The Left's Jewish Problem

The historical relationship invoked by the phrase does not amount to a single doctrine or uniform position across the political left. Left-wing movements have often opposed antisemitism and promised tolerance, while prominent individuals and some movements have also expressed antisemitic ideas. Jewish people have participated in left-wing politics and formed distinct socialist organizations; at the same time, associations between Jews and communism became a recurring antisemitic theme, and recent disputes have often treated Jewish identity through the lens of Israeli policy.[4][7]

A central dispute concerns the boundary between opposition to Israeli government policy, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism. Several sources distinguish criticism of Israeli policy from antisemitism while disagreeing about particular language, campaigns, and political settings. Warning signs identified in the cited material include targeting Jews collectively, using antisemitic imagery, denying Jews national self-determination granted to other peoples, or comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.[5][6] Whether a specific statement or campaign crosses that line remains contested.

The phrase is also the title of Dave Rich’s book, The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism, published in 2016. The English-language edition is cataloged as 292 pages, with a bibliography and index; its chapter titles indicate coverage of British anti-Zionism, Jewish exclusion, Palestine activism, and the left’s relationship to antisemitism and the Holocaust.[1]

The relationship between Jews and the left developed alongside the growth of modern socialist movements. Jews held prominent roles in some left-wing organizations, but the association between Jews and communism also became a recurring antisemitic trope. The history is complex: the left often opposed antisemitism, yet some prominent leftists expressed antisemitic ideas. Explanations for Jewish participation in radical politics—including commitments to social justice, solidarity with oppressed groups, and hopes that class politics would overcome ethnic divisions—are presented as possibilities, not settled explanations.[4][7]

Marxist politics commonly treated ethnicity as secondary to the shared interests of workers, but socialists disagreed over national self-determination. Stalin’s 1913 definition of a nation required common territory, language, economy, and culture; because he judged that Jews did not meet those criteria, he denied that they constituted a nation with a claim to statehood. The Soviet state nevertheless recognized Jews as a nationality after 1918. Communism advocated equal rights for Jews while rejecting Judaism as a religion and opposing Zionism, Bundism, and other forms of Jewish nationalism.[7]

Prominent Jewish participation in communist movements did not mean that Jews generally supported communism. Jewish Bolsheviks made up four percent of the Communist Party’s 23,600 members at the start of 1917, despite being more numerous among delegates at a party conference and in its Central Committee. In interwar Poland, Jews could be a substantial share of the illegal Communist Party while remaining a small minority of Jewish voters and of the wider Jewish population.[7]

Norwood traces antisemitic ideas in parts of the American left to nineteenth-century Marxist and anarchist writing. In Marx’s 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question,” he described “huckstering” as the Jew’s “worldly religion.” Norwood also cites explicitly hostile language about Jews by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. These examples document the writers’ views as presented and interpreted by Norwood; they do not establish a single position shared by left-wing movements.[3]

The history of Jewish relations with communist parties included both political involvement and conflict over Jewish national identity. Although some Jews held prominent positions in communist movements, communists remained a small minority among Jews. The association between Jews and Bolshevism nevertheless contributed to the “Żydokomuna,” or Communist-Jewish conspiracy myth, particularly in parts of Eastern Europe.[7]

During Soviet occupation of territories including eastern Poland and the Baltic states in 1939–1941, some local Jewish Communists held official positions, and some Jews welcomed Soviet rule as an alternative to increasingly authoritarian and antisemitic regimes. Many non-Jews experienced the occupation as a loss of national independence and viewed Jews who welcomed it as traitors. These divergent perceptions contributed to anti-Jewish violence after Soviet withdrawals and shaped Jewish–non-Jewish relations for decades; the overwhelming majority of Jews were not Communists.[7]

Soviet antisemitic policies intensified after 1943 and peaked in 1948–1953, when Jews were removed from positions, accused of being “rootless cosmopolitans,” and Jewish cultural institutions were closed. In 1952, about twenty leading Jewish cultural and professional figures were executed. In Poland, a Communist Party “anti-Zionist” campaign began in 1968, after which about half of the country’s Jewish population emigrated. These events further alienated Jewish Communists and contributed to defections from communist parties.[7]

