Left-Wing Antisemitism in the United States Past and Present

Key Findings:

The left’s view of Jews and its antisemitic lexicon is rooted in 19th century Marxist and anarchist canonical discourse. Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin (the leading theoreticians of anarchism), depicted Judaism as nakedly materialistic and anti-social, and Jews as fraudulent, parasitic, exploitative and bloodsucking — pervading a secular version of the Christian stereotype of the Jew as obsessed with financial gain and lacking compassion.

The emergence of modern Zionism as an organized international movement in the 1890s precipitated new, equally vicious forms of antisemitic defamation. The Soviet government waged a concerted campaign in the 1920’s to crush it within its territory, exiling thousands of Zionists to Siberian forced labor camps and branding Zionism as “counterrevolutionary” whilst respecting the nationalist aspirations of other ethnic and racial groups.

The American Communist Party (CP) often expressed intense loathing of Zionism. When the anti-Jewish diatribes of the Nazi-allied grand mufti and other Muslim leaders sparked Islamic pogroms across Palestine in 1929, the CP cast the Arab militants as peasants fighting a class war against British imperialists and Zionist “land robbers.” The CP newspaper dismissed reports of the well-documented Arab atrocities against Jews as Zionist fabrications. 

In the late 1960’s, New Leftists and Black Nationalists embraced antisemitism. The Black Panther Party (funded by the CP) identified as Marxist-Leninist. BPP helped introduce Holocaust inversion to the New Left by equating Israel with the Third Reich and Jews with Nazis by directly associated Jews with criminality and appropriating Holocaust language. They denounced Jews who operated businesses in Black neighborhoods as “bandit merchants” and denied any Jewish claim to Israel except by “robber’s right.” It called Israeli soldiers “fascist storm troopers,” and charged that Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War resulted in Arab refugees being forced into “modern concentration camps.” 

Since the late 1960s, the American far left has increasingly recycled the same antisemitic detritus employed by the far right. Gerald L. K. Smith (the most prominent post-World War II American antisemite prior to Louis Farrakhan) distributed an Arab League pamphlet, Jewish atrocities in the Holy Land (1948), which resembled much of the anti-Israel propaganda that the New Left and its Black militant allies began circulating after the Six-Day War.

When the New Left fell apart as a movement in the early 1970s, many New Leftists joined university faculties, where they helped shape campus views of Israel, Zionism, and antisemitism and influenced public opinion through their publications, media appearances, and speaking engagements. In recent years, American universities have become a principal arena for cult-style promulgations of anti-Zionist antisemitism.

In addition, Holocaust and historical revision has also gained favor with moderate leftists. At its 2017 convention, the 25,000-member Democratic Socialists of America charged Israel with apartheid and colonialism — a charge designed to associate Israel with segregationist South Africa under white minority rule and with Nazi Germany. Many DSA members are active in the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. Four are members of the US House of Representatives. 

The Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) movement, which calls for boycotting Israeli products; terminating investments in companies trading with or operating in Israel; and ending ties with Israeli universities and cultural institutions, has strong support from nearly all far left organizations, from DSA, and from many liberal academics. 

Today, few on the American left regard antisemitism as a serious problem. At the same time, many apologize for Islamists and Black nationalists who defame Jews. It is increasingly fashionable in the liberal mainstream to demonize democratic Israel while ignoring persecution routinely committed by authoritarian regimes. Support for Israel within the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, strong in the late 1960s, has dropped dramatically in the last decades.

Notably, antisemitic vitriol from both extremes of the political spectrum have become virtually indistinguishable.