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Almost everyone in the journalistic world is still trying to wrap their heads around the Jason Arday debacle. Meanwhile, much of the media—including Fox News, the BBC, The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Atlantic, The Daily Mail, and others—has seized the opportunity to weigh in with its own brand of “analysis” on the situation. The issue is not that these outlets should refrain from reporting on it. The more fundamental problem is the striking inconsistency with which many of them approach similar controversies when a Jewish figure is involved. In such cases, the same outlets often appear to treat the matter with considerably less enthusiasm, scrutiny, or attention.
Let’s take this slowly. We’ll begin with the troubling case of what happened to Norman Finkelstein after he demonstrated that Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz had plagiarized material and promoted what Finkelstein characterized as fabrications and fraudulent claims in books such as The Case for Israel. But before turning to the Dershowitz controversy, it is worth examining the academic fraud of Joan Peters (born Joan Friedman), who died in 2015 and whose work was admired by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Joan Peters, Plagiarism and the Fabrication of History
Norman Finkelstein’s break with the prevailing academic group-think—particularly on Israel and, later, what he calls the “Holocaust industry”—began during his doctoral studies, when he first encountered Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine. The book had been endorsed by prominent Jewish writers and historians, including Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, Daniel Pipes, and Lucy Dawidowicz.[1] Dawidowicz herself praised Peters for having “dug beneath a half-century’s accumulation of propaganda” and brought “into the light the historical truth about the Middle East.”[2]
Finkelstein subjected Peters’s claims to close scrutiny and examined the serious historical documentation underlying her citations. His findings were startling. As he later wrote, “It quickly became obvious that Joan Peters had concocted—and, more revealingly, that the American intellectual establishment had lent its name to—a threadbare hoax. As it happened, documenting the fraud…proved by far the easiest task as compared to publicizing my findings.”[3] Later Finkelstein noted that the book
“is among the most spectacular frauds ever published on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In a field littered with crass propaganda, forgeries, and fakes, this is no mean distinction. But Peters’s book has thoroughly earned it. The fraud in Peters’s book is so pervasive and systematic that it is hard to pluck out a single thread without getting entangled in the whole unraveling fabric. To begin with, the fraud falls into two categories. First, the evidence that Peters adduces to document massive Arab immigration into Palestine is almost entirely falsified. Second, the conclusions that Peters draws from her demographic study of Palestine’s indigenous Arab population are not borne out by the data she presents. To confound the reader further, Peters resorts to plagiarism.”[4]
As Finkelstein went on to say in Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, Peters’s book “From Time Immemorial was a colossal hoax. Cited sources were mangled, key numbers in the demographic study falsified, and large swaths plagiarized from Zionist propaganda tracts. Documenting the hoax and the rather more onerous challenge of publicizing these findings in the media proved to be a turning point for me.”[5] The frauds were so obvious that Avishai Margalit, chair of the philosophy department at Hebrew University, declared that From Time Immemorial is a “web of deceit.”[6]
After Finkelstein refuted the forgeries in Peters’s book, he writes, “Peters’s book has been rejected as worthless by the scholarly community in Israel and around the world…Yehoshua Porath, one of Israel’s leading scholars on the Arab population of Palestine during the pre-state period, described the book as ‘sheer forgery,’ adding that ‘in Israel, at least, the book was universally dismissed as sheer rubbish except maybe as a propaganda weapon…Given the well-known scholarly reputation of Peters’s book, no scholar would rely on it, any more than a scholar would rely on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’”[7]
To illustrate just how serious the problem was, Peters cites a book on population that states: “Medical and sanitary progress has made little headway among the Palestinian Arabs as yet, and cannot account for any considerable fall in the death-rate.” Finkelstein responded:
“If we consult the pages in World Population cited by Peters, however, we discover the following: ‘Medical and sanitary progress, so far as it affects the personal health and customs, has made little headway among the Palestinian Arabs as yet, and cannot account for any considerable fall in the death rate. But general administrative measures, in the region of quarantine, for example, have been designed in the light of modern knowledge and have been adequately carried out. Measures of this kind can be enforced almost overnight…Therefore we can find in these administrative changes, brought
about by the British occupation of Palestine, what is in any case a tenable explanation of the increase of population among Arabs.’ Carr-Sanders does indeed state that ‘medical and sanitary progress’ couldn’t explain the ‘fall in death rate,’ but only insofar as such progress impinges on the ‘personal
health and customs’ of the Palestinian Arabs.”[8]
As Finkelstein documents, Peters’s own footnotes often undermine the very thesis she set out to prove. He also demonstrates that she fabricated evidence that did not actually exist in order to support her argument.[9] At one point, Peters argues that the Hope Simpson Report, one of her sources, says that “some 300,000 unrecorded Arabs had entered and settled in Palestine.”[10] But Finkelstein noted that “the only policy statement in the Hope Simpson Report pertinent to her thesis reads: illegal immigrants should ‘at once [be] returned to the country whence they came.”[11]
