TJS S6E14 - American Antisemitism part 5

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Ideologies, said author John le Carré, have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves. Oh Lord, let my ideas carry me ever upwards and never downwards. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Season 6, Episode 14, American Antisemitism, Part 5. You know, since Jew hate came down with the Torah, as our sages taught us, Yardah Sina Le'olam, that's where the hate came from, it's been both responsive to, and to some degree constructive of, how Am Yisrael is manifest in the world. Let me explain. It's responsive to how we're manifest in the world, in the sense that we've discussed right at the beginning of this series. There's something in Am Yisrael. in our holding ourselves apart from the world that evokes antagonism.

And beyond that general dislike of other, there's also a specific Torah that the Jews bring into the world, which the haters oppose. That hate is also constructive of Am Yisrael's manifestation of the world because it holds a boundary, one actually more violent than most. It keeps us separate, even as we desire to be. Limit, and to some degree, guides our growth, punishing and promoting certain behaviors in an almost evolutionary fashion. And hence the desire so many of us have today to decolonize our consciousness by getting back to a place where we belong and can be safe from the haters. Together, these responsive and constructive sides of hate make up that Torah of opposition which came down at Sinai to match the written and the oral.

Now, if you want an exploration of these forces in another historical context, send me an email. I'll share my live series on the making of the Jew that traces the emergence of Ashkenazi and European culture together through the Middle Ages. Oh, no lack of Jew hate in that story. So yeah, send me an email, robmikeforage.com. I'm happy to share it. Or you can register early for next year's TJS Live series that's going to focus, actually, on the development of Judaism and the Jews in both the Muslim and Christian early medieval empires. Should be good. For now, you'll just have to take my words in the context of our present topic. The anti-Semitism in America is both a reaction to and a shaper of the Jews throughout history.

It's kind of a hateful ezerkenegdo if you think about it. That's that idea upon which God created a partner for the first human being. A helpmate to stand against. Such a dynamic exists between Israel and the nation down through the generation. And there's definitely a help and reconciliation even possible in that relationship. I believe we have a lot to learn from this particular story of American Jew hate on how to bring that final resolution about. I mean, after all, the prophet Ovadia did say right at the end of his book, that the Redeemers are going to stand on Mount Zion to judge the mountain of Esau, and that's when God's kingship will be real. America is certainly left holding the bag for Esau at this point in history.

Let it be soon, let it be now. Anyhow, I meander. The time has come to add to our discussion the third of the three faces of American antisemitism, which I laid out at the very start. We got to add progressive hate to the white and black antisemitism that we've already given some consideration to. Remember, these are general categories with a lot of overlap and cross-current, as we're going to see in particular with the story ahead. In order to add this facet in an orderly fashion, I want to do a little bit of review using that frame of the Torah of opposition. White anti-Semitism in America is without doubt rooted in the old school European Christian Jew hate. Although, of course, it's a little wackier in its religious doctrine as befits the American story.

Christian identity is definitely a religion of the new world. To that classic Christian opposition, we added the racial element so definitive of American history. Which isn't to say that European hate was devoid of issues of race, of course. I mean, the very notion that there was a taint of Jewish blood was born out of the 15th century Reconquista of Spain. And, of course, the Nazis took racial science to its final conclusion, so to speak. But American history, and thus its present politics and culture, have been bound up with racial struggle from the start in a way in which Europe never was. I mean, classically, it starts with the white man discovering and then taming the new world, reclaiming the unused wilderness from the savages, whom they savagely slaughtered in the process, of course.

And the U.S. may not be built on the institution of slavery, as some people would like to say today, but it was certainly bound up with the origins of the American state, and it played a pivotal role in the Civil War, what brought that state to its maturity in modernity. Add to this the complex growth of the immigrant nation, fueled by waves of foreigners who became Americans, with all the issues of melting pots and tossed salads that involves, which we've discussed, That's what brought the Jews really into the general racial mix of American hate. But once we're in that mix, we rose to the top of the list for many of those haters, an achievement in which we need not take pride. Of course, these angry white folks were not entirely delusional.

