about the internal dynamics of these

movements (e.g., the treatment of dissenters, the guru phenomenon). Cofnas

doesn’t even begin to address any of these issues. The theses of CofC are

eminently falsifiable.

Is the theory presented in CofC predictive? Predictive power is considered the

gold standard of scientific theories. However, consider the difficulties of

developing a predictive theory of Jewish group behavior in the post-

Enlightenment West, i.e., after the lapse of strong community controls on the

behavior of individual Jews typical of traditional societies. Within the Jewish

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12 
 
group there is wide variation in Jewish identity, ranging from highly committed 
activists to Jews who are uninvolved for personal reasons (e.g., psychiatric issues 
or bad experiences with the Jewish community) or perhaps they have family ties 
to non-Jews because of intermarriage or they are lower on ethnocentrism. The 
activist edge of the Jewish community tends to be the most strongly identified 
and will be the main force charting the direction of the community as a whole, 
and  there  is often  more  or less  of a consensus  among the  organized Jewish 
community on particular issues like immigration or Israel, despite there being 
some strongly identified Jews who dissent  from this consensus (e.g., Stephen 
Steinlight on immigration [here, pp. iv–vi) or Philip Weiss on Zionism).  
But even assuming a well-reasoned consensus among the activists as to what 
is in  the interests of  Jews, this consensus could  change if  conditions change. 
Activists might evaluate the effects of Muslim immigration as harming Jewish 
interests in the long run, as Steinlight does, and the consensus of Diaspora Jews 
on Israel may change for a number of reasons (e.g., they may see their position 
in  the  Diaspora  West  as  endangered  because  Israeli  behavior  has  become 
indefensible and  has lost  support  from  non-Jews). Such a change  in activist 
consensus would likely be gradual, just as the decline in Jewish support for the 
USSR  was  gradual.  Non-Jewish  elites  may  begin to  see  that  their  business 
interests  are  compromised  because  of  successful  pressure  by  the  Boycott, 
Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or Muslims may begin to exert real power 
in the West, as seems to be happening in the U.K.  
Moreover,  the  consensus  may  not  be  entirely  rational. It’s  clear  that  many 
activist Jews in the Diaspora (but by no means all) will support Israel no matter 
what,  while  at the  same  time  Israel  has  become  increasingly  dominated  by 
extreme ethnonationalists bent on extending current policy of dispossessing the 
Palestinians (see, e.g., here, p. 49–50; here). A prediction of what Diaspora Jews 
will do if these trends continue to accelerate would be a bit like predicting the 
weather in Los Angeles on a specific day in 2030. I am content to regard CofC as 
a descriptive  historical account of some  important examples of Jewish group 
behavior embedded within an evolutionary framework and leave it at that. 
8. Cofnas claims that I have ignored centuries of non-Jewish radicalism. Not 
true. What I call an “indigenous culture of critique“ has been a major concern 
of mine for years (see also here, here, and here) and will be a central part of a 
book on Western peoples (an interest of mine that long pre-dated my interest in 
Judaism; e.g., here, here) that I hope to finish this year. My view is that because 
Western peoples are more individualistic (and therefore less ethnocentric), they 
are  more  prone  to  such  views,  but  that  in  the  early  twentieth  century  a 
Darwinian-based movement became dominant in the social sciences and had 
influenced U.S. immigration policy. Darwinism was essentially destroyed by 
the Jewish-dominated movements discussed in CofC only to be resurrected in 
pale form with the publication of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology. Nevertheless, 
Darwinism remains a very minor influence in the social sciences and humanities 

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

as a whole. My argument for this is presented in my review of Eric Kaufmann’s

The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America and especially in my exchange with the

author.

CHAPTER 2: THE BOASIAN SCHOOL OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE DECLINE OF

DARWINISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Cofnas: “MacDonald sees Boas as having been a strongly identified Jew who

pursued (and distorted) science with the goal of preventing anti-Semitism.”

Exactly, but I provide evidence for these claims. This is the first paragraph of

the chapter:

Several writers have commented on the “radical changes” that occurred in

the goals and methods of the social sciences consequent to the entry of Jews

to these fields (Liebman 1973, 213; see also Degler 1991; Hollinger 1996;

Horowitz 1993, 75; Rothman & Lichter 1982). Degler (1991, 188ff) notes

that the shift away from Darwinism as the fundamental paradigm of the

social sciences resulted from an ideological shift rather than from the

emergence of any new empirical data. He also notes that Jewish

intellectuals have been instrumental in the decline of Darwinism and other

biological perspectives in American social science since the 1930s (p. 200).

The opposition of Jewish intellectuals to Darwinism has long been noticed

(Lenz 1931, 674; see also comments of John Maynard Smith in Lewin

[1992, 43]).

Does Cofnas refute these claims? These are all reputable sources, the

majority Jews. Note Degler in particular: “Boas’ influence upon American social

scientists in matters of race can hardly be exaggerated.” In the following

paragraph I cite Irving Horowitz on similar trends in sociology:

The advent of Jewish intellectuals in the pre–World War II period resulted

in “a level of politicization unknown to sociology’s founding fathers. It is

not only that the names of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim replaced those of

Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, but also that the sense of America as

a consensual experience gave way to a sense of America as a series of

conflicting definitions” (Horowitz 1993, 75). In the post–World War II

period, sociology “became populated by Jews to such a degree that jokes

abounded: one did not need the synagogue, the minyan [i.e., the minimum

number of Jews required for a communal religious service] was to be found

in sociology departments; or, one did not need a sociology of Jewish life,

since the two had become synonymous” (Horowitz 1993, 77).

What is critical is the Jewish role in the shift away from Darwinism which had

been the dominant paradigm. The long-range effects of this shift have been of

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

incalculable importance for the history of the West. A prime example is that the

demise of Darwinism was of critical importance in intellectual arguments over

immigration. For example, the American Jewish Congress cited Boas in its

statement to Congress, and Boasians Ashley Montagu and Margaret Mead

testified before Congressional committees, supporting racial egalitarianism. “By

1965 Senator Jacob Javits (Cong. Rec., 111, 1965, 24469) could confidently

announce to the Senate during the debate on the immigration bill that ‘both the

dictates of our consciences as well as the precepts of sociologists tell us that

immigration, as it exists in the national origins quota system, is wrong and

without any basis in reason or fact for we know better than to say that one man is

better than another because of the color of his skin’” (see Chapter 7). Doing away

with the national origins quota system meant that immigration in the future would

not be biased toward Europe. The ethnic status quo envisioned by the 1924

immigration restriction law rapidly became a distant memory.

The demise of a Darwinian paradigm was also critical to my reply to Eric

Kaufmann noted above:

My view is that the eclipse of Darwinism left the ethnic defense of Anglo-

America to religious and popular movements, and that these were unable

to dominate elite intellectual discourse, the academic world, or the media.

This left a huge opening for the triumph of the New York Intellectuals and

other anti-WASP movements of the left.

If Darwinism had won the war for the intellectual high ground, the New

York Intellectuals’ and the Frankfurt School’s implicit ideological message

that WASPs had a moral imperative to give up hegemony would have been

a non-starter. That’s why I (along with scholars like George

Stocking and Carl Degler) emphasize Boas—his triumph in academic

anthropology sealed the fate of Darwinism.

Cofnas complains that my chapter as a whole “suggest[s] that Boasians were

the first to romanticize primitive cultures as “idyllic” and not subject to the ills

of Western civilization. In reality, by Boas’s time this had been a major theme

among many gentile intellectuals for more than 150 years.” But from the above,

it’s obvious that this is irrelevant. The point is that the Darwinian paradigm had

been eradicated from the social sciences. No Darwinian would romanticize non-

Western societies, and indeed, in Chapter 2 I note that a result of the triumph of

the Boasians was that

when Harry Turney-High published his volume Primitive Warfare in 1949

documenting the universality of warfare and its oftentimes awesome

savagery, the book was completely ignored by the anthropological

profession—another example of the exclusionary tactics used against

dissenters among the Boasians and characteristic of the other intellectual

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

movements reviewed in this volume as well. Turney-High’s massive data

on non-Western peoples conflicted with the image of them favored by a

highly politicized profession whose members simply excluded these data

entirely from intellectual discourse. The result was a “pacified past”

(Keeley 1996, 163ff) and an “attitude of self-reproach” (p. 179) in which

the behavior of primitive peoples was bowdlerized while the behavior of

European peoples was not only excoriated as uniquely evil but also as

responsible for all extant examples of warfare among primitive peoples.

From this perspective, it is only the fundamental inadequacy of European

culture that prevents an idyllic world free from between-group conflict.

