*Jews and the Left*
reviewing a recent book by Batya Ungar-Sargon
In 2009, Norman Podhoretz published Why are Jews Liberals?
Batya Ungar-Sargon returns to that question in her book The Jews and the Left. Of Podhoretz, she writes,
In seeking to explain this mystery, he ended up merely restating it. p. 162
I am not sure that Ungar-Sargon does better. On p. 163, she writes,
liberal Jews got a fifty-year head start on this phenomenon--of affluent, educated Americans feeling uncomfortable with their privilege.
Most of the book gives her romanticized version of Jewish American history. She asserts that the founding of America enacted Jewish ideals of equal natural rights.
She points out that the history of Jews in America begins in the middle of the 1600s, and they gain a footing of legal equality very early. And when it was founded, the United States was the first country to give equal natural rights to Jews.
Jews make up both a people and a religion. The Reform movement wanted to de-emphasize peoplehood and convey that Judaism was just a religion. By the late 1800s, it was also, as Daniel Gordis points out, opposed to a Jewish state in Israel.1 The thinking was that America was a wonderful place for Jews, so why rock the boat? Ungar-Sargon does not mention this development.
Equilibrium was disturbed by massive waves of immigration at the turn of the century. Ungar-Sargon writes,
Immigration from Eastern Europe peaked in 1906 with the arrival of 153,000 Jews, bringing the total of the first decade of the twentieth century to one million. p. 37
She describes a Tocquevillian phenomenon.
the formation of hundreds of associations, charities, and mutual-aid societies
Out of this propensity to form associations, there emerged a Jewish labor movement. Ungar-Sargon remarks that its struggles
would by and large be waged by Jews against Jews. By 1900, 90 percent of the garment industry was in Jewish hands
The labor movement had its moderates who wanted to work within the capitalist system, and its socialists who wanted to overthrow it. Jews could be found in both camps. In either case, they were on the left. Ungar-Sargon fails to mention that in this era, the Democratic Party appealed to urban ethnic groups, perhaps with patronage more than policy.
Franklin Roosevelt’s corporatist New Deal appealed to the moderate wing of the labor movement, including many Jews. In my opinion, support for the New Deal is where Jews began to go wrong. The statist impulse of the left is unfortunate. In Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism, the most prominent libertarians are Hayek, Mises, Friedman, Rand, and Rothbard. All but Hayek were of Jewish extraction. Too bad that their view of markets did not prevail among Jews at large. Ungar-Sargon takes the more standard view of New Deal good, libertarian economics bad.
Perhaps what clinched Jewish support for Roosevelt was the antisemitism of many on the right. My father always justified his enthusiasm for FDR by referring to Father Coughlin, a radio broadcaster who was vitriolic against FDR and against Jews. Father Coughlin occupied the space in Jewish heads that Tucker Carlson occupies today.
In the 1920s, early 1930s, late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, much of American politics revolved around Communism and anti-Communism. There were Jews prominent in both camps before World War II, until in the 1950s the Communists receded in light of the Cold War and awareness of Stalin’s terror (and antisemitism). But in the 1950s most Jews thought that American former Communists or suspected former Communists were being persecuted. They regarded anti-anti-Communism as a sophisticated stance.
Another important issue, which came to a head in the 1950s and 1960s, was Civil Rights for black Americans. Jews were overwhelmingly on the side of equal rights.
But in the late 1960s, the first signs of the split appeared. In my view, what happened is that equal rights for blacks failed to yield equal outcomes. Rather than accept this, an important branch of the movement began to demand policies that would promote equal outcomes, requiring “affirmative action” and even stronger means. This drive was then appropriated by feminists who demanded not just equal access to prestigious occupations but equal numbers.
The equity focus settled on a villain-victim narrative. That is how Jews ended up regarded as white oppressors and Israel ended up regarded as a settler colonial project.
For Ungar-Sargon, a genuine left would be one that sides with low-income and working-class people. But today’s progressives create a victim hierarchy that puts certain identities at the top, including American blacks, women, and Palestinians. She sees this as misguided and phony. Her accusation is that Woke progressives are using their political beliefs to enjoy a guilt-free experience as they pursue fancy credentials and affluence.
Ungar-Sargon’s preferred solution is for the left to return to the principles of equal rights. That would take us back to the founding, taking us away from the focus on identity and the victim hierarchy. On her last page, she writes “To hate Jews is to hate America.”
For the left of Ilhan Omar, Zohran Mamdani, and the most radical professors and students on campus, hatred of America seems to be second nature. Why there are Jews who want to throw their lot in with such radicals is a question that I am afraid Ungar-Sargon fails to answer.
I am not sure that I have an answer, either. I have many Jewish friends who are on the left. I keep thinking of one couple, in particular, who took such pride in taking their young grandson to a Drag Queen Story Hour. Why? My guess is that they thought it made them cool.
So here are my guesses:
The Exodus, the founding narrative of the Jews, tells an oppressor-oppressed story. So Jews themselves have a natural affinity for that story.
Jews respect education and book learning. Educated people espouse the left-wing dogma. This makes it seem respectable to Jews, while making those who do not share the dogma seem uneducated.
The intellectual corruption of higher education is the heart of the matter. Jews played their part in that, and now they are feeling the consequences.
I disagree with Gordis that this shows that anti-Zionism was in the DNA of American Jews. A lot changed between the late 1800s and today. Immigration laws directed against Jews, and that were not relaxed during World War II, changed the equation in the minds of American Jews.
I discussed some of these questions at https://1000yearview.substack.com/p/the-jewish-plot-to-make-america-great and came to the following conclusion: "In part, modern American Jews may disproportionately vote Democrat due to the unique strength of the liberal Reform movement and support for the separation of church and state (ie, fear of the Christian right). But most secular Jews hold their political positions for the same reasons as their non-Jewish neighbors (and, increasingly, spouses and children). They are urban, well-educated, and professional, and vote like non-Jews who fit the same profile." American Jews are simply more likely to fit the demographic profile of a Democrat voter, and so, accordingly, vote more for the Democrats.
That being said, other diaspora Jewish communities (including in Canada and Britain) are more likely to support their country's conservative party, while about a third of American Jews voted for Trump in the last election. Orthodox, Russian-speaking, and non-Ashkenazi Jews are also typically right-wing, so "Jews = left-wing" is an oversimplification. The secular, multigenerational, assimilated Ashkenazi Jew in New York City does not represent Jews writ large.
The thing that will save Jews, at least in the US, is that we don't do conversions. So unlike weird christian denominations our institutions reached peak woke and are receding. They are not captured completely, not zombies. They are now tacking away from the left as the left becomes increasingly hostile. The jews, who continue to identify as such will become more and more sober. You can't be jewish in left-spaces, we can't allow our children to continue to be discriminated against at colleges. The only thing left for jews, is the only thing that every mattered. Liberty and common sense. We should treat people the same, by law and custom. We should be critical of people telling us we are guilty or telling us we are absolved. We should look at evidence clearly and do what works. Jews need to lean into making the world better, just that better means richer, and that means capitalism and rule of law, and free speech, and spending money that aligns with our values. We need to reframe jewish values in a more let's do what works rather than what feels good in the moment direction, and since it works, it should feel good.