| 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
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] "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] "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
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 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,
"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
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
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,
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
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
Judaism and possessed
little or no formal Jewish education, remained
an essential part of
the mission of those Jews who believed they had
"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
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
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] Howard Sachar notes
more deeply the case of Hungary where
"a free election took
place in November 1945, and the communists won
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
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'
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]
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
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,
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
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 ... 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. 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
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
"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
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 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]
Stephan
Korbanski also notes that the Soviet Communist secret police
"team assembled by
Berman [whose brother Adolf was chairman of
the Jewish Committee in Poland till 1947,
when he immigrated to Israel]
[CHECINSKI, M., 1982,
p. 85] at the beginning of his rule were all
Jewish -- Vice
Minister Natan Grunsapau-Kikiel (Roman
Romkowski) [who once
interrogated Korbanski], and other high officials
like General Julius
Hibner (David Schwartz), Anatol Fejgin, security
police chief Joseph
Swiatlo, Joseph Rozanski (Goldberg), 'Colonel
Czaplicki,' and Zygmut
Okret. These were not the only Jewish officials
who oppressed Poles in
the name of communism. Victor Klosiewicz, a
member of the Communist Council of State,
has stated that 'it was
unfortunate that all
the department directors in the Ministry of State
were Jews.'"
[KORBANSKI, p. 78]
"Jacek
Rozanski," notes Polish author Jacek Borkowicz, was "director of the
Investigative Department of the Polish State Security Ministry" and was
"sentenced in 1955 to five years imprisonment [a later trial in 1957
sentenced him to fifteen years]" for "using inadmissible means of
persuasion during interrogations ... Son of a prominent Warsaw
Yiddish-language journalist (on the pro-Zionist 'Hajnt'), Rozanski was a
dedicated communist who .. maintained his Jewish identity until the end."
[BORKOWICZ, p. 343-344] "All the detainees described [Rozanski] as an
exceptionally cynical and sadistic psychopath who liked to torture
prisoners needlessly," notes Jewish author Michael Checinski, "...
Rozanski's Jewish origin was then common knowledge, in spite of his
Polonized name." [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 80]
The
aforementioned Anatol Fejgin was head of the "Tenth Department of the
Polish State Security Ministry -- the special unit answerable to the Party
First Secretary and concerned with spying on the communist leadership [and
he] was sentenced at the same trial in 1957 to twelve years'
imprisonment." [BORKOWICZ, p. 344]
Jewish author Michael Checinski notes the post-World War II case of
Semyon Davidov who
"held the
relatively modest post of head of Soviet advisers in
Poland.
But no
serious operational decisions on any question pertaining
to
political
provocations or police terror could ever be taken
without
Davidov's
consent. On the one hand, Davidov and his personal
network
supervised the activities of the Soviet advisers in all
the
mainstays
of real power in Poland (the armed forces,
security
service,
party apparatus, state administration, and industry).
But
he also
was responsible for overseeing the entire Polish
apparatus
of
terror." [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 51]
Abel
Kainer (a pseudonym of Stanislaw Krajewski, a Polish Jew) adds
that
"The archetype of the
Jew during the first ten years of the Polish
People's Republic was
generally perceived as an agent of the secret
political police. It
is true that under Bierut and Gomulka (prior to
1948)
the key positions in the Ministry of
State Security were held by Jews or
persons of Jewish
background. It is a fact which cannot be
overlooked, little
known in the West and seldom mentioned by the
Jews of Poland. Both
prefer to talk about Stalin's anti-Semitism ....
The machinations of
communist terror functioned in Poland in a matter
[sic] similar to that used in other
communist ruled countries in Europe.
What requires
explanation is why it is operated by Jews. The
reason
was the political
police, the base of communist rule, required
personnel
of unquestionable
loyalty to communism. These were people who had
joined the Party
before the war and in Poland they were predominately
Jewish. " [KORBANSKI, p.
79]
"The feeling
that Jews are oppressors probably sounds absurd to many westerners," wrote
Stanislaw Krajewski, under his own name. "The only sense it has derives
from the Jewish participation in the oppressive rule in Poland, and in
particular the fact that a lot of Jews looked favorably at the Soviet
occupation of eastern Poland in 1939." [KRAJEWSKI, p. 50] Most Poles did
not look favorably at such a scenario. World War II was a struggle for
them on two fronts -- in the West against the Nazi fascists, and in the
East against the Russian communists.
Even a Jewish
scholar/polemicist like Robert Wistrich, who expresses astonishment that
one-third of West Germany after World War II still felt that anti-Semitism
was primarily caused by "Jewish characteristics," concedes that
"After the Polish
communist seizure of power in 1948 there were
indeed a number of
Jews like Jakob Berman, Hilary Minc, and
Roman Zambrowski, who
did play key roles in the party, the
security services, and economic
planning. No doubt they were
considered by Moscow
as being less susceptible than the Catholic
majority to Polish
nationalist feelings, though in the eyes of many
Poles they were little
better than agents of a foreign, semi-colonial
power ... the anti-communist underground
was convinced that
Jews were deliberately
betraying Poland." [WISTRICH, AIE, p. 271]
In
another, related, example of the usual sharp double standard of Jewish
morality and responsibility, in an article entitled, "Lithuania May Charge
Jews for Crimes Against Humanity," in December 1997 the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency reported the Lithuanian response to a
Jewish-lobbied letter by thirty United States Congressmen to the president
of Lithuania, insisting that he "put suspected [World War II] criminals on
trial." Kazys Pednycia, the prosecutor general of Lithuania, "alarmed
local Jewish leaders" by announcing that his office "would not only study
the massacres of Jews committed by both Germans and Lithuanians during the
war, but also crimes committed by Jews against Lithuanians when the
country was under Soviet control."
"Of course there were Jews who suffered from Lithuanians," said
Pednycia, "But there were also just the opposite cases, and we all know
that." "The presence of Jews in the Soviet secret police," noted JTA
reporter Lev Krichevsky, "has prompted many Lithuanians to share the
sentiments expressed by the prosecutor general." The chairman of the Jewish
community in Lithuania, Simonas Alperavicius, responded to the
prosecutor's comments about Jews by declaring them "absolutely false,"
"non-ethical," and "historically wrong." [KRISCHEVSKY, Lith, p. 16]
Jewish
pre-eminence in communist terrorist police organizations in the Ukraine
was the same. A Canadian of Ukrainian descent, Lubomyr Prytulak, notes a
1997 volume published in his homeland entitled "The Jewish Conquest of the
Slavs." It was produced by Security Service of the Ukraine, today's state
police agency. In tabulating the nationalities of 183 biographies in the
volume of leading officials in the terrorist Soviet secret police agencies
(the dreaded Cheka-GPU-NKVD), Prytulak notes, on average, about six out of
ten such people were Jewish. This percentage doesn't include, of course,
those who successfully hid their Jewish identities, a practice common in
Eastern Europe. As Prytulak concludes,
"One possible
reason that Jews incessantly paint the false image
of
themselves as
victims of Ukrainians is because of the reality
that
Ukrainians have
been among the foremost victims of Jews ... A
more thoughtful
examination of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism
reveals many
reasons for viewing it -- at least in some of its
manifestations
-- not as an irrational and unexplainable and
gratuitous
hatred, but as a natural and understandable
antipathy
from an
acquaintance with Jewish misbehavior." [PRYTULAK]
Richard Rhodes
notes the prominence of Bela Kun and other Jewish communist elite in
Hungary, and future (Jewish) nuclear bomb scientist Edward Teller's family
there:
"The leaders of
the Commune and many among its officials were
Jewish ... Max
Teller warned his son that anti-Semitism was coming.
Teller's mother
expressed her fears more vividly. 'I shiver at what my
people are
doing,' she told her son's governess in the heyday of
the
Commune. 'When
this is over there will be a terrible revenge.'"
[RHODES, R.,
1986, p. 111-112]
Bela Kun, notes
Louis Rapoport,
"a Jew, [was] the
cruel tyrant of the 1919 Communist revolution in
Hungary and later
Stalin's chief of terror in the Crimea." [RAPOPORT,
In Russia, the
"home" of communism, the preeminence of Jews in oppressive state
departments, including the terrorist secret police, and the enforced
starving of millions, was the same. [See details -- Genrikh Yagoda, head
of the secret police; Lazar Kaganovich, head of the "Apparatus of Terror,"
Jewish dominance of the Soviet concentration camp system, et al --
earlier] As Richard Pipes notes: "Unlike the mass murder of Jews by the
Nazis, every aspect which is known in sickening detail, even the general
course of the Communist holocaust of 1918-1920 remains concealed." [PIPES,
R., 1990, p. 823]
The following
observation is written by a Jewish author, Shmuel Ettinger, with the
normal Jewish framing of Russian perception about the subject as
irrationally anti-Semitic:
"There is a
tendency in Russian intellectual circles "to view the
Bolshevik
Revolution as an essentially non-Russian phenomenon,
which took place
under the influence of the minority nations in the
Russian empire,
chiefly the Jews. There are those who regard the
political terror
as a phenomenon connected mainly with the Jews
(this element is
to be found in, or inferred from [Nobel laureate]
Aleksander
Solzhenitsyn, the [communist] oppositionist, and
Valentin Kataev,
the official writer). Such an attitude is also
behind militant
anti-Semitism, born in publicistic writings and
in
belles-lettres, portraying the Jews as plotters who, since
Peter
the Great, have
sought to harm Russia and are now corrupting
Soviet society.
In this manner anti-Jewish pogroms and measures
in the past are
presented as protests against exploitations." [ETTINGER,
In
communist Poland, according to Pinek Maka (a Jew), the Secretary of
Security for Silesia, the number of Jewish officers in the dreaded OSS
(the secret police organization) was 150 to 225 (as much as 75% of the
total) -- merely in his own jurisdiction. [SACH, p. 175] Another Jewish OSS officer, Barek
Edelstein, estimated that 90% of the Jews of Kattowitz disguised
themselves with Polish names. Josef Musial, the Vice Minister for Justice
in Poland in 1990, suggested that most officers in the OSS throughout
Poland had been Jewish. [SACK, p. 183]
In 1992, when
Shlomo Morel, a Jew still living in Poland, was interrogated by Polish
authorities who were looking into his past as the commandant of a
post-World War II communist concentration camp for Germans and nationalist
Poles, "Shlomo went home, wrote a cousin in Israel, asked him for $490,
and the next month, in January 1992, took the first plane that he could to
Tel Aviv," leaving his Catholic wife behind. [SACH, p. 166] In an
interview with Jewish journalist John Sack, Morel advised him that he must
not write about the story of Jewish dominance and brutality in the OSS
"because it would increase anti-Semitism." [SACH, p.
169]
Surviving
prisoners under Morel's rein had testified that:
* "The
commandant was Morel, a Hun in human form."
* "The
commandant was Morel, a Schweinehund without
equal."
* "The
commandant, Morel, appeared. The clubs and the dog
whips
rained down on us. My nose was broken, and my ten nails were
beaten blue. They later fell off."