I am well aware that there is a long history of romanticizing non-Western

peoples. However, such views had lost out to the Darwinians, only to be

resurrected by an intellectual movement dominated by strongly identified Jews

with a sense of pursuing Jewish interests:

As [Gelya] Frank (1997, 731) points out, “The preponderance of Jewish

intellectuals in the early years of Boasian anthropology and the Jewish

identities of anthropologists in subsequent generations has been

downplayed in standard histories of the discipline.” Jewish identifications

and the pursuit of perceived Jewish interests, particularly in advocating an

ideology of cultural pluralism as a model for Western societies, has been

the “invisible subject” of American anthropology—invisible because the

ethnic identifications and ethnic interests of its advocates have been

masked by a language of science in which such identifications and interests

were publicly illegitimate.

Cofnas does not dispute my evidence that Boas was a strongly identified Jew

who saw his work as combatting anti-Semitism and that he was motivate by his

hatred for the Prussian aristocracy.

Regarding Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, the first point to make is that

whatever their motivations, they do not cast doubt on the basic thesis of the

chapter—that the shift away from Darwinism was fundamentally a project of

Boas and his disciples. None of the intellectual movements reviewed in CofC

was composed exclusively of Jews, and I discuss the issue of the motivation of

non-Jews who were involved in these movements in several places, essentially

proposing three compatible reasons: identification with a group that sees itself

as oppressed, evolutionarily influenced social learning mechanisms in which

prominent individuals are looked up to and admired, and the material rewards

available to those who sign on to the movement (see Chapter 1).

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

I have expanded on these ideas in an article “Why are Professors Liberals”

in which I use the work of Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse as a framework for

understanding the characteristics of successful intellectual movements.

(1) those involved in the movement had a complaint (anti-Semitism,

cultural exclusion); (2) they were able to form cohesive, effective networks;

(3) they had access to the most prestigious academic institutions.

It will be readily seen that CofC provides evidence in support of all three of

these criteria for the movements I discuss. Moreover, a thesis of “Why Are

Professors Liberals” is that shortly after the Jewish ascendancy in academia in

the 1960s other groups with grievances against American culture were recruited

to form various departments composed mainly of activists against their

particular complaint (women’s and gender studies, ethnic studies). Similarly,

outside academia Jewish groups have made a major project of making alliances

with non-White groups to advance their interests in multicultural America.

However, not everyone need have a complaint. In Chapter 2 I cite Carl

Degler on Boasian Alfred Kroeber: “In contrast to the ideological and political

basis of Boas’s motivation, Kroeber’s militant environmentalism and defense of

the culture concept was ‘entirely theoretical and professional’ (Degler 1991, 90).”

Despite Cofnas’s claims, there is evidence that Boas “recruited gentiles into

his movement out of concern ‘that his Jewishness would make his science appear

partisan and thus compromised,’” citing John M. Efron’s Defenders of the Race:

Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe.

The same can be

said of Freud (in the words of one scholar “To put it very crudely, Freud needed

a goy” [(Chapter 4, 114]) and many on the radical left (who often felt out of place

in what was essentially a Jewish milieu; Chapter 3, 71–72).

So we may assume that Boas was quite happy to have Mead as the face of his

movement. Both Mead and Benedict were sexual non-conformists (and lovers)

and may well have been motivated mainly by their perception of American

sexual mores as oppressive or by their perception that in general American

society discriminated against women. Mead was also very ambitious and may

well have seen Boas as someone who could promote her career—as indeed he

did. I quote Benedict as saying we should study other cultures in order “to pass

judgment on the dominant traits of our own civilization”— quite possibly a plea

for tolerance for homosexuality.

In any case, I never claim that Mead and Benedict were Boas’s “puppets.” I

do claim that Mead did shoddy, even dishonest work, citing several sources,

Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse, “Why are professors liberal? Theory and Society 4 (2012):

127–168.

John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle

Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 180.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

and that the Samoan society that emerges from these other sources is far more

compatible with evolutionary perspectives on sexuality.

Cofnas moves on to my discussion of the role of Jews in creating a taboo on

research on race differences: “MacDonald ignores the fact that influential

gentiles have been well represented among environmentalists studying race

differences in intelligence, and Jews have been clearly overrepresented among

prominent hereditarians.” This distorts the view presented in Chapter 2. As a

developmental psychologist and a theorist of culture from an evolutionary

perspective, I have always accepted the importance of environmental influence,

and I noted that there are prominent Jews among hereditarians and non-Jews

who are critics of hereditarian positions. I acknowledge

the very important contributions of these [Jewish] developmental

psychobiologists and their emphasis on the role of the environment in

behavioral development—a tradition that remains influential within

developmental psychology in the writings of several theorists, including

Alan Fogel, Richard Lerner, Arnold Sameroff, and Esther Thelen.

Moreover, it must be recognized that several Jews have been important

contributors to evolutionary thinking as it applies to humans as well as

human behavioral genetics, including Daniel G. Freedman, Richard

Herrnstein, Seymour Itzkoff [the editor of the Praeger series that included

my trilogy], Irwin Silverman, Nancy Segal, Lionel Tiger, and Glenn

Weisfeld. Of course, non-Jews have been counted among the critics of

evolutionary-biological thinking. Nevertheless, the entire episode

[surrounding the critique of Konrad Lorenz and ethology] clearly indicates

that there are often important human interests that involve Jewish identity

and that influence scientific debate. The suggestion here is that one

consequence of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy has been to skew

these debates in a manner that has impeded progress in the biological and

social sciences. (p. 38)

Notice that I included Richard Herrnstein in this list. Cofnas writes: “Instead

of accepting that Herrnstein is an example that does not support his thesis,

MacDonald spins the facts by implying that Herrnstein supported the theory of

race differences in intelligence because it would promote his ethnic interests.”

Two points: I wrote that Herrnstein was “an important contributor to …

human behavior genetics.” And as I have said repeatedly, I am not claiming all

Jews engaged in science identify strongly as Jews, or are on the same page as

all other Jewish scientists, or seek to advance Jewish interests, or that all Jews

are motivated by their Jewish identity in the same way. In the preface to the

paperback edition I did indeed cite Alan Ryan to suggest that Herrnstein may

have had a Jewish motivation, but notice how tentatively I phrase it:

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

In the case of one of those I mention, Richard J. Herrnstein, Alan Ryan

(1994, 11) writes, “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.” This is a stance that is typical, I suppose, of neo-conservatism,

a Jewish movement I discuss in several places, and it is the sort of thing

that, if true, would suggest that Herrnstein did perceive the issues discussed

in The Bell Curve as affecting Jewish interests in a way that Charles

Murray, his co-author, did not.

I am not making a strong claim here. I certainly do not take Ryan’s comment

as showing what Herrnstein’s motives were—only that if true, they would suggest

that. Herrnstein’s case would require much more evidence to be included as an

example suitable for CofC. Moreover, nothing rides on Herrnstein’s motives for

doing what I regard as excellent research. In Chapter 2 he is listed as a prominent

Jewish social scientist who does not fit the framework of CofC, and I am happy

to leave it at that.

Regarding Cofnas’s list of prominent hereditarians, I accept that Jews have

been prominent among hereditarians. The question is whether the actions of those

who opposed hereditarian perspectives were the result of specifically Jewish

identification and motivation and how effective they were in combatting

hereditarianism. Nothing Cofnas says vitiates my claim that Stephen Jay Gould,

Leon Kamin, Richard Lewontin, Richard Lerner, and Steven Rose (reinforced by

academic activists like Jerry Hirsch’s protégé Barry Mehler who has been an

effective force in combatting “academic racism”) were very influential. Chapter

2 has a long section on Gould’s Jewish identification, as well as his scientific

malfeasance and even outright fraud. Gould’s vast influence is beyond question,

not only in academia (where his books have often been used in courses) but also

in the popular arena as a result of his 300 essays in Natural History. In addition

to numerous academic honors and awards, he was named a Living Legend by the

U.S. Library of Congress in 2000.

CHAPTER 4: JEWISH INVOLVEMENT IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MOVEMENT

The thesis of Chapter 4:

The thesis of this chapter is that it is impossible to understand

psychoanalysis as a “science,” or more properly as a political movement,

without taking into account the role of Judaism. Sigmund Freud is a prime

example of a Jewish social scientist whose writings were influenced by his

Jewish identity and his negative attributions regarding gentile culture as the

source of anti-Semitism.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

Is Cofnas successful in refuting this thesis? Note that he does not challenge

the basic thesis of the chapter that psychoanalysis was a Jewish movement (a

common view among scholars), nor does he quarrel with the assertion that Freud

had a strong Jewish identity and sense of pursuing Jewish interests by subverting

gentile culture. Obviously, psychoanalysis was very influential.

Regarding the lists of prominent intellectuals influenced by psychoanalysis

compiled by Kadushin and Torrey, Cofnas does not dispute that they were

influenced by psychoanalysis (my point for bringing it up), but he claims that

most of these people were not pursuing Jewish interests as defined by Cofnas:

“five of these intellectuals are, by MacDonald’s criteria, unambiguously anti-

Israel and therefore opposed to Jewish interests.” Again, support for Israel is

not synonymous with how individual Jews perceive Jewish interests or whether

or not Jewish interests are even relevant to their writing (see above), and this

was certainly not the case prior to the establishment of Israel (see above).

