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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
Teachers Union in 1932 were Jewish." [WEYL., N., 1968, p. 118-119] 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, middle-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
marginal status that probably turned these Jews into such a prevalent on the South African left." [BIALE, D., MARCH/APRIL 2000, p. 63-64] 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 of a particular type: there were few veteran Communists among their victims would be former KPP members and other
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
among the staff of the Tenth Department. On the a distorted conception of 'internationalism,' 'Jewish anti-Semitism.'" [CHECINSKI,
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
for an ultimate redemption of their people, or of mankind at large. The
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
and happiness: money and friends ... The Jews of the world There is no disguising the fact that in the factor in the 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
8 percent of the vote ... With the intimidating force of the Red 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
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 Revolution -- in the Soviet Sovietization 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
and Leonid Brezhnev was said to have a Jewish wife." [RAPOPORT, L., 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
to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela 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 ... Jews have figured prominently in the leadership of the Communist Party, including Charles Rappoport, Jean Kanapa, Jean Ellerstein, Haim Cukierman, Charles Fierman and Henri Krasucki." 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.
origins, which advocacy of whose loyalties would be to Zionism rather than the country of their [KORBANSKI, p. 73] was his total control of 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 [Nazi] That's 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
in America, so many of whom were -- and are -- Jewish ... [Such allowed the Soviet Union to develop atomic weapons years have been [otherwise] possible." [LEITER, p. 46] 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]
As Jewish scholars Stanley Rothman and S. Robet Lichter note: "The same pattern characterized the Socialist Party of America. Until 1918 SPA drew its greatest relative strength from non-Jewish areas of the country. Nonetheless, Jews already dominated the party's organization, aside from the very top leadership (i.e., Eugene Debs and his immediate followers). By 1920 Jews constituted the main prop of both the party leadershp and cadres, a position they maintained through the 1960s. They tended to avoid the very top leadership positions, however, lest attempts to develop a broader base be weakened ... The American Communist party would soon follow the same pattern ... Indeed, when instructed to change their names for party purposes, most American Jewish communists chose non-Jewish pseudonyms." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 99, 100] )
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]
Although Jews played a dominant role in Hollywood (and American) communism, including Soviet espionage [see earlier citations; Hollywood Jewish communist screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr., estimated, for example, that two-thirds of the Communist Party members in Los Angeles were Jewish] [GABLER, N., 1988, p. 331], Jewish organizations were active in lobbying the largely Jewish film community to keep that depiction off the movie screens. As Peter Novick writes, "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 unsympathetic reprsentations of Jews. A good deal of this lobbying dealt with the Jew-Communist issue. The producer of I Married a Communist promised to see that no Communist character had a 'name that can even remotely be construed as Jewish.'" 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 back to the United States, and became part of the [Vietnam] anti-war movement, I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with the left's attitude toward Israel. I was a dove, but sometimes [non-Jewish girlfriend] Rachel and I would hear a criticism of Israeli military policy and find ourselves reacting very differently. She would assume that Israel was partly to blame; I'd wonder whether the criticisms contained a hint of anti-Semitism." [COWAN, P., 1987, p. 19] 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
