Soviet Antisemitism

 Every one-time communist has some cherished floor—some moral bottom line—below which they thought their disillusionment could never sink. In Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook—her floor is antisemitism. No matter what else she discovered the Soviet regime might be capable of—she thought—at least they would never do that. 

Even as it became harder and harder to avoid the reports of purges, hangings, deportations, and gulags, then—she still managed to persuade herself that Stalin's government would at least never stoop to outright antisemitic persecution. It would retain that one moral distinction. "[W]e all had some illusions," she writes: "mine was that anti-Semitism was 'impossible'."

Of course—as the passage already hints—this too proved to be an "illusion" that had to be shed. As news about the "Doctors' Plot" episode began to filter out to the West in the 1950s, it became harder to ignore the fact that Stalin was indeed capable even of that. 

I clung to the same illusion for a while. Even as I learned enough history to be forced to admit just how appalling every Marxist-Leninist regime had been from the standpoint of human rights—I still told myself that there were a few key features that marked them as morally superior to other authoritarian regimes. One, I said, was their racial universalism. 

They might torture people. They might imprison dissidents. They might massacre their own citizens. But at least they did it indiscriminately. Or else—they persecuted only on the basis of political opinion or class. Never on race. At least they didn't do that. At least they weren't anti-Semites. 

The more one learns about twentieth century Soviet bloc regimes—though—the more one realizes this is a complete fiction; a comforting illusion for erstwhile Marxists who are trying to cling to the last shred of their childhood faith. 

And I'm not only referring to the Doctors' Plot affair—which perhaps in isolation could be dismissed as an aberration. 

No, the Doctors' Plot business was not an anomaly. Several of the major Warsaw Pact countries went down the same dark path. It took the communist Polish government barely a handful of decades after the Holocaust to start persecuting Jewish intellectuals—now under the rebranded heading of "anti-Zionism." 

One sees traces of this bizarre episode in our intellectual life still. A case in point is the relentless character assassination that the Polish government carried out against Jerzy Kosinski—seeking to portray him as a liar and a plagiarist. This smear campaign still seems to color his reputation as a writer to this day—despite the lack of any real evidence against him. 

(The Polish government's real objection to his work appears to have been its unflattering portrayal of the role of the average Polish citizenry during the Holocaust.)

I thought for a while, though, that this too was a one-off. A Polish deviation from the true Marxist-Leninist faith. 

Another illusion on my part. I hadn't yet heard about the antisemitic purges in Czechoslovakia that occurred even earlier—in which a group of Jewish Communist Party members were accused of mounting a "Zionist conspiracy" against the state, and were duly executed—following the usual Stalinist show trial routine in a kangaroo court. 

In his Nations and Nationalism, Ernest Gellner dryly observes at one point that it used to be a standing joke on the Marxist Left to say that "Anti-Semitism is the socialism of the stupid"; but, he adds, the phrase "was not conspicuously echoed in the days of the Slansky trial [in Czechoslovakia] or the Polish purges of 1968[.]" 

The Eastern European communist regimes waited barely a few years after defeating Hitler—it would seem—before they too were persecuting the Jews. 

***

Philip Roth's The Prague Orgy—the capstone novella of his Zuckerman Bound tetralogy—is set in this same atmosphere of Soviet bloc antisemitism. Indeed, the book treats the existence of anti-Jewish purges in Eastern Europe as an open secret by the 1970s—even if young Marxist converts decades later (like me) would still manage to go for years of their lives without ever hearing about it. 

The book follows Nathan Zuckerman (Roth's alter ego) on a dangerous and tragicomic mission into communist Prague in order to rescue the unpublished manuscript of a Yiddish author killed by the Nazis. 

The improbable quest is explained partly as a stage in Zuckerman's long-running struggle for redemption. He is seeking yet again to reconcile with his father from beyond the grave—to make it up to him for inflicting the scandal of a sex-crazed novel on the family (the novel in question is Carnovsky—the fictional stand-in for Roth's real-world Portnoy's Complaint). 

But Zuckerman is also seeking emancipation from the prison of the self. In the previous volume in the series, The Anatomy Lesson, Zuckerman frets over the possibility that he has exhausted his subject-matter. He's tired of writing about his Newark childhood and adolescence over and over again. He fears he has nothing else to say about his story. He wants to escape his story. 

And so, he turns to Eastern European refugees. Here—he thinks—are people with real problems. Here are people whose stories are so powerful and tragic that they would finally eclipse his own and give him something else to write about for a change. 

Zuckerman sees in their suffering—then—the possibility of escaping what Byron called (in the dedication to "The Corsair") the "gloomy vanity of 'drawing from self'." 

