"When Victims Rule" - Jewish Pre-Eminence in America
Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2014 3:50 am
JEWISH PRE-EMINENCE IN THE POLITICAL LEFT/COMMUNISM
including Jewish prominence in "radical" movements worldwide, Jewish pre-eminence in secret police terrorist agencies in the Soviet Union and Poland, Jewish communist spy networks, Jewish dominance in the Left of America, and the inevitable Jewish movement towards ethnocentric pro-Israelism and Zionism
(Excerpts from different chapters in When Victims Rule. A Critique of Jewish Pre-Eminence in America.)
How profoundly this paradoxical "particularism" (i.e., chauvinism) is ingrained in the Jewish consciousness is evidenced even in leftist political organizations that are supposed to be founded upon notions of universality, egalitarianism, and pan-human solidarity. In the years leading up to the Russian communist revolution in the early twentieth century, the undying obsession by most Russian Jews for themselves -- distinct from many Russian leftists around them -- often manifest itself in ethnocentric political expressions. Many Jews of Russia and Poland congregated towards their own socialist movement called the Bund. Much to the aggravation of communist party leader V. I. Lenin and his universalistic Bolshevik movement, the Bund's version of leftism insisted upon -- even within the context of the existing nation state of Russia -- special Jewish national rights beyond those civil. [AGUS, p. 164]
"It was not enough for the Bund," says Heinz-Dietrich Lowe, "to shift ... from Russian to Yiddish in its agitational programme, it had to develop a fully fledged national programme which demanded cultural autonomy for the Jews of the Russian empire." [LOWE, p. 171] When non-Jews began rioting in Russia against Jewish exclusionism and commercial exploitation in the late 1800s, "the Bund ... used these pogroms as an opportunity to intensify its economic activities and further its political aims." [LOWE, p. 171] "[The Bund's] leaders," says Joseph Marcus, "consistently conducted a class-conscious policy, ostensibly in the interests of the whole working class, but actually confined to its Jewish members." [MARCUS, p. 211]
While the Bund had a large following in Eastern Europe, notes Shmuel Ettinger,
"at the same time, the Zionist Federation, which was also being formed
by Russian Jews, stimulated the [Jewish] nationalist trends ... Among
Jewish political subgroups the Socialist Zionist Party demanded that
a Jewish society, socialist in principle, be established in a special
territory to be set aside for the Jews; the Jewish Socialist Party, the
'Seymists,' demanded a superior leadership institution, 'Sejm,' for
every one of the nations which belonged to the Federation of Russia;
the 'Peoples' Party' (Folkspartey), led by historian Simon Dubnov,
demanded a large measure of autonomy for the Jews within the
framework of the Russian state ... Many Jews also played a part
in organizing the general Russian political parties." [ETTINGER, 1984,
p. 9]
Across time and culture, even in the context of the supposed multiculturalist and egalitarian American New Left movement of the 1960's, Jews collectively tended to perceive themselves with special distinction. As Arthur Liebman noted:
"[Gentile intellectuals] really are not totally accepted into even the
secularist humanist liberal company of their quondam Jewish friends.
Jews continue to insist in indirect and often inexplicable ways on their
own uniqueness. Jewish universalism in relations between Jews and
non-Jews has an empty ring ... Still, we have the anomaly of Jewish
secularists and atheists writing their own prayer books. We find
Jewish political reformers ... ostensibly pressing for universalist
political goals -- while organizing their own political clubs which are
so Jewish in style and manner that non-Jews often feel unwelcome."
[LIEBMAN, in MACDONALD, p. 158]
Jews have a long history of leftist political advocacy, agitation against any status quo of Christian empowerment, and profoundly disproportionate percentages of leadership roles in groups that ostensibly espouse pan-human, universalist themes. With massive Jewish escape from the working class in America, Nathan Glazer and Patrick Moynihan noted in 1963 that "the unions are increasingly less Jewish [but] Jewish labor leaders continue to dominate, even though they deal for the most part with non-Jewish workers." [GLAZER/MOYNIHAN, p. 144-145] "In America and Europe," says Barry Rubin, "the left was so heavily Jewish as to be virtually a communal activity in itself, especially in the 1930's ... Marxist intellectuals in those years were heavily Jewish in composition and profoundly Jewish in their thinking ... [Its pre-eminent leaders] were all born into highly assimilated, wealthy families..." [RUBIN, B., p. 147] Reflecting on the collapse of the leftist movement in America, Harold Cruse, an African-American intellectual and former communist, complained that
"The Jews could not [Americanize Marxism] with the nationalist-
aggressiveness emerging out of East Side ghettoes to demonstrate
through Marxism their intellectual superiority over the Anglo-Saxon
goyim. The Jews failed to make Marxism applicable to anything in
America but their own national-group ambition or individual self-
election." [LIEBMAN, A., p. 529]
In 1982 a Jewish author noted a similar quote by a Gentile communist activist from Wisconsin:
"It became increasingly apparent to most participants [at a communist
youth conference] that virtually all the speakers were Jewish New
Yorkers. Speakers with thick New York accents would identify
themselves as 'the delegate from the Lower East Side' or 'the comrade
from Brownsville.' Finally the national leadership called a recess to
discuss what was becoming an embarassment. How could a
supposedly national student organization be so totally dominated by
New York Jews? ... The convention was held in Wisconsin." [in MACDONALD, 1998, p. 72]
"The problem arose," says Arthur Liebman,
"to the means to accomplish the objective of Americanizing what was an essentialy Jewish and European socialist movement ... [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 340] ... The disporportionate presence of Jews and the foreign born generally in the socialist movement coupled with the relative absence of non-Jews and native Americans troubled many of its leaders, Jews and non-Jews alike. The Communist party, for example, in the 1920s was made up almost entirely of Jews and foreign born, most of whom were in foreign language federations. The Jews alone in the 1930s and 1940s accounted for approximately 40 to 50 percent of the membership of the Communist party." [LIEBMAN, A.,|
1986, p. 339]
Nathaniel Weyl notes that:
"Although Communist leaders were normally taciturn about the extent
to which Party membership was Jewish, Jack Stachel complained in
The Communist for April 1929 that in Los Angeles 'practically 90 per
cent of the membership is Jewish.' In 1945, John Williamson, another
national leader of the American Communist Party, observed that, while
a seventh of Party membership was concentrated in Brooklyn, it
was not the working-class districts, but in Brownsville, Williamsburg,
Coney Island and Bensonhurst, which he characterized 'as primarily
Jewish American communities.' In 1951, the same complaint about
Brooklyn was reiterated. A 1938 breakdown of Communist educational
directors on a district level reported that 17 out of 34 were Jewish and
only nine 'American' ... Based on scrutiny of surnames, Glazer concluded that all of the 'Rank and File' (Communist) teachers placed on trial by the Teachers Union in 1932 were Jewish." [WEYL., N., 1968, p. 118-119]
The popular association of Jews with Communism," notes Peter Novick, "dated from the Bolshevik Revolution. Most of the 'alien agitators' deported from the United States during the Red Scare after World War I had been Jews." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 92] Major American twentieth century court trials included those of Charles Schenck, general secretary of the Socialist Party, who was arrested for sedition in 1919: "The case marked the first time the Supreme Court ruled on the extent to which the U.S. government may limit speech." [KNAPPMAN, E., 1995, p. 61, 60] Likewise, in 1927 the Supreme Court "upheld the conviction of Socialist Benjamin Gitlow under a New York state law for advocating criminal anarchy." [KNAPPMAN, E., 1995, p. 63]
Peter Pulzer once noted that, in the German socialist ranks of the early 20th century, "Their [Jews'] disproportionately bourgeois origins and their tendency to derive their views from first principles rather than empirical experience, led them into a dominating position [in] the party's debates." [WEISBERGER, A., 1997, p. 93] Arthur Liebman notes the background to the Morris Hillquit's election to the American Socialist party chairmanship in 1932:
"Hilquit, in turn, brought the unmentionable to the center stage in an emotional speech, declaring, 'I apologize for having been born abroad, for being a Jew, and living in New York City.' Hilquit's oblique reference to anti-Semitism assured him of victory. As Thomas[Hilquit's opponent for the chairmanship] later commented, 'Once the anti-Semitic issue was raised, even though unjustly, I was inclined to think it best that Hillquit won.' The Socialist party did not want to risk being labeled anti-Semitic." [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 341]
Some estimates suggest that 60% of the leadership for the 60s-era radical SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) were Jews (well-known radicals included Kathy Boudin, Bettina Aptheker, among many others). [PRAGER, p. 61] From 1960 to 1970, five of the nine changing presidents of the organization were Jewish males (Al Haber, Todd Gitlin, and the last three for the decade: Mike Spiegel, Mike Klonsky, and Mark Rudd). [SALE, K., 1973, p. 663] "Perhaps fully 50 percent of the revolutionary Students for a Democratic Society," says Milton Plesur, "and as many as 50 to 75 percent of those in campus radical activities in the late 1960s were Jewish." [PLESUR, M., 1982, p. 137] As Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter note:
"The early SDS was heavily Jewish in both its leadership and its activist cadres. Key SDS leaders included Richard Flacks, who played an important role in its formation and growth, as well as Al Haber, Robb Ross, Steve Max, Mike Spiegel, Mike Klonsky, Todd Gitlin, Mark Rudd, and others. Indeed, for the first few years, SDS was largely funded by the League for Industrial Democracy, a heavily Jewish socialist (but anti-communist) organization. SDS's early successes were at elite universities containing substantial numbers of Jewish students and sympathetic Jewish faculty, including the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Brandeis, Oberlin, and the University of California. At Berkeley SDS leaders were not unaware of their roots. As Robb Ross put it, describing the situation at the Unversity of Wisconsin in the early 1960s, '... my impression is that the left at Madison is not just a new left, but a revival of the old ... with all the problems that entails. I am struck by the lack of Wisconsin-born people [in the Madison-area left] and the massive preponderance of New York Jews. The situation at the University of Minnesota is similar' ... [Researcher] Berns and his associates found that 83 percent of a small radical activist sample studied at the University of California in the early 1970s were of Jewish background." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 61]
Susan Stern was among those to turn to the violent Weatherman underground organization. Ted Gold, another Weatherman member, died when a bomb he was making exploded in his hands. [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 61] In an iconic 1970 incident, three of the four students shot and killed by National Guardsmen at a famous Kent State University demonstration were Jewish. [BYARD, K., 5-5-00]
A study by Joseph Adelson at the University of Michigan, one of the American hotbeds of 1960s-era activism, suggested that 90% of those defined as politically "radical students" at that school were Jews. [PRAGER, p. 61, 66] And, "when, for instance, the Queens College SDS held a sit-in at an induction center several years ago," wrote Gabriel Ende, "they chose to sing Christmas carols to dramatize their activity, although the chairman and almost all of the members were Jewish." [ENDE, G., 1971, p. 61]
Ronald Radosh notes that
"In elite institutions like the University of Chicago, a large 63 percent of student radicals were Jewish; Tom Hayden may have been the most famous name in the University of Michigan SDS, but '90 percent of the student left [in that school] came from jewish backgrounds;' and nationally, 60 percent of SDS members were Jewish. As my once-friend Paul Breines wrote about my own alma mater the University of Wisconsin, 'the real yeast in the whole scene had been
the New York Jewish students in Wisconsin' ... As late as 1946, one-third of America's Jews held a favorable view of the Soviet Union." [RADOSH, R., 6-5-01]
Decades earlier, note Rothman and Lichter:
"The American Student Union, the most prominent radical student group during the 1930s, was heavily concentrated in New York colleges and universities with large Jewish enrollments. And on other campuses,
such as the University of Illinois, substantial portions of its limited membership were students of Jewish background from New York City." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 101]
In communist organizations that supposedly idealized a classless society for all people, it inevitably grated with enduring Jewish self-perception: Jews often tended to configure as a special caste of controllers of -- not a religious, but now -- a secular messianism. As Jeff Schatz notes about pre-World War II Poland: "Despite the fact that [communist] party authorities consciously strove to promote classically proletarian and ethnically Polish members to the cadres of leaders and functionaries, Jewish communists formed 54 percent of the field leadership of the KPP [Polish Communist Party] in 1935. Moreover, Jews constituted a total of 75 percent of the party's technica, the apparatus for production and distribution of propaganda material. Finally, communists of Jewish origin occupied most of the seats of the Central Committee of the of the KPPP [Communists Workers Party of Poland] and the KPP." [SCHATZ, p. 97] Jews were at this time 10% of the Polish population.
In Russia, notes Shmuel Ettinger,
"when the Russian Social Democratic Party split into two factions --
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks -- both factions had many Jews in
their leaderships (such as Boris Axelrod, Yuly Martov, Lev Trotsky,
Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenov) and among their most active
party members. Many Jews also played a part in the foundations and
leadership of the party ... For example, Mikhail Gots was one of the
party's main thereoticians and Grigory Gershuni was the leader of
its fighting organization, which carried out terrorist acts against the
Tsarist regime." [ETTINGER, p. 9]
Earlier in Russia, notes Leon Schapiro, "a particularly important part was played by [Jewish revolutionary Aaron] Zundelovich, who in 1872 had formed a revolutionary circle mainly among students at the state-sponsored rabbinical school, at Vilna." [SCHAPIRO, L., 1961, p. 153]
Also, notes Albert Lindemann, "it seems beyond serious debate that in the first twenty years of the Bolshevik Party the top ten to twenty leaders included close to a majority of Jews. Of the seven 'major figures' listed in The Makers of the Russian Revolution, four are of Jewish origin." [LINDEMANN, p. 429-430] Among the most important Jewish communists were the aforementioned Trotsky (originally Lev Davidovich Bronstein) and Grigori Yevseyevich Zinoviev ("Lenin's closest associate in the war years"). Lev Borisovich Kamenev (Rosenfeld) headed the party newspaper, Pravda. Adolf Yoffe was head of the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Bolshevik Party in 1917-18. Moisei Solomonovich, head of the secret police in Petrograd, was known by some as the epitome of "Jewish terror against the Russian people." [LINDEMANN, p. 431]
In Hungary, notes Jewish scholar Howard Sachar, "for 135 days [in 1919], Hungary was ruled by a Communist dictatorship. Its party boss, Bela Kun, was a Jew. So were 31 of the 49 commissars in Kun's regime." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 339] During that time, note Jewish scholars Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Jews also represented
"most managers of the forty-eight People's Commissars in his revolutionary government. Most managers of the new state farms were Jewish, as were the bureau chiefs of the Central Administration and the leading olice officers. Overall, of 202 high officials in the Kun government, 161 were Jewish. Jews remained active in the Communist party during the Horthy regime of 1920-44, dominating its leadership. Again, most were from established, midle-class (or, at worst, lower-middle-class) backgrounds. Hardly any were proletarians or peasants. Most of the Hungarian Jewish community was massacred during World War II ... Nonetheless, the leading cadres of the Communist party in the postwar period were Jews, who completely dominated the regime until 1952-53 ... The wags of Budapest explained the presence of a lone gentile in the party leadership on the grounds that a 'goy' was needed to turn on the lights on Saturday." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 89]
"In Lithuania," add Rothman and Lichter,
"about 54 percent of the [Communist] party cadres were Jewish. Salonika Jewry played a major role in the foundation of Greek Communist party and remained prominent until the early 1940s. Similar patterns prevailed in Rumania and Czechoslovakia. Jews played quite prominent roles in the top and second echelon leadership of the communist regimes in all of these countries in the immediate postwar period. Theywere often associated with Stalinist policies and were strongly represented in the secret police. In Poland, for example, three of the five members of the original Politburo were Jewish. A fourth, Wladyslaw Gomulka, was married to a woman of Jewish background. In both Rumania and Czechoslovakia, at least two of the four key figures in the Communist party were of Jewish background." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 90]
In Canada, in the 1940s, the Jewish head of the Communist Party in Montreal, Harry Binder, estimated that 70% of the Communist Party membership in his city were Jewish. In Toronto, from a Jewish population of 50,000, about 30% of the formal members of the local Communist community were believed to be Jews, not including those who had looser ties to the organization. [PARIS, E., 1980, p. 145]
David Biale notes Jewish pre-eminence among the communists of South Africa:
"The fact that they were outsiders to the main elements of white South
African society -- British and Afrikaner -- undoubtedly made them more
likely to rebel against the existing order. It was the explosive combination of Communist ideology as a kind of substitute for religion and the Jews' marginal status that probably turned these Jews into such a prevalent presence on the South African left." [BIALE, D., MARCH/APRIL 2000, p. 63-64]
Jews of Polish background played an important role in the founding of the Cuban communist party," note Rothman and Lichter, "and there are scattered indications of their significance in left-wing parties and groups in other Latin American countries. Jews were also prominent in the formation of Communist parties in various North African countries." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 90-91]
Even in 1930's pre-Nazi Germany, the Communist Party's top two leaders -- Rosa Luxemberg and Paul Levi -- were Jewish. (Hannah Arendt notes that Luxemberg was a member of a "Polish-Jewish 'peer group,'" which was a "carefully hidden attachment to the Polish party which sprang from it.") [ARENDT, 1968, p. 40] Earlier, in the wake of World War I, another Jewish radical, Kurt Eisner, proclaimed a socialist republic in Bavaria. Upon his assassination, Eisner's government was replaced by another socialist one -- that of president Ernst Toller (also Jewish). Erich Muehsam and Gustav Landauer were other Jews in high positions in the government. [PAYNE, p. 124-125] Next came a Communist coup to oust the socialist regime. As John Cornwell describes it, "After a week or two of outlandish misrule, on April 12 [1919] a reign of terror ensued under the red revolutionary trio of Max Levien, Eugen Levine, and Tonja Axelrod [also all Jewish] to hasten the dictatorship of the proletariat. The new regime kidnapped 'middle-class' hostages, throwing them into Stadeheim Prison. They shut down schools, imposed censorship, and requisitioned peoples' homes and possessions." [CORNWELL, p. 74] In Austria, in 1920, repeating the theme, "the socialist government was led by Friedrich Adler, Otto Bauer, Karl Seitz, Julius Deutsch and Hugo Breitner." [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 117] "The Austrian Social Democrat party was founded by Victor Adler, a deracinated Jew from a well-known Prague Jewish family, and the party paper was edited by Friedrich Austerlitz, a Moravian Jew. Other prominent Jews in the party leadership included Wilhelm Ellenbogen, Otto Bauer, Robert Dannenberg, and Max Adler." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 88]
'The list of leading socialists [in Germany] of Jewish origin is long and illustrious," adds Adam Weisberger, "-- Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemberg, Gustav Landauer, Kurt Eisner, Paul Singer, Hugo Haase -- to mention some of the most prominent among them." [WEISBERG, A., 1997, p. 2]
As George Mosse notes:
"Jews were highly visible in many of the postwar [World War I]
revolutions, not only in Bolshevik Russia but also in Budapest,
Munich, and Berlin. During the postwar crisis, belief in Jewish
conspiracies and subversive activity was not just a curious notion
held by professed haters of Jews; in 1918, even Winston Churchill
associated Jews with the Bolshevik conspiracy." [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 68-69]
For those who even know about such a past, Jewish historiography these days tends to assert that communist and socialist Jews, in Russia and everywhere else, did not have any interest in a Jewish identity. This position asserts that such Jewish communist involvement was an investment in a secular universalism that leaves behind the traditional Jewish collectivist identity. In explaining away why so many Jews were secret police terrorists under the communist regime in Eastern Europe [see above links], Jewish author Michael Checinski writes that
"They were, for better or worse, considered less susceptible to the
lures of 'Polish nationalism,' to which even impeccable Polish Communists were not thought immune. It should be remembered that these Jews were of a particular type: there were few veteran Communists among them, as their victims would be former KPP members and other
left-wingers, and Moscow was taking no chances with sentimental
ties of comradeship cramping their style as guardians of political
'purity.' Many of them had not only sadistic inclinations but also
various grudges against their future victims, both Polish and Jewish.
