OPINION
Jewish writer David Cole likes to remind American Jews of the lesson of the golem: the mud-men will turn on you in the end.
Cole has repeatedly invoked the golem legend to warn Jewish Americans that their uncritical support for the BLM movement, and wokeism in general, was going to bite them in the arse. Right on cue, the mud-men are rampaging.
But then, after the massacre in Israel on October 7, when some 1,400 Jews were brutally murdered, not to mention the rapes, beheadings, and instances of torture, [Emily Rose] began to notice something odd from the cohort of fellow progressives she admired: they were cheering for the other side.
Nobody could accuse her of being quick on the uptake, then.
Hadn’t she taken the least notice while the anti-Semitic BDS movement was sweeping the left? Did she pay no attention when the leader of Britain’s alternative government at best turned a blind eye to open anti-Semitism among his closest party supporters allies? Had she really not even clued-in to what the near-universal ‘pro-Palestine’ obsession of the left actually meant?
Apparently, it took the naked Jew-hating of the left, marching in lockstep with Islamic thugs chanting “Gas the Jews” and celebrating the butchery in southern Israel, to shake these complacent ninnies out of their comfortable mental torpor.
While professional politicos, like DSA founder Maurice Isserman, are publicly stepping down from their parties and denouncing organizations that justify, or even cheer, the events of October 7, and wealthy Jewish donors claw back their millions from elite universities that they say helped foment antisemitism on their campuses, there’s a quieter, more personal reckoning happening among progressive Jews. Like Rose, they feel betrayed by a left that they thought would have their backs.
Some of it is tragi-comic stuff.
Dov, 30, a Canadian musician who didn’t want to share her last name for privacy reasons, is transgender and a self-proclaimed “political progressive.” Since October 7, she says, “Every time I open Instagram I’m just like blocking or deleting people that I thought I knew.” She calls anti-Zionism “cloaked antisemitism”.
It’s not even “cloaked”: it’s right in your face.
Josh Gilman, 37, who lives in Arizona and prides himself on having friends across the political spectrum, says he has been muting even close friends who espouse anti-Zionist views […]
Nate Clark, 34, lives in Virginia. He’s marched for gay rights, and in 2020, for the removal of statues of Confederate soldiers in his home state. He said his choice to stand up for others is rooted in his Jewish identity.
And their choice to stomp all over him is also rooted in his Jewish identity. He marched with the mud-men, only to find that the mud-men were never marching with him.
It’s all a big shock to ‘progressive’ Jews. It shouldn’t have been.
Jack Hazan, a therapist in New York, [has] been hosting virtual group therapy sessions for Jews in the wake of the massacre. “I have clients in tears over this; we spend the entire session talking about it,” he says. A theme that’s come up again and again is betrayal, by best friends who parrot lines like “Israelis are guilty of settler colonialism,” or committing genocide.
He says there’s an element of shock among the many other Jewish people he counsels.
Because apparently even they never stopped to think what the left meant when they were chanting “From the River to the Sea.”
So why does he think the left has turned on its own people?
“It’s not based on values or beliefs,” he replies, adding that the left’s view on Israel is part of a set of ideological platforms they can’t break from.
That, and that, deep down, they really, really, just hate Jews.
As for Rose, she says her party registration isn’t shifting quite yet, though her media habits are.
“My friends and I are like, ‘My God, we find ourselves watching clips on Fox News’?”
The Free Press
The challenge now for the right is to confront the drooling anti-Semitic sewer-dwellers in their own ranks. Jew-hating may be mainstream on the left, but it’s still all-too common on the fringe of the right.
These are the right’s mud-men: the Groypers and the neo-Nazis. The right have tolerated and indulged these golems for far too long, happy to left them smear their mud on the snowflakes, ha ha ha. But, just as left-wing Jews are discovering, the right will find that, in the end, the golems will come for you.