the original question proposed was why are the jews so successful in the academics? and the reason, i still believe, and will continue to believe until proven otherwise, are the reasons stated as above: refusal to assimilate, sharing of precious information (or monopolizing that information), extremely tight networking, and the idea of being special. you people are so funny–implying a genetic factor! as if mecantile skills acquired over 5k years or whatever is going to ring a genetic component, when most secular compatriots claim racial and genetic equality for the rest of us! think of the ARROGANCE.

want to watch something funny? watch pinker’s lecture on jews and IQ–seems that the OP watched it in earnest, and was inspired from it. self-congratulations always works well amongst ones own.

and ofri–if you think you have the reason for the pre-dominance, please, by all means, share it. if not, just keep it quiet then. i offered an outsider perspective, not based on self-emulation, but on true reflection.

you guys miss the main point of assimilation + nurturing. can you imagine the influence on anyone, raised from birth, being told repeatedly how special they were, how they are god’s people, how they are the chosen ones, how they have a social obligation to essentially excel in whatever endeavor they enter?! on top of that, can u imagine how much societal pressures influence people with relatively high IQ’s into deviant or misplaced activities?! PUT 2 and 2 TOGETHER, OFRI!!!

and i agree, to a certain extent, that there are numerous jews who haven’t been able to reach the bars their other kin have set. but i do urge you, if you have time, to go to jewwatch.com and though i do think it is a hate-site, just to click on the link for jewish power. un-freaking-believable. and us SHEEP let it happen. can anyone say, grassroots?

Excuse me now, I have to go to call my mommy because she hasn’t told me she loves me in at least three hours.

i meant counter-culture, if you will. or trendy culture. just think real long and hard how many jewish people get tattoos, or join the military, etc. they certainly are an exclusive community–but i would argue, no different than indians here.

if you want to try something interesting, if you have the time, do this. do a search under the web, for new jersey property tax records. ok? then choose passiac county (there is an orthodox ocmmunity out there) and put in very jewish sounding last names? like cohen, weinstein, etc.

you cannot believe how many of the residents there own multiple properties or businesses–it literally blew me away, considering passaic city is a dump and passiac park is beautiful. they resided in passaic park and had investments in passaic city. coincidence? a whole community full?

im not saying that jewish people or bad, etc. i think they have a very successful, and admirable to a fault, model that we gentiles ought to follow.

and regarding point #31, the mommy-coddling theory, is probably more suited as to why jews are more liberal as a group than others.

hey, im not perfect, but only offering goyim insights as to what accounts for jewish success.

Jobber, chill out!

Charles Paver, I know what you mean. My mom never told me I was smart or special and look how I turned out.

1) they think they are an enlightened group, here on earth to tell the rest of us what they have *discovered. in short, the vision of the anointed (yawn)from the “chosen people.” this is the same reason, i think, for black intellectual failure. jews were raised from mothers who always told them, time immemorial, how special, how smarter they were than othres. blacks, on the other hand, had it reinforced time and again how dumb they were, how they were “natural athletes.” this gave the jews probably a 5% edge, cause as you know, thinking makes it so.

2. diaspora–many diaspora groups are utter failures in socities, but the key you are missing here, is unadulterated access to quality information. in short, jews share better information better than anyone else, and monopolize that information for the betterment of their community. can anyone say networking?

in sum, the jewish people think that they are smarter and brighter than other ethnic groups, but this is decisively false, as the IQ test is only a reflection of culture, and not much else. jews have been at the forefront of social movements for one reason–thye have a passion for social justice, and they think that they are an enlightened group who has to get out the message to us unenlightened folk.
oh and i forgot to add, their “H”olocaust makes them bind together more tightly than any other group. which is why you dont see any such thing as “white” nationalism on a large scale. common miseries certainly help.

just imagine, mothers nurturing you day in and day out, telling you how special, how important, and how you are God’s chosen people, what that does to your thinking. Now imagine the way other cultures raise their children, and yo ucan suddenly account for the gap in performance.

From a post on Jews and the porn industry, an acknowledgement of Traci Lords….

That aside, there is too much evidence suggesting that Ashkenazim have undergone intense sexual/natural selection (Cochran et al. ’05), thus increasing IQ/intelligence, for me to believe it’s totally cultural. You’re not going to convince me of that.

BTW, Israel is only half-Ashkenazi with a large population of Arabs and Ethiopians. But the Israeli average is STILL relatively high for the region. I think Sephardim and Mizrahim probably have higher-than-average IQs, too, but there isn’t very much data about them available.

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Whenever the Torah uses the word vayehi (“and it came to pass”), this connotes a woeful event. What woe was there in the Mishkan’s completion? This is comparable to a king who had a contentious wife. So he said to her: “Make me a purple cloak.” As long as she was preoccupied with it, she did not quarrel. When her work was completed, she brought it to the king. The king saw it and was pleased with it, and began to cry out, “Woe! Woe!” Said his wife: “What is this, my lord? I have labored to do your will, and you cry, ‘woe, woe’?” Said he to her: “The work is beautiful and favorable in my eye. But as long as you were preoccupied with it, you did not anger or provoke me; now that you are free of it, I fear that you will again anger me.”

So, too, said G-d: “As long as my children were occupied with the Mishkan, they did not grumble against Me. Now they will again begin to provoke Me.” Therefore it says vayehi–vy hi, “woe is it.”

(Midrash Tanchuma)

That is why it is perfectly ok to fuss about the drapes matching the ottoman. It keeps us out of trouble.

GM will be so impressed.

I see the involvement of Jews in pornography as something quite different from the Jewish involvement in social justice movements like the socialist labor movement of the early 20th century, feminism, civil rights etc. I’m not going to address the factors I believe caused jews to overpopulate these movements. But I do believe that when it came to social justice, idealism, not money, was the controlling factor.

In contrast, jews are overrepresented in porn in the same way that they were/are overrepresented in the music industry. Entreprenuerial jews with an interest in the subject matter, and little class status at stake, saw business opportunities and took them.

We tend to think of the ascendency of Jews into the middle class as being paved with doctors, lawyers, engineers and accountants. (And yes, my dad is an engineer, my mom was an accountant and I am a lawyer). But what this hegemony of the american jewish professional leaves out are the many other avenues that Jews took to reach that middle class- avenues often adjacent to, or running through the middle of, the shady part of town. Occupations like running a small record label (and there are too many examples to even begin to list them), not only didn’t have the respectability of being a doctor or lawyer, but the record business, as well as the porn business, often had mafia and other organized crime connections. So, when the history of modern Jewish america is written, the less savory aspects of our middle class aspirations tend to be seen as anomolous, or ignored altogether. (BTW, see Tony Michel’s new book Fire in the Their Hearts: Jewish Socialism in New York City for a better formulation of this idea)