Bret Stephens Image by Wikimedia

By PJ Grisar December 30, 2019

Days after publication, The New York Times removed chunks of text referring to an academic paper from Bret Stephens’s controversial column on “Jewish genius.” The reason? The study Stephens cited was co-authored by a man considered a white nationalist.

Stephens quoted the paper’s statistics on IQ in a column “The Secrets of Jewish Genius,”, in which he argues that Jews’s unconventional thinking has played a role in a track record of Jewish achievement. Published in 2005, the paper was called “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence,” and Stephens used it to support his claim that Ashkenazi Jews “are, or tend to be, smart.” The paper put forward the theory that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group, The Daily Beast reported.

During the time of that paper’s publication, some dismissed its findings; among them, Andrew Clark, a population geneticist at Cornell who called its arguments “far-fetched.” One of the authors of that study, Henry Harpending, is described as having a “white nationalist” ideology by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Harpending has lectured at conferences with that worldview and is often referenced on white nationalist platforms like Stormfront.

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Following the publication of Stephens’s column on December 27, many on Twitter claimed it subscribed to the theory of eugenics. Others pointed out the problem of citing the research on Harpending, who died in 2016, given his alleged white nationalist ties.

In an editor’s note that explained the revisions, the Times responded “Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors’ views, but it was a mistake to cite it uncritically,” adding that it was only after the column ran that Stephens and his editor’s learned of Harpending “promoted racist views.”

“The effect was to leave an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens was arguing that Jews are genetically superior,” the editor’s note continued, “That was not his intent.”

PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at [email protected].

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