i was once an avowed communist china gamers

If you go on YouTube and search “ David Brooks Milton Friedman,” you can see a 22-year-old socialist me debating the great economist. I dreamed of being the next Clifford Odets, a lefty playwright who was always trying to raise proletarian class consciousness. I read magazines like The Nation and old issues of The New Masses.

In America, the descendants of recent Russian-Jewish immigrants are staunchly more right-wing when compared to Jews who have been here for a few generations.I was a socialist in college. To this day, Russian Jews are traumatized by their experiences in the Soviet Union. Jews for Jesus exists as an organization because they tried to trick Soviet Jews into thinking you could be Jewish and believe in Jesus, and they were falling for it. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Soviet Jews flooded into America, they had to be re-taught Jewish history and Judaism. Often times the only thing that reminded Jews that they were Jews was abuse by their peers. It only existed at all via smuggled in Judaica from America and Israel. Stalin even dismissed a Jewish diplomat during the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to appease Hitler.īy the 1980's, Jewish knowledge among Soviet Jews was at an all-time low. He executed multiple Yiddish poets for just writing in Yiddish, and the Doctor's Plot led to the dismissal of many Jewish party officials. The only Jewish institutions that were allowed to exist were Yiddish publications that did nothing more than tow the party line, leaving fuck-all for the non-Ashkenazim in the Soviet Union. Synagogues, yeshivot (schools), the Bund, Zionist organizations, and basically any Jewish thing that was proudly Jewish was forcibly shut down. Ethnically Jewish sections of the Communist Party were organized to harass Jews into abandoning Jewishness in all it's forms. Things were okay for a while, but the Soviet Union's antitheistic policies affected Jews badly. You can't just end that with the flick of a switch. But antisemitism was ingrained in the Russian psyche as antiblackness is in America. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, they legally emancipated the Jews and made antisemitism illegal. However, with the exception of a few, many of the OG Jewish revolutionaries were avowed atheists and had little to no connection with the Jewish world. Blaming Jews for wanting to overthrow the Czar is like blaming black people for wanting to overthrow the Confederacy. Russia didn't legally emancipate it's Jews until 1911. Pogroms left and right, and the Czar was in kahoots with the Black Hundreds, a notoriously antisemitic group of people. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that Czarist Russia was built on rivers of Jewish blood. There were many Jewish leftists in Russia. You're no comrade of mine if you claim solidarity with the victims of fascism in Pittsburgh and Christchurch but somehow call for the abolition of Judaism and Islam at the same time. But I would rather have the honest antisemitism of the right than the fair-weather friendship of the left. Antisemitism is a bug of the left, it's a feature of the right.

I'm an observant Jew, and I'm also an avowed leftist. I was banned from r/rcommunism101 when someone asked for critiques of the USSR and I gave them this. But many of their policies either outright or basically endorse it. The Left has an odd history with antisemitism. Because if history weren't complicated, it wouldn't be history.

I was once an avowed communist china gamers