The first essay I wrote in college argued that there was need for a new religion, as the traditional ones were in decay, leaving a vacuum. I based the argument on the rise of various ersatz replacements, including comic books.

t seems to me you’re saying that progressive secular Jews and progressive secular Christians have many things in common. I don’t know why that would be surprising or even worthy of note. Progressivism is their new replacement for religion, whether they see it that way or not.”

Yes and they are both being bitten in the ass by the environment they worked incessantly and with religious fervor, and by virtually any means necessary, to create.

Ah the joke. The Jewish kid comes home from school and tells his dad he was taught about the Trnity. The dad is upset and says that that is what Christians believe, not us. “We are Jews. There is only one God, and we don’t believe in Him!”

Might have been in one of those limks to Haaretz or something.

No, I’m not familiar with that joke.

I’m still not sure what you’re trying to say, though, although I’ll leave it be after this. It seems to me you’re saying that progressive secular Jews and progressive secular Christians have many things in common. I don’t know why that would be surprising or even worthy of note. Progressivism is their new replacement for religion, whether they see it that way or not.

To put it in coarse terms, I was saying that there was a parallel to the fake nonsupernaturalist leftist Jews in the fake nonsupernaturalist progressive Christians. They both function in society in somewhat similar ways, taking their deracinated religious principles and leveraging them against traditionally formed moralities harkening back to metaphysical principles. They are both atheists in search of the secular eschaton; though Rorty’s version is by his own stipulation relativistic and based merely on preferences or subjective evaluation.

I was actually unaware that he was engaging with a stream of Jewish thought which took its own supernaturalistic historical premises seriously.

However, that should come as no surprise, as he was determine to displace any metaphysical foundations from an analysis of moral groundings altogther.

The progressive Jews simply ignore that aspect.

Their attitude is well represented by that joke you – I think – told, about the Jewish kid who goes to school and on returning home informs his father he was taught about the Trinity that day.

https://www.ynetnews.com/category/3089#hk11dwqlb0

not surprising considering the cv of the investigator so call

With regard to the precursor or even catalysts of the dynamic we are witnessing now played out, I brought up Rorty as a “Christian” social parallel to those progressive “Jews” who have been under discussion.

Inasmuch as there is as you have mentioned, no pope of the Jews nor any obvious way to tell who is “a true Scotsman” or not in the case of Jews, and because the context of American Reform leftism was already established, I didn’t bother placing quotation marks around the term as I was carefully doing before.

I didn’t say that the percentage of Jewish Communists is irrelevant (I think I made that clear in the post I wrote on the subject, that I linked in my comment). I said that the fact that all the Communists Chuck knows are Jewish is irrelevant. The sample is way too small.

What some individual Jewish intellectuals did or said is not what JEWS do or say. Would you speak of “what Italians do” because of Gramsci? Or “what French do” because of Foucault?

As I’ve written before, Jews are often prominent in the fields in which they enter. They are also over-represented in many fields. Jews completely dominated the American musical theater during its golden years, for example.

There are plenty of non-Jewish leftists who were very very influential. Why care so much about the Jewish ones, or the half-Jewish ones, or the quarter-Jewish ones – by ethnicity rather than by having any sort of Jewish upbringing?

As for Rorty, I’ve heard very bad things about Rorty from several people who studied under him, although I fortunately never encountered his work in school. But I am puzzled as to why you bring him up. You write that you know “his background,” but he certainly wasn’t Jewish. Are you talking about this sort of thing?

Basically, I have no idea what you’re trying to say – except that Jewish leftists are leftists, and leftists have had a bad effect on institutions and culture. Agreed.

My view:

Fact that: Jewish [ of the specific variety we are referencing here] moral and social sensibilities were secularized and transformed by the Reform movement. As with the American Congregationalists who degenerated into Unitarian Universalists and morphed into Social Gospel “Christians”, the effect was that generations of collective-morals secularists Jew and nonJew wended their ideologically inspired way through the sinecured niches and benefices provided by our social institutions whether they were secular or religious, private or state. ****

Fact that: Jew hatred is old and in its essence is deeper than any annoyance at a subset of pushy loud and forward know-it-alls who make a secular tikkun olam religion out of hectoring others who just want to live in peace.

Fact that: although Jewish leftists are not the proximate “cause” of the open expressions of Jew hatred we are witnessing coursing through our public institutions, nor even the instigators of it; they (or more properly, their progenitors) assiduously prepared the permissive environment for it with what they consciously intended as socially subversive if ultimately self-protective and humanity benefiting, activities.

Just as a sample of this phenomenon, I would suggest a quick glance at the background and activities of two modern philosophers 1, Richard Rorty, whose background I knew; and 2, Hilary Putnam whose history [ as opposed to philosophy] I just today became aware of after mentioning him in another context elswhere.

****
See tangentially, Henry Olsen, Claremont Review of Books, Fall, 2017

‘ Working-class Americans reject what Williams calls the professional class’s “work devotion.” Professional elites, she argues, place great emphasis on work as a source of happiness and accord high priority to it. They readily uproot—and in the worst cases, abandon—their families in pursuit of better work opportunities. Working-class whites see work as a means to life, but professional classes see it as “a vocation, a calling, a métier,” as David Brooks wrote in Bobos in Paradise (2000).

This “work devotion” leads professionals to interact with other people in ways that working-class whites see as suspect. Professionals’ status and success depends as much on whom they know as on what they actually do. Thus, they network and use their interactions with others for professional purposes, not solely or even primarily to form real relationships. “This peculiar combination of the personal and the strategic strikes the working class as insincere,” Williams writes. This leads to a belief in plain speech as a moral virtue for the working class.”