In an academic version of the Rachel Dozezal controversy, the New York Times is reporting that George Washington University is investigating the bizarre case of George Washington associate professor Jessica A. Krug who admitted in a Medium post Thursday that, despite publicly identifying as a black woman, she is in fact a white Jewish child from the suburbs of Kansas City. Krug has called herself a “cultural leech” and announced that she was “cancelling herself.” The Chronicle of Higher Education stated that some of the positions that she secured in teaching were due to her claimed minority status.
The case rekindles the tension in academic over claims of minority status, including the controversy surrounding the long-claims of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) who also taught at George Washington that she was a Native American. Much of our minority status designations are based on such self-identifications. The Census Bureau approach is based solely on self identification. Since 2000, it has allowed people to check multiple boxes for races and ethnicities. Brown University attracted attention for proposing a pure self identification system for “people of color.”
Krug, 39, wrote a Medium post titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.” She revealed what she described as a life built on a “napalm toxic soil of lies.” That career include different claims of minority status from African to Caribbean to Puerto Rican roots as well as being raised in a poor family in the projects. This background gave her greater credence in writing as a “historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora.”
Krug has a Ph.D. and is the author of the book “Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom,” according to her GW faculty profile. She was also a Diversity Achievement Scholar at Portland State and an Advanced Opportunity Fellow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
She wrote “To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness. I have built my life on a violent anti-Black lie, and I have lied in every breath I have taken.”
In a culturally ironic twist, she then declared that she was going to publicly commit self-cancelling: “I am a coward,” she writes, and then repeats it. “You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”
Notably, she insisted that she wanted to be held accountable. It is unclear legally what form such accountability could take. Securing minority positions or benefits can be fraudulent like those at Wisconsin. However, the benefits (as discussed in the Warren controversy) can be less direct or easy to isolate for academics. As with “stolen valor cases,” the most common punishment is public recrimination and isolation.
It seems she “played the system” to get ahead. Invoking “self-cancellation” is a novelty…a way to deflect blame while gaining big publicity. She’s the Bernie Madoff of African-American Studies, the P.T. Barnum of Liberal Progressivism (“a sucker is born every minute”). She’s building a market for her brand and her next book.
Like Rachel Dolezal’s Jessica Krug’s offense is self-punishing. I’m not interested in adding obloquy and embarassment to what Ms Kruq already feels. Not my business. She, at least, has the presence of mind to recognize she’s done wrong, which places her above 90% of the “peaceful protesters” violating other people’s civil rights by impeding their freedom of peaceable assembly. You could point to an antifa or BLM activist at randome and you’d be pointing at a less culpable person than Jessica Krug. Ms Krug has also done is all the service of showing how unreliable self-reporting is in matters of ethnicitiy (absent DNA analysis).
Turns out I was wrong – Jessica Krug only confessed about lying about her ethnicity when fellow ethno-Nazis found out about her lies: https://nypost.com/2020/09/03/jessica-krug-admitted-she-lied-about-being-black-after-being-caught/
Liathawa Elizabeth Warren isn’t a Native American Cherokee Indian either. Surprise, surprise, surprise!
I once drove a Jeep Cherokee..that makes me more Native American than Liawatha Warren.
I went to Wal-Mart and for about three weeks had more authenticity about being native American in my fridge than Prof. Warren had her entire life: http://blog.jonolan.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/warren-land-o-fakes.jpg
Jewish isn’t minority enough?
You tell us David. Are you Jewish? What is your experience of it, if you are?
I suspect that secular Jews, have an attenuated ethnic identity, based on a lack of observance of the Jewish religion, which makes them liable to disgusting self-negations like the professor in question. I am not Jewish, so I would not know of my own personal experience. However, this was the them of “The Vanishing Jew” by Alan Dershovitz. Before you call me an ant eye semite for advancing his thesis, consider arguing with his discussion of the subject, if you find it dubious. Once you have, then you can call me an ant-eye if it pleases you, but let me know what you thought of it.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/d/dershowitz-jew.html
“Introduction
The “Jewish Question” for the Twenty-first
Century: Can We Survive Our Success?
