
Jews are hated because we are: capitalists, communists, anarchists, Christ-killers, rootless cosmopolitans, land-grabbing imperialists… whatever fits the moment.
In truth, Jews are hated because we brought monotheism to the world and insisted, through the Written and Oral Torah, that human beings are agents of morality who are free to choose between good and evil.
This makes it difficult for those who insist that morality, that truth itself, is relative. It’s much easier to blame and then kill the Jews for well, anything that’s wrong with society — or, better yet, in your loser-life.
Unemployed? The Jews took your job. Rent too high? Blame the Jewish landlord. Wait — your landlord isn’t Jewish? Well, then, he’s controlled and manipulated by the international Zionist conspiracy.
You see how it works.

It should come as no surprise that the obsession with the so-called One Percent comes from Obama, who spent over twenty years of his adult life as a member of a church that openly espoused hatred of Jews and free enterprise and whose guiding doctrine/theology/whatever of Black Theology is best described as Marxism fused with classic European Jew-hatred. In addition, Obama boasted that Jeremiah Wright, the leader of this so-called church, was his spiritual mentor.
Now, Obama is cozy with Al Sharpton, the race-baiter who rose to prominence through the Tawana Brawley hoax and incited a riot against Jews in Crown Heights, 1991.
That Sharpton is one of Obama’s most visible confidants should be a national disgrace. Imagine if the Grand Dragon of the KKK were a welcome visitor to a Republican White House. Such a relationship would, quite properly, spark national outrage.
But of course, because Obama is (sorta) black and Sharpton is a professional race hustler, and because the mainstream media are racists — they are as obsessed with race as the 19th-century Progressives were with eugenics — they Photoshop Sharpton as a respectable (ahem) civil rights leader instead of a tax-evading, anti-Semitic grifter who, in 1991, shrieked to a black mob:
“If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”
According to the sworn testimony of Efraim Lipkind, a resident of Crown Heights at the time, Sharpton incited a black crowd to murderous rage.
Said Lipkind:
“Then we had a famous man, Al Sharpton, who came down, and he said Tuesday night, kill the Jews, two times. I heard him, and he started to lead a charge across the street to Utica.”
And of course, like a true leftist who uses victimhood as a blackjack against personal responsibility, Sharpton justified the three days and four nights of rioting, and the murders of Jewish student Yankel Rosenbaum and Italian-American Anthony Graziosi, who had been mistaken for a Hasid, by saying:
“We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system.”

Sharpton went on to lead a massacre in 1995 in which seven innocent souls — Angelina Marrero, Cynthia Martinez, Luz Ramos, Mayra Rentas, Olga Garcia, Garnette Ramautar and Kareem Brunner — were butchered at Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned business, in Harlem.
It is beyond belief that Sharpton has his own TV show on MSNBC. Okay, he only has about 37 viewers and the network is a conga line of freaks, but still…. Even more unbelievable is that this man, who incited two deadly American pogroms, is an adviser to a sitting American president.
The connection between Jews and the affluent is a standard and deadly rallying cry from the left. Obama, who is hard-left, is not a vulgar, foaming-at-the-mouth Jew-hater. He’s smoother in his custom-tailored Brooks Brothers suits. But he falls neatly into the tradition of polite, Anglo-Saxon country club Jew-haters who were America’s Ivy League intellectual elite.
Ruth R. Wisse has written an important piece about Jew-hatred and the One Percent in today’s WSJ.
Two phenomena: anti-Semitism and American class conflict. Is there any connection between them? In a letter to this newspaper, the noted venture capitalist Tom Perkins called attention to certain parallels, as he saw them, between Nazi Germany’s war against the Jews and American progressives’ war on the “one percent.” For comparing two such historically disparate societies, Mr. Perkins was promptly and heatedly denounced.
But is there something to be said for his comparison—not of Germany and the United States, of course, but of the politics at work in the two situations? The place to begin is at the starting point: with the rise of anti-Semitism, modernity’s most successful and least understood political movement.
The German political activist Wilhelm Marr, originally a man of the left, organized a movement in the 1870s that charged Jews with using their skills “to conquer Germany from within.” Distinguishing the movement that he called anti-Semitism from earlier forms of anti-Judaism, Marr argued on professedly rational grounds that Jews were taking unfair advantage of the emerging democratic order in Europe, with its promise of individual rights and open competition, in order to dominate the fields of finance, culture and social ideas. Though some of Marr’s rhetoric and imagery was based on earlier stereotypes, he was right to insist that anti-Semitism was a new response to new conditions, channeling grievance and blame against highly visible beneficiaries of freedom and opportunity.