(Indeed, Zuckerman's plight—and Roth's—is similar to Byron's in several respects; not least in the fact that both are regarded as disreputable scoundrels due solely to the behavior of their fictional counterparts. The Prague Orgy is also, then, about Zuckerman's efforts to retrieve his reputation as an upstanding and idealistic member of the literary community.)

Zuckerman's unlikely trip to Czechoslovakia in The Prague Orgy seems to have been inspired by this fleeting suggestion about Eastern European refugees in The Anatomy Lesson: maybe, he thinks, this trip might grant him some reprieve from having to endlessly rework the same tired material of his personal psycho-biography. 

But the attempt proves—he is forced to admit—to be a failure. "Another assault upon a world of significance degenerating into a personal fiasco, and this time in a record forty-eight hours!" 

He'd gone to Prague hoping to find some way of "snaking away from the narrative encasing me." But "[n]o," he is forced to concede at last, "one's story isn't a skin to be shed[.]" It seems he is to be forced to follow Byron's gloomy precedent after all. 

Here as elsewhere, the book is a worthy entry in the Roth canon and the Zuckerman saga—warm and funny and sparkling and sad; with Zuckerman as an ever-appealing protagonist who charms us not only with his mordant capacity for self-deprecation—but also by the fact that he benefits from low expectations (we too share his readers' initial trepidation about what the author of Carnovsky might get up to in the flesh). 

But what I wanted to talk about today are not so much Zuckerman's self-revelations in this novella—as interesting as those are—but rather the political context of Soviet-era antisemitism. 

The Czech dissident and exile who talks Zuckerman into undertaking his rescue mission of the Yiddish manuscript in the first place has been silenced in his home country in part through antisemitic purges. His girlfriend—a gentile former actress—was slandered in her native land as "the Jew's whore." Zuckerman himself—as he is going through customs on his way out of the country at the book's conclusion—is deemed a "Zionist agent." 

All this, at the hands of my sainted Marxist-Leninist regimes. The ones that, when all else failed, I thought, were at least still racial universalists; the lands where, as Lessing's protagonist puts it, "anti-Semitism was 'impossible'."

***

In seems worth bearing some of these episodes in mind—in the midst of our current debates as a society about Zohran Mamdani, the future of the State of Israel, etc. 

I have no doubt the Left is correct that anti-Zionism is not necessarily the same thing as antisemitism. The two can be distinguished. 

At same time, the Left is overly glib in implying that just because they can be distinguished, they necessarily are and always will be distinguished. 

As a tour through Eastern Europe in the twentieth century reveals—after all—it turns out that there is a remarkably long history of left-wing antisemitism—Marxist-Leninist antisemitism—that used the ideological window-dressing of "anti-Zionism" as a paper-thin disguise for anti-Jewish sentiment. 

When the accusation of "Zionist conspiracist" and "Zionist agent" have been wielded for so many decades in antisemitic purges, then—can anyone be surprised that not everyone is willing simply to take it on faith that your variety of anti-Zionism is absolutely pure and uncontaminated with any hint of anti-Semitism? 

Besides—if some of the results are the same—then does the ideological motivation behind anti-Jewish violence even matter? If Carlos the Jackal tries to assassinate a civilian in London (which he did)—does it make a moral difference whether he targeted him for being Jewish or, rather, for being a "Zionist"? 

As Bret Stephens aptly observed in a recent column for the New York Times—about why he still has reservations about Mamdani's comments on Israel: 

"An article of faith among many self-professed anti-Zionists is that they are not antisemitic. But Jews don’t live in a world of fine-grained semantic distinctions. The man accused of killing Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, the young couple fatally shot in May outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, yelled 'Free Palestine.' Many of the thousands of antisemitic incidents nationwide since the Oct. 7 attacks also have had at least a patina of anti-Zionism."

If someone kills Jews in a pogrom—would it make a moral difference to you if they told you afterward: "oh, I didn't kill them for being Jews; I killed them for supporting 'settler colonialism'?" (Some on the Left would appear to answer "yes" to this question; viz. the Japanese Red Army faction's participation in the massacre at Tel Aviv's Lod Airport in 1972. Therein lies the whole problem.)

***

Look, my own view of the Israel-Palestine conflict continues to be that a situation in which a Jewish population exercises effective state power over a disenfranchised Palestinian population, living under a quasi-permanent military occupation, is not morally tolerable or defensible. 

At the same time, there seem to be only two possible ways to escape the current condition of apartheid—and neither has much to recommend it as realistic or workable.

One: Israel could allow and facilitate the creation of a contiguous and independent Palestinian state. But this would require withdrawing so many settlements from the West Bank and giving up so much influence over what happens next in Gaza that it is functionally almost inconceivable at this point. It would also result in massive civilian suffering for the Jewish settlers—and their children—currently living in those communities. 

