I was stupefied that The New York Times saw nothing wrong with publishing an op-ed that effectively advanced this eugenic theory. Unsurprisingly, critics – many of them Jewish – pounced:
Critics knocked Bret Stephens, the ultra-conservative New York Times columnist known for his controversial writings, for a recent op-ed titled ‘The Secret of Jewish Genius’ in which they accuse him of promoting eugenics on Saturday.
In the column, Stephens makes the claim that Ashkenazi Jews (Jews with ancestry from Central Europe [most notably Albert Einstein]) are more intelligent than other people. …
Stereotypes about Jews using special ‘Jewish genius’ to obtain power has long been a tool of anti-Semitic ideology to justify hatred of Jews.
(HuffPost, December 29, 2019)
But I am surprised that critics piled on Stephens while ignoring the Times. Because it only aggravated my stupefaction when it published an “Editor’s Note” to and a corrected version of Stephens’s column.
It removed references to Henry Harpending, the white-supremacy eugenicist Stephens cited to make his case. More to the point, it claimed that Stephens was unaware of Harpending’s racist and discredited writings.
But perhaps the editor should have also made a point of disclosing that Stephens himself is of Ashkenazi ancestry. After all, the only way his column makes any sense is to infer that Stephens identifies more with the “nazi” in Ashkenazi.
Even worse, though, the editor seems unaware that this clean up made a mockery of
- the Times’s editorial standards because it failed to catch this glaring offense in the first place; and
- Stephens’s presumed genius because only a dumb person would cite Harpending without knowing about the gravamen of his pseudo-scholarship.
This is a helluva way for the Times and Stephens to mark the end of this Hanukkah season.
Related commentaries:
Eighth night of Hanukkah…