The Antisemitic Pincer Move:

Caught Between Right-Wing Nazis and Left-Wing Bolsheviks

Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. He was seeking Lebensraum for the Aryan people. 

Stalin invaded Poland on September 17, 1939. He was seeking something similar. 

When we tell the history of World War II, we rarely, if ever, discuss the brief alliance between the Nazis and the Soviets. On August 23, 1939, the two nations signed a secret treaty, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, in which they agreed to divide Europe into respective spheres of influence. 

Poland, with its population of 3.5 million Jews, was caught in the middle. It was a soft target for these political behemoths.

The antisemitism of the Nazis is well discussed these days, but the antisemitism of the Soviets is not. It was a different kind of antisemitism, and it used a different kind of rhetoric, and if we want to understand the Antisemitism of today, we must understand both. 

Hitler’s right-wing antisemitism was concerned primarily with two Jewish threats: the Jewish Capitalists and the Jewish Communists. As he saw it, the Jewish Capitalists were secretly controlling the West with the banks, and the Jewish Communists were not-so-secretly controlling the East with their Bolshevism. 

In both cases, the Jews represented what we might today call the “deep-state.” The “deep-state,” is the idea that there are elements of the government that exist outside the view of the public who manipulate political affairs for their own political ends. 

The deep-state fear of the Jewish Communists goes something like: 

“The progressive left has infiltrated our universities and is indoctrinating our students with an anti-American form of cultural Marxism.” 

Or,

“Left-wing academics have taken over academia and are using it to undermine American interests. 

And the deep-state fear of the Jewish Bankers goes something like: 

“Zionist donors hands off our universities!” 

(An article from Social Revolution, Zionism and Capitalism: Hands Off Our Universities!)

Soviet antisemitism was slightly different. While Soviet antisemitism maintained almost exactly the same fear and hatred towards the Jewish Capitalists as Nazism did, its relationship with Jewish Communists was quite different. 

For the Soviets, there were three different issues that the Jews presented. 

1. Philosophically, Marxism is an ideology that rejects human distinction like those of race and religion. Therefore, under Marxism there would be no animosity towards the Jews because the Jews are quite simply our comrades in arms, theoretically. However, Marxism also posits that the state is the highest authority on earth, and Judaism flatly rejects that idea. Therefore, any Jew who maintains any vestige of their old faith would be a traitor to the great Marxist project. And, of course, how could anyone really be sure that someone like Trotsky or Marx ever really gave up their Jewish background? 

2. Politically, the Jewish Zionists represented a very real threat to the Soviet Union’s place as the leader of global socialism. The Russian Revolution was contemporaneous with the wave of Jewish Marxists moving to the Land of Israel and establishing communal farms known as Kibbutzim. The Soviets wanted to be the great champions of Marxism in the world, and they did not want to share that crown with some date-picking Jews in Beer Sheva. Moreover, the collectivization of the farms in Russia had been an unmitigated disaster while the creation of the Kibbutzim in Israel had been an undeniable success. The Kibbutzim are still here; the Soviets are not. 

3. Personally, the great Jewish Marxist Leon Trotsky represented a direct threat to Stalin’s authority. Trotsky was the better orator, the better thinker, and the better choice. But Trotsky was Jewish, and no Jew could ever rule over an antisemitic country like Russia. He, like Karl Marx, was a renegade Jew who had abandoned his faith for Communism instead. But that was not enough to clear him of the Abrahamic stain in his blood. 

While the Nazis thought that Jewish Marxists were trying to undermine the world by fomenting Socialist Revolution, the Soviets thought the Jewish Marxists were undermining the Socialist Revolution as counter-revolutionaries and reactionaries. As usual, the Jews were guilty on both counts. 

And so, on September 17th, 1939, when the Soviet Union invaded Poland, the Antisemitic pinch was coming from both sides. 

It’s hard to envision this now, but there were more Jews living in Poland in 1939 than there are currently living in New York City. 

Where were they all to turn? Nazis to the West, Soviets to the East.

Within a few months, the Nazis would turn their guns away from the Poles and train them on the Soviets, and thus would begin the great struggle between Fascism and Communism that we all know as World War II. But we must remember that, before they tried to kill each other, they were united in trying to kill us.

