More falling from grace

Painful though it be, I do find my philoSemitism index dropping. I have Jews in my family and have friendly connections with Jews. Always have, being from New York. Nice people, all around.

But my current habit of considering the typical aggregate impact of groups of all kinds has led to significant downgrading of Hebraic stock. As conservative Jews know, and sometimes have the guts to point out, the leftwing-progressive-liberal element in Western culture, the one engaged in destroying it, is disproportionately populated with (almost always) secularized Jews. Like Gentile liberals, whose values are toxically degraded and deracinated remnants of an abandoned Christianity, liberal Jews retain a lot of Jewish fears and hatreds long after they've left their religion in the dust. In my earlier dissection of my attitudes (plural) toward Jews and Judaism, I noted the Chomsky-Alinsky-Zinn syndrome as an object of my contempt: lefty Jews who take advantage, IMHO, of the acceptance, mobility and freedom from persecution provided them by America to attack America. I deem it a functionally treasonous form of ingratitude*. Jews constitute about 2% of the US population. Their influence, however, is massive. And unfortunately, almost always Left.
My fall from grace is that I have ceased to not notice.

This is not an organized conspiracy. It is the working out of a particular culture, the secularized culture of post-Emancipation Ashkenazi Jews.

As is my native style, I distinguish between individuals and groups. The individuals I can like, even more than like. My brothers-in-law and my nephew, for example. Terrific guys who have become brothers, and sons to my parents. But using the in-law analogy, just because you marry someone doesn't mean you have to like their family. And unfortunately, for every Dennis Prager and Charles Krauthammer there are many many regrettable minyans of Boxers and Bloombergs, Sirotas and Silvermans.

Part two. I was once scolded --that's the only word I can think to use-- by post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman (himself a secular Jew) for using the term Judeo-Christian. Back then I was trying to be inclusive. He thought I was being imperialist/colonialist. Well, he was right about the term, but for the wrong reasons.

I now eschew the hyphenated term because it is out of balance and works as yet another form of PC Newspeak. By replacing the old term, Christian, in front of "civilization" or "values" with the hybrid Judeo-Christian, what you are doing is granting equivalence to a tiny minority. And regular readers of ExC know that ExC is on a tear of late about minorities who dominate majorities by taking up huge amounts of cultural or political space and power that their numbers do not deserve. So no 2% group deserves that place.

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*I feel similarly toward the bishops of the American Catholic Church, whose manifestly self-interested support for illegal immigration under all kinds of "social justice" and "welcome the stranger" gobbledygook makes them accomplices in every bit of damage the Mexican invasion does, every murder and rape and gang violence, they have a hand in. As I've said, the anti-Catholic Nativists of the 19th century had a point.