The War Among The Jews

In a very real sense modern American politics simply cannot be understood without an understanding of the role of the Jews. And yet, for much of modern American history, discussion of that topic has been placed under what almost amounts to a taboo. For a Gentile to raise the topic of Jewish influence, and especially the overwhelming hold over both major parties that is exercised by Jewish donors, has been something like a third rail in American politics, inviting the charge of anti-Semitism—a sure path to vilification and marginalization in American society, as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy - 2008) can testify.

At the same time, Jews themselves have been keenly aware of their preponderant influence and eager to exploit it, often in support of causes that are hostile to the values of mainstream American society. But this leads to our topic, because Jewish opinion is sharply divided on matters of most moment to Jews themselves. American political life, so fiercely divided, is often best understood as at least to some significant extent a war between antagonistic Jewish factions fought using Gentiles as proxies or mercenaries.

These considerations led me, yesterday evening, to recall a book I read quite a few years ago, Yuriy Slezkine’s The Jewish Century (2004). Slezkine doesn’t directly address the issues outlined above, and was writing at a time when those issues were still under the embargo of the charge of anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, his book was widely, and rightly, heralded by Jewish and Gentile reviewers alike (an online pdf of The Jewish Century can be found here). This excerpt from the blurb at Amazon will provide some idea of the scope as well as the limits of Slezkine’s book:

This masterwork of interpretative history begins with a bold declaration: The Modern Age is the Jewish Age--and we are all, to varying degrees, Jews.

The assertion is, of course, metaphorical. But it underscores Yuri Slezkine's provocative thesis. Not only have Jews adapted better than many other groups to living in the modern world, they have become the premiere symbol and standard of modern life everywhere.
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The book concentrates on the drama of the Russian Jews, including émigrés and their offspring in America, Palestine, and the Soviet Union. But Slezkine has as much to say about the many faces of modernity--nationalism, socialism, capitalism, and liberalism--as he does about Jewry. Marxism and Freudianism, for example, sprang largely from the Jewish predicament, Slezkine notes, and both Soviet Bolshevism and American liberalism were affected in fundamental ways by the Jewish exodus from the Pale of Settlement.

I’ll skip over Slezkine’s sweeping—and even “triumphalist”—sociological thesis (Mercurian v. Apollonian types), which others also find at least questionable. For a brief questioning of that thesis I refer the reader to David Myers’ review (well worth reading carefully):

One Historian’s Look at How Jews Shaped the Modern Age

What Myers also does, however, is to focus on three currents of Jewish migration from the Jewish Pale of Settlement (which included major parts of what is now Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania): to the major Russian urban centers, to America, and to Palestine. In doing so Slezkine employs metaphors drawn from Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman, which we can also omit. With regard to the first migration, the fate of the Jewish migrants to the Russian urban centres and their disproportionate influence in the early decades of the Soviet Union isn’t our main concern, although it’s a significant part of the book and plays importantly into the current Neocon war on Russia. I’ll quote Myers briefly in that regard:

Slezkine used these Jewish communists, a few of whom were his own relatives, to unfold an even larger story: the unsurpassed success of Jews in gaining access to positions of prestige and power in the Soviet Union in the early decades after the Bolshevik Revolution, only to end up — after Stalin’s purges began — as one of the most anti-Soviet and oppressed groups of all.

Again, Myers’ is questioning, even dismissive, of Slezkine’s overarching thesis:

Imagine if we were to assemble in one early-20th century Parisian salon the following characters: Aleichem, Walter Benjamin, Nathan Birnbaum, Freud, Rosa Luxembourg, Max Nordau, Baron Edmond de Rothschild and Leon Trotsky. Would this mix of capitalist and communist, Orthodox and atheist, Zionist and cosmopolite find common cause, indeed, speak a single … language? It is highly doubtful.

But he quickly adds—rightly:

Both the porousness of Slezkine’s opposing categories and the premature victory accorded Mercurians (i.e., Jews) in the modern age ultimately undoes the grand theory undergirding “The Jewish Century.” But the merit of this book does not rest on the theory’s ultimate success. Through his wide-ranging erudition, Slezkine challenges us to think about deep structural patterns in human and Jewish history, as well as about the uniqueness of the Jewish historical experience.