Cofnas seems to think that I suppose that all Jews influenced by

psychoanalysis are political radicals (“virtually none of them [the Jews on the

list of prominent intellectuals] comes close to conforming to MacDonald’s

paradigm of a Jewish radical.” However, when I speak of psychoanalysis as

generally linked to the left, I am not referring necessarily to the radical left. Even

neoconservatism, with its roots on the Trotskyist left, has fundamentally acted to

combat paleoconservatism and to move the American conservative movement to

the left on key issues like immigration (see “Neoconservatism as Jewish

Movement“). For example, I cite Samuel Francis: “There are countless stories of

how neoconservatives have succeeded in entering conservative institutions,

forcing out or demoting traditional conservatives, and changing the positions and

philosophy of such institutions in neoconservative directions.”

Moreover, some neocons have been influenced by psychoanalysis. Cofnas

emphasizes Saul Bellow and Alan Bloom, whom I discuss in the previously

referenced article (see especially the quote from Francis and material on neocon

attitudes toward immigration). Indeed, it’s interesting that there is an excellent fit

between Bloom (and Leo Strauss) and the framework of CofC:

As depicted by Bellow [in his novel Ravelstein], Bloom emerges as the

quintessential guru, surrounded by disciples—a “father” who attempts not

only to direct his disciples’ careers but their personal lives as well.

His

disciples are described as “clones who dressed as he did, smoked the same

Marlboros”; they were heading toward “the Promised Land of the intellect

toward which Ravelstein, their Moses and their Socrates, led them.”

“To

be cut off from his informants in Washington and Paris, from his students,

the people he had trained, the band of brothers, the initiates, the happy few

Bellow 2000, 27.

Bellow 2000, 56.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

made him extremely uncomfortable.”

Bloom in turn is depicted as a

“disciple” of the Strauss character, Felix Davarr: “Ravelstein talked so

much about him that in the end I was obliged to read some of his books. It

had to be done if I was to understand what [Ravelstein] was all about.”

Bloom’s Ravelstein is depicted as very self-consciously Jewish. ... there

is the acute consciousness of who is a Jew and who isn’t; all of Ravelstein’s

close friends are Jews. There is an intense interest in whether non-Jews

dislike Jews or have connections to fascism. And there is a fixation on the

Holocaust and when it will happen again: “They kill more than half of the

European Jews. … There’s no telling which corner it will come from

next.”

Ravelstein thought of Jews as displacing WASPs: He “liked to

think of living in one of the tony flat buildings formerly occupied by the

exclusively WASP faculty.”

So yes, neocons may have a psychoanalytic background (like Bellow and

Bloom) and also be strongly identified Jews who are motivated by anti-WASP

animus (for further examples of the latter, see my review of Jacob Heilbrunn’s

They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons). Moreover, the fact that

Bellow and Bloom turned out to be neocons does not vitiate the data presented in

Chapters 4 and 5 indicating that psychoanalysis was in general a creature (and

tool) of the left. Trust me. I was in Madison during the 1960s (see “Memories of

Madison“ and Chapter 3 of CofC, note 13).

Cofnas: “It is ironic that MacDonald casts Robert Silvers as a part of a

nefarious Jewish Freudian movement” given that NYRB published Frederick

Crews’ takedown of Freud and the psychoanalytic movement.” I’m not sure

what got into Silvers to publish Crews, but note should also be made of Crews’

later comment that this was entirely anomalous and does not detract from the

general influence of the NYRB in promoting psychoanalysis:

Publication in the NYRB, as Crews notes, is “almost like pet owners who

had negligently or maliciously consigned their parakeet to the mercies of

an ever-lurking cat” (Crews et al. 1995, 288). The implication is that

publications like the NYRB and the other journals associated with the New

York Intellectuals have been instrumental in propagating psychoanalytic

and similar doctrines as scientifically and intellectually reputable for

decades.

Bellow 2000, 103.

Bellow 2000, 101.

Bellow 2000, 174.

Bellow 2000, 61.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

Cofnas claims that an incident in which Freud criticized the Jewish role in a

1929 confrontation between Jews and Arabs at the Western Wall in then-

Palestine “undermines MacDonald’s caricature of Freud as a monomaniacal

activist dedicated to excusing Jewish behavior and pathologizing anti-

Semitism.” But it certainly doesn’t undermine the basic thesis of the chapter

that Freud had a strong Jewish identity and sense of Jewish interests in

promoting psychoanalysis. Cofnas acknowledges that Freud had a Jewish

identity, “if only because was continually reminded of it by anti-Semites.” But

it would seem to be much deeper than that:

In a 1931 letter he described himself as “a fanatical Jew,” and on another

occasion he wrote that he found “the attraction of Judaism and of Jews so

irresistible, many dark emotional powers, all the mightier the less they let

themselves be grasped in words, as well as the clear consciousness of inner

identity, the secrecy of the same mental construction” (in Gay 1988, 601).

On another occasion he wrote of “strange secret longings” related to his

Jewish identity (in Gay 1988, 601). … Gay (1988, 601) interprets Freud as

having the belief that his identity as a Jew was the result of his phylogenetic

heritage [shaped in a LaMarckian manner by Jewish history]. … Freud and

his colleagues felt a sense of “racial kinship” with their Jewish colleagues

and a “racial strangeness” to others (Klein 1981, 142; see also Gilman 1993,

12ff).

Freud’s hostility to Western culture is legendary as is his sense that

psychoanalysis would end anti-Semitism and subvert the sexual mores of his

day. For example:

[Freud] was proud of his enemies—the persecuting Roman Catholic

Church, the hypocritical bourgeoisie, the obtuse psychiatric establishment,

the materialistic Americans—so proud, indeed, that they grew in his mind

into potent specters far more malevolent and far less divided than they were

in reality. He likened himself to Hannibal, to Ahasuerus, to Joseph, to

Moses, all men with historic missions, potent adversaries, and difficult

fates. (Gay 1988, 604) …

[Freud] wrote of his messianic hope to achieve the “integration of Jews and

anti-Semites on the soil of [psychoanalysis]” (in Gay 1988, 231), a quote

clearly indicating that psychoanalysis was viewed by its founder as a

mechanism for ending anti-Semitism.

“[Freud] was convinced that it was in the very nature of psychoanalytic

doctrine to appear shocking and subversive.” … Peter Gay labels Freud’s

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

work generally as “subversive” (1987, 140), his sexual ideology in

particular as “deeply subversive for his time” (p. 148), and he describes his

Totem and Taboo as containing “subversive conjectures” (p. 327) in its

analysis of culture.

In conjunction with the other material in the chapter, I don’t need any more

evidence to show that Freud fits the mold of Jewish intellectuals involved in the

movements I review in CofC. I also note that “at least by 1930 Freud also became

strongly sympathetic with Zionism,” indicating that his acknowledgement of a

role for Jews in perhaps provoking the 1929 incident does not preclude a general

attachment to Zionism as an aspect of his Jewish identity. Like many Zionists

today, he may have thought that Jewish confrontations with the Arabs motivated

by the “unrealistic fanaticism of our people” were not a good strategy for Jews to

pursue—exactly the argument that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt make in

The Israel Lobby as well as many Jewish critics of Israel who would call

themselves Zionists but who advocate peace and accommodation with the

Palestinians. Obviously battling Arabs in the streets of Jerusalem was far from

the only strategy Zionists used; Freud may well have thought other options would

be more productive.

CHAPTER 5: THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

Cofnas:

MacDonald emphasizes “the double standard in which gentile behavior

inferred from high scores on the F-scale or the Ethnocentrism Scales is

viewed as an indication of psychopathology, whereas precisely the same

behavior is central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy”

(1988a:168). But nowhere does he present evidence that Adorno et al.

approved of this behavior in Jews, which is what would be necessary for

them to have a “double standard.” MacDonald just assumes that they

approve of this behavior because they were Jewish.

I do not assume they approve this behavior simply because they were Jewish.

The first part of the chapter goes into detail on the strong Jewish identifications

of the principle figures, and it is noteworthy that the group’s most influential

work, The Authoritarian Personality, was funded and published by the American

Jewish Committee which is dedicated to advancing Jewish interests. Regarding

Jewish identity, Max Horkheimer (1947, 161) stated that the goal of philosophy

must to be vindicate Jewish history: “The anonymous martyrs of the

concentration camps are the symbols of humanity that is striving to be born. The

task of philosophy is to translate what they have done into language that will be

heard, even though their finite voices have been silenced by tyranny.” Adorno:

“much of Adorno’s later work may be viewed as a reaction to the Holocaust, as

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

typified by his famous comment that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’

(Adorno 1967, 34) and his question ‘whether after Auschwitz you can go on

living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights

should have been killed’ (Adorno 1973, 363). Tar (1977, 158) notes that the point

of the former comment is that ‘no study of sociology could be possible without

reflecting on Auschwitz and without concerning oneself with preventing new

Auschwitzes.’”

