[rmlew]

The 1880's-1922 wave of immigration brought many radical ideas and movements to the US. Despite Marx's open anti-Semitism, Jews were (and are) disproportionately involved in Communist movements.
I think this has to do wit the circumstances of Eastern European Jewry at the time.
They were obviously dray to anti-traditionalist movements as these had liberated them. However, the CLassical Liberalism (or the deranged French version) was being superceded with local nationalism in the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian Empires. The local liberal nationalist movements were not supportive of Jews. The reaction to the ethnic seperatism in the Russian empire, Pan-Slavism was openly anti-Semitic.
Meanwhile the socialists and communists pledged liberation equality and even earthly paradise.
The chains of the new slavery were quite enticing compared to pograms.

[missyme]

rmlew You are to smart!!!!
Your posts sometimes go over my head, I think I need to read more...
Merry Christmas!

[Wallace T.]

There was an American Left well before the arrival of large numbers of East European Jews. Radical movements like the IWW and the Loco-Focos existed in the coastal cities and the industrial and mining towns. Most of their leaders were people of British, Irish, or German ancestry and were largely of Protestant or Catholic background. Big Bill Heywood, Mother Jones, Joe Hill, and others were non-Jewish native born Americans or immigrants. There were also Marxists who were raised in the atmosphere of country clubs and Ivy League colleges, and not in the slums of New York or Chicago. John Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World and the only American buried inside the Kremlin walls, came from such an atmosphere, via New York's Greenwich Village, whose pre-World War I denizens included Eugene O'Neal and Ezra Pound, the latter becoming in the 1940s an apologist for fascism. John Dewey and William James, both descended from British Isles settlers of the Northeast, were effectively shifting the perceptions of ethics and human behavior from Christianity to pragmatism from the ivory towers of the Ivy League.

It must also be recognized that the Jews who were involved with the Left had rejected traditional rabbinic Judaism and were, at most, "bagels and lox" cultural Jews. Heresy and apostasy in Judaism reared its head in the 18th Century with the "Frankist" movement and with the effects of the Enlightenment in Europe. By and large, observant, orthodox Jews have opposed Marxism. However, they represent a minority in the Jewish community, especially upon the emigration from the Russian Pale to America.

The importance of Eastern European Jews in the Communist Party and various Marxist and socialist groups is evident in a review of their rosters. The relatively few non-Jews in these circles, such as Arlo Guthrie or Whittaker Chambers, often married Jewish women. However, the overtly Communist networks alone, while effective in the labor unions and pro-Soviet espionage, were not sufficient to overturn the foundations of American culture. In this regard, Michael Savage (himself of Jewish background) is wrong.

In the 1930s, a number of professors of German Jewish background entered this country as refugees from the Third Reich. Among them were Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Hannah Arendt. They were Marxists who went beyond the economic and class warfare bases of Marxism-Leninism. They perceived the underlying social structures such as churches and families as paternalistic institutions that supported ruling class oppression. Not only that, but racism was viewed as a tool of impression that needed to be overturned. The pioneer in this area was Antonio Gramsci, a non-Jewish Italian Marxist who died in Mussolini's prisons. This line of thought became known as Gramscian Marxism. The summary of the positions held by Gramsci, Marcuse, et. al., was that the overthrow of paternalistic, sexist, and racist institutions and ideals was necessary for the revolution.

The ideas of these professors entered an American intellectual environment where the effects of the philosophies of John Dewey, Charles Darwin (or rather his more enthusiastic acolytes), Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung had largely expunged the traditional Western and Christian worldview from the ivory towers of academia. For those who think the ivory towers are irrelevant, consider that by the mid-1900s, most of our national leaders, such as Franklin Roosevelt, Dean Acheson, and John Foster Dulles, came from Ivy League colleges where pragmatism and positivism were the prevalent moral philosophies, evolutionism was the prevalent view of cosmology, and mental illness, and not the sinful nature of men, was the reason for anti-social behavior. Deprived of the Biblical and natural law bases for individual liberty and social order, there were no reasonable grounds to oppose the agendas of Marcuse and others, which became known as the New Left in the 1960s.

The leadership of the New Left and the antiwar movement was made of men predominately of Jewish background. For example, six of the "Chicago Seven" were of Jewish ancestry. Most of these leaders were "Red diaper babies," with parents who were usually Communists or socialists of Eastern European Jewish heritage. However, one must ask if the likes of Jerry Rubin or Abby Hoffman would have had the mass support they received without the effects of liberalism undermining the viewpoints of college students. Additionally, had the nation's leaders seriously considered the dangers of fighting a prolonged "no-win war" in Vietnam with draftees, they would have either won the war or withdrawn.

The American Left is not a Jewish plot against the Christian religion and Western tradition, even though many of the most prominent spokesmen for these positions are two to three generations away from the Russian Pale. These ethnic, irreligious Jews are reprehensible, but no more so than the old Yankee families like the Tafts, the Welds, the Whitmans, etc., the Irish Catholic Kennedys, and the black elite that currently root for special rights for their co-racialists under the name, "affirmative action." If America ceases to be a free nation, there will be plenty of people to blame, not just the apostate, leftist ethnic Jews.