The Jewish Question

Israpundit ^ | April 17, 2014 | Alex Markovsky

[Pharmboy]

Winston Churchill called Jews, “..the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.” We are remarkable all right. When you have a smart Jew he predominates with his intellectual prowess over the rest of the human race, but when you have a dumb Jew, he is an insult to human intelligence.

As a Jew, I was perplexed which of those remarkable Jewish-Americans voted for Obama in 2008; to me, it was completely obvious that the alternative choices for president in 2008 were clear and unambiguous. On the Republican side was a war hero, a strong supporter of Israel, an experienced politician with a strong track record and a commitment to public service. On the other side, for the Democrats, was a young man of Muslim background, an inexperienced politician with no track record of accomplishment whose personal files were mysteriously sealed. Moreover, this man had dubious connections with anti-Semites and America-haters.

I was even more baffled in 2012. This time, the choice was between Obama and Romney, a friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, supporter of Israel, and a man with impeccable business and civil service credentials. What could Obama do for Jews that Romney couldn’t or wouldn’t do? What was it in the Democratic Party platform that was so appealing to the Jews? What was I missing? After the shocking outcome of each election, I asked “Why?” many times, of many Jews.

The typical answer I received was “I did not (???) vote for him, but I am not going to vote for him this time.” You ask a Jewish question, you get a Jewish answer. But they lied, and did vote for him again in 2012. As prominent Zionist Zev Jabotinsky once said, “Logic is an art of the Greeks; a Jew has his own logic. Jewish logic is the logic of catastrophe. Jews do not detect danger; they face it when it comes.” A Jew will ignore the weather forecast and forego buying an umbrella. He will get wet and contract pneumonia and then tell you that, as he has already survived pneumonia, the umbrella can wait. The old saw, “There are two types of Jews—those who believe that Judaism is about social justice and those who know Hebrew,” contains more than a kernel of truth. By and large, orthodox Jews voted for McCain in 2008 and for Romney in 2012.

Social justice, in terms of helping the sick and the poor, is deeply embedded in Judaism; for Jews it is a case of irrational obsession, and many of them believe that the only way to achieve a just society is through leftist policies. The problem is that their religion is not Judaism; it is almost every other possible ism (with the exceptions of conservatism and fascism), such as liberalism, socialism, feminism, environmentalism, and Marxism.

Speaking of which, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia that brought so much suffering to the people of Russia, including Jews, was in fact a Jewish revolution. Based upon socialist theories developed by a Jewish philosopher and economist, Karl Marx, the principal inspiration, organization, and driving power of the revolution came from Jewish leaders. Most of them changed their Jewish names to Russian ones to conceal their Jewishness, such as Trotsky (Bronstein), Zinoviev (Apelbaum), Kamenev (Rosenfeldt), Sverdlov (Rubenstine), Larine, Uritsky, Steclov (Nakhamkes), all of whom later assumed major positions in Lenin’s government. In effect, Jews founded and shaped the Soviet state. Yet these same Jewish Bolsheviks quickly became the first victims of the Soviet state. Over the next twenty years, by 1937, practically all of them had become targets of Stalin’s repressions and were executed or murdered abroad, like Leon Trotsky. Still, they would not abandon their devotion to socialism.

In the late 1920s, German Jews voted for Hitler’s National Socialist Party, only to become victims of the Holocaust a decade later. They chose to ignore Hitler’s anti-Semitic rhetoric, believing that it was merely for domestic consumption. They doubted that Hitler could be bad, much less evil. After all, he was a socialist!

Jews passionately supported and continue to admire FDR, who denied entry for Jews seeking asylum from Nazi extermination just before World War II. The most telling is the tragedy of the German ocean liner MS St. Louis, whose captain, Gustav Schroder, tried to save 937 German Jewish refugees after they were denied entry to Cuba, by bringing his ship to Miami only to learn that the U.S. refused his Jewish passengers a safe harbor. Finally the Jews were accepted by various European countries and eventually ended up in Auschwitz and Sóbibor, where half of them perished. By refusing to allow Jews to enter the United States Roosevelt offered Hitler a propaganda coup: justification of the persecution of Jews. The Nazis could say that they were not alone in their hatred of Jews; the rest of the world, and especially the United States, did not want them either. Nevertheless, Jews voted for FDR and still love him—after all, the New Deal was a giant step toward socialism.

