My grandfather was a card carrying communist in the 1930s because he was involved in union organizing amongst the mechanics and electricians. He gave it up with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which he viewed as transparently discrediting to communism.
1) The issue of Jewish leftism mostly seems to be a phenomena of elite Jews. While average Jews are slightly to the left of average whites, elite Jews are dramatically to the left, with the UMC falling in-between.
You see this pattern with other non-whites. Your middle class light skinned Cuban pretty to the right, but your professional Indian woman in NOVA being hyper woke.
2) I think there is a "somewhere vs anywhere" divide partly related to class (the upper classes move more) but also quite related to the Jewish experience of not really belonging to an area/society and having to move around.
3) I don't really see any elite Jewish conservatives. I see libertarians and I see neocons. But present author excluded I feel like I see few conservatives.
4) Jewish attitudes in Israel are so different than in America I can't help but think that there is a specifically anti-majoritarian stance that is solely related to their being in the minority. All minorities in all cultures seem to have this attitude, though not all have either the capability or inclination to make it political (East Asians for instance are temperamentally unpolitical, even if they can be counted on for some votes).
See Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century for an extrapolation on this theme across continental Europe and into the Pale and Russia. He details in great length the exceptional performance of Jews in urban settings over successive generations (industry, education, then eventually as influential political actors) starting in the mid 1800s. Sets Jews within the larger merchant class outsider group common throughout world history (Indians in Africa & Caribbean, overseas Chinese in SE Asia, Greeks in Europe and the NE), Germans throughout Europe and Russia, Arabs in Latin America, etc.)
Importantly echoes the idea Arnold expresses here that by the early to mid 20th Jews were vastly over-represented in communist movements, capitalism (banking, industry, prestige professions, academy) and media.
1. Jewish support for Russian vs non-Russian communist movements. Russia may be special because of the particularly vicious history of Tsarist Russian anti-Semitism, against which the Communists' claim to rise above all ethnic prejudice would have particularly stood out.
2. Contemporary support for Communism among Jewish vs African-American intellectuals. Both keenly conscious of long and terrible histories of prejudice, both easily tempted by confirmation bias to see a better alternative in the nominally anti-racist Communist movement. Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes etc may well have had similar motives to the Communist-sympathizing Jews you describe.
Not mentioned in this brief essay was the important role played by the Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution, which is covered in Slezkine's The Jewish Century and Solzhenitsyn's 200 Years Together.
Jews were never majority Bolshevik, nor were Bolsheviks majority Jews, but Jews were greatly overrepresented among them and played a key role in the secret police and the gulag. As Slezkine noted, if you were interrogated and shot during the great purges of the 1930's, it was likely by a Jew. Lenin, himself of part Jewish descent (a grandfather lived in the Yishuv, now Israel) said he could not have made the revolution without them. After WWII, Golda Meir visited the Soviet Union and huge crowds of Jews turned out for her. The Russian Jew had rediscovered his particularist identity after the murderous Nazi invasion, and Stalin grew suspicious. Remember the "Jewish Doctors' Plot," as Stalin grew ill? A huge pogrom such as had been perpetrated on other ethnic identities was about to be launched on the Jews when Stalin died and it just fizzled out.
Today, American Jews of the left focus on the Nazi holocaust, but few are aware of that other holocaust, that of the mass murders and gulags of the Soviet Union, in which Jews unfortunately played a large role.
“One hypothesis, offered by Zvi Eckstein and Maristella Botticini, is that rabbis in the Christian era mandated that young males be taught Torah. This imposed a hardship on a farmer, who needed to tend to crops and/or livestock. A farmer could not spare his own time or the time of his sons to pursue Torah study. Instead, farmers would have found Christianity easier to live with.” So farmers choose Christianity over Judaism because Judaism was too book intensive and time consuming?
Basically, socialism attracts those who are religiously minded, but are in rebellion towards God. They want the blessings of the Torah, but not the obligations of the Torah in their personal life.