*
"The commandant, Morel, arrived. I saw him with my own eyes
kill
After
World War II, writes Richard Lucas, "Jews in [Polish] cities and towns
displayed Red flags to welcome Soviet troops, helped to disarm Polish
soldiers, and filled administrative positions in Soviet-occupied Poland.
One report estimated that seventy-five per cent of all the top
administrative posts in the cities of Lwow, Bialystok, and Luck were in
Jewish hands during Soviet occupation ... The entire character of the
University of Lwow changed during the Soviet occupation. Prior to the war,
the percentage of students broke down as follows: Poles, 70 per cent;
Ukrainians 15 per cent; Jews 15 per cent. After the Soviets, the
percentage changed to 3 per cent, 12 per cent, and 85 per cent,
respectively." [LUCAS, p. 128]
"The evidence,
"observed Jewish commentator Aleksander Smolar, "is overwhelming: large
numbers of Jews welcomed the Soviet invasion, implanting in Polish memory
the image of Jewish crowds greeting the invading Red Army as their
liberator." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 50] "Thousands of Polish survivors'
testimonies, memoirs, and works of history," notes Polish scholar Tadeusz
Piotrowski, "tell of Jewish celebrations, of Jewish harassment of Poles,
of Jewish collaboration (denunciations, manhunts, and roundups of Poles
for deportation), of Jewish brutality and cold-blooded executions, of
Jewish pro-Soviet citizens' committees and militias, and of the high rates
of Jews in the Soviet organs of oppression after the Soviet invasion of
1939." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 51]
Testimony to the
Jewish Polish response to the Soviet invasion of Poland includes the
following Jewish accounts, from the archives of the Yad Vashim Holocaust
organization in Israel:
"When the Bolsheviks
entered the Polish territories they displayed a
great
distrust of the Polish
people, but with complete faith in the Jews ...
they
filled all the
administrative offices with Jews and also entrusted them
with
top level positions."
[from the town of Grodno]
"I must note that,
from the very first, the majority of positions in the
Soviet agencies were
taken by Jews." [from the town of Lwow]
"The Russians rely
mainly on the Jewish element in filling positions,
segregating,
naturally, the bourgeois from the proletariat." [from the
town of Zolkwia]
"A Jewish doctor
recalled how local Jewish youths, having formed
themselves into a 'komsomol,' toured the
countryside, smashing
Catholic shrines."
[near the town of Jaworow]
"Whenever a
[pro-Soviet] political march, or protest meeting, or some
other sort of joyful
event took place, the visual effect was always the
same -- Jews." [from the town of
Lwow]
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 49 -
As Piotrowski notes, these comments have
been edited out of an
English translation of the source volume,
originally published
in Polish]
"The
victims of the reign of terror imposed by Stalin and carried out by his
Jewish subordinates," says Stephan Korbanski,
"during
the first ten years of the war numbered tens of thousands.
Most of them were Poles who had
fought against the Germans in
the
resistance movement. The communists judged, quite correctly,
that such
Poles were the people most likely to oppose the Soviet
rule and
were therefore to be exterminated. The task was assigned
to the
Jews because they were thought to be free of Polish
patriotism,
Korbanski then
goes on to name and detail 29 more Jewish officials (beyond the ones
earlier mentioned) of the communist elite that held positions in
suppressing Polish nationalism. But political winds in the communist world
shifted drastically. Between
1967 and 1968 over 900 Jewish communist officials were purged from Kremlin
ranks; Korbanski sees a direct link to Israel's 1967 military victory over
the Arabs. Russia had backed the Arabs and Jewish Russian loyalties -- per
Israel -- were put into question. [KORBANSKI, p.
85]
"In places like
Gleibwitz," writes John Sack, "the Poles stood against the prison walls as
Implementation tied them to big iron rings, said, 'Ready! Aim! Fire!,'
shot them, and told the Polish guards, 'Don't talk about this.' The
guards, being Poles, weren't pleased, but the Jacobs, Josefs, and Pinteks,
the office's brass [of the Office of State Security] stayed loyal to
Stalin, for they thought of themselves as Jews, not as Polish patriots ...
Stalin ... had hired all the Jews on Christmas Eve, 1943, and packed them
into his Office of State Security, his instrument in the People's Republic
of Poland. And now, 1945, the Poles went to war with the Office, shooting
at Jews in Intelligence, Interrogation, and Imprisonment." [SACK, p.
139]
All this, of
course, including the Poles own struggle for survival under Nazi rule, the
role of Jews in the brutal communist oppression of Polish nationalism,
traditional self-imposed Jewish estrangement from Polish society, and
Jewish docile acquiescence to Nazi rule is part of the unscholarly "gutter
literature" that the likes of David Engel and mainstream Jewry speak.
In 1984, a Polish
journalist, Teresa Toranska, had this interchange with Jacob Berman, the
despised Jewish former "Minister of State Security" in post-war communist
Poland:
Berman: "I was against too large a concentration of Jews in
certain
institutions ... it wasn't the right thing to do and it was a
necessary evil that we'd been forced into when
we
[communists] took power when the Polish intelligentsia
was boycotting us...
Q: In 1948-49 you
arrested members of the [Polish] Home
Army Council of Aid to Jews, the 'Zegata' ... Mr. Berman!
The security services who were all or nearly all Jews
arrested
Berman: ... It was
wrong that that happened. Certainly it was wrong
...
enormous risks to look after Jews during the war."
[TORANSKA, p. 321]
Toranska also talked to Roman
Werbel, a prominent Jewish communist ideologue and editor of major Polish
communist journals, who discussed the implications of the brutality
wrought by Jewish security officers upon Poles in fomenting
anti-Semitism:
"Beating causes degradation not
only in the person who is beaten,
but in the person
doing the beating as well. So it's better to shoot
someone than to beat
him ... There are principals you have to
stick to in beating,
however Johnny has to be beaten by Johnny
and not Moshe ... I
can see now that there were too many Jews in
the security
services." [TORANSKA, p. 109]
Jewish apologist
Michael Checinski (whose world view of Poland is fed by the omnipresent
anti-Semitism model, whereby even in the act of oppression of Poles, Jews
are themselves considered victims of an anti-Jewish plot concocted by an
anti-Semitic communist regime) argues that
"while by coincidence
or evil design, Jewish officials were often placed
in the most conspicuous posts; hence they
could easily be blamed for
all the regime's
crimes ...[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 62] ... Jews --
and
especially those with
Jewish names or striking Semitic features -- could
be placed in the most
controversial posts (for example, those dealing
with Church affairs or
the campaign against the political underground)
and thus deflect
antiregime feelings into anti-Semitism. This policy
was
implemented not only in Poland, but
throughout Eastern Europe, where
the new [communist]
governments, ruling only with the military support
of the Soviet army,
were seen by their own peoples as puppets."
[CHECINSKI, M., 1982,
p. 63]
In 1999, the
government of Poland was still seeking to try a Jewish woman, Helena Brus
(now living in England), who in the post-World War II communist regime was
Poland's chief military prosecutor. Polish investigators, noted the
Jerusalem Report, say "that Brus ... played a key role in the trial
and execution of a hero of the Polish resistance, General Emil Fieldorf
... The anti-Communist Fieldorf, hanged after a one-day trial in 1953 but
posthumously pardoned in 1989, was an intelligence officer in the
underground Polish Home Army in World War II." [WINNER, D., p.
37]
In
1994, the New York Times discussed the case against Marcel
Reich-Ranicki, a well-known German Jewish literary critic who had
emigrated from Poland. "He was forced to admit his involvement with the
Polish secret police from 1944 to 1950," says Carol Oppenheim, "after his
name turned up on the front page of a Warsaw newspaper publishing excerpts
from a secret Polish intelligence archive." [OPPENHEIM, p.
39]
"Hundreds of
Jews," writes Jewish author John Sack, "were operating in all of Poland
and Poland-administered Germany ... [SACK, p. 6] ... Many [officers of the
OSS] were Jewish boys but few used Jewish names ... [SACK, p. 39] ... The
talk was in Yiddish, mostly ... About three out of four of the officers --
two hundred rowdy boys -- in
the Office of State Security in Kattowitz [Poland's large industrial city]
were Jews ... They used names like Stanislaw Niegoslawski, a name that
belonged to a [Polish prisoner]." [SACH, p. 40]
There are even more profound Holocaust-era facts that the Jewish community vehemently strives to bury. While on the one hand the Jewish community wields the "We Shall Never Forget" injunction about their Holocaust, the facts of Jewish-created mass murder are forcibly covered up. In 1993, for instance, Jewish journalist John Sack published the results of his interviews with 23 Jewish OSS (the communist secret police in post-war Poland) officers and 55 family members or friends of Jewish members of the dreaded OSS. The book, not surprisingly, has been subject to a concerted and massive censorial effort [see later chapter]. Sack was shocked with what he found in his seven years of research on the subject: 60,000-80,000 Germans and Poles were murdered in Jewish-run concentration camps, "more than the number of [Jews] who died at Belsen and Buchenwald." [SACH, p. 14] "Jews," says
Sack, "were sometimes as cruel as their [Nazi] exemplars at Auschwitz, and
they even ran the organization that ran the prisons and ... the
concentration camps for German civilians in Poland and Poland-administered
Germany ... The Jews who committed [atrocities] covered them up ... I
learned that in 1945 they killed a great number of Germans: not Nazis, not
Hitler trigger men, but German civilians, German men, women, children,
babies, whose 'crime' was just to be German ... The Germans lost more civilians
[this way than] ... the Jews themselves lost in all of Poland's pogroms.
So I had learned, and I was aghast to learn it." [SACK, p. x] Sack notes
Jewish torturers sticking toads down peoples' throats, whippings, and some
buried alive in potato sacks. A hundred non-Jews at the Myslowitz
concentration camp, for instance, were murdered each day. [SACK, p.
110] The death rate in some
Jewish-controlled camps was 80%. [SACK, p. 206]
Simply the
reporting of facts is, for many Jews, a manifestation of anti-Semitism.
Note this letter by a Polish Jew to a Jewish magazine in
1998:
"Recently,
[Polish] Panorama TV News showed a report about
Jaworzno camp,
where members or suspected members of
independence
fighters groups (many of them were Ukrainians),
were imprisoned
with the statement that it is difficult today to
find traces of
the camp, for the buildings which had housed the
inmates had been
converted into regular housing, the barracks
have been
dismantled and the former commander had left for
Israel. My
husband was outraged by this conclusion, and he
said that such a
blatantly anti-Semitic statement on a public new
broadcast is
sheer manipulation." [MAKOWIECKA, A., p. 3] In the 1980s,
John Sack paid a visit to Yad Vashem to search for information about the
hundreds of Jews who ran the murderous post-war concentration camps under
the auspices of the Office for State Security for Germans and
anti-communist Poles. Virtually all former Jewish OSS members have
successfully hidden their past and many had moved to America. One such
person has become the "vice-president of the United Synagogues of America
and a chairman of the United Jewish Appeal." [SACK, p.
