How Jewish are Jewish leftists? Does it matter?

A few days ago I quoted this statement by Daniel Sokatch, executive director of the Progressive Jewish Alliance:

“ … like economic justice, this [illegal aliens’ rights] is a profoundly Jewish issue. Our soul hinges on this debate. It’s the issue of what kind of country we want to be and who we are as an American people.”

I spoke of the arrogant ethnocentrism of making American national policy rotate around the supposed concerns of the “Jewish soul,” instead of around the question of what is good for America. However, based on the Progressive Jewish Alliance’s website, the organization has as much to do with the Jewish religion as the utopian leftist Michael Lerner has to do with designing anti-missile missiles. Here’s the organization’s description:

A multi-issue, grassroots social justice organization that educates, advocates and organizes on issues of peace, equality, diversity and justice. We are activists and academics, artists and businesspeople, agnostics and rabbis. What we share is a passion for healing our community—a passion grounded in the Jewish commitment to justice and in the American notion of fair play.

Such an organization is not recognizably Jewish in any religious or traditional sense, and seems, more than anything else, to be a bunch of leftist “non-Jewish Jews” using the Jewish label to advance leftism. The fact remains, however, that the Jewish people, far out of proportion with any other ethnic group, keep producing a fantastic number of leftists, whether they are “Jewish” or not. Any gentile country with a significant Jewish population needs to consider honestly this Jewish tendency and find responsible ways of restraining it. Ignoring it will only allow it to become more and more destructive (just as the Jewish left is destructive of Israel itself), leading ultimately to the growth of serious anti-Semitism on the part of the majority population.

And I think in America we already have a good historical model of how the Jewish leftism is to be restrained: it was through the presence of a vital and confident majority culture that believed in itself and expected people to defer to it if they wanted to be recognized as equals in our society. Of course there was plenty of Jewish leftism in the early and mid 20th century, but at the same time Jews by and large had assimilated into America’s Anglo-form, middle-class culture, as discussed and praised by the Jewish writers Will Herberg and Milton Gordon in the 1950s and ’60s. I think the extreme anti-nationalism and open-borderism being expressed by many Jews today is largely a function of the breakdown of that majority culture, which has released the minority will to power. This may be offensive to some people, but in certain contexts the majority culture of a country must be like the parent in relation to the minority cultures which are like children. If the parent stops acting like the parent and leader, the children start “acting out” in destructive ways. The same analogy also suggests the cure for our current dilemma. The traditional majority culture must start acting like the majority culture again. And that in turn requires the rejection of the liberal ideological dominance that 40 years ago began to demonize and shove aside the traditional majority culture. And that in turn requires understanding, resisting, and undoing the mistakes of the last 50 years.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 11, 2006 06:56 PM | Send