Liberals, Leftists and the Jews

How Left-Wing Identity Politics fosters Anti-Semitism

In case I ever needed a reminder , watching the morally obscene testimonies of the presidents of UPenn, Harvard and MIT reminded me of what my grandmother once told me: you are never safe as a Jew.

After being grilled unflinchingly by Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York, the now resigned presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill, and Harvard University, Claudine Gay, ( MIT President Sally Kornbluth remains in her position) were all asked in no uncertain terms if “calling for the genocide of Jews” is against the universities’ respective codes of conduct; all three presidents said the answer depended on the context. As an incredulous world looked on, all three presidents flunked their own code of conduct through their odious evasions and willful obtuseness.

At its most noble, university life should be a repository of free inquiry, heterodox ideas and vigorous debate. One would assume that noxious ideas like anti-Semitism would be given no quarter by university professors or students, and that Jewish safety on campuses would be an ironclad guarantee.

But ever since Hamas’ barbaric sneak attack on Israel on October 7th, being Jewish on elite college campuses has been its own kind of anti-Semitic hell-scape. Jewish students have been routinely taunted by death threats, with hate-filled vitriol both online and plastered on the placards of ostensibly “peaceful” pro-Palestinian protesters. A Cornell professor, Russell Rickford, spoke at a pro Palestine rally on October 15th, and declared he was “exhilarated” by the brutality of Hamas’s attack. Students at Cooper Union had to barricade themselves inside the library to find refuge from an angry, pro Palestinian mob. A Harvard student group signed a letter sympathizing with Hamas immediately following the Oct 7th attacks, and before a single bomb was dropped in Gaza. How could this be, you might ask? How could these so-called elite bastions of ‘progressive’ politics, ‘safe spaces’ and trigger warnings paradoxically be wellsprings for the world’s oldest hatred? After all, aren’t colleges and universities just liberal Shangri-La’s?

Well, the answer is no. At least not since the 60’s, when scholars at many institutions came to embrace less liberal, and more leftist ideas. But aren’t liberals and leftists the same thing, you might wonder? Not at all, but mainly for partisan purposes, liberalism and leftism have often been bandied about indiscriminately and interchangeably.

But we must first define liberalism, which ironically, is closer in its classical definition to today’s free market conservatism than it is to the liberalism long associated with the modern Democratic Party . "Classical liberalism" in its broadest sense refers to the championing of private property, a laissez-faire market economy, the rule of law, freedom of religion and freedom of the press. Until the beginning of the 20th century, this theory was generally known simply as liberalism. The modifying term “classical" differentiates classical liberalism from the more modern usage of the term. For much of the past 60 years, liberalism has been regularly thought of as a platform for robust government activism, social and racial justice, environmental reforms, or what the Republican Party regularly lambastes as ‘big government.’

It was the English philosopher John Locke’s brand of liberalism, with its central claims to the rights of life, liberty, and estate — (which he collectively termed “property,”), however, which left a lasting impact on Madison, Jefferson and Hamilton, who like most of our founders, brought forth the Enlightenment principles that had been transforming Europe in the wake of the collapse of Old World feudal societies. America has indeed been a unique, imperfect and fraught experiment in representative government, but its ideals are infused with English and French Enlightenment notions of progress. The blood soaked European continent, the burning at the stake of religious dissenters and the imprisonment of those who spoke out against church and property were at the forefront of the founders’ minds, when they drafted their blueprint for a New World. The central ideas of the Enlightenment orbited around notions of reason, and propagated the idea that all humans should be guaranteed dignity, regardless of their ethnicities, faiths or backgrounds, For more than four hundred years, Enlightenment ideas have been rooted in these principles of universalism, and these ideas have come to undergird our nation’s creedal promise, perpetually pushing America toward Lincoln’s hope for a more perfect Union. Indeed, America became something of a paradigm of liberalism among nations, especially in the 20th century.

Arguments in favor of a larger federal government, which challenged the foundation of classical liberalism’s free market ideas, really only began to evolve after The Civil War, reaching its greatest expression in FDR’s New Deal and during the wartime economy of World War II. While classical liberal ideas were key to the thinking of our eighteenth century constitutionalists, social protest movements such as abolitionism, as well as the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century, which championed fairer labor laws, workplace safety and food regulation, have long been regarded as liberal, if not classical liberal achievements.

Given liberalism’s historical shape-shifting, its classical definition is central to understanding how many leftism came to ultimately rebuff liberalism’s universalist premises, in favor of identity politics, (such as DEI—Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), regurgitated Marxism and a fervent embrace of an academic pseudo-discipline called post-colonial theory. Definitionally, classical liberalism prizes individual rights as a liberating idea; today’s leftists valorize group rights, and group identity, informed largely, but not exclusively by a toxic academic concept known as intersectionality.