At another point, when the Simpson Report declares that “there can be no doubt that there is at present time serious unemployment among Arab craftsmen and among Arab laborers…Arab unemployment is serious and general,” Peters states that “Arab unemployment was claimed when in fact such was not the case; according to the Report, Arab unemployment figures were inflated.”[12] When the Anglo-American Survey of Palestine (1945-6) reports that “the Survey divides Arab immigration into Palestine during World War II into two categories,” one of which was “the 3,800 Arabs who were brought in under ‘official’ arrangements,” Peters reports that “what the official Anglo-American Survey of 1945-6 definitively disclosed…is that…tens of thousands of ‘Arab illegal immigrants’ [were] recorded as having been ‘brought’ into Palestine.”[13]
From Time Immemorial reached the height of its popularity in the United States in 1984. Yet none of the major newspapers and periodicals that had praised the book as a historical breakthrough—including The New Republic, The Atlantic, Commentary, The Village Voice, Dissent, and The New York Review of Books—were willing to “run any critical correspondence” about the book. The work also received numerous honors, including the prestigious National Jewish Book Award.[14]
When word began to spread that the book was essentially worthless as scholarship, The New York Review of Books could no longer remain silent. In February 1985, it “finally commissioned and in early March received a lengthy piece on From Time Immemorial by the noted Israeli scholar Yehoshua Porath.”[15] Even then the Porath essay “was kept under wraps…The Porath essay dismissed out of hand Peters’s ‘theses,’ yet scrupulously avoided any mention of her fraudulent scholarship; every effort to raise this obviously crucial issue in the Review’s correspondence columns proved unavailing…Faced with escalating accusations of censorship leveled mainly by the British press, the Times finally ran a piece in November 1985. It was placed in the Thanksgiving Day (non-)issue, on the theater page, without even a listing in the index. Indeed, all the painstakingly assembled documentation of the hoax was cut from the published version.”[16]
Why, then, did neoconservatives such as Saul Bellow, Daniel Pipes, and other prominent intellectuals and publications that had previously endorsed the book do so in the first place? Were they simply mistaken about its merits, or were their judgments shaped by an underlying ideological commitment?
Responses from prominent Jewish intellectuals varied considerably. Barbara Tuchman attributed the criticism of Peters’s work, among other factors, to “growing anti-Semitism.” Saul Bellow eventually conceded that, “given another chance,” he would not have endorsed Peters’s work. When asked about the book, Elie Wiesel initially remarked that “political science” was not his field. Yet when the paperback edition appeared, Wiesel endorsed the work, as did Jewish historian Theodore White and Jewish scholar Bernard Lewis of Princeton.[17]
Lewis, in particular, had been supplied with substantial evidence that Peters could not be taken seriously. Nevertheless, he “categorically refused to comment on any aspect of the matter even with a graduate student at his own university (this writer [Finkelstein himself]).” Ironically, Lewis later lamented that the association of his name with the alleged disinformation campaign was “an interesting example of how…myths are born.”[18]
Finkelstein states that he examined Peters’s more than one thousand references and found that nearly all were fabrications or instances of misinformation, amounting, in his words, to “a threadbare hoax.” Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflictwas Finkelstein’s Ph.D. dissertation at Princeton University. Yet, according to Noam Chomsky, he “could not get a faculty member to read it.”[19] Why? Because Finkelstein had already begun to depart from the prevailing Jewish group-think. He eventually received his Ph.D., but, according to the account cited above, only “out of embarrassment.”[20]
Alan Dershowitz and the Regurgitation of Joan Peters’s Fabrications
Peters’s book–and the fabrication it perpetuates–might have long since become relics of the past. But Alan Dershowitz, then the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard, revived many of its fraudulent theses in his own book, The Case for Israel, which Finkelstein documented as plagiarism, fabrication, and hoaxes. Finkelstein declared:
“Dershowitz is aware that I have read his books; I have read them carefully, I studied their documentation and I can demonstrate quite easily as I have in my book Beyond Chutzpah that Professor Dershowitz is a charlatan and a fraud. Those are harsh words, but had I limited myself to words, then people would have good grounds [for] doubting me. However, I took some three hundred pages to document all of my claims in the book. And [it is] precisely because I have documented my claims that Dershowitz does not want to appear on television with me…I have recently chosen not to answer to his accusations because they progressively become more hysterical and less grounded in any kind of reality. He no longer has anything to do with my scholarship and believes that my late mother was a Nazi collaborator…It’s quite impossible to debate claims like that, any more than I would debate a member of the flat earth society.”[21]
Dershowitz and Finkelstein went head-to-head in a debate in 2003, shortly after the publication of Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel. I highly recommend watching this intense exchange, during which Finkelstein challenged the book’s central premises one by one and did so with extensive scholarly documentation. I am reproducing the entire debate here because it provides a revealing illustration of why Dershowitz’s academic record warranted far greater scrutiny at Harvard long ago:
As the debate makes clear, Finkelstein argued that several of Dershowitz’s citations in The Case for Israel involved serious misquotations, misleading representations of his sources, and obvious plagiarism. Even more striking, one of the sources Dershowitz cited as scholarly material was a high-school syllabus!
