The specter of left-wing antisemitism is presented as a major threat facing Jews in the United States today. Certain centrist Jewish magazines, such as Tablet, have entire sections of their website dedicated to “left wing antisemitism.” The Conversation suggests that it has entirely displaced right-wing antisemitism.^[1] Even the Nation, as recently as February 15, 2025, intimated the Left was insufficiently attuned to apparently real and urgent Jewish “concerns.”

Leftists attempt to counter or dispel this charge by asserting that contemporary antisemitism is mainly propagated by the Right. While there is some truth to this, insofar as there are factions of the US Right that are constantly Jew-baiting and suffused with neo-Nazi sympathies, these trends tend to be more marginal and less institutionally influential. In fact, the Euro-American Right, on the whole, tends towards philosemitism, as it serves a variety of useful ideological functions at present. There are three primary vectors through which this philosemitism is expressed.

Vector One: Race and IQ

A major ideological column propping up the phenomenon of right-wing philosemitism is the obsession with so-called Jewish IQ, an issue around which a cross-section of Jewish and non-Jewish right-wing intellectuals have united. Jews, it is argued, for example in Richard Lynn’s The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement, have higher IQs than their gentile peers (White and Black) around one standard deviation above the mean IQ of Whites. The argument goes that this was selected for and passed on through years of interbreeding and is reflected in their high levels of achievement. This rough constellation of beliefs is held among Jews, for reasons of politics and probably self flattery to some extent, and non-Jews on the Right alike. It does ample work in shoring up anti-egalitarian politics, as will be shown. Of the three vectors of philosemitism on the Right, this one probably has the least amount of organic support among Jews. In fact, some of its greatest critics like Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and Steven Rose are left-wing Jewish scientists. But among the Jewish intelligentsia it has more sympathizers than one would expect given their generally liberal inclination, and indeed, as will be shown, such sympathies cut across ideological lines.

IQ-based, right-wing philosemitism as an identifiable school of thought emerges after the passage of the Civil Rights Acts and the political honeymoon between Black and Jewish Americans begins to wane. Psychologist Arthur Jensen published an infamous article in the Harvard Educational Review suggesting that, after one year of civil rights, we had done all we could to eliminate inequality.^[2] It’s hard to know fully what motivated this line of inquiry, but the broader social context does provide some hints. This paper was published a year after the infamous Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike was triggered when Black American Brooklyners seeking community control of schools in their district came into conflict with the largely Jewish dominated teachers union. There was a perception among many Jewish Northerners who, though supportive of Civil Rights in the South, were becoming uncomfortable with its effects spilling over into their own territory, so to speak; if they could make it, why couldn’t Black Americans? In an interview with TrueAnon, Norman Finkelstein notes that among Jewish students at the time, many had taken to Jensen’s work, believing it to hold some validity in explaining the apparent conundrum.^[3]

In 1994, psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray published their co-authored book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, in which they claimed to establish, on the basis of low quality and underpowered studies, not only the inferiority of Black Americans but the superiority of Ashkenazi Jews. This became an incantation among white nationalists to inoculate themselves against charges of racism–after all, how can one be a racist, particularly of the old world variety, if they think Jews are smarter than everyone else?

The marriage has not been wholly harmonious and tensions between the philosemitic and antisemitic factions of the Right occasionally flare up. The former is broadly rationalist and “pro-enlightenment,” with some liberal sympathies that tend to be coterminous with a certain kind of Judeo-Christian/Western chauvinism. The latter is a bit more esoteric and romantic and sometimes flirts with various antisystemic movements, and, at least in its early years, is symbolized best by a figure like US fascist Francis Parker Yockey.

It’s difficult to separate tactical from principled considerations—Ashkenazi Jews, especially in the United States, are well integrated into White America and well off, making it not only practically difficult to cleanly distinguish them from gentile Whites but also unwise analytically. At the same time, they are, in general, closely aligned within the Democratic Party (around 90%) making the task of peeling them off as a group not feasible.

These are fissures that are to some extent embodied by the debate between “race-realist” philosopher Nathan Cofnas and white supremacist evolutionary biologist Kevin McDonald.^[4] The latter set off a great deal of discussion on the Right by repackaging theories of Judeo-Bolshevism and wrapping them up in the language of evolutionary psychology. He proposed that various, generally left-coded intellectual and social movements like multiculturalism, feminism, communism, Freudianism, Zionism, and so on were part of a grand evolutionary strategy on the part of Jews to preserve and maintain their power within their societies. They either physically dispossess whites of control over their demographic and economic power or in some way demoralize or drain them of their natural vigor and disposition towards self preservation and dominance.