DFLer [Democrat] when elected mayor of St. Paul [in 1993]. He defected to the Republican Party less than two years ago, and in June he told activists at the state party convention that their agenda was [SMITH, D., 10-21-98, p. 1A] 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 His classes had become like convenings of a revolutionary republic ... [BATES, T., 1992, p. 52, 53] ... After a bout with liver cancer, Harvey Goldberg passed away in in 1987. His executors discovered a stock portfolio that the secretive professor had managed himself. He had died a millionaire." [BATES, T., 1992, p. 445] 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] JEWISH COMMUNIST, AND OTHER, ASSASSINATIONS: In an entire book about assassinations (limited only to those deemed "political") carried out by Jews in Palestine/Israel from 1882 to 1988, Israeli scholar Nachum Ben David itemizes 91 cases of "assassination events" committed by Jews. (An assassination is defined by this author in his title as "a rhetorical device for justice"). Most murder victims were other Jews who were considered "traitors/collaborators/squealers/informers." [BEN DAVID, p. 418] "We are not dealing with a lone fanatic killer [in these cases]," stresses Ben David, "but with a premeditated planned act, committed by a group or by a representative of a group." [BEN YEHUDA, p. xxi] Aside from a possible volume about Jewish gangster murders (Murder, Inc., etc.) and another about Mossad killings, no doubt a similar volume could be created about Jewish assassinations under the auspices of Russian communism. Just before, and after, the creation of the Soviet state, assassinations by Jews, in one form or another, sometimes as secret police agents, are many. Mark Zborowsky, for instance, (a later immigrant to America where he became a university professor), in league with fellow Jews Naum Eitingon and Grigory Rabinovich, was instrumental in the operation to murder Trotsky's son, Lev Sedov. [VAKSBERG, p. 96] Arkady Vaksberg notes another case of Jews murdering Jews: "The murder of two Jews whom Stalin hated [Efraim Sklyansky and Isiah Khurgin] had been organized by two other Jews, Kanner and Yagoda. Let us add that Kanner's assistant, Bombin, and Mekhil's assistants, Makhovev and Yuzhak, were all Jewish." [VAKSBERG, p. 28] In 1904, the Russian Minister of Interior, Vlacheslav Plehve, also fell to a Jewish assassin. [LINDEMANN, A., 1997, p. 296] In 1906, in the Russian town of Grodno, "Jewish partisans assassinated the Russian district commander of police." In 1908, the chief of police from another town, Bialystok, came to Grodno. This time, "the Jew who tried to shoot him died in prison." [LACEY, p. 18] In September of 1911 another Jewish assassin, Dmitry Bogrov, shot and killed Pyotr Stolypin, a prominent Russian official, at the Kiev Opera Theatre. [SINGER, N, p. 2] Another Jewish would-be killer, Fanya Kaplan, also shot V. I. Lenin through the neck in a failed assassination attempt in early communist Russia, saying that he had "betrayed the Revolution." [LEVYTSKY, p. 29] On the same day, "the Cheka leader Uritsky was shot to death in August 1918 by a distinguished Jewish poet and army officer named Kannegiesser who 'was revolted by the fact that so many of the Bolsheviks were Jewish.'" [WEYL, N., 1968, p. 198] In 1926, another Jewish assassin, Shalom Schwartzbard, murdered Ukrainian nationalist Symon Petlura, in Paris. (Petlura was in exile from his homeland; he formerly led the Ukrainian army against Bolshevik attack). As noted earlier, a Jewish woman was also a member of the team that assassinated Tsar Alexander II. Even in Argentina, "on May Day 1909, during a workers' demonstration in Buenos Aires, a Jewish anarchist murdered a local police chief," thereby igniting anti-Jewish rioting. [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 281] Elsewhere, during the rise of Nazi fascism in Germany, notes Franklin Ford, "paradoxically, during their movement's first years in power, Nazis were the victims, not the perpetrators of two sensational murders of German's residing in foreign parts." [FORD] In 1936 a Nazi official in Switzerland, Wilhelm Gustloff, was assassinated by a Jewish student, David Frankfurter. In 1938 Ernst von Rath, a German embassy official in Paris was killed by Herschel Grynszpan. The Nazis used this act as an excuse to respond with intensified savagery to the German Jewish population. Years earlier, in 1918, long before the Nazis came to power, a Russian Jew, Yakov Blumkin, assassinated the German ambassador to Moscow, Count Mirbach. [SUDOPLATOV, p. 189] Kurt Eisner, the Jewish prime minister of Bavaria, was also assassinated in 1918 by Count Arco Valley, "a young man who felt stigmatized by the fact that his mother was Jewish." [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. 