Moreover, his wide comparative lens brings into focus three distinct Jewish paths in the modern age, two of which are rather well trodden (America and Israel) and one of which (the Soviet Russian) receives rich new attention.

That is, indeed, the great merit of Slezkine’s book—its documentation and perceptive descriptions of the major divisions that characterize modern Jewish life. What we are currently seeing playing out in American politics and American foreign policy are often reflective of those deep divisions among Jews. In a broad sense, those divisions are relgious in nature, to such an extent that it’s not uncommon for some Jews to even deny the Jewish identity of their opponents (Myers himself, in his review, repeatedly refers to “non-Jewish Jews”). The clear focus of these divisions can be said to reside in different aspirations for earthly salvation—essentially religious impulses.

For Zionists, salvation can be said to be embodied in an exclusively Jewish land that can take on all comers in its region. To paraphrase, salvation is from the Jews and for the Jews only. These Jews are outraged at the Prog Jews—in many ways the descendants of socialist inclined European Jews—who identify salvation with the transformation of America, and ultimately the entire world, into a Prog paradise that is universalistic. As such, Progs adamantly reject the ideology of “Jewish salvation in one country” (to paraphrase Lenin). In a sense we can see a split here between Leninists and Trotsky’s ideology of “permanent revolution”—the favored ideology of so many Jewish American Progs and Neocons.

The Neocons are an interesting case. They could be said to represent a falling away from their Trotskyite inspiration based on an attraction to the Zionist appeal. And yet the Trotskyite appeal of permanent revolution remains strong—color revolutions and forever wars to transform the global order fit easily within the Trotskyite conceptual framework. Like Progs, Neocons are largely secular in orientation. Their true divide from the Progs is the Prog programmatic rejection of the Zionist salvational idea. This is the sharp divide that we now see on college campuses, with Prog Jews organizing anti-genocide protests and Neocons marshalling all their political and media influence to suppress these—in their view—heretical views. A further divide between Neocons and Progs is that, while Progs can draw on a broad swath of liberal America, the Neocons and other Zionists are forced to seek proxy support from Christian Zionists, a non-mainstream group that is neither Christian nor Zionist in the proper senses and are anathema to mainstream Jewish opinion.

This conflict is causing increasing distress within the Jewish liberal mainstream, which now finds itself conflicted in ways that involve their basic self identity. Their traditional emotional support for Israel is being challenged by the revelation of the vulgar racism that rules Israeli society and politics. These are people who adhere to the usual liberal ideals of equality and have been in denial about the reality of Israel and its history, but are no longer able to avoid confronting these realities. These shifts have been confirmed in Gallup polling.

All this is playing out in public in an unprecedented way—which is probably a very healthy development. It has also torn the curtain away and exposed the reality of Ruling Class corruption by the The Israel Lobby that Mearsheimer and Walt so bravely described back in 2008. With 2024 being a presidential election year we can expect that these issues will continue to attract attention on a scale that is new to American public discourse. The American people are paying attention.

Now, as I began trying to develop this post I came across a long piece by Marxist economist Michael Hudson at Naked Capitalism. Yeah, I know—Hudson doesn’t do anything but long. As usual, he has his insights, but he also goes off the rails, IMO, at times. I’ve assembled some excerpts that mostly illustrate his comparison of what’s happening today to the McCarthyism of the 1950s. I will readily grant that McCarthy had legitimate points, but the atmosphere of a witchhunt—this time to hound “anti-semites” out of their jobs and public life—is worth considering. Also, please understand that I’m under no illusions about any leftist devotion to “academic freedom” or “free speech” when it comes to the likes of me. This is about genocide.

Gaza Campus Protestors: Today’s “Have You No Sense of Decency?”

Posted on April 29, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. The spectacle of a wave of campus uprisings across the US in opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza evoke many memories and associations, above all to the Vietnam War demonstrations of 1968. But as Michael Hudson points out below, the Congressional campaign to ruin anyone who supports the protestors or even the right to free speech as anti-semitic comes right out of Senator Joe McCarthy’s playbook.