Indeed, it is significant that there were no traces of 'Jewish solidarity' among the staff of the Tenth Department. On the contrary, they represented a distorted conception of 'internationalism,' which could be described as 'Jewish anti-Semitism.'" [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 71-72]
This is a common Jewish apologetic tact today, to explain away the Jewish identities of so many communist terrorists by proclaiming that they had no connective identity with others in their work circles. Even here, Jewish consensus proclaims, even as Jews murdered others, Jews remain victims of anti-Semitism.
But as Kevin MacDonald suggests, "surface declarations of a lack of Jewish identity may be highly misleading ... There is good evidence for widespread self-deception about Jewish identity among Jewish radicals ... [Bolshevism] was a government that aggressively attempted to destroy all vestiges of Christianity as a socially unifying force within the Soviet Union while at the same time it established a secular Jewish subculture." [MACDONALD, 1998, p. 60]
Arthur Liebman notes this phenomenon in "the flood of Yiddish-speaking Jews" to America in the early years of the twentieth century:
"These new Jews were too large a constituency to be kept separate from the Socialist party for the length of time ncessary to accept the arguments of the sophisticated Marxist cosmopolitan Jews. If these masses of Jews who valued their Jewish identity and language would come to socialism through a speical Jewish organization, then the Socialists decided they would have it. The Jewish Socialist Federation was officially recognized by the Socialist party in 1912."
[LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 339]
As Jewish author John Sack notes about the many officials of Jewish origin in Poland after World War II who headed the repressive communist secret police system:
"I'd interviewed twenty-three Jews who'd been in the Office [of State
Security], and one, just one, had considered himself a communist in
1945. He and the others had gone to Jewish schools, studied the
Torah, had been bar-mitzvahed, sometimes wore payes ... By whose
definition weren't they Jews? Not by the Talmud's, certainly not by
the government of Israel's or the government of Nazi Germany's."
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 63]
Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz puts her Jewish identity in a socialist context this way:
"Out of nowhere pops a question, 'If you don't care about being
Jewish, how come all your friends are Jews?'
Vivian ... thinks about being Jewish on the toilet and in her
sleep, as well as every other moment of the day or night.
'I live in New York,' I snap, and we both burst out laughing.
Mentally I flip through my friends for a non-Jew. Nothing.
She shakes her head. 'You're such a Jew. How come you
don't know this about yourself?'
... My parents never thought about it either, it was who they
were. In Vilna they were Jews and socialists, and when they came
here they were still Jews and socialists. They lived among other
Jews. Everyone spoke Jewish. What was there to think? It was
like air, they breathed it. There was Jewish everything. My parents
would argue who you could trust less, communists or Democrats,
anarchists they never worried about. All Jewish. Orthodox,
secular. Owners, bosses, workers. Doctors, teachers, salesclerks,
writers, dancers, peddlers, you name it. All Jewish. Movies. Gossip
columns. Like I said, you breathed it." [KAYE-KANTROWITZ,
1990, p. 188]
Jewish author Anne Roiphe, today an ardent supporter of Israel, addresses the same theme:
"I can say I was a Marxist before I was old enough to know history,
and afterward a liberal, a Leftist, a woman of the people with the people, but finally I must own to the hypocrisy. I see certain unwelcome
contradictions." [ROLPHE, 1981, p. 113]
Rolphe's first hypocrisy was that she was born to wealth: "I am the product of the [economic] wits of my grandfather." [ROLPHE, 1981, p. 113] And despite an identity as a Marxist, Leftist, liberal, or whatever else she thought she was, Rolphe inevitably was drawn back to "this odd mystical connection to the Jewish peoplehood, " [ROLPHE, 1981, p. 182] writing an entire volume about it (subtitled A Jewish Journey in Christian America). "I thought," she wrote, "that ... I had asserted my ego as separate from the forced march of Jewish history ... I had thought I had cut out the roots of the tree that was causing too much shade in my garden ... [but] the tree without roots had surprised me with its staying power." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 180]
Jewish communist Sam Carr was released from a Canadian prison in 1951 for spying for Russia. "Ironically," notes Erna Paris, "given the fact that he 'wasn't much of a Jew,' he did become the leader of the Unified Jewish People's Order after 1960." [PARIS, E., p. 176] In Argentina, Jewish publisher Jacobo Timerman was imprisoned by the ruling military junta in 1977. It was pointed out to him by his right-wing interrogators that he was a member of a "registered affiliate organization of the Communist Party" in his youth. Timerman denied that he joined it because of any interest in communism, but, rather, for how it could serve his other ideological interests: "I belonged to it as an anti-Fascist, a Jew, and a Zionist." [TIMERMAN, J., 1981, p. 116]
"A number of Jewish socialists, particularly in the later stages of the [German] Wilhelhmine period," notes Adam Weisberger, "exhibited the phenomenon of returning to Judaism ... although admittedly often in secular or accentuated form. Joseph Bloch, for example, originally an ardent assimilationist and German nationalist, became perhaps the chief proponent of Zionism in the German socialist movement." [WEISBERGER, A., 1997, p. 98]
In 1961, Jewish author Daniel Aaron criticized the shallow attachment many in radical movements really had to their left-wing postures: "Some writers joined or broke from the [Communist] Movement because of their wives, or for careerist reasons, or because they read their own inner disturbances into the realities of social dislocation. To put it another way, the subject matter of politics ... was often the vehicle for non-political emotions and compulsions." [WALD, p. 14]
Sigmund Freud (although not a Marxist, his areligious work is often joined to Marxist theory) insisted that his psychological speculations applied to all people and tried to dismiss any evidence of his own special Jewish particularism. But he was always conflicted about it. As he once wrote about his connection to Jewish identity, "When I felt an inclination to [Jewish] national enthusiasm I strove to suppress it as being harmful and wrong, alarmed by the warning examples of the people among whom we Jews live. But plenty of other things remained to make the attraction of Jewry and Jews irresistible -- many obscure emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental connection." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 180] (The clique that runs, and enforces, the psychoanalytic world, as we shall see later, remains overwhelmingly Jewish).
Jewish messianic elitism in leftist "universalist" circles endures to this day. In 1992, Michael Lerner, prominent editor of the left-wing Jewish journal Tikkun, suggested remedies for curing anti-Semitism in leftist organizations. The cure? "Put[ting] self-affirming Jews in positions of leadership in your organizations" [LERNER, Socialism, p. 115] and indoctrination sessions to sensitize non-Jews to Jewish needs (Lerner's term is: "internal education programs.")
Erna Paris notes the history of Jewish communism in Canada:
"Although the Jewish left claimed to be dedicated to perfect equality,
it also gave full-blown expression to the strong velvet-gloved, ancient,
patriarchal traditions of Judaism. If the ancestral prophets like Amos
were the Fathers of Israel, so the men of UJPO [United Jewish
People's Order: a 'Jewish' branch of communism] and the school of
the Jewish labour movement were the 'Fathers' of the women and
children in the movement. Without question, they were the new
Hebrew prophets of a better world." [PARIS, E., p. 152]
As Adam Weisberger notes this Jewish identity root in the profound historical influence of Jews in revolutionary communist and socialist movements that aimed to destroy the existing social order:
"A messianic idea, derived from traditional Judaism, persisted through the process of secularization and entered into the groundwork of socialism ... Jewish socialists, even when they were estranged from
Judaism and possessed little or no formal Jewish education, remained
an essential part of the mission of those Jews who believed they had broken with tradition." [WEISBERGER, A., 1997, p. 112]
"After being nurtured by a culture that saw itself superior by virtue of its special relationship with God," note Jewish authors Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter,
"many Jews must have experienced their contact with modern Europe
[with the birth of the Enlightenment] as traumatic. It was difficult to
think Jewish life superior to the achievements of European civilization
once the protective mantle of the shtetl was no longer present. What
better way to reestablish claims to superiority than by adopting the
most 'advanced' social position of the larger society and viewing
this adoption as a reflection of Jewish heritage? Thus many radical
Jewish intellectuals were able to continue to assert Jewish
superiority, even as they denied their Jewishness." [ROTHMAN/
LICHTER, 1982, p. 121]
Arnold Eisen, in a discussion of Leslie Fiedler (who started out as a socialist) and other well-known Jewish American "intellectuals," notes the transformative essence of Jewish identity from traditional Judaism to modern political movements: "Here the entire language of chosenness -- suffering, witness, mission, reciprocity, exclusivity, covenant, and even repudiation of Christianity and idol worship! -- has been appropriated and hollowed out in order to endow the Jewish intellectual with the role of prophet to his own community and the world." [EISEN, p. 136] Salo Baron goes back further in time, but underscores the same Jewish identity foundation, which can, however incongruously, simultaneously straddle both "universalistic" communist movements and "particularist" Zionism:
"Under one guise or another, even the antireligious movements in
19th century Judaism were unable to cast off their messianic yearnings for an ultimate redemption of their people, or of mankind at large. The growing secularization of modern Jewry made the transition from religious messianism to political Zionism appear as but another link
in that long chain of evolution." [BARON, 1964, p. 172]
David Horowitz recalls what it was like growing up in a New York City household with his communist parents, an environment still founded upon the Jewish religious myths of redemption:
"In the radical romance of our political lives, the world was said
to have begun in innocence, but to have fallen afterwards under
an evil spell, afflicting the lives of all with great suffering and
injustice. According to our myth, a happy ending beckoned,
however. Through the efforts of progressives like us, the spell
would one day be lifted, and mankind would be freed from its
trials." [HOROWITZ, D., 1999, p. 284]
Even the founder of Hadassah (the women's Zionist organization), Henrietta Szold, once wrote that "the world has not progressed beyond the need of Jewish instruction, but the Jew can be witness and a missionary only if he is permitted to interpret the lessons of Judaism as his peculiar nature and his peculiar discipline enable him to interpret them." [GAL, A., 1986, p. 371] How Zionism, the modern secular expression of traditional Jewish ethnocentrism, is supposed to "instruct the world that has not progressed beyond the need of Jewish instruction" is never explained. [Note Zionism's implicit racism and oppressive policies against non-Jews in the later chapter about Israel].
With the erosion of the New Left in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Israel's 1967 victory in its war with surrounding Arab states, distinctly Judeo-centric political configurations arose out of the Jewish universalistic left-wing community that, as Mordecai Chertoff notes, "affirm[ed] Zionism ... and Judaism ... as socialists and radicals." [CHERTOFF, p. 192] Such organizations included the Jewish Student Movement, the Jewish Action Committee, Kadimah, the Jewish Student Union, the Maccabees, American Students for Israel, the World Union of Jewish Students, Na'aseh, Jews for Urban Justice, the New Jewish Committee, the Jewish Liberation Project, the Youth Commitee for Peace and Democracy in the Middle East, and the Committee for Social Justice in the Middle East. Such organizations produced between 20 and 40 periodicals with a combined circulation of over 300,000. [GLAZER, NEW p. 192-193]
"The extreme radical groups of the New Left came out officially in favor of the Arabs," notes James Yaffe, "but it generally conceded that there was much opposition from Jews in those groups. 'Jewish kids in the Movement,' one of them told me, 'have a double standard on Israel. A non-Jewish leftist is much more likely to condemn Israel than a Jewish leftist." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 193]
"There are still those [Jews] who are impressed," wrote Nathan Glazer in 1971, "by what seems to be the New Left concern for all of mankind, but more and more ... are discovering ... that there is a limit to the number of trumpets one can respond. [Jews] are responding, in greater numbers to their own." [GLAZER, p. 196] "How many times," complained anti-Vietnam War activist Gabriel Ende in the same year, "have committed Jews joined with others in Vietnam and student power rallies, only to have their erstwhile companions stab them in the back with boorish anti-Israel remarks on the morrow?" [ENDE, G., 1971, p. 59]
Jewish international economic power toward expressly Jewish political ends in a war could even be asserted in Asia. At the turn of the twentieth century, American Jews who were concerned about a perceived Russian mistreatment of its Jewish citizens included Jacob Schiff, a senior partner in the American banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb, and Co. He believed that "the only hope for Russian Jews seemed to lay in the possibility that the Russo-Japanese War would lead to upheaval in Russia and constitutional government there." [BEST, G., 1972, p. 315] Toward this end, Schiff helped Japan raise $180 million, nearly one-fourth of the total Japanese expenditure in its war with Russia. Schiff, the wealthy capitalist, even funded socialist indoctrination programs for Russian prisoners of war by the Japanese, in the hope that this might aid in the Tsar's downfall. [LINDEMANN, p. 170] The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia claims that "in his later years [Schiff] recognized that he had innocently aided in the creation of a menace in the shape of Japanese imperialism." [UJE, v. 9, p. 400]
At the same time, since 1890, Jewish-American financiers -- led by Jacob Schiff, Isaac Seligman, and Adolph Lewisohn -- had vigorously lobbied the powerful international Jewish banking community as a collective entity to reject Russia's own searches for loans. Ultimately defeated by Japan and suffering great indemnity demands, Tsarist Russia faced a largely successful international economic lockout by Jewish money lenders (the Russian government ultimately collapsed to the communist revolution, a situation international Jewry hoped to be better for Russian Jews). "A great nation," reported the Jewish Chronicle with satisfaction about the teetering Tsarist state, "was now going from one Jewish banker to the other, vainly appealing for financial help." [ARONSFELD, p. 103]
Simon Wolf, Chairman of the Board of Delegates of the United American Hebrew Congregation, wrote that
"Russia at this juncture needs two important elements to inspire its future prosperity and happiness: money and friends ... The Jews of the world control much of the first ... There is no disguising the fact that in the United States especially the Jews form an important factor in the
formation of public opinion and in the control of the finances...”
[ARONSFELD, p. 100]
The following ultimatum to the huge country of Russia, and a threat to those who broke Jewish ranks to do business with it, was announced by a group of Jewish American businessmen wielding their own foreign policy, self-described as the "Hebrew alliance:"
"First, until equal civil and religious rights are given the Jews of Russia,
no money will be loaned the Russian government by any American
Jews.
Second, the Rothschilds [the worlds greatest and far-reaching banking
firm, based in Europe] are united with the American Jewish bankers in
this agreement and will use all their enormous prestige and power to
assist in carrying out the threat.
Third, no financial concern will be allowed to loan Russia money, under
pain of the displeasure and financial punishment that such a
combination of resources of the Hebrew alliance could so readily
dispense." [ARONSFELD, p. 100]
Jewish economic collusion against Russia, notes Edwin Black, "was widely criticized for the stubborn continuation of their boycott even as it threatened the Allies' [World War I] war effort. But the boycott remained in effect until the monarchy was toppled in 1917." [BLACK, p. 31] Even within Russia itself, a Jewish "adventurous millionaire," Parvus (aka Israel Lazarevitch Gelfand, or also anglicized as Helphand), was a sponsor of V. I. Lenin. [SINGER, N., p. 2] In this historical context -- the "conspiracy" of international Jewish financiers unifying to bring Tsarist Russia to collapse -- the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia notes that "the canard of the Jewish conspiracy to attain political world domination originated at the time when the Tsarist regime was threatened with revolution." [UJE, v. 3, p. 1] The most famous anti-Semitic volume of all time, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claimed to evidence a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, was created -- and published -- in Russia at this time.