There might not be a great replacement theory, a conspiracy in which Jews aim to use people of color to push aside white America. But American Jews are almost universally opposed to the simplistic tribal presentation of white Christian nationalism. And most see a diverse country as a far more desirable and safer alternative. Remember, safety and diversity means hate against one is hate against all. The international Jew who Henry Ford hated was also not completely a myth. I mean, Jews were disproportionately represented in the Communist Party. generally skeptical of Christian cultural hegemony, and always interested in leveraging the federal government to protect their rights. And last but not least, if you've ever read any Aryan nation literature, or know a little bit about the militia scene in rural America, which I hope you don't, there's good reason that many Jews stand fervently against the gun and Bible as organizing principles for American society.

So piece one, religious and racial hate, real opposition around questions of homogeneity and diversity as social foundations, and to some degree, conflicting cultural values. So piece two, of course, was the black anti-Semitism that we explored in the previous two episodes. The religious element is there as well, both in the Christian and the Muslim communities. I mean, we talked about Farrakhan, but you may remember President Obama. And if you do, you probably remember, or maybe you don't, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor at the Trinity United Church in Chicago before he went on to the White House. In truth, it was already on the campaign trail that Obama was forced to distance himself from Wright due to some of his more fiery anti-American sermons.

But when he became president, Pastor Wright was completely cut off. And who did he blame? You guessed it, the Jews. Now, he no longer speaks with Obama, Wright told the Virginia Daily Press in 2009, because, quote, them Jews aren't going to let me talk to him. Now, Wright made the matter worse, and actually, in a certain way, illuminated for us a key part of the story ahead, when he walked back his remarks by claiming a few days later, let me say I misspoke, let me just say Zionists. So, no surprise that the pastor considered Minister Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam to be what he called one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century. Now, that's despite the racial religious hate that we tasted last episode, or perhaps because of it.

To those elements shared as they are, black anti-Semitism added the socioeconomic hate, that structural element we discussed a few episodes back. Now, white conspiracy theorists might love to rant about the Rothschilds controlling international banking, or they might hate passionately the Jewish professors, lawyers, doctors, and such that are taking over. But white society as a whole has always been in a dominant position in America over the Jews and over everybody else. And historically, even those who didn't love us for it have recognized our positive addition to general American prosperity. But not so African American society. It's a very different story. We saw how Jews were met as the middlemen in the urban ghettos, the butchers, grocers, landlords that served the great migration which brought black America to the northern cities, and how they were often experienced as powerful exploiters, preying on the racial and economic power hierarchy, which had truth to it.

And hence, Jews were seen ultimately as the cutting edge of the white world by many, even as others were receiving them as allies in the struggle for civil rights. This sort of twisted American racial love triangle between black, white, and Jew is what led James Baldwin to title that 1967 New York Times article explaining black hatred, Negroes are anti-Semitic because they are anti-white. And though the Jews have long since left the inner cities the role they play in the inner drama of exploitation for black people is alive and well In today's claims by media elites that their careers are overly profitable to and orchestrated by the Jews. This is all familiar territory of hate, by the way, religious and economic.

But if you actually read Baldwin's article, which of course is highly worthwhile, fantastic author that he was, and you can email me, robmikefoyer, gmail.com, happy to share it, you will find there a searing indictment of the American story as a whole. And within that, there's an important insight on a specific element that black hate adds to the mix of American anti-Semitism. Which, again, not to say that that element is unique or even uniquely black. It's just that the way in which it enters the mix through the African-American experience is uniquely concentrated and thus truly deadly. Very few Americans, writes Baldwin, and this includes very few Jews, wish to believe that the American Negro situation is as desperate and dangerous as it is.

Very few Americans, and very few Jews, have the courage to recognize that the America of which they dream and boast is not the America in which the Negro lives. It is a country which the Negro has never seen. That's a piece from a much larger warning about the explosive situation America faced in 1967. and about how in light of the black-white divide, differentiating between Jews and other white people was basically irrelevant. Baldwin goes on to reveal to the reader the most dangerous element of black anti-Semitism, at least in my eyes, displaced resentment, fueled by an experience of victimhood, and whether he saw what he was saying as such or not. He says, in the American context, the most ironical thing about Negro anti-Semitism is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man.