It would also implicitly pledge each of the resulting two states to maintain a particular ethnic character and demographic majority for their respective populations—the usual result of partition (viz. India and Pakistan)—which hardly seems ideal from the standpoint of liberal democracy. 

Even worse, it might also result in the ethnic cleansing on both sides of people who are deemed not to "belong" to the majority ethnic identities of the two newly-separated states (and there always will be such people—since no state, no matter how you draw its boundaries, has actual ethnic uniformity). Again—this is pretty much what happened during the creation of India and Pakistan. 

The alternative solution—the one that Zohran Mamdani seems to favor—would be to create a unitary binational state. The most direct path to this future would be for the existing Israeli government to extend the franchise to the Palestinians living in the occupied territories. 

I don't know which of these two possibilities is more unworkable at this point—or more likely to result in immediate ethnic cleansing or other forms of violence. They seem about equally problematic and rife with dangers from where we now sit. 

Which is why it strikes me as disingenuous for people to equate the latter of the two options with the "elimination of the State of Israel" or the "denial of Israel's right to exist." All the dangers people fear from the second option seem as likely if not more to result from the first. 

Yet, at the same time, no serious or humane person could possibly defend the status quo, which deprives an entire human community of the rights of citizenship and of any democratic say in their own government. 

And yes, the Palestinians are far from the only people on Earth deprived of democracy (look around at all the surrounding Arab states! Not to mention the persecution of Muslim minorities in China, Myanmar, etc.) That too is terrible and must be condemned. But surely we should try to level up instead of leveling down here. We should aspire to liberal democracy and human rights for everyone, not choose Qatar or Saudi Arabia as our standard. 

(It's unfortunate how often the "leveling down" move turns up in debates over Israel-Palestine. The Bret Stephens column above deploys a similar "tu quoque" sophistry: "One of the ways anti-Zionists tend to give themselves away [...] is that the only human-rights abuses they seem to notice are Israel’s; [...] the only group whose suffering they are prepared to turn into their personal crusade is that of the Palestinians." Well okay, fair enough—but surely that's an argument to care more about those other groups, not to care less about the Palestinians? (One could also point out that the U.S. government has much less influence in those other conflicts, so U.S. citizens getting incensed about them would be relatively futile.))

***

So that's my view of the conflict. If you mean by anti-Zionism, then, being at least as open to a one-state binational solution as to a two-state partition, then I may be some species of anti-Zionist. (You will note that my species of anti-Zionism has no stake in the Palestinian national cause as such—quite the contrary, it is wholly agnostic on the matter; it is just focused on ensuring that every person in the geographic region of Israel-Palestine, regardless of ethnicity or religion, has human rights and a say in their respective government—whatever it may be.)

But if you mean by anti-Zionism—as many on the Left appear to—the belief that the very presence of Jews in Israel is somehow illegitimate—because their arrival there generations ago represented a version of "settler colonialism"—then I am ardently not an anti-Zionist. Because that way lies ethnic cleansing and genocide. 

(It's also an historically absurd position to take, since large parts of the Jewish population of Israel never even emigrated from Europe. They were in fact expelled from Arab states in a mass displacement at the time of partition—just as Arabs were being displaced as well from the newly-created State of Israel. Here, again, India and Pakistan provide the best point of comparison.)

It's tiresome and exhausting to rehearse all of these distinctions every time. Even I find I often lose the thread of the argument. And certainly nothing in my position on the conflict lends itself to being reduced to a slogan on a sign or a chant at a protest march. 

So it's no wonder that so many people outraged by the horror of the Gaza war simply default to shouting "Free Palestine" or waving green flags and wearing keffiyehs—even when these read to many people in context as endorsements of Hamas terrorism and the atrocities of October 7. 

Likewise, it's no wonder that when these same people are then accused of antisemitism, they cry: "I'm not an antisemite, I'm anti-Zionist"—without ever really explaining what they mean by anti-Zionism—or how they would distinguish between the two—or what exactly they envision as the future of the Jewish people in Israel, if it is not under the State of Israel in its current form. 

I agree that it's a heavy burden to explain all this and make serious moral distinctions all the time. But we have to. There is no substitute for it. 

We can't rest on the easy assumption that there is some self-evident distinction between our brand of anti-Zionism and the evils of antisemitism—because the reality is that there has been a long history of antisemitic persecution at the hands of self-described leftist regimes under the mantle of purported "anti-Zionism"—not to mention a great deal of terrorism targeting Jewish civilians carried out under the same label. 

The Israel-Palestine situation, then, really is complicated enough to demand nuance. And if you can't fit the nuances required onto a sign—perhaps it's better not to bring one.