David L. Bernstein: Confront the New Cossacks

A Jewish Political Survival Guide

David H.—Of all the essays collected in Jewish Priorities, perhaps none was as prescient—or as relevant today—as this one. In it, David L. Bernstein explores the underlying psychology of Diaspora Jews’ strategy of survival, which begins with identifying society’s “Cossacks” and defending themselves appropriately. “Notwithstanding our well-honed survival instincts,” he writes, “the Jew’s uncanny ability to recognize the Cossacks has sometimes failed him, particularly when the Cossacks arrive in the form of left-wing ideologues bearing utopian ideals promising universal redemption.” Instead of allying with Progressives, Bernstein calls on both liberal and conservative Jews to rally around a “new American Center.”

David L. Bernstein is founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (JILV.org) and author of Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews (Wicked Son, 2022).

Brooklyn Event: Join the author for a live Jewish Priorities event on February 28, 2024 at the Manhattan Beach Jewish Center, featuring Ruth R. Wisse, David L. Bernstein, and David Hazony. For information and tickets, click here. The event is co-sponsored by Jewish Parent Academy and Z3 Project.

The following is an exclusive reprint from the anthology Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People, edited by David Hazony. Copyright © 2023 Wicked Son. Reprinted with permission.

Confront the New Cossacks

A Jewish Political Survival Guide

David L. Bernstein

The very term “Cossacks” sends shivers down the Jew’s spine. We may not know much about these Eastern Slavic people other than their supposed thirst for murdering Jews, but they’ve nevertheless become a symbol, along with the Nazis, of deadly rampages carried out against vulnerable Jewish communities.

The Cossack riots were pogroms in what today is Ukraine, perpetrated against the Jews during the 1648 uprising led by Bogdan Khmelnitsky against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Khmelnitsky is regarded as a hero in Ukrainian lore for standing up against the powers in the region, but for Jews he was the “Hamil of Evil,” the very personification of the sadistic antisemite. Two centuries later, in the wake of Tsar Alexander II’s assassination, Jews experienced another horrific spate of pogroms, committed not by actual Cossacks but by equally malevolent figures and frenzied mobs who became indistinct in the Jewish historical imagination. To us, they’re all Cossacks.

Such antisemitic attacks were not limited to Europe. My mother, who grew up in Baghdad, was just four months old when about two hundred of her fellow Iraqi Jews were slaughtered while scores of others were beaten and raped in a 1941 pogrom known as the Farhud. She and her family members were sheltered by Muslim neighbors who traded houses with them during the deadliest antisemitic riot in Middle Eastern history.

Jews would not have survived the millennia defying the extirpative forces of history without an uncanny ability to recognize the Cossacks of the day and to take the necessary precautions. As Mark Twain famously commented, “All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?” The secret of his immortality, Mr. Clemens, may have been his well-developed sense of danger and, with it, varied survival strategies consisting of, depending on the context, moving to safer areas, currying favor to government authorities, joining forces with more powerful groups, supporting democratic and liberal movements, and building a Jewish state.

Notwithstanding our well-honed survival instincts, the Jew’s uncanny ability to recognize the Cossacks has sometimes failed him, particularly when the Cossacks arrive in the form of left-wing ideologues bearing utopian ideals promising universal redemption. These particular Cossacks discharge uniquely cagey mind viruses that tend to overwhelm the Jew’s immune system. Under the influence of utopian dogmas, Jews have paid a dear price for lapses in judgment and ideological indulgences. American-Israeli writer Daniel Gordis states “Like moths attracted to the flames that can consume them, Jews have long sought salvation in ideologies that ultimately sought to destroy them. It happened with communism and is being repeated with young Jews’ visceral embrace of ‘wokeness’ that in the name of freedom and equality, snuffs out freedom of thought and equality for Jews.” In an October 2017 essay in Tablet, the great Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse cites sources that estimate that nearly half the members of the American Communist Party of the 1930s and 1940s were Jews, unable to see that Josef Stalin and his supporters were among the most brutal Cossacks ever known. Wisse writes:

This is Soviet Communism we are talking about—that killed an estimated 30 million of its own citizens, including through a government-enforced famine in Ukraine, the details of which even people hardened by Holocaust literature have trouble reading…. This was the totalitarian regime that perfected Orwellian language in a culture of lying that not only camouflaged its evil through innocuous terminology as the Nazis did with terms like resettlement for extermination and cleansing for murder, but justified a culture of spying, expropriation, mass murder, and tyrannical rule in the name of “egalitarianism” and “international peace.”

Exactly seventy years ago from the time I’m writing these words occurred “The Night of the Murdered Poets,” when Stalin executed thirteen Jewish intellectuals by firing squad in a Moscow prison. Blinded by ideology, a good many Jews nevertheless persisted in their adoration of Soviet Communism, which murdered many more Jews than Bogdan Khmelnitsky could have ever dreamed of.

