The Jews’ coming civil war The majority are battling ultra-nationalists to their right and Israel-hating ‘progressives’ to their left. Joel Kotkin
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/07/the-jews-coming-civil-war/
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Whether right or left, Muslim or Christian, anti-Semites speak of Jews as people who pull the strings in culture, politics and especially finance. They assume we are all united in this conspiracy. In reality, not only is there no conspiracy, we Jews are also as divided among ourselves as any other people.
The ‘progressives’
Most Jews continue to identify as Democrats in America, much as they once backed Labour in Britain, the Liberals in Canada and the Socialists in France. Left-wing Jews, like senator Bernie Sanders and those in progressive-dominated media and Hollywood, have already broken with Israel. The author David Grossman and other left-wing scholars have even embraced the ritual denunciation of Israel, as an ‘apartheid’ state and an inherently ‘genocidal’ regime.
In some ways, the progressives really are the new Herodians, heirs to that ignominious tradition of speaking yes to power which marked the days of Mark Antony to the end of the Julian dynasty. If pro-Roman Jews were seduced by classical Greco-Roman culture, progressive Jews have been influenced by the relentlessly anti-Israel coverage of media outlets like the Guardian, NPR, the BBC, Agence France Presse, CNN, MSNBC, Reuters, the New York Times and of course the state-controlled media of Russia and China. Outlets like the courageous Free Press may challenge, say, Hamas’s exaggerated claims of forced starvation. But such efforts have been ignored by the mainstream press, and treated with hostility by the progressive outlets further to the left.
Many left-leaning Jews seem more focussed on showcasing their virtue than seriously considering how Israel can deal with its murderous enemies. They also reflect the fact that, even before 7 October 2023, the majority of Jews disapproved of the current Israeli government. Netanyahu, a bungler whose failures on 7 October should have precipitated his downfall, is seen both by key Democrats and even many Jews as sustaining the war for his own political purposes. His regime has been described by the great Israeli historian, Benny Morris, as ‘the most corrupt’ regime in the Western world – an undoubted exaggeration, but with more than a grain of truth.
Amid the mainstream media’s unrelentingly anti-Israel coverage, support for the Jewish State among Democrats has fallen precipitously and is fading across the board, according to recent polling. Little wonder that universities, which were once major havens for Jews, have turned decisively against their Jewish students. Although Jewish himself, the head of the American Association of University Professors – the ultimate ‘confederacy of dunces’ – now also favours boycotts of Israeli professors. Tellingly, so-called progressives are not calling for the imposition of similar boycotts on the deeply repressive regimes of China, Russia, Iran or Qatar.
Today the majority of Senate Democrats, and even some candidates backed by Jewish-lobby giant AIPAC, oppose providing arms to Israel – a US ally in the midst of a war. Some, notably on the party’s leftist fringe, even embrace the kind of anti-Semitic memes that one also sees among French politicians like Jean Luc Mélenchon.
The ‘progressive’ animosity towards Israel is such that as many as 40 per cent of Jews may even vote for the openly anti-Zionist, pseudo-socialist Zohran Mamdani to be mayor of New York, the city with the largest Jewish diaspora in the world. This scion of Marxist royalty and favourite of Hamasniks has won the endorsement not only of anti-Israel politicians like senator Elizabeth Warren, but also of Jews like retiring congressman Jerry Nadler. He has garnered favourable coverage in the New York Times, too.
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