They want to live life on their own terms, but somehow avoid the consequences that God has created to guide us to the life that we should be living.
Your "theory of political beliefs":......My theory of political beliefs...as it relates to a self-identification with political "radicalism" amongst white/white(ish) Westerners is that it arises from a subliminal but rather shallow desire to feel more virtuous (and sophisticated) than your ordinary Joe/Jane. The vast majority of people of this kind formed their "radicalism" on a conveyor belt from school-to-university (for people who step off at 16, "radicalism" will rarely be part of their vocabulary).
And My Theory of Political Beliefs as it relates to a self-identification with political "conservatism"? At its worst it seems to be a kind of inchoate rage. For others it springs from deep family roots. And for university-educated apostates (like me) - ones given to intellectualising? I'm not sure (maybe it is harder to identify one's own subliminals) but perhaps we are kind of Edmund Burke intellectual clones.
"My theory of political beliefs is that people tend to align with what they think of as a friendly tribe and in opposition to what they think of as an enemy tribe."
Sometimes the description of the aligned tribe as friendly might be a stretch. An important anecdote about the 1930s and Jews is contained within Amity Shlaes forgettable book The Forgotten Man. She covers the NIRA and Roosevelt's prosecution of businesses. The key case the administration eventually lost at the supreme court being the Schechter Chicken case. From wikipedia, "After the decision was announced, newspapers reported that 500 cases of NIRA code violations were going to be dropped." Also, "The Schechter brothers were Jewish (the surname Schechter means "slaughter" in Yiddish, and specifically refers to a ritual slaughterer)." The brothers had already died, but Shlaes tracked down and talked to one of their descendants who said the brothers likely voted for Roosevelt all four times. Which would include 3 elections after their direct fervent prosecution by his administration.
Some of the universalizing, cosmopolitan, socialist feeling may owe partly to German-ness alone (or entwined, Germans and Jews and Romantics).
Red State Texas' Hill Country among other areas was often German-settled, that's well-known, but less well-known is that there were three strands of Germans: Protestants, Catholics, and "freethinkers". The latter for instance founded towns called Comfort and Welfare, not generally Jewish immigrants that I'm aware but they named another of their towns Boerne after a Karl Ludwig Börne, evidently, whose wikipedia page gives you the flavor of their idealism.
To this day, if you drive through Comfort for instance, you may be struck by the absence of what are thick on the ground in other Texas towns: churches. Only a handful were built, eventually.
Interesting read, Arnold. this stuff always intrigued me for the simple reason that, to my knowledge, I have none of it in my history. My mother’s family came straight into the South around 1900, and there wasn’t much enthusiasm for Communism or Socialism in the South. My father’s people came in at Philadelphia, but (from sketchy info) they seem to have been business folks and farmers in Russia and went straight into business when they got here. One great-great grandfather reputedly went to the Dakotas in the 1880s—I’m guessing as part of Baron de Hirchs’s agricultural colonies. No Communists, though.
A more interesting question is why your mother was a communist and you become a neoliberal. I would say that both ideologies have something in common that attract Jews: abstraction.
Both promise transcendence beyond personal and historic attachment, free entry, meritocracy, etc.
"Nazi racial ideology saw Jews as an ethnic group. In my lifetime, Jews have leaned against this. They prefer to think of Jews as distinctive religiously or perhaps culturally, but not genetically."
Well, when Jews themselves defined Judaism by matrilineal descent, then why complain when Jews are taken at their word? Ask any rabbi - a person's mother must be Jewish in order for the person to claim Judaism. How is that NOT a biological test? It's bad when Nazis do it, but ok when rabbis do it? That appears to be the reality on the ground.
As for the idea that Jews do not think of themselves as genetically distinct, if that were true, Israel's rabbinate would not be doing genetic testing to establish a person's Jewishness. Yet they are.
