Summary: Chabad, Jewish Political Elites

Mondoweiss provides an interesting discussion about Chabad in Jack Ross on the relationship of Chabad to Zionism. Ross writes:

Chabad is, at root, a deeply unprincipled organization. In an almost Leninist fashion, they have come to dominate the Orthodox world, or at the very least have the sort of "domination of the big tent" which the Workers World Party had over the antiwar movement of the last decade.

Curiously, they remain opposed to a specifically religious Zionism, that is, they do not have an Israeli flag in the sanctuary nor do they observe the holidays of the 20th century sacred narrative - Yom HaShoah (Holocaust commemoration), Yom HaAtzmaut (Israeli Independence day), and Yom Yerushalayim ('67 War commemoration). Their embrace of the most extreme elements of political Zionism seems more then anything to be merely a rather cynical means of outreach to their target audience.

I probably would have said that Chabad has created the perception among most Jews and non-Jews that it represents the public face of Orthodox Jewry. To read the entire article, click here.

Below is the list of my articles discussing Chabad followed. The list is followed by a more general discussion of Jewish political elites.

• Le jeu dangereux de Chabad Loubavich
• Gentiles Less Human Than Jews?
• Harvard Interfaith Mumbai Vigil Discussion
• Leviev’s Financial Collapse Puts Chabad on the Ropes
• Chabad Lubavitch' Dangerous Game
• Chabad (Lubavitch), Putin, Russian Oligarchs
• Followup: Obsession, Aish, Clarion Fund
• Aish and Clarion Fund History
• Harvard: Jews Better Than Muslims
  

Jewish Political Diversity at the Fin de Siècle (Nineteenth Century)

A century ago Jewish opinion was considerably more diverse and reflected some of the differences in opinion among the wealthy Jews that provided the money, but Zionist success has reinforced a political orthodoxy that has begun to consume non-Judonian and non-Zionist institutions like YIVO and dominate Jewish opinion throughout the world. (See Making YIVO a Zionist Organization[303] and YIVO News No. 204 - Winter 2008[304])

Circa 1900 the situation throughout the Jewish political world was immensely different from that of today. Throughout Europe Jews played prominent roles in all sorts or radical movements from Marxism to fascism and various forms of politicized ethnic fundamentalism often to the distress of the wealthy Jewish elite (Claudia Koonz discusses ethnic fundamentalism in the German context in The Nazi Conscience.[305])

Taxonomy of Political Elites

In North America and most of Europe where Jewish political parties did not generally exist, Jews participate in political parties or political elites across the political spectrum, but even though the majority of Eastern European Jews probably were probably assimilationist in orientation and preferred less ethnically oriented politics, a sizable number of Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim were heavily involved in five exclusively or predominantly Jewish transnational political elites:

• Marxist,
• Political Yiddishist,
• Social patriotist Zionist,
• Jabotinskian Zionist, and
• Occult nationalist.
  

[See Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry,[306] The Real Origins of Neocons,[307] All in the Neocon Family,[308] Money Jews, Brain Jews, Politics,[309] Press Self-Censorship about Jews,[310] Francis Fukuyama and Islamo-Fascism,[311] The Hitler and Nazi Slurs,[312] USHMM: National Thought Control,[313] Jewish Racist Bullies Imam Elahi,[314] Backgrounder on Occult Mystical Zionism,[315] Tohar HaNeshek in Jerusalam Attack,[316] Followup: Natalie Portman's Genocidal Racism ...,[317] and Zionism, Penisism, and Joseph Massad.[318]]

Each political elite was associated with a number of political parties and mass followings.

The political and ethnic boundaries among Jewish elites as well as between Jewish and non-Jewish elites were often indistinct and permeable to some extent.

Marxists

While the transnational Marxist political movement was disproportionately Jewish, it was not wholly Jewish but contained many Jewish cliques and sects throughout Europe and North America.

Political Yiddishists

As a political elite, Yiddishists were committed to Yiddish cultural autonomy within a multicultural state (doikkeyt). The Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund (Jewish Bund) was Marxist but belonged to Yiddishist politics just as did the earlier generation of non-Marxist Yiddish socialists. The members of the Yiddishist political elite were for the most part politically active only in the territory of historic Poland, which spanned Russia, Germany, and Austria before World War I and even more states afterward.

Many Yiddish-speaking Jews tried to preserve Yiddish culture after they emigrated westward.

