On this, the 7th night of Hanukkah, Bret Stephens decided to gift his fellow Jews with a screed on Eugenics placing us so high on the pedestal of natural higher intellectual power, Dr. Josef Mengele himself has risen from his grave to apologize.
Or has Dr. Mengele risen from the grave to recruit Stephens because his ideology so closely matches his own? Hard to know.
That's right, fellow knish-lovers, should we lift Stephens up on a chair our shoulders for a joyful Hora in celebration of his declaration our obvious ability to retain information in our keppies despite being thrown out of homelands for centuries? Of should we tear our clothing in despair that he has brought such tsuris by showcasing us at our most arrogant? By committing harm by othering our already vulnerable population? By giving fuel to anti-Semites to commit even more hate crimes? AS IF they needed more fodder?
Here are some highlights.
[H]ow is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?
The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true.
He goes on to quote a study that is more than ten years old, and whose co-author is...wait for it...a white supremacist.
Oopsie.
Then Stephens lavishes praise on our people's originality and good intentions.
Aside from the perennial nature-or-nurture question of why so many Ashkenazi Jews have higher I.Q.s, there is the more difficult question of why that intelligence was so often matched by such bracing originality and high-minded purpose.
Um...Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller are RIGHT THERE, Bret! Look just past them, and you'll find Ben Shapiro, and Hashem only knows the number of Jews who are just fine with Trump's murderous racism as long as he loathes Palestinians, and moved the capital to Jerusalem! (Is all that really good for the Jews, Bret?)
*deep*
*breath*
Then, Stephens goes on to walk back his own thesis completely. Perhaps to avoid backlash? (har.)
These explanations for Jewish brilliance aren’t necessarily definitive. Nor are they exclusive to the Jews.
Oh, you don't say?
Do you mean, perhaps, OTHER peoples have had to survive being forced from their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs and what they could carry in their hands, if that, and have contributed a thing or two to scientific advancement, linguistic beauty, and cultural achievement?
I'm talking about BLACK PEOPLE, BRET, IN CASE YOU DIDN'T REALIZE THEY, TOO, READ THE NEW YORK TIMES.
I'm talking about BROWN PEOPLE, BRET, in case you didn't realize that people from South and Central America are dying in our very own concentration camps set up by our president.
Now is also not a bad time to mention Indigenous/Native Tribes of what is now called the United States and Canada. Remember them, Bret?
Listen, from one Member of the Tribe to another: I love us, too. We are a great culture. We're earth-bound. We study. We sing. We eat. We cook vegetables to within an inch of their lives. We survive, above all, we survive. Anti-Semitism is a scourge, and spreading — in a terrifying way — in what is supposed to be enlightened society, and that must be stopped.
Survival going forward, however, must rely upon downplaying the "Chosen People" crap and emphasizing the "Tikkun Olam" part. Repairing the world. Fixing the hurts. Apologizing to whom we've wronged, and most importantly, learning.
When will Bret Stephens learn that his self-aggrandizing, poorly thought out drek causes more harm than good? When will The New York Times apologize for running pieces such as these?