It’s reasonable to assume on the basis of this that Jewish identity, Jewish

commitment, and the importance of Jewish continuity were much on the mind of

Frankfurt School luminaries—ethnocentrism by any other name. Cofnas seems

to think that I can’t make my argument without explicit statements by Frankfurt

School authors to the effect that Jewish ethnocentrism is perfectly fine but the

ethnocentrism of non-Jews is a pathology. But why would they do that? There

are really two possibilities here: they realized it was a double standard but didn’t

want to publicize that for the obvious reason that they would be seen as

hypocrites. Or they were deceiving themselves by simply focusing on White

ethnocentrism as pathological while blocking out any thought about how this

presents an intellectual inconsistency—i.e., self-deception.

The latter is a real possibility. I wrote a chapter on self-deception in Separation

and Its Discontents, noting ethnocentric people are particularly prone to self-

deception on issues related to their ethnic group. This material has since been

expanded and updated by Andrew Joyce for his forthcoming volume, Talmud and

Taboo (earlier online version here). The reason why I think self-deception is a

real possibility is Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1944/1990) Dialectic of

Enlightenment (discussed here, 160ff). The theory of anti-Semitism presented

there is so obviously bizarre, so obviously propaganda, so completely outside of

any scientific sensibility of the need to find supporting data, and so completely

devoid of any attempt at doing historical research on the causes of anti-Jewish

attitudes that it’s hard to believe anyone could conceive of it without an element

of self-deception. Within this theory, “the continuation and acceptance of Jewish

particularism becomes a precondition for the development of a utopian society of

the future”—a society free of anti-Jewish attitudes because the pathology of anti-

Semitism has been eradicated. In a psychoanalytic tour de force, the pathology

of anti-Semitism is conceived as resulting from the suppression of nature

resulting in projections of various kinds (e.g., “The forbidden action which is

converted into aggression [against Jews] is generally homosexual in nature.

Through fear of castration, obedience to the father is taken to the extreme of an

anticipation of castration in conscious emotional approximation to the nature of

a small girl, and actual hatred to the father is suppressed.”)

Thus the behavior of Jews is completely irrelevant to anti-Semitism. Judaism

would continue as it always had, as a group apart, while non-Jews would

overcome anti-Jewish attitudes by emulating the supposed Jewish embrace of the

natural: “Happiness without power, wages without work, a home without

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

frontiers, religion without myth. These characteristics are hated by the rulers

because the ruled secretly long to possess them. The rulers are only safe as long

as the people they rule turn their longed-for goals into hated forms of evil.”

Of course, deception is also a possibility. Take your pick. But whatever your

choice, I think it’s safe to say that the Frankfurt School did indeed have a double

standard on ethnocentrism, implicitly if not explicitly. While the above makes

clear that Judaism would continue after the utopian society is achieved, the same

cannot be said for the group identifications of non-Jews. Thus, “in Horkheimer’s

essay on German Jews (see Horkheimer 1974), the true enemy of the Jews is

gentile collectivities of any kind, and especially nationalism.”

Confas then provides two examples of my alleged misrepresentation of

sources. Because of the length my comments on this, I have placed them in an

appendix.

Cofnas goes on to claim that there is no “positive evidence for my claim that

the Frankfurt School members were engaging in “‘crypsis’—members of the

Frankfurt School “conceal[ed] their Jewish identities . . . [and] engage[d] in

massive self-deception.” And he complains about my claim that Jewish

intellectual movements “typically [occur] in an atmosphere of Jewish crypsis or

semi-crypsis in the sense that the Jewish political agenda [is] not an aspect of

the theory and the theories themselves [have] no overt Jewish content” He then

brings up Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse as counter-examples because both

were critical of Israel.

I don’t see how anything Cofnas writes rebuts my claim that explicit Jewish

identities and political interests are not an aspect of the theories I discuss—that

the theories have no overt Jewish content. Was the Frankfurt School ideology

that gentile ethnocentrism was the result of disturbed parent-child relations

somehow specifically Jewish, e.g., explicitly linked to Jewish religious writings

or traditional Jewish ethics? Was Freud’s Oedipal complex an explicitly Jewish

proposal, applying, say, only to Jewish families?

I have already discussed the self-deception issue with regard to the Frankfurt

School, as well as the point that support for Israel is not synonymous with

having a strong sense of Jewish identity or sense of Jewish interests. Jews are

not monolithic, and both Fromm and Marcuse grew up at a time when Zionism

was not a majority view in the Jewish community for the very Jewish reason

that it was thought to be dangerous because of accusations of disloyalty. Today

many strongly identified Jews who are basically sympathetic to Zionism believe

that Israeli actions are reckless and evil, and there is even an Haredi Jewish

group, Neturei Karta, that is utterly opposed to Zionism for (Jewish) religious

reasons. Do they therefore reject a Jewish identity and a sense of Jewish

interests? Different Jews have different ideas of what Jewish interests are.

The important thing, as always, is to see where the power and influence lie

at any particular time. Obviously, the views of Fromm, Marcuse (and Neturei

Karta) have little influence at this time.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

Also, regarding Fromm, in Chapter 4 I cite evidence that he “had a very

strong Jewish identity (Marcus & Tar 1986, 348–350; Wiggershaus 1994, 52ff)

and [like the radicals discussed in Chapter 3] he very self-consciously attempted

to use psychoanalysis to further a radical political agenda.”

Finally, nothing that Cofnas writes, even if correct, vitiates the devastating

conclusions I make about The Authoritarian Personality (p. 185ff). Taken as a

whole, the book indeed created an upside-down world, enabled by psychoanalysis

(“Psychoanalysis essentially allowed the authors to make up any story they

wanted”). It was a world in which adaptive behavior in non-Jews was presented

as pathological and disturbed parent-child relations were seen as a good thing

because they led to rebellious children who would reject their parents’ culture. I

stand by my conclusion that it is a theory that “attempts to alter gentile culture in

a manner that benefits Judaism by portraying gentile group loyalties (including

nationalism, Christian religious affiliation, close family relationships, high-

investment parenting, and concern with social and material success) as indicators

of psychiatric disorder.”

Beginning in the 1950s Jewish organizations were very active in promoting

the Frankfurt School view that “negative attitudes toward groups were … not …

the result of competing group interests but rather … the result of individual

psychopathology (Svonkin 1997, 75). … While gentile ethnocentrism was

viewed as a public health problem, the [American Jewish Congress, which funded

much of this activism] fought against Jewish assimilation” (p. 259).

CHAPTER 3: JEWS AND THE LEFT

In many ways, Jewish activism in the political arena on the left (that is, apart

from purely intellectual movements) is the most important arena of Jewish

influence, with huge ramifications in a wide range of countries, certainly

including the United States and other Western societies, but also the Soviet Union

and Eastern Europe. The Jewish role in Bolshevism is particularly important, and

I have added to the material in Chapter 3 in the Preface to the Paperback Edition

and in my review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, focusing particularly

on the immense consequences of Jewish radicalism in the twentieth century, a

topic that was not emphasized in CofC with its focus on Jewish identity. This

material gives further support to the thesis of Chapter 3 that in general Jews on

the left retained their Jewish identity, sense of pursuing Jewish interests, and their

central role on the left during the twentieth century.

Cofnas begins by complaining about my treatment of Karl Marx (see above

for further comments on Marx suggesting that he did indeed fit the mold of the

type of intellectual reviewed discussed in CofC).

In any case, in Chapter 3 I

note:

I admit the citation to Jacob Katz is screwed up and am investigating. I greatly admire

Katz as a historian and suspect I cited the wrong book. This sort of thing happens to everyone.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

Whatever Marx’s views on the subject [of Jewish identification and group

continuity], a critical question in the following is whether acceptance of

radical, universalist ideologies and participation in radical, universalist

movements are compatible with Jewish identification.

In other words, Marx’s views are not germane to the topic of the chapter.

Cofnas argues against my comments on Richard Pipes regarding the issue of

Jewish underrepresentation in nationalist movements, even if they are anti-

Semitic:

First, anti-Semitic nationalist movements generally targeted Jews

regardless of their self-identity. Jews who identified as “Russian” or

“Polish” would still have been discouraged, if not outright prohibited, from

joining these movements as equal participants. Second, even “de-

ethnicized” Jews might find it difficult to accept anti-Semitic caricatures of

Jews due simply to their close contact with Jewish family and former

friends.