151]
Yad Vashem's
repository, writes Sack,
"had fifty million pages, five, on
the average, per [Jewish] man, woman,
and child, a mile-long
tunnel of pages, all indexed, all catalogued, so I
was surprised it had
nothing at all on the Office of State Security [of
Eastern Europe] or the
Jews who had run it." [SACK, p. 148]
The
director of the Holocaust center told Sack the facts he had thus far
uncovered were "imaginary":
"'Impossible!' the
Director said ... [He glowered] at me as though
he would choke me, a
man who might someday write that the Jews
sometimes killed the Germans [and Poles]
when all the fifty million
pages said it was the
other way around." [SACK, p. 148]
Sack's
investigation at Vad Yashem did turn up, however, the intriguing fact that
the vice-chairman of this vast Holocaust propaganda post had himself
served as an officer in the notorious OSS. He had even been a torturer, a
"heavy-handed interrogator" at the Neisse concentration camp. "I was
terrible," he told Sack. "But better not to speak about this." [SACK, p. 148-149] And
while angry Jewish scholarship fingers Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and
other Nazi collaborators as moral beasts to be hunted down still today
throughout the world, parallel Jewish criminals are never even mentioned.
Popular Jewish convention demands collective Jewish innocence and a
correspondingly collective Gentile evil. Period. In this context,
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski addresses today's chronic double standard held for
Jews and Poles in the World War II situation:
"While the Polish
masses are criticized or condemned for their
reluctance to help the
Jews ... a double standard is applied towards
those members of the
Jewish community who worked in Jewish
Councils ... [They]
are excused, on the grounds that they had little
choice, much more
willingly than those Gentiles whose caution or
fear prevented them
from offering help to Jews ... Most Poles
particularly resent
this application of a double standard to those
Jewish individuals who
were active in, and high-ranking members
of the Communist
Party, and especially the security police ... No
one ... can claim that
he or (very often) she had to be a member of
the Stalinist
political force or judiciary and, for one reason or another,
had no choice but to
torture and kill their innocent political
opponents." [BARTO,
Conv, p. 29] JEWISH
COMMUNIST SPIES
Investigations of Jewish loyalties are not unwarranted. The issue of dual loyalty in the spy context, for example, has a very substantial history in the American Jewish community with some disturbing precedents during the post-World War II American-Soviet "Cold War." In recent years, with the collapse of the Soviet Union's communist regime, KGB and FBI archives have been increasingly accessible for scholarly examination and it is has become starkly clear that a large proportion of American spies for communist Russia were Jewish. They were instrumental in helping the Soviet Union secure American nuclear bomb secrets, as well as other espionage. In the 1950s, notes Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, "fear that the Jewishness of so many of the atom-bomb spy suspects would provoke an anti-Semitic reaction led to a defensive attempt [by Jewish organizations] to prove the patriotism of America's Jewish community and 'scare off' Jews who might be attracted to the Left." [RADOSH/MILTON, p. 353] "What has proven
most disturbing," noted the Jewish Exponent in 1999,
"is the picture we
have of the extent of the betrayal -- truly overwhelming
in sheer bulk. The
fact that many Jewish [American] radicals
participated
in espionage [for
Russia] sticks in peoples' throats ... Spies, spies
everywhere ... [Recent
books about the subject] are invaluable for what
they add to our
knowledge of the [Cold War] period and may yet spur a
bout of soul-searching among the remnants
of the progressive community
Kevin MacDonald
notes the 1950s case of Andhil Fineberg of the American Jewish Committee
and his exploring of Jewish defensive strategies over
the
"repercussions of the fact that the great majority of communist
spies
were Jews
... Fineberg suggested that the best way to combat this
threat to
Jews was to de-emphasize Jewish group identity of
'good
Jews' like
Bernard Baruch as well as a 'bad Jews' like the communist
spies.
Identifying people like Bernard Baruch as Jews 'reinforces
the
concept of
group responsibility' and 'the residue in the mind of
the
average
American person whom the editorial is intended to
influence,
is likely
to be, 'But why is it all those atomic spies are all
Jews?'
Fineberg
argued that an attempt by Communist Party members to
portray
their persecution as anti-Semitism would be 'devastating' to
Jews
generally and recommended that the AJCommitttee reply to
charges
linking Jews and communism to the effect that 'criminals
operate as
individuals, not as members of religious or racial groups.'"
[MACDONALD, p. 25]
A variety of
people of course functioned as spies during the Cold War, but among the
disturbing implications of such recent revelations is that the Soviet side of the Russian
spy system was in large part Jewish too; a critical examination of the
Soviet transnational spy system points in no small way to Jewish networking. As
high-ranking KGB officer Pavel Sudoplatev noted in 1994, "The men and
women [in Russia] who were most influential in acquiring atomic bomb
secrets for the Soviet Union were all later purged because they were
Jewish [i.e., Soviet intelligence officers were eventually driven from the
ranks because of allegations of a 'Zionist conspiracy' within it]."
[SUDOPLATEV]
"Allen Weinstein's study, Perjury, seems to indicate that Jews constituted a substantial majority of known members of the Soviet underground apparatus in the United States during the 1930s. Soviet agents whose backgrounds were probably Jewish include J. Peters, Lee Pressman, Harry Dexter White, Marian Bachrach, Hedda Gompertz, and many others." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 100] On the American
side of the Soviet spy network, perhaps the most famous spy case in
American history centered on two Jewish communists -- Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg -- who were convicted and executed in 1953 for passing along
secrets to the Soviet Union. Harry Gold and David Greenglass were also
Jewish accomplices. Until recent intelligence disclosures, for decades
many Jews have held that the Rosenbergs "were blameless [and] ... that the
couple had been framed by the FBI and had been executed out of a mixture
of anti-Semitism and the government's wish to set an example to all
self-professed radicals." Recent investigations, however, noted the
Jewish Exponent, "had to conclude that their subjects were guilty
as charged." [LEITER, 2-4-99, p. 57]
Curiously, "by
design or destiny," also said the Exponent, "all the principals in
the [Rosenberg] case were Jews. The presiding judge was Irving Kaufman,
the prosecutor Irving Saypole was assisted by Roy Cohn, and the defense
lawyers were Alexander and Emmanuel Bloch, father and son. To redress the
balance, the jury was all gentile." [LUVIA, Y., 7-2-93, p. 1x] (This
situation paralleled a similar court case in South Africa, the Rivonia
trial, where there was a "prevalence of Jews in the [Communist] Party ...
In a striking echo of the Rosenberg Trial in this country," notes David
Biale, the prosecuting attorney, Percy Yutar, was himself Jewish and may
have been partly motivated to show that Jews could be loyal to the
regime.") [BIALE, D., 2000, p. 64]
"The
[Rosenberg] jury complexion, noted the Toronto Star in 1986, "has
prompted charges that the Rosenbergs were victims of an anti-Semitic
cabal." [AGES, A., p. M5] By 1999, however, the Jewish Exponent noted
that "with the unearthing of voluminous evidence from the files of the FBI
and the Kremlin, those who cling to the notion that Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg and [Gentile] Alger Hiss were innocent deserve to be compared to
people who believe the world is flat." [TOBIN, J., 3-11-95, p.
33]
Peter Novick notes the dimensions of Jewish communist spies in that era: "Lucy Dawidowicz -- later well known as an historian of the Holocaust, but in these years the American Jewish Committee's expert on the percentage of Jews among 'hostile witnesses' before various investigative bodies. Jews, she found, often made up 75 percent or more of the totals. Worst of all, producing something near panic among mainstream Jewish organizations, was the number of Jews figuring in espionage prosecutions: the Amerasia case, the Canadian Spy Ring, the Judith Coplon case -- culminating in that ultimate disaster for Jewish public relations, the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, Harry Gold, and David Greenglass." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 92] There was also
Nathan Silvermaster, "a Russian-born economist who worked for the
[American] Farm Securities Administration [and] established a network of
friends in government to provide Soviets material and to aid the U.S.S.R.
during World War II." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 189] Jewish-Russian Isak Akhmerov was
the Soviet control officer of Yakov Golos (also Jewish), "the chief
organizer of espionage activities through the American communist party."
[SUDOPLATOV, p. 219] Gregory
Kheifetz, Jewish too and one of the main organizers of the American
Communist Party, had worldwide assignments from the Russians. [SUDOPLATOV,
p. 84-85] Soviet agent Naum Isakovich Eitingen "used his connections in
the [American] Jewish community to obtain new papers and identity."
[SUDOPLATOV, p. 79] The Rosenberg's Russian case officer was also Jewish,
Sam Semyonov (real name: Abe Taubman).
Controversial,
prominent, and fabulously wealthy Jewish entrepreneur and art
philanthropist Armand Hammer had long been under suspicion -- he was
called by his secretary "the Pimp of the Politburo." [KUROPAS, p. 7]
"Armand and his father," notes Edward Epstein, "had become crucial parts
of the Soviet clandestine organization [in America] ... [EPSTEIN, 1996, p. 103] ... By
1940, British intelligence had developed a lengthy dossier on Hammer. It
identified him and his associates as part of the Soviet 'secret regime' in
the West." [EPSTEIN, 1996, p. 152] FBI files notes that Hammer "had been a
Soviet courier," "he had laundered funds for the Soviet Union," "he had
helped recruit Soviet spies and position them in the United States
government," and "he had been, in the 1920s, a key link in a network that
provided money to espionage rings in New York and London." [EPSTEIN, 1996,
p. 170]
Carl Blumay notes the
fundamentally Jewish nature of Hammer's contacts in early Soviet
Russia:
"From the moment of his arrival [in
Russia] he was surrounded by old
family friends, among
them Ludwig Martens, whom Lenin had appointed
to head the Soviet
mining industry after his deportation from the
United
States; Boris
Reinstein, whose functions as Soviet propaganda
minister
included serving as
guide to visiting Americans; Julius Hammer's
[Armand's father's]
partner, Abe Heller, whom the State Department
categorized as 'a
notorious Bolshevik'; and the Hammer family's
European
representative, Boris Mishell, whose first assignment was
to
locate a Mercedes Benz
for Armand." [BLUMAY, C., 1992, p. 43]
Maurice
Halperin, who while heading "the research department of the Office of
Strategic Services, America's main intelligence agency at the time, gave
hundreds of American diplomatic cables to the KGB." [LEITER, p. 46] Bella
Gold in the U.S. Commerce Department and Sonya Gold in the U.S. Treasury
Department [WEINSTEIN, A.; VASSILEV, p. 167] were among those working with
the aforementioned Nathan Silvermaster, a U.S. Treasury Department
official who was also working as a Soviet espionage "group
handler."
Theodore Hall
(also Jewish: original last name Holtzberg), while working on the nuclear
bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico, was "the only American scientist known to
have given the Soviet Union details on the design of an atom bomb."
[ALBRIGHT/KUNSTEL, p. 9-17] In 1945, Philip Jaffe, editor of
Amerasia magazine, was arrested by the FBI. "Jaffe," noted the
Jewish Exponent, "[was] a committed sympathizer [and had] contacts
with Soviet intelligence agents and said he wanted to spy for them."
