Ep. 217: Communism’s comeback and the surge of antisemitism

Why are so many young Americans saying they support communism and do they understand that the anti-Zionist lies they are swallowing were cooked up by Soviet propagandists a half-century ago? Those are the questions JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin is asking about the willingness of ignorant Americans who are embracing the Marxist war on the West. He’s joined in this week’s episode of Think Twice by scholar Jonathan Brent, the CEO of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and a historian of communism and the Holocaust.   According to Brent, the reason for the revival of Marxism is, “the hatred of the American system of government and of the West generally that has been inculcated in generation after generation of young people who have gone to our most liberal and our most privileged universities and progressive schools.” This has, he says, created an appetite for a belief in the power of the state to “smash” bourgeois values, liberalism and institute more equality. But Brent points out that all this failed ideology has to offer is “an equality that is actually based on deprivation and enslavement rather than on lifting people up.”   The renewed infatuation with Marxism and the overlooking of its role in the murder of more than 100 million people during the 20th century is, Brent argues, also directly related to the support for Hamas, anti-Zionism and the war against Israel among young people. It also explains the support that an anti-Zionist like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani gets from many young people.   Alongside of this trend is a renewed interest in the Jewish Labor Bund, the socialist Jewish movement that thrived in Europe before the Holocaust. Brent believes it is wrong for contemporary anti-Zionists to use it to attack the existence of the state of Israel.   “The back in the 1930s was not between Bundism and Israel,” Brent points out. It was a debate about, “Do we stay here or do we go there? Where do we have the best chance of survival? And by that I don't mean simply physical survival, but the survival of our traditions, the survival of our language, the survival of our customs, our literature, our music, and so on. That was the issue. Bundism, in the classical sense, was never against Israel as such. So, it's a bit dishonest to take that principled intellectual dispute of the 1930s and transport it into the present day.”   Brent also discussed the work of YIVO, which seeks to preserve the record of the Eastern European Jewish civilization that perished in the Holocaust and the Soviet gulags. While the Bundists shouldn’t be blamed for believing that Europe could be a place where Jewish life could continue to flourish, the verdict of history vindicated the belief of the Zionists that it was doomed there.   Listen/Subscribe to weekly episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, iHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.   Watch new episodes every week by subscribing to the JNS YouTube Channel.