'The Left in America Has Really Let Us Down': Some American Jews Reassess the Progressive Left
I first noticed this topic about 10 days ago when Michelle Goldberg wrote about it. Simply put, American Jews who polls show mostly lean left, have been shocked and dismayed by the reaction of fellow progressives to the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Over the weekend there were several good pieces about this topic. First up is one published yesterday bt the Free Press. Author Konstantin Kisin says he heard a friend joke that some people woke up as progressive on Oct. 7 and went to bed as conservatives.
A friend of mine joked that she woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative. But it wasn’t really a joke and she wasn’t the only one. What changed?…
The reaction to the attacks—from outwardly pro-Hamas protests to the mealy-mouthed statements of college presidents, celebrities, and CEOs—has exploded the comforting stories many on the center-left have told themselves about progressive identity politics. For many years, they opted for the coping mechanism of pretending that the institutional capture of universities, corporations, and media organizations by the woke mind virus was no big deal. “Sure, students shutting down events they disagree with is annoying,” they would say, “but it’s just students doing what students do.”…
We woke up on October 8 to the clamor of street protests in cities across the West condemning Israel even before any major Israeli response to the attacks. We watched celebratory crowds brandish swastikas and chant “gas the Jews” at events purporting to be about the loss of Palestinian lives. We saw Black Lives Matter chapters lionize terrorists…
The events of the last two weeks 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.
Kisin isn’t writing explicitly about Jews but I think it’s fair to say they have been at the forefront of this sudden realization about the nature of the progressive left many have been affiliated with. The NY Times had an article about this last Friday.
The LA Times also published a story today which considers the case of Jonah Goldman, a progressive Jew who was active in the left-leaning Jewish group J Street. Now he suddenly finds himself shocked by some of his former comrades.
He was shocked by how quickly friends mobilized for the Palestinian cause while failing to condemn the attack. The militants killed more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians — slaughtering families, including children — and taking about 200 more hostage.
Good people he never considered antisemitic suddenly seemed “supportive of Jewish genocide,” he said…
“The left in America has really let us down,” said Goldman, 31, who lives in the Washington area and considers himself a Democrat and a socialist.
![Rolling on the floor laughing :rofl: 🤣](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/6.6/png/unicode/64/1f923.png)