Caroline Overington makes great sense (“Jewish genius abounds, but why? The film we may never air”, 12/5). The ABC’s “no comment” response is entirely predictable, it’s too busy pursuing failures to be interested in success stories.
Where do Israelis get the elan and chutzpah, the confidence and skill, and the guts to just keep achieving near miracles while their neighbours stumble from crisis to crisis?
Caroline Overington is right to wonder if the documentary What’s With the Jews? may not be too confrontational for a multicultural, egalitarian Australia. The hugely disproportionate achievements of Jews in the more rarefied fields of human endeavour is well known but routinely ignored, because acknowledging the fact would require accepting the inconvenient truth — the belief that all races possess equal intellectual capacity is a polite fiction foisted on us by social engineers; and that in the nature-nurture debate regarding the inheritability of intelligence, nature should be accorded primacy. Such propositions are several bridges too far for modern Australia.
[These two letters were published in The Australian in response to Caroline Overington’s article.]