The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it. The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro's understanding, it increases the Negro's rage. Hear that last piece. Because we've seen the American Jewish claim to solidarity through a shared past of victimhood and suffering before in our story. It was the driving force behind why Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans, as Milton Himmelfarb said. It was the prime emotional identity element that fought the pull of full assimilation into white suburban culture. It was the underlying principle of the survival strategy of diversity.

Safety in diversity is hate against one, hate against all. And here's Baldwin in 1967 telling the Jews that not only is such solidarity illusory, to claim it is enraging. He explains, for it is not here and not now that the Jew is being slaughtered. He is never despised here because he is an American. The Jewish travail occurred across the sea, and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him. What happens to the Negro here happens to him because he is an American. The American story, how it intersects with race, power, anti-Semitism, and anti-Zionism, is a key part of the story ahead. And so the black American experience adds to the mix of American anti-Semitism a healthy dose of displaced resentment.

The Jew is a more compelling target than white society as a whole, and frankly, an easier one as well. In Jews coming to represent the essence, or as Farrakhan said, the architect of white supremacy, a symbolic and pseudo-intellectual anti-Semitism fueled by that displaced resentment joins the more down-home, old-school, religious, racial American versions. And the abstraction of Jews into an ideal target is particularly powerful where anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism intersect. That's what will allow hate to go viral. And so now it's time to add the progressive side of our story. On January 3, 1971, an article entitled The Socialism of Fools appeared in the New York Times. It was written by pre-amended American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, leading theorist of American democracy.

Lipset was born into the Jewish world of the 1920s Bronx, and by the time he passed away in 2006, he'd taken every honor in his field, as well as claiming a place on a list of the top 100 American intellectuals. No small shakes. And he was also a true red diaper baby, meaning he was raised in a world of politics where Democrat and Republican were irrelevancies. The question at hand was communist, socialist, Trotskyist, or anarchist. His 1971 article was a sounding of the alarm over the spirit he saw rising among the young guard that had taken over his generation's revolutionary mantle, the so-called New Left that had replaced his Old Left. The title, The Socialism of Fools, is actually only part of a phrase.

The full slogan, which first appeared amongst German socialists in the 19th century, reads, Antisemitism is the socialism of fools. Lipset just assumed we knew that. This choice of proverb was originally a warning to angry revolutionaries not to get sidetracked into hateful eddies of ideas about Jewish wealth and power as the source of social injustice. The more things change, the more they stay the same, right? And it was actually with his subtitle that Lipset showed he was dusting it off for the younger generation. And in case they didn't know the original expression, he was explicit. The full headline reads, The Socialism of Fools. The New Left Calls It Anti-Zionism, but it's no different from the anti-Semitism of the old right.

Right, he wrote this in 1971. That was more than 50 years ago. Now, I hope you recall the story of the New Left from our exploration of the Jewish 60s back in Season 3. If you don't, hit pause now, review the entire season. It's worthwhile. But back there, I emphasized the central role that Jews played in creating this new iteration of the Left. and we're going to have to touch it again, that role of creation, in next episode when we talk about the rise of progressive politics as a central piece of American Judaism. Right now, I'm actually interested in how the larger New Left related to the Jews. In Season 3, we got a bit paced. We saw, in fact, the opening signs of what was wearing Lipset, that anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic nexus, through the reaction of black separatists to Israel's victory in the 1967 season.

Six-Day War. It was a small but potent outburst of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic feeling, raw in its imagery and seamless in connecting the two. And in many ways, it set the mold for much of what's to come with the rise of progressive hate. Lipset's warning against the socialism of fools came only four years after that war, and it's an exposure of the fundamental place he saw anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish sentiment taking already on the radical left. He starts with a caveat, which may sound a bit like stale apologetics in our ears today, but it was still fresh in Lipset's time, and perhaps a little bit more true. He says, one may oppose Israeli policy, resist Zionism, or criticize worldwide Jewish support of Israel without being anti-Semitic.