Jewish Prominence and Power in Soviet Communism
With the eventual fall of Tsarist rule, the influence of Jews in the rise of Russian communism was profound. (After all, as Louis Rapoport notes, "[Karl] Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Eduard Bernstein [were] men of Jewish origin who laid the foundations of communism and socialism.") [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 15] During the 1917 revolution, two communist factions, the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks vied for power. Leading up to the revolution, eight of the seventeen Menshevik Party central committee members were Jewish. The "entire Menshevik Party which included many Jewish members ... was politically linked with the Jewish Labor Bund [a party largely championing Jewish nationalism]." [LEVIN, N., 1988, p. 13] The head of the Menshevik Party was also Jewish, Raphael Abramovich. [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 31]
The rival Bolshevik revolutionary faction, however, prevailed in the overthrow of the tsarist government, replacing it with a communist government headed by V. I. Lenin. (A Jew, Boris Zbarsky, even was the one who embalmed Lenin's corpse for permanent display in the Kremlin). [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 95] Lenin had a Jewish grandfather, Alexander Dmitrievich Blank, on his mother's side. Russian author Dmitri Volkogonov's 1994 biography of Lenin notes that
"In [Lenin's sister's] letter to Stalin [after Lenin's death], Anna wrote: 'It's probably no secret for you that the research on our grandfather shows that he came from a poor Jewish family, that he was, as his baptismal certificate says, the son of 'Zhitomir meschanin Moishe Blank.' She went on to suggest that 'this fact could serve to help combat anti-semitism.' Paradoxically for a Marxist who believed in the primacy of environmental over inherited factors, she also asserted the dubious proposition that Lenin's Jewish origins 'are further confirmation of the exceptional abilities of the Semitic tribe, [confirmation] always shared by Ilyich [Lenin] .... Ilyich always valued Jews highly.' Anna's claim explains, for instance, why Lenin frequently recommended giving foreigners, especially Jews, intellectually demanding tasks, and leaving the elementary work to the 'Russian fools.'" [VOLKOGONOV, D., 1994, p. 8-9]
Lenin also once told Maxim Gorky that "the clever Russian is almost always a Jew or has Jewish blood in him." [VOLKOGONOV, D., 1994, p. 112]
At the time of the revolution, the chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Jacob Sverdlov, was Jewish. [WEYL, 1968, p. 197] As the new ruling Bolshevik clique took shape, three of the six members of the original ruling Politburo were also Jewish. Two of them, Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Grigori Zinoviev (Apfelbaum), joined with Stalin to form the threesome that ruled Russia at leader V. I. Lenin's death. [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 30] (Zinoviev once remarked that "We must carry along with us ninety million out of the one hundred million Soviet Russian population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.") [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 31] Zinoviev "and his wife Z. I. Lilina were close family friends of Lenin, and Zinoviev probably received more personal letters from Lenin than any other leader." Similarly, Lev Kamenev "received the most correspondence [from Lenin] ... He was much trusted by Lenin, even on personal matters, for example on Lenin's relationship with his mistress Inessa Armand at the time he and Lenin were sharing an apartment in Poland. Kamenev's knowledge of Lenin is important because he was the first editor, with Lenin's direct participation, of Lenin's collected works." [VOLKOGONOV, D., 1994, p. xxxv]
Another Jew, Angelica Balabanova, formerly an associate of Mussolini in Italy, headed the first Communist Comintern. Karl Radek (Sobelsohn) was "one of the leading agents of the Communist International ... The short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic was led by Bela Kun (a variant of Cohen) and the organizer of the Workers' and Soldiers' Soviets of the even more ephemeral Bavarian Soviet Republic was Eugen Levine." [WEYL, p. 197] "Eugen Levine and Max Levien, distinctly un-Bavarian names," notes Alex de Jonge, "proclaimed a Communist Soviet Republic." [DE JONGE, A., 1978, p. 53]
Howard Sachar notes more deeply the case of Hungary where
"a free election took place in November 1945, and the communists won only 8 percent of the vote ... With the intimidating force of the Red
Army behind them, the Communists turned their efforts in the next
year to infiltration ... Their Soviet-trained leadership included a large
majority of Jews. Although many of the commissars from the Bela
Kun era in 1919 had been killed, a number of them survived in Soviet
exile. These were the men who returned now in the wake of the Red
Army. Their spokesman was Matyas Rakosis ... He returned
at the head of a quintet of fellow Jews that included Erno Gero, who
would become the communist government's economic overlord;
Mihaly Farka, its military and defense chieftain; Jozeph Revai, its
cultural 'pope'; and most importantly, Gabor Peter, who would be
named head of the dreaded security police." [SACHAR, H., 1985,
p. 344]
Jewish pre-eminence in the new Russian regime was throughout the communist system. As Zvi Gitelman notes:'
"The idea that the Bolshevik regime was a Jewish one gained
popularity because of the relatively large numbers of Jews who
in 1917 suddenly rushed into governmental posts from which
they had been barred under the tsars. So striking was the
prominence of Jews in high places that when it was proposed
that a Jewish ticket be put forth in the elections to the Constituent
Assembly, Maxim Vinaver commented, 'Why do Jews need a
separate ticket? Whichever party wins, we will still be the
winners.'" [GITELMAN, Z., 1972, p. 114]
In the struggle for power in Russia, notes Nathaniel Weyl, "the prominence of Jews in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party was no greater than their prominence in the leadership of other, less totalitarian parties." Prominent Jews in rival socialist factions included Julius Martov (Tsederbaum), Raphael Abramovitch, and I. N. Steinberg. Boris Savinkov, also Jewish, was the "legendary head of the Terrorist Brigade of the Socialist Revolutionary Party." Aaron Baron and Lev Chorny were well-known Anarchists. [WEYL, 1968, p. 199-200] Building to the Russian revolution era, prominent Jewish revolutionaries also included Grigory Abramovich Perets and Nikolay Utin. One of the founders (in 1876) of the "Land and Liberty" revolutionary party was Mark Natanson. "Another Jew," notes Leon Schapiro, "Aaron Zundelevich, played an important part on its executive committee. There were Jewish propagandists, Jewish organisers, Jewish terrorists ... It is impossible to doubt the importance of the Jewish contribution to the less spectacular business of organisation and staff-work. It was the Jews, with their long experience of exploiting conditions on Russia's western frontier which adjoined the Pale for smuggling and the like, who organised the illegal transport of literature, planned escapes and illegal crossings, and generally kept the wheels of the whole organisation running." [SCHAPIRO, L., 1961, p. 152] One of the Land and Liberty party's later branches, the "Black Repartition" group, "soon became the cradle of the Marxist movement. Jewish revolutionaries participated in all stages and in all aspects of this movement." [SCHAPIRO, L., 1961, p. 149-151]
"The abundance of Jewish names in the higher and middle levels of power (in the [Bolshevik] Party and state apparat, in the military, ministry, etc.) is indisputable," says apologist Jewish author Arkady Vaksberg, "... For anti-Semites now, this is an odious and outrageous fact; from the point of view of normal people not blinded by chauvinist hatred, it is meaningless." [VAKSBERG, p. 22] "Among the second-string leaders of the Soviet," observed Nathaniel Weyl, "were Gregory Sokolnikov (Brilliant), Solomon Lozovsky, who would head the Red International of Labor Unions, and Moses Uritsky, chief of the Petrograd Cheka and number two man in the Soviet secret police."[WEYL, 1968, p. 198]
In 1923, notes Isaac Deutscher, "a triumvirate, composed of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, formed itself within the Politbureau ... Between them, the three men virtually controlled the whole [Communist] party and, through it, the Government ... Zinoviev was, in addition, the President of the Communist International." [DEUTSCHER, p. 255] Amidst intrigue and power struggles within the communist movement, however, by 1927 Kamenev and Zinoviev "at last threw in their lot with Trotsky." [DEUTSCHER, p. 307] Trotsky, an enemy of Stalin, was "the founder and builder of the Red Army," [DEUTSCHER, p. 192] and once the "number two man next to Lenin. " [NEW ENCYC BRITTANICA, p. 945] He was also Jewish, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, notes Arkady Vaksberg, "alone formed the 'leadership nucleus' and had every reason to expect to inherit the mantle of leadership from Lenin. The man closest to the 'troika' (Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev) after [Yakov] Sverdlov's death was Grigori Sokolnikov." [VAKSBERG, p. 19] All five of these men poised to rule Russia were Jewish. Kamenev once told Trotsky (his brother-in-law) [WALSH, p. 440] that "It will be enough for you and Zinoviev to appear together on the platform in order to reconquer the whole party." [DEUTSCHER, p. 308] It didn't work out that way. Stalin proved to be a more ruthless and/or shrewd leader in the struggle for power.
Nonetheless, Jews were very well represented in the Soviet system under Stalin. As Isaac Deutscher notes,
"Jews were quite prominent in [Stalin's] entourage, though far less
so than they had been in Lenin's. [Max] Litvinov stood for over a decade at the head of the Soviet diplomatic service; Kagonovich was to
the end Stalin's factotum; Mekhlis was the chief political Commissar
of the army; and Zaslavsky and Ehrenburg were the most popular
of Stalin's sycophants. Yet he was not averse from playing on
anti-Jewish emotions when this suited his convenience. During
the struggle of against the inner-party oppositions his agents made
the most of the circumstance that Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev,
and Radek were of Jewish origin." [DEUTSCHER, p. 605]
"Lev Mekhlis," notes Louis Rapoport,
"would become Stalin's secretary and one of the most despised
men in Soviet history ... Immediately after the Revolution, many
Jews were euphoric over their high representation in the new
government. Lenin's first Politburo was dominated by men of
Jewish origins ... Under Lenin, Jews became involved in all aspects
of the Revolution, including its dirtiest work. Despite the Communists' vow to eradicate anti-Semitism, it spread rapidly after the Revolution -- partly because of the prominence of so many Jews in the Soviet administration, as well as in the traumatic, inhuman Sovietization drives that followed." [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 30]
The Soviet Union's leading communist newspaper was Pravda. It's "leading staff members," Yakov Khavinson and David Zaslavsky, were Jewish, as were the Soviet Unions ambassadors to the U.S., Maxim Litvinov and Ivan Maisky, who were recalled in 1943. [VAKSBERG, p. 260, 139]
In 1994, Russian-born (and raised) Jewish author Arkady Vaksberg wrote a book entitled Stalin Against the Jews. Its fundamental thesis is that Stalin was a fanatical anti-Semite. (Louis Rapoport's Stalin's War Against the Jews reflects the same theme). The fact that many Jews (including millions of others) died under his direction is beyond question. And Stalin's actions in later life reflect his suspicions of the loyalty of many in the Jewish community. But the fact that Stalin was nonetheless surrounded by Jews everywhere in positions of high power (Lazar Kaganovich, Pyatnitsky, Fillip Goloschekin "and many others who were made part of the ruling circle") [VAKSBERG, p. 20] is described by Vaksberg as "camoflauge" for the Soviet leader's hatred of Jews. [VAKSBERG, p. 27] Yet Vaksberg's own evidence to portray the Russian Jewish community as solely victims consistently deflates the premise of Stalin's enduring anti-Semitism.Vaksberg assails Stalin as a singularly rabid, irrational Jew-hater even while stating that "the people who surrounded Stalin and who had rendered him service in the twenties and thirties were mostly Jews" [VAKSBERG, p. 35] and conceding that Jews especially close to Stalin like Emelyan Yaroslavky (Mines Gubelman), Moisey Gubelman, Lev Mekhlis ("Stalin's right hand man"), [VAKSBERG, p. 23] Lazar Kaganovich and Isaac Mintz all survived Stalin's declared "anti-Zionist" purges.
"Why did Stalin, as an anti-Semite," wonders Vaksberg, "have two Jewish secretaries -- Lev Mekhlis and Grigori Kanner?" [VAKSBERG, p. 27] Why too, we might add in turning Vaksberg's facts to different theses, whenever Stalin went on a vacation, did Lazar Kaganovich, a Jew, take over running the government? [VAKSBERG, p. 51] And why, we might add, if Stalin was so all-encompassingly hateful of Jews, did he entrust his life to a Jewish bodyguard, Matyas Rakoszy? [VAKSBERG, p. 40] (Another Jewish Stalin bodyguard, son of a rabbi, and "protege of Nikita Khruschev," was Alexander Contract, who started out in the NKVD -- later the KGB. Contract even saved the life of future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin). [O'DWYER, T., 7-6-98] And if Stalin was singularly focused in his alleged hatred of Jews, why did his "personal corps of physicians" include "Drs. Weisbrod, Moshenberg, and Lev Gigorievich Levin?" [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 37] Even prominent non-Jewish Communist Party officials (and close associates of Stalin's social circle), President Mikhail Kalinin, Bukharin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Andreyev, Poskrebyshev, and Rykov, all had Jewish wives. Stalin's own daughter Svetlana Allilueva had an affair with Jewish screenwriter Alexei Kapler; she later married Grigory Morozov (Moroz), also Jewish. [VAKSBERG, p. 138; RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 208] The fact that Stalin reportedly did not approve of these men is routinely explained by Jewish scholars as anti-Semitism. Stalin's sister-in-law (eventually imprisoned) by his first wife was also Jewish. So was one of his daughters-in-law. And there is controversial testimony that Stalin even had a Jewish mistress, Rosa Kaganovich. [RAPAPORT, L., p. 46, 241] [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 94]
Over a hundred Jewish generals also served in Stalin's Soviet army, including the chief of the Soviet Air Force at the start of World War II, General Jacob Smushkevich. [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 78]
"It seemed," says Louis Rapoport,
"there were Jews wherever [Stalin] looked. His loyal tin soldier, Marshal
Voroshilov, was devoted to his Jewish wife, Catherine. Marshal Bulganin was also happily married to a Jew, Nadezhda. Politburo member Andrei Andreyev, who fell from grace in 1950, was married to Dora Khazan, and Kaganovich the Jew was married to Maria, also one of the tribe. Malenkov, who was suspected of being a bit of a philo-Semite, had a Jewish son-in-law, as, it was said, did Khrushchev. The up-and-coming Leonid Brezhnev was said to have a Jewish wife." [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 208]
Stalin's alleged fanatical anti-Semitism had further curious twists. "Another non-Jew not only helped create Israel," notes M. Hersch Goldberg, "but saved it. Incredible as it may seem, that man was Joseph Stalin. The tale of Stalin's role in helping create and then insure the early survival of Israel has been little told; and on those occasions when it has been mentioned, there has been no satisfactory explanation for it." This includes the fact that in 1947 the Soviet Union publicly supported the creation of a Jewish state, and was the second country (after the U.S.) to recognize its establishment. Stalin also initially supported Israel in its war of independence against the Arabs and supported Israel with shipments of arms through Czecheslovakia. Even the Soviet delegate to the United Nations, also President of the Security Council, was of Jewish heritage -- Jacob Malik. [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 220-224] It would seem that if Stalin was truly overwhelmed with feelings of irrational anti-Semitism, Jewish power within his own government had overwhelmed him.
From the start of his argument about Stalin's single-minded hatred of Jews, Arkady Vaksberg marks the early struggle for power between Stalin and Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev-Sikolnikov: "All four men whom Stalin perceived as his rivals in the struggle for power were Jewish. Each of them, especially Trotsky, naturally had a large number of allies in higher eschelons of power who could influence the distribution of posts and positions and the political clout and popularity of candidates. There was a certain ethnic 'imbalance' here too." [VAKSBERG, p. 19]
As normal in Jewish scholarship (framing Jews as victims even as they act as oppressors), Vaksberg even makes the preposterous claim that the reason Jewish commanders ran 11 of the 12 major Gulag Archipelago concentration camps (including the director of them all, Matvei Berman, who also headed the slave labor project that built the Belomar-Baltic Canal) was that Stalin wanted to make Jews look bad, and foment anti-Semitism. "It could not," he insists, "have been sheer coincidence." [VAKSBERG, p. 98] Maybe not. But other possible reasons are too profoundly troubling for Vaksberg to consider.
Jews were also everywhere prominent in Soviet secret police organizations. "From the beginning," writes Benjamin Ginsberg, "the Soviet state relied upon military, police, and security services to sustain itself, and Jews were active in these agencies. ... Jews ... staff[ed] and direct[ed] the coercive instruments upon which the state relied to control its citizens." [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 30] Genrikh Yagoda, for instance, was the Soviet Chief of the Secret Police in the 1930s. A pharmacist, he specialized "in preparing poisons for his agents to use in liquidating Stalin's opponents." [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 31] "Yagoda was the man Stalin trusted most within the repressive aparat without which no totalitarian regime can exist," says Arkady Vaksberg, "The Soviet version of dictatorship and Stalin personally would not have survived without the 'faithful watchdogs of the revolution' and their 'punishing swords.'" [VAKSBERG, p. 36] Yagoda's brother-in-law, Leopold Averebakh was the "chief supervisor of Party purity in Soviet literature." [VAKSBERG, p. 35]
(America has even had its own Jewish secret police kind of poisoner. Journalist Alexander Cockburn noted Sidney Gottleib as the "US Official Poisoner ... For more than two decades [he] managed the CIA's Technical Services Division ... With Gottleib's death, America has lost its prime poisoner. For many years, most notably in the 1950s and 1960s, Gottleib presided over the CIA's technical services division and supervised preparation of lethal poisons, experiments in mind control and administration of LSD and other psycho-active drugs to unwitting subjects.") [COCKBURN, A., GOTTLIEB]
"Working side by side with Yagoda," notes Arkady Vaksberg about a kindred Jewish government deputy, "was another professional chekist (a euphemism for professional executioner), Meer Trilissen ... The many actions undertaken by Trilissen's agents included blowing up the cathedral in Sofia with the Bulgarian tsar and his government inside." [VAKSBERG, p. 38]
Other Jews, Matvei Berman and Naftali Frenkel of the secret police, were instrumental in the creation of the slave labor system in which 200,000 workers died during one project alone, the White Sea-Baltic Canal. [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 31] "It was Frenkel," notes Louis Rapoport,
"who refined Berman's use of prisoners as slave labors ... Most of
the chief overseers of the Canal were Jews. Solzhenitsyn described
them as 'six hired murderers each of whom accounted for thirty
thousand lives: Firin - Berman - Frenkel - Kogan - Rappoport - Zhuk
... Thousands of Jewish revolutionaries helped to spearhead the
Terror machine with a messianic fervor. One of them, Matvei Berman,
had helped to institutionalize slave labor as early as 1922." [RAPAPORT, L., 1990, p. 30, 44]
Likewise, Yakov Agranov, Karl Danker "and other representatives of the Jewish proletariat ... distinguished themselves with a talent for execution." [VAKSBERG, p. 39] Other prominent Jewish officials in the Soviet government included K.V. Pauler, Chief Operations Officer of the secret police in the 1930's, Lev Inzhir (Chief Accountant for the Gulag: Inzhir "the all-powerful clerk, was kept busy with figures on transit points, rail depots and harbors, human and other freight transfers, length of terms, mortality rates."), "top" Chekist Aron Soltz, [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 44, 45] M. I. Gay who headed a secret police organization that conducted mass arrests and executions during "The Great Terror" of the 1930s, and A.A. Slutsky and Boris Berman who were in charge of terrorist and espionage activities abroad in the 1930s.
Noting that "many of the prosecution witnesses and agent provocateurs against" Jewish enemies of the communist state were also Jewish, Louis Rapoport adds that
"Some of the main instruments of the Terror [against everyone] were
also of Jewish origin: M. I. Gay, who headed a special secret police
department; A. A. Slutsky and his deputies Boris Berman and
Shpiegelglas, who were in charge of terror and espionage abroad;
and NKVD operations chief Pauker. None of these mass executioners
survived [later purges against them] [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 49-50]
The man who headed the firing squad that executed the Russian royal family, Yakov Yurovsky, was also Jewish, as was the Bolshevik official who reported the deaths to Lenin, Yakov Sverdlov. [KRICHEVSKY, Behind, 1997, p. 8] Or, as Arkady Vaksberg puts it: "There is no getting around the fact that the first violins in the orchestra of death of the tsar and his family were four Jews -- Yakov Yurovsky, Shaia Goloshchekin, Lev Sosnovsky, and Pinkus Vainer (Pert Voikov). The concert master and conducter was Yakov Sverdlov." [VAKSBERG, p. 37]
As Zvi Gitelman notes about the Cheka, the early Soviet terrorist police organization:
"The high visibility of Jews in the Bolshevik regime was dramatized
by the large numbers of Jews in the Cheka ... From the Jewish point
of view it was no doubt the lure of immediate physical power which
attracted many Jewish youths ... Whatever the reasons, Jews were
heavily represented in the secret police ... Since the Cheka was the
most hated and feared organ of the Bolshevik government, anti-
Jewish feelings increased in direct proportion to Cheka terror."
