politico | New York Times columnist Bret Stephens ambushed and gravely wounded his own career on the evening of Dec. 27 when his piece about—bear with me here—the alleged superior intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews went live on the Times website.
As Twitter fury rose to smite Stephens for his “The Secrets of Jewish Genius” column and press coverage
tilted hard against him, his editors attempted some post-publication
damage control. They went back into his column and simply deleted the
most provoking passages from his copy, expunged the reference (and link)
to a controversial and brutally debunked
race-science paper from 2005, and added a note explaining that it was
not Stephens’ “intent” to argue that “Jews are genetically superior.”
The Times disavowal
and re-edit (tellingly neither co-signed nor acknowledged by Stephens)
was too little and too late—if you’re going to edit a piece, the smart
move is to edit before it publishes. More than that, it was clearly
wrong about what he was saying. Jewish genetic superiority was the exact direction his woolly argument was headed, something easily deduced from reading the passages excised
from the original column. If Stephens and his editors want to insist he
was merely misunderstood, they do so at their own peril. As writer Paul
Fussell observed long ago, when a writer is as widely “misunderstood” as Stephens claims he was, it’s almost always the writer’s fault.
The Stephens self-mauling did not
come as a complete surprise. Just a few months ago, he assumed a
vindictive and petty pose by bullying a professor who playfully called
him a “bedbug” on Twitter. Other Stephens columns in the Times about global warming and Ilhan Omar had been irritating the paper’s liberal readers (he’s a conservative) since he moved over from the Wall Street Journal in 2017, but by outraging readers across the political spectrum, his “Jewish Genius” piece marked a new personal low.
