Daniel Greenfield December 05, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog
After the Holocaust, the American
Jewish community, like most liberals, reduced the mass murder of
millions of Jews to a problem of intolerance and prejudice. A massive
effort was undertaken to educate about what had happened rather than
what was happening.
While the first Holocaust museums were being
built, the persecution and killing of Jews had mostly shifted over to
the Soviet Union and its allies in the Arab Muslim world. American Jews
failed to grapple with this shift much as they failed to come to terms
with the reality that black nationalist groups were quickly eclipsing
the KKK when it came to the domestic hatred of Jews.
These are the key ingredients that led to the current open climate of Jew-hatred in America.
Instead
of talking about what the hatred of Jews looked like today, American
Jewish liberals insisted on dwelling on what it had looked like decades
earlier in America and in Europe. Like the generals who are always
refighting yesterday’s war, they were not dealing with the present.
They relied heavily on “antisemitism”: a term invented in the 19th century by a German socialist bigot, Wilhelm Marr,
to emphasize the race of the Jews. But post-Holocaust hatred of Jews on
the Left was more often cultural than racial. Karl Marx, the progenitor
of
Marxism, had been of Jewish descent from a Christian family, and had spread
poisonous antisemitic venom.
Lenin, who had one Jewish grandfather, oversaw the oppression of Jews
while denying they were a distinct people. The Soviet expectation was
that the Jews would disappear as a people, but, aside from Stalin’s
final years, avoided any plans for the racial extermination of the Jews.
The
Marxist and the Islamic position, unlike the Nazi racial position, did
not require the physical extermination of the Jews at a genetic level,
only a cultural genocide. Jews would be allowed to exist under Communism
or Islam, as long as they abandoned their religion and national
identity. The liberal focus on fighting racial antisemitism left it
unprepared to fight such cultural hatred.
Even though the Soviet
persecution of the Jews as a people had been underway for generations,
American liberal Jews never developed a vocabulary for describing it. Or
showed much particular interest in it until a new generation of young
activists in the USSR and America finally made it a burning issue that
rose to national and international attention in the 1970s.
The
Communist persecution of Jews was manifested in many of the same ways as
the contemporary leftist hatred of Jews. The party and the regime
claimed to oppose ‘antisemitism’, even passed laws banning it, while
suppressing Judaism and Zionism as ‘reactionary’ and ‘nationalistic’.
The Soviet Union could point to examples of high-ranking Jewish figures
who had rejected Zionism and Judaism, and represented the Communist
ideal for the Jews.
As Lenin
put it,
“whoever, directly or indirectly, puts forward the slogan of Jewish
national culture is (whatever his good intentions may be) an enemy of
the proletariat… he is an accomplice of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie…
on the other hand, those Jewish Marxists who mingle with the Russian,
Lithuanian, Ukrainian and other workers in international Marxist
organizations, and make their contribution… towards creating the
international culture of the working-class movement… uphold the best
traditions of Jewry by fighting the slogan of ‘national culture.’”
Jews
had to be culturally, but not racially eradicated. Those Jews who
joined with non-Jewish Marxists in the rejection of Judaism and Zionism
were praiseworthy Marxists. Those who did not were an “enemy of the
proletariat” to be executed like a number of my great-uncles.
Like
most Soviet implementations of Communist ideology, this was a ‘Potemkin
village’ of lies. Jews, regardless of their religious observance or
interest in Israel, had been explicitly targeted for persecution and
mass murder, were specially designated as being Jews in government
documents, and the government’s formal anti-Zionism and anti-Judaism was
just the same old ‘antisemitism’, complete with hook-nosed cartoons,
dressed up in progressive clothing.
Much the same is true of contemporary leftist Jew-hatred which is based on
Marx’s stereotypes
of Jews as capitalists, but draws heavily on the Soviet playbook of
substituting anti-Zionism for antisemitism, and trotting out model
Jewish socialists to defend the persecution of Jews.
The liberal
Jewish failure to meaningfully confront the Soviet hatred of Jews left
them unprepared for the leftist movements that mainstreamed the same
hatred in America.
There were plenty of warnings. Decade after
decade, academics pushing these positions on college campuses,
journalists embedding them in magazines, and fringe politicians making
these arguments grew in power and influence while the liberal
establishment talked of ‘antisemitism’ purely in terms of far-right
racial supremacism or small town prejudices.
The rise of black
nationalist antisemitism in the seventies, which was often explicitly
racialist in nature, produced flailing responses. The American Jewish
liberal establishment held up faded pictures of Heschel marching with
MLK, failing to grasp that this made black nationalists despise MLK
rather than like Jews, and prattled about the Jewish contribution to
civil rights. The liberal establishment was so committed to a model of
top-down persecution that it was unable to defend Jews against
antisemitism that appeared to be coming from a minority on the bottom.