[GITELMAN, 1972, p. 117]
Leon Schapiro remarks that "it is difficult to suggest a satisfactory reason for the prevalence of Jews in the Cheka ... Anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with, and very possibly shot by, a Jewish investigator." [SCHAPIRO, L., 1961, p. 165]
"I doubt that there was another poet (or novelist or playwright or artist)," says Arkady Vaksberg, "who was surrounded by as many Chekists as [Vladimir] Mayakovsky. [Mayakowsky was the leading poet of the Russian revolution era.] And sadly, they were almost all Jewish." These included at least three Jewish generals in the secret terrorist organization: Yakov Agranov, Moisey Gorb, and Lev Elbert. [VAKSBERG, p. 45]
Another Jewish author, Richard Pipes, adds that
"The worst bestialities were committed by some of the provincial
Chekas -- which operated at a distance from the eyes of the
central organs and had no fear of being reported on by foreign
diplomats or journalists. There exists a detailed description of
the operations of the Kiev Cheka in 1919 by one of its staff,
I. Belerosov, a former law student and tsarist officer, which he
gave to general Denikin's investigators.
According to Belerosov, at first (fall and winter of 1918-1919)
the Kiev Cheka went on a 'continuous spree' of looting, extortion,
and rape. Three-quarters of the staff were Jews, many of them
riffraff incapable of any other work, cut off from the Jewish
community although careful to spare fellow Jews." [PIPES, R.,
1990, p. 823-824]
In later years, another Jew, Zakhar Ilyich Volovich, "was involved in many of the dirty circles of the NKVD [precursor to the KGB], crimes even today enveloped in dark secrecy." [VAKSBERG, p. 45-46] Among the many Jewish executives in the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD were Mosiey Boguslavsky, Yakov Veinshtok, Zakhlar Volovich, Mark Gai, Matvei Gerzon, Moisey Gorb, Ilya Grach, Yakov Deich, Grigory Rapoport, Abram Ratner, Abram Slutsky, David Sokolinsky, Solomon Stoibelman, Meer Trilesser, Semyon Firin, Vladimir Tsesarsky, Leonid Chertok, Isak Shapiro, Grigory Yakubovsky, "and many other NKVD workers of the same level and same origins." [VAKSBERG, p. 98] The non-Jewish head of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria, had "many Jews in his close entourage ... [who were in] major positions in the NKVD." These included Generals Arkady Gertsovsky, Veniamin Gulst, Ilya Ilyushin-Edleman, Matvei Potashnik, Solomon Milshtein, Lev Novobratsky, Leonid Raikhman, and Naum Eitigen. Heads of NKVD "investigative groups" included Colonels Boris Rodos, Lev Shvartsman, Isaia Babich, Iosif Babich, Iosif Lorkish, and Mark Spekter. [VAKSBERG, p. 102]
Among these, Colonel Lev Shvartsman stands out for Arkady Vaksberg as "one of the most vicious KGB executioners ... He personally tortured Mikhail Koltsov, diplomats, major scientists, and cultural figures." [VAKSBERG, p. 223] Likewise, another Jew, Colonel Boris Rodos was a "sadist [who] ... at the Academy of Internal Affairs taught ... the methods of working over prisoners in their cells." [VAKSBERG, p. 211] "As a Jew," notes Yevgenia Albats in his book about the history of the KGB, "I'm interested in another question entirely: Why were there so many Jews among the NKVD-MGB investigators -- including many of the most terrible? It's a painful question for me, but I cannot evade it." [ALBATS, Y., 1994, p. 147]
"Such Bolshevik Jewish luminaries as Lev Kamenov, Grigori Zinoviev, and Yakov Sverdlov," says Ukrainian-American author Myron Kuropas, "helped Lenin come to power; and it was Jews like Maxim Litvinov, Lazar Kaganovich, and hundreds of lesser lights who were in the forefront of Stalin's rise to power. It was they who later helped Stalin engineer Ukraine's genocidal famine and the brutal Soviet takeover of Western Ukraine. When the USSR began to decline, writes [a former KGB officer married to a Jewish officer in the same force], 'the flower of this educated leadership and their children emigrated to Israel and the West.' I can't help but wonder how many of these criminals now reside in the United States." [KUROPAS, M., 8-14-94, p. 77]
Some estimates suggest that between a fourth and a fifth of the rural Ukrainian population perished by enforced starvation. [MOYNAHAN, p. 120] One of the dedicated Jewish communists was Lev Kopolev. "We were realizing historical necessity," he wrote,
"We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain
for the socialist fatherland ... I saw women and children with distended
bellies, turning blue, with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses -- corpses
in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts,
in the melting snow of old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov ... I
saw all this and did not got out of my mind or commit suicide ... I
believed [in the new Soviet order] because I wanted to believe."
[MOYNAHAN, p. 119]
In 1987, Stuart Kahan, an American relative of Russian communist strongman Lazar Kaganovich (originally named Moiseyevich; he is described by Kahan as the Soviet "Apparatus of Terror"), wrote a book about him. The author interviewed the elderly Kaganovich in Yiddish via his father, and concluded that his relative
"was, to put it mildly, a devil. That relative exuded evil, an evil
that put millions of people to death ... [KAHAN, S., p. 5] ... Although
the Church was left intact, its lands were seized [by the communist
movement]. Even prior religious teaching was forbidden in the schools.
Of course, word came down that it was the Jews who did this. After all,
wasn't the revolution prepared and fashioned by Jews? Both of Karl
Marx's grandfathers were rabbis, and Lenin's grandfather was also
Jewish. And wasn't Yarkov Sverdlov, the first chief of state, a Jew,
as was Trotsky himself? ... That Trotsky, unquestionably the most
outstanding man among the Bolsheviks, was a Jew did not seem an
insuperable obstacle in a party in which the percentage of Jews, 52
percent, was rather high compared to the percentage of Jews (1.8
percent) in the total population." [KAHAN, p. 80-81]
Kaganovich "eventually held more key posts in the power structure than anyone except Stalin ... He demolished the huge Church of Christ the Savior and replaced it with the Palace of the Soviets. As commissar of heavy industry during the war years, he chose his brother Mikhail as his deputy and controlled everything from the vast fuel and steel industries to chemicals and building materials." [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 43]
Jewish author Arkaday Vaksberg even calls yet another Jewish Soviet leader, Rozalia Zemlyachka (Zalkind), "a sadist and monster who would play a major role in the slaughter in the Crimea after the destruction of the last strongholds of the White Movement [anti-communists] there." [VAKSBERG, p. 23] Another Jew, Bela Hun, "spread bloody terror" with Semlyachka. [VAKSBERG, p. 41] Another government (and Jewish) terrorist, "the lawyer Moisey Uritsky ... was the scourge of Petrograd in 1918, terrorizing the citizenry as the local Cheka. He was killed by another Jew, Leonid Kanegisser." [VAKSBERG, p. 23] Another Jewish Soviet leader, Filipp Goloschchekin, "was one of the main organizers of the murder of the tsar's family in 1918 ... [He also] displayed boundless cruelty in the genocide of the Kazakhs when he became Party leader of Kazakhstan." [VAKSBERG, p. 17]
As even Winston Churchill once wrote about Jewish influence in the communist world:
"This [communist] movement among Jews is not new. From the days
of Spartacus-Weishaupt [Adam Weishaupt, the Bavarian founder in
1776 of one of the most famous conspiratorial groups, the Illuminati, in history], to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela
Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemberg (Germany), and Emma Goldman
(United States), this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of
civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of
arrested development and envious malevolence, an impossible equality
has been steadily growing. It has been the mainspring of every subversive
movement during the nineteenth century." [PIPES, D., 1997, p. 139]
Jews were also "particularly visible in the Soviet cultural and propaganda apparatus" and they "dominated the Soviet film industry." [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 31] Half of the June 1930 membership of the Communist Academy -- a philosophy organization -- were also Jewish. "It is obvious that from the very first moves to revive academic and scholarly work in the philosophical field [in Russia]," notes Yehoshua Yakhot, "the part played by Jews was considerable and, in a certain sense, predominant." [YAHOT, p. 244] By 1984, as one percent of the Soviet populace, one author even found that even 33 per cent of Soviet musicologists were Jews. [BRAUN, J. , p. 85]
More than once in Soviet history, Jews have fallen under government suspicion for a collective foreign intrigue -- many charged as agents of "American imperialism" or Israel. Sometimes portrayed in the Soviet press during Stalin era as men of "uncertain allegiance," notes Isaac Deutscher, the newspapers
"revealed systematically the Jewish names of writers who had been
know to the public under Russian pseudonyms ... The Jews were to
some extent protected by their prominence in vital spheres of the
national life, in the management of industry, in nuclear research, in
the [communist] party machine, in the academic world, and in the
armed forces. (Nearly twenty thousand Jews held teaching posts in
the Universities)." [DEUTSCHER, p. 608]
Among those many purged by Stalin in 1953 was the Jewish head (Palgunov) of Tass, the government news agency. [HYDE, H.M., 1971, p. 590] In 1937, in a purge of the Commander of the Red Army, seven of his top generals went with him. Four of these generals were Jewish --Yan Garmarik, Yon Yakir, R. Eideman, and B. Feldman. [HYDE, H.M., 1971, p. 351-352]
Opponents of indigenous European nationalist movements, Jews also rose to power in enforcing communist rule over post-World War II Soviet satellite countries, including Czecheslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. In Hungary, for example, Mathiou Rakosi was the Communist Party leader and Peter Gabor headed the secret police. Eduard Oklag, Yokub Berman and Gilyari Minz were prominent in the Polish government, Anna Pauker in Romania. "It was she," notes Howard Sachar, "not the [Communist] party's chairman, Gheorghe Gheorghin-Dej, who made the key policy decisions in her triple capacity as deputy premier, foreign minister, and deputy secretary of the central committee … Simeon Bughichi, Mrs. Pauker's successor as foreign minister, was also Jewish ... There were several Jews [after World War II] ... who played leading roles in the [Yugoslavian communist] government. The most eminent of these was Moshe Pijade [president of the Yugoslav National Assembly]." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 363, 365, 315]
A number of these Jewish leaders throughout the communist system met their end in government power purges. In Czecheslovakia, for example, Rudolph Slansky and ten other Jewish elites of the party were tried; eight were executed. "The Slansky trial," note Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, "was in part a move to purge the Czech communist party of its Jewish leadership." [RADOSH/MILTON, p. 349] Jewish scholar Barnet Litvinoff adds that
"When Stalin's tyranny was at its height, and his grasp upon his
satellites complete, powerful Jewish personalities were conspicuous
in the Communist hierarchies of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
and Romania ... Hilary Minc and Jacob Berman who returned to
Warsaw ... stood very close to the master in the Kremlin ... Erno
Gero, Matyas Rakosi, and Mihaly Farkas occupied similar
positions in Hungary, while Anna Pauker was the unquestioned
mistress of Romania, with authority comparable to Rudolf
Slansky's in Czechoslovakia. The list was an extensive one, and
included government and Party officials alike, ambassadors
abroad, and some military figures trained by the Soviet secret
police, not to mention university professors, film producers and
broadcasting personalities." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 104-105]
Philip Mendes notes Jewish prominence in a wide variety of communist and left wing movements throughout the world:
"As early as the French Revolution of 1830, Jews played an active role in radical movements [including Michel Goudchaux, Philippe Anspach, Michel Alcan, Olinde Rodrigues, Adolphe Cremieux, and Josue Leon] ... In the 1860s and '70s Jewish activists occupied some of the highest positions in the fledgling Russian revolutionary movement. The 'pioneer of Russian-Jewish revolutionary action' was Nicholas Utin [Others included Mark Natanson, Paul Axelrod, George Plekahnov, Vera Zasulitch, Rosalie Bograd, Meir Molodetsky, Gregory Goldenberg, Lew
Deutch, Vladimir Jochelson, Aaron Sundelievitch, and Hsya Helfmann] ... Jewish individuals also played a prominent role in all the Russian radical movements, from the Socialist Revolutionaries to the Mensheviks to the Bolsheviks ... In Hungary ... for almost four decades in fact, the top leaders of the Communist Party were Jews ... In France, many Jews have figured prominently in the leadership of the Communist Party, including Charles Rappoport, Jean Kanapa, Jean Ellerstein, Haim Cukierman, Charles Fierman and Henri Krasucki." [MENDES, P., 1993, p. 9-13]
Other countries of prominent Jewish radicalism cited by Mendes included Poland, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Holland, Austria, Germany, Spain, Great Britain, Chile, and the Middle East.
Ultimately, Benjamin Ginsberg [GINSBERG, B., 1993] alludes to the reoccurring paradigm to all this, that Jews throughout European history have sought benefit from allegiance to ruling powers -- from absolute monarchists to communist dictatorships -- which oppressed, suffocated, and even massacred non-Jewish masses. As a people who historically distanced themselves from the indigenous peoples of every land they lived and as centuries-old nemeses of the Christian order, Jews were ideally suited to function as dispassionate legislators -- and exploiters and oppressors -- over those of whom they had no real bond or interest. "The Gentile population in general," says Ewa Morawska about Eastern Europe, "and the inhabitants of villages surrounding the [Jewish community] in particular, were seen by Jews primarily in instrumental terms as suppliers of ... material livelihood." [MORAWSKA, p. 15] For those many Jews who had a religious basis in their lives, traditional Judaism often served the interests of devaluing others. As consequence, Jewish communities periodically engendered the wrath -- and sometimes violence -- of the common populace.
Jewish scholar George Mosse frames the common bond between the polar politics of the Jewish European capitalist and communist this way:
"There was an affinity between the Jewish bourgeoisie which supported the newest in the arts, placing themselves squarely on the side of the
modernists, and their wayward socialist children, who wanted to
overthrow the existing social and economic order. This affinity was
based on shared ideals that the sons wanted to realize more completely than the fathers had." [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 57]
"Empirical data," adds Jewish scholar Norman Cantor, "support the contention of French and German anti-Semites in the 1920s and 1930s that the Jews were both capitalists and communists, and thus doubly anathema to the reactionary racist movements that funneled into Judeo-phobic fascism. The German cartoons of the 1920s who depicted Jews as both bloated capitalists swallowing European civilization and nefarious red terrorists plotting to blow up western civilization were not engaging in absolute fantasy, even though Jewish apologists then and historians now like to make that accusation and try to forget the whole thing." [CANTOR, p. 275]
Communist Poland
Stephan Korbanski indicts Jewish communists of the secret police agencies in the post-war destruction of Poland:
"To realize his plan of seizing total control of Poland, Stalin formed two teams: one to satisfy appearances and the Western Allies, the
other to actually rule Poland. The first was headed by the Polish
communist Warda Wasilewska and the other by Jacob Berman, who
knew Stalin well. The choice of Berman was connected with his Jewish origins, which exonerated him from suspicion of Polish patriotism and advocacy of Poland's independence. Stalin regarded the Jews as cosmopolites, whose loyalties would be to Zionism rather than the country of their residence ... [KORBANSKI, p. 73] The principal instrument of Berman's power was his total control of
the Ministry of State Security, which began -- under Stalin's
instructions -- to liquidate all centers of Polish opposition, often by
simply murdering persons suspected of advocating Poland's
independence. [KORBANSKI, p. 74]
Jewish historians Pawel Korzec and Jean-Charles Szurek also "admit [that] the Jewish youth and proletariat played an important ('although not exclusive') role in the apparatus of oppression." [BARTOSZEWSKI, p. 18] One Jewish veteran, Wladyslaw Krajewski, of the earlier pre-World War II Communist Party (KPP), estimated that half of its leadership was of Jewish origin. [KRAJEWSKI, W., p. 94] With Jews representing about 10% of the Polish population that was mostly Catholic with relatively little interest in communism, "in the large cities the percentage of Jews in the [Communist Party] often exceeded 50 per cent and in the smaller cities, frequently over 60 per cent. Given this background, [the] statement that 'in small cities like ours, almost all communists were Jews' does not appear to be a gross exaggeration. [SCHATZ, p. 96]
In Warsaw about 65 per cent of the Communist membership was Jewish. In 1930 "Jews constituted 51 percent of the [Communist Union of Polish Youth], while ethnic Poles were only 19 percent. (The rest were Bylerussians and Ukrainians)." [SCHATZ, p. 96] In 1932 Jews were 90 percent of the International Organization for Help to Revolutionaries. [SCHATZ, p. 97] They were also 54 percent of the communist field leadership, 75 percent of its propagandists, and "occupied most of the seats" of the Central Committee of the Communist Workers' Party and Communist Party of Poland. In pre-World War II Poland, many communist activists were jailed. Polish researcher Andrzej Zwolinski fond that "in Polish court proceedings against communists between 1927 and 1936, 10 percent of those accused were Polish Christians and 90 percent were Jews." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 36] [SCHATZ, p. 97] Not surprisingly, the formal positions of the Polish Communist Party included a "firm stand against anti-Semitism." [SCHATZ, p. 100]
Furthermore, the symbology of three very high level Jewish officers -- Minc, Berman, and Zambrowski -- in the post-war oppressive Communist institutions, "became a lasting part of anti-Semitic vocabulary." [SCHATZ, p. 206] "All three communist leaders who dominated Poland between 1948 and 1956, [Jacob] Berman, Boleslaw Bierut, and Hilary Minc, were Jews." [MACDONALD, 1998, p. 63] As the Catholic Primate of Poland, Cardinal Hlond, noted in 1976, ethnic Polish anti-Jewish sentiment was now "due to the Jews who occupy leading positions in Poland's government and endeavor to introduce a governmental structure that the majority of Poles do not wish to have." [SCHATZ, p. 207]
Chaim Kaplan even noted with sarcasm in 1939 the Russian representative to the Nazis in a pre-war German-Soviet treaty: "Representatives of [the Nazis'] former arch-enemy, the Bolshevik-Jewish government, are now guests in this zone and have been received with royal honors. The head of the Soviet delegation is a Jew, the Nazi's 'friend' Litvinov. When it is time to engage in politics, nobody cares about race." [KAPLAN, C., p. 84]
including Jewish prominence in "radical" movements worldwide, Jewish pre-eminence in secret police terrorist agencies in the Soviet Union and Poland, Jewish communist spy networks, Jewish dominance in the Left of America, and the inevitable Jewish movement towards ethnocentric pro-Israelism and Zionism
(Excerpts from different chapters in When Victims Rule. A Critique of Jewish Pre-Eminence in America.)