THE GOOD NEWS is that American Jews–as individuals–have never been more secure, more accepted, more affluent, and less victimized by discrimination or anti-Semitism. The bad news is that American Jews–as a people–have never been in greater danger of disappearing through assimilation, intermarriage, and low birthrates. The even worse news is that our very success as individuals contributes to our vulnerability as a people. The even better news is that we can overcome this new threat to the continuity of American Jewish life and emerge with a more positive Judaism for the twenty-first century–a Judaism that is less dependent on our enemies for its continuity, and that rests more securely on the considerable, but largely untapped, strengths of our own heritage.
American Jewish life is in danger of disappearing, just as most American Jews have achieved everything we ever wanted: acceptance, influence, affluence, equality. As the result of skyrocketing rates of intermarriage and assimilation, as well as “the lowest birth rate of any religious or ethnic community in the United States,” the era of enormous Jewish influence on American life may soon be coming to an end. Although Jews make up just over 2 percent of the population of the United States–approximately 5.5 million out of 262 million–many Americans mistakenly believe that we constitute a full 20 percent of the American people, because of our disproportionate visibility, influence, and accomplishments. But our numbers may soon be reduced to the point where our impact on American life will necessarily become marginalized. One Harvard study predicts that if current demographic trends continue, the American Jewish community is likely to number less than 1 million and conceivably as few as 10,000 by the time the United States celebrates its tricentennial in 2076. Other projections suggest that early in the next century, American Jewish life as we know it will be a shadow of its current, vibrant self–consisting primarily of isolated pockets of ultra-Orthodox Hasidim.
Jews have faced dangers in the past, but this time we may be unprepared to confront the newest threat to our survival as a people, because its principal cause is our own success as individuals. Our long history of victimization has prepared us to defend against those who would destroy us out of hatred; indeed, our history has forged a Jewish identity far too dependent on persecution and victimization by our enemies. But today’s most serious threats come not from those who would persecute us, but from those who would, without any malice, kill us with kindness–by assimilating us, marrying us, and merging with us out of respect, admiration, and even love. The continuity of the most influential Jewish community in history is at imminent risk, unless we do something dramatic now to confront the quickly changing dangers.
This book is a call to action for all who refuse to accept our demographic demise as inevitable. It is a demand for a new Jewish state of mind capable of challenging the conventional wisdom that Judaism is more adaptive to persecution and discrimination than it is to an open, free, and welcoming society–that Jews paradoxically need enemies in order to survive, that anti-Semitism is what has kept Judaism alive. This age-old perspective on Jewish survival is illustrated by two tragic stories involving respected rabbinical leaders.
The first story takes place in 1812, when Napoleon was battling the czar for control of the Pale of Settlement (the western part of czarist Russia), where millions of Jews were forced to live in crowded poverty and under persecution and discrimination as second-class subjects. A victory for Napoleon held the promise of prosperity, first-class citizenship, freedom of movement, and an end to discrimination and persecution. A victory for the czar would keep the Jews impoverished and miserable. The great Hasidic rabbi Shneur Zalman–the founder of the Lubavitch dynasty–stood up in his synagogue on the first day of Rosh Hashanah to offer a prayer to God asking help for the leader whose victory would be good for the Jews. Everyone expected him to pray for Napoleon. But he prayed for the czar to defeat Napoleon. In explaining his counterintuitive choice, he said: “Should Bonaparte win, the wealth of the Jews will be increased and their [civic] position will be raised. At the same time their hearts will be estranged from our Heavenly Father. Should however our Czar Alexander win, the Jewish hearts will draw nearer to our Heavenly Father, though the poverty of Israel may become greater and his position lower.”
This remarkable story is all too typical of how so many Jewish leaders throughout our history have reasoned about Jewish survival. Without tsuris–troubles–we will cease to be Jewish. We need to be persecuted, impoverished, discriminated against, hated, and victimized in order for us to retain our Jewishness. The “chosen people” must be denied choices if Judaism is to survive. If Jews are given freedom, opportunity, and choice, they will choose to assimilate and disappear.
The story recurs, with even more tragic consequences, on the eve of the Holocaust. Another great Eastern European rabbi, Elchanan Wasserman–the dean of the Rabbinical College in Baranowitz, Poland–was invited to bring his entire student body and faculty to Yeshiva College in New York or to the Beis Medrish Letorah in Chicago, both distinguished Orthodox rabbinical colleges. He declined the invitations because “they are both places of spiritual danger, for they are run in a spirit of freethinking.” The great rabbi reasoned, “What would one gain to escape physical danger in order to then confront spiritual danger?” Rabbi Wasserman, his family, his students, and their teachers remained in Poland, where they were murdered by the Nazis.
