The Marxism–Antisemitism Nexus

Since the events of 10/7, Americans have been confronted with the horrifying reality that acts of violence against Jews confirm in poisoned minds the notion of Jewish complicity and justify even more acts of barbarity. But amid the near-hourly cascade of horrors — the bomb threats, the defacement of posters featuring the children Hamas is holding hostage, and the moral depravity on American campuses committed by student and faculty alike — one piece of antisemitic graffiti in Los Angeles stands out:

Believe it or not, there is something profound in this, the composition of semiliterate troglodytes. It is an illustration of the historical nexus coupling the modern incarnations of antisemitism and Marxism, particularly the brand of it practiced by the Soviet Union.

As Jonah Goldberg detailed in a 2018 essay for Commentary, Karl Marx suffused his conspiratorial theory of everything with antisemitic narratives. Who were the distributors of capital, the owners of the factors of production, the exploiters of surplus labor, and the comfortable members of a bourgeois class of investors, anyway? “What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest,” Marx himself wrote. “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.” As Goldberg observed, the “spread of capitalism, therefore, represented a kind of conquest for Jewish values.”

Although it was always a potent force among the citizenry of the USSR, the Soviet Union elevated antisemitism into a national organizing principle and an instrument of geostrategic utility in the post-war period. Jews were steadily purged, sometimes violently, from Soviet government and its diplomatic corps after the war. The process continued under Khrushchev in local governments in the Soviet republics. The USSR’s internal nationality passports became the means by which the Soviets limited the movement of what became the “refusenik” Jews under Brezhnev, and the university quota system resulted in a “severe disadvantage of the Jewish population,” according to one American observer.

All the while, Soviet organs such as Pravda attacked the Jewish identity, mocked the “laughable dwarf capitalist state” of Israel, and retailed the notion of the “corporate Jew” as the enemy of the international proletariat. “What is Zionism?” a 1967 article published in the USSR asked. “A wide network of Zionist organizations with a common center, a common program, and funds exceeding by far the funds of the mafia ‘Cosa Nostra’ is active behind the scenes of the international theater.”

On the American campuses that now traffic in something resembling either common parlor socialism or outright Bolshevism, depending on the institution, it’s not surprising to see the resurrection of theories promoted by the Soviet experiment. As the graffiti in Los Angeles indicates, its adherents aren’t especially bright, but they are motivated. That’s exactly the sort of person the moribund Marxist cause is looking for.