Norwood’s account of the American Communist Party shows how its position on Zionism shifted. He describes the party as vilifying Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s and at times defending or minimizing violence against Jews in Palestine. In his account, the party described the 1929 violence as a class conflict and dismissed reports of atrocities as Zionist fabrications; more than 130 Jews were killed in the pogroms. Norwood also recounts that the party newspaper published a cartoon combining a cross and a Star of David in a deicide image.[3]

The party’s position later changed. After the Soviet Union reversed its position in 1947, the American Communist Party supported the UN partition plan and backed Israel in 1948. The party established a School of Jewish Studies in New York in 1945, offering courses on antisemitism and Hebrew. Its membership fell sharply after revelations about Stalin’s crimes, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and an internal dispute over the Sinai campaign in 1956–57.[3]

The New Left was a late-1960s wave of radicalism among students and young people in the United States and Western Europe, encompassing ideologies from Maoist Marxism to anarchism. Jewish activists were prominent in American groups including Students for a Democratic Society, CORE, and SNCC, and in Free Speech and anti-Vietnam War movements. One estimate put Jews at one-third to one-half of New Left activists on college campuses, despite their representing about three percent of the U.S. population and ten percent of college students.[8]

The 1967 Six-Day War became a point of strain between some Jewish progressives and parts of the New Left. Some New Left groups criticized Israel as imperialist and rejected Zionism; Jewish activists faced tensions over those views and the rise of Black Power. At the 1967 Conference for a New Politics in Chicago, African American delegates pressed for a resolution calling the conflict an “imperialist Zionist war.” In Berkeley, Jewish New Leftists formed the Committee for a Progressive Middle East in March 1969, seeking a position between anti-Zionist New Left groups and less critical Jewish organizations.[8]

Norwood describes some parts of the American New Left as becoming more anti-Israel and, at times, overtly antisemitic after the Six-Day War. He cites the Black Panther Party and SNCC, including rhetoric equating Israel with Nazi Germany and the use of Nazi imagery against Jews and Israelis. The New Left was varied and initially devoted little attention to Jewish issues; as an organized movement it declined in the early 1970s. It also lost much of its earlier Jewish influence, with some Jewish activists redirecting their methods toward Jewish communal causes.[3][8]

In Rich’s interpretation of British political history, hostility to Israel became more prominent across parts of the British left as the New Left developed during the 1960s. He links the shift to anti-colonial politics, race, and Cold War thinking, pointing to 1967 writing in New Left Review that framed Israel as aligned with imperialism. Rich further argues that some anti-colonial accounts cast Jewish national aspirations as an extension of Western power, denying Jewish agency and the Jewish connection to the land; he also contends that Soviet propaganda linking Zionism with colonialism, racism, and Nazism helped circulate older antisemitic conspiracy themes in left-wing settings.[2]

Dave Rich’s book examines the development of left-wing antisemitism in Britain and the relationship between Labour politics, Israel, and anti-Zionism. A profile presents it as growing out of Rich’s PhD thesis and describes his argument that the British left’s embrace of the Palestinian cause had roots in the now-defunct Young Liberals rather than beginning in the Labour Party. Rich identified Louis Eaks, a former Young Liberals chair and editor of radical magazines including Free Palestine, as influential in making Palestine a mainstream issue in that organization.[9]

Rich’s account follows anti-Zionist politics into Labour-related groups before Jeremy Corbyn became an MP. The Labour Movement Campaign for Palestine, described as a radical-left anti-Zionist group, formed before Corbyn’s election to Parliament. He became its sponsor in early 1983. The group’s stated aims included eradicating Zionism from the Labour Party, and Rich says Corbyn spoke at its events and called it the only campaign rooted in the Labour movement that addressed the Palestine question.[2]

A 1985 dispute at Sunderland Polytechnic concerned a students’ union ban on the Jewish Society because of its support for Zionism. The Labour Movement Campaign for Palestine defended the union’s action while rejecting the claim that it was antisemitic; its newsletter characterized Zionism as inherently racist and colonialist. Rich uses the episode to argue that anti-Zionist ideas associated with Corbyn’s earlier political milieu predated his Labour leadership.[2]

