The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements

The Culture of Critique was originally published by Praeger in 1998, and reissued in paperback with an extended preface in 2002. The Kindle edition is an expanded version of the 2002 paperback edition, including significant expansions of the material on Jews and the left, the New York Intellectuals, and Neoconservatism. The basic method remains the same: It discusses influential intellectual and political movements that have been spearheaded by people who strongly identified as Jews and who viewed their involvement in these movements as serving Jewish interests. In addition to the new material mentioned above, it focuses on the Boasian school of anthropology, psychoanalysis, leftist political ideology and behavior, the New York Intellectuals, and the Frankfurt School of Social Research. In addition, I describe Jewish efforts to shape United States Immigration policy in opposition to the interests of Americans of non-Jewish European descent. An important thesis is that all of these movements may be seen as attempts to alter Western societies in a manner which would neutralize or end anti-Semitism and provide for Jewish group continuity either in an overt or in a semi-cryptic manner. At a theoretical level, these movements are viewed as the outcome of the fact that Jews and non-Jews have different interests in the construction of culture and in various public policy issues (e.g., immigration policy).