Perpetuating the romance of the Bolshevik regime, whose ‘good intentions’ cannot mask the horrors imposed in its name
[In] this country there was a time when virtually all intellectual vitality was derived in one way or another from the Communist Party. If you were not somewhere within the party’s wide orbit, then you were likely to be in the opposition, which meant that much of your thought and energy had to be devoted to maintaining yourself in opposition. In either case, it was the Communist Party that ultimately determined what you were to think about and in what terms.
This was written not in the Soviet Union or one of its satellites, but in New York in 1947 by Robert Warshow in Commentary magazine about the American culture of the previous decade. While slightly hyperbolic (the Southern Agrarians, the American Scholar, etc.?) it faithfully describes American Jewish culture of the time, emphatically including its Yiddish branch. At the extreme of this movement were people like Julius Rosenberg, George Koval, and Mark Zborowski, who actively spied for the Soviet Union. At the same time, editors of Communist publications, Hollywood and union activists, party writers and institutional leaders were all directed by Moscow and were joined by rank-and-file members in promoting the virtues of Stalinism over the evils of American constitutional democracy.
A more current source, the Jewish Women’s Archive Encyclopedia, assures us that of about 83,000 Communist Party members in 1943, women formed about 46 percent:
CP historians estimate, moreover, that almost half of the party’s membership was Jewish in the 1930s and 1940s, and that approximately 100,000 Jews passed through the party in those decades of high member turnover. It seems safe to say, then, that Jewish women were one of the CP’s largest sectors during the Depression and war years; and for each who was a “card-carrying” Communist, there were several who took part in party-led mass organizations but did not belong to the party itself. (Entry on Communism in the United States)
The tone here is celebratory, taking pride in Jewish prominence in Communist activities. Like Barbra Streisand’s character in The Way We Were, who enchants the WASPy American Robert Redford, these Communist women are introduced as champions of a noble cause. Vivian Gornick recently gushed in the New York Times over the Communists who prodded the United States “into becoming the democracy it always said it was.”
This is Soviet Communism we are talking about—that killed an estimated 30 million of its own citizens, including through a government-enforced famine in Ukraine, the details of which even people hardened by Holocaust literature have trouble reading. Hitler killed a million Jewish children; Stalin killed more than twice as many children of the Ukraine alone. This is the movement that struck a pact with Hitler precipitating the war against Poland, and built the Gulag, which far surpassed Hitler’s concentration-camp network in the number of victims. This was the totalitarian regime that perfected Orwellian language in a culture of lying that not only camouflaged its evil through innocuous terminology as the Nazis did with terms like resettlement for extermination and cleansing for murder, but justified a culture of spying, expropriation, mass murder, and tyrannical rule in the name of “egalitarianism” and “international peace.”
Regarding Jews and Judaism, Soviet Communism forbade the practice of religion and the study of Hebrew. The Jewish section of the Communist Party took the lead in persecuting rabbis and teachers, killing some, sending others to certain death. The Soviets hailed the 1929 Arab massacres of Jews in Palestine as the start of the Arab Communist Revolution and formulated the slogans of anti-Zionism that are the basis of anti-Semitism in America today. Soviet propaganda accused Jews of imperialism in the 1930s and (with the Arabs) of racism in the 1970s. It lured Jews with false promises to an outpost in Birobidzan and demonized the Jewish yishuv in the Land of Israel. The Soviets used the Jewish anti-Fascist Committee to win American support during the Second World War and then executed its leadership in 1952. Might Gornick say that in these ways Communism prodded Jews into becoming the righteous people they always aspired to be?
We Americans and Jews ask nations that once succumbed to fascism and practiced genocide in its name to acknowledge their past evils. We do so not to perpetuate guilt, but because self-awareness alone prevents repetition of the same behavior. How then can Americans and particularly the Jews among them perpetuate the romance—or the innocence—of the Bolshevik regime?
Today no one has the excuse that “we did not know what was happening.” We know, we know, we know—and if we pretend not to know let Robert Conquest and Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread become our required reading alongside Elie Wiesel.
In no way does any of this imply that Jews are responsible for Communism as some of its former European subjects try to claim. That false accusation should be exposed as strenuously as any blood libel or accusation of deicide. Communism did at least as much damage to Jews as to any other people, but in the name of that damage, we are also obliged to take seriously that many Jews supported one of the most murderous regimes in history and to see how and why and to what extent they went wrong. That Sen. McCarthy’s public hearings in the 1950s were almost as “un-American” as the activities being investigated dare not continue to be used as exculpation for the harm that American Communism did in concealing Soviet crimes, subverting American institutions, and opposing the Jews’ recovery of their ancestral homeland.
