“Everything the social justice crowd has said for the past 15 years has been a lie. The movement gained a foothold in American culture around 2008, riding a wave of popular reexaminations of race relations, political divisions, and systemic disparities. It styled itself as an honorable call to right the wrongs of society, both historical and contemporaneous. The past three weeks, however, have served as definitive proof that the benevolent emperor is a naked tyrant. The warriors for the oppressed are not so noble and selfless as they claim. Neither are they singularly motivated by the ideals of ‘inclusivity,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘diversity.’ They’re as greedy, vicious, prejudiced, and hateful as the oppressors they accuse.”

Could Lefty Jews be… “Woke”… in a new sense?

A couple of weeks ago I did a post asking Will Left-Wing Jews get a clue?. Given their long history of supporting the Left around the world and especially the Far Left, plus the Democrat Party in the USA, I still found it hard to believe they would get a clue even now. After all there was a time when America’s Democratic Socialists Loved Israel:

“The basic fact, is that Zionism—which I take to mean the philosophy of support for and identification with a Jewish homeland in Israel—is the national liberation movement of a Jewish people asserting their right to self-determination.”

If men can become pregnant there’s no reason why “national liberation movements” can’t become Nazis, all it takes is the magical Orwellian power of the Far Left language controllers.

That statement was actually from Michael Harrington, a prominent theorist and spokesperson of the Democratic Socialist movement during the 1960s and 1970s. And here’s a key comrade, Bayard Rustin, who was both Black and Gay in an age when you really were oppressed for both things, and who fought like hell for the civil rights of both groups and others:

“Since Israel is a democratic state surrounded by essentially undemocratic states which have sworn her destruction, those interested in democracy everywhere must support Israel’s existence.” 

Both men are long dead, as are Socialists and most other Lefties who support Israel against the likes of Hamas. You can see why Lefty Jews, even Far Left Jews, would have felt comfortable in those confines.

Not now. Given the evidence I noted in that post of the modern, Woke Left biting the Jews on the ass I had hopes of an awakening, especially given that the primary victims of the October 7 attacks were traditional Leftist Jews in the south of Israel – but only minimal hopes.

However, it seems they are getting a clue, Hamas killed my Wokeness – says Alex Olshonsky, although it includes cringe like this:

[As] a man in his 20s, it was only natural that I found myself firmly situated within the progressive left.

I never once questioned my political home. Guided by my Jewish values, during the George Floyd tragedy and the racial reckoning that followed, I wholeheartedly embraced anti-racism initiatives. I read Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and I even took on the role of facilitating international dialogues on collective sense-making and healing. I strove to be a good “white ally.” Truly, I did.

🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

It was actually one of those sessions that caused the first crack in his World View:

During a 2021 Bay Area psychotherapy training, in a “processing session” around race, a woman vulnerably shared her firsthand experience with a horrific act of antisemitic hatred. To my astonishment, the two facilitators, both white women, chastised her–yes, chastised–stressing the session’s emphasis on anti-Black racism.

I continue to be astonished by what others find astonishing.

Still, this Bay Area (e.g. San Francisco) idiot held on even as the crack opened:

I began to feel as though I had been baited into an a priori virtuous worldview that, in a twisted way, sows more division than it does healing; more concerned, as it is, with retribution than reconciliation.

Wow! You don’t say? This is my shocked face. You can see how shocked I am.

But it took the events of October 7, 2023 to finally break him:

[M]any celebrated–yes, celebrated–these attacks as a form of “anti-colonialist resistance.” Memes circulated, like the now infamous Chicago #BLM paratrooper, that quite literally glorified an unimaginable slaughtering…

The straw that broke my proverbial “progressive” back occurred last Thursday, when students at a high school in the Bay Area, my home for the last 15 years, were seen chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” They marched in the hallways of a public school ringing the jihadist rallying call that implicitly calls for the erasure of the State of Israel. And all those who live within it.

Wait until he discovers the anti-GOP, anti-Right, anti-White People shite that spews from the same movement. Ok, so actually he probably did know all about that and almost certainly celebrated it. Now he realises that he and other Jews are also in the firing line. I wonder if he’s heard of being White Adjacent?

Same with this Jewish Leftist and his popular YouTube show H3TV:

Ethan Klein, the host of h3TV, is having a rude awakening to the fact that the far-left woke audience he’s courted over the past few years, alongside his co-host Hasan Piker, utterly despises him and stands for everything he hates.

The hatred has so thrown him that he’s pausing his show.

Then of course there are obvious signals that no Jew could fail to understand:

That’s from an article with the Schadenfreudelicous title, America Has a Problem With Nazis—and They Aren’t Wearing MAGA Hats. It lists a stack of recent Jew-hating events in the USA, from that one to the Bay Area school protest that so triggered Mr Olshonsky, to this:

Hey now, if you’re not explicitly anti-Zionist then you are a Zionist and deserving of … consequences. That’s how this works.

Of course some Liberal Jews were already well down the awakening track due to incidents in other realms of Lefty activism, like Lesbian Feminist Bari Weiss, who is now really struggling with the cognitive dissonance. How bad is it? Trump was good bad:

”As a Democrat who has been left homeless, who is now definitely in the center but probably leaning increasingly right, I am left yet again with an appreciation, despite the messenger, of the message of the Trump administration because what those guys did was pretty incredible in hindsight.”

“So much of the work that happened in that [Trump] administration turns out to have been right. And that’s what is so frustrating for me. The work on the border wall? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message. Turned out it was right. Issuing long-term debt to refinance when rates were at zero? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message. A structural peace in the Middle East? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message.”

