The Surprising Surprise of Progressive Jews
Marx and Carter and Corbyn, BDS and identity politics foretold the current vilification of Jews and Israel.
In the aftermath of 7/10, progressive Jews expressed dismay at the reaction of their leftist allies. On American university campuses, activists gleefully supported Hamas, accused Israel of genocide, and taunted Jews as oppressors. On the streets of London, large demonstrations sent the same message. To the surprise of Jewish leftists, antisemitism became fashionable once again.
In the Los Angeles Times, UC Berkeley law dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote that he “was stunned when students across the country, including mine, immediately celebrated the Hamas terrorist attack.” No previous encounters with antisemitism had prepared him for the new outbursts, he said. The New York Timesreported on progressive Jews feeling “abandoned” by left-wing allies. As Daniel Sokatch, executive director of the New Israel Fund, put it, leftist justifications for the Hamas attack were “beyond shocking”: “It felt like betrayal, not of us as allies, but of the values we all stand for.” At the World Economic Forum, Kamala Harris’ Jewish husband, Douglas Emhoff, echoed the sentiment: for American Jews “It’s just shocking” to see “who our friends weren’t.” Similarly, in the Financial Times, Joshua Chaffin noted that in his “progressive suburb” of New York, “fellow Jews have been startled by the lack of solidarity from groups they have supported in the past.” In Haaretz, Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz lamented her “extraordinarily indifferent” fellow leftists’ “overt joy over Jews being massacred (perceived as heroic resistance)” and “sanctimonious hair-splitting (“massacres should be condemned but are understandable”).” She wrote, “I . . . . used to think that the political camp most likely to be revolted by atrocities was mine, the left. No longer.”
I understand their dismay and they are right to be shocked. But stunned? Startled? Their surprise is surprising.
Their surprise is surprising as a matter of politics. In all political movements, but especially on the left, allyship is contingent. Solidarity is rarely solid. Changing conditions determine who is useful to the cause. Comrades can turn on you. Past performance is no guarantee of future appreciation. Witness the saga of J.K. Rowling: feminist in good standing one day, deplorable TERF the next, having committed the heresy of defending women against the trans transformation of their rights and spaces. As allies, progressive Jews are equally dispensable. Did they not notice JKR’s demonization?
Their surprise is also surprising in light of history. Though perhaps no longer the patron saint of the global left that he once was, Karl Marx himself peddled rather nasty antisemitic stereotypes in “On the Jewish Question.” You see, the “worldly” God of the “practical” Jew is money—a “jealous” God to boot—and his real religion, haggling. For the Jewish man of money, contempt for theory, art, history, and man as an end in himself is a virtue. The Jew represents the alienating domination of private property and money—perhaps the worst sin in Marx’s catechism. Not surprisingly, Marx concludes that “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.” Jews as Jews were obstacles to be removed—or better, in good Hegelian fashion, transcended. After World War II, plenty of interpretive gymnastics went into absolving Marx, and over the years, plenty of progressive Jews were willing to overlook the Marxian contempt. But on the left, Jew-hatred has a history. Marx wrote his infamous essay in 1844. Have Jews stopped reading him?
It wasn’t just the far left either. In his mostly admiring book, President Carter, Stuart Eizenstat recounts how for his first sermon at a Washington D.C. church Jimmy Carter chose as his topic Christ driving the moneylenders from the Temple, challenging the “existing church” in way Jewish leaders could not avoid: “So they decided to kill Jesus.” Undeterred even after receiving an anguished response from a Lutheran pastor, Carter delivered another sermon at his church’s pre-Christmas Bible class, saying that by revealing himself as the Messiah, Jesus knew he was risking death “as quickly as [it] could be arranged by the Jewish leaders, who were very powerful.” Carter later expressed his strong feeling about Jewish inequity in his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It led Emory historian Kenneth Stein, an expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict, to formally resign from the Carter Center. In his letter, Stein said:
President Carter’s book on the Middle East, a title too inflammatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished analyses; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments. Aside from the one-sided nature of the book, meant to provoke, there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book. Being a former President does not give one a unique privilege to invent information or to unpack it with cuts, deftly slanted to provide a particular outlook.
Did progressive Jews miss the “particular outlook” a rather prominent Democrat conveyed under a rather “inflammatory” title, back in 2006?
Other leaders on the left have their own “particular outlook.” Well before 10/7, British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn once described his “friends” in Hamas as pursuing “peace and social justice,” regretting that their organization had been declared terrorist by the UK government. In a podcast interview with Andrew Sullivan, UK journalist Jonathan Freedland recounted Corbyn’s reaction to a Jewish demand that a grotesque antisemitic mural in East London be removed: he wondered why it should come down at all, and suggested that no matter how long “Zionists” had lived in the UK, they just didn’t get English “irony.” When Freedland wrote a piece on Labour becoming a “cold house” for Jews, Corbyn accused him of “utterly disgusting subliminal nastiness” and charged that Jews were “weaponizing” antisemitism. The current and former chief rabbi of the UK chided Corbyn for using “the language of classic prewar European anti-Semitism.” In 2020, the Labour Party finally sacked Corbyn, after his special “genius” for progressive anti-Semitism had become too much for his comrades. When interviewed by The New Yorker about her book, Antisemitism: Here and Now, my colleague Deborah Lipstadt channeled Corbyn’s views (and those of “some of the younger new members of Congress” whose party affiliation she tactfully omitted):
“[T]heir view of the world is refracted through a prism that is either ethnic- or class-based, or both. And they look at Jews and they see white people, even though, ironically, the far right looks at Jews and doesn’t see white people. They see white people with power, white people with privilege, and they say, “Well, those people can’t be suffering. Those people can’t be victims of prejudice. And I, as a progressive . . . ” You know, this is Jeremy Corbyn speaking, “I absorbed progressive values with my mother’s milk. So I could never be prejudiced, therefore these people must be claiming that they are victims of prejudice for all the wrong reasons. There must be an ulterior motive.”
