Joel Kotkin’s writing spans the political spectrum. He is sometimes featured simultaneously at the Daily Beast, Spiked, and the “conservative” Spectator. Kotkin often has informative things to say about urban problems, a subject on which he lectures at a university in Orange County, California.

 But his commentary for Spiked, “Where Have All the Jews Gone?” offers what are, at most, partial truths. Kotkin writes about the recent upsurge of anti-Semitism in the U.S. and in Western Europe, but in doing so he ties this unfortunate phenomenon mainly to pro-Palestinian activism in the American educational establishment and on social media. Jews, we are told, are now fleeing urban centers for less populated areas and in many cases are escaping countries that are now infested with Jew-hatred.

 Worried Jews, as exemplified by 50,000 who left France since 2000, mostly for Israel, are cited as proof of the growing anxiety among world Jewry about safety in the face of ancient and violent prejudice. Despite some pushback by federal and local governments, this torrent of anti-Semitism has left Jewish communities in a state of panic: “The wandering Jew has returned, now with a laptop in backpack, seeking some form of security.”

It may be necessary to contextualize what Kotkin depicts as expressions of panic. Some of those phenomena he notes as evidence that Jews are moving out of their places of residence in fact reflects long-term changes, for example, the transfer of Jewish populations from urban to suburban areas. This was well underway in the 1950s and has continued down to the present. Jews began moving into incipient suburbs following World War II. This happened as they became more affluent but also because of the growing violence in urban areas in the 1960s.

For decades, Jews and other ethnics were fleeing the black underclass, which drove white populations out of urban neighborhoods. Until recently, these fleeing Jews were far more likely to encounter violence from the black underclass than from Hamas sympathizers.  Even according to the politically leftist Anti-Defamation League, blacks are four times more likely to express anti-Semitic views than white Christians.

Europe’s Jewish population, according to Kotkin, is down to 1.5 million, having dropped from 3.5 million in 1945, after the Nazis had murdered or dispersed millions of European Jews. But what exactly would the number be if the Muslims had not come on the scene in the last 30 to 40 years? After 1945, Jews left Europe to move to the U.S., Canada, Australia, or Israel. They started doing this well before the appearance of a swelling Muslim population, perhaps in response to the sense that after the persecution they suffered under the Nazis, the survivors no longer wished to stay in the Old World.

Contrary to Kotkin, it is not the case that left-wing anti-Semitism is being significantly accompanied by “anti-Jewish memes” on the right. Kotkin cites Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and Joe Rogan as figures who have indulged in anti-Semitic speech, but apart from gestures such as inviting a people onto your podcast who argue Churchill was more responsible for World War II than Hitler or who grouse about Zionist influence, it’s hard to identify these supposed right-wing enormities. Kotkin suggests that French politician Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Party includes anti-Jewish rabble-rousers, but he does not name names—perhaps because there aren’t any. Éric Zemmour, the head of the French right-wing party Le Reconquête (“Reconquest) is an Algerian Jew, and wins the votes of other North African Jews along with French nationalists of all ethnicities. Although Kotkin does underline that “most attacks on Jews in Europe come mainly from either the left or Muslims,” I’m not sure these hostile acts are now coming from elsewhere, if we discount controversial “memes.”

This brings me to the problem that Kotkin carefully avoids discussing, namely, what Jews have done themselves to create the Frankenstein monster that’s now threatening them. Which white demographic, let me ask, has supported the cultural left and its immigration policies more enthusiastically than any other? Since I’m Jewish and not a Fox News celebrity, I won’t hesitate to tell you that it is my fellow Jews—both here in America and in Western Europe. They are enamored of Third World immigration and overwhelmingly vote for political parties on the multicultural “antifascist” left. One wonders how many of the Jewish victims of Muslim terrorists in the U.S. and Europe voted for precisely the parties and candidates who favored bringing such miscreants to the Western world.

 I made a similar point quite bluntly in my book on multiculturalism, and not much has changed in the intervening 23 years. In Germany, the Central Committee of Jews denounces as Nazi sympathizers any German party and politician who tries to halt Muslim immigration. The same committee officials will then routinely turn around and blame ethnic Germans for anti-Semitic violence carried out by “the new settlers (Neusiedler).”    

In a recently published anthology Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership, the two editors, Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser, deal critically with Jewish organizations that claim—often counterfactually—to be combating anti-Semitism. Viewed even from narrowly defined Jewish interests, groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress, according to Jacobs and Goldwasser, misrepresent themselves. What they really represent is the cultural and social left, with which they misleadingly confuse the Jewish cause that they’re supposed to further. This book tells of contributors to the anthology attending meetings of the Anti-Defamation League, the large Jewish organization the raison d’être of which is to combat anti-Semitism and giving nonstop warnings about the danger of white supremacy and white nationalism. Jacobs and Goldwasser stress that Jewish organizations that claim to be fighting anti-Semitism exist mostly to further leftist agendas, including the not very subtly anti-Semitic activist group Black Lives Matter.

The question, of course, is whether these organizations reflect the ideological orientation of their members and donors or whether they exist mostly to create a more pervasive woke mentality. Perhaps we’re speaking here about mutually reinforcing influences. But it may be hard to treat people who have disproportionately supported the forces that are threatening them as totally innocent victims. Naturally, I’m excluding from this criticism those Orthodox Jews who are often stuck in high crime urban areas and who overwhelmingly identify with Trump’s immigration policies. These poor souls are the victims of the disastrous politics embraced by other, usually far more prosperous Jews.