How the Left Got Its Antisemitic Groove

The Leftist campus protests publicize in vivid colors the triumph of the Leftist ideal of coercive egalitarianism over their ideal of anti-racism and anti-antisemitism.

May 10, 2024

Dear friends and supporters,

The eruption of pro-Hamas and -Palestinian Leftism on elite American campuses has caught much of the country by surprise. (The statistics here of the widespread arrests are accurate as of Wednesday, May 8.)

U.S. universities are hotbeds of Leftism, and Leftism for many decades has been identified with antiracism and anti-antisemitism. Part of this aversion to antisemitism stems from the West’s response to the Holocaust. Nazism and the extermination of over 6 million Jews have been widely identified with the Far Right Wing, despite the fact that the Nazi Party was the National Socialist Party. While there were plenty of prominent antisemites in Western democracies, they belatedly drew the line at racist extermination.

How the Left Became Anti-Antisemitic

After World War II, U.S. Jews tended to gravitate to the Democratic Party, which at the time still preserved contact with classical liberalism and therefore stressed universal ideals of God-given rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — including for Jews. Plenty of Republicans did too, but there was always a lingering nativist, isolationist, and “America First” element, even though the latter movement itself was disbanded a few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In any case, in the U.S. the Democratic Party provided a warm welcome to American Jews (though, to be fair, so did the dispensational evangelical wing of the GOP).

What has changed, evidenced by today’s widespread antisemitism on numerous progressive U.S. campuses? Zach Kessel’s “Anti-Zionism’s Soviet Roots” (paywalled) furnishes a clue. He lays out a history of the Soviet Union’s hostility to Jews, and in particular how its ideology of oppression and emancipation paints a target on Jewish backs. “In fact,” he writes,

the very notion of distinct Palestinian nationhood emerged from a Soviet project devised under the banner of national liberation.

For explanation, we need to go back further in Soviet history. In a 1995 article “Why and How Stalin Hated Jews” in The Moscow Times, Karen Dukess provides evidence for Stalin’s anti-Jewish cruelty, from

the rise and bloody demise of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, which was dedicated to raising money in the West for the Soviet war effort and was later persecuted as a hotbed of traitorous Zionists, to the orchestrated murder in a “car crash” of the great director, actor and Jewish leader Solomon Mikhoels, [to] Stalin’s covert plan to deport the entire Soviet Jewish population to Siberia, and the overtly anti-Semitic “Doctors’ Plot” of the 1950s. Throughout, it becomes clear that Stalin's methods of persecution were far more subtle and devious than the historical precedent of whipping Cossacks into the [earlier] frenzy of a pogrom. Except for a brief respite, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in World War II, and it joined the hip with England, France, and the US as the allied powers, Stalin was uniformly anti-Semitic.

It is surprising how surprising such a revelation is to so many Americans, who overwhelmingly identify antisemitism with Hitler and the Nazi party and Southern U. S. Republicans. But Stalin was almost equally antisemitic and, in its effect, more antisemitic since his version lasted much longer than Hitler’s did.

Capitalist Blood-Suckers

For one thing, Stalin identified Jews as the capitalist bloodsuckers of the world, a prominent antisemitic conspiracy theory embraced by too many on the American Far Right. Jews tended to be proportionately rich and to own businesses and to individually accumulate wealth, the poison of capitalism that communism was calculated to eviscerate.

Jews as Oppressors

But Stalin had deeper geopolitical reasons. In the Cold War, many countries were lined up either behind the U.S. or the U.S.S.R., and the latter coveted the support of Arab regimes against Israel, which was a staunch ally of the U.S. After Stalin’s death, the antisemitism did not abate. In the Six Days’ War between Egypt and Israel in 1967, the U.S.S.R. was Egypt’s primary weapon supplier. After that, antisemitism became a tenet of Soviet ideology. The Palestinians must have their own state to overthrow the colonial oppressors, the Jews. The fact that a people suffering the extermination of over 6 million just a quarter century before could be considered an “oppressor” is hard to stomach. (cont. below)

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(cont.)

The Left’s Long Love Affair with the Soviet Union

Cue American campuses, 2024. Since the 60s, the American Left has gradually purchased stock in Cultural Marxism, which like its predecessor Classical Marxism, divided society into the oppressors and the oppressed. (Listen to my talk on “Classical and Cultural Marxism.”)

The youngling Left comes by this love affair with Marxism honestly. Before the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, American Leftist intellectuals were among the Soviet Union’s most ardent foreign apologists (see Paul Hollander’s The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality in the Twentieth Century). When Hitler broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the affection returned. Why affection? Because the undeniable evils of the Soviet Union were understood to be harmful extremes of a basically sound social order — coercive egalitarian leveling. Stalin simply went too far. In substance, the political philosophy of the Soviet Union was that of much of the American Left: the world is filled with oppressors and the oppressed, and true social justice demands dispossessing the oppressors.

The Jews are part of the systemic oppressors because they hold such disproportionately privileged positions in finance, entertainment, science, the arts, and so forth. Therefore, for a society to be just, the Jews must be overthrown. To the extent the Left adopts this oppressor/oppressed social paradigm (and its adoption is increasing all the time), it will be vulnerable to antisemitism.

The campus protests, some of them widely illegal, are all pro-Palestinian, but some are explicitly pro-Hamas. A minority support the murderous Hamas rampage against Israel last October 7, and even those who don’t nonetheless feel some sympathy for the Hamas perpetrators who were allegedly overthrowing their Jewish oppressors.

It is the Marxist ideology that creates a way of viewing the world that interprets Jews as an oppressive class that must be overthrown, violently if necessary. The Left’s increasing indebtedness to Marxism rivals the antisemitism once reserved for the fever swamps of the nativist American Right.

Conclusion

The Leftist campus protests display in vivid colors the triumph of the (actual) Leftist ideal of coercive egalitarianism over their (alleged) ideal of anti-racism and anti-antisemitism. Just as Stalin was willing to throw overboard the declared Marxist ideal of the brotherhood of all races in order to preserve the Marxist project of the leveling of all hierarchies, so the American Left has now descended into the bowels of excremental antisemitism.

The biblical worldview sees all races, as well as individuals and families and nations, as standing under God’s judgment and in need of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. “There is no difference” (Rom. 3:22). In the biblical picture, race is simply irrelevant.

Religion is everything.

Yours for the King,

Founder & President, Center for Cultural Leadership

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