The tokenistic Jews vs the real Jewish Left

The Jewish Council and other tokenistic Jews vs the real Jewish Left: It’s a re-run of the famous clash between Trotsky and the Jewish Labour Bund 1903 

In recent months, a parade of tokenistic Jews – both representatives of organizations such as the Jewish Council of Australia/JCOA and individuals such as Socialist Alternative activist Yasmine Johnson – have presented submissions to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion demanding a right to be given an equal hearing to mainstream Jewish organizations that reasonably claim to represent majority Jewish opinion in Australia.

I have previously defined tokenistic Jews as those who internalize manifestations of antisemitism in order to conform to dominant social codes within their ideological communities, actively align with and provide a Jewish alibi for pro-racist groups, and deny or belittle Jewish lived experiences of racism (Mendes 2026a). I would add that there is no inherent connection between having a Jewish cultural background and being knowledgeable regarding Jewish affairs. Just because a small number of people were born into Jewish families or the Jewish community, or even in some cases attended Jewish schools or youth groups as children, that does not mean they will have an informed let alone specialist understanding as adults of global Jewish history and politics including particularly the long history of oppression of Jews in both the Global North and Global South and the associated intergenerational trauma impact on Jews today.

To use an obvious analogy, it’s the same as myself claiming a Czech identity on the sole basis that my mother was born in 1930 in a small village (called Nagyszollos) in the then state of Czechoslovakia which was based in the area called Transcarpathian Ukraine. For the record, she and her family came to Australia in April 1938, and never returned to that town which became part of Ukraine after World War Two. But regardless, I could copy the JCOA and the likes of Yasmine Johnson, and absurdly pretend that I was an expert on Czech politics and history even though I do not speak the language, and have never visited the country. It would of course be ludicrous, but no less so than the tokenistic Jews who claim a right to speak on behalf of Jews in Australia.

But even more annoying is the fact that they ignore a long malevolent history of tokenistic progressive Jews doing just that: claiming wrongly to represent Jews for cynical and opportunistic political purposes. One infamous historical example is Trotsky’s intervention to damage the Jewish Labour Bund at the 1903 Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) Congress.

It is well known that the Bund played a major role in organizing and hosting the 1898 founding Congress of the RSDLP which later split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions. Indeed, three of the nine founding delegates were from the Bund including Samuel Katz who was the only worker attending alongside eight middle-class intellectuals. That meeting was scheduled in the Bund stronghold of Minsk for security purposes, and the Bund was influential in planning the future program of the Party, and determining its revolutionary strategy and political tactics.

Initially, the RSDLP granted autonomous status to the Bund to organize Jewish workers. But, the Bund’s relationship with the broader socialist movement collapsed at the 1903 RSDLP Congress over the question of Jewish nationalism. The Bund demanded formal recognition as the sole representative of the Jewish proletariat without geographical limits. However, the Bolshevik leader Lenin strongly rejected the notion of Jewish national culture, insisting that the concept was inherently reactionary, and that the only solution to antisemitism was the eventual assimilation of Jews into the broader population.

Lenin proposed instead to restrict the Bund’s autonomy to the practical question of communicating and interpreting Party views and strategies within the specific language and living conditions of Jewish workers. Twelve Jewish delegates led by Trotsky initiated an aggressive attack on the Bund’s so-called nationalist perspective, claiming that they had as much right as the Bund to speak on behalf of the Jewish proletariat. Mark Liber of the Bund responded that these delegates had never worked with Jewish workers. As a result, the Bund decided to withdraw from the Party (Crabapple 2026: Chapter Four; Mendes 2013: 2014: 211-215; Portnoy 1979: 288-290).

