At the Socialist Scholar’s Conference in 1992, Arthur Hertzberg— a rabbi, historian and Jewish community activist of a left-liberal bent— spoke on Zionism as being akin to affirmative action for a historically persecuted people. He spoke of writing the State Department when he was a teenager in an immigrant family (the only one who could write English) appealing to get his Polish relatives out of Europe. The State Department replied: "Because of the Polish immigration quota, in eleven years, your relatives will have a chance to be interviewed at the consulate." Of course, in eleven years, those people were long dead.

I’d like to quote Hertzberg’s most powerful point: "For me, the holiest place in the world is not Jerusalem, it is not the [Western or Wailing] Wall, it is the very secular customs shed at Ben-Gurion Airport. Finally, there is one place in the world where Jews control the port of entry. There has to be one port in the world where we don’t ask other people, not even nice non-Jews, to let us in. Not even nice non-Jews."

Based upon my own family's experience, I heartily endorse these sentiments. We were fortunate in that my parents had a relative living in Yugoslavia, my mother’s aunt, "Tante Elsa," who was widowed and exiled from her native Vienna by the Nazi takeover. They left Poland in 1938 and joined Tante Elsa in Belgrade; they then applied anywhere and everywhere they could to get out of Europe, but initially had no success.

Three years later, my parents did get visas to the United States. These came through shortly before the Germans invaded Yugoslavia, but it was not easy. The US consular authority tried to get them into a Catch-22 situation, saying: "I have the visas in my hand, but I need to know that you'll have transit visas, to get to the United States."

This is putting the cart before the horse: you generally go to countries you're transiting through showing an end-destination visa, so that they know you don't intend to stay there. My parents didn't know then what historians have told us since, that this obstructive behavior was explicitly at the dictate of the anti-Semitic Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long. Fortunately, my father was assisted by a friendly travel agent, who provided a letter to the various consulates stating that he had tickets for the journey, and the consulates in turn produced letters to the US Consulate saying they would definitely get the transit visas.

But my parents lost their parents in the Holocaust, and my father's family was totally wiped out. A problem with Jews in the US is that we do not have the status of a minority group, and a vulnerable minority at that. We are viewed either as part of the white majority (there are some Jews of color, but not many), or as one of the three or four major religious faiths. But in fact, we are hardly a major faith at all in numbers: there are between five and six million American Jews, but at least 250 million Christians. There are only about 14 million Jews in the entire world; we have not yet recovered from the Holocaust of 60 to 65 years ago, when one in three of the world's 18 million Jews were slaughtered.

We act politically with special sensitivity as a minority group. American Jews ordinarily vote Democratic by 80 to 90 percent. The modern Republican high-water mark occurred when Reagan won 31 percent of Jewish votes against Carter in 1980. Bush campaign operatives hope to duplicate this. Of all demographic categories, only African Americans are more firmly Democratic than Jews. One should also add that Jews have always supported radical left movements in greater proportions than other populations.

It is not by accident that the executive director of my Zionist group, Meretz USA, along with our recently deceased president, and an early past president, all spent time in the deep south during the dangerous voter registration drives of the early 1960s. The legal department of the American Jewish Congress worked very closely with the NAACP in challenging a host of discriminatory practices and laws in this country. The Jewish Labor Committee was intimately involved with the leadership of what eventually became the Students for a Democratic Society, better known as SDS. It is estimated that one third to one half of the radicals of the early New Left were Jews.

Why is this? Jews can certainly point to some religious scriptures, including the biblical Prophets, to be "a light unto the nations," "proclaim liberty throughout the land," and pursue justice, etc., but these are available as inspiration for Christians as well. It is less our religious heritage than our history as a persecuted or marginal minority that drove many of us to be active politically, and especially within the left. Many of the racist laws and practices which oppressed African Americans also permitted discrimination against Jews.

Until the late 1960s and '70s, Jews were widely discriminated against in housing and in employment. If you grew up during the 1930s, '40s or '50s, you knew the term "restricted"— code for no Jews allowed. Ivy League and other elite universities discriminated against Jews with so-called geographic quotas; better to take a mediocre but earnest WASP student from Nebraska than another "pushy Jew" from New York. Restricted medical school admissions forced many Jewish aspirants to careers in medicine to study abroad. So-called whiteshoe law firms were closed to Jewish attorneys.