How profoundly this paradoxical "particularism" (i.e., chauvinism) is ingrained in the Jewish consciousness is evidenced even in leftist political organizations that are supposed to be founded upon notions of universality, egalitarianism, and pan-human solidarity. In the years leading up to the Russian communist revolution in the early twentieth century, the undying obsession by most Russian Jews for themselves -- distinct from many Russian leftists around them -- often manifest itself in ethnocentric political expressions. Many Jews of Russia and Poland congregated towards their own socialist movement called the Bund. Much to the aggravation of communist party leader V. I. Lenin and his universalistic Bolshevik movement, the Bund's version of leftism insisted upon -- even within the context of the existing nation state of Russia -- special Jewish national rights beyond those civil. [AGUS, p. 164]
"It was not enough for the Bund," says Heinz-Dietrich Lowe, "to shift ... from Russian to Yiddish in its agitational programme, it had to develop a fully fledged national programme which demanded cultural autonomy for the Jews of the Russian empire." [LOWE, p. 171] When non-Jews began rioting in Russia against Jewish exclusionism and commercial exploitation in the late 1800s, "the Bund ... used these pogroms as an opportunity to intensify its economic activities and further its political aims." [LOWE, p. 171] "[The Bund's] leaders," says Joseph Marcus, "consistently conducted a class-conscious policy, ostensibly in the interests of the whole working class, but actually confined to its Jewish members." [MARCUS, p. 211]
While the Bund had a large following in Eastern Europe, notes Shmuel Ettinger,
"at the same time, the Zionist Federation, which was also being formed
by Russian Jews, stimulated the [Jewish] nationalist trends ... Among
Jewish political subgroups the Socialist Zionist Party demanded that
a Jewish society, socialist in principle, be established in a special
territory to be set aside for the Jews; the Jewish Socialist Party, the
'Seymists,' demanded a superior leadership institution, 'Sejm,' for
every one of the nations which belonged to the Federation of Russia;
the 'Peoples' Party' (Folkspartey), led by historian Simon Dubnov,
demanded a large measure of autonomy for the Jews within the
framework of the Russian state ... Many Jews also played a part
in organizing the general Russian political parties." [ETTINGER, 1984,
p. 9]
Across time and culture, even in the context of the supposed multiculturalist and egalitarian American New Left movement of the 1960's, Jews collectively tended to perceive themselves with special distinction. As Arthur Liebman noted:
"[Gentile intellectuals] really are not totally accepted into even the
secularist humanist liberal company of their quondam Jewish friends.
Jews continue to insist in indirect and often inexplicable ways on their
own uniqueness. Jewish universalism in relations between Jews and
non-Jews has an empty ring ... Still, we have the anomaly of Jewish
secularists and atheists writing their own prayer books. We find
Jewish political reformers ... ostensibly pressing for universalist
political goals -- while organizing their own political clubs which are
so Jewish in style and manner that non-Jews often feel unwelcome."
[LIEBMAN, in MACDONALD, p. 158]
Jews have a long history of leftist political advocacy, agitation against any status quo of Christian empowerment, and profoundly disproportionate percentages of leadership roles in groups that ostensibly espouse pan-human, universalist themes. With massive Jewish escape from the working class in America, Nathan Glazer and Patrick Moynihan noted in 1963 that "the unions are increasingly less Jewish [but] Jewish labor leaders continue to dominate, even though they deal for the most part with non-Jewish workers." [GLAZER/MOYNIHAN, p. 144-145] "In America and Europe," says Barry Rubin, "the left was so heavily Jewish as to be virtually a communal activity in itself, especially in the 1930's ... Marxist intellectuals in those years were heavily Jewish in composition and profoundly Jewish in their thinking ... [Its pre-eminent leaders] were all born into highly assimilated, wealthy families..." [RUBIN, B., p. 147] Reflecting on the collapse of the leftist movement in America, Harold Cruse, an African-American intellectual and former communist, complained that
"The Jews could not [Americanize Marxism] with the nationalist-
aggressiveness emerging out of East Side ghettoes to demonstrate
through Marxism their intellectual superiority over the Anglo-Saxon
goyim. The Jews failed to make Marxism applicable to anything in
America but their own national-group ambition or individual self-
election." [LIEBMAN, A., p. 529]
In 1982 a Jewish author noted a similar quote by a Gentile communist activist from Wisconsin:
"It became increasingly apparent to most participants [at a communist
youth conference] that virtually all the speakers were Jewish New
Yorkers. Speakers with thick New York accents would identify
themselves as 'the delegate from the Lower East Side' or 'the comrade
from Brownsville.' Finally the national leadership called a recess to
discuss what was becoming an embarassment. How could a
supposedly national student organization be so totally dominated by
New York Jews? ... The convention was held in Wisconsin." [in MACDONALD, 1998, p. 72]
"The problem arose," says Arthur Liebman,
"to the means to accomplish the objective of Americanizing what was an essentialy Jewish and European socialist movement ... [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 340] ... The disporportionate presence of Jews and the foreign born generally in the socialist movement coupled with the relative absence of non-Jews and native Americans troubled many of its leaders, Jews and non-Jews alike. The Communist party, for example, in the 1920s was made up almost entirely of Jews and foreign born, most of whom were in foreign language federations. The Jews alone in the 1930s and 1940s accounted for approximately 40 to 50 percent of the membership of the Communist party." [LIEBMAN, A.,|
1986, p. 339]
Nathaniel Weyl notes that:
"Although Communist leaders were normally taciturn about the extent
to which Party membership was Jewish, Jack Stachel complained in
The Communist for April 1929 that in Los Angeles 'practically 90 per
cent of the membership is Jewish.' In 1945, John Williamson, another
national leader of the American Communist Party, observed that, while
a seventh of Party membership was concentrated in Brooklyn, it
was not the working-class districts, but in Brownsville, Williamsburg,
Coney Island and Bensonhurst, which he characterized 'as primarily
Jewish American communities.' In 1951, the same complaint about
Brooklyn was reiterated. A 1938 breakdown of Communist educational
directors on a district level reported that 17 out of 34 were Jewish and
only nine 'American' ... Based on scrutiny of surnames, Glazer concluded that all of the 'Rank and File' (Communist) teachers placed on trial by the Teachers Union in 1932 were Jewish." [WEYL., N., 1968, p. 118-119]
The popular association of Jews with Communism," notes Peter Novick, "dated from the Bolshevik Revolution. Most of the 'alien agitators' deported from the United States during the Red Scare after World War I had been Jews." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 92] Major American twentieth century court trials included those of Charles Schenck, general secretary of the Socialist Party, who was arrested for sedition in 1919: "The case marked the first time the Supreme Court ruled on the extent to which the U.S. government may limit speech." [KNAPPMAN, E., 1995, p. 61, 60] Likewise, in 1927 the Supreme Court "upheld the conviction of Socialist Benjamin Gitlow under a New York state law for advocating criminal anarchy." [KNAPPMAN, E., 1995, p. 63]
Peter Pulzer once noted that, in the German socialist ranks of the early 20th century, "Their [Jews'] disproportionately bourgeois origins and their tendency to derive their views from first principles rather than empirical experience, led them into a dominating position [in] the party's debates." [WEISBERGER, A., 1997, p. 93] Arthur Liebman notes the background to the Morris Hillquit's election to the American Socialist party chairmanship in 1932:
"Hilquit, in turn, brought the unmentionable to the center stage in an emotional speech, declaring, 'I apologize for having been born abroad, for being a Jew, and living in New York City.' Hilquit's oblique reference to anti-Semitism assured him of victory. As Thomas[Hilquit's opponent for the chairmanship] later commented, 'Once the anti-Semitic issue was raised, even though unjustly, I was inclined to think it best that Hillquit won.' The Socialist party did not want to risk being labeled anti-Semitic." [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 341]
Some estimates suggest that 60% of the leadership for the 60s-era radical SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) were Jews (well-known radicals included Kathy Boudin, Bettina Aptheker, among many others). [PRAGER, p. 61] From 1960 to 1970, five of the nine changing presidents of the organization were Jewish males (Al Haber, Todd Gitlin, and the last three for the decade: Mike Spiegel, Mike Klonsky, and Mark Rudd). [SALE, K., 1973, p. 663] "Perhaps fully 50 percent of the revolutionary Students for a Democratic Society," says Milton Plesur, "and as many as 50 to 75 percent of those in campus radical activities in the late 1960s were Jewish." [PLESUR, M., 1982, p. 137] As Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter note:
"The early SDS was heavily Jewish in both its leadership and its activist cadres. Key SDS leaders included Richard Flacks, who played an important role in its formation and growth, as well as Al Haber, Robb Ross, Steve Max, Mike Spiegel, Mike Klonsky, Todd Gitlin, Mark Rudd, and others. Indeed, for the first few years, SDS was largely funded by the League for Industrial Democracy, a heavily Jewish socialist (but anti-communist) organization. SDS's early successes were at elite universities containing substantial numbers of Jewish students and sympathetic Jewish faculty, including the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Brandeis, Oberlin, and the University of California. At Berkeley SDS leaders were not unaware of their roots. As Robb Ross put it, describing the situation at the Unversity of Wisconsin in the early 1960s, '... my impression is that the left at Madison is not just a new left, but a revival of the old ... with all the problems that entails. I am struck by the lack of Wisconsin-born people [in the Madison-area left] and the massive preponderance of New York Jews. The situation at the University of Minnesota is similar' ... [Researcher] Berns and his associates found that 83 percent of a small radical activist sample studied at the University of California in the early 1970s were of Jewish background." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 61]
Susan Stern was among those to turn to the violent Weatherman underground organization. Ted Gold, another Weatherman member, died when a bomb he was making exploded in his hands. [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 61] In an iconic 1970 incident, three of the four students shot and killed by National Guardsmen at a famous Kent State University demonstration were Jewish. [BYARD, K., 5-5-00]
A study by Joseph Adelson at the University of Michigan, one of the American hotbeds of 1960s-era activism, suggested that 90% of those defined as politically "radical students" at that school were Jews. [PRAGER, p. 61, 66] And, "when, for instance, the Queens College SDS held a sit-in at an induction center several years ago," wrote Gabriel Ende, "they chose to sing Christmas carols to dramatize their activity, although the chairman and almost all of the members were Jewish." [ENDE, G., 1971, p. 61]
Ronald Radosh notes that
"In elite institutions like the University of Chicago, a large 63 percent of student radicals were Jewish; Tom Hayden may have been the most famous name in the University of Michigan SDS, but '90 percent of the student left [in that school] came from jewish backgrounds;' and nationally, 60 percent of SDS members were Jewish. As my once-friend Paul Breines wrote about my own alma mater the University of Wisconsin, 'the real yeast in the whole scene had been
the New York Jewish students in Wisconsin' ... As late as 1946, one-third of America's Jews held a favorable view of the Soviet Union." [RADOSH, R., 6-5-01]
Decades earlier, note Rothman and Lichter:
"The American Student Union, the most prominent radical student group during the 1930s, was heavily concentrated in New York colleges and universities with large Jewish enrollments. And on other campuses,
such as the University of Illinois, substantial portions of its limited membership were students of Jewish background from New York City." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 101]
In communist organizations that supposedly idealized a classless society for all people, it inevitably grated with enduring Jewish self-perception: Jews often tended to configure as a special caste of controllers of -- not a religious, but now -- a secular messianism. As Jeff Schatz notes about pre-World War II Poland: "Despite the fact that [communist] party authorities consciously strove to promote classically proletarian and ethnically Polish members to the cadres of leaders and functionaries, Jewish communists formed 54 percent of the field leadership of the KPP [Polish Communist Party] in 1935. Moreover, Jews constituted a total of 75 percent of the party's technica, the apparatus for production and distribution of propaganda material. Finally, communists of Jewish origin occupied most of the seats of the Central Committee of the of the KPPP [Communists Workers Party of Poland] and the KPP." [SCHATZ, p. 97] Jews were at this time 10% of the Polish population.
In Russia, notes Shmuel Ettinger,
"when the Russian Social Democratic Party split into two factions --
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks -- both factions had many Jews in
their leaderships (such as Boris Axelrod, Yuly Martov, Lev Trotsky,
Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenov) and among their most active
party members. Many Jews also played a part in the foundations and
leadership of the party ... For example, Mikhail Gots was one of the
party's main thereoticians and Grigory Gershuni was the leader of
its fighting organization, which carried out terrorist acts against the
Tsarist regime." [ETTINGER, p. 9]
Earlier in Russia, notes Leon Schapiro, "a particularly important part was played by [Jewish revolutionary Aaron] Zundelovich, who in 1872 had formed a revolutionary circle mainly among students at the state-sponsored rabbinical school, at Vilna." [SCHAPIRO, L., 1961, p. 153]
Also, notes Albert Lindemann, "it seems beyond serious debate that in the first twenty years of the Bolshevik Party the top ten to twenty leaders included close to a majority of Jews. Of the seven 'major figures' listed in The Makers of the Russian Revolution, four are of Jewish origin." [LINDEMANN, p. 429-430] Among the most important Jewish communists were the aforementioned Trotsky (originally Lev Davidovich Bronstein) and Grigori Yevseyevich Zinoviev ("Lenin's closest associate in the war years"). Lev Borisovich Kamenev (Rosenfeld) headed the party newspaper, Pravda. Adolf Yoffe was head of the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Bolshevik Party in 1917-18. Moisei Solomonovich, head of the secret police in Petrograd, was known by some as the epitome of "Jewish terror against the Russian people." [LINDEMANN, p. 431]
In Hungary, notes Jewish scholar Howard Sachar, "for 135 days [in 1919], Hungary was ruled by a Communist dictatorship. Its party boss, Bela Kun, was a Jew. So were 31 of the 49 commissars in Kun's regime." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 339] During that time, note Jewish scholars Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Jews also represented
"most managers of the forty-eight People's Commissars in his revolutionary government. Most managers of the new state farms were Jewish, as were the bureau chiefs of the Central Administration and the leading olice officers. Overall, of 202 high officials in the Kun government, 161 were Jewish. Jews remained active in the Communist party during the Horthy regime of 1920-44, dominating its leadership. Again, most were from established, midle-class (or, at worst, lower-middle-class) backgrounds. Hardly any were proletarians or peasants. Most of the Hungarian Jewish community was massacred during World War II ... Nonetheless, the leading cadres of the Communist party in the postwar period were Jews, who completely dominated the regime until 1952-53 ... The wags of Budapest explained the presence of a lone gentile in the party leadership on the grounds that a 'goy' was needed to turn on the lights on Saturday." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 89]
"In Lithuania," add Rothman and Lichter,
"about 54 percent of the [Communist] party cadres were Jewish. Salonika Jewry played a major role in the foundation of Greek Communist party and remained prominent until the early 1940s. Similar patterns prevailed in Rumania and Czechoslovakia. Jews played quite prominent roles in the top and second echelon leadership of the communist regimes in all of these countries in the immediate postwar period. Theywere often associated with Stalinist policies and were strongly represented in the secret police. In Poland, for example, three of the five members of the original Politburo were Jewish. A fourth, Wladyslaw Gomulka, was married to a woman of Jewish background. In both Rumania and Czechoslovakia, at least two of the four key figures in the Communist party were of Jewish background." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 90]
In Canada, in the 1940s, the Jewish head of the Communist Party in Montreal, Harry Binder, estimated that 70% of the Communist Party membership in his city were Jewish. In Toronto, from a Jewish population of 50,000, about 30% of the formal members of the local Communist community were believed to be Jews, not including those who had looser ties to the organization. [PARIS, E., 1980, p. 145]
David Biale notes Jewish pre-eminence among the communists of South Africa:
"The fact that they were outsiders to the main elements of white South
African society -- British and Afrikaner -- undoubtedly made them more
likely to rebel against the existing order. It was the explosive combination of Communist ideology as a kind of substitute for religion and the Jews' marginal status that probably turned these Jews into such a prevalent presence on the South African left." [BIALE, D., MARCH/APRIL 2000, p. 63-64]
Jews of Polish background played an important role in the founding of the Cuban communist party," note Rothman and Lichter, "and there are scattered indications of their significance in left-wing parties and groups in other Latin American countries. Jews were also prominent in the formation of Communist parties in various North African countries." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 90-91]
Even in 1930's pre-Nazi Germany, the Communist Party's top two leaders -- Rosa Luxemberg and Paul Levi -- were Jewish. (Hannah Arendt notes that Luxemberg was a member of a "Polish-Jewish 'peer group,'" which was a "carefully hidden attachment to the Polish party which sprang from it.") [ARENDT, 1968, p. 40] Earlier, in the wake of World War I, another Jewish radical, Kurt Eisner, proclaimed a socialist republic in Bavaria. Upon his assassination, Eisner's government was replaced by another socialist one -- that of president Ernst Toller (also Jewish). Erich Muehsam and Gustav Landauer were other Jews in high positions in the government. [PAYNE, p. 124-125] Next came a Communist coup to oust the socialist regime. As John Cornwell describes it, "After a week or two of outlandish misrule, on April 12 [1919] a reign of terror ensued under the red revolutionary trio of Max Levien, Eugen Levine, and Tonja Axelrod [also all Jewish] to hasten the dictatorship of the proletariat. The new regime kidnapped 'middle-class' hostages, throwing them into Stadeheim Prison. They shut down schools, imposed censorship, and requisitioned peoples' homes and possessions." [CORNWELL, p. 74] In Austria, in 1920, repeating the theme, "the socialist government was led by Friedrich Adler, Otto Bauer, Karl Seitz, Julius Deutsch and Hugo Breitner." [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 117] "The Austrian Social Democrat party was founded by Victor Adler, a deracinated Jew from a well-known Prague Jewish family, and the party paper was edited by Friedrich Austerlitz, a Moravian Jew. Other prominent Jews in the party leadership included Wilhelm Ellenbogen, Otto Bauer, Robert Dannenberg, and Max Adler." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 88]
'The list of leading socialists [in Germany] of Jewish origin is long and illustrious," adds Adam Weisberger, "-- Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemberg, Gustav Landauer, Kurt Eisner, Paul Singer, Hugo Haase -- to mention some of the most prominent among them." [WEISBERG, A., 1997, p. 2]
As George Mosse notes:
"Jews were highly visible in many of the postwar [World War I]
revolutions, not only in Bolshevik Russia but also in Budapest,
Munich, and Berlin. During the postwar crisis, belief in Jewish
conspiracies and subversive activity was not just a curious notion
held by professed haters of Jews; in 1918, even Winston Churchill
associated Jews with the Bolshevik conspiracy." [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 68-69]
For those who even know about such a past, Jewish historiography these days tends to assert that communist and socialist Jews, in Russia and everywhere else, did not have any interest in a Jewish identity. This position asserts that such Jewish communist involvement was an investment in a secular universalism that leaves behind the traditional Jewish collectivist identity. In explaining away why so many Jews were secret police terrorists under the communist regime in Eastern Europe [see above links], Jewish author Michael Checinski writes that
"They were, for better or worse, considered less susceptible to the
lures of 'Polish nationalism,' to which even impeccable Polish Communists were not thought immune. It should be remembered that these Jews were of a particular type: there were few veteran Communists among them, as their victims would be former KPP members and other
left-wingers, and Moscow was taking no chances with sentimental
ties of comradeship cramping their style as guardians of political
'purity.' Many of them had not only sadistic inclinations but also
various grudges against their future victims, both Polish and Jewish.