It's the insistence that anti-Zionism is not intrinsically anti-Semitism. But he goes on and says, but when one draws on the age-old hostility to Jews to strengthen a political position, when one gives credence to the charge of a worldwide Jewish plot to rule, when one implies that Jews are guilty of some primal evil, then one is guilty of anti-Semitism. And that's exactly what this old socialist, poised at the heart of the intellectual and left-wing political world, saw bubbling up in the new wave rising all around him. Lipset offers a key reason in history that he sees anti-Zionism taking off with such enthusiasm in the early 70s. He says, as the war in Vietnam peters out, the various incarnations of the extreme left, new and old, anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyists, Black Panthers, and communists, have reoriented their international emotional priorities to identify the heroes as the Arab terrorists and freedom fighters, and the villains as Israel and its American ally.

Now, don't miss the precision of this insight in its politics. The shift toward anti-Zionism, he says, is driven by international emotional priorities, meaning that progressives and would-be revolutionaries all around the world need someone they can point to somewhere and say, they're sticking it to the man. And now that the Viet Cong are out of fashion, it's the PLO's turn to play hero. Because someone must. There's an international emotional need. Now, by the way, I can tell you, both from my work with couples and my study of history, that once we enter the realm of an emotional need for hero and villain, there's a moral space that opens up quite quickly in which hate can become not only acceptable, but even noble and laudable.

Lipsick goes on to detail a terrifying Array of international hate Just to give you a taste he talks about German New left students chanting Make the Near East Red smash the Zionists dead And he says there was an insistence by one editor of a French New Left journal that to demonstrate the intricacies of the Palestine problem, leftists must use expressions which, taken by themselves, appear to resemble certain lines from Mein Kampf. Nice. You're going to pull a play from Hitler's handbook just to make your point. but you're just an anti-Zionist, not an anti-Semite. Lipset goes on to explain how this international emotional priority, which has brought Zionism into focus as the ultimate enemy of the radical left, is playing out over a much larger topography of anti-Semitism, one which, frankly, many of these enthusiastic and callow youth may be largely unaware of.

Now, that's the nature of assumptions, of course. We don't think about them, but so often they define. even what we consider as an option, much less the choice we make. And so Lipset defines this assumption underlying Western culture really as a whole. I would call it a narrative topography of Jew hate. He says the generationally transmitted reservoir of cultural anti-Semitism, best conceived of as a kind of collective consciousness built almost erraticably into our literature, into our language, into our most general cultural myths. Now that's a broad observation. But Lipset's warning about the dangers that such a reservoir hold for the enthusiastic anti-Zionists of the New Left, from whom he's hearing more and more anti-Semitism, was far more specific.

He says, in expressing directly or indirectly a disdain for Jewishness, the young New Leftists are following in a classic tradition set by a number of prominent Marxists of Jewish origins. those who could find it in their hearts to be concerned about many national groups, but not about the Jews. Meaning, not only is the new left traveling a well-worn road of hate in their seeming new focus on Israel, the freedom they feel in expressing a denigration of Jewishness through that seemingly political opposition is actually built into their personal ideological inheritance. there's a permission to hate Jews which has been given by the Jews themselves I mean, after all, it was Marx, the apostate Jew and not Joe Rogan, who said what is the worldly religion of the Jew?

Huckstering what is his worldly God? Money money is the jealous God of Israel, said Marx, in face of which no other God may exist now, next episode, we're going to go further into the very special role Jews have played in at least paving the way for this new face of progressive hate to emerge. For now, I want to make one more point, which may feel a little bit tangential, but it's useful in wrapping up this look at Professor Lipset's call to arms. Today, in progressive circles, it's increasingly common to speak of unconscious racism and institutional racism. Really, these are the same things on different scales, be they the actions of the individual or the norms and practices of an institution, both of them can be built on a consciousness and structures that produce racist outcomes even without racist intent.

