Jan 16, 2024 07:10 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 17, 2024 01:28 AM by C C.)
As liberal Jews feel abandoned by the Left: What's next?
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-78...e_vignette
INTRO (Adam Milstein): All Jews agree on one thing… that all Jews never agree. At any Jewish gathering around the world, you’ll hear heated debates on food, religion, culture, and everything in between. Politics are no different, but the debate is louder.
James Baker once said “F*** the Jews, they don’t vote for us.” While perhaps untrue, Baker’s sentiment reflected a historical American Jewish political truism – the Jewish community votes Democrat. Since the early 1990’s, a growing number of Jews have shifted rightward, but the majority of the Jewish-American community reside in the “liberal” camp.
After the October 7th terrorist attack, prior to Israel’s ground operation in Gaza, the true sentiment of the left towards Jews was exposed. Protests on college campuses, airports, freeways, bridges, outside synagogues, and Holocaust museums forced Jewish Americans to face a stark reality. Leftist and their Muslim allies were exposed not only as anti-Israel but as plainly anti-Jewish groups. Mobilizing under a guise of liberation (“From the River to the Sea”), and civil rights (“justice” in Palestine), one thing became increasingly clear – for a large coalition of leftists and Muslims in America, Jews have no right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland and deserve no safety anywhere.
Historically and for good reason, Jews have been fixated on the antisemitism from the far right as our greatest threat. This focus on antisemitism’s political affiliation left us vulnerable. We have virtually ignored the growing warning signs of antisemitism from the Islamo-leftist camp.
After all, Jews were an integral part of the left. In the name of Tzedek (Justice), we’ve marched with every marginalized community throughout American history. Yet, on October 7th, 2023, we marched alone. As our women had blood dripping down their legs, women’s rights groups didn’t express any outrage. They stood silent. As our children were identified by their ashes, children’s rights organizations were nowhere to be found. And as our civilians were brutalized, all human, civil, and LGBTQ+ rights didn’t march, didn’t organize, and didn’t protest. On the contrary - they stood with the attackers.
In the wake of October 7th, American Jews were left speechless. The wakeup call has been loud. The Jewish political home, the American left, turns a blind eye to war crimes and to the sexual mutilation of women, children and men when the victims are Jews. It has become evidently clear that in leftist spaces, the American Jew is dehumanized as a mere “oppressor”, an “Occupier”, a “Colonialist”, “White privileged”, and “Apartheid” supporter. Compassion for the deep trauma Jews sustained was nowhere to be found.
One must wonder, if killing Jews and raping women in Israel is ‘just’ and legitimate under the guise of a victim using ‘resistance by any means necessary’, what prevents our enemies from committing the same crimes in America? And where can liberal Jews find a political home? (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - -
Cynic's Corner: While granting that one in five Jews might be politically conservative (a figure asserted to be static), and the few pundits like Shapiro are very vocal...
Nothing is going to change in the long run. The American Jewish community has been betrayed by and disillusioned by the Left many times in the past, and they always flock back or remain. New Antisemitism has actually been around for a while, this is hardly the first eruption of it.
The 19th-century grandfather of the post-Jacobin Left was a Jew, for Pete's sake. Most Jewish erudites (especially the young ones) will always have a bent for the evolving intellectual offshoots of Marxism. (Why Do American Jews Idealize Soviet Communism?).
Jews recruited by the Party in the early 20th-century became disenchanted by it, but then the next generation in the 1940s became enamored with it again. Not becoming crestfallen till Soviet officials themselves finally revealed that the horror-stories of the Stalin era were true. And then the next generation immediately became a fixture of the New Left in the '60s and early '70s. By the '80s, virtually everyone finally got the message not to be reading something like Worker's World in public, and had safely tucked themselves behind the long-standing label "Social Democrat".[1]
The majority's conception of the only political alternative is the far-Right (where rests the old-fashioned antisemitism). What's in-between that and the Left is just an indistinct, cognitive blur to them -- either as good as invisible or just degrees on an extended spectrum of fascism. I.e., in their minds, there is no option to the Left. The latter's historical and putative current abuses against Jews must be borne and tolerated.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-78...e_vignette
INTRO (Adam Milstein): All Jews agree on one thing… that all Jews never agree. At any Jewish gathering around the world, you’ll hear heated debates on food, religion, culture, and everything in between. Politics are no different, but the debate is louder.
