The New American Anti-Semitism: The Left, the Right and the Jews

by Benjamin Ginsberg

Independent Institute Press

230 pp., $26.95

Benjamin Ginsberg’s The New American Anti-Semitism is a mediocre book that could have been superlative. The author is a distinguished professor of government at Johns Hopkins University who has produced more than 30 books. Two of them, The Captive Public (1988) and The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (1993), are especially worth reading, as they provide useful warnings about the degree to which the modern state tries to control our lives. The Fatal Embrace also deals critically with Jewish overreliance on the modern state as a protector. 

Ginsberg’s latest does provide some useful information and timely warnings. It underlines the limits and dangers of the American Jewish romance with the political left. Ginsberg shows to what extent the woke and black nationalist left has deserted its Jewish benefactors and sided not only with Hamas sympathizers but also with very explicit anti-Semites. He also correctly stresses how conservative Christians have been the most faithful friends of American Jews but have had their friendship repeatedly spurned in favor of a continued Jewish alliance with the cultural and political left.

The book makes all these points but also allows Ginsberg to express tiresome peeves. Most annoyingly, he pushes positions that give too much credence to neoconservative narratives. Although Ginsberg concedes that someone may scold the Israeli government without being an anti-Semite, he then disregards that distinction in discussing American critics of Israel. John Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago, Stephen Walt at Harvard, and above all, Pat Buchanan are all allegedly attempting to delegitimize American Jewish citizenship when they assault “the machinations of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States.” Indeed, Buchanan, we are told, once referred to Congress as “Israeli-occupied territory.”

Ginsberg disregards the complaint that Israel’s American lobby, The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and its neoconservative allies swing away at any prominent figure who deviates from their Israel-party line. But Mearsheimer and others have demonstrated that AIPAC does engage in defamatory practices and does so obsessively. Is being critical of AIPAC, as Ginsberg suggests, the new criterion for who should be viewed as an anti-Semite? If so, then there are lots of Jewish critics of this lobbying organization who would qualify as anti-Semites, while one long-standing Jewish organization, the American Council for Judaism, has been at the forefront of AIPAC’s enemies for generations. Ditto for certain Hasidic sects, which have always viewed the present Israeli state as an arrogant attempt to force the hand of divine Providence by returning all Jews to their land before a future messianic age.

Where I would differ from some American critics of Israel is that I see no evidence that the neocons and AIPAC are doing the bidding of the Israeli government. These organizations follow their own counsels as to what is good for Israelis. Thus, one can look back at the neocons’ well-orchestrated agitation to push the American government into an ill-advised attack against Iraq in 2003. There is no evidence that either the Israeli government or the Israeli public imposed that war on the U.S. 

In The Transparent Cabal (2008), Stephen Sniegoski proved that the plan to attack Iraq originated with neoconservatives several years before the invasion.  George W. Bush’s administration invaded Iraq in accordance with what neoconservatives, not Israeli leaders, proposed. 

Yet Ginsberg clumsily attempts to uncouple the totally unnecessary, costly Iraq War from Jewish—meaning neocon—responsibility. He hopes to convince us that the “Iraqi debacle” was the work of “Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld—not a Jew among them.” But this comes after Ginsberg’s admission that there was a vast neoconservative network inside and outside the government that promoted the invasion and pushed the idea that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling “weapons of mass destruction.” Clearly, not every Jew in the U.S. was involved in that decision, but I can’t think of a single neocon journalist or government official who wasn’t.

The most dubious accusations are reserved for “right-wing anti-Semites like the paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan,” who enjoyed “the Left’s
embrace” in his impugning of the patriotism of American Jews. According to Ginsberg, leftists took over Buchanan’s mantra that “foreign policy should be based on national interest.” Because of Buchanan’s paleoconservative influence, “the notion of Jewish conspirators shedding American blood to serve Israeli purposes has become an essential element of the American progressive critique of American foreign policy.”  

Allow me to state that these charges are so unfounded that one wonders why Ginsberg bothers to make them. Although Buchanan’s indictment of the Israeli government and its foreign influence seems, in my view, to have been poorly aimed, there is nothing intrinsically anti-Jewish about what he said. Buchanan was making accusations about Israel and its zealous foreign operators, not about all Jews everywhere. This is a distinction that Michael Kinsley, a Jewish leftist but a close friend of Buchanan, drew when the neocons began attacking Buchanan.