I should add that Trotsky was not an antisemite, and later he transitioned to a less dogmatic view of Jewish nationalism (Johnson 2019). But regardless, his cynical manipulation of his Jewish background to marginalize the genuinely representative Bund in 1903 serves to remind us that Jewish involvement in the Left can best be framed as reflecting a spectrum of Jewish influences and identity. In my 2014 book, I identified six distinct manifestations or categories of the Jewish contribution to Left politics including:

• Specific Jewish labour groups such as the Jewish Labour Bund, Left Zionist groups such as Poale Zion, and Jewish-identifying Communist networks or factions affiliated with national Communist parties. These organizations were particularly influential in pre-revolutionary Russia, and in the first half of the twentieth century in the USA. There were large Jewish labour movements in New York, London, Paris, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Berlin and Buenos Aires that attracted thousands and sometimes even tens of thousands of members and supporters. These movements developed large sub-cultures that provided a secular collective identity for left-wing Jews based on a synthesis of Socialist ideas and Jewish culture.
• Significant Jewish electoral support in democratic countries for either social democratic parties as in, for example, the United Kingdom, Australia and much of Western Europe till the 1970s, or alternatively support for liberal parties as in the USA.
• Socialists who identified as Jews, but mainly participated in broader Left parties and movements. They included, for example, the French Popular Front Prime Minister Leon Blum, and the leading Austrian socialist, Julius Braunthal.
• Jews who were mainly internationalists, but still demonstrated a specific concern with combating antisemitism. They included, for example, the Russian Menshevik leader Julius Martov, and the German socialist leader Eduard Bernstein.
• Radicals who actively distanced themselves from their Jewish background, but were generally not hostile to Jewish aspirations. They included, for example, the leading Bolsheviks Trotsky and Zinoviev.
• Non-Jewish or even antisemitic Jews who both rejected any link with the Jewish people, and were actively hostile to Jewish concerns. They included, for example, Karl Marx, the Austrian Jewish Marxists Victor Adler and Otto Bauer, the Hungarian Communist leader Rakosi, and the prominent Bolshevik Lazar Kaganovich.

Of course, these six categories are fluid, and some Jewish activists moved from one to another during their careers. The largest number of Jewish leftists belonged to Category One, but it was those in categories 3-6 and particularly 5-6 who became most famous and notorious. Yet they always constituted a minority and perhaps even a small minority of Jews who were aligned with the Left (Mendes 2014: 17-18).

These historical categorizations help to unpack the opportunistic role played by tokenistic Jews in contemporary campaigns that seek to reverse the victims and perpetrators of antisemitism. For example, Yasmine Johnson, the national coordinator of the ultra-nationalist Students for Palestine group, describes herself as a “Jewish student” solely on the basis of having a Jewish grandmother whose family were murdered in the Holocaust (Johnson 2026). She seems to narrowly define Judaism as just a “religious faith”, and makes no reference to any contemporary engagement with the Jewish community, whether via involvement in sporting, cultural, social or political groups. Nor does she indicate an understanding of discrete Jewish languages such as Hebrew, Yiddish or Ladino. She displays an acute ignorance of the long history of complex debates and tensions in the international Left around universalist vs particularist interpretations of Jewish identity and how best to advance effective struggles against antisemitism.

I do not know whether any of the spokespersons for the JCOA have a specialist knowledge of the global historical and political background and context to contemporary Jewish-Left relations. To be sure, Max Kaiser, the ideological guru of the JCOA, actively seeks to connect the JCOA to earlier Australian Jewish Left groups such as the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Antisemitism (JCCFAS) which existed from 1942-1970. However, in his book history of the JCCFAS (based on his earlier Doctoral thesis), he spuriously alleges that I argue “that Jewish leftists can be neatly divided into those who were communist universalists and used their Jewishness cynically, and those who prioritized their Jewishness but had a mistaken strategy in aligning themselves with the left” (Kaiser 2022: 8).

Oddly, he quotes a page number from a book chapter of mine that presents no such argument. As noted above, my views on this matter presented in detail in my 2014 book are deeply complex and nuanced, and hardly correspond with his description. I suspect he may have been aggrieved with my specific description of the Communist Jewish writer Judah Waten (whom I would place in my Category 6 above) as a person who “mainly exploited his Jewish background to defend the Soviet Union’s anti-Jewish policies (Mendes 2016: 201).

