The Self-Defeating Nature of Jewish Leftism

The Self-Defeating Nature of Jewish Leftism

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Paul Gottfried

Benjamin Ginsberg’s The New American Anti-Semitism is a mediocre book that could have been superlative. The author is a distinguished professor of government at Johns Hopkins University who has produced more than 30 books. Two of them, The Captive Public (1988) and The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (1993), are especially worth reading, as they provide useful warnings about the degree to which the modern state tries to control our lives. The Fatal Embrace also deals critically with Jewish overreliance on the modern state as a protector.

Ginsberg’s latest does provide some useful information and timely warnings. It underlines the limits and dangers of the American Jewish romance with the political left. Ginsberg shows to what extent the woke and black nationalist left has deserted its Jewish benefactors and sided not only with Hamas sympathizers but also with very explicit anti-Semites. He also correctly stresses how conservative Christians have been the most faithful friends of American Jews but have had their friendship repeatedly spurned in favor of a continued Jewish alliance with the cultural and political left.

The book makes all these points but also allows Ginsberg to express tiresome peeves. Most annoyingly, he pushes positions that give too much credence to neoconservative narratives. Although Ginsberg concedes that someone may scold the Israeli government without being an anti-Semite, he then disregards that distinction in discussing American critics of Israel. John Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago, Stephen Walt at Harvard, and above all, Pat Buchanan are all allegedly attempting to delegitimize American Jewish citizenship when they assault “the machinations of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States.” Indeed, Buchanan, we are told, once referred to Congress as “Israeli-occupied territory.”

Ginsberg disregards the complaint that Israel’s American lobby, The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and its neoconservative allies swing away at any prominent figure who deviates from their Israel-party line. But Mearsheimer and others have demonstrated that AIPAC does engage in defamatory practices and does so obsessively. Is being critical of AIPAC, as Ginsberg suggests, the new criterion for who should be viewed as an anti-Semite? If so, then there are lots of Jewish critics of this lobbying organization who would qualify as anti-Semites, while one long-standing Jewish organization, the American Council for Judaism, has been at the forefront of AIPAC’s enemies for generations. Ditto for certain Hasidic sects, which have always viewed the present Israeli state as an arrogant attempt to force the hand of divine Providence by returning all Jews to their land before a future messianic age.

Where I would differ from some American critics of Israel is that I see no evidence that the neocons and AIPAC are doing the bidding of the Israeli government. These organizations follow their own counsels as to what is good for Israelis. Thus, one can look back at the neocons’ well-orchestrated agitation to push the American government into an ill-advised attack against Iraq in 2003. There is no evidence that either the Israeli government or the Israeli public imposed that war on the U.S.

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