The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America, edited by Steven Fraser (Basic, 216 pp., $10)
NOT PURPORTING to offer a fair sample of opinions provoked by the publication of The Bell Curve, this slender volume brings together 19 previously published commentaries on the book by Charles Murray and the late Richard Hermstein. Most of the reviews are from last fall’s famous auto-da-fé issue of The New Republic, and most of the reviewers sound as if they were in the presence of absolute evil. Jacqueline Jones, a Brandeis historian, tells us that despite the authors’ “disingenuous disclaimers to the contrary,” the book implicitly calls for disfranchising low-IQ people. Speaking of disingenuousness, New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, an Ashkenazi Jew, goes ballistic over the book’s statement that Ashkenazi Jews have unusually high IQs, and writes: “I am not suggesting, of course, that Charles Murray is an anti-Semite. Still, . . .” Eager to de-
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