Yet Kaiser strangely tries to reinvent Waten (whom he appears to admire) as an anti-racist, based solely on his alleged solidarity with Aboriginal Australians, whilst whitewashing his long-term denial or active defense of institutionalized antisemitism in the Soviet Union. Even in 1960, Waten bizarrely asserted that Jews enjoyed complete equality in the Soviet Union, and denied that there had ever been Stalinist persecution of Jews. And again in 1962, he insisted that there had never been any manifestations of official antisemitism in the Soviet Union. Kaiser’s book failed to critically interrogate how Waten could stand up for the rights of one oppressed people, and yet provide nil solidarity with the struggle of his own oppressed nation against racial discrimination (Mendes 2023).

Elsewhere, Kaiser has argued that the JCCFAS partnered with progressive political groups such as trade unions, churches and the peace movement to oppose antisemitism (Kaiser 2024). That statement is true, but fails to mention two major inconvenient facts.

The first is that the antisemitism that the JCCFAS confronted in that earlier period was almost exclusively from the right (primarily the far right), whereas antisemitism in Australia today, at least in what might be termed intellectual or academic groupings, principally emanates from a partnership of progressive and/or Islamist sources. It would be totally obtuse to copy the JCCFAS’s strategy of collaborating with progressive groups when many of those same groups today are dedicated perpetrators of antisemitism. Secondly, the JCCFAS was marginalized in the Jewish community not solely because of the McCarthyism that Kaiser refers to, but also because of its active denial of Stalinist antisemitism during the horrific Slansky trial and Doctors Plot of 1952-53. Yet, Kaiser either ignores or downplays this seminal issue in his various reflections on the JCCFAS, allocating only a footnote (p.165) and then one further line (p.256) to Soviet Antisemitism in his long 302 page book.

In their submission to the Royal Commission, the JCOA specifically insist that the JCCFAS did not “support a foreign nation state”, and did not engage in “pro-Israel advocacy” (2026: 5 and 8). Both statements are completely ahistorical. In fact, the JCCFAS led the Jewish community campaign to support Israel during the 1947-48 war, and also actively raised funds for the United Israel Appeal during the 1956 and 1967 wars. The JCCFAS persistently advocated on behalf of Israel until their demise in 1970 (Mendes 1998: 2009). 

Another representative of the JCOA, their Executive Director Sarah Schwartz, stated in her presentation to the Royal Commission that she had recently been introduced to the historical activities of organizations such as the Jewish Labour Bund and the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism (JCCFAS) that she “hadn’t been taught about growing up” (2026:292). She added that knowing about the JCCFAS had reinforced her belief that “it is possible… to have a Jewish identity and a proud and strong Jewish identity which fights antisemitism and which doesn’t believe that our safety is found in a nation state” (2026: 292).

There are three major problems emanating from that statement. Firstly, any contemporary Australian Jewish Left leader that took the Jewish side of their identity seriously would arguably be very well informed about the histories of both the Bund and the JCCFAS, particularly the latter which has been the subject of multiple academic journal articles, book chapters and theses over six decades. Secondly, as already noted, the JCCFAS was a strong supporter of the Jewish nation state of Israel throughout the period from 1948-1970. Additionally, the World Bund, although originally anti-Zionist, passed a motion at their 1955 Conference in Montreal which signaled a shift to a “non-Zionist” position. That motion influenced Bundists globally to adopt a positive view of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state whilst still rejecting the Zionist construction of Israel as the homeland of all Jews (Slucki 2012: 173-174, 207-08).

Thirdly, the JCCFAS – with the notable exception of its appalling denial of Stalinist antisemitism – always sided in domestic affairs with the victims of antisemitism and vigorously combatted the perpetrators of anti-Jewish racism. The current Jewish Council has, in my opinion, instead taken nil action to support the victims of anti-Jewish racism. In their submission to the Royal Commission, the Council frequently presented blaming the victim language (Seymour 2026) alleging that Jews “conflate” or “weaponize” accusations of antisemitism for political gain (JCOA 2026: 3, 4 and 14), and by so doing, arguably provided a Jewish alibi for pro-racist groups and individuals. 