[LEITER, 8-22-96]
The only known
U.S. Congressman to have spied (beginning in 1937) for the Russians was
also Jewish, Samuel Dickstein, for fifteen years a Democratic Congressman
from New York, and later a judge. The Russian NKVD (precursor to the KGB)
codenamed Dickstein "the Crook" because of his "mercenary instincts."
Consummate hypocrite and deceiver, Congressman Dickstein was also "the
founding father" of the (HUAC) House Un-American Activities Committee --
the organization that sought to expose Russian communist agents in
American government and popular culture in the 1950s. [GUARDIAN, 1-27-99,
p. 6] (Ten of the nineteen people subpoenaed by HUAC were Jewish, as were
six of the ten who were indicted by the committee). [NAVASKY, p.
113]
Among non-Jewish
Americans spying for the Soviets were some whose espionage roots revolved
around sexual affairs with Jewish Russian agents: Elizabeth Bentley was
the aforementioned Jacob Golos' lover. [WEINSTEIN/VASSELIV, p. 84] Martha
Dodd's partner was Soviet agent Boris Vinogradov. In Bentley's case, after
Golos died, she defected from the espionage ranks. Jewish Soviet agent
Joseph Katz was assigned the task of killing her, but the murder was never
carried out. [WEINSTEIN/VASSELIV, p. 108] In Dodd's case, she never knew
that her love affair with Vinogradov was being directed from Moscow. She
eventually married wealthy Jewish-American businessman Alfred Stern, who
also became involved in Soviet espionage activities. Stern was influential
in setting up a music business, with a Jewish-American Hollywood producer,
Boris Morros, as a front for Soviet espionage efforts. "Most Americans who
spied for Moscow during the 1930s," notes Allen Weinstein and Alexander
Vasselev, "were antifascist admirers of the Soviet Union whose involvement
in espionage had ideological roots. There were two noteworthy exceptions,
one a U.S. Congressman [the aforementioned Samuel Dickstein] and the other
a Hollywood producer [Boris Morros]. [Both] offered their services as
Soviet agents for a price tag." [WEINSTEIN/VASSILEV, photo section] Even
Marilyn Monroe's Jewish psychoanalyst, Ralph Greenson, was secretly an
agent for the communist Comintern. (Monroe had a series of romantic
affairs with the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and
innocently shared information she gleaned from him with Greenson). [WOLFE,
D., p. 384]
In later
years, the only known Soviet spy to have penetrated the CIA (1973-77),
described "in intelligence circles ... as one of the most important spies
in United States history" was Karl Koecher. He was also Jewish. Koecher,
notes Ronald Kessler, "gave his Czech handlers and the KGB details of
dozens of 'top secret' CIA operations targeted at the Soviets and U.S.
allies alike. He supplied them with classified CIA documents, lists of
photographs of CIA employees in the United States and overseas and names
of U.S. government officials who might be blackmailed into cooperating
with the Soviets." Koecher and his wife Hana were enjoyed their American
stay in the fullest of ways; they were extremely active in group sex
orgies, nudist retreats, and wife-swapping events. [KESSLER, 4-17-88, p.
C1]
There were a
significant number of Jews working on the American Los Alamos nuclear bomb
project, including some from other countries like Hans Berthe, Emilio
Segre, and Edward Teller. (Jewish equivalents in England included Rudolf
Peierls). Such Jewish immigrants were so important in the development of
the bomb that Richard Rhodes, in his Pulitzer-prize winning The Making
of the Atomic Bomb, devotes an entire chapter to their "exodus" from
Europe, particularly Germany and Hungary. Jewish scientists involved in
the bomb, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, even managed to get Jewish
economist Alexander Sachs to convey to President Franklin D. Roosevelt the
urgency of building the nuclear weapon. A colleague jokingly called
immigrant Jewish bomb developers Szilard, Teller, and Eugene Wigner "the
Hungarian conspiracy." [RHODES, R., 1988, p. 306,
308]
The director of
the atomic bomb program was also Jewish, J. Robert Oppenheimer. "I had had
a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of the Jews in Germany,"
he once said. [RHODES, R., 1988, p. 445] The chairman of the Atomic Energy
Commission, for that matter, in that era was also Jewish, David
Lilienthal. "The most vital information for developing the first atomic
bomb," says former top KGB official Pavel Sudoplatov, "came from
scientists designing the American atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico --
Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 172]
(Of the three, Fermi was not Jewish, but his wife was). Jewish Soviet
agents Gregory Kheifetz and Elizabeth Zarubin "persuaded Oppenheimer to
share information with 'antifascists of German origin' ... Oppenheimer,
together with Fermi and Szilard, helped [the Soviets] place moles in
Tennessee, Los Alamos, and Chicago as assistants in those three [nuclear]
labs." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 190] Others seminally influential with Oppenheimer
included Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels and Yiddish poet Itzik Feffer
(later murdered in Soviet purges) -- Russian nationals on a tour of the
United States with the Moscow Yiddish State Art Theatre. [SUDOPLATOV, p.
188] Soviet intelligence noted in 1944 that Oppenheimer, head of America's
nuclear weapon program, was a "secret member" of the American Communist
Party. [WEINSTEIN/VASSILEV, p. 183-184] For Szilard's part, the army's
head of atomic bomb security, Leslie Richard Groves, thought the scientist
was "the kind of man that any employer would have fired as a
troublemaker." "Groves," says Richard Rhodes, "seems to attributed
Szilard's brashness to the fact that he was a Jew." [RHODES, R., 1988, p.
502] Groves also suspected the scientist of being a spy and had him put
under surveillance, but caught him doing nothing illegal. [RHODES, R.,
1988, p. 506-507]
(Jewish involvement in weapons to invoke "holocausts" are a steady theme. In later years the "father of the neutron bomb" was also Jewish: Samuel Cohen. "Few people know the man behind the neutron bomb," noted the New York Times in 1982, "J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, the key scientists in the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, are well known but only dedicated students of weaponry have heard of Mr. Cohen.") [NEW YORK TIMES, 3-28-82, sec. 1, p. 34] On the Soviet
side of the Russian-American spy rings, "the [Russian] men and women who
were most influential in acquiring atomic secrets for the Soviet Union
were all later purged because they were Jewish." [SCHECHTER, p. 301] These
early 1950s purges in Russia (centering on alleged Zionist intrigue in the
Russian intelligence agency and other departments) began with the alleged
"confessions" of Naum Shvartsmann, whose own job was to edit "falsified
confessions extracted from prisoners." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 300-301] Brutal
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin grew suspicious of increasing Russian Jewish
interest in the new nation of Israel. The principal focus of this concern
was the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, an organization created to raise
support for the Soviet Union from western Jewry in lobbying other
governments against the threat of Hitler. But, to Stalin's chagrin, the
JAC soon "brought an extraordinary stirring of Jewish consciousness in its
own ranks, reflecting the prevalent mood of Soviet Jewry as a whole ...
[It expressed] feelings of [Jewish] national solidarity and Jewish pride
... They were frequently so carried away by their faith and enthusiasm as
to overlook the JAC dominant objective, namely, that of spreading Soviet
propaganda ... JAC speakers and writers increasingly resorted to biblical
imagery, Talmudic references, and Jewish historic symbols." [GILBOA, p.
46-48] Soviet poet Perets Markish, for example, publicly talked about
"Jewish brothers" around the world, declaring that "we are one people, and
now we are becoming one army." [GILBOA, p. 47] For Stalin, the JAC was turning
into a anti-communist threat. Voices were also heard around the world like
that of Chief Rabbi J. H. Hertz who announced that, "Let us remember that
if we do our full duty, we not only help to smash Hitlerism, but bring back Russian Jewry to the
fold of Israel." [author's italics: GILBOA, p.
54]
Shortly after
the founding of Israel in 1948, Foreign Minister Golda Meir visited the
Soviet Union. Her arrival, notes Stuart Kahan, "brought with it a welcome
far beyond anything contemplated. Soviet Jews poured into the streets of
Moscow. They surrounded her hotel day and night. Her very appearance
brought thunderous roars of approbation. Stalin was in shock. He called an
emergency meeting: 'The Jews have still not been able to adapt themselves
or become acclimatized like other minorities. Only very few can -- or want
to ... They constitute an ever present danger. Every Muscovite Jew has
foreign connections. We are threatened by the danger of Zionism.'" [KAHAN,
S., p. 250] Among those deeply moved by Meir's visit was Polina
Zhemchuzhina, the Jewish wife of Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav
Molotov. Joshua Rubenstein notes that Zhemchuzhina
met
"members of the
Israeli delegation at a diplomatic reception ...
[and]
she could hardly
restrain herself. 'I've heard you attend the
synagogue,'
Zhemchuzhina told
Golda Meir, speaking in Yiddish. 'Very good. Keep
going. The Jews want
to see you.' When Meir asked how she knew
Yiddish so well,
Zhemchuzhina proudly responded, 'Ich bin a
Yiddische
tochter' (I am a daughter of the
Jewish people), a phrase she repeated
several times.
Zhemchuzhina asked about life in Israel, about the
Negev
[desert], and conditions on the
kibbutzim. She parted from them with
tears in her eyes, saying, 'I wish all
will go well for you there and then
it will be good for
all Jews.' " [Rubenstein, J., p. 262]
Zhemchuzhina
herself was arrested by Soviet security a couple months later and sent
into exile.
Although Zionism was banned in Russia under tsarist rule, Nora
Levin notes that in the year of the Russian revolution, 1917, the Zionist
movement had 300,000 members (of a total Jewish population of 3.5 million)
in 1,200 chapters throughout the country. [LEVIN, N., 1988, p. 3, 7]
Zionism prevailed in many pan-Jewish organizations -- for example, 60% of the vote in the All-Russian Jewish
Congress. In nine Ukrainian provinces, in 193 kehillas (traditional Jewish
self-governing bodies), 36% (the largest number of any ideological group)
of the delegates were Zionists. "When the Bolsheviks took power," notes
Nora Levin, "Zionism was unquestionably the dominant movement in Russian
Jewish life." [LEVIN, N. 1988, p. 7, 87] Zionism's free expression after
the Russian revolution was stifled by 1919, however, when the new
communist government perceived the demands of expressly Jewish nationalism
to be a threat. That year the new government also began forcing Zionist
offices to close. Communist Party leader V.I. Lenin had called Jewish
demands for national autonomy a "Zionist idea ... [one which] is
reactionary in its political implications." [LEVIN, N., 1988, p. 17] "There is no doubt," says
professor Norma Levin, "that had the [Russian] anti-Zionist campaign been
relaxed, many Jews would have joined or rejoined Zionist groups, thus
crippling communist control." [LEVIN, N. 1988, p.
94]
The theme of
purges of various dissidents, real and imagined, in communist ranks, is a
continuous one in Soviet history. Jews were periodically one of the major
targets. Ironically, anti-Zionist purges in the 1930s "were all under
[Jewish communist leader Lazar Kaganovich's] orchestration, and he
relished it ... All Jewish cultural institutions were liquidated. The
Communist Party apparatus and the ministries at all levels were purged of
Jewish personnel." In the later anti-Zionist purge, prominent Russian
Jewish leader S. M. Mikhoels "was shot to death in Minsk ... the order had
been given by Lazar with Stalin's approval." [KAHAN, S., p.
