By: Millicent Zakowski
An op-ed piece that raised a stir has been tweaked by the New York Times.
The by now infamous Bret Stephens’ column “The Secrets of Jewish Genius,” reportedly cited an academic paper that had been co-authored by someone accused of being a white nationalist.
“A reference to the 2005 study was scrapped from after the author and his editors “learned that one of the paper’s authors … promoted racist views,” an editor’s note now reads on the op-ed,” the New York Post reported. “In his article published Friday, Stephens wrote that Jews “are, or tend to be, smart” and “might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better.” He cited the paper “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence,” which compared Ashkenazi Jews to other ethnic groups and determined that they have the highest average IQ. The study “traffics in centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremism.”
Notably, said businessinsider.com, the article “referenced a 2005 paper measuring IQ which was scientifically questioned and written by a professor with ties to white nationalist groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Backlash to the article argued that the assertion also promoted a school of thought called eugenics, which suggests that the human race can be improved by encouraging the reproduction of people with “desirable traits.” This same ideology has been used to justify atrocities like slavery and the Holocaust.
According to Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, the column “crossed a very important line and for no reason other than to be provocative.”
“How is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?” Stephens asked. “Aside from perennial nature-or-nurture questions, there is the more difficult question of why that intelligence was so often matched by such bracing originality and high-minded purpose.”
Stephens joined the Times in 2017 and during his relatively brief tenure he has attracted controversy, according to motherjones.com. “Before he became a columnist, in the Wall Street Journal, he had described climate change as a “mass hysteria phenomenon” made up of mostly “discredited” science. And then there his recent overreaction during the bed bug incident at the paper, when he viciously went after a George Washington University professor for a tweet comparing him to a bedbug.”
