Jewish Socialists

A Jewish Mystery:  Episcopalians and Puerto Ricans

     It has been repeatedly observed that American Jews have incomes and education resembling the highest status Protestants in this country, i.e. Episcopalians, even as we vote like Puerto Ricans, who have little money and are seldom the beneficiaries of a higher education.

     At first glance this appears to be an anomaly without a sufficient explanation. However, an understanding of the American Jewish community as it evolved during the past century explains this sufficiently.

    In 1995 I published a book entitled American Judaism: The Secularization of a Religious Community. This showed that by then a majority of the descendants of the nearly two million eastern European Jews who entered the United States after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1891 and the quota restrictions on American immigration in 1923 had left Judaism and become socialists instead. In short, it is not the case that these children and grandchildren of Jews have no religion. On the contrary. Jewish agnostics and atheists, comprising at least 52% of the progeny of the 19^th century Jews, have adopted what sociologists call a “secular” religion. Examples are socialism, Nazism, Communism and Fascism. These religions, like all religions, have founders like Karl Marx. They have “holy” scriptures like Das Kapital (Capital), they have saints like Lenin and they expect a final kind of salvation, or in our terms, an Olam Habo, “the next world,” like the millennium.

      Socialism, like all religions, has major scholars who explain the founder's ideas to the followers. Of these there are many among socialists who have written whole libraries full of comments on Marx, Engels and other philosophers such as the Russian Jews J. Pomeranz and Morris Meyer.

     In the early 1900’s, some of the oppressed Jews living in the Russian empire, which then included Poland, the Baltic states, and much of the Balkans, concluded that their future lay in the emerging communist movement in Russia. They believed that only the overthrow of the Czar and the Russian Orthodox church would give them any future. Therefore, some Russian Jews, by no means a majority, actively participated in the work of the Russian Socialist and Communist parties.

     Therefore, when the eastern European Jews came to the United States, many of them brought these ideas with them to New York and other cities. If you will read World of Our Fathers by Irving Howe, you can understand why the Jewish sweatshop laborers in this country became socialists, joined the Bund (association), a Jewish socialist organization, and rejected the Jewish religion in favor of socialist ideals.

     Some Jews even returned to Russia during the communist revolution, believing they would achieve paradise there. Only a small fraction of Jews understood what Theodore Herzl predicted. Herzl knew and wrote in Der Judenstaat in 1897 that the Jews of Europe were doomed and that only a Jewish state could save them.

      Indeed, a few Russian Jews did move to Israel and founded colonies there in the early 20^th century, especially after the British had taken the Holy Land from the Turks and invited the European Jews to come there. Ninety nine percent refused. In fact, the majority could have some to the United States before 1923. Only 2 million of the eleven million European Jews came here.

     As the generations proceeded, some Russian Jewish socialists did recognize that Jews had no future among the Russian communists and went to Israel where, after years of internal disputes, they founded the Labor party in the 1930’s. The Russian Jewish communists remained opposed to Zionism until the dictator Stalin murdered prominent Jews in the communist hierarchy even after the Holocaust.

     In this country, Jews gradually amassed more and more education and wealth. Our social standing rose generation after generation, but the old affinity for dictatorial socialism remained. This is not surprising. The 52% of erstwhile Jews who have left us needed to cling to something. They, like all of us, need an explanation for human existence and for suffering and pain in this world. So they used socialism because they were raised in it. Sociologists call this culture lag. We mean that many people follow beliefs and opinions which are of no further use to the survival of the group because they have always believed these doctrines. Therefore, American Jews today have a “knee jerk” loyalty to the Democratic party, which teaches that individualism is evil, that one must follow “the leader”, at present Obama, that criticism of the government is not allowed, that differences of opinion are un-American and that we are all better off if we do what we are told by unelected government bureaucrats.

      We support the enemies of Israel’s survival because they are Democrats. We despise the supporters of Jewish survival because they are Republicans. A recent poll shows that only 38% of Democrats support the survival of Israel. 86% of Republicans support the survival of Israel. In addition,  a majority of Democrats blame the current recession on, you guessed it, “the Jews”. Only a few Republicans agree with that sentiment, which is particularly pronounced in the Afro-American community

     We conclude therefore that there are really only about two million Jews in this country. Those mythical “six million” American Jews touted by the ignoramuses in the media never existed. There were 5.8 million Jews in this country in 1937, when we were 3% of the U.S. population. Since then our very low birth rate, 1.4 per woman age 15-35 (the U.S. birth rate is 2.0), our high death rate, and our high intermarriage rate (54%) have reduced our number and our ratio to the U.S. population radically.

     In 1960, Look magazine featured a cover story entitled "The Vanishing American Jew". This has now come true. It is therefore time to recognize that those who happen to carry a Jewish sounding name are not therefore Jews. They are mostly believers in the dogmas of socialism, to which they adhere blindly and without any thought or contemplation. They have left us and should not be counted among us. Many of these erstwhile “Jews” also suffer from the Stockholm syndrome. This refers to the capture of some bank customers by bank robbers in Sweden who sided with their captors after their release. This is true of many so-called Jews who side with Jew haters and Israel bashers for fear of being regarded as Jewish by the bigots.

      It is time that the ignorant media learn the lesson that a Jew is someone who supports Judaism just as a Catholic is someone who supports Catholicism. We are not a race. That is Nazi talk. Jewishness or Judaism are not inherited through the genes. Therefore it is nonsense to claim that Obama appointed numerous Jews to high office. He appointed socialists who happened to descend from Jews some generations ago. These are not our friends. Like Obama, they seek the destruction of Israel. May we be protected from seeing their schemes come to fruition.

Shalom u’vracha.

Dr. Gerhard Falk is the author of numerous publications, including Women & Social Change in America (2009).

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