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December 2, 2016

Paul Gottfried, the Jewish Intellectual Godfather of the Alt-Right

An unlikely figure.

A retired history professor, the child of refugees from pre-World War II Europe, a life-long secular Jew, a graduate of Yeshiva University, a critic of “white nationalism,” and a disciple of the New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Paul Gottfried is not the man most would expect to be the leading theorist of the self-styled “alt-right.” But Gottfried claims to have “co-created” the term with his erstwhile disciple Richard Spencer, now famous for shouting “Hail Trump!” at a Washington, DC conference. (Spencer insists he invented the term independently, when composing a title for an article by Gottfried.) Jacob Siegel writes:

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