This was met by a somewhat feverish reaction on the part of some on the far Right, such as Nathan Cofnas or paleoconservative political commentator John Derbyshire,^[5] which may seem baffling when one considers the sort of vitriol directed at “blacks,” passed off as science or neutral observation, that one commonly finds in their corner. In any case the dispute is emblematic of some of the disagreements on the Right that emerge as a result of philosemitism. Cofnas, unsurprisingly, attributes Jews’ prominence in certain political and social movements to their superior IQ and their overrepresentation in cities and centers of urban life, and correctly notes that Jews are fairly well represented in both right-wing and left-wing intellectual circles.

In his new book, Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right, historian Quinn Slobodian touches on an important figure here—one Nathan Weyl, a Jewish ex-communist and radical libertarian in league with others like right-libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, cited by Hernstein and Murray—and neatly threads a needle that helps paper over some of these differences. Making an almost Nietzschean case for philosemitism, Weyl argued that the persecution of Jews is necessarily driven by resentment—it’s a form of “aristocide.”^[6] They have higher IQs than gentiles and so are inevitably overrepresented among elites and possess inordinate amounts of social and economic capital. They sit at the top of a natural hierarchy—Nazism is wrong, therefore, because it was an inversion of the natural hierarchy and a revolt against nature (as all egalitarianism is, according to Murray Rothbard).

In a sense, Weyl weaponizes the Left concern for racial and ethnic minorities into an argument in defense of rule by an elite. In this worldview, attributing individual or group status to structural or contingent historical factors (as opposed to innate genetic or cultural features) and seeking to deconstruct such systems of privilege that distribute the collective fruits of a society in such an arbitrary way necessarily maligns those at the top for benefiting from such a system, and if they are on the whole disproportionately comprised of this or that ethnic group then the Left has simply reproduced its own “woke racism.”

Bari Weiss, though not particularly interested in race and IQ, forwards this argument:

For Jews, there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity. If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation—and Jews are 2% of the American population—suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege. This conspiratorial conclusion is not that far removed from the hateful portrait of a small group of Jews divvying up the ill-gotten spoils of an exploited world.^[7]

This kind of argument—that requires we ignore racial inequality or naturalize it—appears again and again, and not just in right-wing circles.

A major Jewish acolyte of this reactionary ideology, Steven Pinker, is in fact a luminary of modern US liberalism. Genetic determinism is a constant theme in much of his early work, beginning with his 1994 book The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, where he forwards linguistic nativism, a proposition which, though not as controversial as hereditarianism, is not entirely uncontroversial among psychologists.

However, it was in his second major book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, that he laid it on rather thick. Pinker suggests heritability of intelligence is high, differs among groups, and leaves open the possibility that certain groups are disposed towards lower levels of intelligence and certain groups higher. Leftists reject these conclusions, in his reading, because they make egalitarian politics untenable. Pinker also asserts that values are not derivable from facts and that the Left has nothing to fear by accepting the reality of genetic and racial difference—apparently unable to discern the obvious contradiction.^[8]

Apart from his own writing, Pinker has spent much of his career rehabilitating virulent racists like Steve Sailer and Greg Cochran. He managed to secure a place for the former’s essay in the 2004 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing, despite the article having absolutely nothing to do with science and the author having absolutely no scientific credentials to speak of. The essay is a bizarre piece that analyzes the United States invasion of Iraq and attributes the failure of the US to establish democracy (presumably the invasion’s sincere mission) to an Arab disposition towards cousin marriage.^[9] Unsurprisingly, Sailer also endorses the theory that Ashkenazi Jews are substantially more intelligent than others, citing Cochran's 2006 paper “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence."^[10]

One set of incubators for much of the modern new Right’s racialist thinking, the so-called “rationalist” spaces formed in the Bay Area beginning in the late 2000s, picked up a lot of this partly by direct influence. Many of the participants would go on to serve as the court intellectuals of Silicon Valley. Scott Alexander, the ring leader of these circles, links to one of Steven Pinker’s main sources in his article on Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence. One emergent voice from these circles, known as Crémieux, remains a major face of contemporary racialist discourse and, of course, is a fervent proponent of the Jewish intellectual supremacy thesis—this was apparently quite the hot topic some months ago.