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To protect themselves from impending danger, Jews have applied an implicit two-part test in assessing emerging threats from political leaders and movements: (1) Are they favorable to particularistic Jewish interests, such as the security of Jewish communities (and, since its founding, the well-being of the State of Israel)? And (2) Do they advance liberal ideals, such as freedom of thought and speech, in which Jews are most likely to thrive? In other words, Jews assess both threats aimed at them as well as general societal conditions likely to produce those threats.

My mother recounts that in revolutionary Iraq of the 1960s, Jews were drawn to the Iraqi leader Abd al-Karim Qasim, who violently deposed the monarchy in 1958 because the Iraqi-Jewish community perceived him as both warmer to the Jews and a champion of a more liberal version of Iraq, particularly in extending rights to women. Not nearly as transformational as advertised, however, Qasim was overthrown by the Ba’ath party in 1963, and Iraqi Jews once again faced their Cossacks, knowing instantly that the Jewish community was in peril. My mother, among others, immediately planned her exit. Several weeks after her arrival to the United States, the doors of emigration from Iraq closed.

While Jews in America have never faced a campaign of state violence as did Jews in Eastern Europe or the Middle East, neither have they always felt entirely secure. It is for the second of the two criteria Jews apply in assessing the potential danger of a leader or cause—the need to live in a more liberal and tolerant society—that three-quarters of American Jews typically vote for the Democratic party in the U.S. The political scientist Kenneth D. Wald, who has studied Jewish voting patterns for decades, observed in a 2015 interview in the Washington Post that American Jews largely embraced the classic liberal model in separating citizenship and religion, which did away with “ethnic particularity as a condition for full membership in the political community.” According to Wald, this model “differs radically from their historical experience as, at best, a ‘tolerated’ minority whose status often changed on the whims of rulers.” Democrats largely embraced the separationist model, argues Wald, and Republicans largely rejected it, placing the GOP under suspicion in the eyes of many in the Jewish community of being America’s Cossacks. Wald states that when “the Republican party reached out to white Protestant evangelicals, who eventually came to constitute the party’s base, Jews reacted negatively because they perceived a threat to the liberal regime.”

For many years, conservative critics of American-Jewish left-wing politics have complained that the American Jewish community’s identification with the Democratic party is a sign that their danger alert system has failed them; that Democrats, with their association with anti-Israel figures, and not Republicans, should be regarded as the Cossacks. They cite the growing criticism of Israel in the Democratic party and the emergence of progressive ideologues such as “The Squad” in Congress with a penchant for anti-Israel and antisemitic remarks. “It’s long past time for Jewish voters to end their longstanding—but unrequited—loyalty to the Democrats, who clearly no longer care about their concerns,” argued Andrew Stein and Monica Crowley in the New York Post in May 2022.

Until recently, however, the mainstream American Left did not possess a strong core ideology that would likely pose an explicit threat to Jews. To be politically liberal in America was to embrace an ethical obligation to help the needy. American political liberals possessed no theory as to why there are “haves” and “have nots,” only that their obligation was to even the playing field. They were decidedly un-ideological. And while Democratic support for Israel was slowly eroding in Congress, the vast majority of Democrats still could be counted on to vote for any AIPAC-backed resolution.

Political progressives, by contrast, until recently only a small minority on the Left, have a well-developed dogma: the “haves” cause the deprivations of the “have nots.” And in recent years they’ve successfully inculcated this ideological strain in mainstream politics and institutional life. Such dogma has significantly raised the stakes for American Jews—not least because they are perceived as being among the “haves.” And we see the same progressives applying this oppressor-versus-oppressed narrative to Israel, the majority of whom (according to an August 2022 poll) buy into the settler-colonialist narrative denying the Jewish state’s very legitimacy.

Wald recounts that support for Democrats remained steady for several decades but began to weaken in the late 1960s as affirmative action and other forms of identity politics took center stage. Wald notes that American Jews were divided 50/50 on affirmative action and other programs that afforded special entitlements to groups based on race and gender.

Many Jews sensed something dangerous in the identity politics of the time, inimical to their interests. Yet today, as identity politics run roughshod over traditional liberal values, American-Jewish support for the Left has remained unshaken. Many Jewish liberals are in denial of the threat posed by the far Left to the liberal order, which Jews have relied upon for a sense of security and well-being and as a bulwark against the Cossacks on the Right.