123] As Leon Schapiro notes about late 19th century Russia and the formation of a communist base there: "When Jews thronged into the party after 1881 the number of Jewish terrorists was very high. There were important Jewish terrorists, like Gershuni, for example, in the socialist revolutionary party which evolved during the present century as the heir of the 'People's Will' ... In more recent times one could cite the extensive Jewish participation in the savageries of the Red Terror of the Cheka [the secret police] -- or even events in Palestine." [SCHAPIRO, L., 1961, p. 152] 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 pointn 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 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] In America, in 1892 famous Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman and two comrades decided to assassinate millionaire Henry Clay Frick. "In desperation [Goldman] tried whoreing [sic] (unsuccessfully) on 14th Street [in New York] to raise the money for a gun, and [Alexander] Berkman went to Pittsburgh to pull the trigger." [SHULMAN, A., 1970, p. 10] The assassination attempt by Berkman was carried out, but Frick survived his wound. Also in America, in 1974 Samuel Byck, another Jewish would-be assassin, embarked on a sensationally bizarre suicidal scheme to kill President Richard Nixon. He murdered a security guard at the Baltimore/Washington airport, stormed into a jet and demanded to the pilots that it take off and follow his orders. His plan was to crash the plane into the White House. Technically unable to accommodate him, Byck murdered the two pilots before he was, in turn, shot and killed by authorities. [CLARKE, J., p. 128-142] More famous, of course, in Texas, was Jack Ruby (born Jacob Rubinstein), the (Jewish) murderer of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who is believed to have killed John F. Kennedy. Ruby had interests in six Dallas-area strip-tease clubs. As Gerald Posner notes: "Ruby often resulted to violence with his employees, and lost the tip of his left index fingers when one bit it off during a scuffle. He beat one of his musicians with brass knuckles, cracked another's head with a blackjack, knocked another's teeth out, and put the club's handyman in the hospital with a severe beating. To avoid paying the club's cigarette girl $50 in back wages, he threatened to throw he down the stairs until she relented her claim ... He was not above attacking people from behind, kicking men in the groin or face once he had them to the floor, or even striking women ... He was often malicious, forcing beaten victims to crawl out of the club on hands and knees." [POSNER, p. 357] Ruby's killing of Oswald erased his looming testimony, as well as any other person's or organization's involvement in the most famous political assassination in American history. "In Dallas, Texas," noted Jewish scholar Barnet Litvinoff, "a man born with the name Rubinstein who subsequently eliminated its Jewish-sounding suffix took it upon himself to avenge the martyrdom of a President. He gave his Jewishness as one of the reasons for doing so." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 18] At Ruby's trial, Patrick Dean (the police sergeant in charge of security where Oswald was killed) testified that shortly after the shooting he talked to Ruby about what he had just done. One of the reasons Ruby killed Oswald, the killer told him, was "because he wanted the world to know that Jews do have guts." [BELLI, p. 167] When Kennedy was shot, Ruby was in the advertising offices of the Dallas Morning News, troubled by a full page advertisement in that morning's newspaper. As Gerald Posner notes, "The entire page was a black-bordered advertisement, headed in large block letters, 'Welcome Mister Kennedy,' and the text accused the President of being a Communist tool. It was signed by 'The American Fact-Finding Committee, Bernard Weissman, Chairman. Ruby was very disturbed that the News should have run such a demeaning advertisement and was dismayed that it was signed by someone with a Jewish name." [POSNER, 1993, p. 371] Ruby mingled with a variety of underworld figures, and was involved in gun smuggling to Cuba, facts that has fueled in later years a variety of conspiracy theories about who really killed Kennedy. And for what reason. Jim Marris notes that "The smuggling of arms to Cuba was overseen by Norman 'Roughhouse' Rothman, a burly associate of Miami's mob boss Santos Trafficante who managed Trafficante's Sans Souci in Havana. At the same time Rothman reportedly was splitting Havana slot machines with [Cuban dictator] Batista's brother-in-law." [MARRIS, p. 391] In his 1989 investigation of the Kennedy assassination, Marris also devotes an entire chapter entitled, "Did Ruby and Oswald Know Each Other?," itemizing the testimony of those who claimed that the two were not strangers to each other. [MARRIS, p. 402-414] "There were many signs that Ruby wasn't just a harmless scoundrel," noted Newsweek in 1993, "and the investigation into his background was remarkably -- almost willfully -- shallow. FBI agents interviewed hundreds of his acquaintances, but they barely followed up on obvious leads about his underworld friends and his trips to Cuba." [BECK, p. 94] While Ruby was locked in prison and sentenced to death for the murder of Oswald, the London Guardian notes that Ruby "was