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On 28.06.2013 14:34, Marv Gandall wrote: <snip>
Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, and other lesser known Bolsheviks were materialists who rejected religion and had long ceased to identify with the Jewish communities into which they had been born. However, as Bolsheviks they still regarded the Jews as a nation with a common language, culture, and territory in Eastern Europe, and they viewed anti-semitism as an major ruling class weapon in the struggle against the growing mass influence of Marxism. Therein lies the importance of being Jewish in that historical period. It was often a life and death matter, and it universally doomed the entire Yiddish-speaking nation in WWII. Today, Judaism survives as a transnational religion like Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, etc. I've never quite understood understood why Deutscher continued to describe himself as a "non-Jewish Jew" since he did not practice the religion and had no longer had connection to an organized Jewish community. In his defence, he could claim to have come from the shtetl and to speak its distinctive language. The attenuated attachment to the tradition of contemporary secular non-Jewish "Jews" in many countries, however, seems to me to resemble that of the descendants of the Irish, Italian, and other European immigrant families: mainly nostalgic - a fondness for pastrami, klezmer, and other features of the inherited culture - and an uncritical belief in the blood tie of having been born of a Jewish mother and of belonging to a separate Ashkenazi or Sephardic racial or ethnic group. In one respect, though, "Jewish" self-identification is unique, owing much to the traumatic memory of the Judeocide, still too fresh for a generation once removed to ease fears of its recurrence and to fully assimilate even though it is widely dispersed, intermingled, and intermarried.
It may be that anti-semitism is now irrelevant in the USA, but unfortunately it's very much alive and well in Europe (the current Hungarian government officially propagates anti-Semitism and a fascist anti-Semitic party is a junior partner in the government). This is why so many secular socialists of Jewish descent who are absolutely non-religious still identify themselves as Jews as a sign of their opposition to anti-Semitism.
As on of my secular socialist Jewish friends once said when asked by some Orthodox Jewish students in Poland why he considered himself Jewish even though he was an atheist and didn't adhere to any Jewish religious practices: "As long as anti-semitism continues to exist I will proclaim that I'm Jewish and not try to hide the fact that I'm of Jewish descent."
Einde O'Callaghan ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