Lenin considered Marxist Yiddish speakers an important target population for recruitment into the Russian Communist Party and derided Bundists as Zionists that were afraid of the water. The Polish Agudas Yisroel Party (Yiddish pronunciation) was a Yiddish-speaking party that took part in Yiddishist politics in order to oppose to secular Yiddish culture. Because the Agudoh was also anti-Zionist, it could often find common grounds to work with the Jewish Bund and Jewish Marxists.[xlviii] After the founding of the State of Israel, the Israeli Agudat Yisrael Party (Hebrew Pronunciation) and various splinter parties have gradually moved toward Occult nationalism.[xlix]

Some more strictly anti-Zionist Yiddish religious groups like Neturei Karta have remained committed to preserving Yiddish religious culture while they disdain the secular Yiddish culture of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Unlike the secular Yiddishists, such religious Yiddish-speakers have managed successfully to transplant their culture and politics to North America especially in Brooklyn, Spring Valley, NY and neighboring regions.

Social Patriotists

Despite the historical acceptance by European socialists of Labor Zionism as a genuine socialist movement, the Labor Zionist political elite belongs to the Eastern European political current that Eastern Europeans often called social patriotist. Hebrew University Professor Zeev Sternhell tries to argue in The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State[319] that Zionists were nationalist socialists but not National Socialists (i.e. Nazis) or fascists because Labor Zionists were democratic at least among Jews.

Sternhell’s book is somewhat dishonest because it ignores the class of Eastern European fascist movements to which Labor Zionism belongs. In Eastern Europe and especially in regions of historic Poland, fascist ideology was never as reflexively anti-democratic as fascist movements in the West, and Eastern European fascism has generally preferred to operate within a formally democratic framework.

In Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France[320] Sternhell argues on p. 212:

Yet, on the other hand, the revision of socialism by the French and Belgian socialist rebels itself developed into fascism for one essential reason the same reason that underlay the move toward the extreme right of the generation of 1910. For the revolutionary syndicalists at the beginning of the century as for the exponents of the new socialism twenty years later, the proletariat had ceased to be a revolutionary force and Marxism no longer provided a suitable answer to the problems of the modern world. This loss of faith in the vitality and capacities of the proletariat, joined with an unhesitating denunciation of the essential principles of Marxism and social democracy, this desire to achieve quick results by utilizing the full force of political power but without undertaking structural changes, this need to come to terms with the existing social order because one has come to regard it as natural and immutable, this replacement of Marxism by a national socialism, and of the revolutionary impulse of Marxism by a planned, organized, rationalized system of economy, led, through a natural inner logic, to fascism. Thus in the thirties, fascism often appeared to be the only system of thought that answered to the logic of the twentieth century.

Where the above analysis does not apply to Labor Zionism is hard to discern. In any case, the Labor Zionist ideologue Berl Katznelson plagiarized the Belgain fascist Henri de Man while another Zionist leader Vitaly Viktor Haim Arlosoroff openly renounced democratic principles if they were to apply to the native population of Palestine. In New history, old ideas[321] Edward Said discusses the intellectual contortions through which Zionists put themselves to defend Zionism.

Jabotinskians

Zionist historiography calls Jabotinskians Revisionists or Maximalists. They are politicized ethnic fundamentalists, who believe in social Darwinism, free markets, biological determinism, and an essentialist primordialist form of extremist organic nationalism. Neoconservatism is the latest incarnation of the American branch of Jabotinskianism.

Occult Nationalists

The Occult nationalist transnational political elite evinces the least intellectual development since the Shabtai Tzvi debacle. Jewish occult nationalist groups and parties include

• Mizrahi Zionists, whose current official Israeli political party is Mafdal,
• followers of Tzvi Yehuda Kook, who was head of the Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva as well as a leader of Gush Emunim, and
• other groups like Lubovitchers, which are nominally anti-Zionist or non-Zionist as well as extremely anti-Gentile in politics and attitude.
  

Lobbyist Jack Abramoff was part of this elite as is film critic Michael Medved.

Implications for the Jewish Financial Elite

Of all the transnational Jewish political elites Zionists offered the most to wealthy Western Jews with increasing capital resources while the Marxist transnational political elite promised the least.

Yet, there was a tremendous similarity among the first generation Jabotinskian Zionist and Jewish Marxist leaders and later events[l] have indicated that some sort of Jewish identity has persisted among Soviet Ashkenazim even including those that remained members of the Soviet elite after the founding of the State of Israel.

Despite membership in the former Soviet elite, Russian Jewish oligarchs hooked up with incredible alacrity with both the international organized Jewish community and with the Friedmanites (or Neoliberals), whose movement is in many regards the negative mirror image of that of the Marxism even to the point of being characterized by a mostly Jewish leadership with a mostly non-Jewish following. (See Re: Report: Finkelstein Lecture at MIT.[322])

Not only have Friedmanites as members of a predominantly Jewish movement proselytizing to non-Jews found it easy to collaborate with Jabotinskian Neoconservatives on the basis of shared principles and assumptions, but many Jabontinskian Neoconservaties are also Friedmanite Neoliberals.

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