My Fellow Jews: Is It Time to Leave the Left ?

Given Leftist hatred toward Jews, given that Our involvement in the left ironically fuels anti-Semitism, and Given the Left’s Abandonment of its Mission, should we Call it Quits ?

By

David Gottfried

I still believe in many tenets of what might loosely be termed the “left.”  I believe in combatting income inequality.    I believe, as I have believed since I was very young, that nothing is as noble and as G-dly as the liberation of the downtrodden, the tender of succor to the slaves, redemption to the rabble, vindication to the vanquished.  

I imbibed the manna of divine revolution when I was taught the story of Passover and our enslavement in Egypt, the saga of Purim and Haman’s Plan to kill the Jews, the depredations of Antiochus and the Assyrian Empire, the belligerence of Babylon,  the unadulterated evil of Rome, the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the German HEP (Hierosolyma est Perdita)¹ riots,  the blood libel, the Cossacks, the damnable lie that Jews created the black plague by poisoning the wells. 

When I was young, I planted myself in the left field of every ballpark, and my synagogue decided that the New York Mets was the Jewish team because, until 1969, the Mets always seemed to lose.  When I was young, the Democratic Party split the waters of the Hudson as G-d split the waters of the Red Sea and we took the George Washington Bridge to Eretz New Jersey for great American summer vacations.        

However, all good things have to end, and its time to distinguish between the long-lasting and durable and the relatively ephemeral and transitory.  Fighting for the downtrodden, the deviates, the dejected and despondent should be eternal aspirations.   However, paltry, plebian things like party politics, position papers and political posturing for transitory electoral gain should be discarded as readily as winter coats in summertime.  The summer is here and it’s time to shed the shapeless, sexless coats of the unisexual, decaying, decadent left. 

Here are a few reasons why we should abandon most contemporary forms of the Left:

First, the obvious:  The left is bewitched by the Third World, Multiculturalism and the Screaming Arab Street and has Decided that Jews are rapacious, capitalistic colonizers or, in its patently Hitlerite moments, children of the Devil, 

If you survey the student activists emoting for Palestine, you will suffer scads of prima donnas who are merrily oblivious to the fundamental facts regarding the conflict between Israel and the Arabs. 

They believe that Jews displaced the so-called Palestinians, but they ignore the eviction of one and a half million Jews from Arab lands after Israel was created. 

They petulantly pretend that the Jews refuse to tender land for peace, but they forget that Israel offered to give up 96 percent of the West Bank in 2000, and the Arabs responded by walking- out of negotiations and instituting a new intifada.   They say that Israel will not tender land for peace, but every time we’ve tendered land, we’ve gotten burned:  In 2000, Israel gave up its positions, in Lebanon, South of the Litani River, and Israel gave up Gaza in 2004, and both of those locales have become terrorist launching pads against Israel. 

They never protest the Chinese occupation of Muslim lands in Western China, even though if China made concessions to Muslims, China’s power would not be undermined as the Chinese vastly outnumber the Muslim minority in her midst.  They never protest the Egyptian repression of the Christian Copts, even though if Egypt made concessions to the Copts, she would not be endangered because Egyptian Muslims outnumber Christians by huge numbers.   However, they demand that Israel give up Gaza and the West Bank even though this would give Israel a waist of 9 miles, and she would be subject to immediate annihilation. 

Jews should redirect their energies away from the Left because Jewish leftist activism Has tended to Inspire Anti Semitism. 

The Jewish Attraction Toward the Left:

The Jews were in the vanguard of the Left in the beginning of the 20th Century, and they were in the vanguard of the left, in the United States, in the 1960’s.  The first third of the last century gave us Trotsky, Zinoviev, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Blum, Henry Laski (Right Wing Joe Kennedy wanted his children to be subjected to a variety of perspectives, and President John F Kennedy was tutored by Laski) and other bold Jewish Leftists.     

In the 1940’s, the masses of Europe rewarded the Jews, for caring about their poverty and misery, by sending them to their deaths.  And it wasn’t simply a German affair; it’s not fair to blame the holocaust entirely on Germans.  The Ukrainians, Poles, and Lithuanians were exceptionally anti-Semitic.  (Poland even had pogroms after the holocaust.  In 1945, when some Polish Jewish survivors of the camps tried to go back to their homes, 50 Polish Jews were killed in one town alone)   Also, even France, who we thought was a staunch lover of liberty, which gave us the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and which wanted to reconvene the ancient Sanhedrin in the time of Napolean, succumbed to racist barbarism.   (Thousands of Jewish children in Paris were brought to a sports stadium, and locked up, prior to deportation to concentration camps.) 

The Jews had spent decades bewailing the poverty of the masses, and struggling to  effectuate a redistribution of wealth, and Europe made it clear that it did not want our help.  They wanted us dead.  

