The Jewish Mystique
Kogan, Michael
The Importance of Being Jewish The Jewish Mystique By Ernest van den Haag Stein and Day, $5.95 Like most Jews, I love to read-like most everyone, I love to read about myself. This double passion...
...From the figures available, it is clear that the Israelis devour books with the same ferocity with which the Arabs would like to devour the Israelis...
...He is careful to define the exact nature of the problem: Although few Jews are radicals, very many radicals are Jews: out of one hundred Jews, five may be radicals, but out of ten radicals, five are likely to be Jewish...
...pledged to celibacy, they failed to reproduce, thus impoverishing the gene pool and lowering the general intelligence level of Christian Europe...
...You're absolutely right...
...For that they suffered...
...It contains a perfectly ridiculous-and completely, though unintentionally, hilarious-psycho-sexual analysis of the causes for Jewish dominance in the brassiere and corset industry...
...The value of this chapter and its subject matter can be summed-up in the same words: a bust...
...His educational background includes Columbia University, The Jewish Theological Seminary of America and The New School for Social Research where he was a member of the faculties of Religion and English Literature...
...The essence of it was that God had chosen the Jews for a special destiny which required their suffering and absolute fidelity to the laws He had given...
...His psychological treatment of the question of Jewish political behavior is as clear, as honest, and as accurate as any I have ever read...
...Elsewhere in the book, Dr...
...for that they underwent toil which no pleasure or pain addressed to the senses would lead one to undergo...
...It may well be that Jews make up the single largest group among the American reading public-a remarkable possibility when one considers that only three percent of our population is Jewish...
...Lately there have appeared so many works belonging in the last two of these categories, that I was hardly prepared for what I found between the covers of The Jewish Mystique...
...d National Review...
...Why are so many radicals Jewish...
...level...
...Michael Kogan Michael S. Kogan is a graduate fellow in religious philosophy at Syracuse University...
...for that they bore burdens no slave could be lashed or bribed into bearing...
...In his chapter on "Why Anti-Semitism," we find the following conversation : "Everything that is rotten in the world," said the anti-Semite to the Jew, "is the fault of the Jews...
...This question is sufficiently perplexing to thoughtful conservatives to cause many of you to buy The Jewish Mystique to find out the answer...
...He observes, correctly, that all three are inseparably intertwined and he clearly knows his subject when he writes: The endogenous Jewish self-image, carefully cultivated in a lifelong process of education, remained strong enough to vouchsafe survival and self-respect...
...The Jews and the people who eat bananas...
...But, he is also perfectly capable of using humor to make his always telling points...
...I review it as a convert...
...Van den Haag tells his readers, but I will not tell you...
...His most interesting remarks in this regard deal with genetic continuity and patterns of breeding...
...Week after week, one finds that a majority or at least a large minority of the books so listed are either by or about Jews...
...That's true," said the Jew with great conviction...
...We do know that the State of Israel boasts the highest per capita book sales in the world...
...Van den Haag deals with the potentially explosive question of whether Jews are more intelligent than other people...
...Pick it up and, in the deathless words of Jennie Grossinger, "hearty appetite...
...And because I want you to have the pleasure of reading this book, I will not relieve you of the need to do so by spilling the beans here...
...It is compact, to the point, occasionally truly original, often insightful, very often highly amusing, and always absorbing...
...Meanwhile, back in the ghetto, the best Jewish minds, entering the rabbinate and heeding the Divine command to "be fruitful and multiply," did just that and enriched the Jewish community with great numbers of intellectually superior offspring-this, steadily raising the average Jewish I.Q...
...Weekly perusal of the national best seller lists has led me to conclude that I am far from alone in these habits...
...Van den Haag concludes that "if Jews had deliberately decided to breed children so as to maximize genetic intelligence, they could not have done much better...
...but, at the same time, it is difficult to imagine that a people who resisted and outlasted Nineveh, Babylon and Rome will finally be But, regardless of what the future holds, there are certainly enough Jews around at the moment to make this book a bestseller-and if the Jews don't do it, the gentiles will, because "you don't have to be Jewish to enjoy" Van den Haag's The Jewish Mystique...
...I opened the book as a skeptic...
...Why the people who eat bananas...
...Thus it is incorrect to say that a disproportionate number of Jews are radicals but quite correct to say that a disproportionate number of radicals are Jews...
...He is Editor-in-Chief of IDEAS, a quarterly of conservative Jewish thought and has written for various publications including The New Guard and National Review...
...Van den Haag concludes his book with a lament for the "vanishing Jews" of America...
...He points out that for a period of perhaps one thousand years, the best minds in the Christian world entered the priesthood...
...For that, they survived...
...The one serious flaw in this book may be the chapter on "Jews and Sex" which might be sub-titled "Freud takes a bad trip...
...Survival-survival as Jews-for millenia was their first priority...
...It is written with a sympathetic understanding of its human subject which may be accounted for by the author's psychoanalytic training-or simply by his essential humanity and goodwill which shine from every page of the book, yet never cloud his vision nor lessen his objectivitv Dr...
...This double passion for 1) reading and 2) self-examination sends me off in the direction of the nearest bookstore whenever I happen upon a review or announcement of a new "book about the Jews...
...His statistics on Jewish rates of intermarriage (rising) and birth (declining) will give pause to readers concerned with Jewish survival...
...The result of all this has been a continuous flood of books of Jewish interest-some excellent, some ghastly, most of only passing interest...
...Why the Jews...
...Having dealt with the sensitive issue of Jewish intellectual superiority, the author moves on to a question of almost equal volatility-that of the Jews and the radical left...
...But, he does not dismiss anti-Semitism with a joke-or even with * simple True to his psychoanalytic calling, he offers an analysis-introductory and generalized, to be sure, but strikingly accurate as far as it goes-of the psychological roots of this irrational hate-projection which has so long afflicted the western world...
...Here, as elsewhere, Van den Haag rises to his subject and offers us heroic writing for a heroic theme...
...Van den Haag begins his study with a short yet comprehensive discussion of Jewish character, religion, and history...
Vol. 4 • February 1971 • No. 4
