Mar 20, 2022 12:28 AM
(This post was last modified: Mar 20, 2022 04:17 AM by C C.)
I.e., Russian Jews "lived under pervasive antisemitism" during the Soviet (communist) era.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/rus...39032.html
EXCERPTS: I’m from the [bygone] Soviet Union. And in our Soviet passports, before we turned them in when I was nine years old and were granted our refugee status, where my friends’ nationality said “Russian,” mine had said “Jewish.”
After living under pervasive antisemitism, my family made the decision to emigrate to the US — and my beloved [Russian] elementary school teacher moved me to the back of the class when she learned of my family’s upcoming betrayal of the motherland. She began calling me by last name only.
[...] When the Soviet Union collapsed ... I became even more confused about my identity. We were from Leningrad, but now it was St Petersburg. And though I lived in Leningrad, I was born in Odessa, which was now in a different country: Ukraine.
[...] Every night I wake at two or three in the morning and check if our friend in Kyiv has done her “morning rounds” on social media. Is she alive? What buildings are destroyed? How many new civilian deaths? The collective anguish of my ancestors and every refugee pulses through me.
Now my American friends are asking: Why don’t the Russians stand up against this war? There are so many people there, surely everyone can’t be arrested. I try to explain about decades upon decades of systemic repression of rights. I try to compare it to systemic racism: it’s hard to change a whole system of thinking, centuries of expected behaviors.
[...] I don’t know a single person here in St. Petersburg who supports this war, my friend from third grade tells me in a private message. And I get nervous that she uses the word “war” in case the government sees it. And I don’t ask her if she’s protesting. A bomb killed my friend’s mom in Kharkiv. What you are seeing there isn’t true, I tell her.
They’ll never tell us the truth, she replies, but we know to believe nothing. She needs daily medicine but she says she now can’t get it because of American sanctions. So many of my friends are losing their jobs, she adds. The shelves are looking empty and I can’t find sugar.
“We made a terrible mistake not leaving when you did, not following you out,” my mom’s friend in Volgograd says to her on the phone. “I’m scared,” my other friend writes me. I don’t feel sorry for the Russian people, but I do.
[...] Now the lines are clear. There is no confusion about who is the aggressor and whose lives are being destroyed. My heart and soul are with Ukraine. I’m still confused if I’m Ukrainian or Russian — both or neither? — but I know that the pain of it all is cumulative... (MORE - missing details)
- - - retrospective reference point - - -
During the late 1940s-1950s period of the Cold War, the leftist faction of the US dismissed antisemitism in the USSR and its Stalin era atrocities as capitalist lies and propaganda. As information from a trickle of administrative defectors increased, reality and disillusionment finally set in as the sixties dawned and unfolded.
Saving face meant attributing the decline of Party membership in the US to other causes than betrayal or disenchantment. (Like McCarthyism and so-forth espoused as primarily or solely responsible.) Momentum actually just diversified beyond the class-struggle between proles and bourgeoisie, to a wide variety of "oppressed population groups" whose issues could likewise be recruited and exploited to facilitate the intellectual class's rise to prescriptive influence and power. (Reminiscent of the functional roles of Plato's "philosopher kings", first reflected in traditional Marxist revolutionaries and then the transition to cultural Marxist, academic elite.)
Note that there were plenty of WASPs in the Marxist organizations mentioned below: "Soviet intelligence, who ran a sophisticated espionage/propaganda operation on the East Coast, favored WASP Ivy Leaguers, who did not stand out as potential traitors as easily as others." [Due to the bigoted stereotype in that era of American communists consisting of Eastern European ancestry.]
From: Jewish Women's Archive (encyclopedia entry) "Communism in the United States"
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/com...ted-states
EXCERPTS: From the 1920s into the 1950s, the Communist Party USA (CP) was the most dynamic sector of the American left, and Jewish women made up an exceptionally large portion of the party and its affiliated organizations. Yiddish-speaking immigrants were especially active in the 1920s, when the party fostered revolutionary yiddishkeit. In the 1930s and 1940s, U.S.-born daughters of immigrants took center stage, carrying the party’s revolutionary version of Americanism into community organizations, labor unions, student movements, and cultural projects.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when the domestic “red scare” and international Cold War shattered the party’s vitality, Jewish women formerly active in the CP or its affiliates turned to new movements and carried revolutionary traditions into rising struggles against racism, sexism, and imperialism. [The early New Left social justice movements, still around under new and revived labels.]
In the forty years following the Russian Revolution of October 1917, communism was the most dynamic force in American left-wing politics and a primary mobilizer of radical Jewish women. At the center of this movement lay the American Communist Party, which grew out of various radical factions inspired by the October Revolution. In December 1921, most of these groups came together as the Workers Party, renamed the Communist Party USA (CP) in 1930.