Crémieux regularly circulates all the typical race realist arguments about national IQs, certainly the most preposterous set of theses by people in this camp, and the purported existence of genetic racial “clusters.” It’s not an accident that their name is a reference to Adolphe Crémieux, a Jewish French Minister of Justice whose decree in 1870 established the enfranchisement of Jews in Algeria as proper French citizens—with natives and Muslims of course not being granted these same privileges en masse.

Vector Two: Immigration and Antisemitism

In Europe (and the United States to an increasing degree) the invocation of the spectre of antisemitism has acted as the basis for immigration restrictionism. In the US, though at the moment there are probably some true believers, this angle is largely the provenance of opportunist right-wing activists, such as Christopher Rufo, who are largely unconcerned with Israel-Palestine or antisemitism and are simply taking advantage of the ease by which unilateral deportations can be carried out against student visa holders (that are Arab or pro-Palestine). “Moderate” Zionist Jewish organizations like the ADL are merely happy to go along with it. In Europe, however, this issue runs much deeper and is bound up with incredible hostility toward Arabs and Muslims independent of views on Palestine.

In France, this issue became quite salient following the murder of Ilan Halimi a Moroccan Jew who was kidnapped and held ransom for money. This crime, like many of those committed against French Jews, are carried out to some extent by Muslim immigrants, not as a result of antisemitism, but because they are largely a poor and an underserved community. In other words, they are not typically directed at Jews qua Jews—it is rarely ideological and follows patterns of crime typical of stratified societies. Even many of those crimes committed under some specific radical Jihadist or Islamist ideological banner are carried out by young men typically on the fringes of society who are often under the sway of serious mental disturbance. That, however, has not prevented conservative elements in the European Jewish community from exploiting this issue.

Though sometimes a racialist argument is made by the far right that Arabs and Muslims are predisposed to crime against people generally, immigration is leveraged in an increasingly disturbing fashion in debates over antisemitism, in which it is argued that loose restrictions have allowed for the reintroduction of the “formerly defeated” scourge of antisemitism by Muslim immigrants into the West. France and the UK are said to be “importing” antisemitism into otherwise philosemitic Western societies. All the while, elements of the Jewish community come more and more to identify themselves with Western middle class norms and dispositions and less with their working-class immigrant ancestors, imbibing and even propagating this anti-immigrant ideology.

Indeed, Western European Jewry, particularly in the UK and France, are generally quite conservative as compared to their North American counterparts and this issue, along with Zionist policy (the two are interlinked incidentally), largely drive these politics. In France, vote shares are impossible to know specifically because of the nature of French demographic statistics, but according to an Ipsos poll some 20% of Jews expressed support for the National Front coalition in the 2024 elections and this almost certainly came down to the issue of immigration and antisemitism.^[11] This is despite the fact that the party’s disgraced former leader is famously a barely disguised Nazi sympathizer and was even brought to court. A similar, though less extreme, story can be told in the UK where around 90% of Jews identify with the Tories.^[12]

This is encapsulated well in a figure like conservative commentator Douglas Murray, whose career in the 2010s, after a largely failed attempt at influencing foreign policy, has been spent heaping on the most grotesque hatred against Muslim immigrants. In his The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, and to a lesser extent Democracy and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, numerous pages are spent on how Muslim immigrants have dramatically increased the level of antisemitism in Europe—incredibly attributing the lack of Jewish observance in places as far flung as Ukraine to fear of Muslims attacking their spaces of worship.^[13]

Murray’s colleague and friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali has spent practically her entire professional life stoking hatred of Muslims throughout Europe and the United States. Her most recent book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights, rises just barely above the level of Birth of a Nation-level racism, depicting Muslims as rapist hordes that pose an acute threat to white (she is not shy about specifically racializing this phenomena) European women. She is also a promoter of the notion that Muslim immigrants pose a threat to Judeo-Christian civilization (despite being an immigrant herself), and unsurprisingly, like Murray, is a thoroughgoing Zionist.

Vector Three: Zionism Itself

However, the most dangerous and actively genocidal variant of philosemitism on the Right is Zionism itself. In terms of how it relates to the integration of Jews into whiteness, the story is slightly more complicated than the immigration or intelligence questions. To some extent the polarity appears to be reversed as those working and lower middle class Jews coming from Eastern Europe filled the ranks of the American Jewish Committee while their German Jewish cousins in the American Jewish Congress were generally either non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. The denizens of Reform Judaism, often well off wealthy bankers, were implacable foes of Zionism in its early years fearing it would delay the project of integration. This tracks to some extent as they came of age as a minority group prior to the advent of Zionism.

