The Hebrew Conservative is a blog that’s worth your time to follow, especially if you’re Jewish and conservative. I’m sharing an interview with Amy Wax, by Romo1979.
Wikipedia describes Amy Wax as follows:
Amy Laura Wax (born January 19, 1953) is an American lawyer, neurologist, and academic. She is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her work addresses issues in social welfare law and policy, as well as the relationship of the family, the workplace, and labor markets. She has often made remarks, about non-white people, described as white supremacist and racist.
In other words, she’s an intelligent person whose opinions are worth taking into consideration. Here is an excerpt from the interview, and you should visit the source for the entire thing.
We were happy to contribute to your legal fund and hope you will come out triumphant. Are you enjoying these battles?
Thank you and any publicity that you can get for it would be great. I do have lawyers fees that are rapidly accumulating – these very large very wealthy universities that are arrayed against you and that’s how they try to wear you down and drive you away.
Am I enjoying this? Well, not really, I’d rather be writing stuff and reading stuff as professors do. My summer is kind of trashed. They do intend to trash your summer, that’s all part of the plan. I teach a course in law and neuroscience, I have ideas for articles and book reviews and the like. Obviously, I can’t publish in law reviews because they are all woke, but there are a lot of outlets that I get published in, like Claremont. So I would like to focus on what I am writing, but I can’t do that because really this is a full-time job.
That’s a downer.
Yes, but I think the way I keep myself going and inspire myself to fight is that I see it indeed as a war. There’s a reason they call it a “culture war,” and I tell my students that. A lot of students reach out to me, not just conservative students, but students who are completely upset by what’s happening on campus. They are really afraid of their fellow students and rightly so.
Fearful of what?
They are fearful that if they say anything they will be punished and penalized. So, as a result, there is a ghastly pall over most of the classes – there aren’t discussions going anymore because nobody dares to say anything. So I told my students that I am going to hang in there. I think it would be very discouraging for them if I cut and run. That’s a big factor that’s motivating me.
On Brahmins and Jews
After your Tucker Carlson interview, which was incredibly impressive, I wrote a panegyric about you, did you get a chance to read it?
I didn’t read it in detail. You have to understand that I am overwhelmed with messages and also litigation.
No offense taken. In any case, you pointed a finger at the highly observable phenomenon of the Brahmin corporate lady, coming here from India, then immediately dumping on America as racist, sexist, etc., becoming angry cultural warriors.
I love the culture warrior label because that is indeed what they are doing. They are out there on the barricades, yet they are saying I am the culture warrior.
Can’t the same critique though be pointed at American Jews? Dumping incessantly on America?
Oh totally. I get a ton of mail and messaging about that interview – most of it just abuse and vilification – but, some of it pretty intelligent, and a common question is “What about the Jews, why are you letting them off the hook?”
Well, I am not. I said in another interview that Jews have a lot to answer for. They are a very successful group, they’ve risen to the top and have a tremendous amount of cultural influence in the media and entertainment and the universities and publishing, you name it. If it’s an intellectual sphere, they are in it. And I am very disappointed in how they have used that influence. I think they have used it in ways that have in some respects been very disruptive and very intolerant of the fact that this country contains people that don’t agree with their kind of Davos-man cosmo-universalistic super-rights-based lefty ideology.
They don’t like dissent.
They really oppose it and they oppose it whether it is for sound reasons or just due to people just thinking differently. And they have utter contempt for those thinking differently and are determined politically to mow them down.
Was it always like this?
Yes, and no. I might have told this anecdote elsewhere. I remember years ago when I was a little kid, my parents were arguing over the local public school having Christmas pageants and Christmas carols and basically acting very Christian. My mother was very indignant. But my dad simply said, “Judy, it’s a Christian nation, they got here first. You have to understand that this town is overwhelmingly Christian, let them have it, it doesn’t hurt you.” So he basically said, “Judy shut up.”
Good advice!
I remember sitting at the dinner table like it was yesterday thinking, “He’s right. You know, he’s got the better of this let me tell you.” And of course, I loved the Christmas pageants. I loved the Christmas carols, I love the hallelujah chorus. I wasn’t harmed or traumatized by it in any way. Nor did I feel like they were trying to get me to practice their religion. That was absurd.
So where does it come from?
I’ll give you the most charitable explanation. I think that Jews have been mistreated throughout history and they have been treated as threatening outsiders. They have been under siege in Christian societies. They have experienced some horrible things. Including a massive attempt at genocide. But the problem is when they came to this country they just couldn’t shake that underdog mentality.
So basically unloading their PTSD on the good people of America.
That’s how they do it, right? Making common cause with the black community. Which, at the beginning of civil rights I could certainly see. But now, with BLM’s determination to DEMOLISH the legacy of the enlightenment is just really whacko and incredibly dangerous and destructive. I mean an attempt to take us from the first world to the third world is what they are doing. And for Jews to be complicit in that…
When we do become a third-world hybrid of Honduras and Bangladesh, who’s going to be suffering first?
Jews! For the whole woke thing to be spearheaded by Jews, I’m sorry, but I can’t understand it. All I can say is that Jews are having fewer and fewer children. So, maybe that critical part of the Covenant which not only commands respect for those who come before but also solicitude for those who come after, maybe that part of Judaism is just gone. The part about maintaining that thread of continuity and loyalty among the generations…
I would have liked to include the entire interview here, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to contact The Hebrew Conservative staff or writers for permission.
I think Jews have felt threatned by conservative/traditional viewpoints in
America. AMERICAN conservatives and traditionalists, are NOT as a rule
Antisemitic. In Europe, to be a traditionalist of good standing, one needed to
be Antisemitic-it went with the territory. Not so in America.
The history of Jews in America has usually been a positive one. Jews have
achieved things here that they could never achieve anywhere else.
M. Hirsh Goldburg in his book “The Jewish Connection” calls America
“Promised Land number 2.”
The “Brahmin corporate ladies” that first come to mind are Indra Nooyi and Pramila Jayapal. F both of them.
As for the Christmas carols in the public schools, they were quite open about it back in the early 00s at my son’s elementary school in a small town in Nevada, and my reaction was GOOD! F the ACLU too! If only my son’s autism didn’t keep him from understanding the meaning behind it, I could have explained it all and how we’re Jewish and have a different tradition, but respect theirs too.