[...] Although the Communist Party survives to this day, it is smaller than ever in both size and influence. Rival communist factions—Trotskyists, Maoists, and other Marxist-Leninists—thrived briefly in the 1960s and 1970s and surged again amidst the economic and political crises of the early twenty-first century. The CP’s dynamism in its heyday has yet to be matched, however. Jewish women remain a vital component of the American left, but the communists among them are increasingly few and belong to an array of competing sects.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/rus...39032.html
EXCERPTS: I’m from the [bygone] Soviet Union. And in our Soviet passports, before we turned them in when I was nine years old and were granted our refugee status, where my friends’ nationality said “Russian,” mine had said “Jewish.”
After living under pervasive antisemitism, my family made the decision to emigrate to the US — and my beloved [Russian] elementary school teacher moved me to the back of the class when she learned of my family’s upcoming betrayal of the motherland. She began calling me by last name only.
[...] When the Soviet Union collapsed ... I became even more confused about my identity. We were from Leningrad, but now it was St Petersburg. And though I lived in Leningrad, I was born in Odessa, which was now in a different country: Ukraine.
[...] Every night I wake at two or three in the morning and check if our friend in Kyiv has done her “morning rounds” on social media. Is she alive? What buildings are destroyed? How many new civilian deaths? The collective anguish of my ancestors and every refugee pulses through me.
Now my American friends are asking: Why don’t the Russians stand up against this war? There are so many people there, surely everyone can’t be arrested. I try to explain about decades upon decades of systemic repression of rights. I try to compare it to systemic racism: it’s hard to change a whole system of thinking, centuries of expected behaviors.
[...] I don’t know a single person here in St. Petersburg who supports this war, my friend from third grade tells me in a private message. And I get nervous that she uses the word “war” in case the government sees it. And I don’t ask her if she’s protesting. A bomb killed my friend’s mom in Kharkiv. What you are seeing there isn’t true, I tell her.
They’ll never tell us the truth, she replies, but we know to believe nothing. She needs daily medicine but she says she now can’t get it because of American sanctions. So many of my friends are losing their jobs, she adds. The shelves are looking empty and I can’t find sugar.
“We made a terrible mistake not leaving when you did, not following you out,” my mom’s friend in Volgograd says to her on the phone. “I’m scared,” my other friend writes me. I don’t feel sorry for the Russian people, but I do.
[...] Now the lines are clear. There is no confusion about who is the aggressor and whose lives are being destroyed. My heart and soul are with Ukraine. I’m still confused if I’m Ukrainian or Russian — both or neither? — but I know that the pain of it all is cumulative... (MORE - missing details)
- - - retrospective reference point - - -
During the late 1940s-1950s period of the Cold War, the leftist faction of the US dismissed antisemitism in the USSR and its Stalin era atrocities as capitalist lies and propaganda. As information from a trickle of administrative defectors increased, reality and disillusionment finally set in as the sixties dawned and unfolded.
Saving face meant attributing the decline of Party membership in the US to other causes than betrayal or disenchantment. (Like McCarthyism and so-forth espoused as primarily or solely responsible.) Momentum actually just diversified beyond the class-struggle between proles and bourgeoisie, to a wide variety of "oppressed population groups" whose issues could likewise be recruited and exploited to facilitate the intellectual class's rise to prescriptive influence and power. (Reminiscent of the functional roles of Plato's "philosopher kings", first reflected in traditional Marxist revolutionaries and then the transition to cultural Marxist, academic elite.)
Note that there were plenty of WASPs in the Marxist organizations mentioned below: "Soviet intelligence, who ran a sophisticated espionage/propaganda operation on the East Coast, favored WASP Ivy Leaguers, who did not stand out as potential traitors as easily as others." [Due to the bigoted stereotype in that era of American communists consisting of Eastern European ancestry.]
From: Jewish Women's Archive (encyclopedia entry) "Communism in the United States"
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/com...ted-states
EXCERPTS: From the 1920s into the 1950s, the Communist Party USA (CP) was the most dynamic sector of the American left, and Jewish women made up an exceptionally large portion of the party and its affiliated organizations. Yiddish-speaking immigrants were especially active in the 1920s, when the party fostered revolutionary yiddishkeit. In the 1930s and 1940s, U.S.-born daughters of immigrants took center stage, carrying the party’s revolutionary version of Americanism into community organizations, labor unions, student movements, and cultural projects.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when the domestic “red scare” and international Cold War shattered the party’s vitality, Jewish women formerly active in the CP or its affiliates turned to new movements and carried revolutionary traditions into rising struggles against racism, sexism, and imperialism. [The early New Left social justice movements, still around under new and revived labels.]
In the forty years following the Russian Revolution of October 1917, communism was the most dynamic force in American left-wing politics and a primary mobilizer of radical Jewish women. At the center of this movement lay the American Communist Party, which grew out of various radical factions inspired by the October Revolution. In December 1921, most of these groups came together as the Workers Party, renamed the Communist Party USA (CP) in 1930.
[...] Although the Communist Party survives to this day, it is smaller than ever in both size and influence. Rival communist factions—Trotskyists, Maoists, and other Marxist-Leninists—thrived briefly in the 1960s and 1970s and surged again amidst the economic and political crises of the early twenty-first century. The CP’s dynamism in its heyday has yet to be matched, however. Jewish women remain a vital component of the American left, but the communists among them are increasingly few and belong to an array of competing sects.