Upon further inspection it becomes clear that the forces that converged to turn the Jewish intelligentsia toward Israel are borne of the shift in US imperial grand strategy. This shift occurs, unsurprisingly, in tandem with the shift in US academia writ large and the political establishment generally. The change in grand strategy was a turn towards Israel as a strategic asset, a check on nationalist currents in the Middle East. Even those that reject the idea that Israel, currently, is a strategic asset, like Mearsheimer and Waltz (proponents of the primacy of the Israel Lobby), maintain that during the Cold War, with the 1967 war as the starting point of the relationship, Israel was in fact an important ally and strategic asset.^[14] In The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, Noam Chomsky outlines how this development came to pass as the US saw independent nationalism in the Third World as a critical threat to the free flow of capital and US control of global resources. He notes that:

Through the 1960s, American intelligence regarded Israel as a barrier to Nasserite pressure on the Gulf oil-producing states, a serious matter at the time, and to Russian influence. This conclusion was reinforced by Israel’s smashing victory in 1967, when Israel quickly conquered the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.^[15]

It’s no coincidence that the prominent Jewish neoconservative “New York Intellectuals” most doggedly committed, at a time when the term did not necessarily have the same pro-war connotations it has now, to some form of negotiated settlement in Vietnam (as opposed to withdrawal, the demand of the anti-war movement) also became fanatical Zionists during the 1967 war. Chomsky, in the same chapter, notes how editors of neoconservative magazines like Commentary practically never mentioned Israel until the 1967 war—it was seen as pathetic and weak, and was not really considered a relevant player. It was not until it leaned forthrightly into its role as Sparta and took on the martial value of serving as the enforcer of Western interests in the Middle East (and abroad) that it began to feature more prominently in their politics.

If there is anything to be drawn, then, from the reality of right-wing philosemitism, it is in fact the opposite of what is implied by right-wing ideologues, who suggest allegedly identitarian leftists fetishize oppressed minorities per se and separate groups into oppressed and oppressor. The reality is that any individual or group's status within a society depends on particular institutional arrangements. It is highly context specific and nothing can be said about where one group stands in general abstracted from questions of time and place. It’s absolutely derisory to treat Jews as downtrodden and vulnerable because of the Holocaust, even as Israeli boots trample over the Palestinians, for the same reason it is vulgar to treat settler-colonists anywhere, who themselves often are fleeing persecution from their native land, as being victims.

1. Arie Perliger, “Antisemitism has moved from the right to the left in the US − and falls back on long-standing stereotypes,” The Conversation, October 25, 2023, https://theconversation.com/antisemitism-has-moved-from-the-right-to-the-left-in-the-us-and-falls-back-on-long-standing-stereotypes-215760.

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2. Arthur R. Jensen, "How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?, Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 1 (Winter 1969), https://arthurjensen.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/How-Much-Can-We-Boost-IQ-and-Scholastic-Achievement-OCR.pdf.

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3. TrueAnon, "Norman Finkelstein Interview Pt 1," January 20, 2021 (Youtube 22:50-26:55), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzrWYyx6sMM.

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4. Nathan Cofnas, "Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy: A critical analysis of Kevin MacDonald’s theory," Human Nature 29, no. 2 (2018): 134-156.

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5. John Derbyshire, “The Marx of the Anti-Semites,” The American Conservative, March 10, 2003, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-marx-of-the-anti-semites/.

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6. Nathaniel Weyl, "Aristocide as a Force in History," The Intercollegiate Review 3, no. 6 (1967): 237.

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7. Bari Weiss, “End DEI,” Tablet, November 7, 2023, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/end-dei-bari-weiss-jews.

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8. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin, 2002).

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9. Steve Sailer, “The Cousin Marriage Conundrum,” in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2004, ed. Steven Pinker and Tim Folger (Houghton Mifflin, 2004).

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10. Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending, "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence," Journal of Biosocial Science 38, no. 5 (2006): 659-693.

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11. Ian Johnston, “France’s Muslim and Jewish Voters Fear Rising Extremism,” Financial Times, July 25, 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/55740b08-dd73-4ac5-a8be-9a20b5dfeb56.

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12. Josh Dell, “UK Jewish Community Likely to Come out in Force for May’s Conservatives,” The Jerusalem Post, https://www.jpost.com/international/uk-election-jewish-community-likely-to-come-out-in-force-for-mays-conservatives-496331.

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13. Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), Chapter 17.

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14. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel lobby and US Foreign Policy (Macmillan, 2007).

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15. Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (South End Press, 1999).

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