FIVE REASONS WHY JEWS GRAVITATE TOWARD THE LEFT
FIVE REASONS WHY JEWS GRAVITATE TOWARD THE LEFT
By
David Gottfried
Many people have often wondered why so many Jews, it seems, have a predilection toward the Left. I have heard people pose the question bluntly, like this: “Jews live like Episcopalians yet vote like Puerto Ricans. Why.” I have heard conservative Jews become irate at their co-religionists’ liberal sympathies. In the Nixon tapes, we hear Richard Nixon berating Henry Kissinger for the tendency of many Jews to find partnership on the Left. And finally, and with the most gruesome results, Jews were castigated by the Nazis as a group with a special, almost diabolic fellowship with the Bolshevik Revolution. Quite frankly, I think Jews do identify with the Left and that it might be profitable to understand why:
1) We are idol-smashers.
To a large extent, this has to do with what it means to be a Jew. Being a Jew means being an idol-smasher. The first Jew was Abraham. His father’s profession was that of idol-maker. Abraham looked at the assortment of idols that suffused his primitive world, and he ridiculed the patent baloney. He realized that inanimate heaps of wood and stone cannot govern the universe. Abraham, very simply, asked questions, doubted and disparaged blind acceptance of tradition and authority. Accordingly, the sort of person who is very Jewish is the sort of person who will shun reflexive deference toward conventional wisdom and will constantly venture-out, on his own, to find that which is really true.
Because Jews tend to ask questions and to doubt, they will ask questions of authority. The Jewish proclivity for questioning those in power tends to make Jews more receptive to left-of-center thought.
Ironically enough, the most Jewish of the Jews will often find themselves alienated from their fellow Jews. Because they decry herd-like acceptance of hoary customs and laws, they will continually find themselves at odds with their faith.
Consider the issue concretely, in the development of a Jew’s mind: In good Jewish schools, a teacher will tell a group of five year olds, on the first day of class, a story of some sort. Then he will ask his students to find the “Kasha,” or inconsistency, in this story. This inculcates the development of a challenging, probing intellect. And the legacy of this sort of education is the very radicalism so often despised.
The most Jewish of the Jews have always chafed at the boundaries of existent knowledge and belief, have always deviated from most Jews and from most other humans, have always been on the outskirts of what was deemed permissible or legal or prudent, and the most Jewish of the Jews have been traitors to their people and leaders of the world: Jesus, Freud, Marx, Spinoza.
2) The Multi-Thousand Year Dialectical Conflict Between Judaism’s Legal and Prophetic Traditions.
I don’t want to sound pretentious or obnoxious by using the word “dialectical”; such verbiage was, perhaps, among the favorite words of pseudo-intellectual adolescents just a few years ago. I use the word dialectical because a dialectic, as Hegel described it, is exactly what we have here. A dialectic is this: A phenomenon has within it the seeds of its own antithesis. Example: A) We feel love, B) We get really sick of loving that selfish bastard who hasn’t given squat in return and C) we finally feel hatred towards that person whom we had loved. In other words, love created its opposite, hate. (Marx, of course, applied Hegelian dialectics toward material matters: Rich people create their opposite, poor people, i.e., they become rich by making other people poor.) Hegel also said that after the thesis, or original point of view, had created its opposite, or antithetical point of view, a synthesis would emerge.
In Judaism, long before the destruction of the second temple, there had been a civil war between the legal tradition and the prophetic tradition. More specifically, the exacting, almost intellectually sadistic and punitive legal tradition had given birth to its antithesis: The full-throated prophetic tradition calling-out for justice and helping the poor. Occasionally, Jacobean strains in the prophetic tradition (Abbie Hoffman) incite a revitalized and furious right. (Think of Norman Podhoretz, writing the same thing for thirty years: “I used to be a radical, and people like Norman Mailer and Lillian Hellman were once my friends, but I have finally become a grown-up Jewish burgher with respectably dreary and bourgeois points of view.”) Then, after having endured the sneering, smugness of the neo conservative years when Jews thought Bernie Madoff was G-d because he was rich (Hell, those rich bastards DESERVED to lose their money), many Jews voted for Obama. In any event, this is how the dialectic played itself out in Judaism:
A big part of Judaism is the Law.
(People often say that the Jewish contribution to civilization has been the law, but I don’t understand why the world should love us for having given it the law. To me the law is a means of using obfuscation, mental machinations and tricky language to shroud the truth and further injustice. I could give you so many examples of the law being used to further injustice that I wouldn’t really know where to begin.
We can begin with the sadistic legal trick known as the “Negative Pregnant.” This feature of Anglo-American jurisprudence has, over the centuries, probably thrust millions of people into servitude and poverty. This is an example of the negative pregnant:
A alleges: B owes me one hundred dollars.
B answers: I don’t owe A one hundred dollars.
Result: B must pay A 99 dollars and 99 cents.
Reasoning: The allegation, by B, that he did not owe 100 dollars was “pregnant” with the admission that he owed all lessor sums of money.