This is a definition of racism as a social phenomenon, one which isn't reducible to hate or even self-awareness on the part of those accused of indulging in it. Taken to its extreme, these are the notions which produce the idea that even saying you're not a racist and meaning it, itself is indicative of how deeply unconscious your inevitable structural subconscious racism is indeed. Ibram X. Kendi and the other theorists of this new racism would likely agree with Lipset's notion of a collective consciousness built into literature, language and cultural myths if it's applied to blackness and whiteness. And yet, for they and other progressive intellectuals, anti-Semitism is left out of the analysis, pun intended.

So much so that it becomes routine in our day for people to make statements, anti-Semitic in their form and their content, magnifying tropes, stoking myths which can have real danger and damage to the Jews. And yet, all it takes is a denial or a pro-forma apology. And the world is happy to say, see, no harm intended. So there's no Jew hate here. I, we, they are not an anti-Semite. Even though if you say you're not a racist, you're doubling down. Now, Lipset was well aware that bigoted ways of thinking can actually often gain hold much faster when they're held by people who really believe they oppose bigotry as a whole. This isn't just simple hypocrisy, hiding hate behind universal rhetoric. Halavai was that simple.

It's actually a manifestation of that collective consciousness of which he wrote, which if left unchecked actually gains momentum from the emotional needs he identified and explosive power should it ever come to offer political utility next thing you know in our day you hear presumably intelligent people expounding insane doublespeak like John Molyneux theorist of the influential socialist workers party in the UK who declared at one point from the standpoint of Marxism and international socialism an illiterate conservative superstitious Muslim Palestinian peasant who supports Hamas is more progressive than an educated liberal atheist Israeli who supports Zionism, even critically. How on earth do you figure that?

I mean, we could go into the theory, but the real answer is, is that Molinoy's notion of progress doesn't include Jewish sovereignty, or frankly, the Jews, whether he knows it or not. So, now Lipset has gotten our story of the third phase of American anti-Semitism started by calling out the new left, 1971. Anti-Zionism might begin as something separate from anti-Semitism, but the pressures of emotion, the profound influence of that collective cultural consciousness, and the power of an intellectual inheritance on the left make it unlikely to remain separate from anti-Semitism. and be warned about the magnifier effect that the other sociologists we've discussed, Earl Rabb, warned us about, the one that kicks in when Jew hate becomes a political commodity?

In the 70s, anti-Semitism was on the fast track to becoming an indispensable part of international left-wing politics and thus, in a sense, the gateway drug to anti-Semitism as well. In 1975, the UN General Assembly proved that Lipset's warning about the socialism of fools was basically a case of shutting the barn door after the horse had bolted, with the passage of Resolution 3379. If you don't recall, that was a resolution which declared Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. And it passed the General Assembly with an overwhelming majority of 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions. Back in Season 5, we explored a bit about the coalition of Arab countries, post-colonial states, and radical left activists, all under Soviet patronage, which made such a resolution not only possible, but palatable and even appealing to a majority of the UN's member states.

Now, there was, of course, a clear political context to the move. By 75, Israel was firmly in the Western camp, and itself dubbed a colonial power by many for its conquest of the biblical heartland in Uda and Shomron in the Six-Day War. But one ignores the hatred of Jews, which gave this coalition of interests its passion at their peril. And after all, it does seem a wee bit strange that the only nationalism ever to be defined as intrinsically racist was that belonging to the Jews. Famous Jewish feminist Betty Friedan got sucker-punched by this hate when she attended the First World Conference on the Status of Women, held in Mexico City less than a year before Resolution 3379. There, she watched in horror as Lea Rabin, wife of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was booed and boycotted, stood dumbstruck as Third World and Communist delegates linked the 10-year plan of action for women to the abolition of imperialism, neocolonialism, racism, apartheid, and Zionism, leaving sexism off the list, and ultimately, followed by gunmen and advised to get out of town, she was escorted to safety by three tough women from Detroit.