First, earlier in the chapter, I note Pipes’ claim that “Bolsheviks of Jewish

background in the czarist period did not identify as Jews, although they were

perceived by gentiles as acting on behalf of Jewish interests and were subjected

to anti-Semitism.” I agreed that, under such circumstances, it would be hard for

such a person not to identify as a Jew on some level. For one thing, as I note, anti-

Semitism tends to increase Jewish identification. Secondly, the views of anti-

Jewish nationalists need not have been “caricatures” but rather more or less

accurate conceptions of Jewish behavior. Given the vast overrepresentation of

Jews among their enemies, it would have been natural not to trust someone with

a Jewish background who offered to participate in a nationalist movement. In

fact, Jews generally opposed national cultures throughout Eastern Europe during

the period (here, pp. 73–76)—anti-Jewish or not, and often in leadership

positions: “their love of cultural icons transcended national and ethnic boundaries

in an age of popular nationalism.” Indeed, Jewish lack of attachment to national

cultures has been a theme of anti-Semitism throughout the centuries, beginning

with the Book of Exodus (here, 60–70), and extending to perceptions of European

Jews in the early twentieth century (here, p. 142) and to concern that Jewish

neoconservatives are more loyal to Israel than the United States.

But in any case—and this is the critical point, Jewish overrepresentation in

anti-nationalist movements cannot be explained simply by Jewish IQ, etc.

Cofnas has an incorrect link to his citation of Alan Dershowitz, and repeatedly refers to CofC as

published in 1988 in the body of the article, although he gets it right in the references.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

Cofnas claims that “For MacDonald, having a strong Jewish identity appears

to be the only reason not to support anti-Semitic movements,” citing this

example from Chapter 3:

The [Soviet-German] nonaggression pact provoked a great deal of

rationalization on the part of Jewish CPUSA [Communist Party USA]

members, often involving an attempt to interpret the Soviet Union’s

actions as actually benefiting Jewish interests—clearly an indication that

these individuals had not given up their Jewish identities. Others

continued to be members but silently opposed the party’s line because of

their Jewish loyalties (1988a:73)

It seems to me that, if the issue is being evaluated in terms of whether or not

it benefits Jewish interests rather than the interests of the country as a whole, this

evident rationalization makes my point. However, the other example cited by

Cofnas is indeed unclear exactly what the motives of the Jewish-Polish

communists were. But this is cherry-picking. If read in the context of the entire

section (pp. 60–68), the Jewish identifications of these communists come through

clearly, so it becomes implausible that their concern about the nonaggression pact

was unrelated to their Jewish identity when Jewish identity was so salient in other

areas. The same can be said for Jewish involvement in the Communist Party–

USA (CPUSA; see p. 72ff). For example:

In the following years [i.e., after 1925 when there was a “mass exodus” of

Jews from the party after ethnic sections were abolished], Jewish support

for the CPUSA rose and fell depending on party support for specific Jewish

issues. During the 1930s the CPUSA changed its position and took great

pains to appeal to specific Jewish interests, including a primary focus

against anti-Semitism, supporting Zionism and eventually Israel, and

advocating the importance of maintaining Jewish cultural traditions. As in

Poland during this period, “The American radical movement glorified the

development of Jewish life in the Soviet Union. . . . The Soviet Union was

living proof that under socialism the Jewish question could be solved”

(Kann 1981, 152–153). Communism was thus perceived as “good for

Jews.” Despite temporary problems caused by the Soviet-German

nonaggression pact of 1939, the result was an end to the CPUSA’s isolation

from the [mainstream] Jewish community during World War II and the

immediate postwar years. (p. 73)

Finally, Cofnas makes the following criticism:

In several places, as here, Cofnas cites CofC as having been published in 1988. It was

published in 1998.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

MacDonald leaves out a key fact noted by Schatz (1991:225), which is

that 40% of the victims of the secret police were Jewish. Since the Jewish

population of Poland at the time was miniscule (less than half of 1% of

the population in 1949; see Schatz 1991:208), Jews were extremely

disproportionately likely to be attacked by the security service. These

data are more consistent with the thesis that Jews were simply more likely

to be in positions of power—more likely to be in the position to persecute

others, and more likely to be perceived as rivals by those in power, so

more likely to be persecuted. There is no convincing evidence supporting

the tale of Jews qua Jews victimizing gentiles for revenge on a significant

scale.

Unfortunately, Schatz doesn’t explain why Jews were targeted by the security

forces. However, in making this claim, Schatz cites an article by Wlodzimierz

Rozenbaum titled “The Background of the Anti-Zionist Campaign of 1967–68 in

Poland” (Essays in History 17 (1972–1973): 70–96). I have ordered this item

from the library and will revise this section as needed. However Rozenbaum

covers the same topic with a similarly titled article here. Quite clearly, Jews were

being targeted by the security forces because their Zionist sympathies conflicted

with the foreign policy of the Soviet bloc (disloyalty) but also because the

situation provided an opportunity for Polish leader Wladyslaw Gomulka to purge

Jews from positions of power and thus consolidate his own power:

Israeli victories, even before they were acknowledged in the media, brought

some relief to most Jews in Poland. Many did not hide their happiness,

although they were understandably restrained in demonstrating it. …

The pro-Israeli sympathies in Poland were known to the authorities.

Reportedly, even the Soviet leaders were aware of them and this issue was

mentioned during the summit meeting in Moscow. Thus, in the case of

Gomulka, the signing of the anti-Israeli declaration was not just the usual

bow in the Kremlin’s direction. An anti-Zionist campaign in Poland was

meant to have serious domestic implications. Gomulka was obviously

concerned about the anti-Soviet overtones permeating pro-Israeli

sympathies in Poland. But he also must have seen other very important

political advantages, namely an opportunity to deal openly and decisively

with the Jewish problem which could bring him even greater control over

the party leadership.

Thus the targeting of Jews was done because of (or on the pretext of) their

Zionist sympathies, not because of opposition to communism per se. Indeed, in

general, Jews had been staunch supporters of the regime and were

overrepresented in leadership positions, although less so than in the immediate

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

post-World War II era. Nevertheless, I note that in the 1950s there was a relatively

minor purge in which Jews may have been targeted by the security forces:

Khrushchev himself supported a new policy with his remark that “you have

already too many Abramoviches” (in Schatz 1991, 272). Even this first

stage in the anti-Jewish purges was accompanied by anti-Semitic incidents

among the public at large, as well as demands that Jewish communists who

had changed their names to lower their profile in the party reveal

themselves. As a result of these changes over half of Polish Jews responded

by emigrating to Israel between 1956 and 1959.

The purge in the 1950s, like similar purges in the USSR during this period,

occurred because Jews were seen as having too much power.

In neither of these purges were Jews being targeted because they were Polish

nationalists who, after all, were by far the most important targets of the regime

throughout the entire period:

When this group [i.e., “the generation” of Jewish communists] came to

power after the war, they advanced Soviet political, economic, and cultural

interests in Poland while aggressively pursuing specifically Jewish

interests, including the destruction of the nationalist political opposition

whose openly expressed anti-Semitism derived at least partly from the fact

that Jews were perceived as favoring Soviet domination. The purge of

Wladyslaw Gomulka’s group shortly after the war resulted in the

promotion of Jews and the complete banning of anti-Semitism. Moreover,

the general opposition between the Jewish-dominated Polish communist

government supported by the Soviets and the nationalist, anti-Semitic

underground helped forge the allegiance of the great majority of the Jewish

population to the communist government while the great majority of non-

Jewish Poles favored the anti-Soviet parties (Schatz 1991, 204–205). (65)

If there is one thing Jews have learned, it’s that no system of government is

guaranteed to be resistant to anti-Jewish attitudes. Similarly, after being a

dominant elite in the Soviet Union beginning with the Bolshevik Revolution and

extending at least well into the 1930s (and really until after World War II), Jewish

power declined, Jews were purged from positions of power, and Jews ultimately

became leaders of the refusenik movement aimed at being able to emigrate from

the USSR.

Moreover, Schatz is quite clear that the criteria for acceptance into the security

forces had to do with Jewish issues:

To begin with, there was the basic fact of the general society’s hostility

toward the regime and the latter’s need for trusted cadres. Old communists,

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

among them the generation [i.e., the core group of Jewish communists

central to the Polish Communist Party since before World War II] had to

be relied on as the core. They were joined by other Jews who were not pre-

war communists, but whom the regime could rely on because of their

sympathies for the new political system and because of their isolation and

exposed position in the wider society. (225)

Thus, because of anti-Jewish attitudes in the wider society (at least partly due

to the perception that Jews were vastly more likely to favor the hated communist

government than Poles and because of their prominent positions in the

government), they were disproportionately likely to be recruited. The same goes

for other positions in the government (see pp. 67–68; e.g.: “Jews who had severed

formal ties with the Jewish community, or who had changed their names to

Polish-sounding names, or who could pass as Poles because of their physical

appearance or lack of a Jewish accent were favored in promotions”).

Finally, Cofnas never comes close to refuting the fundamental thesis of the

chapter—that Jewish radicals retained their Jewish identity and sense of pursuing

Jewish interests.

CHAPTER 7: “JEWISH INVOLVEMENT IN SHAPING U.S. IMMIGRATION POLICY”

As noted above, writing the chapter on immigration was a game-changer for

me because the policies inaugurated by the 1965 immigration law and similar

laws throughout the West have resulted in demographic transformations that will

make the Western peoples minorities in lands they have dominated for hundreds,

and in the case of Europe, for thousands of years.