James Baker once said “F*** the Jews, they don’t vote for us.” While perhaps untrue, Baker’s sentiment reflected a historical American Jewish political truism – the Jewish community votes Democrat. Since the early 1990’s, a growing number of Jews have shifted rightward, but the majority of the Jewish-American community reside in the “liberal” camp.
After the October 7th terrorist attack, prior to Israel’s ground operation in Gaza, the true sentiment of the left towards Jews was exposed. Protests on college campuses, airports, freeways, bridges, outside synagogues, and Holocaust museums forced Jewish Americans to face a stark reality. Leftist and their Muslim allies were exposed not only as anti-Israel but as plainly anti-Jewish groups. Mobilizing under a guise of liberation (“From the River to the Sea”), and civil rights (“justice” in Palestine), one thing became increasingly clear – for a large coalition of leftists and Muslims in America, Jews have no right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland and deserve no safety anywhere.
Historically and for good reason, Jews have been fixated on the antisemitism from the far right as our greatest threat. This focus on antisemitism’s political affiliation left us vulnerable. We have virtually ignored the growing warning signs of antisemitism from the Islamo-leftist camp.
After all, Jews were an integral part of the left. In the name of Tzedek (Justice), we’ve marched with every marginalized community throughout American history. Yet, on October 7th, 2023, we marched alone. As our women had blood dripping down their legs, women’s rights groups didn’t express any outrage. They stood silent. As our children were identified by their ashes, children’s rights organizations were nowhere to be found. And as our civilians were brutalized, all human, civil, and LGBTQ+ rights didn’t march, didn’t organize, and didn’t protest. On the contrary - they stood with the attackers.
In the wake of October 7th, American Jews were left speechless. The wakeup call has been loud. The Jewish political home, the American left, turns a blind eye to war crimes and to the sexual mutilation of women, children and men when the victims are Jews. It has become evidently clear that in leftist spaces, the American Jew is dehumanized as a mere “oppressor”, an “Occupier”, a “Colonialist”, “White privileged”, and “Apartheid” supporter. Compassion for the deep trauma Jews sustained was nowhere to be found.
One must wonder, if killing Jews and raping women in Israel is ‘just’ and legitimate under the guise of a victim using ‘resistance by any means necessary’, what prevents our enemies from committing the same crimes in America? And where can liberal Jews find a political home? (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - -
Cynic's Corner: While granting that one in five Jews might be politically conservative (a figure asserted to be static), and the few pundits like Shapiro are very vocal...
Nothing is going to change in the long run. The American Jewish community has been betrayed by and disillusioned by the Left many times in the past, and they always flock back or remain. New Antisemitism has actually been around for a while, this is hardly the first eruption of it.
The 19th-century grandfather of the post-Jacobin Left was a Jew, for Pete's sake. Most Jewish erudites (especially the young ones) will always have a bent for the evolving intellectual offshoots of Marxism. (Why Do American Jews Idealize Soviet Communism?).
Jews recruited by the Party in the early 20th-century became disenchanted by it, but then the next generation in the 1940s became enamored with it again. Not becoming crestfallen till Soviet officials themselves finally revealed that the horror-stories of the Stalin era were true. And then the next generation immediately became a fixture of the New Left in the '60s and early '70s. By the '80s, virtually everyone finally got the message not to be reading something like Worker's World in public, and had safely tucked themselves behind the long-standing label "Social Democrat".[1]
The majority's conception of the only political alternative is the far-Right (where rests the old-fashioned antisemitism). What's in-between that and the Left is just an indistinct, cognitive blur to them -- either as good as invisible or just degrees on an extended spectrum of fascism. I.e., in their minds, there is no option to the Left. The latter's historical and putative current abuses against Jews must be borne and tolerated.
