The Fiddler by Marc Chagall

The current lack of Jewish self-awareness can be amusing. For example, Fox 17 in Michigan reports that a few of those low-key “It’s okay to be white” fliers have successfully trolled the city fathers of East Grand Rapids:

“As a Jewish American this really strikes home,” says Chad Zagel, First Ward Commissioner. “With the kind of world that I’m trying to build for my son, I’m deeply offended, the outrage knows no bounds.”

Unfortunately, this growing Jewish pompousness and obtuseness has serious long-term consequences. For example, much of the reigning conventional wisdom about immigration policy is based on a retconning of the past to make the late arrival of the Ellis Island immigrants into the central event of American history.

It’s a pious bit of ancestor worship that should be laughed off as understandable but ridiculous and, more important, irrelevant to determining our future.

But almost nobody ever gets the joke. For instance, when Donald Trump’s Jewish speechwriter Stephen Miller scoffed at a reporter’s claim that the “wretched refuse” poem on a plaque added to the Statue of Liberty in 1903 proves that America shouldn’t rationally regulate immigration, this was treated as shocking impropriety in the ever more humor-impaired press.

The Anne Frank Center announced:

“Stephen Miller has turned himself simultaneously into a Statue of Arrogance and a National Monument of Ignorance,” Goldstein said in a statement issue Wednesday. “His subpar knowledge of American history, as reflected in Emma Lazarus’ poem, means he couldn’t pass President Trump’s new immigration test. Therefore, Stephen, please leave.”

Similarly, much of the current mania over Russia is due to Putin’s role as the Neo-Czar of Russia, automatically triggering American Jews raised on Fiddler on the Roof to assume that the pogroms will begin at any moment. That would be funny…except that it could lead to WWIII.

Likewise, Trump is literally Hitler, except with blond hair.

One common explanation for why nobody, not even Larry David, is supposed to joke about Jewish tendencies is because Jews are so powerless.

An alternative and perhaps more plausible answer is because Jews are so powerful. As former vice president Joe Biden artlessly declaimed in 2013 at a Jewish American Heritage Month shindig:

“I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media, are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry,” he said. “The influence is immense, the influence is immense. And, I might add, it is all to the good.”

Nonetheless, it would seem imprudent for Jewish journalists to get so worked up excoriating “white privilege,” as in their promoting the bizarrely un-self-aware #OscarsSoWhite hate campaign, at a time when the 2 percent of the population that’s Jewish makes up roughly one-third of the Forbes 400.

Indeed, much of the Late Obama Age Collapse of the progressive coalition into squabbling factions seems to be focused on heavily Jewish institutions such as Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the universities. There isn’t all that much wealth left in red-state America for identity-politics groups to strip-mine, so their claws are now out for the wealthy institutions of blue-state America, whose leaderships are, of course, quite Jewish.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. An intelligent people should be able to sidestep these kinds of self-inflicted disasters. But when you make your highest priority keeping everybody else unaware, you wind up intellectually disarming yourselves as well.