Several weeks ago the Israelite published Jonathan S. Tobin’s essay “The Jewish Establishment Still Failing on Campus Anti-Semitism.” This comes at the same time that the city with the largest Jewish population in the United States appears to be on course to elect a pro-Hamas socialist anti-Semite.
The natural expectation that Jews would be united against institutions and politicians who are anti-Semitic displays naivete about the connection between one’s religious and ancestral origins and one’s political convictions. Frequently, these are utterly independent of one another. For example, persons born into Jewish families have been major figures on both sides of the American political spectrum. Progressives from E. R. A. Seligman, Felix Frankfurter and Louis Brandeis to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Michael Walzer, Saul Alinsky, Noam Chomsky, Robert Reich, Paul Samuelson, Joseph Stiglitz, Bernie Sanders, Cass Sunstein and Thomas L. Friedman have been major intellectual figures on the American Left. But Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Frank Chodorov, Alan Greenspan, Robert Nozick, Ben Shapiro, Michael Zuckert, Murray Rothbard, Richard Epstein, Harry Jaffa, Randy Barnett, Mark Levin, David Horowitz and David E. Bernstein have been equally pivotal on the American Right. Mises had fled the Nazis, and Rand, whose Russian name was Alisa Rosenbaum, had escaped Stalin’s communism. Many on both sides were not practicing Jews. But whether they were or not, their political principles were antithetical to one another. And this opposition has affected their views and those of their followers on Israel, anti-Semitism, DEI, education, as well as capitalism and its institutions. Therefore, in order to understand the divisions in opinion about political issues and institutions among Jews and their organizations, one has to investigate their disparate political philosophies and convictions and not naively expect that a common religious heritage will necessarily unite them on issues particularly affecting those of Jewish ancestry. There have been, broadly speaking, two opposed American political traditions which embrace antithetical, fundamental principles. There were the founding principles of the American Republic, which are unique in recorded human history. The United States is the only country founded on the view that all members of the human species are born with a pre-legal right to self-ownership and therefore a property right in what they produce, both derived from nature not government. And further, that all legitimate governments must have as their principal purpose the protection and certainly not the infringement of such rights. This view led inevitably to the Civil War to end the infringement of those rights by the imposers and defenders of the institution of slavery. It also led to a vigorous protection of property rights and freedom of exchange in the economy.
The second tradition was the view that there are no natural rights to oneself and what one produces, and that instead a governing elite should assign privileges of self- and property ownership to those it selects. There have been two versions of this view — the racialist justification of slavery by figures like John C. Calhoun, and the Progressivist or Collectivist tradition imported into American higher education and political culture from German universities in the late 19th century. This elite may acquire power by democratic or nondemocratic means. Its associated economic schools were various versions of economic collectivism including socialism. This tradition has invoked various pretexts for unbounded central governments — poverty, economic inequality, the climate and several “oppressed” groups variously defined just as Karl Marx identified the “working class,” and its “exploitation” as justification for state ownership (i.e., ownership by a dictatorship) of the means of production.
These two traditions have competed in the 20th and 21st centuries for political dominance in the United States. For Jews, the consequences have been relatively benign until recently, when the events of October 7 have led to the rise for Progressives of a new group of “oppressed” — Hamas and the occupants of Gaza—and a new class of “oppressors” — Israeli Jews. This has led to the rise in campus anti-Semitism, since American universities are dominated by Progressives in the social sciences and the humanities. Many of its proponents view Israelis as the subjugators of the Palestinians and American Jews as their financial and political enablers. The principal opponents of this view are the ideological descendants of the American Founders — libertarians, natural rights classical liberals and conservatives, i.e., the American Right. This explains why Jews and Jewish groups are divided over the Israeli conflict and the anti-Semitism permitted and even encouraged on many university campuses and elsewhere, as in the New York mayoral election. And this is why there is no unity among Jews over these matters and why, as Mr. Tobin says, “the Jewish establishment is failing on campus anti-Semitism.” Opposed underlying political principles will lead to differences among those with the same religious ancestry. And that is what is occurring presently in America within the Jewish community.
