Has the Left Finally Started to Alienate Secular Jews?

By Yehudit Garmaise

Has the left gone so far that even secular Jews, who often have long-comprised a big part of progressive culture, feel as alienated from it than more religious Jews have for decades?

In The Nation, which at 156-years-old, is not only the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the US, but also one of the country’s most liberal publications, Alexis Grenell reveals rifts between the far left and Jews that may not be easily repaired.

Grenell writes that “Jewish voices are too often excluded from precisely the conversations they should be leading.”

Although many pervasive progressive ideas do not seem to bother secular Jews, what does alienate them is a dark, underlying anti-Semitism, a liberal knee-jerk idea that Israel somehow oppresses members of the Arab nations that seek to destroy the Jewish state, and assumptions that Jews, who are often white, do not experience the systemic violence and harsher penalties in the criminal justice system than do people of color.

“Call it ‘goy-splaining,’” Grenell humorously responds. 

“Visibly Jewish people absolutely are subject to violence in the US, as was seen this past spring, when [perpetrators] drove through NYC’s heavily Jewish Diamond District and violently assaulted a man wearing a yarmulke,” she wrote.

In fact, in New York City, month and after month, and year after year, when the NYPD reports hate crime statistics, Jews, and in particular, Orthodox Jews, are usually, by far, the targets of the largest proportions of hate crimes, compared with any other minority group.

Some Jews claim that Orthodox Jews who commit crimes do receive “disproportionately harsher outcomes in the criminal justice system” than their less religious and non-Jewish brethren do, so as to “serve as examples.”

Even the many secular Jews who say they support the Palestinians, Grenell writes that they get attacked as part of “a shortcut that equates Jews with white colonists: White colonialism is bad, ergo Israel is bad.”

The last straw for Grenell was when the Democratic Socialists of America’s [DSA] National Political Committee “raked over the coals,” she said, US Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who represents the 16th district, for refusing to back the movement to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) Israel, which he also visited.

“Several [DSA] chapters across the country have called for his ouster,” wrote Grenell, who incredulously added that the DSA chapter at the University of Wisconsin at Madison further took Bowman to task for a respectful tweet Bowman posted to honor the former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, after his death. 

Powell, the son of Jamaican immigrants, often fondly recalled his childhood in the Bronx, where he had many warm relationships with Jewish neighbors, who perhaps influenced his later support for and defense of Israel, when he had considerable political power to do so.

“I proudly served as a Sabbath goy,” Powell, a four-star US general and a distinguished statesman, said many times with a laugh.

After Bowman expressed that Powell had inspired him, the DSA agonized over whether to expel the NYC Rep, which, in the end, they did not do in a long statement that repeatedly proclaimed that the DSA remains an opponent of the “Zionist lobby.” 

Grenell explains that among many other offensive aspects of BDS, the "boycott recalls the ‘Don’t buy from the Jews’” announcement the Nazis issued just before “confiscating Jewish assets and cutting our world population by more than a third,” which she explained was part of the reason Jews need Israel in the first place: as a refuge from worldwide persecution.

“It only leaves Jews who are inclined to support DSA’s politics, but who are put off by its virulently anti-Israel position, searching for a political home somewhere else,” said Grenell, who knows that when she hears “Am Yisrael,” she is a part of that nation.

Photo by: Flickr