Shortly after the debate, Dershowitz launched a campaign to have Finkelstein dismissed from DePaul University. It got even interesting because Dershowitz, knowing that Finkelstein was on the brink of releasing Beyond Chutzpah which meticulously showed the fraudulent enterprise of Dershowitz, went on a campaign to threaten the University of California not to release the book. In a desperate move, Dershowitz even contacted then-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in an attempt to pressure the university not to publish the book. But the effort failed. The governor’s office declined to intervene, writing: “You have asked for the Governor’s assistance in preventing the publication of this book. He is not inclined to otherwise exert influence in this case because of the clear academic freedom issue it presents.”[22] We read:
“According to The Nation’s reporter Jon Weiner, who is also a professor of history at the University of California, Dershowitz got a prominent law firm to write stern letters to the university regents, to the university provost, to 17 directors of the press and to 19 members of the press’s faculty editorial committee.”[23]
Yet Dershowitz was deeply frustrated when he realized that academic freedom still prevailed, even at the University of California, Berkeley. After learning that UC Berkeley would proceed with the book’s publication, Dershowitz denounced the university as “very hard-left” and “very anti-Zionist,” adding, “No other university press would publish garbage like this.”[24]
The fundamental question is this: As a lawyer who represents accused criminals and who appeared confident that he could prevail in a case against Finkelstein, why didn’t Dershowitz sue him? Why not take the matter to court and present the evidence, allowing a judge or jury to determine whether Finkelstein should be held liable for the alleged emotional and academic harm—and, if so, whether damages were warranted? In fact, during the debate on Democracy Now!, when Finkelstein began presenting his case that Dershowitz had plagiarized Joan Peters, Dershowitz quickly interrupted, warning that allegations of plagiarism had “great legal implications.” Finkelstein responded that he was prepared to face those implications and urged Dershowitz to address the evidence. One can certainly speculate about why Dershowitz did not pursue the matter in court.
Dershowitz apparently had at least an iota of common sense: He did not dare take Finkelstein to court. A serious judge, he may have realized, would be unlikely to accept the claim that Dershowitz had not plagiarized, given the cumulative evidence. Instead of pursuing the matter in court, Dershowitz launched a campaign aimed at doing nearly everything possible to prevent Finkelstein from publicizing his allegations. The advantage for Dershowitz was that Finkelstein had not yet received tenure. Dershowitz apparently understood that, if he played his cards carefully, he might be able to pressure DePaul University into denying Finkelstein tenure. As legal scholar and judge Frank J. Menetrez later put it,
“In September 2006, as Finkelstein’s tenure review got underway, Dershowitz sent a 7-page, single-spaced letter, plus 14 single-spaced pages of supporting materials, to the former chairman of Finkelstein’s department, arguing that Finkelstein’s ‘purported scholarship’ consists of nothing but ‘ugly and false assertions’ and ‘preposterous and discredited ad hominem attack[s].’ Dershowitz sent a similar but even larger packet of materials-totaling over 60 pages-to a large but unknown number of members of DePaul’s faculty and administration, including every professor at the law school.”[25]
After a lengthy review, DePaul concluded that Finkelstein was among its most respected professors, a view reportedly shared by many of his students. In fact, “Finkelstein’s department had voted 9-3 in favor of tenure, and a college-level committee unanimously joined that recommendation, 5-0.”[26] Yet the pressure was intense. The university faced a difficult choice: retain Finkelstein or bow to outside pressure calling for his dismissal?
Finkelstein was eventually denied tenure and left the university. What is particularly troubling is that much of academia rallied to Dershowitz’s defense while showing comparatively little concern about the allegations of plagiarism, misquotation, and questionable sourcing surrounding The Case for Israel. Elena Kagan, who was at Harvard at the time, asked then Harvard president Derek Bok to do the hatchet job. Bok, of course, concluded that Dershowitz did not plagiarize, and that’s all Dershowitz wanted to hear. Dershowitz wrote at the Harvard Crimson:
“Former Harvard President Derek C. Bok was appointed to conduct the investigation and found no plagiarism. Neither did James Freedman, the former president of Dartmouth and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The Harvard Law librarian concluded that my use of citations was certainly correct.”[27]
But Dershowitz was not entirely off the hook. Menetrez, whose work was featured in the epilogue to Finkelstein’s paperback edition of Beyond Chutzpah, sent a letter to Harvard University, with a copy forwarded to Dershowitz. Menetrez raised a series of straightforward questions about the issues Finkelstein had identified in Beyond Chutzpah—the same issues Menetrez had independently investigated and concluded that Finkelstein was correct about. While awaiting Harvard’s response, Menetrez said:
“I began receiving heated and not entirely coherent responses from Dershowitz. The most noteworthy feature of Dershowitz’s replies is that despite repeated opportunities to answer my question about whether Harvard had investigated the identical errors issue, he never did.He did not even say that he believed they had investigated it. Rather, he stuck to his previous pattern of refusing to acknowledge that the issue even existed, and he repeated his claim that he had been quoting some of the relevant primary sources long before Peters’ book was published.”[28]
Menetrez concluded that Harvard had not seriously investigated the allegations against Dershowitz as a thorough investigator would have done. He also believed he had sufficient evidence to substantiate that conclusion.[29] Menetriz concluded, “No honest and competent investigation by Harvard would have held Dershowitz to a lower standard than Harvard sets for its freshmen.”[30] Finkelstein, by contrast, became something of an academic and intellectual outcast and subsequently struggled to secure another academic position in the United States.