Occasionally a sense of being embattled and threatened makes us succumb to blandishments from the right. This happened to a minor degree when sectors identified as leftist turned anti-Jewish, such as when the Civil Rights movement increasingly took on the rhetoric of Black Power in the late '60s and '70s, and the radical left stridently identified with a Third World-ist ideology which blanketly branded Zionism as a form of racism. It is in this environment that the neo-conservative movement rose from sectors of the liberal left. The neo-conservatives are an intellectual and political current of people (and, in some cases, their offspring)—many, but not all, are Jews—who were liberals or socialists until they reevaluated their positions in the 1970s.

It is the so-called neo-conservatives who are widely perceived— in Europe, in the Islamic world and among many Americans— as a Jewish or pro-Israel conspiracy that runs US foreign policy today. As with all conspiracy theories, there are elements of truth in this, but to buy this line whole is to accept an anti-Semitic canard with classically dangerous consequences. Anti-Semitic movements always assign out-sized, sinister powers to "the Jews." Hate-mongers see Jews simultaneously as controlling Wall Street, the banks, and the media, and also as pinkos and commies. They can point to many Jewish names in all these categories for evidence.

During the last century, Jews were twice cast as proverbial canaries in the coal mine: the first (or over-sized) targets of both Nazism and Stalinist-Communism. Today, we are canaries again, as most of the Islamic world is riddled with the worst possible, Nazi-like anti-Semitic venom. Even moderate Egypt broadcasted a television series based upon the notorious Czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Of course, this is driven by the televised imagery of Israelis killing and injuring Arabs, and destroying Palestinian infrastructure and homes. This plays more effectively with most of the world's population than the imagery of Jewish civilian victims of terrorist attacks. Both are deplorable, and violence by each side causes the other to respond in turn, but most of the world, and especially the Islamic world, does not understand that Israelis and Palestinians share blame for this bloody mess— that the fault is not simply "the Jews" or US policy in the region. For example, it is the onset of the Second Intifada in the fall of 2000 which brought Ariel Sharon and the Israeli right back into power (in two elections now), with terrible consequences for both Palestinians and Israelis.

Obviously, Pres. Bush has been far more understanding and tolerant toward the military measures and unilateralist plans of Sharon than any other US chief executive would likely be. Bush's rhetorical embrace of Sharon has favorably impressed those Jews whose over-arching political concern is how "pro-Israel" they perceive the competing political camps to be. But the "Road Map" that Bush advocated with the Europeans and the UN was promoting a Palestinian state by 2005— if only Bush had the perseverance and political courage to push this vision forward by investing adequate effort and political capital. He has preferred, especially during this political season, to court the support of AIPAC (the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) and the Christian fundamentalists (with their separate agenda for supporting hardline elements in Israel). But AIPAC is only playing the rules of the game, exercising the right to fight politically for policies its members support as US citizens. I would argue, that since the uncompromising policies they usually favor will not advance the interests of peace, they are not really being pro-Israel. It will be interesting to see how AIPAC activists react if Bush (heaven forbid) is reelected and seriously pushes Sharon toward the withdrawals he now claims to advocate.

The current Republican administration, despite its remarkably diverse cabinet, contains not a single Jew at the highest level. It is mostly within the Defense Department that Jews figure in positions of authority, including Secretary Rumsfeld’s two leading deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. These two, plus a few others also identified as influencing administration policy in Iraq, such as Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams and Kenneth Adelman, have obtained international infamy as part of this alleged "neo-conservative" conspiracy to aid Israel and oppress Islam. Still, the contention that a few second and third level Jewish officials would compel or manipulate their non-Jewish superiors—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell—to do what they otherwise wouldn't, smacks of classical anti-Semitism.

Neocons are widely assumed to be a "pro-Likud cabal." Interestingly, the most prominent neocon today, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, is not a supporter of Likud and pro-settler policies—this on the word of his sister, a biologist who immigrated to Israel years ago, substantiated by Wolfowitz's speech before a large pro-Israel rally in Washington, DC two years ago; he was booed after speaking of the need to fulfill the legitimate rights and aspirations of Palestinians as well as Israelis. Even such journalistic neocon boosters of the Iraq war as William Kristol and David Brooks have off-handedly stated in their television punditry that they don't think West Bank settlements are a good idea.

