States of Exile

Spengler writes in response to the recent British court case over defining a Jew: Judaism has nothing to do with race–there are Jews of every race–but it does have to do with family. Jews are members of Abraham’s family. Not only tradition, but a great deal of DNA evidence support this claim. To insist that Jews adopt the criterion of “belief” for membership is to rule that God must act in accordance with a human court’s notion of the permissible range of God’s behavior. No wonder the Reform Jews and the British Humanist Association support this. Judaism certainly has nothing to do with "scientific racism" of the Gobineau variety. The fact that, according to religious authorities, a child born of a Jewish mother is fully Jewish while a child born of a Jewish father is not Jewish at all proves this disconnect. Converts to Judaism are also fully Jewish from a theological standpoint. "Half-Jewish" is a modern racial category, and counter to the "all or nothing&qu

Spengler writes: Reality presented itself to the White House in the course of the current give-and-take over Israel and Palestine in the person of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, perhaps the last functioning realist in the Obama administration. The Pentagon, as I noted two weeks ago, views with realistic horror the possibility that Israel might exchange military technology with Russia and India. An immediate concern is the Russian-Indian joint venture to produce a fifth-generation fighter, but drone, anti-missile, and other technology are also a concern. That, there is reason to believe, explains why the US administration abruptly dropped its demand for a complete Israeli freeze on settlement construction and accepted the Israeli offer of a freeze on acquiring new land, once 3,000 homes at present under construction are complete. That, contrary to Mearsheimer and Walt, is realism: in a world of weapons of mass destruction, very large numbers of poorly educated people make no contribut

The New York Times reports on a court case in Britain: In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jewish — was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.” The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M’s mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism. “The requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act,” the court said. It added that while it was fair that Jewish schools should give preference to Jewish children, the admissions criteria must d

What is it to be a Palestinian, as distinct from an Arab? Animus toward an other (the Israeli, the Jew) does not a nationality make. Edward Said, who once called himself a "Jewish-Palestinian" and "the last Jewish intellectual," offers several relevant observations in After the Last Sky : Palestinian life is scattered discontinuous, marked by the artificial and imposed arrangements of interrupted or confined space, by the dislocations and unsynchronized rhythms of disturbed time where no straight line leads from home to birthplace to school to maturity, all events are accidents, all progress is a digre ssion, all residence is exile. . . . The Palestinian is very much a person in transit. Suitcase or bundle of possessions in hand, each family vacates territory left behind for others, even as new boundaries are traversed, new opportunities created, new realities set up. . . . We are migrants and perhaps hybrids in, but not of, any situation in which we find ourselves.

Kevin MacDonald asks: Can the Jewish Model Help the West Survive? Rather than dismiss him off-hand as an anti-Semite, I will take his question and assumptions at face value. My main objection to MacDonald is that he privileges the dichotomy of Jews and Gentile whites. Some Jews do as well, for understandable psychohistorical reasons. But that dichotomy is wrong and outdated. Jews are a small ethno-religious group. Whites encompass a range of ethnic and religious groups. If we exchange MacDonald's implicit label, Gentile whites, for his explicit one, Westerners, it is obvious that Jews are one of the ethnic and religious groups that together make up "Westerners." No matter how much the Hutus and Tutsis hated each other, to the outsider they were all Africans. Similarly, despite whatever other Westerners may say, to anyone outside of the West Jews are obviously Westerners. Are Jews different in origin, culture and religion from most other Westerners? Certainly, just as Afr

Do not look back What would you see! What was is gone Like smoke, and free You ride the dawn. Be deaf to pasts. Their call corrodes. What was has died. The Word will guide From foul abodes. Do not think back. What was is cleft. One refuge fair And ripe is left. The refuge: There! No dreams for pasts! Now grip you staff. What was is hail On frozen trail Where north winds laugh. No love for pasts! What was is cracked. The days when you Were vision-racked Grew faint and few. No grudge for pasts! What was - forgive; Fling out your hands To sunset lands And stride and live! Reject return! Spring stirs the clods. What was is gauds. Is death. You wear The wanderer's garb. To go - what pain! To go - what joy! Do not remain! - Karl Wolfskehl , German-Jewish exile, 1933