In the 1960’s, Jews figured prominently in the civil rights and antiwar movements.  Although Jews were about two or three percent of the American population, Jews made up one third of the freedom riders who journeyed to the South to try to desegregate buses.  Many of them were beaten.  Schwerner and Goodman were killed trying to help blacks to register to vote.   However, soon enough, blacks turned against their Jewish supporters.  SNCC exiled its white supporters, a huge proportion of whom were Jewish.  In 1968, blacks in NYC wanted Jewish teachers fired from the public schools, complaining that the Jews prevented their children from learning how to read, and WBAI, the local radical radio station, aired a radical poet’s recitation of her rant against Jews: “Oh you Jewboy with that Yamalka on your head oh how I wish you would drop dead.”

Why do they hate Jewish leftists: 

Gentiles may hate Jewish Leftists because of The Atheistic inclinations of Some Jewish Leftists:

Sometimes, I think that anti Semites are “saying” this:   Just because you can’t believe in G-d doesn’t mean I have to become a bitter Marxian atheist like you.    Our religion oppressed you, and in the guise of helping us you are trying to kill our religion by converting us to Marxism.  You really don’t want to help us; you want to kill our religion which sustained us. 

Leftist condescension   

It is condescending when Jewish liberals, some of whom come from affluent and comfortable backgrounds, purport to be able to solve your problems.   Implicit in A’s notion that he can help B is the idea that A is more intelligent or competent than B.      

The belief that Jews are Lying when they maintain that we are all equal

The Jewish leftist will obediently parrot the dogma of the Left.  The Jewish leftist says that he believes that we are all equal, yada, yada, yada.

However, I don’t think that many Jews believe it, and I don’t think that many non-Jews believe it.  We are far, far less than one percent of the world’s population and yet the most influential thinkers of the world have all been Jews:  Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, Marx, Jesus.   

We are hugely represented among Nobel Prize recipients, the student body of elite American universities and industrial and scientific innovators.  

The Jewish people have survived all the empires that sought to destroy the Jews.  In 1948, the State of Israel was attacked by six Arab armies on the day Israel declared Independence.  The Jews were outnumbered by about one hundred to one.  Although President Truman was sympathetic to the Jewish State, America would not send any arms to the Jews.  By contrast, the British trained and aided the Jordanian army and when the Jews scored a serious victory at the expense of the Egyptians, the British army bombed the Jewish soldiers.  The Jews of Israel, in 1948, numbered 600,000, and many of them were the half-starved remnants of Europe’s concentration and death camps, but the Jews won.  Put it this way:  To arrive at the conclusion that the Jews have a special affinity and connection to the Divine is, for me, emotionally irresistible and intellectually perfectly plausible.

Of course, most liberal Jews would deny that Jews have any special rendezvous with destiny.  However, some liberal Jews may be consciously lying when they deny this,  and many Jews may subconsciously or unconsciously admit that Jews have a special place in history.

I think that gentiles can perceive that Jewish odes to equality are just standard operating leftist rhetoric and that Jewish leftists are insincere.   Sometimes it seems as if Jewish leftists feel guilty for having crafted an Old Testament which is so chauvinistic about Judaism and have over-reacted by devising an almost rabid egalitarianism. 

It's Time to Help Our Own

In the early 1960’s, thousands of Left-wing Jews joined the Civil Rights Movement.   That’s all well and good, but what about our own. 

Not all of the survivors of the camps went to Israel.  A few hundred thousand washed-up in New York City.  And, contrary to popular mythology, not  every Jew quickly dusted off the ashes of Auschwitz and became a gaudy American “macher.” (A big shot)

Some of them huddled in the prolific dark and dreary tenements of New York City.  I knew Holocaust survivors whose lives were defined by terror, regret and the ever-present memory of death on an industrial scale.  I did not know that many holocaust survivors; I knew their children, and so many of their children bore the psychic wounds of their parents.  I remember parents who shrieked at the sound of police sirens, and I remember their children, literally hiding under their mothers’ skirts.  And that flamboyant, flashy bitchy comic, Sarah Silberman, said, in 2008, that we should stop visiting our grandparents if they don’t vote for Obama.  

But the rich Jews never acknowledged the Jews of despair, found them unfashionable, and the rich Jews were far too Hollywood Reporteresque to show anything but abject disdain for their brothers.      

   
The Left is Under the Spell of Identity Politics and Is, therefore, a Renunciation of the True Left

The Left is becoming a vulgar conglomeration of groups shouting odes of praise for their special group, whether it be blacks or Arabs or Women or Jews for that matter. 

I will leave aside what most of you already know:   If we simply reward people for their blackness or their femaleness, we will show contempt for that poor, bright White Boy from Kentucky who may have no New York style but might  have a sweet heart and a keen mind.  There once was a left that cared about the individual. 

There is another reason why I hate identity politics, one that hasn’t gotten much airplay.  I simply can’t stand people who seem to be bereft of the gutsiness to be a real live human being and seem like pale imitations of ethnic and socio-sexual stereotypes on Saturday Night Live.  

1. Translated from the Latin meaning “Jerusalem is Lost.” While Jews were being killed, they were taunted for the loss of Zion.