The Tribe’s Philosophy
What does this story actually tell us? The lesson is that challenging Jewish orthodoxies in academia can carry a steep professional price—particularly for those who have not yet secured tenure. In other words, you either need tenure or membership in the new academic Sanhedrin. If you are well connected and continue promoting one dubious claim after another, you may enjoy greater protection than a non-tenured scholar who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy, even when the latter’s arguments are better supported by the evidence.
The career of Larry Summers, the former Jewish president of Harvard University, illustrates this point. Summers maintained a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein for years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction, and emails later revealed the extent of their continued correspondence. Harvard ultimately placed Summers on leave while it investigated his ties to Epstein, and in February 2026 Summers announced that he would retire from his Harvard professorship at the end of the academic year.
The point here is that the Jewish tribe has been able to successfully develop powerful networks of insiders who protect one another, soften the consequences of misconduct, or provide influential figures with opportunities that would be unavailable to less-connected academics. Even after he was linked to Epstein, Harvard still honored him as he left the university, giving him the new title of “President Emeritus.”[31]Conversely, Jewish scholars like Finkelstein who challenge Jewish orthodoxies often find themselves marginalized, particularly when they lack institutional protection.
Finkelstein’s academic career was already in shambles when he exposed serious problems with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Rather than offering substantive counterarguments to the criticisms raised by Finkelstein and his coauthor, historian Ruth Bettina Birn, Goldhagen threatened legal action against both of them.[32]
Once again, Goldhagen received widespread acclaim for a book that Finkelstein and other scholars regarded as academically fraudulent. The irony was that Goldhagen was rewarded with prestigious accolades, while Finkelstein was academically excommunicated
Claude Gay and Bill Ackman
Let us bring the same issue into a more recent Harvard controversy. Claudine Gay came under intense criticism after her congressional testimony and her response to questions about antisemitism and criticism of Israel. Within days, billionaire investor Bill Ackman launched a public campaign against her, arguing that she had been appointed in part because of DEI considerations. Ackman subsequently highlighted allegations of plagiarism in Gay’s Ph.D. dissertation at Stanford and called for her resignation, which she ultimately submitted.
Ideologues such as Jared Taylor welcomed Ackman’s campaign against Gay and cited it approvingly. So far, so good—if the principle is that plagiarism should be taken seriously regardless of who commits it. But the situation becomes considerably laughable when the same standard is applied elsewhere. Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, was also accused of plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation at MIT. Oxman herself acknowledged that parts of the dissertation had been taken from other sources without proper attribution. Ackman’s response was notably different: he defended his wife while describing the criticism of her as part of what he characterized as an antisemitic attack!
Did Taylor call for Ackman’s wife to resign or demand an apology from her? Perhaps American Renaissance readers and supporters should put that question directly to Taylor and ask him for an answer.
Einstein’s Plagiarism Problem
Perhaps we should now turn to one of the most consequential controversies in the history of physics: the allegations that Albert Einstein plagiarized earlier work.
Mathematician Roger Schlafly has revived a long-standing argument that much of the work commonly credited to Einstein had been developed, at least in part, by others. The renowned mathematician Henri Poincaré and physicist Hendrik Lorentz, for example, had already made important contributions to the ideas underlying relativity before Einstein published his work.[33]
This argument was articulated by the British mathematician and historian of science Sir Edmund T. Whittaker (1873–1956), who argued in his work A History of the Theories of Aether & Electricity that the equation (E = mc2) should be attributed to earlier work by Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré rather than to Einstein alone.“Einstein’s friend and colleague Max Born had even tried to persuade Whittaker not to publish this opinion,” but Born himself later admitted that it was highly plausible that Einstein got his idea from Poincare.[34]
Similar arguments were advanced by the Russian physicist A. A. Logunov in his book Henri Poincaré and Relativity Theory.[35] After Whittaker confronted Einstein with these claims, Einstein reportedly expressed the hope that posterity would recognize Lorentz and Poincaré for their contributions to the development of relativity theory. As biographer Albrecht Fölsing puts it:“After nearly half a century this was the first time that Einstein ever mentioned Poincare in connection with the special relativity theory.”[36]
Biographer Dennis Brian, however, dismissed the charge that Einstein derived some of his work from earlier sources as having little merit. His evidence? No one—not even Poincaré, Brian argues—ever accused Einstein of plagiarism. Yet Brian overlooks the fact that Lorentz came remarkably close to making precisely such an accusation, writing: “Einstein simply postulates what we [Lorentz and Poincaré] have deduced.”[37]
Schlafly argues: “On every essential part of special relativity, Poincare published the same idea years earlier, and said it better. It was Lorentz’s and Poincare’s work, not Einstein’s, that led to time being considered the fourth dimension.”[38] Shlafly continues to say that while historians “prefer to credit Einstein” for the theory, “no one can dispute the fact that Poincare discovered all the elements of special relativity with help from Lorentz and others, published them before Einstein, and developed a theory that was either identical or observationally equivalent to Einstein’s.”[39]
Einstein’s 1905 paper in particular “fails to cite any references to the scientific literature. The failure is extremely odd,” since “the best mathematical physicists in Europe had been writing papers on the subject for ten years, and Einstein did not cite any of them.” Einstein “uses some of Poincare’s terminology without mentioning Poincare’s name. Einstein is not just sloppy; he is artfully vague about his sources.”[40]
Here is how Einstein defended his position: “It appears to me that it is the nature of business that what follows has already been partly solved by other authors. Despite that fact, since the issues of concern are here addressed from a new point of view, I am entitled to leave out a thoroughly pedantic survey of the literature…”[41]
When Einstein began receiving negative reviews of his theory, he was quick to invoke the charge of antisemitism—a response that reportedly surprised some of the scientists who had criticized his work.[42]
The Troubled Legacy of DEI, Affirmative Action, and Civil Rights
What we are seeing here is that the evidence suggests that you cannot critically examine the Jewish tribe in academia—the powerful forces that have shaped much of academic and intellectual life throughout the Western world. Even when the same group helps put you in a position of power through programs such as DEI and affirmative action, it will continue to support you as long as you promote those programs, serve as their public face, and do their work. But the moment you challenge the system itself, you may find yourself in the same position as Claudine Gay. What is equally important is that organizations such as the American Renaissance often do everything they can to make the Jewish tribe invisible in the ideological war. In many cases, people like Taylor end up defending the group while ignoring much of the historical scholarship that challenges its role.
