Jews and the Left
Liebman, Arthur
B00K IN REVIEWS - "Jews and the Left" The revolution in thought that marks off modern from pre-modern times promised political emancipation to all based on the idea of natural rights. Mysteriously, this...
...This happened because the leadership decided, after some experience of America, that "capitalism was here to stay...
...E Pluribus Unum is a provocative and spirited look at how that question came to be answered...
...The radical Jew, then, is faced with a dilemma...
...But there is no a priori reason to grant the truth of Marx's views, even in the most illiberal and oppressive of regimes...
...Liebman's chief contribution to this ongoing saga is an account of why the attraction of Jews to the radical Left has persisted...
...We are not dealing here with Randians, Carlists, Birchers, anarcho-science-fiction fans, or any of the other oddballs who pass in and out of the right wing like migrating terns...
...And the same is true of property and trade...
...Liebman simply argues that "capitalism" impoverished and to some extent "proletarianized" the Jews of Czarist Russia...
...When they went out to work among the peasantry, they discovered, to their horror, that in the peasant's eyes even a non-Jewish Jew was still a Jew...
...A28 Indianapolis, Indiana 46250 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1980 31 sprang from the Old (Jewish) Left...
...This rebirth, which the author spells out in an epilogue, will spring from the same sources whence it first saw the light of day, capitalism and antiSemitism...
...Loyalty to some kind of universalism is thus loyalty to some particularism...
...Both men were born in small towns...
...On just such shifting sands was that living impossibility, Jewish socialism, both radical and Jewish, built...
...What makes this split between two former colleagues generally interesting is their normality...
...Indeed, Liebman's account of a Jewish Left "subculture," which 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1980 could explain the perpetuation of a Jewish socialist tradition in spite of the continual falling away and hostility of the Jewish mainstream, is evidence of this fact...
...The "far Right of the Republican Party" with which Regnery moved on to associate" himself is the ideological home of millions of Americans, and the intellectual construction--built over 30 careful years--of dozens of eminently sensible thinkers...
...Cameron on Ronald Knox and His Brothers Carl F.H Henry on Issues in New Testament Theology Michael Novak on How He Has Changed His Mind J Richard Quebedeaux on the Left wing Evangelicals / L Paul Seaburu on John C. Bennett's Pseudo Niebuhrianism G.B...
...Moreover, the theory of a Jewish Left "subculture" cannot explain why Jews were attracted to radicalism in the first place...
...It has therefore robbed the whole world, human as well as natural, of its own values...
...As a radical he is also a universalist and, in thought at any rate, is beyond nationalism, religion, and all particularisms...
...The reason for this is something simply stated: Loyalty...
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...Eventually, because of their efforts, a uniquely Jewish movement, part political party and part labor union, called the Bund, emerged...
...Rather, we say to them: because you can be politically emancipated without completely and consistently abandoning Judaism, this means that political emancipation itself is not human emancipation...
...It is true that the position of the Jews, which for a brief moment in history looked relatively secure, now appears increasingly insecure...
...On the one hand, antiSemitism can be explained "scientifically" in Marx as the corruption of men by the forces of history...
...Will lead scholars to reassess some of their assumptions about the formative years of the American republic...
...But when this is done, the root problem of Jewish radicalism appears in bold relief...
...Hardcover $8.00, Paperback $3.50...
...Moreover, as the Jewish community became established, so did its particular interests and communal organizations...
...Regnery joined the publica...
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...Money is the alienated essence of man's work and being, this alien essence dominates him and he adores it...
...A fresh, vivid, and penetrating recreation of the crucial fourteen years in which a new nation was born "--New York 77rues Book Review...
...In Czarist Russia, then, and for a relatively brief but intense period in the United States, the self-contradictory phenomenon of Jewish socialism flourished...
...I am not at all sure that Felix Morley would care to be called a conservative," Regnery concurs in his Memoirs...
...Oakland, CA 94618 ClTV STATE ZrP coPE PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FOR THE RECORD Felix Morley / Regnery/Gateway / $15.00 MEMOIRS OF A DISSIDENT PUBLISHER Henry Regnery / Harcourt BraceJovanovich / $12.95 Richard Brookhiser I n the late 1940s, when rightwingers were considered hicks or pinheads, Felix Morley and Henry Regnery helped midwife the modern conservative intellectual movement, and their autobiographies offer, among other things, some interesting insights into the movement's nature and direction...
...Morley does not seem to consider, however, whether conservatives might also be right-whether all or some of those distortions might have been necessary for American survival...
...The early Russian Jewish radicals considered their fellow Jews to be "social parasites," and were drawn rather to Russian populism...
...The possibility that an openness to ideology, nourished on a diet of class h a t r e d and resentment, might be pathological is nowhere entertained by the author...
...The failure of the hopes of liberalism, the rise of a "scientific" anti-Semitism that supplemented but did not supplant the older, theological variety, the allure of an intellectual assault on the very foundations of liberalism--all played their part in bringing about Jewish participation in the political extremes of modernity...
...Liebman speaks of the "two souls" of the Jewish radical...