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Today, the conservative critique holds more water: American Jews seem to have developed a blind spot for progressive ideological movements, much as many Jews did for Communism, that undermine liberal values, demonize alternative points of view, and foment hostility against those deemed “privileged.” While contemporary “woke” ideology might not lead to the Gulag or mass murder as it did in Soviet Communism or the Chinese Cultural Revolution (the same can be said of the right-wing authoritarian brand of antisemitism in America, which may never lead to rounding up Jews for extermination), it nevertheless presents a real and present danger to the American-Jewish community and shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Wokeness fuels antisemitism in several ways. Woke ideology’s preoccupation with “privilege”—who has it and who doesn’t—has lapsed into accusations of “Jewish privilege.” Its adoption of Ibram X. Kendi’s “anti-racism” program and his “equity” concept—that any disparity among groups is prima facie evidence of discrimination—easily lends itself to accusations that successful groups, such as Jews and Asians, have achieved success on the backs of other minorities. Its embrace of the oppressor-versus-oppressed binary and the need to “recognize and resist systems of oppression” (often invisible to the naked eye) condition young people to see Jews and Israel as the oppressors. Indeed, while the American Left’s identitarian obsession may never produce a Gulag or death camps, it certainly sets off alarm bells among Soviet dissidents such as Natan Sharansky. In his foreword to my book Woke Antisemitism, Sharansky argues that:

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph of Western, liberal values in the 1990s, I became convinced that this hateful, antisemitic ideology had been defeated once and for all and that there was no place in the liberal order for such radical dogma. We fought against it and defeated it. Unfortunately, now we see it has come back in new forms, often in the name of social justice. In woke ideology, if you substitute the word race for class, you will get almost the exact same Marxist-Leninist dogma in which we were indoctrinated in schools that became the basis of the hatred against dissidents and anyone who dared question the party line.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons many Jews remain tied at the hip to the Left. Even as the Left has become ideologically charged, the Right has become more perilous and unmoored from its liberal principles. The Cossacks on the Right have guns, argue Jewish political liberals, while those on the Left only have cultural power. And they have a point. For example, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who promotes bizarre conspiracy theories that sometimes involve Jews, can easily be marked a Cossack. Many Jews feel in their kishkes that xenophobia found on the political Right spawns antisemitism that can eventually spark violent attacks like those in Squirrel Hill and Poway. In the popular American-Jewish conception, the American Cossack is a gun-toting, Christianity-practicing, pickup-driving, swastika tattoo-sporting white man. I have no idea if Alex Jones, for example, has any ill will (or, for that matter, fondness) for Jews, but his brand of angry, illiberal politics screams dangerous Cossack.

The progressive antisemite is harder to conjure up than the right-wing fanatic, as progressive antisemitism itself is less explicit by nature. Very rarely do we find a raving lunatic on the Left directly calling for the eradication of the Jews. The left-wing Cossack is better disguised and harder to identify. He uses all the right words. The right-wing Cossack speaks openly about Jewish power; the left-wing Cossack about “adjacency” to white power and privilege.

And this less conspicuous assault has fooled too many progressive Jews who desperately wish to remain aligned with the Left, will defend almost any ideological pronouncement, no matter how strange or alienating, and deny the very existence of this variant of ideological antisemitism. For example, Isaac Luria, a prominent Jewish foundation executive, wrote in the journal Sources that:

Unfortunately, some Jewish advocates against antisemitism, in the name of defending liberalism, seek to delegitimize anti-racist scholarship like Kendi’s by claiming that his racial justice framing is inherently anti-Jewish…. By attacking the ideas that drive movements for racial and economic justice, critics…separate white Jewish interests from the struggles of other minorities for the benefit of authoritarian movements and consolidated power—both in Israel and in the United States.

Indeed, perhaps the biggest threat of wokeness for the Jews is that it renders some unable or unwilling to recognize the well-hidden Cossack in their midst. Inevitably they find themselves offering apologia for antisemites on the Left and twisting themselves into knots defending indefensible and, frankly, silly ideas about America, Israel, and even freedom of speech, which is now viewed by many left-wing ideologues as a shill for white supremacy. They turn in their intellectual autonomy and defer to those with “lived experience,” meaning well-curated leftists from minority communities with cultural power, and ignore majorities in those same communities who think differently. Once they sign on the dotted line of deference, they are forced to defend and parrot all manner of narishkeit.

In many ways, the ascendency and potential dominance of woke ideology on the mainstream Left present a nightmare scenario for American Jews, one that many still haven’t contended with: Neither the Left nor the Right offers a safe harbor against antisemitism or a hospitable political home.

Perhaps it’s time that Jews stop fooling themselves. There are Cossacks on both sides of the political spectrum. Our true friends are on neither end. They are the still-too-quiet centrists who thirst for dialogue, rational argument, free expression of ideas, and support for democratic institutions. It’s time that we pick up our things and build a new American Center.