When
various forms of critical race theory made the formula official that
black people and minorities could not be racist toward anyone with more
privilege than them, a position that legitimized a general hatred of
white people, Asians and Jews, there was little response. The formal
understanding that Jews could now be freely hated was ignored by liberal
Jews.
Some outnumbered figures launched a struggle for the soul
of liberalism, but they had little and fleeting support from an
establishment that was still influential enough to make a difference.
The liberal Jewish establishment was more interested in being in the
vanguard of civil rights than in protecting Jews from the emergence of
an ideology that deprived them of their civil rights.
Only after
the Hamas mass murder of over 1,000 Jews and the statements of support
for it at major universities, did some donors and community leaders wake
up enough to push back. It took the worst massacre of Jews since the
Holocaust and the widespread acceptance of it by their friends for them
to realize how bad the situation had gotten, but not to realize why.
And that is the crucial issue.
The
pro-Hamas Left insists that it is not ‘antisemitic’ and most of it
probably believes that’s true because while traditional bigotry and
hatred created the Islamic obsession with killing Jews and the
conviction in the old Marxist Left that the Jews were not a legitimate
people, the final product is cloaked in talk about liberation,
decolonization and an end to privilege and oppression.
It may support the mass murder of Jews, but it doesn’t culturally ‘feel’ like ‘antisemitism’.
The
Leftist hatred of Jews doesn’t fit the liberal model in which there is a
continuity of oppression. A downtrodden minority faces prejudice, which
escalates into political repression and then violence. First there are
the jokes, then laws and then bullets. Leftists cheering for Hamas
would argue that since they don’t tell ‘antisemitic’ jokes, they can’t
be considered antisemitic even while they’re calling for the mass murder
of Jews.
This is why the traditional model of talking about antisemitism has failed so badly.
The
liberal insistence on teaching tolerance by addressing the roots of
bigotry rather than its outcome has been a disastrous failure because
where far-right bigotry is a continuity, left-wing bigotry is a
discontinuity of ideological abstractions leading indirectly to mass
murder. The ideological detachment from reality can be measured in the
fact that inmates in Nazi camps did not shout, “Heil Hitler” before
dying, but those in Soviet gulags were known to shout, “long live
Stalin” before being executed. The Nazis knew what they were doing,
Communists often did not. They existed and still exist in an ideological
haze of slogans rather than people.
‘Antisemitism’ is an
ideological abstraction that leftists reject because it appears to refer
to a certain type of person and behavior that their ideological purity
tells them that they couldn’t be. They’re not the sorts of people who
talk about ‘jewing down’ or believe in the inferiority of races and
therefore, even while they’re smashing Jewish store windows and
attacking a Holocaust museum, they can’t be ‘antisemites’. They know
‘antisemites’ are ‘right wing’ and when they’re assaulting Jews in the
street, they, like the Soviet Communists, are fighting against
‘Zionism’.
The emphasis on antisemitism, on the roots of bigotry
rather than their outcomes, makes such moral evasiveness easy for
leftists. Focus on the mass murder of Jews, the broken glass and a mob
outside the doors of a Holocaust museum, and then you’re talking about
hateful outcomes.
Those are much harder to evade than abstractions.
The
analysis of ‘antisemitism’ rather than the concrete reality of
Jew-hatred has played into the hands of a leftist culture of hate that
uses analysis to disguise the reality of its actions.
Confronting
the realities of the assaults on Jews will require taking stock of a
cultural war, rather than a racial one, and deal with outcomes instead
of motives. Talking about ‘antisemitism’ becomes misleading when
confronting a form of antisemitism that hides its ethnic hatred behind
cultural and political hostility. And that will require discussing
cultural, religious and political differences, topics which liberal Jews
are uncomfortable with.
The modern liberal consensus, like that
of the Soviet Union, is racially diverse but ideologically unified. The
illusion of multiculturalism in the Soviet Union or a college town in
America is limited to only those cultural differences that don’t clash
with the dominant leftist belief system. This is a comfortable echo
chamber for those who agree and a repressive cage for those who do not.
Liberal
Jews bought into this system in a big way because they were terrified
of feeling different. They shed their religious traditions for
non-threatening culturally Jewish versions of liberal Protestantism and
stayed silent about the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. The
rebirth of Israel challenged their theology and their politics, but
mostly their anonymity.
While American Jewish anti-zionists
lashed out at Israel in resentment for creating tension between their
politics and their identity, Israel was just the canary in the coal
mine. Black nationalists weren’t attacking Jewish teachers because of
Israel. And Marxists weren’t targeting Jews because of the Jewish State.
To a liberal establishment that was turning leftist, the existence of a
traditional Jewish community was unsustainable in either Israel or
America.