raving by the end -- there was no bigger conspiracy theorist than Jack Ruby. He became convinced America had begun a pogrom against the Jews because of what he, or Oswald, or both of them, had done." [BYGRAVE] Most of the best known "radical" and hippie 1960s-era newspapers were also Jewish-founded. These include The Realist (Paul Krassner, later an editor at Ramparts), the Berkeley Barb (Marvin Garson), Rat (Jeff Shero, who had funding help from Jason Epstein at the New York Review of Books, [NOBILE, p. 198], the East Village Other (Allan Katzman), and the Liberation News Service (Jesse Kornbluth and Marshall Bloom). [WHITFIELD, American, p. 145] Arthur Kunkin, who eventually softened from being a "radical Zionist," founded the Los Angeles Free Press. [PECK, 1991, p. 22] Allen Cohen was "editor of the San Francisco Oracle." [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 152] Even in communist Russia, a Jewish author noted in 1969 that "younger Jewish intellectuals feature prominently in 'protest' campaigns, which here have taken the form of underground literature. Moscow's first underground magazine, Syntax, was founded by Alexander Ginsburg." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 100] "The leading exemplars of this genre [of radical journalism]," note Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, "such as the East Village Other, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, and Detroit's the Fifth Estate, as well as 'alternative' papers like the Village Voice, the key personnel were invariably of Jewish background." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 107] Today's versions of this include David Barsamian (founder and director of Alternative Radio), Michael Albert (editor of Z magazine), and Robert Weissman (editor of Multinational Monitor).
Mother Jones, the well-known left-wing
"social conscience" magazine, was largely founded in 1974
by the philanthropy of Adam Hochschild, heir to a fortune; he thereby
became the magazine's original managing editor, as well as Board
Chairman. Judging by his autobiography, Hochschild's commitment
to create Mother Jones in behalf of the socially and politically
dispossessed appears to have been, in major part, in atonement for
the sins of his father. This man, Harold Hochschild, was the wealthy
Jewish co-founder (and chairman) of an international mining syndicate
that sent entire communities of Africans into holes in the ground
for a miniscule wage, and engendered local wrath for its strip-mining
in Appalachia, pollution of Indian fishing areas in British Columbia,
and destroying Aboriginal lands in Australia. The younger Hochschild
was even embarrassed to discover, while working on a series of exposes
about the CIA as a staff member at an earlier left-wing journal,
Ramparts, that for a decade his father was Chairman of the
Board of the African-American Institute, a front for the CIA. [HOCHSCHILD,
1986, p. 130] Adam Hochschild, noted the San Francisco
Examiner in 1998, is "historically [Mother Jones'] largest
funder and the wielder of very substantial clout within the foundation
[that runs Mother Jones] ... Hochschild has placed an unspecified
sum in a 13-year account which ... provides money year by year in
diminishing amounts." [ARMSTRONG, D., 9-13-98, p. D1] As editor-in-chief
Jeffrey Klein resigned in 1998, "creative director" Rhonda
Rubenstein designed a new format for the magazine. Today's editor-in-chief
at Mother Jones is Roger Cohn.
Matthew Rothschild edits the left-wing Progressive
(for years published by Erwin Knoll). James Weinstein is the founding
editor and publisher of another influential leftist journal, In
These Times. (Today's editor: Joel Bleifuss). Naomi Klein is
a former editor of a Canadian leftist journal, This. As mentioned
earlier, Jews have dominated Nation for decades. Louis Weisberg
edits Chicago's gay newspaper, The Chicago Free Press. And
as Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter note about the world of
American journalistic communism:
"From the 1930s through the 1950s, Jews were quite active in the [Communist] party leadership. Almost half the Communist leaders tried for violations of the Smith Act in 1947 were Jewish. In the 1940s, the editor of the Daily Worker, the managing editor, and the labor editor were all of Jewish background. The publicly visible top leadership, however, was non-Jewish." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 100] On the Jewish Question, by Karl Marx |
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Group
Names Soviet-Era Victims, THE "FRANKFORT SCHOOL" (the profoundly influential Jewish
Marxist-Freudian school of social and political thought that came --
with German Jewish exile from Hitler -- to dominate American universities): Erich Fromm,
Judaism, and the Frankfurt School, Jewish
Communists in Eastern Europe Solzhenitsyn
breaks last taboo of the revolution,
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