250]
Common
Jewish-enforced convention in the West holds that Stalin's anti-Zionist
purge (and others in Soviet history) was rooted in baseless anti-Semitism.
(Jews, of course, were not the only ones subject to brutal purges in the
Russian communist past. As Jonathan Franklin notes, "it would be totally
erroneous to suggest that the Jews were the only victims of the purges.
Initially, at least in the years 1949-51, those communists suspected of
national deviation ... were in the greatest danger and, throughout,
'Titoism' remained a major form of anathema held in readiness to fall
almost at random on the leaders of the [communist] bloc countries."
[FRANKLIN, J., p. 320] ) Philosemitic former KGB official Pavel
Sudoplatov, whose perspective is that of a man with a Jewish wife who was
a lieutenant in the Russian spy organization, condemns the 1950s
anti-Zionist purge as unwarranted. Jewish scholar Barnet Litvinoff notes,
however, that "any Jew who does not absolutely denounce Zionism can, with
some truth, be charged with accepting it. By this interpretation, the
[Zionist] movement is [in 1969] strong in the Soviet Union." [LITVINOFF,
B., p. 87]
Or, as Sylvia
Rothchild notes:
"In 1965, Elie Wiesel
was in Moscow in time to witness the Simchat
Torah celebration. He
was astonished to find crowds of young people
dancing and singing in
front of the synagogue on Arkhipova Street,
as he reports 'openly
celebrating their faith in the people of Israel.'"
[ROTHCHILD, S., 1985,
p. 19]
Whatever the
case, the charge of "Zionist conspiracy" as a "fifth column" looms as an
endless, terrible cycle. Those with primary allegiance to the Jewish state
invariably create suspicion in others for all Jews in positions of
political power. Those Jews innocent of Zionist allegiance nonetheless
gravitate towards Israel as insurance against anti-Jewish hostility.
Hence, the problem -- in a self-fulfilling loop -- grows like the nature
of anti-Semitism itself: Gentile suspicion of, and outrage at, Jewish
alienation and intrigue, followed in consequence by further Jewish
alienation, followed by further Gentile alienation, and so forth.
Prominent Jewish Russian Zionist Natan Sharansky (famous among
international Jewry for his fight to emigrate to Israel) stated the
problem succinctly: "I loved Russian culture ... but I was a Jew because
of anti-Semitism." When Sharansky was interrogated by the KGB for his
Zionist activities, he writes that "I was eager to show the agent that I
was a loyal citizen just like him, although I already knew in my heart
that wasn't true." [SHARANSKY, p. xiv]
With the Soviet
purge of Jews in its intelligence ranks, 50 colonels and generals were
arrested, including the Deputy Minister of Security, Andrej Sverdlov, son
of the first president of the Soviet Union. Such Jewish characters as
Grigori Maironovsky, head of the "top secret toxicological laboratory" who
had "personally liquidated a number of the most important enemies of the
Communist Party and the Soviet government" [SUDOPLATOV, p. 279] also met
their ends. Jews, notes Sudoplatev, were deeply entrenched in the
communist elite everywhere: "Key members of the Politburo like Voroshilov
and Molotov had Jewish wives; Kaganovich was Jewish." [SUDOPLATOV, p.
300] (Even in America, Earl
Browder, for many years the head of the American Communist Party, had a
Jewish wife, Raissa Berkman. Polish communist strongman Wladeslaw Gomulka
also had a Jewish wife.) [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 82]
Although there
was also a purge of Zionist Jews in the Soviet system in 1922-23
(particularly members of the Politzi Zion: "Police of Zion"), by 1933 "in
every major ministry at the time, Jews held top positions." [SUDOPLATOV,
p. 288] By 1937, "some
students of the Kremlin power struggle put the number of Jewish military
officers executed at 500, not less than twenty of them generals." In power
struggles not solely aimed at Jews, one-third of the 75,000 Red Army
officers were purged from the ranks of communist leadership. [LITVINOFF,
B., p. 79] In September 1948,
not long after the declaration of the founding of the new nation of
Israel, a Jewish Communist Party member, Ilya Ehrenburg (later an elected
member of the elite Supreme Soviet), "published a bitter tirade in Pravda
against those Jews who looked with approval at Israel and Zionism."
[LITVINOFF, B., p. 84]
In
Czecheslovakia, Rudolf Slansky, the Vice-Premier of the country, and
"considered the most powerful man in the country" was put on trial in 1952
along with the Deputy Ministers of National Defense, State Security,
Foreign Trade, and Finance. Of the 14 on trial, 11 were Jewish. Romania's
Jewish Foreign Minister, Anna Pauker, also were tried. "Large numbers of
Rumanian Jews," notes Barnet Litvinoff, "were imprisoned on the grounds of
Zionist activities." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 90] One Jewish Czech of intrigue, Otto
Katz, had "developed a number of Communist cells in the Hollywood film
community and was a key participant in the conspiracy to kill Foreign
Minister Masaryk. He was executed during the Slansky purges." [GREENBERG,
M., p. 44]
Indictments
against Slansky and other Jewish communist leaders in Europe stemmed in
large part from association with American Jews (and self-proclaimed
communists) Noel and Hermann Field, who were involved in a variety of
European intrigues and were ultimately imprisoned for allegedly spying for
the United States. [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 76-85]
Further along in
the Soviet spy world, other Jewish Soviet intelligence operators in
America included George Gamo, who provided Moscow with "the names of left
wing [American] students who might be recruited to supply secret
information," [SUDOPLATOV, p. 192] Lev Vasilevsky, who from Mexico City
headed efforts to get information from nuclear bomb director Oppenheimer,
and Leonid Eitingon, who set up two Polish Jewish agents on America's west
coast. The early lead scientist in Moscow's intelligence agency who
studied stolen atomic spy secrets was also Jewish, Yakov Petrovich
Terletsky.
Fleeing
Stalinism, the most prominent Soviet spy ever to defect to America,
General Alexander Orlov (originally Leiba Lazarevich Feldbin) was also
Jewish. In the 1930s Orlov set up a Soviet spy school outside of
Barcelona. An American Jew, Morris Cohen, "became one of the elitist of
the elite at the special school," [ALBRIGHT, p. 31] and Cohen's first
Russian spy controller in New York was also Jewish, the aforementioned
Semyon Semyonov. [ALBRIGHT, p. 33] "Why [defector] Orlov never told
American authorities about Cohen after the general received asylum in the
United States in mid-1938 remains Orlov's secret." [ALBRIGHT, p. 32]
Senator James O. Eastland once called Orlov "the highest ranking officer
of the Soviet State Security [later KGB] ever to come to the side of the
free world." Yet, with access these days to KGB archives, in an entire
1993 volume about Orlov, John Costello and Oleg Tsarev assert that "Orlov
had played a subtle game of wits, first with the FBI and then with CIA
interrogators. This enabled the Soviet agents he recruited and former
colleagues he could have identified to continue clandestine operations
against the West. Orlov's case was therefore a classic: it was the record
of a man squeezed between divided loyalties with little room to maneuver."
[COSTELLO/TSAREV, p. 10-11, p. xi, xii] (Other prominent Soviet Jews who
defected to the U.S. were Valter Krivitsky (Samuel Ginzburg) and Ignati
Reis (Natan Poretsky). [VAKSBERG, p. 97] )
From Poland, Jozef
Swiatlo, also Jewish,
"won international
fame on account of his defection in 1953. [He] was
head of Section One [in the Polish
government], which dealt with foreign
intelligence services and their
infiltration into key party and state
positions."
[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 70-71]
Another Polish
Jew, Jerzy Bryn, a diplomat, attempted to defect from Poland to the West,
changed his mind, and was sentenced to life in prison for treason.
[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 152]
Elsewhere, the
"most senior Soviet intelligence officer ever convicted in America,"
Colonel Rudolf Abel, [ALBRIGHT, p. 245] was also Jewish, later freed in
1962 in exchange for American spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers.
Likewise, the "Resident Director of all Soviet spy networks in France
between World Wars I and II" was Jewish, Ignace Reiss. [GREENBERG, M., p.
44]
In Britain,
shockingly, the fifth Soviet spy known to have penetrated British
intelligence was an heir to the fabulously wealthy capitalist Rothschild
fortune, Nathaniel Meyer Victor Rothschild. An entire volume, entitled
"The Fifth Man," about his betrayal was published in 1994. Rothschild
"supplied espionage material to the Russians on work in everything from
nuclear weaponry and radar to germ warfare developments at the biological
center." [PERRY, p. xxii] Roland Perry also notes that Rothschild "was
camouflaged as the Fifth Man by virtue of his powerful position in the
[British] Establishment. The vast wealth of his banking dynasty embedded
him in the power elite more than the other members of the [spy] Ring of
Five. It was a perfect cover and served to shield him. He seemed the
epitome of the ruling class in twentieth century Britain, and therefore
the least likely to be a traitor ... Rothschild was more loyal to his
Jewish heritage than anything English ... Rothschild assisted in the
creation of a homeland [Israel] for the Jews who had been dispossessed [in
Europe]." [PERRY, p. xl]
Another of the
preeminent five Soviet spies in Great Britain was (non-Jew) Kim Philby.
Alice Kohlman, notes the Jerusalem Post, was "the Jewish woman who
had been Kim Philby's first wife, and by some accounts, instrumental in
leading the young Philby to work as a Soviet agent." [ARAD, p. 21]
Canada? Erna
Paris notes that
"The highest ranking Jew in
the Canada Communist Party was Sam
Carr [born Shloime
Kogan] ... Carr's crucial role as principal
recruiter
of Soviet spies was
revealed in the 1946 Royal [Canadian] Commission
on Espionage." [PARIS,
p. 171]
Canada
also had its own Jewish Congressman-traitor:
"The man
who actually transmitted Canadian atomic information
to Russia
was Fred Rose (born Rosenberg), the only communist
MP [Member
of Parliament] ... The effects of Rose's conviction
ricocheted
through the Jewish community of Montreal ... The
primarily
Jewish voters of Cartier [an area in Montreal] ... found
themselves
represented in Parliament by a convicted spy." [PARIS,
p.
Upon release from prison in
1951, Rose moved to communist Poland. [PARIS, p.
176]
Communist East
Germany? "Markus Wolf, the mastermind of former East Germany's spy
network" was in 1993 "charged with treason, espionage, and bribery." In
recent years, noted the Associated Press, Wolf "has had more
appreciation of his Jewish roots." [COSTELLO, K.,
5-3-93]
In the
years leading up to, and during, World War II, a Polish Jew, Leopold Trepper,
headed a Soviet spy ring (known as the "Red Orchestra") in western Europe
that was able to infiltrate the Nazi General Staff in the early 1940s.
Trepper was an early member of the Zionist Hechalutz organization.