"Israel's Rabbinical Courts Begin to Recognize DNA Tests, Potentially Opening Gateway to Proving Jewishness" ~Haaretz (Sep 1, 2019)
It isn't genetic - converts don't change genetically when they are called Jews. Yet Israel's right of return is sometimes based on genetic testing of the people applying.
It isn't cultural - there isn't a consistent Jewish culture. Some people who claim to be Jewish do so only on the strength of their mother being Jewish. They don't share any other cultural aspects of Judaism, yet matrilineal descent is sufficient to make them Jewish.
It isn't matrilineal descent - the Karaites and the Ethiopian Jews both recognize only patrilineal descent, yet they have right of return.
It isn't the rabbinical system - Ethiopian Jews don't recognize rabbinic or Talmudic authority.
It isn't national citizenship - Jews can be citizens of any nation.
It isn't belief - atheists can be Jews.
It isn't circumcision - the Reform often don't practice it any more.
No matter what you point to, it is easy to find a group of Jews who don't fit the definition you choose. Judaism is like the luminiferous ether. Everybody thinks it should exist, because if it did exist, it would answer a lot of questions, but when you test to find it, you can't. It doesn't actually exist.
Judaism is an illusion maintained because Christians and Muslims have historically required Jews to exist in order to maintain their end-time prophecies. For Christianity, Jesus doesn't return until all the Jews have converted. For Muslims, Jesus doesn't return until all the Jews have been murdered. If there are no Jews, then both end-times prophecies fail. Everyone pretends Judaism exists because so many groups NEED it to exist.
But it doesn't exist.
Judaism hasn't existed for millennia.
At this point, it's just a bunch of 21st century people LARPing ancient monotheism.
My grandfather was a card carrying communist in the 1930s because he was involved in union organizing amongst the mechanics and electricians. He gave it up with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which he viewed as transparently discrediting to communism.
1) The issue of Jewish leftism mostly seems to be a phenomena of elite Jews. While average Jews are slightly to the left of average whites, elite Jews are dramatically to the left, with the UMC falling in-between.
You see this pattern with other non-whites. Your middle class light skinned Cuban pretty to the right, but your professional Indian woman in NOVA being hyper woke.
2) I think there is a "somewhere vs anywhere" divide partly related to class (the upper classes move more) but also quite related to the Jewish experience of not really belonging to an area/society and having to move around.
3) I don't really see any elite Jewish conservatives. I see libertarians and I see neocons. But present author excluded I feel like I see few conservatives.
4) Jewish attitudes in Israel are so different than in America I can't help but think that there is a specifically anti-majoritarian stance that is solely related to their being in the minority. All minorities in all cultures seem to have this attitude, though not all have either the capability or inclination to make it political (East Asians for instance are temperamentally unpolitical, even if they can be counted on for some votes).
See Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century for an extrapolation on this theme across continental Europe and into the Pale and Russia. He details in great length the exceptional performance of Jews in urban settings over successive generations (industry, education, then eventually as influential political actors) starting in the mid 1800s. Sets Jews within the larger merchant class outsider group common throughout world history (Indians in Africa & Caribbean, overseas Chinese in SE Asia, Greeks in Europe and the NE), Germans throughout Europe and Russia, Arabs in Latin America, etc.)
Importantly echoes the idea Arnold expresses here that by the early to mid 20th Jews were vastly over-represented in communist movements, capitalism (banking, industry, prestige professions, academy) and media.
Good interview with Slezkine here with Harry Kreisler: https://youtu.be/K_nhahTUFWo?feature=shared
Two useful comparisons here would be:
1. Jewish support for Russian vs non-Russian communist movements. Russia may be special because of the particularly vicious history of Tsarist Russian anti-Semitism, against which the Communists' claim to rise above all ethnic prejudice would have particularly stood out.
2. Contemporary support for Communism among Jewish vs African-American intellectuals. Both keenly conscious of long and terrible histories of prejudice, both easily tempted by confirmation bias to see a better alternative in the nominally anti-racist Communist movement. Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes etc may well have had similar motives to the Communist-sympathizing Jews you describe.
