The Attack of the Ashkenazi Jewish Left on Israel
The growing hostility to the State of Israel by left-wing Jewish groups in the United States is well documented and frequently reported. Less well understood is the history of this animus. Some of the current-day Left’s position is a reaction to and rejection of the right-wing politics that now dominates the Jewish State. Most of it, however, is focused on the very existence of the State of Israel, regardless of its domestic policies. The roots of this hostility run much deeper than recent political events. Much of the animus towards Israel is led by a coalition of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist organizations and is steeped in nostalgia for the Ashkenazi anti-Zionist Jewish Labor Bund, which was destroyed in the Holocaust. These new Bundists and allies try to revitalize their struggle against Israel by evoking memories of its Zionist adversaries of yesteryear – a Zionism and an Israel that no longer exist.
Like its predecessors, the new Jewish Left is busy touting the importance of allyship with non-Jewish organizations and causes. The old Bund’s history, which was riddled with failed attempts to connect with allies in the non-Jewish world, continues in its various contemporary organizational reincarnations. The old Bund meetings were renowned for serving pastries made with pig fat to demonstrate its cultural and political connections to its non-Jewish socialist allies; the new Bundists now seek to connect with non-Jewish allies by cooking their politics in the ideological pig fat of anti-colonialism. All this is done in the hope that the increasingly antisemitic Left will see them as the “Good Jews” not the Zionist “Bad Jews. “
Modern Zionism and Anti-Zionism both emerged as reactions to the waves of violence and pogroms against Jews in the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1921. This flood of violence gave birth to a pair of mutually antagonistic twins – the Jacob and Esau of the Jewish political world. Both movements were intent upon rescuing Jews from the antisemitism that permeated Eastern Europe, but they had radically different approaches.
Zionists believed that the only hope for Jews was to leave Europe to reinstate an egalitarian Jewish world in their ancient homeland in Israel. Some Zionists, like the Bund, were socialists, who called for the creation small egalitarian collective settlements (kibbutzim) grounded in socialism. Others focused on creating small agricultural settlements and communities. Still others focused primarily on the spiritual development of Jews who were immigrating to Palestine. Although very few Zionists spoke Hebrew, the Zionist Congress declared that Hebrew would be the language of the revitalized Jewish world in the Land of Israel.
In contrast, the Bund sought to strengthen the Jewish world within Europe, as a distinct but recognized part of the international socialist movement. The key strategy of this movement was participating with non-Jewish working-class Russian, Polish and Ukrainian allies in the universal class struggle. The three primary philosophical elements of the Bund were its dedication to socialism; its emphasis upon Yiddishism, the use of Yiddish, a largely European language labeled as the “true language’ of the Jews, which they considered embodied the essence of Jewish culture; and Doikayt or “Hereness”, the belief that Jewish political struggles were tied to European countries of origin, not to the ancient land of Israel. The Jewish Labor Bund’s motto was “Where we live, there is our country.” For the Bund, the socialist revolution at home was the key to Jewish survival, not Zionism and immigration to the Land of Israel.
The Zionists and the Bundists held their first meetings at virtually the same time. The First Zionist Congress was held on August 29-31, 1897 in Basel, Switzerland. The Bund’s first meeting was held in Vilna on October 7-9 in 1897, in a secret attic in order to hide from the Russian authorities. The Zionist movement started as a very diverse set of movements, all calling for the return of Jews to the Land of Israel. The Bund, by contrast, was one of the founding members of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and played a key role in promoting revolutionary ideology prior to the Russian Revolution. By any measure, the Jewish Labor Bund was the dominant Jewish political movement in Europe. In 1897, the year of their first meetings, there were about 7-8 million Jews living In Europe, of which about 7 million were native speakers of Yiddish. Very few of the Jews living in Europe spoke any Hebrew. Compared to the huge membership of the Bund and the Yiddish speaking population of Europe, the Zionists at the First Zionist Congress must have appeared to the Yiddish world as insignificant as a group of tiny insects.
But the very strength of the Bund was also the source of its weakness. Rooted in Europe, it was crushed by the very allies with which it hoped to align itself. European socialists proved to be relentlessly antisemitic before, during, and after the Holocaust. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which the Bund helped create, came under the control of Vladamir Lenin and the Bolsheviks and finally seized control of Russia during the Russian Revolution and the Civil War of 1917-1921, and established Soviet Russia. The Bundists fared no better under the Soviets than they had under the Tsars. They were driven out of the party and regarded as a dangerous nationalist movement. In the new Soviet Union, Bundists were forced to become communists or flee for their lives to other countries in Eastern Europe, particularly to Poland. The Bolsheviks also hated the Zionists, but the Zionist’s disengagement with the struggles within Europe made them less important enemies than the Bundists. Adding to the Bund’s troubles, large numbers of ordinary Jews had little interest in its philosophy of “Hereness,” which had no effect on stopping the antisemitism, pogroms, and poverty that led thousands of Jews to flee Eastern Europe. Between 1881 and 1924 more than 2 million Jews immigrated from Europe to the USA, clearly choosing “Thereness” over “Hereness.”
At the same time, a significantly smaller number of Jews immigrated from Eastern Europe to the Land of Israel. These immigrations came in waves, largely from Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania. About 40, 000 arrived between 1904 and 1914, 35, 000 between 1919 and 1923, and 67,000-82,000 between 1924 -1928. The central reasons for immigration to Palestine remained antisemitism, pogroms, wars, and revolution in Eastern Europe. In addition, immigration to the United States became impossible after the passage of the Johnson Reed Act of 1924 that closed the US to most immigrants. The rise of Nazism in Germany and the opening up of immigration in 1922 to British Mandatory Palestine dramatically raised the levels of immigration. Between 1929 and 1939 about 250,000 Jews immigrated to British Palestine. But in 1939, Great Britain shut down Jewish immigration to Palestine, eliminating the primary escape route for Jews trapped by the Holocaust and World War II. By 1942, only about 2,000 Jews were able to make their way to British Palestine.