People like Harold Cruse learned this lesson the hard way. A longtime communist, Cruse eventually concluded that Jewish revolutionaries were promoting these movements among blacks just to advance policies that black Americans would not have supported had they understood that they were being used as subjects in a broader social experiment.[43]
In fact, affirmative action, DEI, and even the broader civil rights movement have undermined much of the progress achieved by black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time, students at schools such as Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., were achieving remarkable academic success, earning a reputation for excellence that extended well beyond their local communities.[44] To avoid any confusion about the timeline, this period spans roughly 1870 to 1955, when institutions such as Dunbar High School produced students who would have viewed programs such as affirmative action and DEI with skepticism or outright disdain. In fact, wherever affirmative action has been applied, it has produced disastrous effects.[45]
People such as Thomas Sowell have argued that, although the civil rights movement was presented in part as an effort to advance a democratic vision, its policies ultimately produced damaging consequences for black communities.[46] Sowell, however, having long refused to address the Jewish question, failed to seriously examine who was behind the civil rights movement and affirmative action, or what their motives were.
For example, affirmative action can historically be seen as a movement with strong Jewish involvement. The book Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States has an entire chapter titled “Affirmative Action: Jewish Ideals, Jewish Interests.”[47] Jewish professor Marc Dollinger writes in his study Jews and Liberalism in Modern America: Quest for Inclusion, “Almost all American Jewish organizations supported the notion of affirmative action. The American Jewish Committee praised the practice of giving ‘special assistance to special categories of people on whom society has enforced hardship and injustice.’”[48]Jewish writer J. J. Goldberg even admitted in his book Jewish Power:
“Jewish power is felt, too, in a wide variety of domestic spheres: immigration and refugee policy, civil rights and affirmative action, abortion rights, church-state separation issues, and much more….Yes, by the end of the twentieth century, American Jewry has become to be viewed around the globe as a serious player in the great game of politics, able to influence events, to define and achieve important goals, to reward its friends and punish its enemies.”[49]
Dollinger makes a similar argument. He goes so far as to argue that the “politics undergirded Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, [which] inspired white liberal support for affirmative action,” is essentially the by-product of what he calls “Jewish affinity” or “Jewish exceptionalism.”[50] Later in the book, Dollinger goes on to say: “most American Jews resisted the allure of renascent conservatism. They continued to vote for the Democratic party and supported the creation of affirmative action programs. When President Johnson proposed aggressive race-based reform ideas, almost all Jewish organizations approved.”[51] Dollinger again declares:
“As they had in earlier generations, Jewish leaders created a political program that guaranteed their rights as an ethnic minority as it appealed to American society as a whole. During the consensus era of the 1950s, that meant forging alliances with other minorities to achieve common goals. In the 1960s, it demanded that Jewish leaders adopt an ethnic nationalist approach to American liberalism. By emulating the political strategies of militant black activists, Jews enjoyed the opportunity to take aggressive self-defense measures without risking charges of dual loyalty and without swaying far from the contemporary political norm.”[52]
Dollinger’s last statement is certainly not true. Black political activism in the United States was influenced by a wide range of Jewish intellectuals, organizations, and political movements. Black activists encountered revolutionary ideas from Jewish figures and Jewish political movements such as Stalinism and largely from the socialist and communist tradition.
For example, Frederick Douglass’s political development was largely shaped by his close intellectual and sexual relationship with Ottilie Assing, who supported his work and translated his writings even into German.[53] By the twentieth century, the influence of Jewish revolutionary movements on black radical thought became even more direct. W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, wrote a lengthy eulogy praising Joseph Stalin shortly after the Soviet leader’s death in 1953. This was years after the Great Purge in Soviet Russia, during which Stalin’s regime was responsible for the deaths of millions through executions, forced starvation, and other forms of repression. Du Bois described Stalin as “a great man.”
