#daniel friedman

Could be nostalgia for all that is lost? Could it be that our love is star-crossed?

Daniel Friedman is an American author and lawyer. He is best known as the author of the Buck Schatz series of novels that began in 2012 with the release of Don’t Ever Get Old. He is a Memphis native who graduated from White Station High School in 1999.

Buck Schatz

Don't Ever Get Old (2012) — Buy on Amazon!

Don't Ever Look Back (2014) — Buy on Amazon!

Running Out of Road (2020) — Buy on Amazon!

Lord Byron Mystery

Riot Most Uncouth (2015) — Buy on Amazon!

Claire's Last Secret (By: Marty Ambrose) (2018) — Buy on Amazon!

A Shadowed Fate (By: Marty Ambrose) (2019) — Buy on Amazon!

Forever Past (By: Marty Ambrose) (2022) — Buy on Amazon!

Chronological Order of Lord Byron Mystery

Claire's Last Secret (By: Marty Ambrose) (2018) — Buy on Amazon!

A Shadowed Fate (By: Marty Ambrose) (2019) — Buy on Amazon!

Riot Most Uncouth (2015) — Buy on Amazon!

On October 17th, the New York Times published an op-ed celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Million Man March that neglected to mention the anti-Semitic history of its organizer, Louis Farrakhan. In response, former Times editorial board member Bari Weiss tweeted that the institution had adopted “a worldview in which Jew hate does not count.” The author of the Times op-ed, Howard University professor Natalie Hopkinson, replied that “ppl who have become white”—that is, Jews like Weiss—“should not be lecturing Black ppl about oppression.”

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Exposing and objecting to racial disparities became the purpose of the New York Times around August 2019, when executive editor Dean Baquet called a town hall meeting attended by the paper’s staff. He announced that, with the Mueller probe winding down, the paper needed to “regroup, and shift resources and emphasis” from Russiagate to the story of “race and class” and “what it means to be an American.” A few months later, the Times published “The 1619 Project” which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, and the paper’s editorial and ideological focus has been consistent ever since.

When Weiss left the Times in July 2020, she published a resignation letter on her blog in which she claimed that management indifference to harassment from progressive staffers had created an intolerable work environment. She has since argued that progressive ideology is increasingly hostile to Jews and other successful minorities because they undermine the narrative of systemic racism pushed by antiracist activists.

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In September, the Times published an interactive feature exploring the “Faces of Power” in the United States. The idea, the creators announced, was to look into the demographics of the people who “pass our laws, control Hollywood’s studios and head the most prestigious universities… [who] own pro sports teams and determine who goes to jail and who goes to war.” These powerful individuals were divided up by the institutions they control: who sits in Congress, who holds cabinet seats in the Trump administration, who runs giant companies, prestigious universities, movie studios, glossy magazines, fashion houses, and police departments. A photo of each person is included, and if the person is black, Hispanic, Native American, or Asian, their portrait is superimposed on a yellow background. Move the mouse pointer over a photograph, and the subject’s name appears. For each category, the Times included a count of members of underrepresented groups. Of 922 total individuals identified, 180 are people of color. The population of the United States is about 60 percent white, which means that whites are about 33 percent more common among the “faces of power” than they are among Americans overall.

The progressives at the New York Times aren’t the only ideological faction interested in the demographics of America’s “Faces of Power.” Although it was more slickly designed and presented, the Times’s package looked similar to the kind of anti-Semitic memes that routinely circulate on far-Right Twitter:

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The far-Right believes that the mechanisms of power have been seized by a sinister Jewish cabal, while the far-Left believes that institutions are jealously guarded by white heterosexual males. Both the Times package and the far-Right’s memes hope to communicate the same message to their respective audiences—they believe that depicting the institutions they hope to disrupt as rows of similar-looking faces will convince others that the system is unfair and needs to be corrected. Overall, the Times‘s project indicates that whites are overrepresented by about 30 percent among the figures pictured compared to their share of the general population.

The Times doesn’t identify Jews in their images, but these faces are disproportionately the faces of successful Jewish Americans. Nor does the Times explicitly argue that Jews wield an unfair degree of American power, or that they have acquired that power through illegitimate means. However, its graphics certainly imply that Jewish success must be dismantled to rebalance ethnic distribution. Jews only comprise about two percent of the US population. However, of the nine US Supreme Court Justices, three were Jewish prior to the recent death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When Barack Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the Court in 2010, the paleoconservative writer and former politician Pat Buchanan complained that if Kagan were confirmed, Jews would hold “33 percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?”