1975 marked the inflection point in the coalescence of the global left, the Arab world, and the third world liberation movements around the issue of anti-Zionism. It had proven itself to be a powerful political commodity. The backers of Resolution 3379 held off the concerted opposition of Israel and a number of Western powers, including America. You can go back to Season 5, Episode 4 for the story. And due to the inseparable nature of Jews and Israel, anti-Semitism was bound to follow in the wake of this anti-Zionism. What lies ahead is basically old wine in new bottles. As we've discussed, the nature of anti-Semitism is such that the Jew fills whatever conceptual role the society might need to hate at the time, and that hate is often rationalized by the socioeconomic structural role we play in the society, be it a local or an international one.

In the decade following that original Zionism is racism resolution, it was reiterated multiple times in the General Assembly, sometimes by even larger majorities. Notice Zionism by the way not just Israel It doesn say Israel is a racist state It says Zionism is racism because the state itself was seen to be a platform Call it the Archimedian point in the Jewish quest for global domination. Sound familiar? And Zionism began through this battering of resolutions to assume an almost mythical proportion in the international discourse as the cause of most world problems. From 69 to 72, there were four anti-Israel resolutions per year at the UN. From 73 to 78, it grew to 16, peaking in 1982 with 44, and we'll come to where that situation is at before the end of this series.

The racism of Zionism and the Zionist state was on the verge of becoming simply common knowledge. All that was lacking was a conceptual framework. one that could extend the utility and appeal of anti-Zionism as an intellectual and political posture, while sufficiently obscuring the Jew hate lurking beneath, meaning one which could turn it completely into a commodity. Cue the Soviet Union. I mean, truth is, communist hate for the Jews goes all the way back to Marx, as we saw, and it never lacked for enthusiastic theoreticians in the communist state of the USSR. are, but the hard anti-Zionist stance of Soviet thought really began post-1967. Soviet reponery, in the hands of its Arab clients, had failed to destroy the Jewish state.

But the August 7, 1967 article, What is Zionism?, which appeared simultaneously in several Soviet publications only two months after that defeat, was the opening salvo in a new war against the Jews. Author by Yuri Ivanov, employee of both the KGB and the Communist Central Committee, the article presents Zionism as a centrally controlled international system gripping global politics, finance, and the media using its unlimited resources to gain control over the entire world. No Jew hate there. What is Zionism? Joined earlier publications like Judaism Without Embellishment that had already labeled the Jewish religion, with its notion of chosen people, as inherently racist. And now that religion was linked to Jewish nationalism, and together they were labeled agents of American imperialism and Israeli colonialism.

Now Ivanov went on to become the center of a massive campaign. Hundreds of anti-Zionist and anti-Israel books, thousands of articles were published, with millions of copies entering circulation, often translated into multiple languages. Slowly, this information deluge eroded the meaning of Zionism, transforming it in the minds of many from Jewish National Liberation Movement into a synonym for racism, imperialism, and colonialism, as you can see it on posters today. And hence its contribution, by the way, to the passage of that UN Resolution 3379. But the wise men of the KGB knew they couldn't stop short at racism if they really wanted to eliminate Israel. By 1970, the propaganda campaign had already found a new central theme, other than racism in their war on the Jews, comparison between alleged Zionist and Nazi acts.

Remember, national legitimacy in the post-World War II world was all but contingent on the role which a people had played in fighting the Nazis. So aside from the sick inversion of victim and villain, painting Israel as the new Nazi state placed it automatically beyond the pale, a rogue state by definition, regardless of history or policies. You'd think it would be a tough sell to make the Jews out to be the new Nazis, but apparently you would be wrong. In 1972, the Soviet Academy of Sciences established a permanent commission for the coordination of scientific criticism of Zionism, housed at their prestigious Institute of Oriental Studies. Scientific Zionism now took its place along scientific atheism and scientific communism as pillars for the cognitive transformation of the world into the workers' paradise, meaning brainwashing.

Specifically, the purpose was, quote, fight anti-Soviet and anti-communist activities of international Zionism. And it would do so by establishing an incontrovertible link between Zionism and that ultimate Soviet enemy, the Nazis. And man, were these academics prolific. I mean, aside from countless lesser-known work, which don't deserve our attention, they published current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's thesis in 1982, granting him a doctoral status for defense of his dissertation, you guessed it, the relationship between Zionists and Nazis, 1933 to 1945. And it wasn't just at home that scientific Zionism flourished. the Soviet Academy exported its worldview and its perspective on Nazi equivalency abroad as well, aiding books like the 1983 anti-Zionist classic Zionism in the Age of Dictators.