[PERRAULT, p 16] Likewise, in the early 1930s, another Jewish communist,
Isiah Bir (nicknamed "Fantomas") headed a Soviet spy ring in France. His
number two man in command, Alter Strom, was also Jewish. [PERRAULT, p.
18]
In Trepper's
network, in earlier years, a traitor to his organization was an unnamed
Dutch Jew, a "former head of a Soviet Spy ring in the United States."
[PERRAULT, p. 21] Trepper's
spy network, notes Gilles Perrault, consisted of "a high proportion of
Jews." [PERRAULT, p. 49] These included Leo Grossvogel, Jules Jasper,
"Camille," the Sokols, Abraham Raichman, "Captain" Gurevich, and many
others. Trepper survived the war and, under the alias Leiba Domb, became a
publisher, specializing in
"Jewish classical literature." [PERRAULT, p.
509]
During
World War I, Dr. Isaac Strauss, a Jewish spy for Germany, was arrested in
the United States. [BENDERSKY, J., 2000, p. 56] Incredibly, there were
even Jewish spies working for Hitler's Aryan fascism, some of whom "had
prewar careers as criminals ... The fact that several were so easily
'turned' [to work for Hitler] suggests that opportunism, rather than
ideology, was often the dominant motive." Such spies included Hans Arnheim
(sentenced to death in 1940 by the French who captured him) and Joseph
Jakobs (part-Jewish; sentenced to death by the British in 1941). Rudolph
Korda, a Hungarian-Jewish journalist, also headed a German spy ring til
1942. Karl Molnar (described as "part Jew"), chief of the Hungarian
intelligence in Istanbul, was "a valuable collaborator with the Abwehr
[the Nazi intelligence organization]." Ivan Lissner, described as "a
German half-Jew," was a collaborator in Germany itself; he was even a Nazi
party member. In Shanghai, Hans Mosberg served Nazi spy interests. "The
terrible fact," noted the Jerusalem Post, "remains that their
actions contributed, each in his own degree, to the Nazis' anti-Jewish and
anti-human war machine." [WASSERSTEIN, B., 4-9-99, p.
5B]
Jews have also
been prominent in Hollywood as communist activists, a tradition decidedly
against American popular opinion. As Neal Gabler noted in
1988:
"One leading
communist estimated that 50 per cent of the party's
members were
Jews during its heyday in the thirties and forties,
and
a large minority
-- and sometimes a majority -- of the party
leadership
was Jewish. What
was true of the national party was even truer in
Hollywood, where
Jews already formed a large part of the
left-leaning
artistic
community." [Ring Lardner, Jr., for example, himself a
CP
member,
estimated that two-thirds of the communists in Los
Angeles
were Jewish]
[GABLER, N., 1988, p. 331] "Jewish organizations, throughout the fifties and well into the sixties, worked on a variety of fronts to prevent, or at least limit, the association of Jews with Communism in the public mind. Thier principal co-operative venture was the 'Hollywood Project,' in which they jointly employed a West Coast representative Whatever the context of the riots/pogroms beginning in the late nineteenth century in Russia against Jews, they must be weighed (as they never are) within the growing socio-political turmoil in that country -- a society wresting free from its foundation in (non-Jewish) indentured servitude. Violent peasants outbursts in their struggles for justice, freedom, and dignity were many: between 1826 and 1861 there were 1,186 "peasant uprisings" in Russia [WOLF, E., p. 52] struggling against feudal oppressors, whoever they were. The culmination of a century's turmoil was ultimately expressed in the Russian civil war of 1919-20 in which nine million people perished. [KAHAN, S., p. 99] Other estimates cite Russian deaths at sixteen million between 1914 and 1921, the result of war and revolution. [CLEMENTS, B., p. 172] Bryan Moynahan notes further, a decade later, that "the terror-famine inflicted as a matter of Socialist policy from the beginning of 1930 probably killed fourteen million peasants ... Whole villages were depopulated ... The Soviet Union was still massively a peasant country; more than 80 per cent of the population lived in its 600,000 hamlets and villages. The Communist attitude to country people, however, was murderous. The Party never enjoyed any rural affection." [MOYNAHAN, p. 107-108] Those thousands of peasants deported to other areas of Russia "sometimes spent weeks in the [train] cars as they rolled slowly toward their place of deportation, stacked into cattle wagons or 'Stolypin cars,' windowless prisons. The legs of some did not touch the floor for days, because they were so tightly packed that they hung suspended between each other." [MOYNAHAN, p. 113] As noted earlier, many Bolshevik Jews were at the helms of these mass oppressions and mass murders. British
(Jewish) prime miniser Benjamin Disraeli even believed that Jews
everywhere were uniformly desirous of "revenge" against Christians, using
absolutely contrasting ideologies -- capitalism and communism -- to the
same end through parallel "internationalism." "Men of Jewish race," he
wrote, "are found at the head of every one of [the communist and socialist
groups]. The people of God cooperate with atheists; the most skilled
accumulators of property ally themselves with communists, the peculiar and
chosen people touch the hands of the scum and low castes of Europe! And
all this because they wish to destroy the ungrateful Christendum which
owes them even its name and whose tyranny they can no longer endure."
[ARENDT, p. 76]
"In this
singular delusion," says Arendt,
"even the most ingenious of Hitler's
publicity stunts, the cry of the
alliance between the Jewish capitalist
and the Jewish socialist was
already anticipated.
Nor can it be denied that the whole scheme,
imaginary as it was,
had a logic of its own. If one started, as Disraeli
did, from the
assumption that Jewish millionaires were makers of
Jewish politics, if
one took into account the insults Jews had
suffered
for centuries (which
were real enough, but still stupidly exaggerated
by Jewish apologetic
propaganda), if one had seen the not infrequent
instances when the son
of a Jewish millionaire became a leader of the
workers' movement and
knew from experience how closely knit Jewish
family ties were as a
rule, Disraeli's image of a calculated revenge upon
Christian people was
not far fetched." [ARENDT, p. 72]
Disraeli,
suggests Albert Lindemann, "may have been, both as a writer and even more
as a personal symbol, the most influential propagator of the concept of
race in the nineteenth century, particularly publicizing the Jews' alleged
taste for power, their sense of superiority, their mysteriousness, their
clandestine international connections, and their arrogant pride in being a
pure race." [LINDEMANN, p. 77]
As Stanley Weintraub notes, Disraeli "sees crypto-Jews managing
affairs: professors, ambassadors, generals, councellors, and cabinet
members." In Coningsby, Disraeli wrote that the world is "governed
by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not
behind the scenes." [WEINTRAUB, S., 1993, p. 216] In real life, "within
days of publication" of this book, Disraeli was invited to dinner with a
Rothschild. [WEINTRAUB, S., 1993, p. 219]
Marilyn
Monroe's alleged suicide has always been controversial, and there are
various conspiracy notions about who would want her dead. Romeo Greenson's
secret life is much clouded. As well as being Monroe's therapist, he was,
like a number of Hollywood people, a Jewish activist Communist Party
member; he was also part of its international Comintern. Whatever
Greenson's role as a listener of movie star's confessionals, his communist
ties have profound implications because Monroe had romantic affairs with
President John F. Kennedy and knew a great deal about behind-the-scenes
politicking, perhaps including plans against communist Cuba and Fidel
Castro. Everything Monroe knew, per "opening up" in therapy, she
undoubtedly told her psychotherapist. As Donald Wolfe
notes:
"Once Marilyn Monroe
became Greenson's patient, he became one of
the most important
Comintern operatives in America; he had access
to the mind of a woman
who often shared the bed with the president
of the United States
and was an intimate of the attorney general
[Kennedy's brother,
Robert] ... As Greenson has correctly stated,
Marilyn Monroe had a
tendency to 'get involved with very destructive
people, who will
engage in some sort of sado-masochistic
relationship
with her.' Ironically,
among these people was her psychiatrist
[Greenson], her
physician [Engelberg], and her housekeeper, Eunice
Murray [who was
appointed by Greenson to live with Ms. Monroe
and report back to
him], who joined in a conspiracy to survey
Marilyn Monroe within
a sphere of influence designed to gather
intelligence from her
relationship with the president of the United
States and the
attorney general." [WOLFE, D., p. 386]
Greenson, once noted
his sister, Elizabeth, also had "strong ties to Israel." [KELLEY, K., p.
305]
Yet another tragic
Hollywood movie star "goddess" driven to a psychological abyss was Frances
Farmer, one of the most famous film faces of the late 1930s and early
1940s. Farmer's demise is particularly disturbing. Ardent rebel and
idealist, she was attracted to the largely Jewish New York communist world
before she became a movie celebrity, even visiting Moscow in 1935.
Attracted to serious theatre, in New York she was "escorted around the
city by a delegation of local communist leaders and -- through an
introduction written by [Jewish friend] Sophie Rosenstein -- [Farmer] got
herself invited to a party given by members of her cherished left-wing
Group Theatre" where she first met famous Jewish playwright Clifford
Odets. [ARNOLD, W., p. 50] (Supposedly anti-capitalist and
anti-materialist, the Group Theatre grew out of meetings at Harold
Clurman's home. Eventually he, fellow Jew Lee Strasberg and "WASP shiksa"
Cheryl Crawford were the Group's early directors. [SMITH, W., p. 213,
photo] Clurman was
also the aforementioned Stella Adler's husband.) William Arnold notes the
illusory idealism of the famous (largely Jewish) Group Theatre: "The Group
actors, far from being the artistic purists [Farmer] had always believed
them to be, all seemed to want to go to Hollywood and make piles of money
(which, eventually, most of them did)." [ARNOLD, W., p.
90] Both Farmer's
mother and sister Edith believed that such "communists" destroyed her.
[ARNOLD, W., p. 94] (For her part, Frances despised her mother and placed
enormous blame for her troubles upon her. In the third page of her
biography she even quotes a "Jewish saying" about mothers, and bemoans her
lack of a good one). [FARMER, p. 12] William Arnold, who interviewed
sister Edith, notes that she believed "the Communists drove Frances crazy.