The Jewish love affair with socialism that began in Russia continued in Germany and endures in today’s America. An examination of the current socialist Obama administration reveals a similar Jewish pattern. Living in ghettos for two millennia, the Jewish people have been struggling to reconcile their tragic history with the logic of contemporary reality. They have a difficult time coming to terms with the freedom and equal opportunities that America offers. They continue to fight for social justice, refusing to recognize that, as far as Jews are concerned, what they have accomplished in this country goes well beyond their wildest expectations. Sons and daughters of the first immigrants, who dug trenches and washed dishes in New York, became doctors, lawyers, senators, bankers, industrialists, and influential politicians.

Unfortunately, the descendants of the first immigrants inherited the genetic memories of their ghetto ancestors. They appear to have nurtured and maintained a sense of guilt, even in the face of their success; they feel guilty for achieving a standard of living as good as or better than any other ethnic group in this country. They are constantly seeking forgiveness for their survival. They are prisoners of insecurity. The guilt associated with their own success has led them to take on, and support, the cause of every underdog and liberal movement in sight, no matter how undeserving, no matter how irrational or against their own interests or even survival. As Jewish sociologist Milton Himmelfarb observed, “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” Over the last century, no social macrocosm in America has more consistently voted against their own interests.

Socialism, which began with the fanaticism of the grandparents, has been transformed into fear in the parents and subsequently into habits in the children and grandchildren; it is embedded deeply in the Jewish DNA.

The Jewish unequivocal commitment to the Democratic Party makes them irrelevant during the elections. Republicans do not care about Jewish interests because Jews do not vote for them regardless of whether or not Republicans address their concerns. Democrats take the Jewish vote for granted and essentially do not care about Jewish votes because the Jews will vote for them regardless of their position on Jewish issues. Even among the Jews who emigrated from the Soviet Union there are many supporters of Obama and his socialist policies. That confirms the Russian saying, “You can take a Jew out of socialism but you cannot take socialism out of a Jew.”

Despite the obvious, Jews continue to disregard the teachings of Karl Marx, their fellow member of the tribe, that socialism is about redistribution of wealth. Redistribution means taking from one group of citizens and giving it to others. Bolsheviks took from the bourgeoisie; Nazis took from the Jews. The contemporary American Neo-Bolsheviks aim at taking from the rich, even though there are many Jews among them.

Immediately before the 2012 election, I was in a Las Vegas restaurant with some of my Jewish friends, talking politics over dinner. At an adjacent table was another Jewish gathering. One of them turned around and asked one of my friends if he really was going to vote for Romney. My friend replied that he would vote for a cock roach if it ran against Obama. I thought that perhaps this expression, which I personally enjoyed, reflected a glimmer of hope that the Jews might emerge from their intellectual ghetto and commence a wave of voting based on logic, not habit. In the end, however, habit proved to be stronger than logic and, once again, emotional attachments trumped Jewish interests. In retrospect, I was picking up the dinner tab, which may have tilted the table in my philosophical direction. How else can I explain it.

[luvbach1]

Re Marx’s “Jewishness,” being Jewish is more than professing a religion. It is also an ethnicity. And denying one’s Jewishness, or being self-loathing does not turn one into a gentile.

[Olog-hai]

Ethnic Jews are still descendants of Judah, the fourth son of Jacob (Israel), no matter what religion they may profess. AFAICS, Adolf targeted Jews by both ethnicity and religion.

[cynwoody]

A quick internet search tells me that that paragraph is another thing the author got wrong. The St. Louis never even attempted to enter the U.S., because the Immigration Act of 1924 barred those refugees; the ship was turned away from Cuba and Canada before being returned to Europe.