Lipstadt said that in 2019. Did progressive Jewish readers overlook it?
In the U.S. and elsewhere, leftist academics haven’t exactly hidden their disdain for Israel. Many support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. The American Studies Association passed a pro-BDS resolution in 2013, and the Middle East Studies Association followed in 2022. A similar resolution failed only narrowly in the American Anthropological Association, and the American Historical Association had to fend off repeated leftist BDS pressure. Just in 2020-2021, the ADL reports, American student governments considered 17 BDS calls, of which 11 passed. The BDS website makes the message pretty clear:
“Israel is occupying and colonising Palestinian land, discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel and denying Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes . . . Since its launch in 2005, BDS is having a major impact and is effectively challenging international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.”
Lipstadt tried to warn her fellow Jews on this issue as well: “at its heart—when you see what is really behind it, and the people who have organized it—[BDS] is intent on the destruction of the State of Israel.” The post-10/7 rhetoric may sound a little more grating to Jewish ears, but the ubiquitous “settler-colonialism” trope and the urge to wipe out Israel are not new. Did progressive Jews assume their comrades didn’t mean it?
Progressive values provide no protection, quite the opposite. Measured by good anticapitalist standards, Jews remain suspect, distressingly overrepresented as they are among the captains of finance and media. As perennial overachievers, beholden to quaint notions of meritocracy, Jews also obstruct the pursuit of diversity—no wonder colleges have limited their admission. In the standard hierarchy of identity groups, Jews have long since been demoted to the lower rungs anyway—too white, as Lipstadt already implied, or at best white-adjacent. Standard progressivism thus set the stage for a revival of Jew-hatred well before 10/7. As Liel Leibovitz wrote in Commentary—under the perhaps too-insistent title, “No, Jews Aren’t White”—its genius is “its ability to imagine the Jew as the embodiment of whatever it is that polite society finds repulsive.” Thus, if you decide, as progressives have, “that there’s such a thing as ‘whites’ and that they are uniquely responsible for all evils perpetrated on the innocent and downtrodden, well, the Jews must be not only of them but nestled comfortably at the top of the white-supremacist pyramid.” That was published in 2021. Why, at this late date, be surprised at the nastiness that followed?
OK, but might leftist support for Hamas still be surprising? Not really. Under the headline “A Pro-Hamas Left Emerges,” historian Jeffrey Herf a while ago summarized an open letter to President Obama by a group of American academics, “Historians against the War”:
“With a brief and unconvincing effort to sound balanced, the statement deplored “the ongoing attacks against civilians in Gaza and in Israel” but then turned its fire on Israel for what it called “the disproportionate harm that the Israeli military, which the United States has armed and supported for decades, is inflicting on the population of Gaza.” The signers were “profoundly disturbed that Israeli forces are killing and wounding so many Palestinian children.” They found “unacceptable the failure of United States elected officials to hold Israel accountable for such an act” and demanded “a cease-fire, the immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and a permanent end to the blockade so that its people can resume some semblance of normal life.” Further, they urged the President to suspend U.S. military aid to Israel until there is assurance that it will no longer be used for the commission of “war crimes.””
Sound familiar? That was back in 2014.
As Herf explained, the people who claimed to be “against war” objectively argued in favor of the war Hamas launched against Israel. To facilitate the red-green alliance in the West, he showed more recently, Hamas rebranded itself by sanitizing its charter of the most obvious antisemitic and historical absurdities and providing just the sort of rhetoric that could be spouted on Western streets. That happened in 2017.
The alliance itself had been long in the making. Herf again: “For the generations who have come of age since the 1960s, the language of anti-racism and anti-colonialism, mistakenly applied to Zionism and Israel, has facilitated the emergence of a kind of magical thinking that transforms Hamas from an inherently racist and antisemitic terrorist force into a member in good standing of the struggle of the wretched of the earth against colonialism and Western domination.” Since the 1960s . . . That makes the apparent surprise of progressive Jews all the more surprising.
Shockingly painful as the recognition of leftist callousness is to anyone who feels any solidarity with Jews and Israel, it creates an additional quandary for progressive Jews. What if the surge in antisemitism is not a betrayal but a confirmation? Could support for Hamas reflect rather than repudiate progressive values? Might progressivism trigger Jew-hatred not by regrettable mistake but through predictable logic?