That one was written by a Jew, Lenny Brenner, whose journey from orthodoxy to civil rights activism to anti-Zionism may deserve an exploration of its own in the coming episode. We'll see. But for now, these were two prominent successes amongst countless others. In April of 1983, Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, published an appeal signed by eight prominent Jewish personalities from various fields of science and culture, headed by one General David Dragunsky, highly decorated Jewish war veteran. It was an appeal, a call for the formation of the committee to head the struggle of all Soviet citizens to, quote, reveal the reactionary nature of Zionist provocations as part of an imperialist psychological campaign against the USSR under the guise of defending the cultural and religious rights of Soviet Jews.

I'll let you unpack that on your own some other time, but you should just know that within weeks, the anti-Zionist committee of the Soviet public had been formed, with Dragunsky as its chair, and with branch committees throughout the Soviet Union. Such a committee had actually been in the works for more than a decade, but the immediate trigger that caused its formation and its designation of a large budget was an international gathering in Jerusalem on behalf of Soviet Jewry. They called for free immigration, release of prisoners of conscience, and a restoration of Jewish and cultural religious life, and that was the straw which broke the camel's back. The Soviet leadership felt that the only appropriate response was to depict Zionism as a reactionary appendage of world imperialism.

And man, did they find that that had a broad appeal behind its immediate application? Known by the acronym of OXO, I'm not going to mangle the Russian name, the committee published feverishly, building on the works of the 70s on its chosen topic, its activity peaking in August 85 with the publication of what it called the White Book, A 300-page compendium of documents, articles, which laid the intellectual groundwork for much of progressive anti-Semitism down to our day, defining Israel as a striking force of American imperialism in the Middle East, and supposedly documenting the Nazi-like methods and ideology it used to accomplish its goals. Now, the Soviet Union is long gone, but its influence lives on.

In July of 1990, less than a year before the USSR fell apart, Pravda published an editorial admitting to the evils of this anti-Zionist campaign. Considerable damage was done by a group of authors who, while pretending to fight Zionism, began to resurrect many notions of the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Black Hundreds and of fascist origin. That's reaching back to Russian Jew hate, pre-Soviet Union. It goes on and says, Hiding under Marxist phraseology, they came out with coarse attacks on Jewish culture, on Judaism, and on Jews in general. Meaning, yes, we admit it, that whole anti-Zionist thing was really just a cover for anti-Semitism. But too little, too late. One editorial isn't going to erase decades of hate propaganda.

A Soviet poll published that same year showed a significant percentage of citizens thought Zionism was, quote, the policy of establishing the world supremacy of the Jews. And that was just at home, where belief in communist truths had already been deeply eroded by the reality and collapse of the communist state abroad, where communism still held far more appeal. The messages of scientific Zionism continued to serve as the intellectual framework for international far-left politics, really down to our day. Today's slogans, claiming Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, defining Zionism as inherently racist and oppressive, labeling Israel a settler colonial state-engaging genocidal apartheid behavior, were all part and parcel of that Soviet anti-Zionist campaign.

And when a prominent progressive like one-time London mayor and Labour Party member Ken Livingstone claims Hitler was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews, you can be sure that he's indulging in the socialism of fools. I want to thank some folks before I sign off I want to thank all the folks who give their hard-earned money to make this show happy, keep it free widely available, I want to ask you to join them right now, go to my website Jewestory.co, upper right hand corner you'll see a button that says be a patron, you can click on that to give a little bit of per podcast support or be in touch with me, if you want to dedicate a show or make a one-time donation RobMikeFoyer, gmail.com, or find me on Facebook, RobMikeFoyer, I want to thank the Land of Israel Network, that's thelandofisrael.com they're building a center for global transcendence in the heart of Judea.

I want to thank the Pardes Institute, P-A-R-D-E-S dot org dot I-L, for throwing the doors of the Beit Midrash open as wide as possible. And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.