These were some of its typical ploys: Are you unemployed? The Jews have your jobs. Is your family mired in poverty? The Rothschilds have your money. Do you feel more insecure in the city than you did on the land? The Jews are trapping you in factories and charging you exorbitant rents.
Anti-Semitism accused Jews of undermining Christian authority and corrupting the German legal system, the arts and the press. Jews were said to be rabid internationalists spreading Bolshevism—and ruthless capitalists exploiting for their own gain the nation’s natural and human resources. To ambitious politicians seeking office, to rulers of still largely illiterate populations, “the Jews” became a convenient catchall explanation for deep-rooted and sometimes intractable problems.
But though the origins of modern anti-Semitism may be traced to Germany, anti-Semitism itself remains sui generis and cannot be simply conflated with either Germany or Hitler. True, the latter gained power on a platform of anti-Semitism and then proceeded to put his Final Solution into effect, but the modern organization of politics against the Jews is independent of Nazism—and of fascism, since the Italian variant did not specifically target the Jews. Features of anti-Semitism are present in other political movements, on the left fully as much the right.
The parallel that Tom Perkins drew in his letter was especially irksome to his respondents on the left, many of whom are supporters of President Obama’s sallies against Wall Street and the “one percent.” These critics might profitably consult Robert Wistrich, today’s leading historian of anti-Semitism. His “From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel” (2012) documents the often profound anti-Semitism that has affected socialists and leftists from Karl Marx to today’s anti-Israel movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions. It was Marx who said, “The bill of exchange is the Jew’s actual god,” putting a Jewish face on capitalism and accusing both Judaism and capitalism of converting man and nature into “alienable and saleable objects.”
Herein lies one structural connection between a politics of blame directed specifically at Jews and a politics of grievance directed against “the rich.” The ranks of those harping on “unfairly” high earners include figures in American political life at all levels who have been entrusted with the care of our open society; in channeling blame for today’s deep-rooted and seemingly intractable problems toward the beneficiaries of that society’s competitive freedoms, they are playing with fire.
I say this not only, and not even primarily, because some of those beneficiaries happen also to be Jews. So far, mainstream American politicians and supporters of movements like Occupy Wall Street have confined their attacks to the nameless “one percent,” and in any case it is doubtful that today any U.S. politician would be electable on an explicitly anti-Jewish platform.
My point is broader: Stoking class envy is a step in a familiar, dangerous and highly incendiary process. Any ideology or movement, right or left, that is organized negatively—against rather than for—enjoys an inherent advantage in politics, mobilizing unappeasable energies that never have to default on their announced goal of cleansing the body politic of its alleged poisons.
In this respect, one might think of anti-Semitism as the purest and most murderous example of an enduring political archetype: the negative campaign. That campaign has its international as well as its domestic front. Modern anti-Zionism, itself a patented invention of Soviet Communism and now the lingua franca of the international left, uses Israel just as anti-Semitism uses Jews, directing grievance and blame and eliminationist zeal against an entire collectivity that has flourished on the world scene thanks to the blessings of freedom and opportunity.
Herein lies a deeper structural connection. On the global front today, the much larger and more obvious beneficiary of those same blessings is the democratic capitalist system of the United States, and the ultimate target of the ultimate negative campaign is the American people. Anyone seeking to understand the inner workings of such a campaign will find much food for thought in Mr. Perkins’s parallel.
Israel and the Jews serve as the all-purpose villains and scapegoats for evil people in all times and in all places.
To me, the leftist politics of the Hollywood 1% resemble the well established practice in the Middle Ages of buying indulgences from corrupt bishops. This is supposed to forgive many sins, such as being rich and extravagant. It was not confined to Europe as the Aztecs practiced child sacrifice to propitiate the gods, no doubt fearing retribution for similar sins of gluttony and licentiousness. It is an old practice and should not be a surprise.
The reason for anti-semitism is the same reason for the war against the “1 percent”. It’s envy. Jews everywhere, so long as they’re not actually being murdered, tend to be more successful than those around them. Whatever field they go into, they tend to excel. Therefore, the more prone a group is to envy and resentment of success, the more anti-semitic they’re going to be.
So true Brianna. Take the example of the Israelis; they ‘made-the-desert-bloom’ (are a success) and their neighbors simply cannot stomach-it. Few things are as indicative of character as envy/jealousy.