[Here begin the Hudson excerpts]

Today’s demonstrations are in opposition to the Biden-Netanyahu genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. The more underlying crisis can be boiled down to the insistence by Benjamin Netanyahu that to criticize Israel is anti-Semitic. That is the “enabling slur” of today’s assault on academic freedom.

The claim is that Israel is defending itself and that protesting the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank frightens Jewish students. But research by students at Columbia’s School of Journalism found that the complaints cited by the New York Times and other pro-Israeli media were made by non-students trying to spread the story that Israel’s violence was in self-defense.

The student violence has been by Israeli nationals. Columbia has a student-exchange program with Israel for students who finish their compulsory training with the Israeli Defense Forces. It was some of these exchange students who attacked pro-Gaza demonstrators, spraying them with Skunk, a foul-smelling indelible Israeli army chemical weapon that marks demonstrators for subsequent arrest, torture or assassination. The only students endangered were the victims of this attack. Columbia under Shafik did nothing to protect or help the victims.

I found the most demagogic attack to be that of Republican Congressman Rick Allen from Georgia, asking Dr. Shafik whether she was familiar with the passage in Genesis 12.3. As he explained” “It was a covenant that God made with Abraham. And that covenant was real clear. … ‘If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you.’ … Do you consider that to be a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God of the Bible?”[1]

This next paragraph suggests that the ferocity of the efforts to suppress and smear these protests stems from fear of awakening pangs of conscience among mainstream liberal Jews who have heretofore been reflexively supportive of an Israel that no longer exists—if it ever did.

A good number of these protestors being criticized were Jewish. Netanyahu and AIPAC have claimed – correctly, it seems – that the greatest danger to their current genocidal policies comes from the traditionally liberal Jewish middle-class population. Progressive Jewish groups have joined the uprisings at Columbia and other universities.

Next, Hudson addresses Netanyahu’s lying claim that American campuses have been overrun by “anti-semitic mobs” reminiscent of Nazi Germany, and his calls for harsher crackdowns.

This is a call to make American universities into arms of a police state, imposing policies dictated by Israel’s settler state. That call is being funded by a circular flow: Congress gives enormous subsidies to Israel, which recycles some of this money back into the election campaigns of politicians willing to serve their donors. It is the same policy that Ukraine uses when it employs U.S. “aid” by setting up well-funded lobbying organizations to back client politicians.

Where did Ukraine learn this technique?

What kind of student and academic protest expressions could oppose the Gaza and West Bank genocide without explicitly threatening Jewish students? How about “Palestinians are human being too!” That is not aggressive. To make it more ecumenical, one could add “And so are the Russians, despite what Ukrainian neo-Nazis say.”

I can understand why Israelis feel threatened by Palestinians. They know how many they have killed and brutalized to grab their land, killing just to “free” the land for themselves. They must think “If the Palestinians are like us, they must want to kill us, because of what we have done to them and there can never be a two-state solution and we can never live together, because this land was given to us by God.”

Netanyahu fanned the flames after his April 24 speech by raising today’s conflict to the level of a fight for civilization: “What is important now is for all of us, all of us who are interested and cherish our values and our civilization, to stand up together and to say enough is enough.”

Is what Israel is doing, and what the United Nations, the International Court of Justice and most of the Global Majority oppose, really “our civilization”? Ethnic cleansing, genocide and treating the Palestinian population as conquered and to be expelled as subhumans is an assault on the most basic principles of civilization.

Peaceful students defending that universal concept of civilization are called terrorists and anti-Semites – by the terrorist Israeli Prime Minister.

What really is the big public relations issue is the unconditional U.S. backing for Israel come what may, with “anti-Semitism” the current propaganda epithet to characterize those who oppose genocide and brutal land grabbing.

Before reading this final section, it’s worth reflecting that the big donors—the people who get campus buildings named after themselves, and so forth—never had any problem with the anti-intellectual wokeism that characterizes most American campuses. They only began to care about academic standards when Zionist genocide came into question. That should tell you a lot about the Zionist threat to American higher education. It is definitely not about defending Western Civ.

But there is one class of major offenders that should be held up for contempt: the donors who try to attack academic freedom by using their money to influence university policy and turn universities away from the role in supporting academic freedom and free speech. ...

The problem is that American universities have become like Congress in basing their policy on attracting contributions from their donors.