My view that individual influential Jews and Jewish organizations were the

most influential force—a necessary condition—for the passage of the law has

received support from historians Hugh Davis Graham and Otis Graham who

emphasize the importance of Jewish influence in the executive branch of the

government (I focused on Congress). This is how Hugh Davis

Graham summarized it in his 2002 book Collision Course (pp. 56–57):

Most important for the content of immigration reform, the driving force at

the core of the movement, reaching back to the 1920s, were Jewish

organizations long active in opposing racial and ethnic quotas. These

included the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee,

the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the American Federation

of Jews from Eastern Europe. Jewish members of the Congress, particularly

representatives from New York and Chicago, had maintained steady but

largely ineffective pressure against the national origins quotas since the

1920s. . . . Following the shock of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders had been

especially active in Washington in furthering immigration reform. To the

public, the most visible evidence of the immigration reform drive was

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

played by Jewish legislative leaders, such as Representative Celler and

Senator Jacob Javits of New York. Less visible, but equally important, were

the efforts of key advisers on presidential and agency staffs. These included

senior policy advisers such as Julius Edelson and Harry Rosenfield in the

Truman administration, Maxwell Rabb in the Eisenhower White House,

and presidential aide Myer Feldman, assistant secretary of state Abba

Schwartz, and deputy attorney general Norbert Schlei in the Kennedy-

Johnson administration.

The most important point here is that Cofnas does not dispute the central role

of Jews and Jewish organizations in passage of the immigration law of 1965.

Cofnas begins by complaining about my treatment of John Dewey:

MacDonald “argues that Dewey was being manipulated by his less famous,

albeit Jewish, student, Sidney Hook.” However, I did mention that Hook was

Dewey’s student and never said that Dewey was being “manipulated,” only that

he was being promoted by an intellectual who achieved a great deal of

prominence and influence as a New York Intellectual (I discuss the New York

Intellectuals in Chapter 6, including material on Hook’s strong Jewish identity

and sense of pursuing Jewish interests). I have no doubt that Dewey was sincere

in his beliefs—beliefs that were very attractive to the Jewish intellectual

ascendency. The same goes for Cofnas’s assertion that I claim that Margaret

Mead was a “puppet” of Boas. As indicated above, I have no doubt that her

beliefs were sincere.

Cofnas’s treatment of my comments on Dewey ignores my citations of David

Hollinger, perhaps the premier historian of U.S. intellectual history. “Hollinger

(1996, 4) notes “the transformation of the ethnoreligious demography of

American academic life by Jews,” and specifically with respect to Dewey:

“If lapsed Congregationalists like Dewey did not need immigrants to

inspire them to press against the boundaries of even the most liberal of

Protestant sensibilities, Dewey’s kind were resoundingly encouraged in

that direction by the Jewish intellectuals they encountered in urban

academic and literary communities” (Hollinger 1996, 24).

While Jews promoted people like Dewey whose views resonated with theirs,

they worked to destroy the reputations of intellectuals whose views they

disapproved. In particular, Jewish intellectuals were successful in opposing the

work of populist intellectuals and artists (discussed in Chapter 5 and in my review

of Eric Kaufmann mentioned above). Andrew Joyce and Brenton Sanderson have

made major contributions in this area, with essays on Jewish attempts to destroy

the reputations of T. S. Eliot, Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound, and Richard Wagner.

On the other hand, Jewish intellectual activism has been central in promoting the

work not only of the intellectuals reviewed in CofC, but also the reputation of

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

Baruch Spinoza who is now being promoted by Jewish academic activists as the

philosopher without whom the Enlightenment never would have happened.

Regarding Cofnas’s comments on Madison Grant, he was indeed a Nordicist

advocating for people like himself—an attitude that is certainly not foreign to

Jews. However, to claim that “Jews were effectively promoting, not

undermining, white unity” (his emphasis) is a stretch to say the least. Even

during the 1920s and before (e.g., unanimous opposition in the Jewish press to

the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; see p. 283), Jews promoted immigration

from all of humanity.

In 1920 the Central Conference of American Rabbis passed a resolution

urging that “the Nation . . . keep the gates of our beloved Republic open . .

. to the oppressed and distressed of all mankind in conformity with its

historic role as a haven of refuge for all men and women who pledge

allegiance to its laws” (in The American Hebrew, Oct. 1, 1920, 594). The

American Hebrew (Feb. 17, 1922, 373), a publication founded in 1867, to

represent the German-Jewish establishment of the period, reiterated its

long-standing policy that it “has always stood for the admission of worthy

immigrants of all classes, irrespective of nationality.” And in his testimony

at the 1924 hearings before the House Committee on Immigration and

Naturalization, the AJCommittee’s Louis Marshall stated that the bill

echoed the sentiments of the Ku Klux Klan; he characterized it as inspired

by the racialist theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. At a time when

the population of the United States was over 100 million, Marshall stated,

“[W]e have room in this country for ten times the population we have”; he

advocated admission of all of the peoples of the world without quota limit,

excluding only those who “were mentally, morally and physically unfit,

who are enemies of organized government, and who are apt to become

public charges.” Similarly, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, representing the

AJCongress and a variety of other Jewish organizations at the House

Hearings, asserted “the right of every man outside of America to be

considered fairly and equitably and without discrimination.”

Far from promoting “White unity,” Jewish activists were promoting making

Whites a small minority in a country that they had established and dominated for

150 years.

Cofnas claims that I am incorrect in attributing “hypocrisy” to American Jews

because they support immigration and diversity in the U.S. but not Israel in

Chapter 8. However, I never mention hypocrisy in that chapter but am only

interested in describing the “disparities” in policies advocated by Jews in the two

countries. This is the quotation (from Chapter 8) that Cofnas is disputing

(including additional material in order to clarify the context):

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

Notice that American Jews have had no interest in proposing that

immigration to Israel should be similarly multiethnic, or that Israel should

have an immigration policy that would threaten the hegemony of Jews. I

rather doubt that Oscar Handlin (1952, 7) would extend his statement

advocating immigration from all ethnic groups into the United States by

affirming the principle that all men, being brothers, are equally capable of

being Israelis. I also doubt that the Synagogue Council of America would

characterize Israeli immigration law as “a gratuitous affront to the peoples

of many regions of the world” (PCIN 1953, 117). Indeed, the ethnic conflict

within Israel indicates a failure to develop a universalist Western culture.

I go on to discuss the “disparities” (not hypocrisy) between attitudes toward

immigration of American Jews versus Israeli Jews. The simplest explanation of

this disparity is that in general Jewish perceptions of their interests differ

dramatically depending on whether they are a solid majority of a country or a

small minority. What’s good for the Jews depends on context—hardly surprising.

Regarding immigration to Israel, Cofnas writes:

the claim that immigration to Israel is restricted to Jews—even nominal

Jews—was and is false. Since 1970, Israel will give automatic citizenship

to anyone with one Jewish grandparent and their non-Jewish spouse and

children (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2013). Hundreds of

thousands of gentiles were granted Israeli citizenship because of this

policy (Felter 2009). (An exact estimate is difficult to give since Israelis

with no Jewish ancestors, or only a distant one, may identify as Jewish in

surveys.)

Jewish immigrants to Israel must establish their “Jewish roots” which typically

involves documentation of family history. Recently there was a rabbinic ruling

that Ashkenazi Jews could use DNA to prove that they are Jews, a particular

problem for Jews who emigrated from the former Soviet Union. Imagine a U.S.

law that allowed only people of who could establish a European family history

and their spouses and children to immigrate to the U.S. and allowed the use of

genetic testing to confirm European ancestry. I may be going out on a limb here,

but I’m thinking every Jewish organization in America would be up in arms.

Realize also that historically, marriage in Israel has been controlled by the

Orthodox rabbinate. A 2013 law liberalized marriage somewhat, but there is still

an Orthodox monopoly on marriage and divorce in Israel, and converts still

suffer some disabilities, mainly because non-Orthodox conversions are not

recognized:

Some Israeli supporters of marriage liberalization remained skeptical

despite the passage of the law.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

“The law won’t help more than 300,000 immigrants who are defined [under

Israeli law] as ‘without religion.’ It also won’t help Reform and

Conservative converts who are recognized as Jews by the state, but not by

the rabbinate,” noted Rabbi Uri Regev, a Reform rabbi and director of

Hiddush, a group advocating an end to the Orthodox monopoly in Israel’s

state rabbinate.

Regarding Alan Dershowitz’s advocacy of Ethiopian migration to Israel:

again, different Jews see Jewish interests differently. Some Jewish advocates

for Ethiopian migration may see refusal to admit Ethiopians as indicating Israeli

policy is racist and that it would destroy the idea that Judaism is simply a matter

of religious belief—both of which would tend to give Israel a poor image in the

West which is a vital pillar of support for Israel. As I have repeatedly noted

here, one has to look at where the power is and pay close attention to divisions

within the Jewish community Moreover, using Cofnas’s estimates, Ethiopian

Jews constitute only a little over 2% of the population and thus may not be seen

as a serious threat to the demographic status quo. And it’s worth pointing out

that Ethiopian Jews have not been welcomed by many Israelis and remain on

the fringes of Israeli society. A BBC report from 2015: “when they arrived in

Israel, these distinctive people faced appalling discrimination, racism and a lack

of empathy for their hardships in Ethiopia and during their journey to Israel. …

Many in the religious establishment even dared to question their Judaism”; see

also here and here).