Indeed, it is significant that there were no traces of 'Jewish solidarity' among the staff of the Tenth Department. On the contrary, they represented a distorted conception of 'internationalism,' which could be described as 'Jewish anti-Semitism.'" [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 71-72]
This is a common Jewish apologetic tact today, to explain away the Jewish identities of so many communist terrorists by proclaiming that they had no connective identity with others in their work circles. Even here, Jewish consensus proclaims, even as Jews murdered others, Jews remain victims of anti-Semitism.
But as Kevin MacDonald suggests, "surface declarations of a lack of Jewish identity may be highly misleading ... There is good evidence for widespread self-deception about Jewish identity among Jewish radicals ... [Bolshevism] was a government that aggressively attempted to destroy all vestiges of Christianity as a socially unifying force within the Soviet Union while at the same time it established a secular Jewish subculture." [MACDONALD, 1998, p. 60]
Arthur Liebman notes this phenomenon in "the flood of Yiddish-speaking Jews" to America in the early years of the twentieth century:
"These new Jews were too large a constituency to be kept separate from the Socialist party for the length of time ncessary to accept the arguments of the sophisticated Marxist cosmopolitan Jews. If these masses of Jews who valued their Jewish identity and language would come to socialism through a speical Jewish organization, then the Socialists decided they would have it. The Jewish Socialist Federation was officially recognized by the Socialist party in 1912."
[LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 339]
As Jewish author John Sack notes about the many officials of Jewish origin in Poland after World War II who headed the repressive communist secret police system:
"I'd interviewed twenty-three Jews who'd been in the Office [of State
Security], and one, just one, had considered himself a communist in
1945. He and the others had gone to Jewish schools, studied the
Torah, had been bar-mitzvahed, sometimes wore payes ... By whose
definition weren't they Jews? Not by the Talmud's, certainly not by
the government of Israel's or the government of Nazi Germany's."
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 63]
Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz puts her Jewish identity in a socialist context this way:
"Out of nowhere pops a question, 'If you don't care about being
Jewish, how come all your friends are Jews?'
Vivian ... thinks about being Jewish on the toilet and in her
sleep, as well as every other moment of the day or night.
'I live in New York,' I snap, and we both burst out laughing.
Mentally I flip through my friends for a non-Jew. Nothing.
She shakes her head. 'You're such a Jew. How come you
don't know this about yourself?'
... My parents never thought about it either, it was who they
were. In Vilna they were Jews and socialists, and when they came
here they were still Jews and socialists. They lived among other
Jews. Everyone spoke Jewish. What was there to think? It was
like air, they breathed it. There was Jewish everything. My parents
would argue who you could trust less, communists or Democrats,
anarchists they never worried about. All Jewish. Orthodox,
secular. Owners, bosses, workers. Doctors, teachers, salesclerks,
writers, dancers, peddlers, you name it. All Jewish. Movies. Gossip
columns. Like I said, you breathed it." [KAYE-KANTROWITZ,
1990, p. 188]
Jewish author Anne Roiphe, today an ardent supporter of Israel, addresses the same theme:
"I can say I was a Marxist before I was old enough to know history,
and afterward a liberal, a Leftist, a woman of the people with the people, but finally I must own to the hypocrisy. I see certain unwelcome
contradictions." [ROLPHE, 1981, p. 113]
Rolphe's first hypocrisy was that she was born to wealth: "I am the product of the [economic] wits of my grandfather." [ROLPHE, 1981, p. 113] And despite an identity as a Marxist, Leftist, liberal, or whatever else she thought she was, Rolphe inevitably was drawn back to "this odd mystical connection to the Jewish peoplehood, " [ROLPHE, 1981, p. 182] writing an entire volume about it (subtitled A Jewish Journey in Christian America). "I thought," she wrote, "that ... I had asserted my ego as separate from the forced march of Jewish history ... I had thought I had cut out the roots of the tree that was causing too much shade in my garden ... [but] the tree without roots had surprised me with its staying power." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 180]
Jewish communist Sam Carr was released from a Canadian prison in 1951 for spying for Russia. "Ironically," notes Erna Paris, "given the fact that he 'wasn't much of a Jew,' he did become the leader of the Unified Jewish People's Order after 1960." [PARIS, E., p. 176] In Argentina, Jewish publisher Jacobo Timerman was imprisoned by the ruling military junta in 1977. It was pointed out to him by his right-wing interrogators that he was a member of a "registered affiliate organization of the Communist Party" in his youth. Timerman denied that he joined it because of any interest in communism, but, rather, for how it could serve his other ideological interests: "I belonged to it as an anti-Fascist, a Jew, and a Zionist." [TIMERMAN, J., 1981, p. 116]
"A number of Jewish socialists, particularly in the later stages of the [German] Wilhelhmine period," notes Adam Weisberger, "exhibited the phenomenon of returning to Judaism ... although admittedly often in secular or accentuated form. Joseph Bloch, for example, originally an ardent assimilationist and German nationalist, became perhaps the chief proponent of Zionism in the German socialist movement." [WEISBERGER, A., 1997, p. 98]
In 1961, Jewish author Daniel Aaron criticized the shallow attachment many in radical movements really had to their left-wing postures: "Some writers joined or broke from the [Communist] Movement because of their wives, or for careerist reasons, or because they read their own inner disturbances into the realities of social dislocation. To put it another way, the subject matter of politics ... was often the vehicle for non-political emotions and compulsions." [WALD, p. 14]
Sigmund Freud (although not a Marxist, his areligious work is often joined to Marxist theory) insisted that his psychological speculations applied to all people and tried to dismiss any evidence of his own special Jewish particularism. But he was always conflicted about it. As he once wrote about his connection to Jewish identity, "When I felt an inclination to [Jewish] national enthusiasm I strove to suppress it as being harmful and wrong, alarmed by the warning examples of the people among whom we Jews live. But plenty of other things remained to make the attraction of Jewry and Jews irresistible -- many obscure emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental connection." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 180] (The clique that runs, and enforces, the psychoanalytic world, as we shall see later, remains overwhelmingly Jewish).
Jewish messianic elitism in leftist "universalist" circles endures to this day. In 1992, Michael Lerner, prominent editor of the left-wing Jewish journal Tikkun, suggested remedies for curing anti-Semitism in leftist organizations. The cure? "Put[ting] self-affirming Jews in positions of leadership in your organizations" [LERNER, Socialism, p. 115] and indoctrination sessions to sensitize non-Jews to Jewish needs (Lerner's term is: "internal education programs.")
Erna Paris notes the history of Jewish communism in Canada:
"Although the Jewish left claimed to be dedicated to perfect equality,
it also gave full-blown expression to the strong velvet-gloved, ancient,
patriarchal traditions of Judaism. If the ancestral prophets like Amos
were the Fathers of Israel, so the men of UJPO [United Jewish
People's Order: a 'Jewish' branch of communism] and the school of
the Jewish labour movement were the 'Fathers' of the women and
children in the movement. Without question, they were the new
Hebrew prophets of a better world." [PARIS, E., p. 152]
As Adam Weisberger notes this Jewish identity root in the profound historical influence of Jews in revolutionary communist and socialist movements that aimed to destroy the existing social order:
"A messianic idea, derived from traditional Judaism, persisted through the process of secularization and entered into the groundwork of socialism ... Jewish socialists, even when they were estranged from
Judaism and possessed little or no formal Jewish education, remained
an essential part of the mission of those Jews who believed they had broken with tradition." [WEISBERGER, A., 1997, p. 112]
"After being nurtured by a culture that saw itself superior by virtue of its special relationship with God," note Jewish authors Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter,
"many Jews must have experienced their contact with modern Europe
[with the birth of the Enlightenment] as traumatic. It was difficult to
think Jewish life superior to the achievements of European civilization
once the protective mantle of the shtetl was no longer present. What
better way to reestablish claims to superiority than by adopting the
most 'advanced' social position of the larger society and viewing
this adoption as a reflection of Jewish heritage? Thus many radical
Jewish intellectuals were able to continue to assert Jewish
superiority, even as they denied their Jewishness." [ROTHMAN/
LICHTER, 1982, p. 121]
Arnold Eisen, in a discussion of Leslie Fiedler (who started out as a socialist) and other well-known Jewish American "intellectuals," notes the transformative essence of Jewish identity from traditional Judaism to modern political movements: "Here the entire language of chosenness -- suffering, witness, mission, reciprocity, exclusivity, covenant, and even repudiation of Christianity and idol worship! -- has been appropriated and hollowed out in order to endow the Jewish intellectual with the role of prophet to his own community and the world." [EISEN, p. 136] Salo Baron goes back further in time, but underscores the same Jewish identity foundation, which can, however incongruously, simultaneously straddle both "universalistic" communist movements and "particularist" Zionism:
"Under one guise or another, even the antireligious movements in
19th century Judaism were unable to cast off their messianic yearnings for an ultimate redemption of their people, or of mankind at large. The growing secularization of modern Jewry made the transition from religious messianism to political Zionism appear as but another link
in that long chain of evolution." [BARON, 1964, p. 172]
David Horowitz recalls what it was like growing up in a New York City household with his communist parents, an environment still founded upon the Jewish religious myths of redemption:
"In the radical romance of our political lives, the world was said
to have begun in innocence, but to have fallen afterwards under
an evil spell, afflicting the lives of all with great suffering and
injustice. According to our myth, a happy ending beckoned,
however. Through the efforts of progressives like us, the spell
would one day be lifted, and mankind would be freed from its
trials." [HOROWITZ, D., 1999, p. 284]
Even the founder of Hadassah (the women's Zionist organization), Henrietta Szold, once wrote that "the world has not progressed beyond the need of Jewish instruction, but the Jew can be witness and a missionary only if he is permitted to interpret the lessons of Judaism as his peculiar nature and his peculiar discipline enable him to interpret them." [GAL, A., 1986, p. 371] How Zionism, the modern secular expression of traditional Jewish ethnocentrism, is supposed to "instruct the world that has not progressed beyond the need of Jewish instruction" is never explained. [Note Zionism's implicit racism and oppressive policies against non-Jews in the later chapter about Israel].
With the erosion of the New Left in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Israel's 1967 victory in its war with surrounding Arab states, distinctly Judeo-centric political configurations arose out of the Jewish universalistic left-wing community that, as Mordecai Chertoff notes, "affirm[ed] Zionism ... and Judaism ... as socialists and radicals." [CHERTOFF, p. 192] Such organizations included the Jewish Student Movement, the Jewish Action Committee, Kadimah, the Jewish Student Union, the Maccabees, American Students for Israel, the World Union of Jewish Students, Na'aseh, Jews for Urban Justice, the New Jewish Committee, the Jewish Liberation Project, the Youth Commitee for Peace and Democracy in the Middle East, and the Committee for Social Justice in the Middle East. Such organizations produced between 20 and 40 periodicals with a combined circulation of over 300,000. [GLAZER, NEW p. 192-193]
"The extreme radical groups of the New Left came out officially in favor of the Arabs," notes James Yaffe, "but it generally conceded that there was much opposition from Jews in those groups. 'Jewish kids in the Movement,' one of them told me, 'have a double standard on Israel. A non-Jewish leftist is much more likely to condemn Israel than a Jewish leftist." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 193]
"There are still those [Jews] who are impressed," wrote Nathan Glazer in 1971, "by what seems to be the New Left concern for all of mankind, but more and more ... are discovering ... that there is a limit to the number of trumpets one can respond. [Jews] are responding, in greater numbers to their own." [GLAZER, p. 196] "How many times," complained anti-Vietnam War activist Gabriel Ende in the same year, "have committed Jews joined with others in Vietnam and student power rallies, only to have their erstwhile companions stab them in the back with boorish anti-Israel remarks on the morrow?" [ENDE, G., 1971, p. 59]
Jewish international economic power toward expressly Jewish political ends in a war could even be asserted in Asia. At the turn of the twentieth century, American Jews who were concerned about a perceived Russian mistreatment of its Jewish citizens included Jacob Schiff, a senior partner in the American banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb, and Co. He believed that "the only hope for Russian Jews seemed to lay in the possibility that the Russo-Japanese War would lead to upheaval in Russia and constitutional government there." [BEST, G., 1972, p. 315] Toward this end, Schiff helped Japan raise $180 million, nearly one-fourth of the total Japanese expenditure in its war with Russia. Schiff, the wealthy capitalist, even funded socialist indoctrination programs for Russian prisoners of war by the Japanese, in the hope that this might aid in the Tsar's downfall. [LINDEMANN, p. 170] The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia claims that "in his later years [Schiff] recognized that he had innocently aided in the creation of a menace in the shape of Japanese imperialism." [UJE, v. 9, p. 400]
At the same time, since 1890, Jewish-American financiers -- led by Jacob Schiff, Isaac Seligman, and Adolph Lewisohn -- had vigorously lobbied the powerful international Jewish banking community as a collective entity to reject Russia's own searches for loans. Ultimately defeated by Japan and suffering great indemnity demands, Tsarist Russia faced a largely successful international economic lockout by Jewish money lenders (the Russian government ultimately collapsed to the communist revolution, a situation international Jewry hoped to be better for Russian Jews). "A great nation," reported the Jewish Chronicle with satisfaction about the teetering Tsarist state, "was now going from one Jewish banker to the other, vainly appealing for financial help." [ARONSFELD, p. 103]
Simon Wolf, Chairman of the Board of Delegates of the United American Hebrew Congregation, wrote that
"Russia at this juncture needs two important elements to inspire its future prosperity and happiness: money and friends ... The Jews of the world control much of the first ... There is no disguising the fact that in the United States especially the Jews form an important factor in the
formation of public opinion and in the control of the finances...”
[ARONSFELD, p. 100]
The following ultimatum to the huge country of Russia, and a threat to those who broke Jewish ranks to do business with it, was announced by a group of Jewish American businessmen wielding their own foreign policy, self-described as the "Hebrew alliance:"
"First, until equal civil and religious rights are given the Jews of Russia,
no money will be loaned the Russian government by any American
Jews.
Second, the Rothschilds [the worlds greatest and far-reaching banking
firm, based in Europe] are united with the American Jewish bankers in
this agreement and will use all their enormous prestige and power to
assist in carrying out the threat.
Third, no financial concern will be allowed to loan Russia money, under
pain of the displeasure and financial punishment that such a
combination of resources of the Hebrew alliance could so readily
dispense." [ARONSFELD, p. 100]
Jewish economic collusion against Russia, notes Edwin Black, "was widely criticized for the stubborn continuation of their boycott even as it threatened the Allies' [World War I] war effort. But the boycott remained in effect until the monarchy was toppled in 1917." [BLACK, p. 31] Even within Russia itself, a Jewish "adventurous millionaire," Parvus (aka Israel Lazarevitch Gelfand, or also anglicized as Helphand), was a sponsor of V. I. Lenin. [SINGER, N., p. 2] In this historical context -- the "conspiracy" of international Jewish financiers unifying to bring Tsarist Russia to collapse -- the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia notes that "the canard of the Jewish conspiracy to attain political world domination originated at the time when the Tsarist regime was threatened with revolution." [UJE, v. 3, p. 1] The most famous anti-Semitic volume of all time, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claimed to evidence a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, was created -- and published -- in Russia at this time.