Jews accepted the Torah at Sinai to save them from the evil consequences of good intentions. The Torah’s prohibitions against idolatry were intended to protect us from precisely the horrors that Communism’s “good intentions” imposed in its place. Idealism is no justification for moral shortcuts, and revolution no substitute for civilization.
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This article is part of a week-long Tablet series analyzing the 100th anniversary of the Soviet Revolution.
I had an aunt name Frances who was in a concentration camp but managed to escape with the help of a man she married. They escaped and went to Bulgaria temporarily. This Jewish man Felix would be happy to know was a communist. ”
So naturally when my aunt and her husband escaped they told people what was going on this Nazi concentration camp.
Jews knew a massive crime was being committed against them during the war. A good friend of my a German Jew who had come to pre-state Israel after the Germans starting stealing all their property and beating them.
My friend spoke the flawless British English, French and German like a German because he was born and raised in Germany. The prestate government asked him to go back to Europe to help rescue Jews and bring them to “Palestine”. He went back to Europe for several years rescuing Jews and trying to sneak them into British controlled “Palestine”.
@ Felix Quigley:
Felix Jews knew they were being rounded up and taken to camps in many many cases. They did not know at first that these were death camps. No they did not have a view of the overall picture.
Naturally you the psychopath calls me a liar when relaying part of my family history learned first hand from parents and relatives because it does not correspond with your view of the world. Naturally you would know more about my family history and what happend to Austrian Jews. Why I do not know because I am not a psychiatrist.
I
@ adamdalgliesh:
You must understand that in general on these types of boards nobody ever tells a lie. It is all done by suggestion and above everything else by silence. So above who knows about Moses…it is in the area of faith, but from Marx onwards they wrote everything down it is not faith it is reading, assessment of facts.
Not comparable.
But it is the fact you say not a word about Trotsky and you refer to Communism when you are really talking about Stalinism. That is always the big lie and that is also the big lie Wisse uses.
Wisse is consciously rubbing Trotsky out of history.
Wisse writes as if there was no Trotsky in the world and no movement behind Trotsky in Russia, that is the Left Opposition, and no Trotskyist movement in America and above all no assassination of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940.
Bear Kline and Dalgliesh are writing lies. If the Jews knew what was in store in relation to the Nazi Holocaust they would have been gone.
Why insult the Jewish people thus? You are both attacking viciously the Jewish people.
There was a general feeing among the Jews that the Germans could not be that bad. That is why the Nazis spun their stories about going to special places of work and they would be safe.
They were convincing because they had the power. The Jews were totally defenceless. And the rabbinical leadership was ineffectual.
Plus the Stalinists were lying and the Stalinists were Antisemitic.
You are in fact attacking the Jewish people.
A large part of the Jewish population believed the Nazi lies because the Nazis were sophisticated liars and the Jews were powerless, betrayed by everybody, and their leaders were ineffectual. The Jews in Europe did not have a mass party to take control of the situation as regards leadership of the Jews. The other possible saviour of the Jews Trotsky this is the importance of the lies of Wisse…the Stalinists were gathering to assasinate him and thereby silence him.
So to sum it up as they faced the Holocaust the Jews were leaderless.
How could they possibly have a clear idea of what faced them and what were the dangers?
@ Felix Quigley: I haven’t told any lies, Felix. To the best of my recollection, I have not mentioned either Trotsky or Moses in any of my posts about the Wisse article, or much the less compared the two for brilliance. In fact, I don’t recall ever mentioning Trotsky or Moses in any of recent posts in Israpundit, or ever commenting on the brilliance of either one, anywhere. Please inform me where you are getting these ideas from.
The point of my post in the Wisse article is that “the Jews,” as a people, are not collectively responsible either for Communism in general, or the Soviet regime, or Communism in America. I believe that most Jews have never been Communists, and that most Communists are not and never have been Jews.
@ adamdalgliesh:
You are very correct in what you wrote.
Some of my relatives were successful in fleeing Europe. Many others were killed. My one aunt stayed in Austria hiding from the Nazis. They were openly rounding up Jews and taking them away to concentration camps. The kept detailed records of all their activities in rounding up and killing Jews.