Du Bois was unmoved by Stalin’s crimes, which, in his view, paled in comparison with the Atlantic slave trade, the Nazi death camps, and other atrocities.[54] Du Bois, though sympathetic to communism throughout much of his ideological life, did not formally join the Communist Party until 1961, at the age of 93, just two years before his death in 1963. Numerous Black intellectuals and writers followed Du Bois in embracing communist ideas, and the list is extensive. They include Harry Haywood, Otto Huiswoud, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, Grace P. Campbell, William L. Patterson, Benjamin J. Davis Jr., Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Doxey A. Wilkerson, James W. Ford, Angela Y. Davis, and Eldridge Cleaver, among others.
Many of those people didn’t even know that the party they associated with was a movement that did not really care about their well-being but were trying to get them involved in subversive activities which always turned out to have disastrous effects upon their communities and subsequent generations.
The same point can be made about the civil rights movement. Jewish activists such as Stanley Levison played important organizational and financial roles behind the movement. Levison helped raise money for civil rights organizations, helped develop the idea that became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. throughout his career.
After decades of what I would call subversive activity, we eventually ended up with affirmative action and DEI programs, and both have led to one failure after another. In that sense, affirmative action and DEI did not develop in isolation. They depended on Jewish revolutionaries and organizations, intellectuals, activists, and political institutions that promoted and sustained them. So, it is difficult to explain these movements simply as spontaneous developments without examining the people and organizations that helped shape, finance, and advance them. What ideologues like Jared Taylor would do is ignore all of that historical reality and focus only on blacks who capitalized on the messy system which Jewish revolutionaries had created.
Sowell had plenty of opportunities to research this important topic. In fact, over the years, the scholarly literature on the subject had grown enormously. By the time Sowell began writing books such as Intellectuals and Society, in which he devoted a chapter praising the Iraq War as a “surge” that had worked, there was already a substantial body of literature on the subject. For example, Intellectuals and Societywas published in 2009, while The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy was published in 2006. Yet Sowell did not even attempt to address the latter book, even though it presented the Iraq War as a war strongly influenced by Israel.
Similarly, Murray Friedman’s The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (2005) and What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance (1994), along with America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (2004), were published long before Sowell began writing books such as Dismantling America. Yet, like Jared Taylor and others, he was unwilling to confront the Jewish Question, leaving him unable—or unwilling—to grapple with what may be among the most fundamental political and intellectual questions of our time. In his book Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study, Sowell documented quite rightly the failures of affirmative action wherever it has been practiced. He devoted an entire chapter to affirmative action in the United States. One might therefore expect him to examine who was behind the movement from its inception and what motivated its leading advocates.
Marc Dollinger’s study, for example, was published in 2000, five years before Sowell’s book appeared in 2004. Yet Sowell says virtually nothing about the key figures who shaped the American affirmative-action movement. I suppose he knew that, had he documented these incontrovertible facts, he would have found himself in the middle of “World War III” and might even have been pushed out of academia, particularly at the Hoover Institution. He also would have found it difficult to secure publication with major New York publishers such as Basic Books, or even with university presses such as Yale University Press.[55]
Plagiarism: One Rule for the Powerful, Another for Everyone Else
To return to the central thesis of our discussion, when rabbis such as Walter Homolka were accused of lifting more than 60 pages of his 240-page dissertation from a German scholarly article by Dorothee Schlenke,[56] much of the Zionist-oriented media coverage was comparatively limited, allowing the controversy to fade from public attention. By contrast, when blacks are accused of plagiarism, the issue is often portrayed far more prominently, with commentators such as Jared Taylor and others and even Bill Ackman quick to cite such cases as evidence of broader academic misconduct.
In fact, if one is to be brutally honest, the academic world is riddled with cases involving plagiarism, research misconduct, and other forms of academic fraud. One can point to figures such as Gayle Pohl, Stephen E. Ambrose, Ward Churchill, and Kevin M. Kruse, Laurence H. Tribe, H. Gilbert Welch, Shervert H. Frazier, Matthew Whitaker, Susannah Dickinson, Matthew Whitaker, among others. Yet how much attention do such cases receive from the American Renaissance crowd? Jason Arday’s academic misconduct deserved scrutiny, but what about Ambrose and the other cases? Will the same people who have written extensively about Arday and other blacks who have been duped by DEI and affirmative action policies devote comparable attention to misconduct by the very people we have looked at? Will they even examine the work of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and Alan Dershowitz? If the argument is that academic fraud and plagiarism should be exposed regardless of race, ideology, or political affiliation, then surely these cases deserve scrutiny as well.