Jewish Prominence and Power in Soviet Communism
With the eventual fall of Tsarist rule, the influence of Jews in the rise of Russian communism was profound. (After all, as Louis Rapoport notes, "[Karl] Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Eduard Bernstein [were] men of Jewish origin who laid the foundations of communism and socialism.") [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 15] During the 1917 revolution, two communist factions, the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks vied for power. Leading up to the revolution, eight of the seventeen Menshevik Party central committee members were Jewish. The "entire Menshevik Party which included many Jewish members ... was politically linked with the Jewish Labor Bund [a party largely championing Jewish nationalism]." [LEVIN, N., 1988, p. 13] The head of the Menshevik Party was also Jewish, Raphael Abramovich. [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 31]
The rival Bolshevik revolutionary faction, however, prevailed in the overthrow of the tsarist government, replacing it with a communist government headed by V. I. Lenin. (A Jew, Boris Zbarsky, even was the one who embalmed Lenin's corpse for permanent display in the Kremlin). [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 95] Lenin had a Jewish grandfather, Alexander Dmitrievich Blank, on his mother's side. Russian author Dmitri Volkogonov's 1994 biography of Lenin notes that
"In [Lenin's sister's] letter to Stalin [after Lenin's death], Anna wrote: 'It's probably no secret for you that the research on our grandfather shows that he came from a poor Jewish family, that he was, as his baptismal certificate says, the son of 'Zhitomir meschanin Moishe Blank.' She went on to suggest that 'this fact could serve to help combat anti-semitism.' Paradoxically for a Marxist who believed in the primacy of environmental over inherited factors, she also asserted the dubious proposition that Lenin's Jewish origins 'are further confirmation of the exceptional abilities of the Semitic tribe, [confirmation] always shared by Ilyich [Lenin] .... Ilyich always valued Jews highly.' Anna's claim explains, for instance, why Lenin frequently recommended giving foreigners, especially Jews, intellectually demanding tasks, and leaving the elementary work to the 'Russian fools.'" [VOLKOGONOV, D., 1994, p. 8-9]
Lenin also once told Maxim Gorky that "the clever Russian is almost always a Jew or has Jewish blood in him." [VOLKOGONOV, D., 1994, p. 112]
At the time of the revolution, the chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Jacob Sverdlov, was Jewish. [WEYL, 1968, p. 197] As the new ruling Bolshevik clique took shape, three of the six members of the original ruling Politburo were also Jewish. Two of them, Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Grigori Zinoviev (Apfelbaum), joined with Stalin to form the threesome that ruled Russia at leader V. I. Lenin's death. [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 30] (Zinoviev once remarked that "We must carry along with us ninety million out of the one hundred million Soviet Russian population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.") [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 31] Zinoviev "and his wife Z. I. Lilina were close family friends of Lenin, and Zinoviev probably received more personal letters from Lenin than any other leader." Similarly, Lev Kamenev "received the most correspondence [from Lenin] ... He was much trusted by Lenin, even on personal matters, for example on Lenin's relationship with his mistress Inessa Armand at the time he and Lenin were sharing an apartment in Poland. Kamenev's knowledge of Lenin is important because he was the first editor, with Lenin's direct participation, of Lenin's collected works." [VOLKOGONOV, D., 1994, p. xxxv]
Another Jew, Angelica Balabanova, formerly an associate of Mussolini in Italy, headed the first Communist Comintern. Karl Radek (Sobelsohn) was "one of the leading agents of the Communist International ... The short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic was led by Bela Kun (a variant of Cohen) and the organizer of the Workers' and Soldiers' Soviets of the even more ephemeral Bavarian Soviet Republic was Eugen Levine." [WEYL, p. 197] "Eugen Levine and Max Levien, distinctly un-Bavarian names," notes Alex de Jonge, "proclaimed a Communist Soviet Republic." [DE JONGE, A., 1978, p. 53]
Howard Sachar notes more deeply the case of Hungary where
"a free election took place in November 1945, and the communists won only 8 percent of the vote ... With the intimidating force of the Red
Army behind them, the Communists turned their efforts in the next
year to infiltration ... Their Soviet-trained leadership included a large
majority of Jews. Although many of the commissars from the Bela
Kun era in 1919 had been killed, a number of them survived in Soviet
exile. These were the men who returned now in the wake of the Red
Army. Their spokesman was Matyas Rakosis ... He returned
at the head of a quintet of fellow Jews that included Erno Gero, who
would become the communist government's economic overlord;
Mihaly Farka, its military and defense chieftain; Jozeph Revai, its
cultural 'pope'; and most importantly, Gabor Peter, who would be
named head of the dreaded security police." [SACHAR, H., 1985,
p. 344]
Jewish pre-eminence in the new Russian regime was throughout the communist system. As Zvi Gitelman notes:'
"The idea that the Bolshevik regime was a Jewish one gained
popularity because of the relatively large numbers of Jews who
in 1917 suddenly rushed into governmental posts from which
they had been barred under the tsars. So striking was the
prominence of Jews in high places that when it was proposed
that a Jewish ticket be put forth in the elections to the Constituent
Assembly, Maxim Vinaver commented, 'Why do Jews need a
separate ticket? Whichever party wins, we will still be the
winners.'" [GITELMAN, Z., 1972, p. 114]
In the struggle for power in Russia, notes Nathaniel Weyl, "the prominence of Jews in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party was no greater than their prominence in the leadership of other, less totalitarian parties." Prominent Jews in rival socialist factions included Julius Martov (Tsederbaum), Raphael Abramovitch, and I. N. Steinberg. Boris Savinkov, also Jewish, was the "legendary head of the Terrorist Brigade of the Socialist Revolutionary Party." Aaron Baron and Lev Chorny were well-known Anarchists. [WEYL, 1968, p. 199-200] Building to the Russian revolution era, prominent Jewish revolutionaries also included Grigory Abramovich Perets and Nikolay Utin. One of the founders (in 1876) of the "Land and Liberty" revolutionary party was Mark Natanson. "Another Jew," notes Leon Schapiro, "Aaron Zundelevich, played an important part on its executive committee. There were Jewish propagandists, Jewish organisers, Jewish terrorists ... It is impossible to doubt the importance of the Jewish contribution to the less spectacular business of organisation and staff-work. It was the Jews, with their long experience of exploiting conditions on Russia's western frontier which adjoined the Pale for smuggling and the like, who organised the illegal transport of literature, planned escapes and illegal crossings, and generally kept the wheels of the whole organisation running." [SCHAPIRO, L., 1961, p. 152] One of the Land and Liberty party's later branches, the "Black Repartition" group, "soon became the cradle of the Marxist movement. Jewish revolutionaries participated in all stages and in all aspects of this movement." [SCHAPIRO, L., 1961, p. 149-151]
"The abundance of Jewish names in the higher and middle levels of power (in the [Bolshevik] Party and state apparat, in the military, ministry, etc.) is indisputable," says apologist Jewish author Arkady Vaksberg, "... For anti-Semites now, this is an odious and outrageous fact; from the point of view of normal people not blinded by chauvinist hatred, it is meaningless." [VAKSBERG, p. 22] "Among the second-string leaders of the Soviet," observed Nathaniel Weyl, "were Gregory Sokolnikov (Brilliant), Solomon Lozovsky, who would head the Red International of Labor Unions, and Moses Uritsky, chief of the Petrograd Cheka and number two man in the Soviet secret police."[WEYL, 1968, p. 198]
In 1923, notes Isaac Deutscher, "a triumvirate, composed of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, formed itself within the Politbureau ... Between them, the three men virtually controlled the whole [Communist] party and, through it, the Government ... Zinoviev was, in addition, the President of the Communist International." [DEUTSCHER, p. 255] Amidst intrigue and power struggles within the communist movement, however, by 1927 Kamenev and Zinoviev "at last threw in their lot with Trotsky." [DEUTSCHER, p. 307] Trotsky, an enemy of Stalin, was "the founder and builder of the Red Army," [DEUTSCHER, p. 192] and once the "number two man next to Lenin. " [NEW ENCYC BRITTANICA, p. 945] He was also Jewish, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, notes Arkady Vaksberg, "alone formed the 'leadership nucleus' and had every reason to expect to inherit the mantle of leadership from Lenin. The man closest to the 'troika' (Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev) after [Yakov] Sverdlov's death was Grigori Sokolnikov." [VAKSBERG, p. 19] All five of these men poised to rule Russia were Jewish. Kamenev once told Trotsky (his brother-in-law) [WALSH, p. 440] that "It will be enough for you and Zinoviev to appear together on the platform in order to reconquer the whole party." [DEUTSCHER, p. 308] It didn't work out that way. Stalin proved to be a more ruthless and/or shrewd leader in the struggle for power.
Nonetheless, Jews were very well represented in the Soviet system under Stalin. As Isaac Deutscher notes,
"Jews were quite prominent in [Stalin's] entourage, though far less
so than they had been in Lenin's. [Max] Litvinov stood for over a decade at the head of the Soviet diplomatic service; Kagonovich was to
the end Stalin's factotum; Mekhlis was the chief political Commissar
of the army; and Zaslavsky and Ehrenburg were the most popular
of Stalin's sycophants. Yet he was not averse from playing on
anti-Jewish emotions when this suited his convenience. During
the struggle of against the inner-party oppositions his agents made
the most of the circumstance that Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev,
and Radek were of Jewish origin." [DEUTSCHER, p. 605]
"Lev Mekhlis," notes Louis Rapoport,
"would become Stalin's secretary and one of the most despised
men in Soviet history ... Immediately after the Revolution, many
Jews were euphoric over their high representation in the new
government. Lenin's first Politburo was dominated by men of
Jewish origins ... Under Lenin, Jews became involved in all aspects
of the Revolution, including its dirtiest work. Despite the Communists' vow to eradicate anti-Semitism, it spread rapidly after the Revolution -- partly because of the prominence of so many Jews in the Soviet administration, as well as in the traumatic, inhuman Sovietization drives that followed." [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 30]
The Soviet Union's leading communist newspaper was Pravda. It's "leading staff members," Yakov Khavinson and David Zaslavsky, were Jewish, as were the Soviet Unions ambassadors to the U.S., Maxim Litvinov and Ivan Maisky, who were recalled in 1943. [VAKSBERG, p. 260, 139]
In 1994, Russian-born (and raised) Jewish author Arkady Vaksberg wrote a book entitled Stalin Against the Jews. Its fundamental thesis is that Stalin was a fanatical anti-Semite. (Louis Rapoport's Stalin's War Against the Jews reflects the same theme). The fact that many Jews (including millions of others) died under his direction is beyond question. And Stalin's actions in later life reflect his suspicions of the loyalty of many in the Jewish community. But the fact that Stalin was nonetheless surrounded by Jews everywhere in positions of high power (Lazar Kaganovich, Pyatnitsky, Fillip Goloschekin "and many others who were made part of the ruling circle") [VAKSBERG, p. 20] is described by Vaksberg as "camoflauge" for the Soviet leader's hatred of Jews. [VAKSBERG, p. 27] Yet Vaksberg's own evidence to portray the Russian Jewish community as solely victims consistently deflates the premise of Stalin's enduring anti-Semitism.Vaksberg assails Stalin as a singularly rabid, irrational Jew-hater even while stating that "the people who surrounded Stalin and who had rendered him service in the twenties and thirties were mostly Jews" [VAKSBERG, p. 35] and conceding that Jews especially close to Stalin like Emelyan Yaroslavky (Mines Gubelman), Moisey Gubelman, Lev Mekhlis ("Stalin's right hand man"), [VAKSBERG, p. 23] Lazar Kaganovich and Isaac Mintz all survived Stalin's declared "anti-Zionist" purges.
"Why did Stalin, as an anti-Semite," wonders Vaksberg, "have two Jewish secretaries -- Lev Mekhlis and Grigori Kanner?" [VAKSBERG, p. 27] Why too, we might add in turning Vaksberg's facts to different theses, whenever Stalin went on a vacation, did Lazar Kaganovich, a Jew, take over running the government? [VAKSBERG, p. 51] And why, we might add, if Stalin was so all-encompassingly hateful of Jews, did he entrust his life to a Jewish bodyguard, Matyas Rakoszy? [VAKSBERG, p. 40] (Another Jewish Stalin bodyguard, son of a rabbi, and "protege of Nikita Khruschev," was Alexander Contract, who started out in the NKVD -- later the KGB. Contract even saved the life of future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin). [O'DWYER, T., 7-6-98] And if Stalin was singularly focused in his alleged hatred of Jews, why did his "personal corps of physicians" include "Drs. Weisbrod, Moshenberg, and Lev Gigorievich Levin?" [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 37] Even prominent non-Jewish Communist Party officials (and close associates of Stalin's social circle), President Mikhail Kalinin, Bukharin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Andreyev, Poskrebyshev, and Rykov, all had Jewish wives. Stalin's own daughter Svetlana Allilueva had an affair with Jewish screenwriter Alexei Kapler; she later married Grigory Morozov (Moroz), also Jewish. [VAKSBERG, p. 138; RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 208] The fact that Stalin reportedly did not approve of these men is routinely explained by Jewish scholars as anti-Semitism. Stalin's sister-in-law (eventually imprisoned) by his first wife was also Jewish. So was one of his daughters-in-law. And there is controversial testimony that Stalin even had a Jewish mistress, Rosa Kaganovich. [RAPAPORT, L., p. 46, 241] [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 94]
Over a hundred Jewish generals also served in Stalin's Soviet army, including the chief of the Soviet Air Force at the start of World War II, General Jacob Smushkevich. [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 78]
"It seemed," says Louis Rapoport,
"there were Jews wherever [Stalin] looked. His loyal tin soldier, Marshal
Voroshilov, was devoted to his Jewish wife, Catherine. Marshal Bulganin was also happily married to a Jew, Nadezhda. Politburo member Andrei Andreyev, who fell from grace in 1950, was married to Dora Khazan, and Kaganovich the Jew was married to Maria, also one of the tribe. Malenkov, who was suspected of being a bit of a philo-Semite, had a Jewish son-in-law, as, it was said, did Khrushchev. The up-and-coming Leonid Brezhnev was said to have a Jewish wife." [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 208]
Stalin's alleged fanatical anti-Semitism had further curious twists. "Another non-Jew not only helped create Israel," notes M. Hersch Goldberg, "but saved it. Incredible as it may seem, that man was Joseph Stalin. The tale of Stalin's role in helping create and then insure the early survival of Israel has been little told; and on those occasions when it has been mentioned, there has been no satisfactory explanation for it." This includes the fact that in 1947 the Soviet Union publicly supported the creation of a Jewish state, and was the second country (after the U.S.) to recognize its establishment. Stalin also initially supported Israel in its war of independence against the Arabs and supported Israel with shipments of arms through Czecheslovakia. Even the Soviet delegate to the United Nations, also President of the Security Council, was of Jewish heritage -- Jacob Malik. [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 220-224] It would seem that if Stalin was truly overwhelmed with feelings of irrational anti-Semitism, Jewish power within his own government had overwhelmed him.
From the start of his argument about Stalin's single-minded hatred of Jews, Arkady Vaksberg marks the early struggle for power between Stalin and Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev-Sikolnikov: "All four men whom Stalin perceived as his rivals in the struggle for power were Jewish. Each of them, especially Trotsky, naturally had a large number of allies in higher eschelons of power who could influence the distribution of posts and positions and the political clout and popularity of candidates. There was a certain ethnic 'imbalance' here too." [VAKSBERG, p. 19]
As normal in Jewish scholarship (framing Jews as victims even as they act as oppressors), Vaksberg even makes the preposterous claim that the reason Jewish commanders ran 11 of the 12 major Gulag Archipelago concentration camps (including the director of them all, Matvei Berman, who also headed the slave labor project that built the Belomar-Baltic Canal) was that Stalin wanted to make Jews look bad, and foment anti-Semitism. "It could not," he insists, "have been sheer coincidence." [VAKSBERG, p. 98] Maybe not. But other possible reasons are too profoundly troubling for Vaksberg to consider.
Jews were also everywhere prominent in Soviet secret police organizations. "From the beginning," writes Benjamin Ginsberg, "the Soviet state relied upon military, police, and security services to sustain itself, and Jews were active in these agencies. ... Jews ... staff[ed] and direct[ed] the coercive instruments upon which the state relied to control its citizens." [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 30] Genrikh Yagoda, for instance, was the Soviet Chief of the Secret Police in the 1930s. A pharmacist, he specialized "in preparing poisons for his agents to use in liquidating Stalin's opponents." [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 31] "Yagoda was the man Stalin trusted most within the repressive aparat without which no totalitarian regime can exist," says Arkady Vaksberg, "The Soviet version of dictatorship and Stalin personally would not have survived without the 'faithful watchdogs of the revolution' and their 'punishing swords.'" [VAKSBERG, p. 36] Yagoda's brother-in-law, Leopold Averebakh was the "chief supervisor of Party purity in Soviet literature." [VAKSBERG, p. 35]
(America has even had its own Jewish secret police kind of poisoner. Journalist Alexander Cockburn noted Sidney Gottleib as the "US Official Poisoner ... For more than two decades [he] managed the CIA's Technical Services Division ... With Gottleib's death, America has lost its prime poisoner. For many years, most notably in the 1950s and 1960s, Gottleib presided over the CIA's technical services division and supervised preparation of lethal poisons, experiments in mind control and administration of LSD and other psycho-active drugs to unwitting subjects.") [COCKBURN, A., GOTTLIEB]
"Working side by side with Yagoda," notes Arkady Vaksberg about a kindred Jewish government deputy, "was another professional chekist (a euphemism for professional executioner), Meer Trilissen ... The many actions undertaken by Trilissen's agents included blowing up the cathedral in Sofia with the Bulgarian tsar and his government inside." [VAKSBERG, p. 38]
Other Jews, Matvei Berman and Naftali Frenkel of the secret police, were instrumental in the creation of the slave labor system in which 200,000 workers died during one project alone, the White Sea-Baltic Canal. [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 31] "It was Frenkel," notes Louis Rapoport,
"who refined Berman's use of prisoners as slave labors ... Most of
the chief overseers of the Canal were Jews. Solzhenitsyn described
them as 'six hired murderers each of whom accounted for thirty
thousand lives: Firin - Berman - Frenkel - Kogan - Rappoport - Zhuk
... Thousands of Jewish revolutionaries helped to spearhead the
Terror machine with a messianic fervor. One of them, Matvei Berman,
had helped to institutionalize slave labor as early as 1922." [RAPAPORT, L., 1990, p. 30, 44]
Likewise, Yakov Agranov, Karl Danker "and other representatives of the Jewish proletariat ... distinguished themselves with a talent for execution." [VAKSBERG, p. 39] Other prominent Jewish officials in the Soviet government included K.V. Pauler, Chief Operations Officer of the secret police in the 1930's, Lev Inzhir (Chief Accountant for the Gulag: Inzhir "the all-powerful clerk, was kept busy with figures on transit points, rail depots and harbors, human and other freight transfers, length of terms, mortality rates."), "top" Chekist Aron Soltz, [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 44, 45] M. I. Gay who headed a secret police organization that conducted mass arrests and executions during "The Great Terror" of the 1930s, and A.A. Slutsky and Boris Berman who were in charge of terrorist and espionage activities abroad in the 1930s.
Noting that "many of the prosecution witnesses and agent provocateurs against" Jewish enemies of the communist state were also Jewish, Louis Rapoport adds that
"Some of the main instruments of the Terror [against everyone] were
also of Jewish origin: M. I. Gay, who headed a special secret police
department; A. A. Slutsky and his deputies Boris Berman and
Shpiegelglas, who were in charge of terror and espionage abroad;
and NKVD operations chief Pauker. None of these mass executioners
survived [later purges against them] [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 49-50]
The man who headed the firing squad that executed the Russian royal family, Yakov Yurovsky, was also Jewish, as was the Bolshevik official who reported the deaths to Lenin, Yakov Sverdlov. [KRICHEVSKY, Behind, 1997, p. 8] Or, as Arkady Vaksberg puts it: "There is no getting around the fact that the first violins in the orchestra of death of the tsar and his family were four Jews -- Yakov Yurovsky, Shaia Goloshchekin, Lev Sosnovsky, and Pinkus Vainer (Pert Voikov). The concert master and conducter was Yakov Sverdlov." [VAKSBERG, p. 37]
As Zvi Gitelman notes about the Cheka, the early Soviet terrorist police organization:
"The high visibility of Jews in the Bolshevik regime was dramatized
by the large numbers of Jews in the Cheka ... From the Jewish point
of view it was no doubt the lure of immediate physical power which
attracted many Jewish youths ... Whatever the reasons, Jews were
heavily represented in the secret police ... Since the Cheka was the
most hated and feared organ of the Bolshevik government, anti-
Jewish feelings increased in direct proportion to Cheka terror."
