Here’s a long but interesting piece (h/t Gordon Peffer) by Rachel Cohen, a writer for the liberal bimonthly American Prospect, on the expunging from the Jewish American historical memory of the community’s secular, left-wing, working class origins.
Today, the class position of Western Jews has shifted, secularism has been replaced by the rise of religious orthodoxy, internationalism by Zionism, and socialism by a growing sympathy for the loudly pro-Zionist Republican party. “No doubt, the Jewish political shift..was partially grounded in Jewish economic mobility”, Cohen writes. “But such a narrative obscures the reality of the many Jewish individuals who do not fall so squarely into the classic American Success Story…who never endorsed American free-market values.” Cohen traces the rightward drift of the community to the McCarthy era in which “the institutional Jewish community actively participated, disavowing radical Jews, cooperating with HUAC, and organizing their own propaganda campaign to demonstrate they were loyal, patriotic Americans.” McCarthyism at home coincided with the birth of Israel in the Mideast, but Cohen says it was not until the 1967 Six Day War, “which engendered a more visceral commitment to Israel’s survival for many American-Jews”, that “things noticeably began to change”. “It’s not a coincidence that the erasure of radical history has coincided with the creation of an American-Jewish consensus that was built and maintained in large part to drive a specific politics around Israel”, she notes. "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…Fortunately, the shaky foundations of consensus are already beginning to crumble.” https://medium.com/thelist/the-erasure-of-the-american-jewish-left-1dd41335a46b _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