Intersectionality is a rejection of universalist principles in favor of tribalist ones. Intersectionality’s maxims conquered the academy in the past 30 plus years, and humanities departments, in particular, have led the way in seeing oppression and racism in every nook and cranny of American life. Fundamentally, intersectionality rejects the Enlightenment’s universalist ideals of progress and humanity in favor of a narrowly prescribed hierarchy of oppression (often jokingly referred to as “The Oppression Olympics,”) by which race, gender and sexuality are all interwoven, vying for various forms of power on the ladder of hierarchical victimhood. This thinking divides the world into a rigidly absurd binary which reduces everything to the categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed.” And specifically, it organizes itself across racial lines labeling “whiteness” as inherently oppressive and all persons ideologically deemed as non-white as oppressed. Though it’s patently reductive and dangerously false, today’s Jews are deemed white, and therefore cannot be considered as a ‘marginalized’ group, according to the commissars of DEI. As for the many brown Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews originally expelled from Muslim countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq and elsewhere, intersectionality ignores their own histories of violent Jew hatred and uprooting and necessarily casts them as agents of white supremacy.

The DEI Industrial Complex, in which intersectionality is comfortably nestled, is its own convoluted tangle of university and corporate bureaucracy, but DEI operates as an ideological authority which permeates much of academia and (corporate America) regulating not only speech and hiring practices, but weaponizing victimhood as a means of ideological conformity. It’s laughable to now see today’s totalitarian thought police suddenly morph into ‘free speech’ absolutists, ardently now defending not only the three university presidents, but singing backup for “From the river to the sea” Hamas chorale as if its a benign jingle. In the intersectional left’s worldview, the belief that we are more than the sum of our racial or sexual identities is, in and of itself, racist. Arguments which avow that our humanity matters more than our balkanized categorizations, isn’t an argument simply to be contested. Instead, it’s an idea which should be eradicated on its face. What’s more, any exchange of ideas which threaten intersectional notions of power and oppression, makes one not just a bad person, but a ‘white supremacist,’ a racist, or the worst of leftist epithets, a Zionist. It’s this very reason that Zionism as a political concept and support for the state of Israel, by Jews and non-Jews alike, is an intersectional no-no, as Israel’s mere existence, not to mention its right to self defense, represents the continuation of colonialism, racism and patriarchal capitalism. Never mind that Hamas’s rape and torture of women is the worst in the historical record, and yet it’s #MeToo unless you are a Jew. Or that a group with the Orwellian name “Queers for Palestine” blocked the Manhattan Bridge in December, even though being openly gay in Gaza is the equivalent of signing your own death warrant.

More ominously, what makes intersectionality so antithetical to the idea of liberal democracy is its denigration of meritocracy as essentially a tool of white supremacy. Intersectionality willingly perverts the true essence of liberalism’s essential promise that we are all entitled to equality of opportunity but not opportunity of results. Intersectionality also reprises Marxist delusions that humans everywhere are somehow all identical in talent, effort, intelligence and skill. And though it foregrounds as “equity” as its primary aim, intersectionality shares Marxism’s long held lust for power. The ideological dogma motivating the intersectional/DEI movement is hellbent on vengeance against foundational Enlightenment ideals. Like Marx’s theories of how the world is at bottom about class struggle, intersectionality is born of a delusion that race and ethnicity are determinative of all outcomes because the oppressive cake, as it were, has long been baked. It defiantly refuses to account for nuance, varying degrees of talent, let alone the innate human capacity for reason. The revolution may not necessarily be televised, but the revolution is coming for you and yours, and by any means necessary. 

Even though Jews only make up approximately 2.4% of the population, according to the FBI, they are the actual victims of nearly 60% of hate crimes nationwide. But empirical evidence is verboten, particularly if it threatens to upend intersectional understandings of hierarchical power, warped though they may be. The scary truth held sacred by many on the illiberal left is that Jews don’t deserve comfort or sympathy, because no universe exists in which they are victims. If anything, these Zionist ‘oppressors’ need to ‘check their privilege,’ or it will be checked for them.

As President Gay of Harvard put it when issuing a tortured apology following her loathsome testimony: “Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth.” Her truth? Gay’s essay in the New York Times immediately following her resignation this week was even more tone-deaf and egregious. After she gallingly writes without a scintilla of irony: “My commitment to fighting anti-Semitism has been questioned,” Gay wasted no time in playing the victim, and laughably martyred herself on the cross of free speech and open inquiry. (Free speech is essential now that she’s out of a job, apparently.) Faced with voluminous evidence against her of plagiarism and shoddy scholarship, Gay still can’t help herself in disparaging her detractors, (which include scores of Jewish alumni, religious leaders and colleagues) in saying:

“My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence and truth.”

Alas, I can’t help but despair that I’d ever hear the president of the world’s most famous university double down on her own flagrant unwillingness to combat anti-Semitism nor impute demagogic motives to the countless Jews (and their Righteous Gentile allies) everywhere whose worlds have been shattered since the October 7th slaughter of 1,200 Jews in cold blood. But then again I never imagined two other sobering truths—that I’d ever feel unsafe as a Jew in America and that my grandmother would turn out to be right.