Finally, I acknowledge very high intermarriage rates for Jews in the U.S. and

that my projections of the Jewish demographic future in America, made 20 years

ago on the basis of my reading, are not holding up. However, this should be

placed in context. These trends do not signal the death knell of ethnic Judaism.

First, a major goal of Zionism during the early decades of the twentieth century

was to prevent intermarriage and assimilation (here, p. 157), and in large measure

that has succeeded in Israel. Secondly, to my knowledge, the leadership of the

American Jewish community remains ethnically Jewish. Third, intermarriage and

conversion have benefits for the Jewish community (e.g., here), including the

advantages of marrying into prominent non-Jewish families, such as the families

of presidents Trump and Clinton—a centuries-old phenomenon. Some authors

have suggested that relatively high rates of intermarriage, low fertility, and the

various levels of Jewish identification in the modern Western societies are highly

functional for Judaism because they serve as a bridge to the surrounding culture

because of family ties with non-Jews.

Finally, there remains a highly fertile core

of Conservative and Orthodox Jews who reject intermarriage.

For example, Lieberman, S., & M. Weinfeld (1978). Demographic trends and Jewish

survival. Midstream 24 (November): 9–19.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

COFNAS’S CONCLUSION

Cofnas: “After arguing so strenuously that liberal movements were designed

to advance a Jewish group evolutionary strategy, he acknowledges that Jews are

also in the vanguard in the fight against those same movements.” As noted

above in discussion of the history of Jews under communism, no political

system is guaranteed to serve Jewish interests, and I have written about the

concern within the organized Jewish community over the immigration of groups

that may not resonate with Jewish issues, particularly Muslims. As always, the

Jewish community will respond to problems as they arise. In the case of Poland

and the Soviet Union, that meant large-scale emigration, and Jewish emigration

from France and other European countries because of Muslim anti-Semitism is

already a reality.

Cofnas notes that several Jews are prominent in evolutionary psychology and

as critics of “liberal social science.” This in no way invalidates anything in

CofC. As noted above, there have always been Jews who do good work in the

social sciences. However, I should say that I disagree with Pinker’s orthodox

version of evolutionary psychology (“massive modularity”) in favor of

emphasizing how modular and non-modular mechanisms work together to

create human culture. And for obvious reasons I have a particular complaint

because of his anti-scientific approach to my work—in part responsible for my

spending the last 20 years in the intellectual wilderness. Nevertheless, Pinker

has moved the scientific and popular reception of behavior genetics of

evolutionary perspectives forward (see., e. g., his withering criticism in The

Blank Slate of three pf the figures discussed in Chapter 2 of CofC: Gould,

Lewontin and Rose). And, for all I know, he is pursuing a tactical strategy of

gradualism by supporting ideas that are still regarded with extreme hostility in

large swaths of academia and the media in the hopes that things will eventually

change, although his recent work, Enlightenment Now is not encouraging in that

regard.

The rest of Cofnas’s conclusion is simply name-calling. No need to respond.

DISCUSSION

Perhaps the most important message here is that the successful Jewish attack

on Darwinism by the Jewish intellectual movements discussed in CoC was a

pivotal moment in intellectual history, with ramifications still being felt in

psychology, anthropology, sociology, criminology, gender studies, political

science, and political activism on the left generally—including, in particular,

immigration policy. Anti-Darwinism is really the intellectual force field that

protects the whole leftist-postmodern-multiculturalist worldview and gives it a

veneer of scientific credibility because it is promulgated from the most

prestigious academic and media sources—a key to the success of all the

movements discussed in CofC (see especially Chapter 6).

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

With vanishingly few exceptions, every single person in evolutionary

psychology and behavior genetics has suffered personal and career costs because

of this assault on Darwinism. To the academics reading this, when was the last

time your psychology department advertised for a specialist in behavior genetics?

When was the last time your gender or ethnic studies departments advertised for

specialists in evolutionary approaches to race or sex differences? This has had the

effect of limiting job opportunities for those who aspire to careers in these fields,

and it prevents talented faculty fortunate to have a position from moving to more

prestigious institutions.

Fundamentally, this dominant zeitgeist of the left denies the biological reality

of race and sex differences and the heritability of important mental traits like IQ.

I vividly recall a conversation during the 1990s with J. Philippe Rushton, who

produced ground-breaking theories and research on race differences, life history

theory as applied to humans, and the importance of genetic similarity for

friendship, mate choice, and other examples of human assortment.

He asked:

Why do we (i.e., the academic establishment) know so much less about race and

race differences now than we did in the 1920s? Why has research and theorizing

in this area become taboo to the point that careers are ruined, and many academics

engage in self-censorship to preserve their jobs, their career prospects, and their

social life? CofC and my subsequent writing (e.g., here) are an attempt to answer

that.

At this time there is enormous interest centering around free speech at

universities. Cofnas mentions Jonathan Haidt, whom I admire as a leader in

combatting the pall of leftist, anti-Darwinian orthodoxy reigning at universities

today. Haidt describes “tribal moral communities“ in academia, particularly

social psychology. Like dissenters from the movements discussed in CofC,

opponents of the reigning orthodoxy are seen as moral reprobates (not simply

intellectually mistaken). In these tribal moral communities, research that

contravenes the values of the community is held to higher standards by insisting

on “hyper-purism that settles for nothing less than absolute certainty and

absolutely correct methodology, epistemology, and ontology” (CofC, Chapter 2,

p. 45).

Moreover, as noted in Chapter 6, all of the movements discussed in CofC were

essentially morally based critiques of the West, its people and its cultures—tribal

moral communities by any other name. This is also a theme of John Murray

Cuddihy’s masterpiece:

It is here [i.e., the Jewish moral critique of the hypocrisy of Western

society], I think, that we have a far-reaching convergence of the role of the

J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, 1st ed. (New

Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994); J. Philippe Rushton, “Ethnic nationalism, evolutionary

psychology and Genetic Similarity,” Nations and Nationalism 11, no. 4 (2005), 489–507.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

Jewish intelligentsia for 150 years within the European system and the

modernizing elite of many of the new nations: the moral passions become

the ruling passions, become special pleaders. Lionel Trilling once wrote

“that the moral passions are even more willful and imperious and impatient

than the self-seeking passions.” It is Susan Sontag … who notes that “the

Jews pinned their hopes for integrating into modern societies on promoting

the moral sense.

This morally based critique is based on a pre-existing firm foundation

stemming from developments in European cultures that greatly accelerated

during the eighteenth century. However, the morality that is now being preached

and coercively enforced as a result of the triumph of the Jewish intellectual

movements reviewed in CofC is a morality of altruism for the people of the West

that will, if continued, lead to the destruction of European peoples and their

cultures. It is a vision of culture as motivated by an altruistic, guilt-suffused moral

sense that was never envisioned by Enlightenment intellectuals or their

descendants in the West until the triumph of these movements.

On the surface, Cofnas appeared to engage my work, but he didn’t really grasp

the key arguments or how CofC fit into the framework of the other books in the

trilogy or my other writing on evolution and culture. One suspects he had a

foregone conclusion about its value—what psychologists term “motivated

cognition” (which, as I attempt to demonstrate, was characteristic of the Jewish

intellectuals I review in CofC). Like the hyper-purists discussed in several places

in CofC, he was looking for ways to condemn research he didn’t like for deeper

reasons. He understood perfectly well that a positive review would never be

published. And he was deeply troubled by CofCs increasing acceptance outside

academia and by the possible political ramifications of that acceptance. He was

quite aware that the silent treatment that had surrounded the book for 20 years

had failed.

So now we are back at square 1. I welcome further comment and promise to

respond.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

Appendix

Cofnas provides a specific example of me misrepresenting sources based on

this passage:

R. Nevitt Sanford (Chapter VI) finds that affiliation with various Christian

religious sects is associated with ethnocentrism, and that individuals who

have rebelled against their parents and adopted another religion or no

religion are lower on ethnocentrism. These relationships are explained as

due to the fact that acceptance of a Christian religion is associated with

“conformity, conventionalism, authoritarian submission, determination by

external pressures, thinking in ingroup-outgroup terms and the like vs.

nonconformity, independence, internalization of values, and so forth” (p.

220).

First, let’s look at the relevant passage from The Authoritarian Personality. It

is certainly true that Sanford is saying that, as I summarized it, “that individuals

who have rebelled against their parents and adopted another religion or no

religion are lower on ethnocentrism.” The first part of that sentence could be

fleshed out to reflect some more specific findings discussed by Sanford, although

note that he too has a similar general statement at the beginning of his Discussion

section: “Belonging to or identifying oneself with a religious body in America

today certainly does not mean that one thereby takes over the traditional Christian

values of tolerance, brotherhood, and equality. On the contrary, it appears that

these values are more firmly held by people who do not affiliate with any

religious group.”