I recall that ex-communist David Horowitz described the Jewish communist enclaves in New York as a kind of shtetl.
Not mentioned in this brief essay was the important role played by the Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution, which is covered in Slezkine's The Jewish Century and Solzhenitsyn's 200 Years Together.
Jews were never majority Bolshevik, nor were Bolsheviks majority Jews, but Jews were greatly overrepresented among them and played a key role in the secret police and the gulag. As Slezkine noted, if you were interrogated and shot during the great purges of the 1930's, it was likely by a Jew. Lenin, himself of part Jewish descent (a grandfather lived in the Yishuv, now Israel) said he could not have made the revolution without them. After WWII, Golda Meir visited the Soviet Union and huge crowds of Jews turned out for her. The Russian Jew had rediscovered his particularist identity after the murderous Nazi invasion, and Stalin grew suspicious. Remember the "Jewish Doctors' Plot," as Stalin grew ill? A huge pogrom such as had been perpetrated on other ethnic identities was about to be launched on the Jews when Stalin died and it just fizzled out.
Today, American Jews of the left focus on the Nazi holocaust, but few are aware of that other holocaust, that of the mass murders and gulags of the Soviet Union, in which Jews unfortunately played a large role.
“One hypothesis, offered by Zvi Eckstein and Maristella Botticini, is that rabbis in the Christian era mandated that young males be taught Torah. This imposed a hardship on a farmer, who needed to tend to crops and/or livestock. A farmer could not spare his own time or the time of his sons to pursue Torah study. Instead, farmers would have found Christianity easier to live with.” So farmers choose Christianity over Judaism because Judaism was too book intensive and time consuming?
Basically, socialism attracts those who are religiously minded, but are in rebellion towards God. They want the blessings of the Torah, but not the obligations of the Torah in their personal life.
They want to live life on their own terms, but somehow avoid the consequences that God has created to guide us to the life that we should be living.
Your "theory of political beliefs":......My theory of political beliefs...as it relates to a self-identification with political "radicalism" amongst white/white(ish) Westerners is that it arises from a subliminal but rather shallow desire to feel more virtuous (and sophisticated) than your ordinary Joe/Jane. The vast majority of people of this kind formed their "radicalism" on a conveyor belt from school-to-university (for people who step off at 16, "radicalism" will rarely be part of their vocabulary).
And My Theory of Political Beliefs as it relates to a self-identification with political "conservatism"? At its worst it seems to be a kind of inchoate rage. For others it springs from deep family roots. And for university-educated apostates (like me) - ones given to intellectualising? I'm not sure (maybe it is harder to identify one's own subliminals) but perhaps we are kind of Edmund Burke intellectual clones.
"My theory of political beliefs is that people tend to align with what they think of as a friendly tribe and in opposition to what they think of as an enemy tribe."
Sometimes the description of the aligned tribe as friendly might be a stretch. An important anecdote about the 1930s and Jews is contained within Amity Shlaes forgettable book The Forgotten Man. She covers the NIRA and Roosevelt's prosecution of businesses. The key case the administration eventually lost at the supreme court being the Schechter Chicken case. From wikipedia, "After the decision was announced, newspapers reported that 500 cases of NIRA code violations were going to be dropped." Also, "The Schechter brothers were Jewish (the surname Schechter means "slaughter" in Yiddish, and specifically refers to a ritual slaughterer)." The brothers had already died, but Shlaes tracked down and talked to one of their descendants who said the brothers likely voted for Roosevelt all four times. Which would include 3 elections after their direct fervent prosecution by his administration.
Some of the universalizing, cosmopolitan, socialist feeling may owe partly to German-ness alone (or entwined, Germans and Jews and Romantics).
