I find myself now, in middle age, with complicated and sometimes self-contradictory feelings about the Jews. Those early impressions — culture, wit, intelligence, kindness, and hospitality — are still dominant, and I have read enough to know what a stupendous debt our civilization owes to the Jews. At the same time, there are aspects of distinctly Jewish ways of thinking that I dislike very much. The world-perfecting idealism, for example, that is rooted in the most fundamental premisses of Judaism, has, it seems to me, done great harm in the modern age. That dreadful speech Charlie Chaplin gives at the end of The Great Dictator made me gag instinctively, even before I understood why. I also find the theories of Kevin Macdonald (The Culture of Critique) about the partly malign influence of Jews on modern American culture very persuasive — though this is not an endorsement of Macdonald's theory of "group evolutionary strategies," which I do not understand. And like (I suppose) every other Gentile, I have often been irritated by Jewish sensibilities, and occasionally angered by them
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