...Both men opposed America's entry into World War II...
...And a final word on the Jewish question: The social emancipation of the Jew implies the emancipation of society from Judaism...
...In Liebman's view it soon fell to worshipping the golden calf as it moved into "bourgeois mainstream politics...
...To try to explain this fundamental attraction, there is really no alternative but to return to the thought of the Founder...
...The response of the Jews to the modern political world may be explained by the fact that they have been among its greatest beneficiaries as well as its greatest victims...
...Morley meanwhile slipped gradually out of the mainstream...
...Indeed, it may already have started in its classic form as the group at the bottom of the economic ladder has begun to focus its grievances on the Jews...
...Under its auspices, Regnery published a series of books and pamphlets which soon grew into a separate company of his own...
...tion in its first year as treasurer...
...The defect of this view, which as far as it goes may well b e true, is of course its intellectual narrowness...
...which guarantee human rights and subordinate religion to the state, far from there being freedom from religion, there is only freedom of religion...
...Mysteriously, this revolution brought with it the appearance of the Jewish people on the stage of world politics...
...Moreover, the garment industry, traditionally weak and under-capitalized, required cooperation on the part of the union if jobs were to be maintained...
...They are thus in their numbers the most passionate defenders of liberal democracy because it subordinates religion and guarantees civil rights...
...Two causes suggest themselves...
...Regnery would presumably say that he judges the Soviet threat to be overriding...
...But, Marx observes, in North American states (he means the U.S...
...JEWS AND THE LEFT Arthur Liebman /JohnWiley& Sons / $19.95 Robert Licht radical Left and of hostility toward "capitalism...
...it also radicalized some of the i n t e l l i g e n t s i a . Thus Liebman assumes that the Marxist theory of capitalism, which served the radicals as an explanation of their own situation, is correct...
...The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of the world...
...He locates the cause in a Jewish Left "subculture," which, while not necessarily itself "radical," indeed quite middle-class in many respects, provides the ground of sympathy for the Robert Licht is a Research Fellow at the Ameman Enterprise Institute...
...Original and stimulating "--American Historical Review...
...As they did so they were transformed into political moderates, that dirtiest of words in the radical vocabulary...
...The first concerns foreign policy...
...In short, as Liebman complains, they were ruled by the "success ethic," a characteristic they brought to these shores with the mass waves of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century...
...Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things...
...Maturing, monopolistic capitalist society" will prove a hostile environment for Jews who, as small businessmen, professionals, managers, and administrators, "stand outside of the politico-economic core where real power is vested...
...But no particular credit accrues to Liebman for his predictions based upon hoary and specious Marxist premises if, given the present political climate, almost anything might come to pass...
...As one of the most sprightly written brief accounts of this turbulent era it is also likely to gain a nonacademic audience "--Annals of the American Academy...
...T h u s , what has been written many times as the history of one immigrant group's great success--and the hope of all--is seen by Liebman as but the sad decline of the glorious promise of adical socialism, done in by the unrelenting pressure of Jewish particularism and its attraction to, and support for, liberal democracy...
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...Yet, on the other hand, Marx also teaches that the spirit of Judaism is what corrupts and prevents full human emancipation...
...Why the parting of ways...
...The Human Events of the 1940s was an analytical journal, more like the Freeman of Albert J. Nock than the brassy dope sheet it is today...
...He now defines himself as "essentially 'Libertarian' "--though "it is with great reluctance that I yield the old Richard Brookbiser is an editor at National Review...
...The fact is, however, that as a purely intellectual phenomenon Marxism has been powerfully alluring to certain intellectuals...
...In the expansive economy following the Second World War this fact was treated by Jewish organizations as a "status irritant" rather than "a major stumbling block to Jewish mobility...
...Marx, in a review, takes issue with Bruno Bauer, who had argued that for the Jews to achieve social and political emancipation, all men must be emancipated from religion, which would disappear were it subordinated to the state...
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...This, together with the oppressive anti-Semitic policies and pogroms of the Czars, forced the radicals back into the Jewish community where, gradually overcoming their prejudices, they learned to work among their own people...
...What is required then is human emancipation, and liberal democratic regimes cannot bring that about because, not to put too fine a point on it, they are infected with the spirit of Judaism: Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may stand...
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...Various points of view are presented...
...Although there was a large, homogeneous Jewish working class centered on the garment industry, and although a socialist Jewish labor movement arose after a time, it failed to remain socialist, i.e., radically socialist...
...Human Events marked a juncture, a switching point, afteL which the thinking of the two men began slowly, glacially, to diverge...
...Peter L. Berger on Religion and the AmeriCan Future Donald G. Bloesch, Thomas Howard, and Robert E. Webber on the Chicago Call J.M...
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...Whatever the reality of the Soviet threat...
...Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, which is one extreme, saw in political autonomy the only hope for full entry on the basis of human equality into the modern world...
...But the escape in thought does not overcome the particularism that is imputed to him by others or, paradoxically, that may still reside in his heart...
...Both learned to be skeptical of big government from close contact with it: Regnery spent two disillusioning years in the Resettlement Adrfiinistration...