My aunt had married a Catholic so for a while since he vouched for her so, she was allowed to stay in Vienna in the open more or less (due to some law that was in affect for a while). She then got an order to appear at the local SS headquarters. There an officer said are you not a Jew? She slapped him and said how dare you call me a Jew and ran off outside into a crowd of people. The rest of the war thereafter she was hidden by her husband. She would have been sent a concentration camp just like her parents (my grandparents) were otherwise.
So this massive crime was not hidden. At times the Germans tried to fool Jews to were they were rounding up by telling them they were going to work camps. Since they were taking everything from the Jews and rounding them in mass it was not hidden. They were shooting anyone who resisted on site.
Felix, it is true that the Nazis made some efforts to hide the Holocaust. Between 1933 and 1939, however, they made no real effort to hide from the Western press their brutal actions during that period, including the Kristalnacht” pogrom. And even their efforts to hide the Holocaust were only partial. Hitler made a number of public speeches between 1941 in which he strongly implied that the “extermination of the Jewish race in Europe (his phrase) was being carried out. These statements were even quoted in some German newspapers. Hitler had even warned of his intention to exterminate the Jews in public as early as 1939, and on several occasions between then and July 31, 1941, when Goering signed the order authorizing the ‘final solution. Goering also made similar public statements as early as November 1938. As a result, attentive people who followed the news closely in both Germany and the United States knew that it was going on. The Pope certainly was informed. The Red Cross knew all about it. The Allies even announced it in a public statement by all three Allies in January 1943. All this suggests to me that the Nazi efforts to hide this crime were probably rather half-hearted. They certainly never hid their “philosophy.” or claimed to be humanitarians. The Soviets did a much better job covering up their crimes from the Western democracies. Perhaps they were less proud of them than the Nazis.
Adam Dalgliesh
I am not sure how you can write that the Nazis did not hide their crimes. Surely the Nazis took great care in hiding the Holocaust?
The fact is that people believed also what they wanted to believe. Even though the Nazis were cunning bastards all one had to do was to take the speeches of Hitler and his book Mein Kamph very seriously and they would see his intent very clearly.
That is why I watch Alex Jones closely. He may be defending Trump and I consider that is good…but then he is saying some things running alongside of that which to me are alarming.
But alarming to me also are the positions taken by Ruth Wisse even though she may be more “genteel” than is Jones.
Trotsky was supported especially by the Socialist Workers Party, the SWP led by James Cannon. Trotsky himself was very supportive from Mexico and writing about everything under the sun as was his wont anyway.
Trotsky at one point advised a turn to the worker types of America and not to rely so much on the Jews of New York, meaning that layer of intellectual Jews.
In fact there were many spies from both the Stalinist GPU and the FBI inside of the SWP.
Agents Provocateurs are a great problem for small struggling left wing movements.
Perhaps Lenin had the correct idea. He knew one that was and he made sure he was worked extra hard.
It is a good film and a good portrayal by Richard Burton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeKHthb-YMM
By the way the Mark Zborowski who Ruth Wisse refers to..she does not seem to understand his role and who he really was…Wiki has a good report on this creep.
By the way as you all visit this film this coming weekend Burton is masterly and Losey is simply the best. Losey gets the opening good. The Stalinists were bombastic and empty, the Trotskyists more thoughtful and quieter types. This is not an accident. The Stalinists used the glory of the 1917 Revolution consciously to betray. Robert Wistrich came close to understanding some of this in his last couple of years.
When I watch this film I am always horrified in one respect and that is that this assasination was not inevitable and with proper work by the SWP would have been stopped. Very simply Mercader smelled and should have been stopped. He was allowed in by very weak and faulty security methods. The Stalinist spy ring in America used a woman and her relationship with the stalinist agent Mercader to get into the house. The woman was called Ageloff from a Jewish New York family. The agent of Stalin smelled of treachery and should have been exposed a hundred times. And Mercader came out of the Spanish 30s treachery. On his release he travelled via the Castros and Che to Moscow. They too were totally Stalinist not Communist ever for one second.
Trotsky was supported especially by the Socialist Workers Party, the SWP led by James Cannon. Trotsky himself was very supportive from Mexico and writing about everything under the sun as was his wont anyway.
Trotsky at one point advised a turn to the worker types of America and not to rely so much on the Jews of New York, meaning that layer of intellectual Jews.