[GITELMAN, 1972, p. 117]
Leon Schapiro remarks that "it is difficult to suggest a satisfactory reason for the prevalence of Jews in the Cheka ... Anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with, and very possibly shot by, a Jewish investigator." [SCHAPIRO, L., 1961, p. 165]
"I doubt that there was another poet (or novelist or playwright or artist)," says Arkady Vaksberg, "who was surrounded by as many Chekists as [Vladimir] Mayakovsky. [Mayakowsky was the leading poet of the Russian revolution era.] And sadly, they were almost all Jewish." These included at least three Jewish generals in the secret terrorist organization: Yakov Agranov, Moisey Gorb, and Lev Elbert. [VAKSBERG, p. 45]
Another Jewish author, Richard Pipes, adds that
"The worst bestialities were committed by some of the provincial
Chekas -- which operated at a distance from the eyes of the
central organs and had no fear of being reported on by foreign
diplomats or journalists. There exists a detailed description of
the operations of the Kiev Cheka in 1919 by one of its staff,
I. Belerosov, a former law student and tsarist officer, which he
gave to general Denikin's investigators.
According to Belerosov, at first (fall and winter of 1918-1919)
the Kiev Cheka went on a 'continuous spree' of looting, extortion,
and rape. Three-quarters of the staff were Jews, many of them
riffraff incapable of any other work, cut off from the Jewish
community although careful to spare fellow Jews." [PIPES, R.,
1990, p. 823-824]
In later years, another Jew, Zakhar Ilyich Volovich, "was involved in many of the dirty circles of the NKVD [precursor to the KGB], crimes even today enveloped in dark secrecy." [VAKSBERG, p. 45-46] Among the many Jewish executives in the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD were Mosiey Boguslavsky, Yakov Veinshtok, Zakhlar Volovich, Mark Gai, Matvei Gerzon, Moisey Gorb, Ilya Grach, Yakov Deich, Grigory Rapoport, Abram Ratner, Abram Slutsky, David Sokolinsky, Solomon Stoibelman, Meer Trilesser, Semyon Firin, Vladimir Tsesarsky, Leonid Chertok, Isak Shapiro, Grigory Yakubovsky, "and many other NKVD workers of the same level and same origins." [VAKSBERG, p. 98] The non-Jewish head of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria, had "many Jews in his close entourage ... [who were in] major positions in the NKVD." These included Generals Arkady Gertsovsky, Veniamin Gulst, Ilya Ilyushin-Edleman, Matvei Potashnik, Solomon Milshtein, Lev Novobratsky, Leonid Raikhman, and Naum Eitigen. Heads of NKVD "investigative groups" included Colonels Boris Rodos, Lev Shvartsman, Isaia Babich, Iosif Babich, Iosif Lorkish, and Mark Spekter. [VAKSBERG, p. 102]
Among these, Colonel Lev Shvartsman stands out for Arkady Vaksberg as "one of the most vicious KGB executioners ... He personally tortured Mikhail Koltsov, diplomats, major scientists, and cultural figures." [VAKSBERG, p. 223] Likewise, another Jew, Colonel Boris Rodos was a "sadist [who] ... at the Academy of Internal Affairs taught ... the methods of working over prisoners in their cells." [VAKSBERG, p. 211] "As a Jew," notes Yevgenia Albats in his book about the history of the KGB, "I'm interested in another question entirely: Why were there so many Jews among the NKVD-MGB investigators -- including many of the most terrible? It's a painful question for me, but I cannot evade it." [ALBATS, Y., 1994, p. 147]
"Such Bolshevik Jewish luminaries as Lev Kamenov, Grigori Zinoviev, and Yakov Sverdlov," says Ukrainian-American author Myron Kuropas, "helped Lenin come to power; and it was Jews like Maxim Litvinov, Lazar Kaganovich, and hundreds of lesser lights who were in the forefront of Stalin's rise to power. It was they who later helped Stalin engineer Ukraine's genocidal famine and the brutal Soviet takeover of Western Ukraine. When the USSR began to decline, writes [a former KGB officer married to a Jewish officer in the same force], 'the flower of this educated leadership and their children emigrated to Israel and the West.' I can't help but wonder how many of these criminals now reside in the United States." [KUROPAS, M., 8-14-94, p. 77]
Some estimates suggest that between a fourth and a fifth of the rural Ukrainian population perished by enforced starvation. [MOYNAHAN, p. 120] One of the dedicated Jewish communists was Lev Kopolev. "We were realizing historical necessity," he wrote,
"We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain
for the socialist fatherland ... I saw women and children with distended
bellies, turning blue, with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses -- corpses
in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts,
in the melting snow of old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov ... I
saw all this and did not got out of my mind or commit suicide ... I
believed [in the new Soviet order] because I wanted to believe."
[MOYNAHAN, p. 119]
In 1987, Stuart Kahan, an American relative of Russian communist strongman Lazar Kaganovich (originally named Moiseyevich; he is described by Kahan as the Soviet "Apparatus of Terror"), wrote a book about him. The author interviewed the elderly Kaganovich in Yiddish via his father, and concluded that his relative
"was, to put it mildly, a devil. That relative exuded evil, an evil
that put millions of people to death ... [KAHAN, S., p. 5] ... Although
the Church was left intact, its lands were seized [by the communist
movement]. Even prior religious teaching was forbidden in the schools.
Of course, word came down that it was the Jews who did this. After all,
wasn't the revolution prepared and fashioned by Jews? Both of Karl
Marx's grandfathers were rabbis, and Lenin's grandfather was also
Jewish. And wasn't Yarkov Sverdlov, the first chief of state, a Jew,
as was Trotsky himself? ... That Trotsky, unquestionably the most
outstanding man among the Bolsheviks, was a Jew did not seem an
insuperable obstacle in a party in which the percentage of Jews, 52
percent, was rather high compared to the percentage of Jews (1.8
percent) in the total population." [KAHAN, p. 80-81]
Kaganovich "eventually held more key posts in the power structure than anyone except Stalin ... He demolished the huge Church of Christ the Savior and replaced it with the Palace of the Soviets. As commissar of heavy industry during the war years, he chose his brother Mikhail as his deputy and controlled everything from the vast fuel and steel industries to chemicals and building materials." [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 43]
Jewish author Arkaday Vaksberg even calls yet another Jewish Soviet leader, Rozalia Zemlyachka (Zalkind), "a sadist and monster who would play a major role in the slaughter in the Crimea after the destruction of the last strongholds of the White Movement [anti-communists] there." [VAKSBERG, p. 23] Another Jew, Bela Hun, "spread bloody terror" with Semlyachka. [VAKSBERG, p. 41] Another government (and Jewish) terrorist, "the lawyer Moisey Uritsky ... was the scourge of Petrograd in 1918, terrorizing the citizenry as the local Cheka. He was killed by another Jew, Leonid Kanegisser." [VAKSBERG, p. 23] Another Jewish Soviet leader, Filipp Goloschchekin, "was one of the main organizers of the murder of the tsar's family in 1918 ... [He also] displayed boundless cruelty in the genocide of the Kazakhs when he became Party leader of Kazakhstan." [VAKSBERG, p. 17]
As even Winston Churchill once wrote about Jewish influence in the communist world:
"This [communist] movement among Jews is not new. From the days
of Spartacus-Weishaupt [Adam Weishaupt, the Bavarian founder in
1776 of one of the most famous conspiratorial groups, the Illuminati, in history], to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela
Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemberg (Germany), and Emma Goldman
(United States), this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of
civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of
arrested development and envious malevolence, an impossible equality
has been steadily growing. It has been the mainspring of every subversive
movement during the nineteenth century." [PIPES, D., 1997, p. 139]
Jews were also "particularly visible in the Soviet cultural and propaganda apparatus" and they "dominated the Soviet film industry." [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 31] Half of the June 1930 membership of the Communist Academy -- a philosophy organization -- were also Jewish. "It is obvious that from the very first moves to revive academic and scholarly work in the philosophical field [in Russia]," notes Yehoshua Yakhot, "the part played by Jews was considerable and, in a certain sense, predominant." [YAHOT, p. 244] By 1984, as one percent of the Soviet populace, one author even found that even 33 per cent of Soviet musicologists were Jews. [BRAUN, J. , p. 85]
More than once in Soviet history, Jews have fallen under government suspicion for a collective foreign intrigue -- many charged as agents of "American imperialism" or Israel. Sometimes portrayed in the Soviet press during Stalin era as men of "uncertain allegiance," notes Isaac Deutscher, the newspapers
"revealed systematically the Jewish names of writers who had been
know to the public under Russian pseudonyms ... The Jews were to
some extent protected by their prominence in vital spheres of the
national life, in the management of industry, in nuclear research, in
the [communist] party machine, in the academic world, and in the
armed forces. (Nearly twenty thousand Jews held teaching posts in
the Universities)." [DEUTSCHER, p. 608]
Among those many purged by Stalin in 1953 was the Jewish head (Palgunov) of Tass, the government news agency. [HYDE, H.M., 1971, p. 590] In 1937, in a purge of the Commander of the Red Army, seven of his top generals went with him. Four of these generals were Jewish --Yan Garmarik, Yon Yakir, R. Eideman, and B. Feldman. [HYDE, H.M., 1971, p. 351-352]
Opponents of indigenous European nationalist movements, Jews also rose to power in enforcing communist rule over post-World War II Soviet satellite countries, including Czecheslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. In Hungary, for example, Mathiou Rakosi was the Communist Party leader and Peter Gabor headed the secret police. Eduard Oklag, Yokub Berman and Gilyari Minz were prominent in the Polish government, Anna Pauker in Romania. "It was she," notes Howard Sachar, "not the [Communist] party's chairman, Gheorghe Gheorghin-Dej, who made the key policy decisions in her triple capacity as deputy premier, foreign minister, and deputy secretary of the central committee … Simeon Bughichi, Mrs. Pauker's successor as foreign minister, was also Jewish ... There were several Jews [after World War II] ... who played leading roles in the [Yugoslavian communist] government. The most eminent of these was Moshe Pijade [president of the Yugoslav National Assembly]." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 363, 365, 315]
A number of these Jewish leaders throughout the communist system met their end in government power purges. In Czecheslovakia, for example, Rudolph Slansky and ten other Jewish elites of the party were tried; eight were executed. "The Slansky trial," note Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, "was in part a move to purge the Czech communist party of its Jewish leadership." [RADOSH/MILTON, p. 349] Jewish scholar Barnet Litvinoff adds that
"When Stalin's tyranny was at its height, and his grasp upon his
satellites complete, powerful Jewish personalities were conspicuous
in the Communist hierarchies of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
and Romania ... Hilary Minc and Jacob Berman who returned to
Warsaw ... stood very close to the master in the Kremlin ... Erno
Gero, Matyas Rakosi, and Mihaly Farkas occupied similar
positions in Hungary, while Anna Pauker was the unquestioned
mistress of Romania, with authority comparable to Rudolf
Slansky's in Czechoslovakia. The list was an extensive one, and
included government and Party officials alike, ambassadors
abroad, and some military figures trained by the Soviet secret
police, not to mention university professors, film producers and
broadcasting personalities." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 104-105]
Philip Mendes notes Jewish prominence in a wide variety of communist and left wing movements throughout the world:
"As early as the French Revolution of 1830, Jews played an active role in radical movements [including Michel Goudchaux, Philippe Anspach, Michel Alcan, Olinde Rodrigues, Adolphe Cremieux, and Josue Leon] ... In the 1860s and '70s Jewish activists occupied some of the highest positions in the fledgling Russian revolutionary movement. The 'pioneer of Russian-Jewish revolutionary action' was Nicholas Utin [Others included Mark Natanson, Paul Axelrod, George Plekahnov, Vera Zasulitch, Rosalie Bograd, Meir Molodetsky, Gregory Goldenberg, Lew
Deutch, Vladimir Jochelson, Aaron Sundelievitch, and Hsya Helfmann] ... Jewish individuals also played a prominent role in all the Russian radical movements, from the Socialist Revolutionaries to the Mensheviks to the Bolsheviks ... In Hungary ... for almost four decades in fact, the top leaders of the Communist Party were Jews ... In France, many Jews have figured prominently in the leadership of the Communist Party, including Charles Rappoport, Jean Kanapa, Jean Ellerstein, Haim Cukierman, Charles Fierman and Henri Krasucki." [MENDES, P., 1993, p. 9-13]
Other countries of prominent Jewish radicalism cited by Mendes included Poland, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Holland, Austria, Germany, Spain, Great Britain, Chile, and the Middle East.
Ultimately, Benjamin Ginsberg [GINSBERG, B., 1993] alludes to the reoccurring paradigm to all this, that Jews throughout European history have sought benefit from allegiance to ruling powers -- from absolute monarchists to communist dictatorships -- which oppressed, suffocated, and even massacred non-Jewish masses. As a people who historically distanced themselves from the indigenous peoples of every land they lived and as centuries-old nemeses of the Christian order, Jews were ideally suited to function as dispassionate legislators -- and exploiters and oppressors -- over those of whom they had no real bond or interest. "The Gentile population in general," says Ewa Morawska about Eastern Europe, "and the inhabitants of villages surrounding the [Jewish community] in particular, were seen by Jews primarily in instrumental terms as suppliers of ... material livelihood." [MORAWSKA, p. 15] For those many Jews who had a religious basis in their lives, traditional Judaism often served the interests of devaluing others. As consequence, Jewish communities periodically engendered the wrath -- and sometimes violence -- of the common populace.
Jewish scholar George Mosse frames the common bond between the polar politics of the Jewish European capitalist and communist this way:
"There was an affinity between the Jewish bourgeoisie which supported the newest in the arts, placing themselves squarely on the side of the
modernists, and their wayward socialist children, who wanted to
overthrow the existing social and economic order. This affinity was
based on shared ideals that the sons wanted to realize more completely than the fathers had." [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 57]
"Empirical data," adds Jewish scholar Norman Cantor, "support the contention of French and German anti-Semites in the 1920s and 1930s that the Jews were both capitalists and communists, and thus doubly anathema to the reactionary racist movements that funneled into Judeo-phobic fascism. The German cartoons of the 1920s who depicted Jews as both bloated capitalists swallowing European civilization and nefarious red terrorists plotting to blow up western civilization were not engaging in absolute fantasy, even though Jewish apologists then and historians now like to make that accusation and try to forget the whole thing." [CANTOR, p. 275]
Communist Poland
Stephan Korbanski indicts Jewish communists of the secret police agencies in the post-war destruction of Poland:
"To realize his plan of seizing total control of Poland, Stalin formed two teams: one to satisfy appearances and the Western Allies, the
other to actually rule Poland. The first was headed by the Polish
communist Warda Wasilewska and the other by Jacob Berman, who
knew Stalin well. The choice of Berman was connected with his Jewish origins, which exonerated him from suspicion of Polish patriotism and advocacy of Poland's independence. Stalin regarded the Jews as cosmopolites, whose loyalties would be to Zionism rather than the country of their residence ... [KORBANSKI, p. 73] The principal instrument of Berman's power was his total control of
the Ministry of State Security, which began -- under Stalin's
instructions -- to liquidate all centers of Polish opposition, often by
simply murdering persons suspected of advocating Poland's
independence. [KORBANSKI, p. 74]
Jewish historians Pawel Korzec and Jean-Charles Szurek also "admit [that] the Jewish youth and proletariat played an important ('although not exclusive') role in the apparatus of oppression." [BARTOSZEWSKI, p. 18] One Jewish veteran, Wladyslaw Krajewski, of the earlier pre-World War II Communist Party (KPP), estimated that half of its leadership was of Jewish origin. [KRAJEWSKI, W., p. 94] With Jews representing about 10% of the Polish population that was mostly Catholic with relatively little interest in communism, "in the large cities the percentage of Jews in the [Communist Party] often exceeded 50 per cent and in the smaller cities, frequently over 60 per cent. Given this background, [the] statement that 'in small cities like ours, almost all communists were Jews' does not appear to be a gross exaggeration. [SCHATZ, p. 96]
In Warsaw about 65 per cent of the Communist membership was Jewish. In 1930 "Jews constituted 51 percent of the [Communist Union of Polish Youth], while ethnic Poles were only 19 percent. (The rest were Bylerussians and Ukrainians)." [SCHATZ, p. 96] In 1932 Jews were 90 percent of the International Organization for Help to Revolutionaries. [SCHATZ, p. 97] They were also 54 percent of the communist field leadership, 75 percent of its propagandists, and "occupied most of the seats" of the Central Committee of the Communist Workers' Party and Communist Party of Poland. In pre-World War II Poland, many communist activists were jailed. Polish researcher Andrzej Zwolinski fond that "in Polish court proceedings against communists between 1927 and 1936, 10 percent of those accused were Polish Christians and 90 percent were Jews." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 36] [SCHATZ, p. 97] Not surprisingly, the formal positions of the Polish Communist Party included a "firm stand against anti-Semitism." [SCHATZ, p. 100]
Furthermore, the symbology of three very high level Jewish officers -- Minc, Berman, and Zambrowski -- in the post-war oppressive Communist institutions, "became a lasting part of anti-Semitic vocabulary." [SCHATZ, p. 206] "All three communist leaders who dominated Poland between 1948 and 1956, [Jacob] Berman, Boleslaw Bierut, and Hilary Minc, were Jews." [MACDONALD, 1998, p. 63] As the Catholic Primate of Poland, Cardinal Hlond, noted in 1976, ethnic Polish anti-Jewish sentiment was now "due to the Jews who occupy leading positions in Poland's government and endeavor to introduce a governmental structure that the majority of Poles do not wish to have." [SCHATZ, p. 207]
Chaim Kaplan even noted with sarcasm in 1939 the Russian representative to the Nazis in a pre-war German-Soviet treaty: "Representatives of [the Nazis'] former arch-enemy, the Bolshevik-Jewish government, are now guests in this zone and have been received with royal honors. The head of the Soviet delegation is a Jew, the Nazi's 'friend' Litvinov. When it is time to engage in politics, nobody cares about race." [KAPLAN, C., p. 84]