According to this page from the Holocaust Museum,

Sailing so close to Florida that they could see the lights of Miami, some passengers on the St. Louis cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for refuge. Roosevelt never responded. The State Department and the White House had decided not to take extraordinary measures to permit the refugees to enter the United States. A State Department telegram sent to a passenger stated that the passengers must "await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States." US diplomats in Havana intervened once more with the Cuban government to admit the passengers on a "humanitarian" basis, but without success.

FDR's action was supposedly based on the 1924 law.

But did he have the power to override the law on humanitarian grounds, and did he choose to forgo its exercise? It appears he did. In August 1940, the Portugese freighter Quanza, a ship filled with over 300 passengers, including 83 Jewish refugees fleeing from France, was allowed to dock in Norfolk, Virginia. Asylum was granted to all passengers — many of whom at the time believed they had to return to Europe, and the Nazis. Eleanor probably deserves some credit for the policy change.

[Jewbacca]

Sadly, I believe his mother was Jewish.

Not that it matters under Jewish law, but his mother converted 7 years after Karl was born.

Karl was, indeed, baptized Lutheran at a young age, was reasonably active in church, and had zero Jewish education.

(I have read to the contrary, that his mother was not Jewish and his father converted in order to marry her, which would make Marx not Jewish.)

[wardaddy]

Many claim social justice as religion

If only it were that simple but its just an excuse nowadays to do what comes natural to humans

[x]

Not really, blacks switched in a single election, until 1932 they voted one way, and then switched to the opposite in 1936.

1) Most of the country -- White or Black -- was behind FDR in 1936.

2) Most Blacks in large parts of the country couldn't vote then. If African-Americans had the vote across the country and had held office in states where they couldn't, those numbers might have been different.

3) FDR was personally popular with Blacks and won their votes, but it took time for African-Americans to fully embrace the Democratic Party. In FDR's time, African-Americans went from identifying strongly with Republicans to identifying 50% with the Republicans and 50% with the Democrats. It would be another 20 years before African-Americans registered overwhelmingly with the Democrats. Eisenhower and Nixon won over a third of the Black vote when they ran.

Conservative democrats switched fairly quickly.

It depends on what you mean by "fairly quickly." From when to when? Southerners who had complaints about FDR still voted for Stevenson, Kennedy, maybe Johnson, definitely Carter. That's not "fairly quickly" in my book. Things are even more unclear with the less liberal Northern Democrats, who might have swung to Nixon or Reagan, but who swung back in later elections (or died).

My point, though, was that people can come up with all kinds of theories why Jews vote Democrat, but it's very unlikely that they'd swing to McCain (in a very Democrat) year or Romney because of Obama's Muslim heritage or because he was liberal or progressive. If you've been a convinced liberal for decades, you aren't going to run away because of one candidate.

True, Jimmy Carter did do a lot to drive Jews away from the Democrats, but even though Obama may be as bad as Carter there are reasons why he has better control of his base -- White or Black.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

LL: I don’t have any books here at the office on the Russian Revolution, but there were two, the Kerensky Revolution and the Lenin Revolution, basically occurring at the same time.

What someone needs to do is to see how many Russian Jews supported Kerensky, who I believe was more of a democratic socialist, but definitely not a marxist.

Interestingly, two people I knew summed up personal experiences with Russian Communism. The first man was the Pulitzer Prise winning writer Isaac Don Levine, who covered the Russian Revolution as a journalist, and who later brought admitted Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers to AA Berle in the White House.

He warned the world of the threat of communism.

Meanwhile, in the US, a man named Marx Lewis (he was named after Karl Marx), took at stand. I once asked him when he first became an anti-communist, and he said, Nov. 4, 1917. He was one of the Jewish anti-communist labor leaders (Hatters Union) in the US, along with his friend Arthur McDowell, and others.