Rich also recounts political tests he says Jews may face in left-wing spaces, including being asked to declare views on Israel, settlements, or boycotts. He reports that Amnesty International cancelled a meeting of the Jewish Leadership Council at its London premises on the grounds that the council supported settlements and opposed boycotts of them. Rich characterizes such tests as discriminatory and compares them to antisemitic loyalty tests; that is his argument, rather than a neutral classification established by the account.[2]

Rich’s own account includes a qualification: he writes that most left-wing people are not antisemitic and that, overall, the left’s history of opposing antisemitism outweighs its history of indulging it. His argument is that antisemitism can also take forms associated with left-wing anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist ideas, and that a belief in the left’s anti-racist character can make it harder to recognize those forms.[2]

Contemporary disputes often focus on whether anti-Zionist statements or campaigns cross into antisemitism. The cited framework distinguishes criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism from antisemitism as such, while describing antisemitism as arising when anti-Zionism denies Jews national self-determination recognized for other peoples, targets Jews collectively, uses antisemitic imagery, or compares Israel to Nazi Germany. It also summarizes disagreement about definitions: the 2021 Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism permits some criticism and boycotts of Israel, while critics objected to its framing.[5]

The ADL report on European political movements identifies recurring themes across its case studies of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Spain: claims that Jews control politics or media, Holocaust trivialization, comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, and claims that antisemitism accusations are fabricated to silence criticism of Israel. It also identifies anti-capitalist tropes about Jewish control of financial markets, money, or workers. The report stresses that national cases and political contexts differ, and notes that its European contributors’ positions may not match standard ADL practice or policy.[6]

At the 2017 Chicago Dyke March, Jewish participants were told they could not carry a Star of David rainbow flag. In August 2020, a Kenosha synagogue that had supported peaceful protest and opposed racism was vandalized with “Free Palestine” graffiti. The cited account presents these as examples of Jews being treated as representatives of Israeli policy while maintaining the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.[5]

British Labour politics became a prominent focus of debate during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The ADL report contrasts Labour’s response under Keir Starmer—including a new disciplinary process and education—with the party’s record under Corbyn, and describes leadership as a factor in how parties respond to antisemitism.[6] A British attitudes study found that most people expressing anti-Israel attitudes did not express antisemitic attitudes, although a significant minority held both.[10] A separate report described disagreement among British Jews about supporting Labour under Corbyn and said some Jewish supporters who warned about him were called disloyal or traitors.[11]

Israel-related rhetoric and activism are also disputed in the United States. Norwood discusses the Democratic Socialists of America’s 2017 convention resolution expressing solidarity with Palestinian civil society against Israeli “apartheid, colonialism, and military occupation,” and the chants that followed its passage; he cites the organization’s 2021 statement on the Gaza war as part of a broader development he identifies. These are Norwood’s interpretation of the examples, not a neutral classification shared by all sources. He also discusses the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which advocates boycotts of Israeli products and ending investments and institutional ties involving Israel; his claim that some campaigns demonize Israel through comparisons to Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa should not be generalized to every BDS supporter or campaign.[3]

During the May 2021 Israel–Hamas conflict, 251 antisemitic incidents were recorded in the United States from May 11 through the end of the month, a 115 percent increase over the same period in 2020. The report describes attacks on Jewish people and institutions, but the total covers incidents across the country and does not attribute them specifically to the political left.[6]

In a 2020 U.S. Department of State conference speech, Rich argued that conspiracy theories could link far-left and far-right activists and that antisemitic ideas could appear in such movements. He cited conspiracist claims involving the Rothschilds and George Soros and allegations connecting Israeli police training to George Floyd’s killing. He characterized the UK conspiracy scene as a “melting pot of conspiracism,” adding, “This is not so much a political horseshoe as a melting pot of conspiracism.” These are Rich’s analyses and examples, not independent findings established by the conference page.[12]

The wider debate also cautions against assigning antisemitism to a single faction. A Calcalist report notes disagreement about explanations and causal claims, and summarizes the view that antisemitism occurs on both the right and left. It also describes criticism of a 2003 claim about an alliance of pro-Palestinian leftists, anti-globalization activists, and Islamists for generalizing about entire populations. The sources therefore support examining specific rhetoric, actors, and contexts rather than treating the left as a whole as antisemitic.[13]