Nadene Goldfoot
Bernie Sanders speaks at a New York campaign fundraiser, September 18, 2015 (Michael Vadon / Flickr) I found Bemie Sanders to be most disappointing in that he is Jewish but against Israel even though he had once moved on a Kibbutz there. Even though he didn't manage loving to milk cows, he need not take his early experience out on the country.
A most disappointing fact is that some American Democrats are following the Leftists of the world in being the most anti-Semitic people compared to other political groups. It's here in USA that Democrats are on the Left and Republicans are on the Right. Left-wing politics support social equality and egalitarianism (the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities,), often in opposition of social hierarchy. As has happened, Leftists feel this way about all except us Jews.
The truth is that the Left has opposed Jews both for their religion and for their nationality. Jews have fused their religion and nationality which is an anathema to both the secularism and universalism of the Left. The people, Leftists, have the reputation of being so hospitable and supportive of the national liberation movements of all other people, but has been so antagonistic to the nationalism of the Jews. An example is from the Social Democrat, Irving Howe, who wrote, "In the warmest of hearts, there is a cold spot for the Jews."
As we examine Marx and the French Socialists to the Soviets, the 3rd World, and Western Leftists today, we see that their intense Jew-hatred has prevailed among their society. Our American Democrats have been inching closer and closer to European Socialism of late, wanting more of it as they enjoy its benefits of being so cared for by the whole society. What the connection is between a socialistic society and anti-Semitism behooves me. I ask, just what is this connection?
Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, now deceased, once said, "Antisemitism has become a unifying global ideology of the totalitarian Left." Below is the historic November 10, 1975 speech delivered by Daniel Patrick Moynihan right after the U.N. declared that “Zionism is racism.” The resolution was repealed in 1991, but its spirit tragically lives on in the form of the U.N.’s enduring obsession with condemning Israel.".........There will be time enough to contemplate the harm this act will have done the United Nations. Historians will do that for us, and it is sufficient for the moment only to note the foreboding fact. A great evil has been loosed upon the world. The abomination of anti-semitism — as this year’s Nobel Peace Laureate Andrei Sakharov observed in Moscow just a few days ago — the Abomination of anti-semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction. The General Assembly today grants symbolic amnesty — and more — to the murderers of the six million European Jews. Evil enough in itself, but more ominous by far is the realization that now presses upon us — the realization that if there were no General Assembly, this could never have happened."
Many on the nontotalitarian Left have been compromised by their "no enemies on the Left" attitude. Thus , a movement founded, established, and supported in large part by Jews has come to constitute, along with the Arab/Muslim world, the Jews' greatest enemy at this time. My thoughts go to the movie, Fiddler on the Roof, when the Jewish girl and gentile Russian fellow go away and he is joining the Communist Party, who promises a much better life.
Karl Marx is a famous Communist with a profound and powerful mind that went astray, in my opinion. The disappointment to us is that such a man started life as a descendant of a long line of distinguished rabbis. He was born in the German city of Trier in 1818 but was baptized as a Lutheran at age 6. His father converted to Christianity before he was born so as to continue practicing law. Being a Jewish lawyer was pronounced to be against Prussian laws, and his part of the world was suddenly part of Prussia according to the latest winning war. A Jewish lawyer would find it hard to make a living any other way, but didn't have to convert like the Spanish Jewry of 1492. He did it to make life easier, and had no strong feelings for his own religion. I'd say that his family lacked that kind of education.
Karl Marx wrote the essay, On the Jewish Question. It was a response to Bruno Bauer, a philosopher's article, "The Jewish Question, where Bauer attacked Jews and Judaism, arguing against emancipation for Jews until they leave Judaism, their own morality and even their customs. (This so infuriates me, knowing that Judaism is basically a religion made up of the morality, on how one treats others as they want to be treated--the Golden Rule and this basic morality is what Bruno hates.)
Surprise! Marx didn't go along with his conclusions, but managed to outdo Bauer in antisemitic bitter and abusive language. He thought all Jews should be attacked, not just religious ones. This, coming from a Jew! Yes, I know, he was converted when a small child, but to us Jews, he was still a Jew. His father went along with it all, evidently, to have him develop in this way. He must not have cared what he was, and that is the real shame.
French socialists were even more anti-Jewish than Marx. There were George Lichtheim, one of French socialists hostile to Jews, and Charles Fourier, founder of French socialism who said that Jews were Parasites, merchants, usurers," whose emancipation he termed "the most shameful of all recent vices of society." Before these men were born, their land was boiling over with hatred for Jews, mainly due to their prevailing religious liturgy that hit them in the face every Sunday. People were immersed in anti-Semitism. Hated of one group kept them from dwelling on other problems in their society.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) of early socialism, expressed his antisemitism in a "moderate" manner. Proudhon received no formal education as a child, but he was taught to read by his mother, who had him spelling words by age three. However, the only books that Proudhon was exposed to until he was 10 were the Gospels and the Four Aymon Brothers and some local almanacs.
His theories were found to be in more extreme forms in his journals which were published after his death. It held his Nazi-life sentiments regarding the Jews. He had a program for the disappearance of Jews in December 1847. He said of Jews, "this race poisons everything by meddling everywhere without ever joining itself to another people. Demand their expulsion from France, with the exception of people married to Frenchwomen. Abolish the synagogues: don't admit them to any kind of employment, pursue finally the abolition of this cult...the Jew is the enemy of the human race. One must send this race back to Asia or exterminate it...by fire or fusion or by expulsion, the Jew must disappear...What the peoples of the Middle Ages hated by instinct I hate upon reflection, and irrevocably." His French admirers justified the Russian pogroms going on. One can wonder if Hitler hadn't received some of these writings.