I call the approach taken by these rabbis the Tsuris Theory of Jewish Survival. Under this theory, the Jews need external troubles to stay Jewish. Nor has this fearful, negative perspective on Jewish survival been limited to ultra-Orthodox rabbis. Many Jewish leaders, both religious and secular, have argued that Jews need enemies–that without anti-Semitism, Judaism cannot survive. Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism and a secular Jew, believed that “our enemies have made us one … It is only pressure that forces us back to the parent stem.” In a prediction that reflects an approach to the survival of Judaism strikingly similar to that of the founder of the Lubavitch Hasidim, Herzl warned that if our “Christian hosts were to leave us in peace … for two generations,” the Jewish people would “merge entirely into surrounding races.” Albert Einstein agreed: “It may be thanks to anti-Semitism that we are able to preserve our existence as a race; that at any rate is my belief.” Jean-Paul Sartre, a non-Jew, went even further, arguing that the “sole tie that binds [the Jewish people together] is the hostility and disdain of the societies which surround them.” He believed that “it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew.”
If the Tsuris Theory of Jewish identity, survival, and unity is true, then Jews are doomed to live precariously on a pendulum perennially swinging in a wide arc between the extremes of persecution and assimilation. As the pendulum swings away from the Scylla of persecution, it inevitably moves toward the Charybdis of assimilation. In this reactive view, Jews have little power over their ultimate destiny. Our enemies always call the shots, either by persecuting us, in which case we fight back and remain Jewish, or by leaving us alone, in which case we assimilate. The only other alternative–the one proposed by Herzl–is for all Jews to move to Israel, where they control their own destiny. But most Jews will continue to ignore that option, certainly if our “hosts” continue to leave us in peace in our adopted homelands. In this respect, aliyah (emigration) to Israel has also been largely determined by our external enemies, since most Jews who have moved to the Jewish homeland have done so in reaction to anti-Semitism and persecution in their native countries.
Historically, therefore, there has been some descriptive truth to this pendulum view of persecution alternating with assimilation. Jews have retained their Jewish identity, at least in part, because of tsuris. Our enemies herded us into ghettos, created pales of settlement, discriminated against us, excluded us from certain livelihoods while pressing us into others. We stuck together and remained Jews, resisting as best we could the persecution by our enemies.
But there is more–much more–to Jewish identity than collective self-defense. There is something important that is worth defending. After all, until anti-Semitism changed from religious bigotry to “racial” bigotry–roughly near the end of the nineteenth century–persecuted Jews generally had the option of conversion. Unlike Hitler, our religiously inspired persecutors–the Crusaders, the Inquisitors, Martin Luther, and the pogromists–did distinguish between Jews who converted to Christianity and Jews who did not. Indeed, it was precisely their religious mission to convert the Jews, by whatever methods it took.
Many Jews did convert–some at knifepoint, others to advance themselves. The story about Professor Daniel Chwolson illustrates the latter phenomenon. Chwolson, a Russian intellectual of the nineteenth century, had converted from Judaism to Russian Orthodoxy as a young man, but he continued to fight against anti-Semitism. This led a Jewish friend to ask him why he had converted: “Out of conviction,” the great man said. “What conviction?” his Jewish friend inquired. Chwolson responded: “Out of a firm conviction that it would be far better to be a professor in St. Petersburg than a Hebrew school teacher in Shklop.” Yet despite the material advantages of conversion, most Jews resisted it. Clearly, those Jews–who sacrificed so much–remained Jewish not only in reaction to their enemies. More than our fabled “stiff-neckedness” was involved. There are substantive principles that Jews have been so stubborn about–that we have been willing to fight and even die for. For Jews who define their Jewishness in theological terms, it is easy to find that principle: It is God’s will. For the large number of Jews who are skeptical about being God’s “chosen people,” the principle is more elusive, but it is palpable to most of us, though difficult to articulate. It is a disturbing reality, however, that for a great many Jews, their Jewish identity has been forged and nurtured by our external enemies who have defined us as victims of their persecution.