In fact there were many spies from both the Stalinist GPU and the FBI inside of the SWP.
Agents Provocateurs are a great problem for small struggling left wing movements.
Perhaps Lenin had the correct idea. He knew one that was and he made sure he was worked extra hard.
It is a good film and a good portrayal by Richard Burton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeKHthb-YMM
By the way the Mark Zborowski who Ruth Wisse refers to..she does not seem to understand his role and who he really was…Wiki has a good report on this creep.
According to his brother, Bill Mostel, their mother coined the nickname “Zero”, noting that if he continued to do poorly at school, he would amount to a Zero.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Mostel
There you have it. They will never be beaten. A people with that degree of wit can never be overcome.
Michael S ah I wish I could get some of that light, things seem to be dammed obscure at the moment. Maybe I can get across to Connemara at Xmas and listen tot he ocean with my little dog, if he lasts to then, he has turned blind.
I always take the best of what people say. On the question of Trotsky I really have read nothing in that regard all of my life from so many quarters that is not in the category of put down, and those who promote him I am in disagreement with, for example on Catelonia, who I support against the Spanish Imperialists. I am a Marxist who sees great importance and value in the national issue and I have learned that from the Irish of 1916 and from the Jews like forever.
You have given me new information, that is Zero Mustel. I am very very suspicious these days of this stuff coming out of Alex Jones, and these witchhunts against Hollywood. He is portraying what he calls communism as evil and he is placing it in the same sentences as pedofiles, and I am seeing this in the case of Jones coming out of David Icke with whom he has been associated for about 20 years. I do not at all mind people attacking communism but what I seek from them is some understanding of what they mean, and a logical argument on what the theory of communism says, and where it has come from, and the experiences of this theory along the way.
Your contribution is interesting and thoughtful. Take this
These groups that Jones deals with such as Antifa they certainly are not the youth of today. The youth I spoke to a few days ago were far from crazy but very serious and also very worried.
These are not crazy people. They are young but serious minded. They have some idea of the problems on earth and these are new and very challenging problems.
A very serious report came out very recently concerning the acidification of the oceans. I doubt the youth I spoke to knew anything about it.
But there is enough to leave them very worried all the same.
I would advise you as a religious man to look up some info on The Iberian Lynx. This is the result of Spanish capitalist man, the rapacious capitalism since 1980 EU style.
I was forced by circumstances to live far from home in a boarding college in Derry at age eleven. In the long lonely days some of us existed reading books and as the Spanish capitalist state descended on poor Puigdemont and drove him from his home I was reminded again of Rob Roy by Walter Scott and also those lonely days in that college library. I feel for the Catalans and Irish the same empathy I do for the Jews.
Felix,
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a posting of yours that didn’t extol Leon Trotsky. As for Adam Dalgliesh, I can’t comment much — he just seems too wordy, occasionally pausing to puff out the word “Anti-Semitic” to achieve some sort of effect that resonates among Jews.
Wisse was likewise wordy. She asserted that US Jews, right after WWII, tended to be more supportive than most of the Soviet Communists. I think this is a fair assertion. During the McCarthy witch hunt, Zero Mostel claimed that in targeting “Communists” in Hollywood, the committee was really targeting Jews. He wouldn’t have said this, if there were not substance to the connection.
There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since the McCarthy days, and even more since the days of Lenin and Trotsky. In fact, I would guess that most of our youth today believe Vladimir I. Lenin was married to Yoiko Ono.Today’s leftist crazies: are they Jewish? Anarchist? Trotskyite? Stalinist? Islamist? Does it even matter? The bottom line seems to be, that they are crazy; and the cause of that, is that they have been believing all sorts of lies about reality.
There is a cure for this madness, namely, The Truth, the God of Israel. The latest batch of nut cases need to humble themselves, turn, and seek to know Him who can lead them in the path of life. Barring that, it doesn’t matter whether they are following Soviet lies, Trotskyite lies, MSM lies or any other. They’re all brands of darkness; but what we need here is light.
Adam Dalgliesh
You also lie just as much as does Wisse!
The most brilliant Jew of all time was not Moses but Marx and we know a lot more about the latter!
At least as brilliant a Jew in everything was Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky especially was Jewish through and through just as I am Irish through and through.
You see you have an old fashioned idea of what being Jewish or Irish is.
Trotsky had a set of ideas in his mind but he was totally a Jewish person. You hate that idea Dalgliesh and that is why not once do you even mention Trotsky.