The negative pregnant is, to my knowledge, no longer in force in any jurisdictions of the United States; the last hold-out for this ancient doctrine was the Deep South. It is, perhaps, one of the reasons why lawyers often write documents with an obsessive-compulsive streak, forever wary and forever verbose.)
The law is, largely, all about the governance of commercial relations. By contrast, Christianity sometimes is infused with a longing to transcend petty commercial squabbles and rise to a more spiritual plane.
[Of course, I am not saying that Christians are more honest than Jews. After all, no one can beat the Vatican when it comes to playing the capitalist game. Just consider the sale of indulgences. (I strongly recommend Barbara Tuchman’s exquisite exposition, in “The March of Follies,” regarding the sale of indulgences, a process which enabled Rome to capture most of the gold of Europe.) The Roman Church made Goldman Sachs look like schoolboys when it came to stealing money.]
Judaism is suffused with all things commercial. The Talmud, I have been told, seems at times like nothing but an arid treatise on contract law, replete with detailed and comprehensive analyses of every facet and permutation of a case in which a cow, costing x amount of money, fails to deliver milk. Judaism, therefore, in many ways has little to do with the things that we normally think of when we think of religion. It is, supposedly, not much interested in the metaphysical; it is deeply pragmatic and seeks to govern and define all of our day to day affairs, many of which are commercial.
Some of us get a little ill when religious study seems just like Law school. (Actually, I first started to think about this and related issues when I heard a man, on line at a bank, say that Law school is liar school.)
Some of us think that not only the Law, but also that which it tries to protect and manage, namely commercial activity, is also all about lying. After all, what is the essence of the capitalistic act: Taking a piece of dreck worth 10 dollars and convincing a poor schnook that it is really worth 50 dollars.
Not only Jewish thought but also the very structure of our Sabbath services is a testament to Judaism’s division into two very different realms, the legal and the prophetic. In one part of the services, we read from the Law, the unyielding, parsimonious and haughty law. In a different part of the service, the Bar Mitzvah boy will read the Haftorah, and this is from the prophets. It is fitting that a young guy will grace the services with the uplifting, redeeming, benevolent language of the prophets.
In any event, the legal tradition of Judaism inspired the prophetic tradition: Damn your legal equivocations and distortions. Take from the rich and give to the poor. The Jewish drive to the left is inspired by the Prophetic strain of Jewish life. Judaism, I have often thought, has some of the biggest and most successful capitalists, and this has birthed our tendency to have the biggest communists.
3) The Legacy of Passover.
One of our cardinal holidays is Passover, when we commemorate our freedom from slavery. Consequently, Judaism sparks an identification with, or at the very least sympathy for, people who are persecuted. This of course inculcates a predisposition toward the Left. I am disgusted because so many conservative, observant Jews whom I have known seem to be utterly blind to all of this. What does their Judaism consist of ? Knowing how to say “shvatza,” “shlemeil,” and “oy vey.” Acting like Jackie Mason, Ed Koch, Bernie Madoff, and Rudy Guiliani ?
4) From the French Revolution until the 1950’s, an era once satirized by the phrase, “Allen Dulles, Henry Luce, GOP hypotenuse.”
From the time of the French Revolution until, perhaps, the Sinai crisis of 1956, when the Soviet Union assumed an unequivocally hostile stance toward aggression against Egypt, the left and the Jews were on the same side in almost all European conflicts.
The Church was of course anti-Semitic, and the Church was the prime defender of the ancien regime. Through doctrines like the divine right of kings, which held that the King is the King because that is what G-d wants, Christianity buttressed autocracy and repression. Those who sought to demolish aristocratic privilege tended to despise Christianity because it aided the aristocracy and this engendered a natural sympathy for the Jews among revolutionary factions. Consider Marx’s ode to the Paris Commune: “Compare these Parisians, storming Heaven, with the slaves to Heaven of the German, Prussian, Holy Roman Empire, with its posthumous masquerades, reeking of the Church, of the barracks, of cabbage Junkerdom, and above all, the philistine.” The revolution will not wait for Heaven; the revolution seeks justice now whereas reactionary German Christians will bow down to their masters and believe that their salvation will be had in some heaven that none of us have ever glimpsed.
This alignment between the Left and Jewry continued during the early days of the Bolshevik revolution: An inordinate proportion of Communist agitators were Jews, most of Hungary’s leading Bolsheviks (Bella Kuhn and company) during the post WWI communist insurrection were Jews, Germany’s post WW1 Bolshevik revolution was run by the Jewish Pole Rosa Luxembourg and in the 1930s and 1940’s the Jewish affinity for the left made all the sense in the world because the Left was at war with Fascism and Nazism.
For example, during the Nazi occupation of Poland, there were two Polish undergrounds – one for communists and one which was backed by London. The Polish Home Guard, which was allied with London, for the most part handed Jews, in hiding, over to the Nazis and did nothing to help the Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. By contrast, the Polish Peoples Guard, which was associated with Moscow, sent radiograms to Moscow regarding the uprising and the Red Army bombed German positions which were harassing the Ghetto.