“When are we gonna stop shooting ourselves in the foot? And when are we going to actually see and take the time to look past who is saying things and actually listen to them word for word?”

“If it’s clear that the last two weeks have been a wake-up call.“

Holy Red Pilling, Batman. What’s really good about this one is that Ms Weiss actually gets the bigger picture:

“The events of the last week have shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities. This ideology is and has always been about the one thing many of us have told you it is about for years: power. “And after the last two weeks, there can be no doubt about how these people will use any power they seize: they will seek to destroy, in any way they can, those who disagree.”

This my Schadenfreudelicous face. Better include feminism in that list sweetie – and the Democrat Party.

The famous playwright, David Mamet, was red-pilled two decades ago in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and is thus ahead of Ms Weiss in not being a homeless Democrat and seeing them for what they truly are but also why so many Jews still vote for them, How the Democrats betrayed the Jews:

The New York Times and The New Yorker were run by Jews; they were both our Rialto and our Bible. New York Theatre, in my lifetime, had always been Jewish. The playwrights were Miller, Odets, Elmer Rice, Ben Hecht, Sidney Kingsley; and, later, Arthur Laurents, Lillian Hellman, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, Wallace Shawn, and myself.

We New York Jews have always voted for the Democrats, as their policies appealed to the immigrants and the first generation (my parents). A Fair Shake, a safety net, and unionism were manna to the newly arrived — in spite of (in both their and my lifetime) quotas and antisemitic discrimination. The immigrant Jews did well here, and voted for Franklin Roosevelt. And we are voting for him still.

He discusses the “congenital Jews”, of which he once was one, and likens their excuse-making about the Democrat Party to the German Jews who fought in WWI and couldn’t understand why the Nazis hated them, plus other Western European Jews who agreed that the Eastern European Jews were pretty “uncouth”. They died with them anyway.

But there is no more cosy mystery in the antisemitism of the Democratic Party; Representatives are affiliated with the Democratic Socialists and pro-Palestinians, calling for the end of the state of Israel — that is, for the death of the Jews. And Democrat Representatives repeat and refuse to retract the libel that Israel bombed a hospital, in spite of absolute proof to the contrary, and will not call out the unutterable atrocities of Hamas. The writing is on the wall. In blood.

Law Professor Glenn Reynolds (creator of the Instapundit blog) is bemused by UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky being shocked about all the Jew-hatred on his campus, pointing out that Instapundit has been covering Berkeley’s descent into the sewer for twenty years now:

So even in Chemerinsky’s own backyard, the signs have been there continuously for basically the entire 21stCentury to date.  If Chemerinsky read my blog, he’d have known about happenings there, and elsewhere throughout the higher education world, that apparently are news to him.

All this has lead Joel Kotkin to write a premature article in Spiked magazine, Why Jews are abandoning the left, again putting history up as a context:

Historically, Jews have been wary of the right – and for good reason. Not only did they fear the fascists, but also the old-school conservative establishment, which generally disdained Jews. The British Home Office used to limit Jewish immigration to the UK, and the US State Department tried to block reports of the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews from reaching the US. In most countries, Jews consistently supported mainstream left-wing parties – namely, Labour in Britain, the Socialists in France, the Democrats in America and the Liberals in Canada. Jews even played critical roles in more radical movements on the left, including the Communists.

The Mamet, Weiss, Olshonsky, world. Kotkin talks about the slow drift of Jews away from the Left, of which Mamet is the best example here, rather than those like Olshonksy recently shocked by their comrades. Kotkin does point out the pockets of Jew Hatred that still exist on the Far Right, but that they’re fringes, who admittedly produce the occasional lethal threat like the Tree of Life synagogue killer.

But even such an event as that pales in comparison to the likes of Hamas, and there is no question that much of the Left, and especially the Far Left, are on their side:

None of this, however, contradicts the reality that in the US, Europe, Australia, the UK and Canada, the targeting of Jews now comes overwhelmingly from the left and its constituencies. A detailed 2017 survey from the University of Oslo found that in Scandinavia, Germany, Britain and France, most anti-Semitic violence came from Muslims, including recent immigrants. Similarly, a poll of European Jews found the majority of incidents of anti-Semitism came either from Muslims or left-wingers. Barely 13 per cent traced it to right-wingers. 

He looks at Britain, Canada, France and the USA and sees the unsurprising move of Jews away from the Left, and even from the radicals, as well as the irony that “fascists” like Giorgia Meloni (Italy), Marine Le Pen (France), Nigel Farage (Britain) and Viktor Orbán (Hungary) are strong supporters of Israel and defenders of Jews in the West. As well as the biggest Nazi Fascist of them all, Orange Man Bad who says that the fight between Israel and Hamas is a fight between civilisation and savagery.

Naturally the Left and Far Left regard this as further proof that the Israelis are the new fascists because of course that’s why those Righties are snuggling up to them. Fascists gonna fascist, amirite?

However, I have doubts that this will help such right-wing parties, since the Jewish vote may just vanish rather than shift to the Right. Kotkin sees some signs:

The awful Donald Trump managed to boost his Jewish vote from 24 per cent in 2016 to 30 per cent in 2020 – well above the average for most recent Republican presidents. The GOP also made gains in the 2022 election, going from a quarter of the Jewish vote in 2016 to a full third. Orthodox Jews are already mostly GOP-leaning. Today, notes Pew, 75 per cent of Orthodox Jews identify as Republicans, up from 57 per cent in 2013.

But one thing is sure; the energy and commitment of Jews to the Western Left is fading faster than ever, and October 7 is the biggest jolt so far.