Or perhaps there is another explanation as to why you do not mention Trotsky if so please confide!
You and Wisse Dalgliesh are alergic to Trotsky. You think deep down that if you even mention his name much less his thinking you will be struck down with a terrible disease.
Your whole reply to Wisse is a fraud. You are as deep a reactionary as is Wisse.
Lorenzo has spòtted somethjing in the writing of Wisse:
But you are not quite there Lorenzo. Wisse simply lies wholesale about the processes of history.
This essay by Wisse is most dishonest but I am not sure it is wilfully dishonest or she simply does not understand history. It is most likely a mixture of the both.
Ask a simple question…where in the essay of Wisse is mentioned anything about the writings of Lenin? For example what was the position of Lenin and Stalin at the various points alont the line? I mean if you are studying something you might just like to look at what they were saying and thinking!
Lenin died on the 21 January 1924 at an early age. He had been shot by somebody from his own left side using the word “left” loosely. Does Wisse know of his relations with Stalin in the last years…Anything? At this stage anything will do Wisse!
What about Trotsky Wisse? Did Trotsky not actually exist in the year of 1904 when he outlined with Parvus some ideas of a general nature concerning revolution. Not heard of this Wisse?
Actually Lenin in 1904 did not hold precisely that position of Trotsky and Parvus and not until April 1917 did Lenin see that the working class had to take power in its own hands in order to make the necessary advance. The lines of the future events were predicted by Trotsky and Parvus in 1904 that is thirteen years in advance.
What if Lenin had not come to that conclusion…you heard of Franco Wisse? Hope so. Society unable to advance has only the one other alternative…Fascism.
So no word from Wisse of what happened either in any part of the year of 1917!
I mean no concrete historical detail at all!
What about the war on the young Soviet Republic Wisse raging in all corners of that vast coiuntry from 1918 to 1922 which also had the involvement of a detachment from America. Nothing on the Civil War Wisse?
Any word on the results of fighting the Civil War? I mean like total physical exhaustion of a nation and indeed of a class.
Nothing on the position of Trotsky and Lenin and the Bolsheviks towards Antisemitism in general?
Or carrying on that theme…Antisemitism in particular as in the Whites in the Civil War especially in Ukraine?
Antisemitism as in the Red Army itself, as it grew very rapidly, and the position of Trotsky and Lenin and their actions against this.
And so I can continue but why would I do that? Wisse is a hardened liar about history.
By the way the mention by Wisse of Mark Zborowski the Stalinist agent provocateur and spy at the centre of the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s IS MOST PECULIAR BUT THE RESEARCH IS ALREADY THERE! But if Wisse has read the research she keep quiet.
Basically Wisse follows whether intentionally or not in the lies against history of Diana West in the book “American Betrayal” 2013 where West not once identifies the role of Stalinism in America and the connection of that role with the actions of Stalinism in the Civil War in Spain. Nor do Wisse and West identify that the Stalinists in America were also truly the killers of real socialist revolutionaries (as in Spain and Europe). West totally leaves out that Leon Trotsky was murdered in Mexico in 1940 by means of the Stalinist movement in America.
Why would Wisse and West concern themselves by a little thing like that?
Quite simply to understand history Jews today will need to fight agaisnt Wisse also a true liar about history.
REPLY TO RUTH WISSE RE JEWS AND COMMUNISM
Much as I respect Ms. Wisse’s work, I believe that she is taking a wrong tack here. Claims that Jews are responsible for communism, the horrors of the Bolshevik regime and communist influence in other, democratic countries, are part of the stock-in-trade of right wing anti-Semitic propaganda, and continue to be circulated by many people on the right in Europe and the United States. These claims are untrue and unfair, and they are profoundly damaging to all Jews everywhere. By recycling these anti-Semitic distortions of history, Ms. Wisse has done her people a great disservice.
Ms. Wisse’s statistics are incorrect. Hitler killed at least one and a half million Jewish children in the camps and ghettos, not one million. Probably several million other children were killed by Hitler’s legions. either starving to death in the siege of Leningrad, or slaughtered in the numerous massacres of entire villages by the S.S. all over Europe, or killed in vicious destructions from the air of major population centers (Amsterdam, Warsaw, Stalingrad, the East End of London). Fourteen million people died in Hitlers camps and ghettos alone, the majority of them non-Jews. All respected Historians place the number who died in the Soviet Gulag at about half the or less. Hitler was directly responsible for the death of at least thirty million people. Nearly all historians of the Stalin era place the death toll caused by his regime at about twenty million. About 2.8 million people died of starvation in the Ukraine, and it is unlikely that more than half were children. I write this not to exculpate the Stalin regime. which was the worst tyranny of the twentieth century after that of Hitler. But facts are facts; and trying to minimize the viciousness of the Hitler regime is nearly truthful nor in the Jewish interest.