[Edith] seemed particularly bitter towards the Group Theatre and its
left-wing members who, she said, took criminal advantage of France's kind
nature and then harassed her into insanity." [ARNOLD, W., p. 94] During
the McCarthy-era communist probes, eight Group Theatre members were
identified as members of a communist cell -- Joe Bromberg and Lewis Leverett
were its "co-leaders." [SMITH, W., p. 157] "Since
the last great wave," says Woocher, "of social activism in America in the
1960's, the rhetoric of Jewish pursuit of social justice has been somewhat
muted within the polity. Greater attention has been paid to the tasks of
Jewish self-preservation; the polity has, in the view of many observers,
'turned inward.' [WOOCHER, p. 87] In other words, as the Jewish community
achieves increasing influence in the American economic and political
worlds, it is inevitably gravitating back to the ideological base that has
served Jews throughout history:
the insular preoccupation with "being Jewish," Jewish
self-promotion at others' expense, and the refocusing of a delineation
between Jewish selves and outsiders. "For most of [American] history,"
says Gordon Lafar,
"American Jewry
avoided the conflict between universalism and
particularism by
identifying its selfish interests with the broader
dictates of
liberal universalism. Indeed, in the early part of this
century, the
circumstances of American politics conspired to offer
Jews an easy
congruence between the general principles of liberalism
and their
particular economic and social interest ... In recent years,
however, the
marriage between liberal universalism and Jewish
particularism
has unraveled ... It has become increasingly apparent
that the
community's selfish interests diverge from the dictates of
abstract
universalism, leading the Central Conference of American
Rabbis to note
in 1976 that 'until the recent past our obligations to
the Jewish
people and all humanity seemed congruent. At times now
these two
perspectives appear to conflict.'" [LAFAR, p. 181]
"Even during the
Berkeley sit-in of 1964," notes Stephen Whitfield, "according to one
report, Hatvikah [the Israeli
national anthem] was sung; and Students for a Democratic Society was
packed with Jews, whose Jewish identity was often disguised or
downplayed." [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 114]
Using the always
reliable Jewish device pointing to an irrational, endemic anti-Semitism as
an omnipotent threat to Jews, Ruth Wisse in 1992 framed her move to
political conservatism in terms of Jewish
self-protection:
"Gentiles invented ...
[anti-Semitism]. Its defeat requires, on the part of
the victims and
onlookers, a temporary sacrifice of the liberal
optimism
upon which the whole
of democratic society is founded." [WISSE, p.
46]
Large scale Jewish abandonment of social justice movements was
evidenced during the wake of the Vietnam war era, especially after the
1967 Arab-Israeli war. There were many Jews active in leftist political
organizations, but with the state of Israel increasingly understood by the
Left to be an imperialist and/or colonialist nation positioned against
Third World struggles, "faced with the choice," says Seymour Lipset, "of
giving up their attachments to Israel or dropping their ties to the Left
... a significant and visible number of Jewish leftists dropped out of the
New Left." [LIPSET, p. 158] "Jews who had thought that being Jewish did
not matter," says Charles Silberman, "... discovered in 1967 that
Jewishness lay at the heart of their being." [SILBERMAN, p. 201] "We
believe," proclaimed a Jewish socialist group called Chutzpah, "that the
form and content of most Left criticism [of Israel] is inescapably
anti-Semitic." [LIEBMAN, A, ANTISEM, p. 350] A Jewish sociologist in
France, Raymond Aron, even declared that "If Israel disappears, I do not
wish to survive." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 9]
"Resigning
in droves," notes J.J. Goldberg, "from liberal and left-wing groups,
[Jews] attacked those who did not do so as traitors to their own kind."
[GOLDBERG, p. 140] "[Jews] were forced to choose," says Arthur Liebman,
"between their ethnic identification and community and their universalist
political movement ... Most chose their ethnic identity." [LIEBMAN, A. p. 526] "When
universalistic policies conflicted with ethnic imperatives," note Stanley
Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, "as in the case of radical critiques of
Israel, Jews were torn in opposite directions, and their attachment to
radicalism was weakened." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 114] "After 1967,"
remarks Gerald Sorin, "support for Israel became the common denominator of
American Jewish life, so much so that no Jew who was not a staunch
advocate for the Jewish state could expect to occupy a responsible
position in any major Jewish organization." [SORKIN, p. 215] "A number of ex-revolutionary
Marxists of Jewish background," says Alan Wald, "had become pro-Israel
after 1948 and had substituted either Zionism or some other form of Jewish
ethnic identity for the revolutionary internationalism to which they had
once adhered." [WALD, p. 15]
A 1996 book about convicted anti-Arab terrorist Era Rapaport even begins: "How does a nice Jewish boy from East Flatbush, Brooklyn, a gifted social worker, a marcher for civil rights, a loving husband and father, end up blowing off the legs of the PLO mayor of Nablus [in Israel]?" [RAPAPORT, E., 1996, p. 1] "Ezra," wrote an old friend to him in prison, "what did Israel do to you? You, the freedom fighter. You who walked arm in arm with thousands of Blacks in D.C. You, one of the best drug-prevention workers I've chanced on. The devoted social worker who could make a desolate human being feel like this life was worth living. Who got beaten up for defending the underprivileged. What happened to you? How could you? Are Arabs not people?" [RAPAPORT, E., 1996, p. 22] Left-wing journalist (Village Voice) Paul Cowan recalls being in the Peace Corps when the 1967 war began: "I remember walking down to the Peace Corps office, and feeling quite lonely when I realized that none of the other volunteers was as disturbed as I was. I Israel's
1967 Six Day War and 1973 Yom Kippur War, says Rabbi Jonathan Sacks,
"evoked a sense of Jewish solidarity on the one hand, and distinctiveness
from the gentile nations on the other. It strengthened deeply rooted
tendencies in the Jewish tradition to stress the uniqueness and isolation
of the Jewish people." [SAIDEL, p. 19] In 1969, in the midst of this
Jewish exodus from universalist ideals, Leonard Fein surveyed his people
and wrote that "the overwhelming ambiguity -- one might even say
contradiction -- of the modern era may be stated as follows: precisely at
a time when the rhetoric of universalism has reached an unprecedented
peak, and precisely at a time when the myths associated with universalism
have become part of conventional wisdom, the tribal instinct has
reasserted itself with overwhelming vigor." [FEIN, ISRAEL, p.
3]
By the
late sixties, says Common Cause president David Cohen, "the Jewish
community began to look inward and deal with its own interests."
[STANFIELD, p. 1849] By the early seventies, says Jack Porter and Peter
Drexler, "the Jewish Left concern[ed] itself primarily with four basic
issues: Israel, Soviet Jewry, the Jewish Establishment, and Jewish
oppression in America [sic: the alleged oppression of Jews]. A conspicuous
phenomena [was] the revival of the Zionist ideology on
campus." [PORTER, p. xxx]
"The inward turn on the part of much of American Jewish leadeship," notes Peter Novick, "-- their insistance that 'Is it good for the Jews?' be the first, if not the only, question that Jews ask themselves -- inevitably mandated a rightward turn as well. By the 1970s Jews were preeminent among the 'haves' in American society, and the gap between Jews and non-Jew, in income as well as in representation in all elite positions, widened over subsequent decades. Jews had everything to lose and nothing to gain from the more equal distribution of ewards which had been the aim of liberal social policies ... The political movement called neo-conservatism was almost exclusively a Jewish affair; Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, became America's best-known conservative magazine." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 183] "In 1972
alone," noted one study of American conservatism, "[Nathan] Glazer, Sidney
Hook, Lewis Feuer, and Seymour Martin Lipset appeared in the
[conservative] National Review. What did these men have in common?
None had been previously known as a conservative. All were Jewish. Three
(Glazer, Feuer, and Lipset) had been at Berkeley (birthplace of the
student revolution) early in the 1960s ... Perhaps most interesting was
the fact that all had at one time been 'radical.'" [JACOBY, p. 87]
"If Jewish intellectuals gravitated toward radicalism in large
numbers," notes Russell Jacoby, "they also hastily beat a retreat ... Not
simply Glazer, Hook, Feuer, and Lipset but Irving Kristol, Lionel
Trilling, Daniel Bell, Leslie Fiedler, and scores of others traded in
their red [socialist-communist] pasts for blue chip careers ... [JACOBY,
p. 87] ... The long view suggests not how many, but, compared to the
non-Jews, how few Jewish intellectuals remained radicals and dissenters."
[JACOBY, p. 88] By 1997,
noted Murray Friedman, "conservative Jews occupy high posts at
conservative think tanks and foundations, such as Bradley, Heritage,
Hudson and the American Enterprise Institute." [FRIEDMAN, p.
51]
What of all of the Jewish
associates of William F. Buckley's politically conservative journal, the
National Review in its early years? As George Nash
notes:
"These premature
Jewish conservatives had something else in common;
each in his youth had
been a student radical." [NASH, G., 2000, p. 130]
Frank Chodorov
had been an anarchist, Morrie Ryskind once joined the Intercollegiate
Society of Socialists. William Schlamm "joined the Communist Youth
Movement" and was once the "editor-in-chief of the Austrian Communist
Party's periodical Die Rote
Fahne (Red Flag)." Eugene Lyons "worked in the New York office of the
Soviet agency Tass for four years" and later was UPI's correspondent in
Moscow. "Although [Lyons] was never a formal member of the Communist
Party," says Nash, "he was enthusiastic nonetheless, determined to use his
new journalistic post 'in the furtherment of the cause.'" Frank Meyer joined the Communist
Party of Great Britain and became "the national secretary of the Party's
student bureau and overseer of several hundred disciplined Party members
in British universities." Marvin Liebman "joined the Young Communist
League in New York City." Ralph de Toledano, and editor at
Newsweek, never formally joined the communist movement, but was, as
he wrote, on the Communist Party's "cozy periphery." [NASH, G., 2000, p.
130-132]
(Among these
men, Liebman was also an activist in the Zionist American League for a
Free Palestine, Chodorov became an "ardent supporter of Israel," and
Toledano was an "Israeli sympathizer," telling a rabbi that his "trip [to
Israel] in 1969 was one of the most moving travel experiences of his
life.") [NASH, G., 2000, p. 146-147]
In 1975, Jewish
historian Daniel Boorstin was appointed to be the Librarian of Congress by
Republican President Gerald Ford. Boorstin had once been a communist
activist as a Harvard student, but by the 1970s he was "an active
Republican and outspoken foe of the antiwar and civil rights movements."
[WIENER, J., 1991, p. 55, 59]
"The Left is
concerned with the oppression of workers, Third World people, including
the Palestinians, people of colour, homosexuals, and so on ...," wrote
Philip Mendes in 1996, "Jews in turn have moved away from the Left and
socio-economic margins of western society into more established economic
and social circles." [MENDES, p. 108]
Jews starting
out as youthful "socialist" radicals who end up making complete
ideological U-turns, with the same fervor into its capitalist opposite are
legion: expeditious sell-outs to economic self-interest, pushing to the
fore whatever the social milieu. The corrupt socialist activist Bernie
Cornfeld [see later chapter] who eventually swindled people around the
world out of tens of millions of dollars was a sensational example, as was
Martin Frankel [see elsewhere], multi-million dollar scamster of the
Vatican. Frankel was described by a former professor who knew him in
earlier years as having "political views [that] were left-wing and
unconventional." [KAHN, J., 6-25-99, p. A1] Jerry Rubin, the co-founder of
the anarchist 1960's "Yippie" party who ended up in a suit on Wall Street,
is another example of this trend, the plugging into whatever ideology that
could propel self-interest. "Politics and rebellion distinguished the
60s," Rubin wrote in 1980, "Money ... will capture the passion of the
80s." American-born Rubin
"picked up an interest in the New Left while studying sociology in
Israel." [COLLINS/SPEACE, 1995, p. 615-616]
Seth Glickenhaus
also started out as idealist socialist, grew into "a cross between an
anarchist and a libertarian," and eventually settled on being a fabulously
wealthy financier. Between 1987-97 his Wall Street investment firm, Glickenhaus and Co., "topped the
ratings in estimates gains." [GIZPENC, p. 8] In Poland, the complete
ideological change of Jewish communist propagandist Jerzy Urban to the
winds around him is breathtaking. "Jerzy Urban reigned as Poland's prince
of propaganda for almost 10 year. The acid-tongued spokesman for the
former communist government enjoyed international notoriety as he clearly
and sarcastically orchestrated the news during the dark years of the
Solidarity trade union. Now, too, years after the fall of communism, Urban
is still in the news business, but with a strange and lucrative twist.