Oct 7, like the protests for Soviet Jewry and the
defenses of Israel, forced American Jews to break with their political
community in support of their religious and ethnic community. It’s a
painful and alienating experience, but like any escape from a toxic
relationship, also liberating.
Among the unexamined truisms that need to be rethought is ‘antisemitism’.
Antisemitism
refers to race and when it comes to the hatred of Jews, culture trumps
race. Aside from the Nazis and a few ‘Jewish Question’ obsessed
racialists, hardly anyone who hates Jews would propose using genetic
screening to track down people of Jewish descent who don’t even know
that they are Jewish to exterminate them. Most cultural ‘antisemitism’
has a racial component, but it’s triggered by the idea of the Jews as a
community and a people.
The term ‘antisemitism’ conflates someone
who doesn’t like Jews, but would never engage in violence or support
violence, with those who engage in and support violence against Jews.
Furthermore some of those who support the mass murder of Jews don’t
believe that they’re prejudiced against Jews, but believe that killing
Jewish children is the right thing to do.
Talking about ‘antisemitism’ or even ‘hatred’ is wholly inadequate in such situations.
The
idea of a continuity of bigotry often breaks down in the madness of
contemporary political discourse. The same term used to describe someone
who resents Jews moving into his town should not be used to also
describe someone massacring Jews. Calling it all ‘antisemitism’
minimizes it and puts the local jerk on the same level as Hitler or
Hamas. And that’s a mistake.
The liberal Jewish establishment has
spent too much time fighting ‘prejudice’ and not enough time dealing
with ‘eliminationist’ sentiments. The existential threat is not
prejudice: it’s genocide.
Fighting the leftist and Islamic hatred
of Jews will require developing a new terminology and a new approach
than the same old tired ‘fight against antisemitism’ establishment
rhetoric. Liberal Jews will have to confront their own fears and rethink
their assumptions to take on the threat.
During the
Hitler-Stalin Pact, Jews had to confront Communists and their
sympathizers who were now suddenly insistent on a friendship with the
Nazis. That genocidal alliance crystalized
a rejection of
Communism by American Jews as “Jewish workers assaulted Communists who
tried to defend their alliance with the Nazis, calling them,
‘Communazis.’”
The pact between Islam and the Left manifested
once again in the response to the Oct 7 atrocities should be met the
same way. The Left should be rejected the same way the Communists were.
The ‘Communazis’ have been replaced by ‘Commuhamasniks’, but that is the
only thing that has changed. American Jews must relearn how to fight
this enemy.
After three generations of failing to confront the leftist hatred of Jews, it’s time to fight.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's
Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
Tags:
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That's history, and that history is incontestable.
Then we have all this talk about how RFK, Jr. may drop out of the race and endorse Trump. Well, if he does I wonder what he gets in return? If Trump just says thank you and walks away, then it's not a problem. If Kennedy gets anything in return, it's a problem. He's a Kennedy, he's a radical leftist, and did I mention he's a Kennedy. Oh, yeah I did, and so let me say it again. He's a Kennedy. Nuf Ced?
The truth is I doubt his endorsement would be all that helpful. His voters are Democrats, they're left wing radicals, just like Kennedy, or they wouldn't be supporting him, so they're either going to vote for Kamala, or they simply won't vote.
The "Republican" votes he was going to get would be from nitwits like Liz Chaney, Mitt Romney, John Kasich, Paul Ryan, etc. Just as Susan Collins is going to write in Nikki Haley in stead of voting for Trump, they weren't going to vote for Trump no matter what, they're already lost votes, and that number is small, and after this all plays out, that number will be even smaller, so, who cares?
Culture is king, and they're no longer part of the conservative culture, and will be shunned, except by the Pravda media who will trot them out for their views, even though no one really cares what they have to say.
And finally, this idea that capitalism and conservatism are pages in the same book, they're not. Since I write about everything that goes on in the world, I subscribe to a number of news sources, including geopolitical sites, and reading their views is so often a painful task, and I include those at the American Enterprise Institute, which these days I just scan rather than read as I can see the foolish direction they're going in so many of their commentaries, and find them hard to stomach.
I was an exterminator for 40 years and served for 25 of them of them as a officer or board member of a number of our industry trade associations, and I discovered believing that large corporations and manufacturers are conservative is a serious error in judgement, they're as slippery as a Tallyrand, or a Kissinger.
At best.... I found them to be leaky vessels as allies dealing with major legislation, including the Montreal Protocol, the Kyoto Accords, the Colony Collapse Disorder lies, etc.
Calling them leaky vessels is being kind, since entirely too often they're views are simply self-serving and corrupt. They even corrupt the trade associations turning them into cats paws for big government activism and unwarranted abusive regulations, which goes back to FDR who utilized them - actually threatened them - to promote his unconstitutional National Recovery Act.