Both spent a lifetime fighting tyranny from the Communists to the Nazis, and the Japanese thrown in too. Both were Jewish and proud of it and both loved America. They were later joined by Morrie Ryskind and other Jews/non-Jews in the Screen Writers Guild who fought the Reds in Hollywood (along with Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, Ward Bond, Adolph Manjeou (sp.?, a man named Barron?, and others.

The old AFL-CIO of George Meaney had many Jewish labor leaders/staffers who successfully fought and crippled the Reds in the labor movement (including Jay Lovestone and his fellow ex-reds, among others).

By the way, the largest contingent in the founding, leadership and membership of the Communist Party USA were from Scandinavia, esp. Finland, according to research provided to Congress by the late Herb Romerstein (and published in House Internal Security Committee hearings, esp. The Theory and Practice of Communism in US Labor, about 1971.

Herb was once the youngest member of the CPUSA, left it because he saw through its lies and bullshit, served in the Korean War, and later devoted his professional career as a govt internal security investigator to exposing communism in the US. He was also the author/co-author of several of the top books on Communism - Venona (with Eric Breindel); Soviet spies (with Stan Evans; the Made-in-Moscow “International Brigades” of the Spanish Civil War, and most of the “Theory and Practice” hearings of HISC, among many other works.

Not all Jews were leftists and many of us who started out as family Democrats learned real fast that the Dems were often the enemies of America, not it supporters (McGovern, Abzug, Dellums, Conyers, all the way to Obama, Axelrod (and his red mentors), Pelois and Reid).

Today, American Jews are among the leadership of the conservative movement across America and in the conservative media. Names like Horowitz, Klein (many), Goldberg, Kesler, King, Chesler, Byren, Rozeman, Kristol, Krouthammer, Mark Levin, etc.

We know who the enemy is and we will not be silent about exposing them.

We also are working hard on getting our misled and undereducated religious brethern to wake up before it is the 1930’s all over again (a time of blindness and pisspoor Jewish leadership).

[ansel12]

The fact is that Jews have never voted republican, and it isn’t because of your bizarre claim about them being in La La land politically and just voting the same for a 150 years out of habit.

Actually you claimed that everyone takes forever to “change”, which just isn’t true at all.

You can’t ignore the facts about blacks for instance, until 1932, they always voted republican, in 1936 they made an instant, and permanent switch.

In 1932 the black vote being republican, gave the democrats the unsurprising 23%, and in 1936, they made the instant and permanent switch, suddenly going 71% democrat, and staying there.

[ansel12]

But did he have the power to override the law on humanitarian grounds, and did he choose to forgo its exercise? It appears he did.

The man who became president for life, was hardly known as timid with his presidential power. If he rejected them, then he rejected them on purpose.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Pharmboy.

We are remarkable all right. When you have a smart Jew he predominates with his intellectual prowess over the rest of the human race, but when you have a dumb Jew, he is an insult to human intelligence. As a Jew, I was perplexed which of those remarkable Jewish-Americans voted for Obama in 2008; to me, it was completely obvious that the alternative choices for president in 2008 were clear and unambiguous... The old saw, “There are two types of Jews—those who believe that Judaism is about social justice and those who know Hebrew,” contains more than a kernel of truth. By and large, orthodox Jews voted for McCain in 2008 and for Romney in 2012.

[Lurking Libertarian]

Not all Jews were leftists and many of us who started out as family Democrats learned real fast that the Dems were often the enemies of America, not it supporters (McGovern, Abzug, Dellums, Conyers, all the way to Obama, Axelrod (and his red mentors), Pelois and Reid).

My parents, aleihem hashalom, were both strongly anti-communist liberals (Adlai Stevenson was their hero), who both voted solidly Democratic until 1972, when George McGovern was a bridge too far for my father. (I think my mother still voted D that year.)

