Imagine, if goons menaced Zionists outside a synagogue, yelling \u201cDeath, death to the IDF,\u201d and \u201cWe need to make them scared,\u201d what would Martin Luther King or Ronald Reagan, George McGovern or William F. Buckley, Eleanor Roosevelt or Margaret Thatcher do? Does anyone doubt they would have confronted the bullies? Can anyone conceive of any of them, from Left to Right, blaming the victim \u2013 as Zohran Mamdani\u2019s spokesperson did after the Park East Synagogue protest, claiming that \u201cthese sacred spaces\u201d \u2013 meaning synagogues \u2013 \u201cshould not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.\u201d The \u201cviolation\u201d was a Nefesh B\u2019Nefesh aliyah information evening.<\/p>\n
I grew up in a world where progressives believed in progress, conservatives conserved institutions, and leaders denounced antisemitism, while recognizing anti-Zionism as the latest update of the world\u2019s longest hatred. Today\u2019s antisemites maintain the sick tradition of being obsessed by Jews, individually and collectively. Whether they \u201cjust\u201d hate Israel and Zionists from the Left or \u201cjust\u201d hate the Jewish people from the Right, they keep targeting history\u2019s greatest scapegoat, the Jew or Jewish institution nearby. The mass breaking of the post-Auschwitz covenant, wherein non-Jews recognized that Hitler\u2019s Jew-hatred harmed the world and threatened them too, has been mind-blowingly rapid. Just a few years ago, for example, progressive antisemites were as rare as racist civil rights activists or pacifist boxers. Traditionally, American liberals \u2013 unlike the Marxist internationalist Left \u2013 opposed all bigotry. Especially during Hitler\u2019s mass murders, America\u2019s progressives defended the Jews and championed Zionism, the movement for Jewish statehood. Today, in spurning that proud history, progressive antisemites resurrect progressivism\u2019s muddled turn-of-the-twentieth-century origins, when Jew-hatred reflected its anti-immigrant, Americanizing agenda.<\/p>\n
Historians usually emphasize the antisemitism of Populist farmers and demagogues. That reflects historians\u2019 left-wing bias and the post-Holocaust view characterizing Jew-hatred as a right-wing pathology. But from the 1880s through the 1920s \u2013 while restricting big business, boosting workers, improving factory conditions, rationalizing American government, and seeking order \u2013 urban reformers also championed \u201cAmericanization.\u201d These upper-class crusaders feared that immigrants, especially Eastern European Jews, were undermining America\u2019s way of life.<\/p>\n
John R. Commons, who founded the American Economic Association, warned in 1907 about \u201cthe immigration of races and classes incompetent to share in our democratic opportunities.\u201d Progressives like Commons considered Jews religiously misguided and a problematic \u201crace.\u201d Proving that antisemitism is the longest and most plastic hatred \u2013 moldable, adaptable, and frequently toxic \u2013 they considered Jews too radical and too capitalist, too Marxist and too Rothschild. Madison Grant\u2019s 1916 blockbuster, The Passing of the Great Race, called the Jews a \u201crace of the urban type, with high intellectual and legal ability,\u201d yet threatening the Nordic stock.<\/p>\n
Then like now, waves of immigration triggered a nativist backlash. From 1871 to 1924, 28 million immigrants arrived, making one of every seven Americans foreign-born. Alarmed, the Immigration Restriction League joined other Brahmin activists in demanding entry quotas favoring immigrants from Protestant countries like England and Germany over predominantly-Catholic countries like Italy, and the main source of Jews, Russia and Poland. The 1924 Immigration Act shut America\u2019s doors just years before Hitler\u2019s rise. Tragically, the restrictive, quota-laden law blocked a life-saving escape route for millions of European Jews.<\/p>\n
The Holocaust shocked the Jew-hatred out of most progressives. Even before most Americans read about the Nazi mass murders, leading progressives like 1940 Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, the journalist Dorothy Thompson, and the liberal Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, supported suspending immigration quotas to save Jewish lives. After 1945, many lobbied the new president, Harry Truman, to support what became the Jewish state of Israel.<\/p>\n
Back then, scholars and activists deemed antisemitism a right-wing phenomenon. In 1950, the German-born social psychologist Theodor Adorno insisted in The Authoritarian Personality that \u201cneither ethnocentrism nor antisemitism ever showed a tendency to go with leftist liberal views.\u201d Such pronouncements ignored Soviet Communism\u2019s Jew-hating dictatorship. Enthusiastically pro-Israel, presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson regretted America\u2019s legacy of discrimination. In 1965, Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, lifting ethnically-driven restrictions, at the base of the Statue of Liberty. He condemned the 1924 Act, bolstering the \u201ctwin barriers of prejudice and privilege,\u201d as \u201cun-American.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the post-1960s zeal for identity politics turned some progressives against American Jews. As Ronald Reagan and William Buckley marginalized antisemitic conservatives, illiberal liberals increasingly defined people solely based on their race, gender, privilege, and alleged role as oppressors. Those prisms undermined the traditional liberal legacy of equality and color blindness advanced by president Lyndon Johnson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others.<\/p>\n
By 2020, demanding a \u201cracial reckoning,\u201d Black Lives Matter activists somehow linked George Floyd\u2019s racist Minneapolis with Gaza, deciding both were \u201coppressed\u201d by American and Israeli \u201coppressors.\u201d They blocked Jews at the intersection, condemned for their \u201cwhite privilege,\u201d and for supporting Zionism\u2019s \u201csettler-colonialists\u201d in Israel. Without this ideological derailment, New York wouldn\u2019t have elected progressive Ugandan immigrant Zohran Mamdani, whose anti-Zionism seems antisemitic. Claiming \u201cthat when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it\u2019s been laced by the IDF,\u201d as he did, is Jew-hatred. Blaming an incident of police brutality reflecting America\u2019s racist past on Israeli soldiers 6,000 miles away falls into the \u201cblame Jews for any random evil\u201d trap.<\/p>\n
Still, there\u2019s good news embedded in this tale of regressive progressives betraying liberal expansiveness. If their predecessors could grow out of their antisemitic, anti-immigrant positions, they and their right-wing counterparts can, too. Hopefully, returning to decency won\u2019t require a Holocaust-sized reset.<\/p>\n