https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/george-soross-multi-front-war-against-israel-kenneth-levin/
George Soros, in his political pronouncements and in his characterization of the goals of his Open Society Foundations (OSF), the primary financial vehicle for his political advocacy and activism, acknowledges his support of a globalist agenda. He also acknowledges his embrace of that position as an alternative to identification with the Jewish people or the Jewish state.
For example, in a 1995 New Yorker interview, Soros remarked, “my mother was quite anti-Semitic and ashamed of being Jewish. Given the culture in which one lived [he grew up in Hungary before and during World War II], being Jewish was a clear-cut stigma, a disadvantage, a handicap – therefore there was always a desire to transcend it, to escape it.”
Elsewhere in the interview, he remarks, “Of course, this whole interest in universal ideas is a typical means to escape from the particular… I am escaping the particular. I think I am doing exactly that by espousing this universal concept… In other words, I don’t think you can ever overcome anti-Semitism if you behave as a tribe… The only way you can overcome it is if you give up the tribalness.”
When asked in the interview about Israel, he answered – “testily,” according to the interviewer – “I don’t deny the Jews their right to national existence – but I don’t want to be a part of it.”
While the cited remarks – the gist of which he has repeated on many occasions – reflect some candid self-observation, there are also elements that are disingenuous and self-serving. It is not true that among Jews targeted for abuse by surrounding societies, there was “always a desire to transcend it, to escape it.” There was, of course, a desire to escape abuse, but most Jews were not inclined to jettison their Jewish identity to appease the haters. Similarly, in his reference to the need to escape tribalism, it is not entirely clear if he is talking about the tribalism of the anti-Semites, or of the Jews, or of both; but the context suggests he is talking at least partly of Jewish “tribalism,” and the sentiment reflects Soros seeking to justify the rightness of abandoning Jewish identity by casting his doing so as his choosing to take a higher, more virtuous path.