...Morley, cherishing the structure of checks and balances in foreign as well as domestic policy, maintains he is only being consistent...
...Rather, it would be but one consequence of an impoverishment--p0ssibly already in its initial stages--of all Americans, brought about more by accumulated confusion, ineptitude, and politial paralysis than by actual malice...
...to some particularity is at the heart of human decency...
...By fleeing to radicalism in the name of freedom the Jew does not escape or overcome hatred or contempt for the Jews, but finds a new and darker form of it in himself...
...They are excluded, except for a few anomalies, from the executive suites, and the "corporate power-elite" is "objectively" anti-Semitic...
...In other words: Big government is bad...
...The "old fashioned" liberalism, or "Libertarianism," to which Morley owes allegiance springs neither from a morbid interest in economics, nor from gaseous philosophizing about the individual and his prelapsarian prerogatives, but from a deep-seated reverence for the federal system of the Founders...
...His god is 0nly the illusion of exchange...
...But if the Jews have proved a burden to radicalism, they have also been a source of renewal from which, the author predicts, we shall see a rebirth of Jewish radicalism, just as in the 1950s and 1960s the New Left Dbertyt ess LlbertyC s :s E Pluribus Unum The Formation of the American Republic 1776-1790 By Forrest McDonald Having won their independence from England, the American colonies faced a new question of paramount importance: Would this be politically one nation, or would it not...
...Although in this way a socialistic Jewish labor movement was created, the leadership never succeeded in radicalizing the Jewish workers...
...Tennyson on the Rumors about TS E l i o t Sheldon Vanauken on the Ordination of Women Dale Vree on Worshiping the Zeitgeist It's time for you to discover the New Oxford Review, a unique and fresh monthly magazine...
...So we do not say to the Jews, as Bauer does: You cannot be emancipated politically without emancipating yourselves radically from Judaism...
...At the other extreme, the radical Left has attracted, and continues to attract, a disproportionate number of Jews, in part no doubt because it promised to do away with the root causes of human inequality, and therewith the "Jewish question...
...But, according to Liebman, in a shrinking economy it is a serious threat, because the decisions made by the "power elite" will inevitably go against the economic interests of-the Jews, who are on the economic periphery no matter how prosperous they might now appear...
...terminology of 'liberal' to the socialists...
...Highly readable and highly recommended "--Library Journal...
...Morley covered the Washington bureaucracy for the Philadelphia North American during World War I. In 1944, after six years on the staff of the Baltimore Sun and seven years--and a Pulitzer Prize-as editor of the Washington Post, Morley helped Frank Hanighen found a four-page newsletter called Human Events...
...military preparations yield big govern32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1980...
...He left Human Events over policy disagreements in 1950 ("Frank [Hanighen] and Henry," he says in For the Record, "moved on to associate with the far Right in the Republican Party...
...It is a problem that Marxism, I believe, cannot solve...
...Morley also opposes special exertions against the Soviet Union today...
...Money debases all the gods of man and turns them into commodities...
...He prefers to be known as an old fashioned liberal...
...As Liebman's account so graphically reveals, the self-expurgation of the particular was too high a price to pay for the majority of Jewish radicals...
...Morley of course is right--the Third World War has disequilibrated our institutions as badly as the Second...
...It is a sociological history of the Jewish radical Left in the United States and its antecedents in Czarist Russia...
...However, any systematic impoverishment of the Jews would not be the result of monopolistic capital and the "objective" hostility of the "power elite...
...Exchange is the actual god of the Jew...
...But liberal democracy is fragile, and its failures far outnumber its successes...
...In America, however, "political and socio-economic conditions soon forced most Jewish Leftists to make a choice of being Jewish or Socialistic...
...To order this book, or for a copy of our catalog, write: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...And since it was as well a work-place that permitted upward mobility, and the Jewish workers had brought their aspirations with them, they remained unradicalized, just as in Russia...
...An ambitious book that may be admired for its unraveling and reweaving of many threads, it is nonetheless flawed from the outset by its Marxist fundamentalism...
...Both religious and secular issues are addressed...
...ATTENTION: Evangelicals, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Other Believers Did You Miss...
...B 0 0 K R E V I E W S The revolution in thought that marks off modern from pre-modern times promised political emancipation to all based on the idea of natural rights...
...Arthur Liebman's massive and prolix study, Jews and the Left, sets out to supply a portion of the painfully ironic and self-destructive history of Jewish radicalism...
...begins a typical sentence...
...Emphasis is given to enhancing understanding between Catholics and Evangelicals...
...The origins of Jewish socialism in the United States are to be found in Czarist Russia...
...For the next 30 years, the Henry Regnery Company introduced most of the seminal works of American conservatism, including the second book of an obscure Michigan history instructor named Russell Kirk, and the first book of a recent Yale graduate, William F. Buckley, Jr...
...They resisted the notion of working-class consciousness and solidarity against the bourgeoisie and bosses because they thought of themselves as presumptive employers...
...The union leaders developed close ties to the organized community...
...In such an event, there would, of course, be scapegoating...
Vol. 13 • January 1980 • No. 1
