Left-Wing Jews: a Jewish and American Tragedy
townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2018/11/06/leftwing-jews-a-jewish-and-american-tragedy-n2535218
It is probably impossible to overstate the damage left-wing -- not liberal but left-wing -- Jews are doing to Judaism, Jews and America. Of course, the same can be said of the damage left-wing Catholics are doing to Catholicism and America, other left-wing Christians are doing to Christianity and America, and, most obviously, the damage the secular left-wing is doing. But since anti-Semitism is in the news, and given the prominence of many left-wing Jews, I will focus on them.
The damage done to Jews by left-wing Jews is not new. It began at the beginning of the left with Karl Marx, the grandson of two Orthodox rabbis (his parents had undergone pro forma conversion to Christianity). He wrote one of the most anti-Semitic tracts of the 19th century, "On the Jewish Question," published in 1844. In it he wrote, among other things:
"What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering ..."
"What is his worldly God? Money ..."
"Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist ..."
"In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism."
In the early 20th century, another left-wing Jew, Leon Trotsky, who, along with Lenin, led the Bolshevik Party in Russia, was a catastrophe for Jews and for humanity. In 1920, when Trotsky was head of the Red Army, Moscow's chief rabbi, Rabbi Jacob Mazeh, asked him to use the army to protect the Jews from pogromist attacks in which tens thousands of Jews were murdered. Trotsky is reported to have responded: "Why do you come to me? I am not a Jew," to which Rabbi Mazeh answered: "That's the tragedy. It's the Trotskys who make revolutions, and it's the Bronsteins who pay the price."
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That is the story of the many Jewish leftists to this day: Jewish leftists make revolutions, and all the Jews (among millions of others) pay the price.
Thus, many of the leaders of the movement to economically strangle Israel -- the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement -- are left-wing Jews.
A few years ago, I was invited to the world's most famous debating forum, the Oxford Union, to debate the farcical question of whether Israel or Hamas is a greater obstacle to peace in the Middle East. One of my two adversaries was a Jewish former professor at Oxford. He argued that Israel was a greater threat to peace than Hamas.
Another prominent left-wing Jew, MIT professor Noam Chomsky, has devoted his life to writing and speaking against two countries: the United States and Israel.
The security of the world's only Jewish state is by far the greatest security issue for world Jewry. Yet many left-wing Jews attack Israel, support many of those who wish to destroy Israel or, at the very least, do nothing to strengthen Israel's security.
In America today, leftism has poisoned so many non-Orthodox synagogues, they differ only from the American Civil Liberties Union or the Democratic Party in their use of Hebrew liturgy.