With respect to American Jewish support for Communism, Ms. Wisse provides no documentary support in her statistics. None of the mainstream Jewish organizations in the U.S. in the 1930s and 40s, religious or secular, supported Communism.But she is right about one thing–there was a very “rapid turnover” in Americans, whether Jewish or not, who joined the party for a brief time, and then quit when they realized what Communism was all about, after attending party meetings. Many Americans were for brief periods of time deceived by the American Communist leader Earl Browder’s claim that “communism is twentieth century Americanism.” But few of these “dupes” stayed in the party for any length of time, Nearly all quit the party eventually, including the Jews among them.
But where Ms. Wisse’s version of events is most distorted is in her failure to provide relevant context. First of all, she fails to mention that the mainstream American press, although it was not Communist or even especially left wing, failed to report on the horrors of the Soviet regime during the 1920s, thirties and forties. Even conservative journals, such as Time magazine then was, often ran favorable articles about the Soviet Union. The Soviets masked their crimes far more thoroughly from the foreign press than did the Nazi regime. For example, the entire Western press, including the American press,
failed to report the dreadful famine in the Ukraine. In addition to barring Western journalists from all areas of Russia outside Moscow, except for occasional carefully supervised visits to Potemkin villages.the Soviets shamelessly bribed Western journalists–sometimes with women. The Nazis, by way of contrast, were proud of their crimes, and made only token efforts to hide them, at least before the outbreak of World War II. And unlike the Communists, they made no attempt to hide their aims and opinions behind a humanitarian facade. As a result, American Jews were more aware of Nazi than Soviet crimes against humanity.
The parallel experiences of other Americans of immigrant background during this era also should be taken into consideration.Before and even during World War I, many German Americans were sympathetic to the German side in the war, and some even worked as saboteurs , spies or terrorists for Germany. In the 1930’s many German-Americans were drawn into the Nazi orbit by the German-American Bund, before World War II broke out, when most quit the organization. Of course many Irish-Americans supported the IRA, and many still do even today. For the overwhelming majority of American Jews in the 1930s, Russia was the “Old country” from which they, their parents and grandparents emigrated to come to the United States. Once a government came to power in Russia which loudly proclaimed it was not anti-Semitic, included some Jews in high office, and offered Jews some measure of protection during the pogroms of 1918-1920, it was natural that some American Jews would identify with Russia as their ancestral “mother country,” where some of their relatives still lived, and would buy the Russian government’s claim to have created a worker’s paradise. Before 1917, the overtly anti-Semitic views of the tsarist government had prevented American Jews from identifying with Russia as their “mother country.” But with the accession of a government in Russia of a government that was ostensibly non-anti-Semitic (even though it actually was ant-Semitic, but in more subtle ways than the tsar’s), it was inevitable that some American Jews would identify with Russia out of a sense that this was the country of their “landsmen.” They were no more inherently pro-Communist than most of the German-Americans who joined the German-American Bund were inherently pro-Nazi. And just as nearly all German-Americans who had joined the Bund left it when World War II began and supported the American war effort unconditionally, so American Jews left the U.S. Communist Party in droves once the Cold War began around 1945-47. By the time of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and Khrushchev’s “secret speech” of 1957, Communism and Soviet Russia had few American Jewish supporters. Most American Jews are liberals, but very few have been Communists or Communist sympathizers since the Cold War era.
Jews as a people, whether in America or elsewhere, were not responsible for the rise of Communism. Most supporters of Communism, worldwide, have not been Jews. Communists took over countries with over a fourth of the world’s population, including China, in which there were no ore very few Jewish inhabitants. There were no Jews in the entourages of Mao tae-tung, Ho Chi Minh, or even Fidel Castro. It is truly shocking to see a Jewish scholar of Ms. Wisse’s stature repeating this blood libel.
What are there? Maybe six American Jews who are nostalgic about Soviet Communism? Why create an issue where none exists?