"One can apply a prodigious intellect in the service of prosaic things — formulating a war plan, for instance, or constructing a ship.... Jewish genius operates differently."

"It is prone to question the premise and rethink the concept; to ask why (or why not?) as often as how; to see the absurd in the mundane and the sublime in the absurd. Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different. Where do these habits of mind come from? There is a religious tradition that, unlike some others, asks the believer not only to observe and obey but also to discuss and disagree. There is the never-quite-comfortable status of Jews in places where they are the minority — intimately familiar with the customs of the country while maintaining a critical distance from them. There is a moral belief, 'incarnate in the Jewish people' according to Einstein, that 'the life of the individual only has value [insofar] as it aids in making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful.' And there is the understanding, born of repeated exile, that everything that seems solid and valuable is ultimately perishable, while everything that is intangible — knowledge most of all — is potentially everlasting."

From "The Secrets of Jewish Genius/It’s not about having higher I.Q.s." by Bret Stephens (NYT).

To answer the question is Stephens Jewish, here's Wikipedia: "Bret Stephens was born in New York City, the son of Xenia and Charles J. Stephens, a former vice president of General Products, a chemical company in Mexico. Both his parents were secular Jews. His paternal grandfather, Louis Ehrlich, was born in Kishenev (today Chișinău, Moldova) in 1901; he fled with his family to New York after a pogrom."

At Wikipedia, Stephens has 1 item under the heading "Controversy":

In August 2019, Stephens sent a complaint to a George Washington University professor and the university's provost about a tweet in which the professor called Stephens a "bedbug." The topic of Stephens's next column was the "rhetoric of infestation" used by authoritarian regimes such as Nazi Germany. The column was interpreted as criticism of the GWU professor and other critics of Stephens.

Just yesterday, I posted on another Bret Stephens column. He had written that Trump’s presidency should be seen is "an unsightly pimple" or "something bad" that needed to be washed off the hands with "soap." I said, sarcastically:

Talking about a human being as filth or disease... I thought we weren't doing that anymore. I thought you could get canceled for that....

In the comments, HoodlumDoodlum brought up the old "bedbug" controversy:

Basically a GWU professor called Stephens a bedbug and sent a complaint to the university provost and wrote a full column on how comparing people to bugs is something Nazis do, etc.

When HE says someone is filth that should be washed away, though, it's different. Why? Well...it just is, and anyone who questions that is probably a Nazi!

I wonder what provoked Stephens to write this new column on the "genius" of Jews. The comments section over at the Times is not at all happy with it. The top-rated comment is:

As a Christian woman who was married to a Jew for nearly 60 years, I find this column incredibly unsettling. The idea of labeling an entire religion (or race or gender) as this or that leads to nothing good...and often to things that are very bad. Where do we take this? Jews are smarter and therefore a bigger threat? Groups that have not won many Nobel prizes are stupid? And since when have we decided that IQ test scores are true measures of intelligence - a trait difficult to define in any case. When my husband was a boy, he was often chased down the street by neighboring children yelling "Christ Killer" at him. "Smarter" is just another label. I am amazed that the Times published this.

Another high-rated comment:

This is baffling. It is hard to picture a corresponding column being written about whatever ethnic group has the lowest average “IQ” and why they are prone to mediocrity, so I’m not sure I agree this angle is acceptable even in its positive light. I think we would collectively be quick to dismiss the reverse as problematic, at best. And how interesting that the author is so careful to clarify Ashkenazi rather than Sephardic or other Jewish sects. I’m interested to hear about cultural teachings that may lead to excellence, but this seems... really off the mark.

ADDED: So, according to Stephens, there are the people who can build things and do things in the real world. They can perform feats of engineering or devise military strategy. But those things are "prosaic," and — in Stephens blunt view — not what Jews do with their "prodigious intellect." Jews — in Stephens view — stand apart from these practical things and "question the premise and rethink the concept," they "ask why (or why not?)," they see absurdities and "maintain[] a critical distance." It may be good to value different kinds of intelligence and to roughly opine that there are the people who do things in the real world and people who stand back and observe and critique everything, but it's a big problem to put a group — even your own group — in the second category.