Is the Right Ready to Welcome Jews?

As I recently wrote for The BFD, the Jewish-American community has long been associated with progressive political movements, almost exclusively of the left. But the left today doesn’t want much to be associated with Jews. In fact, the “progressive” left today hates Jews. As a result, even the most uber-woke American Jews are starting to twig that there’s no longer a home for them on the left.

So where do they go?

Some progressive Jews are admitting, with a palpable sense of shame, to watching Fox News, but they’re still nowhere near ready to vote Republican. Not just yet.

This may seem weird, as the front-runner for 2024, the last Republican president, is as ardently philo-Semitic as could be. Donald Trump was the first American president to have a rabbi officiate at his inauguration since Ronald Reagan (another Republican, note). Trump took the bold step of recognising Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and visited the Wailing Wall, kippah-on-head. Trump brokered the historic Abraham Accords, which saw a record number of Arab states recognise Israel. On a personal level, Trump’s children are either married to Jews or are Jewish converts. His grandchildren are Jewish. Trump Tower is the Kardashians with menorahs and matzoh balls.

But, it has to be acknowledged, the right has long been – or has been seen to be – the natural home of anti-Semitism. It must be acknowledged that this is not an unfair accusation. Before the left came out of the anti-Semitic closet as viciously as they have in recent weeks, the most overt Jew-baiting was undeniably found on the fringes of the right. One doesn’t have to spend more than a few minutes on right-leaning, free speech platforms like Gab to encounter open, gleeful anti-Semitism. It was on Gab, too, that the Tree of Life synagogue shooter announced his deadly intentions.

The “Groyper” movement, too, was too easily tolerated by the right, with neo-Nazi nutbars like Nick Fuentes enjoying a wide following. Too many on the right treated these cretins with condescendingly naïve tolerance, imagining that all the memes of Pepe shoving Jews into gas chambers, or cackling Happy Merchants, was just so much shit-posting.

In fact, the Groypers aren’t that different from the “pro-Palestine” shitheads. The right tolerated them for much the same reasons progressive Jews tolerated the festering anti-Semitism on the left.

The lesson for both the centre-right gentiles and the centre-left Jews is the same one. Finding rapprochement between them both is a matter of acknowledging common errors and reaching mutual understanding.

Jewish-American writer David Cole knows the far-right only too well. As a young idiot (by his own admission), Cole was a holocaust-revisionist Jew. This naturally drew him into the dark circles of far-right anti-Semitism. Cole excoriates the right for their willful naïvete about the Groypers and other assorted anti-Semitic loons. The thinking, Cole says, ran like this: Look, I know these guys are wacky when it comes to Jews, and they have a weird obsession with the Holocaust, but they’re with us on immigration, and we need their youthful energy. The problem, Cole replies, is that You can’t control crazy. You think you can – “We’ll keep ’em leashed” – but you can’t.

The result, Cole says, is that Donald Trump Jr finds himself duking it out on Twitter with Holocaust deniers. When Don Jr affirmed his sympathy for Israelis slaughtered by Hamas, he was accused of “falling for Jew conspiracies”.

This is all part of what Cole dubs the “Golem” approach to politics, drawing on Jewish folklore. Golems are Frankenstein-like mud monsters created by Jews to protect their communities, but which invariably run amok and turn on their creators. The Groypers are the golems of the right.

Now the Jewish left is being plagued by their own golems running amok. All because they wanted, admirably enough, to “fix” America.

Jewish-American writer James Howard Kunstler says that, for Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century, America was almost as much a promised land as Israel itself. Jews have been extraordinarily successful in America. Mostly because they assimilated so completely. But, like the rest of the left in the first half of the 20th century, Jewish Americans couldn’t help noticing that America wasn’t exactly perfect.

Judaism has a long tradition of what is called tikkun olam, which roughly translates to “repair the world”. In classical rabbinic literature, it implies a kind of legal reform movement aimed at preserving the social order. In modern times, it has come to be seen as the pursuit of social justice. Its governing idea is that Jews are not just responsible for their own welfare, but that of society at large.

Tikkun olam was in just the right milieu in the early 60s to align American Jews with the left. It’s no coincidence that the two white Civil Rights activists murdered in Mississippi in 1964 were Jewish. But, with the Civil Rights struggle won, tikkun olam Jewish-Americans, like the rest of the crusading left, were in a bind: where to, now? A problem solved is an existential crisis for an activist, after all. Like the rest of the left, left-wing Jewish Americans lost the plot. As Kunstler writes, “strove to impose another set of repairs…on American society”. First, multiculturalism, which as it happened, is diametrically opposed to the very assimilationism that made American Jews so successful.

The world repairers have lately had to resort to coercion such as tyrannical diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and the shoving aside of equal opportunity for enforced equal outcomes (“equity”). That business has only produced additional unintended consequences, such as the new epidemic of institutional incompetence and the resentment of at least half the population against new forms of counter-discrimination (cultural Marxism, in short).

Now the golems are stomping, right and left — and the Jews are copping the worst of it. Don Jr might get called a “cuck” on Twitter, but (Jewish) David French gets death threats.

So the centre-right has to take on the golems. Stand up to the anti-Semitic fringe. Create a safe space for Jewish refugees from the left.

Similarly, the Jewish centre-left has to acknowledge that the centre-right are not the “Nazis” they’ve so often damned them as.

Because there’s no home for Jews on the Western left, any more. While the fringe right festers with anti-Semitism, it’s the mainstream left who are marching in their thousands, chanting Hamas’s genocidal call-to-arms, “From the River to the Sea”. The left is in Parliament and Congress, spouting their Jew-hating drivel. Sad political LARPers like the neo-Nazi edgelords in Melbourne are merely a boil on the arse of the nether regions of the right: the left’s face is riddled with anti-Semitic acne.

Left-wing Jews are finally cottoning on. It’s almost tragi-comic to watch the light bulb flicker on for left-wing Jewish-Americans: they really hate us! ‘My God, we find ourselves watching clips on Fox News,’ says one.

If it’s any consolation to Jews, I suppose, the leftist golems are coming for us both – the Red Sea pedestrians are just first in their sights. But, as I wrote for Insight last week, the anti-Jewish violence breaking out now is just a foretaste of what “decolonisation” really means: the violent eradication of whiteness, and whites. And Jews better believe that they’re as white in the eyes of the decolonisation goons as any periwigged 18th century British. We’re both just “colonisers”, as far as the Marxist left is concerned – and we have to go.

The future for both the Western centre-right and Jews is a rapprochement.

This is not just a matter of grubby politics, no “enemy of our enemy” expediency. That way lies the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

The centre-right embracing Jews is just the right thing to do.

As the last great centre-left PM of Australia, Bob Hawke, so presciently said: If the bell tolls for Israel, it won’t just toll for Israel, it will toll for all mankind. Benjamin Netanyahu said the same thing, in the wake of the October 7 horrors: This is the battle of our civilisation.

Channeling Churchill’s desperate appeals in the first years of WWII, Netanyahu writes that:

If the centre-right are serious about saving the West, they have to start by saving the Jews. This is just as true in 2023 as it was in 1939.