Jack Jacobs, whose book The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (2016) I recently read, has a new, outrageously expensive book he’s edited titled Jews and Leftist Politics: Judaism, Israel, Antisemitism, and Gender (2017).
The book contains essays such as Michael Walzer’s “The Strangeness of Jewish Leftism”, Antony Polonsky’s “Jews and Communism in the Soviet Union and Poland”, Harvey Klehr’s “Jews and American Communism”, Daniel Soyer’s “The Soviet Union, Jewish Concerns, and the New York Electoral Left, 1939 – 1944”, and
Judith Friedlander’s “Jews and the Left at the New School”. There are also a series of essays on Zionism and Israel.
The opening paragraph of Jacob’s Introduction begins:
Jews played highly visible roles, over an extended period, in the leadership of leftist movements – including socialist, communist, and anarchist organizations – around the world. In the first half of the twentieth century, significant numbers of Jews were also evident in the rank and file of specific left-wing political parties. In addition to participating in general leftist movements, Jews in Eastern Europe created and fostered a number of distinctive Jewish socialist parties with tens of thousands of members. Why were so many Jews sympathetic to left-wing causes?…
What is astonishing is how a book like this can have absolutely zero references to Kevin Macdonald’s trilogy.
And why is it that when a non-Jew (such as Macdonald) makes the exact same observation about Jews’ penchant for Leftwing politics, they are immediately accused of antisemitism?