Surely one will find traces of Marc Hauser’s scientific misconduct among those who have been quick to weigh in on the Arday case. Hauser, an evolutionary psychologist and former Harvard professor and the author of Moral Minds: How Nature Designed a Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, was found by Harvard to be solely responsible for eight instances of scientific misconduct—three involving published papers and five involving unpublished studies. A subsequent federal investigation by the Office of Research Integrity also found that Hauser had engaged in research misconduct, including fabricating and falsifying data.[57] This led Nicholas Wade of the New York Times to admit that “There is a wide spectrum of scientific sins, ranging from wrist-slap offenses like bad data storage at one end, to data fabrication at the other.”[58]
These “scientific sins” did not simply emerge overnight, nor did they begin in 2026 with the Arday case. Numerous scholarly studies have shown that academic misconduct has been a persistent problem in the academic world for decades.In fact, scholars such as Marcel C. LaFollette have shown that the structure of scientific publishing itself can create incentives and opportunities for misconduct.[59]
As LaFollette thoroughly documents and meticulously argues, what happens when scientific publishing creates an environment in which a scientist’s livelihood depends on publishing frequently, obtaining grants, securing prestigious positions, receiving awards and other recognition, building a reputation, accumulating citations, securing authorship in academic journals and professional circles, and producing supposedly significant “discoveries”? What happens when scientists operate in a world governed by the unspoken maxim of “publish or perish”?And what happens when scientists begin with an assumption they are determined to prove at any cost—even through the deliberate fabrication, elaboration, and manipulation of evidence—as illustrated by the now largely forgotten story of Piltdown Man, which was widely accepted as genuine for nearly four decades?[60]
According to LaFollette, serious ethical problems inevitably enter the equation. Under such pressures, some scientists may be tempted to publish fraudulent or sensational claims rather than risk professional obscurity. And if misconduct goes undetected—or worse, if the academic community rewards the work despite its flaws—the incentives to engage in fraudulent research practices become even stronger, while the risks of producing careful, rigorous scholarship appear comparatively greater. In that sense, scientific misconduct has essentially been “codified.”[61] According to LaFollette, cases such as those of cardiologist John Darsee, British psychologist Cyril Burt, whose work focused on intelligence and heredity, and dermatologist William T. Summerlin illustrate how scientists can succumb to pressures that encourage research misconduct.
LaFollette is not some lone scholar documenting these problems in academia. Other scholars have gone even further, examining almost 750 documented cases of academic fraud, fabrication, and plagiarism spanning the period from 1880 to 2010, and concluding that the problem is largely systemic rather than incidental, with some researchers going so far as to fabricate data or invent observations that never existed.[62]
And here Ernst Haeckel played a major role. Haeckel was determined to prove Darwin right, and he made it his mission to spread the gospel of Darwinism throughout Germany. In the process, he manipulated evidence. As historian of science Nick Hopwood himself puts it, scientists recognized problems with Haeckel’s drawings, particularly his use of “artistic license.”[63] But Haeckel’s defenders somehow argues that Haeckel’s case cannot be reduced to a simple charge of deliberate deception.
What we are seeing here confirms scholar Bernard E. Rollin’s argument in Science and Ethics: ethical assumptions enter science long before the experiment even begins.[64]These assumptions are philosophical and moral in nature. They are not, and can never be, scientific in themselves. If they were scientific, then the argument would become circular and would eventually beg the question. When they lack a sound metaphysical foundation, the scientific conclusions built upon them can legitimately be called into question.
This was part of the broader context in which one of Britain’s most famous psychologists, Cyril Burt, was denounced as a fraud who fabricated evidence and invented data to support his theories of intelligence testing—an episode that ultimately destroyed his scientific credibility. By 1979, many scientists and observers had concluded that Burt had “fabricated data to fit the predictions of his favored genetic theories.”[65] The British psychologist and historian of psychology L. S. Hearnshaw had initially been a strong admirer of Cyril Burt. But after undertaking extensive research for his 1979 biography, Cyril Burt: Psychologist, Hearnshaw changed his assessment and concluded that the evidence of scientific fraud was overwhelming. He wrote:
“The evidence…has shown beyond reasonable doubt that these charges were true: Burt did deceive the scientific community on matters of moment, and even after the utilisation of his data by others to substantiate conclusions of social significance, he never issued disclaimers. He committed a grave offence against the tacitlyaccepted codes ofscientific ethics.”[66]
This is why I have argued for years that genuine science cannot ultimately contradict metaphysical morality. When an apparent contradiction arises, the first question should be whether the underlying scientific assumption is itself valid.[67]
To sum up: We are waiting for those who have latched onto easy cases like Arday’s to do the right thing: to acknowledge openly that the academic world is riddled with what Yale epidemiologist Michael B. Bracken has recently called “bias”—biases that can shape research outcomes in pharmacological studies, genetic research, animal studies, and pandemic analyses, ultimately distorting true scientific inquiry.[68]
Hopefully, those who have focused so heavily on the Arday case will not disappoint. We can anticipate several possible responses. They may remain silent and refuse to engage with the argument. They may respond with emotional invective, produce ad hominem and red herring, and avoid rational discussion altogether. Or they may acknowledge their own biases and concede that they have not examined the Arday case within its broader historical and scholarly context. In any case, one hopes that these people will approach the issue rationally and honestly, and apply the same standards of scrutiny to academic misconduct across the board.
Notes
[1] Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (New York: Verso, 2001), 21-22.
[2] Ibid., 44.
[3] Ibid., 21-22.
[4] Ibid., 22; emphasis added.
[5] Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 2.
[6] Finkelstein, Image and Reality, 46.
[7] Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, 376.
[8] Finkelstein, Image and Reality, 23.
[9] Ibid.; see chapter 2.
[10] Ibid., 28-29.
[11] Ibid., 27-28.
[12] Ibid., 30.
[13] Ibid., 32.
[14] Ibid., 45.
[15] Ibid., 46.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid., 48.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Noam Chomski, “The Fate of an Honest Intellectual,” Noam Chomski, Peter Mitchell, et al., Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomski (New York: The New Press, 2002), 244.
[20] Ibid., 344.
[21] Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (New York: Verso, 2000), 12.