Red State Texas' Hill Country among other areas was often German-settled, that's well-known, but less well-known is that there were three strands of Germans: Protestants, Catholics, and "freethinkers". The latter for instance founded towns called Comfort and Welfare, not generally Jewish immigrants that I'm aware but they named another of their towns Boerne after a Karl Ludwig Börne, evidently, whose wikipedia page gives you the flavor of their idealism.
To this day, if you drive through Comfort for instance, you may be struck by the absence of what are thick on the ground in other Texas towns: churches. Only a handful were built, eventually.
Interesting read, Arnold. this stuff always intrigued me for the simple reason that, to my knowledge, I have none of it in my history. My mother’s family came straight into the South around 1900, and there wasn’t much enthusiasm for Communism or Socialism in the South. My father’s people came in at Philadelphia, but (from sketchy info) they seem to have been business folks and farmers in Russia and went straight into business when they got here. One great-great grandfather reputedly went to the Dakotas in the 1880s—I’m guessing as part of Baron de Hirchs’s agricultural colonies. No Communists, though.
A more interesting question is why your mother was a communist and you become a neoliberal. I would say that both ideologies have something in common that attract Jews: abstraction.
Both promise transcendence beyond personal and historic attachment, free entry, meritocracy, etc.
"Nazi racial ideology saw Jews as an ethnic group. In my lifetime, Jews have leaned against this. They prefer to think of Jews as distinctive religiously or perhaps culturally, but not genetically."
Well, when Jews themselves defined Judaism by matrilineal descent, then why complain when Jews are taken at their word? Ask any rabbi - a person's mother must be Jewish in order for the person to claim Judaism. How is that NOT a biological test? It's bad when Nazis do it, but ok when rabbis do it? That appears to be the reality on the ground.
As for the idea that Jews do not think of themselves as genetically distinct, if that were true, Israel's rabbinate would not be doing genetic testing to establish a person's Jewishness. Yet they are.
"Israel's Rabbinical Courts Begin to Recognize DNA Tests, Potentially Opening Gateway to Proving Jewishness" ~Haaretz (Sep 1, 2019)
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-09-01/ty-article/.premium/will-dna-testing-become-the-gateway-to-proving-jewishness/0000017f-dc8a-df9c-a17f-fe9a2f270000
Apr 29, 2019
No elite Jewish conservatives? What about David Horowitz, Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, David Goldman?
Actual Judaism is incompatible with communism, the Torah assumes private ownership, even in the future messianic era, see Micah 4:4
Define what Judaism is.
It isn't genetic - converts don't change genetically when they are called Jews. Yet Israel's right of return is sometimes based on genetic testing of the people applying.
It isn't cultural - there isn't a consistent Jewish culture. Some people who claim to be Jewish do so only on the strength of their mother being Jewish. They don't share any other cultural aspects of Judaism, yet matrilineal descent is sufficient to make them Jewish.
It isn't matrilineal descent - the Karaites and the Ethiopian Jews both recognize only patrilineal descent, yet they have right of return.
It isn't the rabbinical system - Ethiopian Jews don't recognize rabbinic or Talmudic authority.
It isn't national citizenship - Jews can be citizens of any nation.
It isn't belief - atheists can be Jews.
It isn't circumcision - the Reform often don't practice it any more.
No matter what you point to, it is easy to find a group of Jews who don't fit the definition you choose. Judaism is like the luminiferous ether. Everybody thinks it should exist, because if it did exist, it would answer a lot of questions, but when you test to find it, you can't. It doesn't actually exist.
Judaism is an illusion maintained because Christians and Muslims have historically required Jews to exist in order to maintain their end-time prophecies. For Christianity, Jesus doesn't return until all the Jews have converted. For Muslims, Jesus doesn't return until all the Jews have been murdered. If there are no Jews, then both end-times prophecies fail. Everyone pretends Judaism exists because so many groups NEED it to exist.
But it doesn't exist.
Judaism hasn't existed for millennia.
At this point, it's just a bunch of 21st century people LARPing ancient monotheism.