Jewish Socialists |
A Jewish Mystery: Episcopalians and Puerto Ricans It has been repeatedly observed that American Jews have incomes and education resembling the highest status Protestants in this country, i.e. Episcopalians, even as we vote like Puerto Ricans, who have little money and are seldom the beneficiaries of a higher education.
At first glance this appears to be an anomaly without a sufficient
explanation. However, an understanding of the American Jewish community as it
evolved during the past century explains this sufficiently.
In 1995 I published a book entitled American Judaism: The
Secularization of a Religious Community. This showed that by then a majority
of the descendants of the nearly two million eastern European Jews who entered
the United States after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1891 and the
quota restrictions on American immigration in 1923 had left Judaism and become
socialists instead. In short, it is not the case that these children and
grandchildren of Jews have no religion. On the contrary. Jewish agnostics and
atheists, comprising at least 52% of the progeny of the 19th century
Jews, have adopted what sociologists call a “secular” religion. Examples are
socialism, Nazism, Communism and Fascism. These religions, like all religions,
have founders like Karl Marx. They have “holy” scriptures like Das
Kapital (Capital), they have saints like Lenin and they expect a
final kind of salvation, or in our terms, an Olam Habo, “the next world,”
like the millennium.
Socialism, like all religions, has major scholars who explain the
founder's ideas to the followers. Of these there are many among socialists who
have written whole libraries full of comments on Marx, Engels and other
philosophers such as the Russian Jews J. Pomeranz and Morris Meyer.
In the early 1900’s, some of the oppressed Jews living in the Russian
empire, which then included Poland, the Baltic states, and much of the Balkans,
concluded that their future lay in the emerging communist movement in Russia.
They believed that only the overthrow of the Czar and the Russian Orthodox
church would give them any future. Therefore, some Russian Jews, by no means a
majority, actively participated in the work of the Russian Socialist and
Communist parties.
Therefore, when the eastern European Jews came to the United States, many
of them brought these ideas with them to New York and other cities. If you will
read World of Our Fathers by Irving Howe, you can understand why the
Jewish sweatshop laborers in this country became socialists, joined the Bund
(association), a Jewish socialist organization, and rejected the Jewish religion
in favor of socialist ideals.
Some Jews even returned to Russia during the communist revolution,
believing they would achieve paradise there. Only a small fraction of Jews
understood what Theodore Herzl predicted. Herzl knew and wrote in Der
Judenstaat in 1897 that the Jews of Europe were doomed and that only a
Jewish state could save them.
Indeed, a few Russian Jews did move to Israel and founded colonies there
in the early 20th century, especially after the British had taken the
Holy Land from the Turks and invited the European Jews to come there. Ninety
nine percent refused. In fact, the majority could have some to the United States
before 1923. Only 2 million of the eleven million European Jews came here.
As the generations proceeded, some Russian Jewish socialists did
recognize that Jews had no future among the Russian communists and went to
Israel where, after years of internal disputes, they founded the Labor party in
the 1930’s. The Russian Jewish communists remained opposed to Zionism until
the dictator Stalin murdered prominent Jews in the communist hierarchy even
after the Holocaust.
In this country, Jews gradually amassed more and more education and
wealth. Our social standing rose generation after generation, but the old
affinity for dictatorial socialism remained. This is not surprising. The 52% of
erstwhile Jews who have left us needed to cling to something. They, like all of
us, need an explanation for human existence and for suffering and pain in this
world. So they used socialism because they were raised in it. Sociologists call
this culture lag. We mean that many people follow beliefs and opinions which are
of no further use to the survival of the group because they have always believed
these doctrines. Therefore, American Jews today have a “knee jerk” loyalty
to the Democratic party, which teaches that individualism is evil, that one must
follow “the leader”, at present Obama, that criticism of the government is
not allowed, that differences of opinion are un-American and that we are all
better off if we do what we are told by unelected government bureaucrats.
We support the enemies of Israel’s survival because they are Democrats.
We despise the supporters of Jewish survival because they are Republicans. A
recent poll shows that only 38% of Democrats support the survival of Israel. 86%
of Republicans support the survival of Israel. In addition,
a majority of Democrats blame the current recession on, you guessed it,
“the Jews”. Only a few Republicans agree with that sentiment, which is
particularly pronounced in the Afro-American community
We conclude therefore that there are really only about two million Jews
in this country. Those mythical “six million” American Jews touted by the
ignoramuses in the media never existed. There were 5.8 million Jews in this
country in 1937, when we were 3% of the U.S. population. Since then our very low
birth rate, 1.4 per woman age 15-35 (the U.S. birth rate is 2.0), our high death
rate, and our high intermarriage rate (54%) have reduced our number and our
ratio to the U.S. population radically.
In 1960, Look magazine featured a cover story entitled "The
Vanishing American Jew". This has now come true. It is therefore time to
recognize that those who happen to carry a Jewish sounding name are not
therefore Jews. They are mostly believers in the dogmas of socialism, to which
they adhere blindly and without any thought or contemplation. They have left us
and should not be counted among us. Many of these erstwhile “Jews” also
suffer from the Stockholm syndrome. This refers to the capture of some bank
customers by bank robbers in Sweden who sided with their captors after their
release. This is true of many so-called Jews who side with Jew haters and Israel
bashers for fear of being regarded as Jewish by the bigots.
It is time that the ignorant media learn the lesson that a Jew is someone
who supports Judaism just as a Catholic is someone who supports Catholicism. We
are not a race. That is Nazi talk. Jewishness or Judaism are not inherited
through the genes. Therefore it is nonsense to claim that Obama appointed
numerous Jews to high office. He appointed socialists who happened to descend
from Jews some generations ago. These are not our friends. Like Obama, they seek
the destruction of Israel. May we be protected from seeing their schemes come to
fruition. Shalom u’vracha. Dr. Gerhard Falk is the author of numerous publications, including Women & Social Change in America (2009). |