You're young.
I suggest you read a little American history before making such stupid comments.
Roger Clegg raises another question, which he puts delicately by writing that "the milieu of Commies is overwhelmingly Jewish and intellectual," which leads him to ask why so many Jewish intellectuals were enamored of the hard Left? It is a very good question, and he gently chastises me for ignoring it in my book. I did so because actually it is a question that others have taken up in many different places, and one that I did not feel was pertinent to discuss in a memoir, which was in fact a recollection of my life which, for better or worse, was lived in that Jewish milieu. Now, however, I wish to attempt a partial and incomplete answer.
My parents’ generation – who came to this country between the turn of the 19th Century and the years before and after the First World War – were recent immigrants who landed in the teeming Jewish ghettos like New York City’s now famous and non-existent Jewish Lower East Side. Now the single memory of those years is the Tenement House Museum, which studiously recreates the typical apartment lived in by immigrant Jews during the 1920s and early ‘30s. Poor and working-class, they made their living in the garment trades. The famed Triangle Fire of 1911, marked as a milestone in American labor history to this day, took the lives of largely female Jewish workers in the teens and 20’s. Moreover, they came to this country as fervent believers in the ideologies that shaped them in the Old World, Communism, socialism, anarchism, Bundism, labor Zionism and the like. One of the most usual conflicts the young immigrants had was with those of their parents who were deeply religious and pious, and whom they rebelled against by breaking away from what they saw as the religion of the village shtetl, which they unfavorably compared with the modern life of the emancipated and secular Jew of cities like Warsaw. Exploited and alienated, they turned in the New World for hope to both trade unionism and socialism.
Irving Howe, of course, discussed all this in his classic book The World of Our Fathers, which sympathetically and wistfully recalled the old struggles and attitudes. When their children emerged as the New Left of the 1960’s, they automatically carried on the tradition. In fact, their parents had already moved out of the early ghettoes and into the middle and even upper middle class. No longer did they live on Orchard Street, but more likely, in Scarsdale, White Plains or Great Neck in Long Island. But in politics, they carried on their parents’ commitments by moving en masse into the New Left. As Kenneth J. Heineman writes (in a book which I will soon review in these pages,) at a time when Jews represented three percent of the US population and ten percent of American college students, 23 percent of young people from Jewish families "embraced the New Left."
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 Madison." And he went on to note what he called the "rootless cosmopolitanism" of the Wisconsin New Left.
Heineman attributes this to these Jewish students absorbing a "propensity to social activism" from their Eastern European backgrounds, despite the obvious assimilation of their parents and their own rejection of Judaism as a religion. Confronting what he calls a "culturally ambiguous environment" in this country, Heineman writes that attaining a higher economic status did not make them forsake their view of what a better society should look like. As late as 1946, one-third of America’s Jews held a favorable view of the Soviet Union, which they foolishly thought was progressive because of the Soviet role in the defeat of Hitler, a fact which made them look the other way when Stalin was preparing his own pogrom against the Jews.