More specifically, however, people in minor Protestant sects (too few to

properly analyze separately) and Unitarians were found to be low on E (the

Ethnocentrism scale), and for the major denominations there is a great deal of

variation among individuals centering around a mean in the middle of E— hardly

indicative of a general pattern of extreme ethnocentrism, as Sanford notes.

Nevertheless, Sanford does not dismiss the idea that being a member of a major

denomination per se is problematic:

It may be argued, however, that this conventional approach to religion

expresses enough identification with the status quo, submission to external

authority, and readiness to emphasize moralistically the differences

between those who “belong” and those who do not, to differentiate, in terms

of E score, members of the large denominations from the nonreligious and

from the members of those minor groups which actually stand for trends of

an opposite character.

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

Despite this claim that even being in a large denomination gives one enough

of a sense of being in an ingroup to produce higher scores on E, Sanford looks at

mother’s religion in an effort to get more powerful findings. Subjects who deviate

from mother’s religion are more likely to be lower on E. Religion for them is

interpreted as self-chosen, whereas those who accept their mother’s religion tend

to be higher on E and on the Anti-Semitism Scale. “Concerning these results as a

whole, one might say that whereas religious affiliation goes with higher scores

on the scales, this is less likely to be the case if the religion is ‘one’s own,’ that is

to say, if it has been accepted independently of or in revolt against the main carrier

of religious influence in the family … [whereas] where there are signs that the

acceptance of religion has been determined primarily by conventional or external

considerations, E score tends to go up.” This was found to be particularly true of

women.

In other words, Sanford is proposing that the real issue is whether the religion

is self-chosen as indicated by being different from the mother’s. Even among the

major denominations, there may be wide variation in the extent to which subjects

adopt their religion by individual choice, thus accounting for the wide variation

in E scores:

But among the members of the major denominations there are many

subjects whose religion would appear to be “genuine,” in the sense that it

was arrived at more or less independently of external pressure and takes the

form of internalized values. These subjects, it seems, tend to score low,

often very low, on ethnocentrism.

In the following quotation, Sanford effectively glosses “self-chosen” as

reflecting the variation in the qualities emphasized throughout The Authoritarian

Personality; this quote includes the part that I quoted from in CofC (the part that

I quoted is in italics):

When the problem is approached from this point of view the psychological

factors which appear as most important are much the same as those which

came to the fore in the preceding chapters: conformity, conventionalism,

authoritarian submission, determination by external pressures, thinking in

ingroup-outgroup terms, and the like vs. nonconformity, independence,

internalization of values, and so forth.

So, did my quote misrepresent Sanford? Here’s Cofnas:

MacDonald cites Sanford out of context and totally misrepresents his

conclusion. First, when Sanford refers to “conformity, conventionalism,

authoritarian submission . . .,” he is not characterizing Christian belief.

He says that to understand the relation between religion and

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

ethnocentrism, we must consider what psychological factors play a role

in the individual’s acceptance or rejection, such as “conformity,

conventionalism, authoritarian submission.” He is not talking specifically

about Christianity, and he says explicitly that these factors do not play a

role in “genuine” Christianity. He clearly distinguishes between nominal

Christians who adopt the religion of their parents or of the majority simply

because they tend to submit to authority, and those “whose religion would

appear to be ‘genuine,’ in the sense that it was arrived at more or less

independently of external pressure and takes the form of internalized

values” (Adorno et al. 1950:220). Sanford says that the latter—the

“genuine” Christians—”tend to score low, often very low, on

ethnocentrism.”

First, I wrote that “affiliation with various Christian religious sects is linked

with ethnocentrism” (emphasis added). I am not claiming anything about “all

Christian religious sects,” and therefore I am not claiming that, according to

Sanford, Christian beliefs per se are the problem. Secondly, as noted, Sanford

does make general statements linking Christianity with ethnocentrism: (1) the

statement linking affiliation with large Christian denominations with

ethnocentrism noted above—their means, after all, are considerably higher than

the Unitarians and the minor Protestant sects; and (2) the statement at the

beginning of the Discussion section, also noted above: “Belonging to or

identifying oneself with a religious body in America today certainly does not

mean that one thereby takes over the traditional Christian values of tolerance,

brotherhood, and equality. On the contrary, it appears that these values are more

firmly held by people who do not affiliate with any religious group” (p. 219).

This last statement is particularly interesting because it appears in the general

summary of the chapter—the take-home message, if you will. One wonders why

Sanford would make such statements if he didn’t want to convey the idea that

Christian religious affiliation per se was problematic (although, again, I never

claimed that Sanford was claiming that Christian belief per se was the problem:

I wrote “various Christian religious sects,” not “all Christian religious sects”). It’s

also noteworthy that in my comments on Chapter II of The Authoritarian

Personality—also written by Sanford, the strongly identified Irishman and anti-

Semite Mack is diagnosed as pathological because of his strong sense of being in

an ingroup (pp, 169–170). Given that Judaism is all about having a strong sense

of ingroup, I have to suppose that Sanford (who was not Jewish) was willfully

ignoring some obvious realities given that he was writing for a project funded by

the American Jewish Committee. Without a strong sense of being an ingroup,

Judaism would have died out long ago.

In the contested passage, I essentially cut to the chase: I did not recount

Sanford’s discussion of how he ends up concluding that whether the subject

accepted mother’s religion is the most important variable, or his suggestion that

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

low E scorers among the major denominations may have self-chosen their

religion for other reasons. Instead, I went directly from claiming that Sanford had

claimed that “affiliation with various Christian religious sects is associated with

ethnocentrism, and that individuals who have rebelled against their parents and

adopted another religion or no religion are lower on ethnocentrism” to Sanford’s

conclusion that variation in E was linked to those traits emphasized by the book

as a whole: “conformity, conventionalism, authoritarian submission,

determination by external pressures, thinking in ingroup-outgroup terms, and the

like vs. nonconformity, independence, internalization of values, and so forth.”

Clearly, I did emphasize the basic points: that Sanford concluded that rebellion

against parents was important, and I implied that Christian religious belief per se

was not the problem.

So I really don’t see where I misrepresented anything.

Cofnas continues:

Second, Sanford characterizes traditional Christianity in a positive, not a

negative, way. He refers to “Christian humanism which works against

prejudice” (Adorno et al. 1950:215). He writes that “in America today,”

the “traditional Christian values of tolerance, brotherhood, and equality”

appear to be “more firmly held by people who do not affiliate with any

religious group,” though “genuine” Christians low in ethnocentrism

“probably predominate in [certain] Protestant denominations” (Adorno et

al. 1950:219–20). Thus Sanford identifies the values promoted by the

Frankfurt School with Christianity, not Judaism.

Again, I never claimed that Sanford claimed that Christian beliefs per se were

the problem. Otherwise, why would the mean E scores for Unitarians and

members of minor Protestant sects be so low, and why would so many members

of the major denominations be low on E? But Sanford is clearly saying that

despite these traditional Christian values and an ideal of “Christian humanism,”

Christians in 1940s’ America did not in general have these values. Clearly, he is

indicting Christianity as it actually existed, although he certainly recognizes that

there are exceptions.

Finally, whether one believes that I misrepresented Sanford’s chapter, it does

nothing to alter my general comments on the Frankfurt School.

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Is Kevin MacDonald’s Theory of Judaism “Plausible”? A Response to Dutton (2018)

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2018

Nathan Cofnas

In a trilogy of books, Kevin MacDonald argues that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy.” According to his theory, Jews are genetically and culturally adapted to advance their own group interests at the expense of gentiles. Several influential twentieth-century liberal intellectual and political movements were designed by Jews to promote separatism and group continuity among themselves while undermining gentile society. According to Cofnas [Human Nature, 29, 134–156, 2018], MacDonald’s argument is based on “misrepresented sources and cherry-picked facts.” Cofnas proposed the “default hypothesis” to explain Jewish overrepresentation among the leaders of liberal intellectual and political movements: Because of their relatively high IQ and concentration in influential urban areas, Jews are overrepresented in all (non-overtly anti-Semitic) cognitively demanding activities. Dutton [Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2018] objects to Cofnas, claiming that, “from the perspective of evolutionary psychology,” MacDonald’s theory is more “plausible” than the default hypothesis because “people tend to act in their ethnic interests” and Jews are particularly high in ethnocentrism. Contra Dutton, it is argued here that there is no evidence to support the general notion that people tend to act in their ethnic interests. The evidence suggests, if anything, that Jews are not particularly ethnocentric. There are no theoretical principles or established empirical findings of evolutionary psychology that make MacDonald’s theory “plausible.”

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Kevin MacDonald's Response with Comments by Nathan Cofnas

Abstract

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