In California during the 1800s Asians – specifically Chinese – were treated horribly. At one time they could not own land, even testify in court. Which is why so many went into the service industries – laundry, restaurants – serving the miners.
But Asians have traditionally emphasized education for their children – to the point today many are doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants.
And it is the same with the Jewish people – education – which has brought success – and resentment.
Not an hour prior to reading this post my mom and I had been speaking about your movie ‘A Stranger Among Us’ (we’re both very fond of it;); she asked me why you didn’t have more films out and I explained you were a pro-Israel, Conservative, Orthodox-Jew, therefore; not popular amongst Hollywood Liberals. Then she suggested you work in Europe instead – so I had to appraise her of the rampant anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism (same-difference) there.
The phenomenon of blaming the Jews is simple scapegoatism used to deflect a populace away from their-own or the system’s failures. It helps ‘them’ to control simmering-resentment by targeting Jews/Israeli’s (G-forbid the Arab’s leaders be held-accountable for failing their countrymen).
Robert, you mention that Obama is ‘sorta-black’ (snort!;) and a ‘smoother’ iteration of anti-Semite. I’m amazed that the fact that he was raised by his white mother and grandparents gets lost in his ‘myth’ (purposely). Also, his original constituency is black and it’s my understanding that there’s a great-deal of anti-Semitism in that population. Obama is such a slick-opportunistic-weasel that he would of-course pander to whatever ideology benefited him the most.
The entire ‘one-percent’ issue is also another case of scapegoatism. The liberals have managed to ‘tar’ all conservatives and anyone with a modicum of resources (most-of-which were earned by talent and industry) as ‘the oppressor’. Transparent as this tactic may be – it certainly has been effective. Unfortunately, the very-people who believe they will benefit by this will end-up mired in a system that minimizes, rather than maximizes their potential. Sad that they cannot see the big picture for themselves.
The war against the One Percent.
How do Hollywood One Percenter’s, and the left’s One Percenter’s (George Soros, leftist media moguls, leftist professional athlete’s etc. not see this?!
Even Barack and Michelle Obama qualify to be One Percenter’s.
Maybe we can make a suggestion similar to the Republican proposal of having members of congress not be subsidized for Obamacare premiums … :
In the interests of narrowing the income Inequality Gap, who among the Hollywood or other leftist One Percenter’s, would like to take part in a pilot program to ‘help the economy and narrow the inequality gap’, by volunteering to be taxed at a much higher rate, (and having any and all tax loopholes disallowed) ?
Surely the liberal One Percenter’s would like to be at the forefront of such social progress, and will rush to take the lead, and after a 5 year trial period (somehow fitting for a Marxist proposal), can gushingly proclaim how wonderful they felt, and how they would like to see the program expanded …
The unstated truth of the matter, is that any Obama or other liberal proposed tax, will affect only the middle class, and past a certain income, they will be taxed at the same rate as billionaires.
This way, the really wealthy will have their lives minimally affected by such taxes, while ensuring that most of the upwardly mobile middle class never get into the circles of the really rich.
For any of the liberal super-rich denying this, ask them how they would feel about the imposition of massive luxury taxes on private jets, large yachts, large estates, rhodium jewelery, other precious metal jewelery, custom tailored clothes, etc. –
all of which are quite unnecessary for their progressive socialized existence, and all of which starkly reflect the income inequality gap.
(Might be interesting if a Republican candidate for 2016 would suggest this,
and see what the public response would be to having rich liberals called on this …)
As for the Anti-Semitic side of the anti-One Percent, I would love to see anyone who has such views, ask George Soros for a grant from his foundation to help further the Anti-Semitic aspect …)
“How do they not see this?”
I think the do see it. But totalitarians (left/right — makes no actual difference) don’t mind things like that because their assumption is that they are the ones who are going to come out on top.
That may be optimistic on their part — Lev Trotsky could tell you about that.
Yes. You continue to depress me, Robert. Nisht gut.
However, I will repost this one on Facebook and, I did ferret out the one line in your piece that made me laugh – “Obama is (sorta) black…”
That does crack me up. The fact that this Lily White Harvard educated Hawaiian can bamboozle an entire nation into believing that he is “(sorta) black,” is tragic comedy.
To me it is comical when Obama tries to play the race card…and talks about his difficult childhood….at Punahou and Harvard.
A brilliant deconstruction of events that have defined our time in our nation. I would post this on Facebook but apparently no route for that exists.