The Free Voice of Labor - The Jewish Anarchists
Of possible interest.
I don't think the Left has been "erased." The anarchists are fairly well-remembered, cited, and quoted. I mean, in America, who is the most famous of all anarchists? Fergus Murphy of Boston?
No, it's Emma Goldman.
The most famous of the New Left are the ones who reconsidered/joined the other side - namely Ronald Radosh and David Horowitz. She thinks this is some kind of ideological conspiracy or suppression effort. Rather, it's the fact that the world has moved on from "factory floors and the countryside" because no one works on factory floors and there is barely any such thing as "countryside."
Jewish socialists, anarchists, and communists did not believe the United States was some wonderful land with boundless opportunities; they saw it as a country full of economic exploitation, its democratic values and capitalist system a blatant contradiction.
Socialists, anarchists, and communists of any ethnic or religious background don't think the United States was some "wonderful land with boundless opportunities."
But some of this also brings to mind the fact that these three things are not one thing.
Consider this scene from "Reds" where Emma Goldman, the anarchist, gets a face-full of communism's excesses:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jt-68hCA9k
You read so much about this "party activity" of the generation which would give birth to Red Diaper babies. If indeed this disappeared, it wasn't because of selling out or getting old or someone conspiring against them: it was that a whole lot of them got a good hard look at how the road to hell is paved with good intentions...and the foul leavings of slimy Stalinists.
In the early 1950s, Jewish communities around the nation voted to oust the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order on the grounds that it was just a front for the Communist party. This came at a time when hundreds of leftists or perceived left-sympathizing Jewish public school teachers were fired from their jobs, when some of Hollywood’s finest Jewish actors, directors, producers, and screenwriters were blacklisted from the entertainment industry, and leaders like Mississippi Congressman John Rankin railed freely about all those “Communist kikes.”
From Wikipedia:
The IWO was made up of a total of 15 sections, the largest section of which was the Jewish section representing one-third of the membership of the IWO and which in 1944 was renamed the Jewish People's Fraternal Order.
OK but:
The International Workers Order (IWO) was a Communist Party-affiliated insurance, mutual benefit and fraternal organization founded in 1930 and disbanded in 1954 as the result of legal action undertaken by the state of New York in 1951.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers_Order
I'm just not getting weepy about this; sorry.
Still, this background does not, and cannot justify dismissing Jewish radicals today; with the vastly diminished threat of anti-Semitism, the increasingly rightward drift of American-Jewish leadership, and the growing number of disaffected young Jews—shrouding Jewish leftist history does far more harm than good.
I'm sorry, I'm not even Jewish, but even a cursory reading of the history of the Left in America by a college Freshman turns up all of this; this is hardly "shrouded" in any way, shape or form. As a matter of fact it is both on record, and is the source of continuing conspiratorial anti-semitism among the Christian Right (the militia types) today.
This hasn't been "erased" or "shrouded." It just ran its course. Its significance was that these people backed the wrong pony just as modern communists do -- to the disgust of anyone even reasonably cognizant of the miserable track record of state and party communism. The social democrat leftists have some life left, and we saw this in their rallying around Bernie Sanders (not even that far left) and the Greens, and the anarchists refuse to be stamped out. The rest on the far left, who still join parties are considered fringe nutcases, and rightly so.
An example of such revisionism can be found by studying the historiography of one of the most important leaders in the Jewish socialist movement, Abraham Cahan. While most young Jews could tell you who Anne Frank or Elie Wiesel was, far fewer would be able to recognize Cahan, even though he spent decades at the forefront of American-Jewish intellectual, political, and cultural life. A novelist, a newspaper editor, and a socialist leader, Cahan devoted himself to rallying other Jews for the revolution.
A stillborn revolution no one wanted and no one wants. So what.
The past half-century has seen a pronounced increase in efforts to dismiss and denounce Jewish intellectuals who offer unorthodox ideas or levy radical critiques.
I am sorry, the universities are full of them. I know: I was a student of many of them. This is a ridiculous statement. And if you want to march toward the mainstream, how about The Nation which has several notable (and widely referenced/quoted) writers.
Jews continued to engage in radical organizing — they were overwhelmingly represented as rank-and-file activists and leaders in the New Left movement that emerged in the 1960s and 70s.
Which ended in divisiveness, infighting, implosion, and the Weather Underground, the legacy of which is a almost a parody of a revolutionary group. I have at least five books on the SDS, and the Weather Underground on my bookshelf. No one has "erased" this. Mocked it. Called it all a terrible idea full of terrible people, sure. But erased it?
Experts estimate that Jews made up between one-third and one-half of all New Left activists on college campuses.
I also have a book by Todd Gitlin from a few years back. They're all still there; there is no mystery. It's that no one gives a shit because all of these particular variants of leftism are spent.
This isn't to say Leftism is dead; it is simply to say the New Left accomplished some things and ran its course and it's not difficult to read about. Hell, a lot of the people from back then can't shut up about it for five minutes, whether it's Collier and Horowitz's excellent Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties skewering figured and myths (they say/allege/from their perspective - The Huey Newton chapter is a doozy) to Bill Ayers's (don't know if he's Jewish) shitty book](https://www.amazon.com/Fugitive-Days-Memoir-Bill-Ayers/dp/0807071242/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1476864347&sr=8-2&keywords=bill+ayers+fugitive+days). (And there are good books about the New Left too, including Ron Jacobs's The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground and James Miller's fantastic Democracy is in The Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago.
These organizations even live on in undead forms:
The author is mistaking people's lack of interest for suppression. It's just that most people aren't moved by this kind of stale yesterday's-news stuff. And no one is denying there were a lot of Jews there, either.
As Michael Staub writes in his book Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America, “The various critics of the New Left propounding their views in…Commentary have set the terms of debate for the subsequent decades.”
There is no one to blame but the New Left for their own self-destruction. Commentary and Podhoretz have opined on these matters, but claiming they set the terms of debate is risible.
Nevertheless, grappling with Jewish leftist history would restore an integral part of Jewish identity to its rightful place within American-Jewish self-conception. It would offer a challenge to leaders who decry communal cultural trends and imminent Jewish demise. It would mean reclaiming a Jewish tradition that binds a commitment to American democracy with a resistance to capitalism, rather than adopting a story that sees the former as dependent on rejecting the latter.
Good luck with all that.
What really threatens Jewish institutions now is the possibility that this perceived sense of Jewish unity, of Jewish accord, might fall apart. Yet that tantalizing idea of Jewish unity was always a myth—one that grew and flourished through the exclusion and expulsion of select groups of Jewish voices, groups, and movements.
And you'd do exactly what to Jewish conservatives if you somehow were "setting the terms of the debate?" I'm sorry, but the Left hardly has any kind of track record indicating inclusion of anyone who wasn't on the same page politically. Shit, the biggest enemy of most leftists is other leftists. Everyone is an entryist, platformist, or infilitrator if they don't get the rap down. This is one of the main reasons why so many people find the far left creepy as shit.
This author mistakes disinterest in reviving these traditions as somehow cloaking, suppressing, or erasing it.
What she doesn't understand is that her politics are boring as fuck.