Funny, he doesn't look like a Jew. Who knew?

Professor Eugene Volokh


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Idiot-savant Eugene Volokh, a blogger on the popular Volokh Conspiracy blog, is just one in a long line of well-known people of Jewish descent who I never even imagined had Jewish ancestry. People like him strengthen my argument that a "systematic" holocaust was impossible because the Nazis had no reliable way of identifying Jews. There are blond-and-blue-eyed Jews and black Jews. There are all kinds of Jews.
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Volokh said in a Wall Street Journal article,
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Modest amounts of anti-Semitic speech and unfair criticism of Israel, it seems to me, can strengthen American Jews' self-identity as Jews, and thus indirectly both support the preservation of the American Jewish community as a community, and strengthen support for Israel . . .

. . . If anti-Semitic speech became too common, these community-strengthening effects may be decreased (for instance, if American Jews became afraid to be publicly identified as Jews) or might be swamped by harmful effects (again, such as violence, ostracism, discrimination or fear suffered by individual Jews). But my sense is that at modest levels, the existence of this speech in America is a net positive (not an unalloyed positive, but a net positive) both for Israel and for the American Jewish community. And we are talking these days about such modest levels, if one looks at the big picture of Jewish existence in America today.

So far I have tried to be purely descriptive: I have tried to describe what I think is an existing phenomenon, a phenomenon that is positive for Israel and for the American Jewish community as a community. (I should say that I'm a relatively assimilated Jew who doesn't care as much about the American Jewish community as a community as some do; I'm much more concerned with the welfare of individuals, Jewish or not, than with the welfare of the community. Still, even I see some value, so long as anti-Semitism does exist, in America and elsewhere, in protecting Israel and preserving American Jewish institutions.)

Now, though, let me shift to the prescriptive: I think that this phenomenon ought to further strengthen American Jews' support for free speech, including for free speech by anti-Semites and unfair, bigoted critics of Israel. (I think we should support such free speech even without this phenomenon, but I hope this phenomenon strengthens such support in others.)

Well, Gene, maybe someday your support for free speech will extend to blogs.
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