I also see no evidence that the left has taken over Buchanan’s anti-Israel stand. Unless I’m mistaken, the left’s critique of Israel is based on the charge that Israeli Jews are practicing “settler colonialism,” not that American Zionists are turning their backs on patriotic American interests. The Mearsheimer-Walt criticism of the Jewish lobby, which Ginsberg conflates with Buchanan’s noninterventionist (or perhaps Old Right) argument, focuses primarily on another topic: American Zionist lobbying and its political consequences.

Neither of these critical responses to AIPAC seems characteristic of the current left, which is openly anti-American and anti-Western. Ginsberg may have Glenn Greenwald, another Jewish critic of AIPAC, in mind when he refers to leftists defending strictly defined American national interest; nonetheless, Greenwald’s connection to the present left has become increasingly tenuous.

Ginsberg does discuss quite thoroughly the formidable array of leftist forces lined up against American Jews, from Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ activists to Muslim Democrats like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. He provides convincing evidence that American Jews have foolishly sided with their enemies against their Christian friends. Unfortunately, Ginsberg is not particularly informative in explaining the origin of this weird attitude and why it has been so hard to change. 

The usual answer is that most American Jews identify the right (that is, any right other than Israeli nationalists) with Hitler and the Nazis. Therefore, most American Jews run to embrace the fiction that in 2017 Donald Trump praised neo-Nazi demonstrators at a Charlottesville rally, even though the president-elect has been demonstrably pro-Israel and has close Jewish relatives. Further, even conspicuously anti-Semitic black organizations continue to enjoy Jewish philanthropy because their Jewish donors give even transparent enemies a pass, providing they are associated with the left. 

American Jews have not always been on the left. Before Eastern European Jewish immigrants arrived, mostly between 1890 and 1920, the predominantly Sephardic and German Jews already here leaned to the right. Northern Jews were conventional Republicans, while those in the South were enthusiastic backers of the Confederacy. 

The Eastern European latecomers, however, harbored a deep distrust of gentiles. They had bitter memories of their troubled relations as scorned outsiders in the Russian Czarist Pale of Settlement, where most of these Jewish immigrants originated. They were more hostile to the Christian power structure than earlier Jewish settlers, who came in much smaller numbers and who quickly accommodated themselves to the prevailing order. Non-Orthodox Eastern European Jews, in contrast, gravitated to leftist politics.

Ginsberg is correct that Jewish voters and Jewish organizations will exaggerate right-wing dangers while typically apologizing for the left. This has become almost second nature for American Jews, especially for those whose ancestors came from Eastern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century.

Meanwhile, little remains of the older Jewish settlers, who were drawn into the now-vanished WASP elite or have become peripheral to American Jewish communal life. A similar lack of influence characterizes less-affluent Jews, many of whom are Orthodox. These Jews, who are often trapped in the high-crime netherworld of large cities, tend to be on the political right. Unfortunately, their ability to change general Jewish opinion is minimal.

Ginsberg devotes his last chapter to warning American Jews about a possible alliance that might render their attachment to the anti-Semitic left even more costly. He conjures up a nightmare scenario where the anti-Semitic far right makes common cause with the left against American Jews. This is highly unlikely for two reasons, one of which Ginsberg himself provides.

First, if the anti-Semitic far right is as small and isolated as Ginsberg insists, why does it matter what kind of coalitions those pariahs try to construct? The anti-Semitic far right is unlikely to go anywhere. 

Second, why should the left, which is very powerful in every Western country, build an alliance with a group that it thoroughly loathes and devotes considerable energy to marginalizing and harassing? The left hardly needs the backing of neo-Nazis to pursue its purposes. And if it wishes to engage in anti-Israeli activities while fawning over anti-Jewish blacks, it certainly can do so without courting neo-Nazi allies.

By the way, as someone who has been in the neoconservatives’ crosshairs for the last 40 years, I’m relieved that Ginsberg refers to me as an “ultraconservative Jewish professor.” Given his other views, the reference could have been a lot less flattering.