In contrast, legitimate Jewish Left groups (i.e. Category one organizations) that genuinely integrate particularist Jewish values and identity and universalist beliefs still exist today. In Australia, they include cohorts such as the ALP-linked Jewish Labor Forum led by Michael Borowick and Adam Slonim, the Jewish Labour Bund (2026), and until 2023 the former Jewish Greens Network (Mendes 2026b). These organisations present real progressive Jewish lived experience voices and experiences, unequivocally reject antisemitism, and always side with the victims rather than the perpetrators of anti-Jewish racism.

 – 

References

Crabapple, Molly (2026) The story of the Jewish Bund: Here where we live is our country. Penguin Random House, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646320/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-by-molly-crabapple/.

Jewish Council of Australia (2026) “Submission to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion”, 16 June, https://www.jewishcouncil.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Jewish-Council-of-Australia-Submission-to-Royal-Commission-FINAL.pdf.

Jewish Labour Bund (2026) “Submission to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion”, 27 April, https://asc.royalcommission.gov.au/system/files/published_submissions/SUB.0001.0001.5167.pdf.

Johnson, Alan (2019) “Leon Trotsky’s long war against antisemitism”, Fathom Journal, March, https://fathomjournal.org/the-fathom-long-read-leon-trotskys-long-war-against-antisemitism/.

Johnson, Yasmine (2026) “A Jewish socialist defends the Palestine movement at the royal commission”, Red Flag, 13 July, https://redflag.org.au/article/a-jewish-socialist-defends-the-palestine-movement-at-the-royal-commission/.

Kaiser, Max (2024) “Jews, antisemitism and power in Australia”, Meanjin, Spring: 110-117.

Kaiser, Max (2022). Jewish Antifascism and the false promise of settler colonialism. Palgrave MacMillan. Switzerland. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-10123-6_8.

Mendes, Philip (1998). ‘The Jewish Council, Communism and the State of Israel’, Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, 14 (3), 459-467. https://collections.ajhs.com.au/Detail/objects/53481?fromBrowse=1.

Mendes, Philip (2009). ‘The Australian Left’s support for the creation of the State of Israel, 1947-48’, Labour History, 97, 137-148. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27740316.

Mendes, Philip (2013) “The rise and fall of the Jewish Labour Bund”, Jewish Currents, Autumn: 21-25, http://jewishcurrents.org/rise-fall-jewish-labor-bund

Mendes, Philip (2014) Jews and the Left: The rise and fall of a political alliance. Palgrave MacMillan, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137008305.

Philip Mendes (2016) “Jewish Communism in Australia” in Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry Srebrnik (eds.) A vanished ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist movement in the English-speaking world in the twentieth century. State University of New York Press. Albany, pp.195-221. https://49thshelf.com/Books/A/A-Vanished-Ideology.

Mendes, Philip (2023). Review of “Jewish Antifascism”. Australian Journal of Jewish Studies, 36: 134-139.

https://www.aajs.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Mendes_AJJS_XXXVI_2023_134-139.pdf.

Mendes, Philip (2026a) Progressive Intolerance: the contemporary antisemitism landscape in Australia. Sydney: Centre for Independent Studies, https://apo.org.au/node/333357.

Mendes, Philip (2026b) “The Australian Greens and the demise of their Jewish network”,

Times of Israel, 22 July, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-australian-greens-and-the-demise-of-their-jewish-network/.

Portnoy, Samuel (1979) Vladimir Medem: The life and soul of a legendary Jewish Socialist. KTAV Publishing House. New York, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nationalities-papers/article/abs/samuel-a-portnoy-translator-and-editor-vladimir-medem-the-life-and-soul-of-a-legendary-jewish-socialist-new-york-ktav-publishing-house-1979-pp-583/493AFC86ACB7791D1BD4A561B9CBA4F2.

Schwartz, Sarah (2026) “Witness statement to Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion”. Transcript of Proceedings, 2 July, https://asc.royalcommission.gov.au/system/files/2026-07/transcript-day-4-sydney-2-july-2026.pdf.

Seymour, David. “Conflation. Conflation.” Fathom Journal, May 2026. https://fathomjournal.org/conflation-conflation/.

Slucki, David (2012). The international Jewish Labor Bund after 1945. Rutgers University Press. New Brunswick. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/the-international-jewish-labor-bund-after-1945/9780813552255.