[22] Gary Younge, “J’accuse,” Guardian, August 10, 2005.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Frank J. Menetrez, “The Case Against Alan Dershowitz,” Counterpunch, February 11, 2008.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Alan M. Dershowitz, “Dershowitz: I Never Suppressed Israeli Pilots’ Free Speech,” Harvard Crimson, November 8, 2005.
[28] Menetrez, “The Case Against Alan Dershowitz,” Counterpunch, February 11, 2008.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid.
[31] https://theconversation.com/former-harvard-president-summers-soft-landing-after-epstein-revelations-is-case-study-of-economics-trouble-with-misbehaving-men-277025.
[32] Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998).
[33] Roger Schlafly, How Einstein Ruined Physics: Motion, Symmetry, and Revolution in Science (Create Space, 2011), 115.
[34] Ibid., 114
[35] Ibid., 133.
[36] Denis Brian, The Unexpected Einstein: The Real Man Behind the Icon (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 198.
[37] Quoted in Schlafly, How Einstein Ruined Physics, 116.
[38] Ibid., 11.
[39] Ibid., 117.
[40] Ibid., 128.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid., 112.
[43] See Harold Cruse, The Crisis of Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc, 1967).
[44] See for example Alison Stewart, First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School (Chicago: Chicago Review Press/Lawrence Hill Books, 2013); Thomas Sowell, Education: Assumptions vs. History (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1985).
[45] See Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
[46] Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1984).
[47] Jack Salzman and Cornel West, eds., Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), chapter 14.
[48] Marc Dollinger, Jews and Liberalism in Modern America: Quest for Inclusion(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 204.
[49] J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 5.
[50] Dollinger, Jews and Liberalism in Modern America, 5.
[51] Ibid., 193.
[52] Ibid.
[53] See E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008), chapter 14.
[54] David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2000), 557.
[55] I personally devoured Sowell’s books when I was in college. The first one I read was Race and Culture, followed by Migration and Culture, then Conquests and Cultures. After that, as they say, the rest is history. Sowell has many valuable insights to offer, but he largely avoids the Jewish question, and his books contain significant gaps, questionable information, and, at times, claims that appear to contradict the historical record. Dismantling America, for example, contains so many errors and questionable assertions about the Middle East that one could almost wonder whether the book was written by Sowell himself. His treatment of Iran is particularly problematic. Long before the book was published, a substantial body of scholarly literature had already examined the historical and political forces that shaped modern Iran.
[56] “German rabbi at center of ongoing scandal plagiarized his dissertation, newspaper finds,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, February 16, 2023; see also “Final investigation into prominent German Reform rabbi affirms abuse of power allegations,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 19, 2023.
[57] “FAS dean details Hauser scientific misconduct,” Harvard Magazine, August 20, 2010’ see also Tom Bartlett, “Document Sheds Light on Investigation at Harvard,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 19, 2010; Peter Aldhous, “Misconduct probe in Harvard animal morality lab,” New Scientist, August 20, 2010; Charles Gross, “Disgrace: On Marc Hauser,” The Nation, December 21, 2011.
[58] Nicholas Wade, “Harvard Finds Scientist Guilty of Misconduct,” NY Times, August 10, 2010.
[59] Marcel C. LaFollette, Stealing Into Print: Fraud, Plagiarism, and Misconduct in Scientific Publishing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
[60] See for example J. S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953 and 2004); Frank Spencer, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Peter Hancock, Hoax Springs Eternal: The Psychology of Cognitive Deception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), chapter 5.
[61] “Codifying misdonduct” is actually a chapter of David Goodstein’s book, On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Tales from the Front Lines of Science (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), chapter 4.
[62] Nachman Ben-Yehuda and Amalya Oliver-Lumerman, Fraud and Misconduct in Research: Detection, Investigation, and Organizational Response (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017); see also Adil E. Shamoo and David B. Resnik, Responsible Conduct of Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022); Barbara K. Redman, Research Misconduct Policy in Biomedicine: Beyond the Bad-Apple Approach (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013); Bernard Montoneri, ed., Academic Misconduct and Plagiarism: Case Studies from Universities around the World (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020); Max H. Bazerman, Inside an Academic Scandal: A Story of Fraud and Betrayal (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2025); Robert L. Park, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Gianfranco Pacchioni, The Overproduction of Truth: Passion, Competition, and Integrity in Modern Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Allan Franklin, The Neglect of Experiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), see for example chapter 8; Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); David L. Cooper, The Czech Manuscripts: Forgery, Translation, and National Myth(DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2023).
[63] Nick Hopwood, Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 289.
[64] Bernard E. Rollin, Science and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
[65] L. S. Hearnshaw, Cyril Burt: Psychologist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 235.
[66] Ibid., 318-319.
[67] For examples of these cases, particularly the controversy involving Harry Ostrer and Eran Elhaik, see my article “Is the Khazar Hypothesis Dead?,” Unz Review, April 2, 2026; for further research, see Mark P. Khurana, The Trajectory of Discovery: What Determines the Rate and Direction of Medical Progress? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
[68] Michael B. Bracken, Bias!: How Systemic Error Threatens Biomedical Research(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026); see also R. Barker Bausel, The Problem with Science: The Reproducibility Crisis and What to Do About It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
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