Now, after two millennia of persecution and victimization, we may well be moving into a new era of Jewish life during which we will not be persecuted or victimized. If this comes to pass, we will need to refocus our attention on defining the positive qualities of Jewish” life that ought to make us want to remain Jews without “help” from our enemies. We must become positively Jewish instead of merely reacting to our enemies.
If Herzl’s and Sartre’s entirely negative view of the reason for Jewish survival were to persist even as we enter this new era of equality and acceptance, then Judaism would not deserve to endure. If Jewish life cannot thrive in an open environment of opportunity, choice, freethinking, affluence, success, and first-class status–if we really do need tsuris, czars, pogroms, poverty, insularity, closed minds, and anti-Semitism to keep us Jewish–then Jewish life as we know it will not, and should not, survive the first half of the twenty-first century. We have been persecuted long enough. The time has come to welcome the end of our victimization without fear that it will mean the end of our existence as a people. We must no longer pray for the czar’s victory out of fear that the end of our collective tsuris and the success of individual Jews will mean the failure of Judaism.
I believe that Jewish life can thrive in the next century, not despite the end of institutional anti-Semitism, the end of Jewish persecution, and the end of Jewish victimization, but because of these positive developments. The ultimate good news may be that the denouement of negative Judaism–Jewish identification based largely on circling the wagons to fend off our enemies–compels us to refocus on a more positive and enduring Jewish identification, which will be more suitable to our current situation and the one we will likely be facing in the twenty-first century, when Jews will have the unconstrained choice whether to remain Jewish or to assimilate. We may be entering a true Jewish golden age, during which we will prove, once and for all, that Jews do not need enemies to survive. To the contrary: We can thrive best in an open society where we freely choose to be Jews because of the positive virtues of our 3,500-year-old civilization.
I say we may be entering this golden age; there are no guarantees. Many Jews believe that the end is near, because increasing rates of assimilation and intermarriage are propelling us toward a demographic Armageddon. A recent apocalyptic article in a Jewish journal concluded that “Kaddish time” is fast approaching for the American Jewish community. (Kaddish is the prayer for the dead.) But reports of the death of Judaism may be premature–if we can change the way we think, and act, about Jewish survival. If we refuse to change, if we accept the current demographic trends as intractable, then Jewish life in America may indeed be doomed.
The challenge is to move the Jewish state of mind beyond its past obsession with victimization, pain, and problems and point it in a new, more positive direction, capable of thriving in an open society. For unless we do, we may become the generation that witnesses the beginning of the end of one of the most influential civilizations in the history of our planet–a unique source of so much goodness, compassion, morality, creativity, and intelligence over the past several millennia. The demise of Jewish life as we have come to know it would be a tragedy not only for the Jewish people collectively, but also for most of us individually–and for the world at large.
The thesis of this book is that the long epoch of Jewish persecution is finally coming to an end and that a new age of internal dangers to the Jewish people is on the horizon. Institutional anti-Semitism is on its last legs as governments, churches, universities, and businesses embrace Jews. No Jew today needs to convert in order to become a professor, a banker, or a corporate CEO. Although anti-Semitism persists in many quarters, today’s overt anti-Semites–the skinheads, militias, Holocaust deniers, and Farrakhan followers–have become marginalized. They continue to constitute a nuisance and pose a potential threat, but they do not have a significant day-to-day impact on the lives of most Jews, as anti-Semites in previous generations did. Today’s marginalized anti-Semites do not decide which jobs we can hold, which universities we can attend, which neighborhoods we can live in, which clubs we can join, or even whom we can date and marry. We no longer look up to anti-Semites as the elites in our society who determine our fate. We look down on anti-Semites as the dregs of our society who make lots of noise but little difference.
As Jews and Israel become more secure against external threats, the internal threats are beginning to grow, as graphically illustrated by the recent assassination of an Israeli prime minister by a Jew, the growing conflict between fundamentalist Jews and more acculturated Jews, the increasing trends toward intermarriage and assimilation, and the decline of Jewish literacy.