Jews are overrepresented in other categories of the Times‘s feature as well—of the presidents of the top 25 universities, nine are Jewish. Of the 15 people directing major news organizations, five are Jewish. Of the 100 US Senators and the 435 members of the House of Representatives, nine Senators and 27 representatives are Jewish. In other words, Jewish representation on the Supreme Court, in elite academia, and in media is about 15 times their demographic share of the general population. Proportionately, there are four times as many Jews in Congress as there are in the country as a whole.

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and the “Jewish Question”

Jews are overrepresented not by mere percentages but by multiples of their demographic representation in academia, media, law, finance, medicine, publishing, and entertainment. At dozens of the most selective and elite colleges, Jews are represented among undergraduates in proportions greater than five times their overall share of the population. The 15 million living Jews represent only two-tenths of one percent of the human population, but Jews have won nearly a third of all Nobel prizes awarded since the year 2000. Forty percent of American adults overall have completed postsecondary degrees, but three-quarters of Jews in North America are college graduates. As a result, Jews out-earn other groups on average, with more than four in 10 American Jews living in households that earn more than $100,000 per year.

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For much of the last century, the liberal position on race in America was that we should eliminate discrimination and prejudice, treat everyone as an individual, and award opportunities on the basis of merit. Some groups, like Jews, Asian Americans, and other minority immigrant groups have flourished under this system, but black Americans continue to be represented in fractions of their societal proportions in many elite settings. In response, the progressive view has evolved. Today it holds that treating everyone the same without regard to race is actually racist because it fails to consider the impact of historic and systemic discrimination. In this way, systemic racism is preserved by judging members of historically marginalized groups as less worthy according to ostensibly race-neutral criteria (for instance, test scores).

The writing of Ibram X. Kendi—professor, Atlantic columnist, and bestselling author of How To Be An Antiracist—provides the intellectual framework for the contemporary antiracist movement. Kendi argues that:

The most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a “race-neutral” one… there are ideas that express hierarchy and inequality. There are policies that create equity and inequity. The other aspect of it that is troubling is that there’s no such thing as a “not racist.” There is only racist and antiracist.

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Just as the alt-Right argues that Jewish control of media and finance is preserved through conspiracies and cabals, Kendi writes: “One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist.” If a group is less successful on average, then it is the result of victimization, and the group should be collectively promoted to rectify the inequity. If, on the other hand, a group is more successful than average, its members must be hoarding power and shaping policy to their benefit. Kendi’s proposals include amending the Constitution to ban inequity, criminalizing “racist ideas,” and creating a new police agency empowered with “disciplinary tools” of enforcement—it is hard to see these ideas as anything but extremely menacing to successful minority groups.

To Kendi’s right, intellectuals like Jordan Peterson have offered a simple explanation for the disproportionate number of Jews in the upper echelons of various fields: There are a disproportionate number of very smart Jews. However, when New York Times columnist Bret Stephens argued in 2019 that Jewish success was mostly attributable to Jewish culture, values, and norms, he was denounced as a eugenicist. Even the empirical claim that high intelligence is unusually common among Jews was blasted in American Scientist as racist pseudoscience. If it is racist pseudoscience to suggest that Jewish families and communities are unusually adept at cultivating talent, then what explanation remains for Jews’ disproportionate success?

On Twitter, Kendi has said that: “The only people who believe equality of outcome between racial GROUPS will never exist are the people who refuse to recognize that racist policy are behind the inequality of outcome between racial GROUPS.” In other words, if Jews are successful it is because they have shaped policy to benefit themselves at the expense of other groups. This is how Kendi and his antiracist disciples arrive—like the white nationalists before them—at the “JQ.” If we dismiss Jewish talent and culture as explanations for Jewish success then the only explanation left is that Jewish success is the result of Jewish mendacity.

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If antiracist policy distributes power, wealth, and success in proportions that mirror group representation, then successful minorities must be brought into equity with everyone else. That will require purges where they are overrepresented in prestigious institutions and professions, and quotas limiting their future success are necessary to achieve the antiracist vision. In order to make space for everyone to be proportionally represented, about 80 percent of Jews have to be pushed out of the media, the professions, and elite academia. But many progressives seem to believe that white supremacy can be dismantled without examining minority success if we simply fold successful minorities into the overarching category of whiteness. You don’t have to deal with the Jewish Question if you don’t acknowledge that Jews exist. Natalie Hopkinson employed this reasoning to dismiss Weiss’s complaint about her elegy to Farrakhan in the Times; since Weiss has “become white,” she lacks the standing to complain to a black writer about oppression.

