Long Beach's Jew-fearing professor

Cover Cal State Long Beach psychology professor Kevin MacDonald is a hero of the anti-Semitic crowd for writing that Jews have evolved as a tribal elite that conspires against the interests of "Europeans" and suggesting that college enrollment be restricted and taxes increased for Jews to fix inequities with white gentiles. Nazi ideology, he also wrote, "may well have been caused or at least greatly facilitated by the presence of Judaism as a very salient and successful racially exclusive antithetical group strategy within German society." Brad Greenberg in this week's Jewish Journal sits down with MacDonald, who is called "America's foremost anti-Semitic thinker" by some civil rights groups.

His three-volume critique of Judaism as a "group evolutionary strategy" -- known collectively as "The Culture of Critique" and published by Praeger in 1994, 1998 and 1998 -- claims the religion discourages inclusion, eggs on anti-Semitism and uses study of Talmud to thin the reproduction of less intelligent members. The books have become sacred scripture for white supremacists, and a growing number of MacDonald's colleagues have urged the university to denounce his writings.
"He is repackaging traditional anti-Jewish beliefs in contemporary pseudo-scientific language," said Jeffrey Blutinger, a history professor leading the push against MacDonald. "If you think of classic anti-Jewish tropes of Jews as clannish, conspiratorial, opposed to Christendom, a threat to the nation, using contemporary ideas as a way of undermining traditional beliefs -- all of these show up in his writing."

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"The Nazi types are reading his stuff like it is the Bible," [Heidi] Beirich continued, "and they're using it to say why Jews should be exterminated, why they should be thrown out of the country -- because he says Jews are responsible for all this immigration that is destroying white culture. His books are like the new Bible of the movement."

Also: Jewish Journal editor Rob Eshman comments at KPCC on the meaning of Israel's 60th birthday.