The Jews and the Left is a crowded field for a writer to enter. However, Batya Ungar-Sargon’s recent book under that title makes a timely contribution to it. Ungar-Sargon is a former editor of The Foreword and host of the Batya! podcast. She came out of the Left and while her politics might have changed due to antisemitism, her concerns and values held.
The Jews And The Left is a refreshingly patriotic book and—in these pressing times—an optimistic book. Ungar-Sargon shows how, throughout the history of our nation, Jews were treated differently. Here, antisemitism was always a side story. And sure, when the first Jews arrived to New Amsterdam in 1654, the colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant wanted to expel the party, but the regular settlers, Ungar-Sargon counters, were sympathetic. And of course there is the terrifying lynching of Leo Franc—the most notorious act of Jew-hate on American soil—but the author argues, this was a significant exception. When the KKK started firebombing synagogues to avenge efforts at desegregation, the public rallied around Southern Jews.
The American founding, Ungar-Sargon explains, was dedicated to religious tolerance and our Founders were determined to show this tolerance by giving the Hebrew race equal treatment. It was the test that, she tells us, early Americans “passed with flying colors. Antisemitism was not an issue until social mobility in the Gilded Age threatened the entrenched elites.
Yet it was clear from the start that the Jewish story in America would be different. During the Revolutionary War, Jews were celebrated as financiers of the American experiment. In Europe, the author reminds us, Jews were despised and frequently prosecuted for their connection to money, real or imagined. Not so in the United States where no popular negative sentiment was attached to either Jews or capitalism. Antisemitism and anti-Americanism typically go hand in hand. In fact, when homegrown radical Malcolm X attacked Jews, he did so on anti-capitalist and anti-American grounds.
American Jews, Ungar-Sargon argues, have a tendency to misread the cues and to identify with the downtrodden, like the blacks under the Jim Crow regime, even if they themselves are not victims of repression. This is not, however, how Jews came to identify with the Left.
The story of the Jewish romance with the Left begins with the labor movement of the early 20th century—and it is one Ungar-Sargon recounts in vivid detail. The movement, a necessary correlative to the excesses of capitalism, forged the Jewish political consciousness in the U.S. The union of the minority group and what is commonly identified as “liberal causes” was solidified in the following decades when Franklin Delano Rosevelt lead the nation in the fight against Nazism and Jews embraced the cause of desegregation.
The Jews And The Left tells the story of betrayal. Ungar-Sargon believes that the working class kept American liberalism honest—and that the working class, the ordinary American men and women—continue to be sympathetic to Jews. But, as our manufacturing base evaporated, the working class has been decimated and the Left embraced identity politics. The internal logic of identity politics lead to the virtual expulsion of Jews from the movement they helped to create.
Whereas the contemporary atrophied Left makes virtue out of weakness, Ungar-Sargon shows that Jews had it relatively easy in the U.S. and—in a refreshingly Zionist cultural mode—argues that our politics should be the politics not of emotional manipulation but of honor.
She proposes a 21st-century alliance of the alienated:
After October 7, Jews were exposed to what White Americans, conservative Americans, and working-class Americans have been subjected to for decades: the contempt the elites have had for people they view as on the side of power, ironically from their own heights of institutional power and immense wealth and privilege. The antipathy that was exposed for Jews was, at the end of the day, an extension of antipathy the Left has developed for America.
She is correct in linking the fate of American Jews with the fate of the country and I like the vibe she champions, but here is where I diverge from her analysis: Jews indisputably fared well here historically while the postmodern Left fetishizes weakness. The latter is a superficial phenomenon that should be viewed in the context of the postmodern Left’s obsessed with power. To power they submit. If anti-Zionists made inroads in the woke movement, it’s because they project what to the Left looks like inevitability.
This has nothing to do with any kind of internal dynamics of American intellectual life, which Ungar-Sargon perfectly captures, but external influences such as money and social media platform manipulation from abroad and, above all, immigration. The Gramscian Left looks at the migrant crisis and the growth of the foreign-born communities—and sees untapped potential. As the number of Muslims in America grows—and many, if not most, are unreformed anti-Zionists—American Jewish fortunes sink. We are being replaced.
It’s not only the Muslims, of course. The percentage of foreign-born living on our shores has never been as high as it is now. According to Pew Research, about 1/3 of young people coming of age in America are either immigrants or children of immigrants. Some of them, like the heavily promoted streamer from Turkey Hassan Piker have been raised abroad. Others went to schools stateside—but were taught to retain their ethnic peculiarities. Instead of assimilating into the American exceptionalism, including philosemitism, they are bathed in third world slop.
Take the recent New York mayoral elections as a test of the emerging third world voting block. The antisemitic Zohran Mamdani lost the native Americans but captured the foreign-born vote by a landslide.
The turn to Jew-hate is by no means unique to the leftist circles. Far more creepy conspiratorial moods rule the Libertarian circles—and the party was founded on the ideas of Jewish economists. Groypers have been aiming for a hostile takeover of the GOP and American Christianity since 2015. Admitting that we have a problem—or that the problem is systemic—is not a sign of weakness. It’s the first step to addressing it.
That said, Ungar-Sargon makes a valid point when she argues that New York City’s antisemitic Democratic Socialist strongholds are concentrated not in working class neighborhoods, but in affluent, champagne-liberal enclaves. The coalition she proposes makes sense. The American working class is interested in preservation of the West—anti-Zionism is not their cause.
An alliance with the Jewish people is in every American’s interest, not only because we share common adversaries in third-worldism, communism, and jihadism. As Ungar-Sargon demonstrates, Jews have long been an integral part of American society—not only because of our contributions, but because of the way our nation has historically understood and defined itself. Her book is ultimately a call to preserve and defend that heritage.
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