In the end, however, it was the Holocaust that brought an end to the Jewish Labor Bund. Its philosophy of “Hereness” was buried in the graveyard it shared with the rest of the destroyed Jewish world. Of the seven million Yiddish speakers in Europe in 1939, only about two million survived. Moreover, fiery post-war nationalism, antisemitism and pogroms assured that surviving Jews were no longer welcome in their European countries of origin. Those Jews who survived in the Soviet Union under Stalin found that Yiddish was suppressed and its use declared treasonous. What was left of the Yiddish speaking world was scattered across the globe. Of the 11 million speakers of Yiddish before the Holocaust, only about one million remain today.
How did the surviving and current generation of Bundists react to its catastrophic failures in Europe? The creation of the State of Israel made clear that the goals of Zionism, arch enemy of the Bundists, had come into being. Herzl’s dreams of the Hebrew-speaking Jewish State was a reality. But this modern-day reality is very different from the one that was central to the struggle between political opponents in the Ashkenazi world. In 1948, the year of creation of the State of Israel, the Jewish populations of Israel and the United States were dominated by Ashkenazi Jews who had fled Russia and Eastern Europe before and after the Holocaust. The non-Ashkenazi Jewish population of the US was small, making up about 1 to 2 percent of the Jews in the US. In Israel, it was slightly larger, making up about 10 percent of the Jewish population. Today, the Jewish world of the United States remains largely dominated by Ashkenazi Jews; Sephardic Jews are still only about 10 percent of the Jewish community in the US – about the same percentage that existed In Israel in 1948.
Israel, in contrast, has developed in a totally different direction. People who self-identify as Ashkenazi Jews make up only about 32% of Israeli Jews. The largest ethnic population in Israel are Mizrachi Jews who come from the Middle East and Central Asia. Many come from Jewish communities of the Middle East that were established long before the existence of Christianity or Islam. The Babylonian Talmud, the mainstay of Jewish learning across the globe, was composed by Jewish communities in the tolerant Zoroastrian empire, long before the invasion and colonization of the Middle East and North Africa by Islam. There are also about 177, 000 Ethiopian Jews in Israel, as compared to about the 1,000 to 2, 000 in the United States. There are about 85,000 Indian Jews in Israel compared to perhaps to 1,000 or so in the United States. These figures do not also address the great diversity of the Jewish communities within the Sephardic/Mizrachi world. Put simply, while the American Jewish community remains largely embedded in the demography, experience, history, and traditions of the Ashkenazi world, Israel has grown in the opposite direction.
So how did the remnants of the Bund, and later its left-wing Jewish allies and political advocates, adapt to the new Jewish world? The political organizational remnants of the Bund slowly collapsed in the United States, where neither Yiddish or Jewish socialism could find a home or a following in a country where the Jewish working class has either disappeared or been ignored by the Left. The entire concept of Hereness, a separate Jewish socialist movement, had little power in America. The Bund became transformed largely into a set of related organizations that sought to salvage its history and culture, and to create a center for non-Zionist Jewish life in the diaspora. So, with specifically Jewish socialism not viable, and Yiddishism transformed into a cultural rescue project, the sole political element that remained alive for leftist Jews was the Bund’s rejection of Zionism; it emerged as the fantasy of Jews who live in the United States (an actual colonial state) that it is Israelis and not American Jews who are colonialist. This rejection of Zionism is the mainstay of rebuilding its connections with allies in the non-Jewish world. The Jewish Left, which once rejected nationalism across the globe, now actively rejects only one form of nationalism – the State of Israel.
Current connections of the Jewish Left to the non-Jewish world are to a variety of organizations. One of the key anti-Zionist organizations is The Democratic Socialists of America, which once had a very large and diverse Jewish membership, but has been transformed into a staunch denier of Israel’s right to exist. The DSA has largely retained as members only those Jews who are the most extreme haters of Israel. Allied with them is Jewish Voices for Peace, which publicly rejects the legitimacy of the State of Israel and which, despite its name, has a substantial non-Jewish anti-Zionist membership and leadership. Other “ally” organizations are the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), which stands for the total eradication of Zionism. In addition, there are a variety of non-Zionist organizations that seek to build Jewish life outside the framework of the existence of Israel. The Jewish Diaspora Movement is perhaps the most recent and prominent of these alternative movements, but despite its attempt to form a non-Zionist Jewish world – a kind of reinvention of the old Bund’s Hereism – its membership and key publications (Jewish Currents, for example) maintain strong relations of cooperation with the anti-Zionist world and are a major forum for promoting anti-Zionist ideology.
So, what exactly is the American Jewish Left? It is essentially an Ashkenazi remnant, with increasing cultural connections to its alleged allies in the non-Jewish world of the American left. In order to create a non-Ashkenazi sense of diversity, it has tried to include Ladino Jews, who trace their descent from Greece, Turkey, Albania, and Bulgaria. But the Left’s connection to the Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, the majority of the non-Ashkenazi Jewish world, remains virtually non-existent. Despite its leftist orientation, Ashkenazi connections to socialism remain historic and nostalgic. As a practical matter, it has essentially neglected the relatively small American Jewish working class and the significantly larger working class Jewish population of Israel. Instead, it has given us major revival events such as Yidstock, fantasy trips to Yiddishland, Klezmer Camps, Yiddish coffee cups and tee shirts and all of the other icons of nostalgia. Its political attention is spent attacking Israel, the only Jewish state and the most culturally diverse Jewish world that has existed in Jewish history.