All this leads to the position that Alfred Dreyfus found himself in who was a Jewish army officer that was falsely accused by the French government of being a spy for Germany. the French Socialist press on January 28, 1898, published a "non-participation in the Dreyfus Affair because Jews would use the rehabilitation of a single Jew to wash out "all the sins of Israel."
The sad affair is that a Jewish researcher, French socialist Saint-Simon, could not find a single word on behalf of Jews in the whole of French socialist literature from 1820 to 1920. It seems that a people who develops a reputation so admirable, such as the French with their dealings with the new Americans that was so appreciated, never see Jews as they see others. We might as well have emigrated from a distant planet.
The Soviets take the cake in treating us Jews badly. There are so many cases, I know not where to begin. The Soviet Union in 1917 was terribly hostile toward the Jewish religion and national needs. In 1919, Zionism was named as a counterrevolutionary movement and prohibited. The Soviet Union had a campaign to destroy the Jewish religion that was quite successful. Between 1956 and 1965, the number of synagogues in the USSR decreased to a low 450 to only 60 remaining.
By 1980, when I made aliyah to Haifa, Israel, there were fewer than 5 rabbis for the more than 2 million Soviet Jews. In Israel, I found myself in a class with 40 Russian Jewish teachers and we were all learning Hebrew from our teacher, Sarah. What had happened was that in 1980, some Russian Jews had been allowed to leave Russia. Our teacher was a pen pal of a Russian Jew in prison for learning Hebrew ! Much later he got out and became well known in the Knesset.
The National Socialist German Workers' Party, otherwise known as the Nazis, is a case that stands by itself in the realm of Socialism promoting anti-Semitism.
Nazis were racists, singling out the Jews as the cause of all their problems, the scapegoat of the world. Nazis told their Germans that non-Aryan races were inferior humans and that they were of the Aryans. The dichotomy is that they didn't count the Arabs as non- Aryans when their earlier Crusaders couldn't tell them apart.
Then again, Nazis labeled all Jews as one race, and we know that others have converted at different periods into the original family group. Moses freed all the slaves; the descendants of Jacob and the Others. It was a mixed group after their arrival after 400 years. King David's grandmother, Ruth the Moabite, was a convert. Many Romans had become Jews, preferring their family values compared to the Roman ways. Jews have had to live in all 4 corners of the earth, yet have kept their religion on task, all reading the same pages of the Torah on the same Shabbat. Jews have become an endogamous society, however, and never know if they are marrying a 5th to distant cousin or not. It's possible. They only make up 0.02% of the world population.
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Hitler was the cause of anti-Semitism. One rumor was that he had had a Jewish girlfriend who disappointed him. Hitler and his gang of thugs realized that Jews were not easily baptized. "Once a Jew-always a Jew," they would say. He wrote the book, Mein Kampf, where he says that "the Jew can speak a thousand languages and nevertheless remains a Jew. His traits of character have remained the same...It is always the same Jew." According to Hitler, the Jews seek to dominate the non-Jewish world through various instruments: Christianity, Marxism socialism, Capitalism, democracy. all are products of Jews and their values, no matter what their non-Jewish guises are. We lost 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. This was more than anti-Semitism, something taken to the nth degree; it was wholesale slaughter.
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Germany in the 20s was doing well, but went through a rough recession in the 30s when people were out of work. They blamed the Jews, as they always did in the past. It was in 1096 when Germans in their Crusade massacred Jews in European towns while passing through on their way to Jerusalem. European civilization's main aspects were preaching hatred of Jews and denying equal rights to them. In 1933, they made racialist anti-Semitism their official creed and started a deliberate persecution of the German Jews. What most remember is WWII between 1939-1945 that Nazi anti-Semitism developed into a plan of genocide against the Jewish people in Europe, a plan called the "Final Solution."
Out of the 16 million Jews who lived throughout the world at that time, nearly 6 million were murdered in the Holocaust in Europe. They were assisted in some European countries by local elements who helped to round up the Jews destined for the death camps. Britain and the USA might have helped to organize the escape of Jews from Europe but deliberately avoided doing anything until almost the end of the war. It was much like the position Ukraine finds themselves in but much worse.
In searching for the answer, I see that Christianity is divided about the Jewish question. Some, like the Evangelicals, are most supportive of Jews and of Israel, while other mainstream Christians are totally against them, so anti-Semitism can have a religious origin.
Why such hatred? One thing I noticed was that during hard times, the Jews persisted in their businesses, keeping them open, lowering their prices, staying open longer than others. They made it, causing a lot of jealousy. Others didn't have what it took to keep afloat. The Jews, by remaining open, could keep their help working, so it was good for everyone, except those who snarled at a Jew's success.
Resource:
Facts About Israel by Ministry for foreign affairs, Jerusalem
Why the Jews? by Dennis Prager & Joseph Telushkin, chapter11, Leftist Antisemitism, p. 123-136.
https://unwatch.org/moynihans-moment-the-historic-1975-u-n-speech-in-response-to-zionism-is-racism/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Joseph_Proudhon
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/irving-howe-a-socialist-life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Howe
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/why-leftists-should-be-democrats
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