For thousands of years, Jews have been embattled. Surrounded by enemies seeking to convert us, remove us, even exterminate us, we have developed collective defense mechanisms highly adaptive to combating persecution by anti-Semites. But we have not developed effective means of defending the Jewish future against our own actions and inactions. This is our urgent new challenge–to defend the Jewish future against voluntary self-destruction–and we must face it squarely, if we are to prevent the fulfillment of Isaiah’s dire prophecy “Your destroyers will come from your own ranks.”
We must take control of our own destiny by changing the nature of Jewish life in fundamental ways. The survival of the Jewish people is too important–to us and to the world at large–to be left in the hands of those ultra-Orthodox rabbis who would rather face Armageddon than change the religious status quo. Just as Jews of the past changed the nature of Jewish life in order to adapt to external necessities and to survive the ravages of their external enemies, so, too, must today’s Jews change the nature of Jewish life to adapt to new internal necessities and to survive the demographic challenges of intermarriage, assimilation, low birthrates, and the breakdown of neighborhoods and communities.
A hundred years ago, Theodor Herzl identified the “Jewish question” of the twentieth century as the literal survival of Jews in the face of external enemies committed to our physical annihilation–Jew-haters in every nation where Jews lived as a minority. His solution–the creation of a secular Jewish state–was to change the nature of Jewish life in dramatic and unanticipated ways. A hundred years later, the “Jewish question” of the twenty-first century is survival in the face of our internal challenges. Herzl also anticipated that this new “Jewish question” might arise if and when our Christian hosts were to leave us in peace. This is now coming to pass. The solution to this Jewish question also requires the creation of yet another Jewish state: a new Jewish state of mind!
This book continues where Chutzpah (1991) left off, in exploring the larger issue of being Jewish today. In the concluding paragraphs of that book I issued the following challenge:
We have learned–painfully and with difficulty–how to fight others. Can we develop Jewish techniques for defending against our own success?…..”
The Jews have shown they can survive oppression. Surviving tolerance may be more difficult.
in the same way we might say Western man has survived the difficulties of history, but can he survive the products of his own success
the Japanese have survived being nuked and losing the war, but will they survive “herbivore men”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWoM4ooZBcc
roughly what we call a “soy boy”
these phenomenon were understood by Frederich Nietzsche who grappled with the problem of nihilism.
Martin Heidegger took that project farther. Ironically, even though Martin was literally a nazi, he has been embraced mostly by the post-war Left
I contend that Heidegger deserves a fresh look from conservatives. here prof Gottfried elaborates:
https://www.waterstones.com/book/martin-heidegger/alexander-dugin/professor-paul-edward-gottfried/9781593680381
Now you know why the American Founders restricted immigration to “…free white person(s)…” and why they generally restricted the vote to: Male, European, 21, 50 lbs. Sterling/50 acres.
America assumes a doom course to failure without those essential criteria.
Oops! We’re almost there.
Maybe this psychotic Feminazi White Shirt can get the vote in China – let’s ask Xi Jinping.
Hey Xi…
The inmates have taken over the asylum.
She needs to go live in a shitty apartment in a poor neighborhood in Baltimore and apply for jobs as if she never went beyond high school.
If a man can call himself a woman and dress like a woman … If a woman can dress in a male fashion and claim to be a man … When obama decided it was more advantageous to him (socially, economically, academically, politically) to identify as a black person, rather than acknowledge himself as bi-racial and the son of a white woman raised by her white parents … If k.harris saw some similar advantages of identifying, not as biracial and the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, but as black …
I don’t get it. She lied to a bunch of liars whose careers are built upon the promulgation of lots of little lies, and a few big, fat collective Lies. Don’t get ethical on us now. This is like young Vader apologizing for purloining one of the emperor’s cookies. No, no, don’t say you’re sorry – keep up the bad work!
I don’t get it. She lied to liars whose careers are built upon the promulgation of lots of little lies and one big, fat collective Lie. Seems to me she’s right on track! No need for remorse – that’d be like Darth Vader apologizing for pinching one of the emperor’s cookies. No, no – keep up the bad work!
Poke a Haunt Us returned in the flesh. How many more. Now it’s the turn of the reverse racists to complain but are they going to do anything. Lizzie Borden Warren got a free pass collected multiple $200 and may still get to be CEO of the FED. Chances are this one is a socialist too so..automatic protection from the law.
She’s a brazen grifter. The institutions she scammed deserve to be scammed.