[PieterCasparzen]

From the biography of Karl Marx in the google books online copy of The Communist Manifesto:

Karl Heinrich Marx was born in Trier, in the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine as the third of his parents' seven children. His father, Heinrich Marx (1777-1838), born Herschel Mordechai, the son of Levy Mordechai (1743-1804) and Eva Lwow (1753-1823), descended from a long line of rabbis but converted to Lutheran Christianity (despite his many deistic tendencies and his admiration of such Enlightenment figures as Voltaire and Rousseau) in order to gain permission to practice law. Marx's mother, Henriette nee Pressburg (1788-1863), was the grand aunt of industrialists Gerard Philips and Anton Philips and a maternal descendant of the Barent-Cohen family through her parents Isaac Heijmans Presburg (Pressburg, c. 1747 - Nijmegen, May 3, 1832) and wife Nanette Salomon Barent-Cohen (Amsterdam, c. 1764 - Nijmegen April 7, 1833), the daughter of Salomon David Barent-Cohen (d. 1807) and wife Sara Brandes, in turn the uncle and aunt by marriage of Nathan Mayer Rothschild's wife.

Of course, Marx married the aristocratic Jenny von Westphalen and had a close relationship with her father.

The standard mythology told to the communist rank-and-file is that Marx "hated" his wealthy and aristocratic circumstances. Of course, there has to be some reasoning as to why "workers of the world unite" should subscribe to the "theories" written by a man with a "capitalist" pedigree. His cohort Engels, of course, requires the same type of cover story. This is generally no problem because the rank-and-file aren't really historians in any meaningful sense of the word.

[bmwcyle]

McCain is a piss poor pilot, no a war hero.

[SJackson]

That Jews voted for Hitler is a classic Jew hater canard. Among several, including the classic that Marx was a Jew. Wouldn’t blame him on the Lutherans either, he failed in his early religious writings. Russian Jews obviously loved communism however, as evidenced by the fact that they began leaving en mass in the 1880s.

[SJackson]

It was the right wing movement in Germany at the time, the left being occupied by the Communists, and to the right of the Social Democrats and the Workers Party.

As to the semite thing, antisemitism, no -, was a term coined by Wilhelm Marr in the 1880s or so for the name of his political party. Means Jew hatred, nothing to do with semites. Guess he didn't want to name his party, which advocated the expulsion of Jews from Europe, the Jew haters. Caught on a bit in Germany and France, but didn't last. And has no connections to National Socialism. Semite is a linguistic term embracing more the Hebrew and Arabic. It had a single meaning.

[cynwoody]

Wikipedia describes it as long line of Rabbis, with Rabbis on both sides of the family, and Karl's mother being Jewish, and his father having converted to avoid persecution, but also choosing a Jewish wife, who did not convert.

Karl's father Heinrich (formerly Herschel) converted to Lutheranism the year before Karl was born, in order to keep practicing law after the Rhineland changed from French to Prussian control. His mother, Henriette Pressburg, converted when Karl was 7.

The family lived as very liberal Protestants without any strong religious beliefs. Karl grew up to be an atheist.

[jjotto]

..."Social justice," a term devised by Marx himself...

The term 'social justice' was devised by Catholics, Jesuits to be exact.

[SJackson]

See post 55, actually dates to the late 19th century. The antisemitisch party.

[PapaBear3625]

Are American Jews genetically programmed and immune to politics, and American life? Don't you think they are just people who keep up with the news and the issues of the day, and vote accordingly?

If that were the case, they would be less dramatically aligned with the Democrats.

Another issue may be that Jews see the Republican party as being heavily under the influence of Evangelicals, and they don't care for being aligned with Christians.

[SJackson]

Re Marx’s “Jewishness,” being Jewish is more than professing a religion. It is also an ethnicity. And denying one’s Jewishness, or being self-loathing does not turn one into a gentile.

You appear to be suggesting that despite being raised by Lutheran parents, baptized, raised as a Lutheran, engaging in writing about Lutheran theology, if your parents are Juden, conversion is invalid. Or at best temporary, until a Christian doesn't like you. Kind of makes a lie of evangelization, doesn't it.