The New York Times’s “Faces of Power” package doesn’t mention Jews at all; for its ideological purposes, all the Jewish people named and pictured in its lists are merely members of the undifferentiated white collective that maintains a stranglehold on American power. Many progressives—and a lot of progressive Jews—who favor the redistribution of power, wealth, and success among groups imagine that perhaps Jews are not a group who need to be considered independently of the larger category of whiteness during the reckoning. In a 2016 Atlantic article, writer Emma Green asked: “On the extreme Right, Jews are seen as impure—a faux-white race that has tainted America. And on the extreme Left, Jews are seen as part of a white-majority establishment that seeks to dominate people of color. Taken together, these attacks raise an interesting question: Are Jews white?”

This question has been asked repeatedly in major media outlets since. When Donald Trump signed an executive order extending Title VI protections against discrimination on the basis of national origin to Jews, Boston Globe columnist Rachelle Cohen argued that the notion of Jewish nationhood had justified anti-Semitism and even genocide in the past and invoked the trope of dual loyalty. To Cohen, Jews are just white people who happen to follow a particular religious tradition. Those who think like her may consider the Jewishness of so many of the people pictured in the Times package to be incidental to their whiteness. In which case, since they rose to their positions of power aided by systemic forces that favor whites, they can be culled in the name of diversity without the fact that they are Jews ever needing to be remarked upon. According to this logic, there is no Jewish genius—despite what Bret Stephens thinks—and there is no Jewish power or success, because the Jews are simply not a people. If Jewishness is just a social construct that can be dismantled and dissolved into whiteness, and if everyone in the way of progress can be redefined as white, then the antiracist project can achieve its goal of displacing the hegemonic oppressor without persecuting any minorities!

The only problem with this reasoning is that it is obviously wrong. I can look at the “Faces of Power” and pick out the Jews—so can you and so can the neo-Nazis at Stormfront. Natalie Hopkinson may declare Jews to be white so she can dismiss our experience of oppression, but we remain non-white to the perpetrators of the massacres at the Tree of Life synagogue, in Jersey City, and in Monsey, or to the perpetrators of the thousands of anti-Jewish hate crimes that occur each year and that have been increasing in frequency.

If I send my DNA to 23andMe, they can identify me as a Jew by my Jewish saliva and my Jewish blood. University of Chicago law professor Daniel Hemel noted in a Times op-ed that Jews cannot escape anti-Semitism by not practicing the Jewish religion, and ought to be protected from discrimination regardless of how they may self-identify. Some Jews may consider themselves to be white people with white privilege who benefit from white supremacy, but that is unlikely to impress those on the radical Left and radical Right who dislike Jews for ideological reasons of their own. Progressives may try to define whiteness in a way that elides the existence of Jews, but theoretical jargon cannot alter reality. Jews still exist, and bigots still want to disappear us, and some of those bigots are pursuing their agendas under the guise of virtuous antiracism.

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The unintended similarities between the memes produced by the alt-Right and the graphics produced by the New York Times expose the unexplored similarities between the ideologies and political missions of these two ostensibly opposed movements. Both ends of the political horseshoe are suspicious of Jews, along with Asian Americans and other successful minority groups. Antiracism went off the rails when its intellectual leaders decided they could use racial discrimination for positive purposes. That has evolved into the view, articulated by Kendi, that opposing discrimination is actually the real racist position. To enforce equity across the land, Ibram Kendi and his enforcers at his Department of Antiracism must dismantle not just white supremacy, but also Jewish, East Asian, South Asian, Catholic, Mormon, African, and Caribbean success, cutting down any group that outperforms any other group until all outcomes are equal. These groups must be purged from power and influence, stripped of their wealth, and gated from obtaining too much power or success again. This will be achieved with the application of racial quotas and by prohibiting any performance metrics that might indicate that some people are more qualified or talented than others.

The King of Chicago: Memories of My Father by Daniel Friedman

The King of Chicago is the story of a father-son relationship as real and hugely loving as that in Philip Roth’s Patrimony. At its heart is a young son who tries furiously to heal his father from a violent childhood inside a Chicago orphanage. The orphanage, the Marks Nathan Home, still stands today on the West Side of Chicago, marked by a tarnished, barely legible plaque. Once home to 14,000…