[Incidentally, some people who condemn the Jewish association with the left allege that Soviet armies were inert while the Nazis destroyed the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto. This is LIBEL. The Jewish Ghetto was destroyed in 1943, and the Soviets rendered some aid. (At that time, Soviet Forces were not near Warsaw) In 1944, the Soviet army idled on the East bank of the Vistula River while Christian Warsaw (led, for the most part, by reactionary Catholics who hated the Soviets and the Jews), which had done nothing to help the Jews of the Ghetto, was destroyed by the Nazis.]
After World War Two, London was opposed to the creation of the Jewish state and actively aided the Jordanian and Egyptian armies in attempting to strangle the nascent Jewish state in the cradle. America gave no aid, whatsoever, to the Jews (America was, however, the first state to recognize Israel; the second state to recognize Israel was the Soviet Union, which did so less than an hour after America’s recognition.) Russia supplied Israel with oil, and the communist bloc, particularly Prague, was for the most part Israel’s only source of weaponry. Until 1967, the membership of the Soviet Academy of Science was two-thirds Jewish.
The Jews, very simply, had an alignment with the left that lasted for almost two-hundred years. Such old friendships do not die overnight and will not die just because a gang of fat old men made a lot of money in America and decided to forget their roots.
5) Alfred Kazin’s unmerited happiness.
Many people in older generations looked at the supposed savagery of the Jewish Radicalism of the 60’s, which is still with us although to a markedly muted degree, and concluded that younger Jews had an almost animalistic, primitive radicalism. They felt revulsion towards the social as well as the political radicalism of the hippies and the yippies, the drugs, the long hair, and the student strikes that started in Berkeley and sooner or later spread to every good university in the nation.
Many of these young leftist Jews may have seemed anti-Semitic because their exultation of youth was like a kick in the shins to their elders, who were of course Jewish. And some conservative Jews were horrified, noting that such anti-Semitism was especially grotesque so soon after the holocaust. However, the holocaust is precisely what made younger Jews so radical in the sixties.
We looked at our American elders and all we could think of was one thing: What did they do to try to stop the Holocaust. We found that in most cases, they – with the exception of Jewish men who fought as soldiers -- did absolutely nothing. They were far too busy trying to make it in America, trying to conform to White Protestant norms, trying to kiss the asses of their Christian teachers in school, trying to get good grades, trying to become part of what William James called the American National Obsession, worshipping at the “altar of the bitch goddess success,” to care about anyone but themselves. And this was conservatism and this was capitalism, caring about no one but yourself, and it was conducive to the Holocaust because if Jews had devoted less time to their financial interests, and more time toward their European brethren, more Jews would have been saved. And we hated our conservative elders because they seemed so self-satisfied with things that were immaterial, they would eat kugel and look at younger Jews and plead for inactivity and passivity and we had contempt for their passivity, which, we reasoned, contributed to the death of six million.
I remember when I was very young, I, like many other little children, showed an inordinate interest in the oddities and differences in strangers. At times, I spoke about what I saw. My Grandmother used to respond to me by saying, MYOB, Mind Your Own Business. But I thought that minding one’s own business was the primary problem with life. That was why my Father had died (He reputedly was choking on his food in a restaurant for several minutes while no one intervened) and that was why six million had died. And so I wanted to shun and shuck all the conformist and conservative behaviors that one might associate with the MYOB mode of behavior.
But I by no means saw this lack of sympathy only in my relatives. This was reflected, for example, in Philip Roth’s novel “My Life as A Man,” which revolves around, in its opening scenes, a Jewish hotel in the Catskills in the 1940’s. The author shows us a bunch of Jews having a fun-filled time in the summer. And I wonder: What the fuck is so funny if it is 1943 and millions of Jews are facing extermination. And why do the Jews of the novel have such a tolerant view of the Jewish guy who allegedly got out of army duty for fraudulent reasons when it seemed clear that every Jew should have done his duty toward Judaism by fighting the Nazis. And I find this lack of care evident in Alfred Kazin’s book ‘New York Jew.” This book, in large measure, is one prosaic Ode to the intellect of Alfred Kazin. At the beginning of the book, Kazin recounts his ecstatic happiness in the autumn of 1942: His first book is published to great critical acclaim, he moves from parochial Brooklyn to cosmopolitan Manhattan, and he is invited to all the really right cocktail and dinner parties where the pampered and erudite guests ferociously argue about Communism and Fascism and all the other isms all hours of the night. And upon reading this, I want to stab Kazin: What was left to be argued about after the Wehrmacht. There was only one thing to do, join the marines, or the royal air force or the red army. The extreme radicalism of young, leftist Jews can be traced to an overwhelming revulsion for complacency and passivity in the face of evil.
And so I always wondered what my elders were doing in 1942. (My Father and his brothers were in the service, but no one on my Mother’s side of the family was fighting.) And this is why I became contemptuous of my relatively conservative elders and this is why I became radical.