Urban is a crusading capitalist -- editing his own newspaper and writing
books." [VANCOUVER SUN, p. B10]
Crain's Chicago
Business journal noted the case of another Jewish business mogul, this
one in computer software, in 1988: "One of the highest paid CEOs in the
United States, Mitchell Kapor of Lotus Development Corporation ... is a
former disc jockey who played the Byrds and the Dead and supported radical
political groups." [HENDERSON, A., 76-13-88, p. T14] Then there is the
case of Jewish entrepreneur Gilbert Trigano, who headed the decadent
luxury resort world of "Club Med," international playground of the rich,
and built it to power. Trigano "was a grocer's son and former member of
the French communist party." [REGULY, E., 3-25-88, p.
24]
Then there is the case
of Jewish politician Norm Coleman:
"Coleman was a radical
college protester in the 1970s. He was a moderate
How about Marxist homosexual, "radical historian," and "oracle for the New Left" Harvey Goldberg? "In his seven years at the University of Wisconsin [leading up to a 1970 bombing on the campus], "he had created a virtual cult. Thousands of students who, as a result of the Cold War had reached college age knowing nothing of the socialist tradition, had been introduced to that forbidden fruit Former Jewish leftist Ronald Rodash notes that "A few months ago, an obituary appeared of the last living survivor of the Triangle Fire, a Jewish woman who went on in life to lecture throughout the nation to college students about the fire and the cause of labor, which eventually unionized the garment grades. The obituary ended with the amazing note that her granddaughter was one of the top executives in Hollywood of a major motion picture company! One can be assured that in the recent negotiations with the writers who were threatening to strike, we know which side of the issue her granddaughter was." [RADOSH, R., 6-5-01] Journalist Ross Wetzsteon, married to a Jewish woman, notes in an article championing Jewish identity that "through my marriage I came to know another Jewish 'type,' the Communist as stockbroker, perusing with equal fervor The Daily Worker and the Wall Street Journal." [WETZSTEON, R., SEPT 6-12, 1998] David Horowitz, former communist, even once raised money to buy the Black Panthers a building in Oakland, California. Today he's a conservative activist and ardent Zionist, at every occasion condemning the leftist principles of his past life. A. M. Rosenthal, chief editor of the New York Times, notes Edwin Diamond, "was raised in a socialist household ... [His sister Ruth was] a member of the Young Communist League ... None of Rosenthal's red-diaper background was surprising, given the secularist ideals of the time among many immigrant Jews." [DIAMOND, E., 1993, p. 170-171] Billionaire
capitalist (and Jewish) oil tycoon Armand Hammer started out as a secret
courier for the Soviets, "delivering money [from Russia] to communist
leaders in the United States." [EPSTEIN, E., 1996, p. 64, 67] Among his
American-based family's early holdings in Russia during early years of the
communist revolution was an asbestos mine. ("The conditions under which
the miners worked were horrendous even by Russia's low standards.")
[EPSTEIN, A., p. 92] Later Hammer profited from the sale of Russian art in
New York City. He also became involved, through his firm United Distillers, in the
mob-linked liquor business. [EPSTEIN, p. 147] "Hammer celebrated his
fifty-fifth birthday cruising around Manhattan on his yacht." [EPSTEIN, p.
162] Lifelong atheist, in later life Hammer reverted back to his Jewish
roots, choosing the bar mitzvah name Avraham Ben Yehuda Maccabee.
[EPSTEIN, p. 21]
Wealthy British
Jewish media mogul Robert Maxwell was in some ways a Hammer clone. Maxwell
also was once a courier and money launderer for Soviet Russia, [DAVIES, p. 7] later becoming a
fabulously rich and particularly corrupt capitalist. [See
elsewhere]
Yet another such
(American) ideological chameleon is Harvey Wasserman -- former hippie,
socialist, SDS member, co-founder of Liberation News Service, and
author of the popular anti-establishment Harvey Wasserman's History of
the United States. By the late 1980s Wasserman was president of his
family's Wasserman Uniform and
Shoe Company, selling Mace and other equipment to police departments.
[CHAFETS, p. 185-187]
Wasserman too --
the former universalist activist and radical for a common humanity -- has, in
later life, made the familiar
pilgrimage back to Jewish tribalism, saying:
"I'll admit something
that's a little strange -- I feel more comfortable
around Jews. I know
that's strange, considering the life I've led, but
it's
the truth. I feel more
comfortable. I was amazed to discover that I
wanted to have
children with a Jewish woman. It's completely
inconsistent but
that's how I feel." [CHAFETS, p. 189]
Wasserman's common-law wife is even more chauvinist, raising the
familiar shield of the Holocaust to deflect direct exposure of her naked
racism, remarking that the father of her children
"had to be a Jew.
Harry's great, I love him. But even more important, I
could trace his family
all the way back to his great-grandparents, and
all
of them were Jews ...
I could never have a child with a gentile, or
someone with gentile
blood. You see, somewhere in his genetic history
there could be someone who put my family
into the gas chambers."
[CHAFETS, p.
191]
What about the
sleazy television talk-show host Jerry Springer, son of Holocaust
survivors? "I've never changed my politics," he says today. A journalist
adds that "Mr. Springer likes to say [this] about his transformation from
'60s anti-establishment idealist to talk-show high sleazio ... He sees the
media criticism of his show as the ultimate bias of elitism and racism."
[LIPPERT, B., 5-3-98, p. D6] This is a man who "lives in a 91st floor
penthouse apartment overlooking Lake Michigan in Chicago's ritziest
neighborhood and is ferried to and fro in a chauffeur-driven limo."
[CAREY/WITHERIDGE, 11-2-98]
And what are we
to make of the strange leftist universalism of prominent Jewish author
Arthur Koestler and the psychological currents behind it? The (Jewish)
Forward notes that a professor of Jewish studies in England, David
Cesarani,
"makes the
claim, based on allegations by the author's former
friends,
that Koestler was a 'serial rapist.' The assertion that
one
of this
century's renowned anti-totalitarian thinkers was a
violent
dictator
in her personal relationships with women ignited
debate
in the
British press about whether Koestler's private life
overshadows
his public
contributions ... [Cesarani] seems to see
Koestler's
Jewishness
as an all-encompassing force that had an impact on
everything
from his sexual promiscuity to his ideas about
communism." [BRAHMS, p. 11]
Like many Jews,
Village Voice writer Paul Cowan is a "fugitive from radicalism who
has converted to [Jewish] Orthodoxy." [BRENNER, p. 337] As a wealthy
student at elite WASP prep school Choate, he and other Jews refused to
recite Christian-oriented school prayers: "I remember holding my head high
those nights, feeling an incrediby strong surge of tribal loyalty that I'd
never before experienced ... After the four years at Choate ... once I'd
been thorugh that experience, my mother's message about the six million
[Holocaust victims] became, perhaps, the single most important fact of my
life." [COWAN, P., 1982, p. 12, 15] But the consummate symbol of the
exploitation of anti-materialist themes for profit is probably Jewish pop
star Bob Dylan who made a very lucrative career singing social conscience
"moral" ballads about dignity and righteousness in the 1960s. Meanwhile,
Dylan led a reclusively elitist and affluent life from limousines.
Apparently not rich enough, in 1996 one of his most famous songs, "The
Times They-Are-A-Changin'" was sold to a bank in Montreal, Canada, for use
in an ad campaign. As one London newspaper noted, many former Dylan
followers were "furious" about the new use of the song that was once "an
anthem for the sixties generation that waged war on materialism and
philosophized on the evils of pin-striped suits." [MILNER, C., p. 4]
"Now
Jewish interests and welfare," notes Stephen Whitfield, "without which
Jewish moral values cannot be perpetuated, are dependent upon a secure and
thriving Israel, whose enemies in the world arena are usually emanated
from the left." [WHITFIELD, p. 120, American] "Scratch an American Jew," notes
longtime Jewish activist Earl Raab, "and you find a democratic voter, but
if you scratch deeper, you will not find a liberal." [FRIEDMAN, M., p.
48] "Most Jews in New York,"
says New York University professor Mitchell Moss, "are concerned with
safety, quality of life and taxes, not public schools and social services,
the two largest areas of public expenditure. Almost half of the Jews in
New York send their children to independent and religious schools."
[FRIEDMAN, M, p. 50]
Today's
Jewish high status and attendant world view represent the material
opposite of much of immigrant American Jewry's sense of itself at the turn
of the twentieth century. As Hania Diner notes:
"Both left-wing
radicalism and Zionism shaped the political and
ideological
lives of many Jews who emigrated to the United
States
beginning in the
1880s ... [DINER, p. 7] ... Socialism proved such
an
attractive
political philosophy to these immigrant Jews
because
of the brutal
sweatshop conditions under which so many worked,
usually in
factories owned by other Jews ... [DINER, p. 9] ... [In
1925]
such
predominantly Jewish unions as the ILGWU, the
United
Cloth Hat and
Cap Makers, and the Furrier's Union all sent
[communist] May
Day greetings to ... the black socialist magazine,
the
Messenger." [DINER, p. 202]
This radically
universalist expression, or whatever else it was (transitory strategy to
deconstruct the existing Christian-oriented culture?), has proven over the
years to have been remarkably illusory and shallow-- merely a means to a
self-promotive end -- as Jewry has quickly ascended the American economic
ladder. As Arthur Hertzberg notes about America's early twentieth century
Russian Jewish population, supposedly rooted so deeply in socialist
ethics, "Jews were uniquely visible in this stampede toward wealth because
they were moving more rapidly upward from the poverty of their youth than
any other group in America. This intense passion for success was noted by
others, and not always with approval." [HERTZBERG, A., 1989, p.
331]
(In Latin
America too, notes Judith Elkin, immigrant Jews were quick to dismiss
their European-based socialist political radicalism in their new
environments: "Jews had never developed linkages with non-Jewish campesinos; ... Contact with the
proletariat was broken. This is a startling fact, considering that so
large and so vocal a portion of Jewish immigrants arrived with leftist and
universalist ideals.")
[ELKIN, 1998, p. 148]
As Nathan Glazer noted
about the American social and political world in
1971:
"All the roles that
Jews play are roles that the New Left disapproves
of,
and wishes to reduce
... [The Left is critical] of all private
business,
and of its whole
associated institutional complex -- lawyers,
stockbrokers,
accountants, etc. -- in which Jews are prominent.
The kinds of society
it admires have no place for occupations in which
Jews have tended to
cluster in recent history." [SHAPIRO, E., 1999,
p. 199] |