If all neocons were slavish backers of the Israeli right, why would they have exhibited opposite sympathies during the Kosovo war? Prominent neocons eagerly supported NATO action against Serb ethnic cleansing of Muslims, while Sharon, and especially the militant core of the pro-settler movement, sided with the Serbs. The neocon bellwether, The Weekly Standard, even advocated the use of ground troops. By the way, if we take The Weekly Standard as the standard for neocon political preferences, their favorite candidate for President was not George W. Bush, but John McCaine.

There are even press reports that this supposedly anti-Muslim, anti-Arab ogre, Wolfowitz, has a close friendship of several years duration— apparently romantic— with a middle-aged Arab-Muslim feminist, Shaha Ali Riza, a World Bank official who was born in Tunis and raised in Saudi Arabia (both are divorcees). It also might be noted that he served for three years as US ambassador to Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, apparently without mishap. Paul Wolfowitz may have manically pushed US foreign policy in a wrong-headed direction in Iraq, but I don't see him as having done so out of evil intent; more importantly, he could not have succeeded without the agreement of the real decision makers in the Bush administration, none of whom are either Jews or neocons.

I don't state these facts in approval of the neocons—I'd like them and all the Bushies to be permanently retired from public life—but only to indicate how the "neo-conservative" label has largely become a codeword and a cover for anti-Semitic conspiratorial thinking. As is all too often the case historically, conspicuous Jews are being scrutinized less as individuals than as "Jews."

By Ralph Seliger

The neo-conservatives are an intellectual and political current—many, but not all, are Jews—who were liberals or socialists until the 1970’s. Prominent non-Jewish neocons include Jeane Kirkpatrick (who would have been Bob Dole’s secretary of state if he had won the 1996 election), William Bennett ( of "virtues" and gambling addiction fame) and Michael Novak (a Catholic social moralist).

It is the neo-conservatives who are widely perceived as a Jewish or pro-Israel conspiracy which runs US foreign policy today. To buy this line whole is to accept an anti-Semitic canard with classically dangerous consequences. Anti-Semitic movements always assign out-sized, sinister powers to "the Jews." This current version of conspiratorial thinking ignores the fact that the vast majority of American Jews are Democrats, second only to African Americans for their consistently high majorities voting for Democrats; also, a disproportionate numbers of Jews have histories on the radical left. The Bush administration is hoping to duplicate Reagan’s modern record, in 1980, of winning 31% of the Jewish vote. In 2000, Bush received 19% of the Jewish vote.

The current Republican administration, despite its remarkably diverse cabinet, contains not a single Jew at the highest level. It is mostly within the Defense Department that Jews figure in positions of authority, including Secretary Rumsfeld’s two leading deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. These two, plus a few others also identified as influencing administration policy in Iraq—such as Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman and Elliot Abrams—are considered part of this alleged neo-conservative/Jewish conspiracy to aid Israel and oppress Islam. The contention that a few second and third level Jewish officials would compel or manipulate their non-Jwish superiors—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell—to do what they otherwise wouldn’t, smacks of classical anti-Semitism.

Neocons are widely assumed to be a "pro-Likud cabal." Interestingly, the most prominent neocon today, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, is not a supporter of Likud and pro-settler policies—this on the word of his sister, a biologist who immigrated to Israel years ago, substantiated by Wolfowitz’s speech before a large pro-Israel rally in Washington, DC two years ago, he was booed after speaking of the need to fulfill the legitimate rights and aspirations of Palestinians as well as Israelis. Even such journalistic neocon boosters of the Iraq war as William Kristol and David Brooks have off-handedly stated as television pundits that they don’t think West Bank settlements are a good idea.

If all neocons were slavish backers of the Israeli right, why would they have exhibited opposite sympathies during the Kosovo war? Prominent neocons eagerly supported NATO action against Serb ethnic cleansing of Muslims, while Sharon and the militant core of the pro-settler movement, sympathized with the Serbs.

The neocons may have manically pushed US foreign policy in a wrong-headed direction in Iraq, but they could not have succeeded without the agreement of the real decision makers in the Bush administration, none of whom are either Jews or neocons. As is all too often the case historically, conspicuous Jews are being scrutinized less as individuals than as "Jews."