Antisemitism is one of the great unifying forces of the non-Jewish world. It unites people like Farrakhan and David Duke, Jeremy Corbyn and Ayatollah Khameni. Now, left to their own devices, I am sure these people would all kill each other the first chance that they got, but, for right now, there is a quiet peace between them. Everyone has taken a brief “Christmas-Truce” to focus on their unified crusade against the Jews. 

Jews have been feeling the Antisemitism from the left since October 7th, which in many ways is good because we had been so blind to it for so long, but the pinch from the right is coming as well, and it is only a matter of time before these two ideologies are fully out in the open. 

Until recently, many conservative Jews looked up to Elon Musk, and they saw him as a kind of shrewd and direct operator in a field of tech entrepreneurs who are more concerned with their reputations than anything else. I was not one of those people, but I certainly know many of them.

(Elon Musk commented that an antisemitic tweet which blamed the Jews for pushing antt-White hatred was the “actual truth”)  

What Musk’s tweet demonstrates is something that many of us have known for a long time: they only care about Antisemitism when it’s convenient for their cause. 

Musk has made it very clear that he bought Twitter to promote his vision of free speech. Free speech has been one of the clarion calls of conservatives over the past 5 or so years. The conservative calls for free speech began in 2017 Safe-Speech Riots in Berkeley. 

The conservative crusaders object to what they see as progressive universities and institutions using accusations of racism and homophobia to deny conservatives the right to speak on campus. 

The argument goes something like, “the progressive left has declared that any opinion they don’t like constitutes harm, and people should not be harmed, so, therefore, you cannot discuss any opinion that the progressive left doesn’t like because it causes harm.” 

These conservative voices love to use antisemitism as their example. There are no safe spaces for Zionist Jews on most college campuses, that is true. There is no safe space for conservative speakers on most college campuses, that is also true. There is no more room for debate of any kind on most college campuses, that is also true. 

But they do not make these arguments because they want to protect Jews; they make these argument because they want to use us to attack their real enemy, “The Progressive Left.” 

Liberal universities like the University of Pennsylvania hosted known antisemites and terrorists at their “Palestine Writes Literature Festival.” 

Jewish donors were enraged that their donations were being used to host speakers who were actively stoking antisemitic tensions on campus. The effects of this festival cannot be accurately assessed, but it is very telling that this festival happened on September 22-24 (during Rosh HaShanah, so religious Jews could not object), and less than two weeks after that we witnessed Penn professors praising Hamas. 

When Elon Musk and other “free speech activists” object to state of public discourse on college campuses, their objection is not that the universities are stifling discourse; their objection is that the university is stifling them. I do not believe any of the free speech activists want to have better discourse on college campuses; I think they only want college campuses to let them host their own version of the “Palestine Writes Literature Festival,” complete with speakers like Milo Yiannopolis and David Duke. 

Do not be fooled, they both hate the Jews. All that antisemitism is for them is a bludgeon with which they can bash their true enemies. They do not care what happens to us. 

~

If you aren’t feeling the pinch, you aren’t paying attention. The antisemites of the world are tightening the screws, and they are getting ready for their messianic political struggle. The antisemitic left and the antisemitic right would rather drag this country into civil war than concede anything to their mortal enemy.

We, the Jewish People, are stuck in the middle, like Poland, pressed between the devil and his demons. Like Poland, we have no political might of our own to stop these empires of antisemitism. We have nothing but the promise of the great liberal democracies that they will protect us in our hour of need. Sadly, England and France look even more weak and inept than they did 100 years ago. 

The irony in all of this is that, in the great global struggle between right-wing Fascism and left-wing Communism, the only winner was Zionism. Fascism collapsed on itself and destroyed the people who supported it. Communism collapsed on itself and destroyed the people who supported it. Of all of the political movements in the 20th century, Zionism is the only one that has had any positive effect in our world. 

Zionism saved the displaced Jews of Europe in the 1940s. Zionism saved the displaced Jews of the Middle East in the 1950s. Zionism saved the displaced Jews of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Israel is undeniably the greatest political success story of the 20th century. It is not surprising that the denizens of those failed philosophies, Fascism and Communism, are so bitter. They spent so much time and energy trying to destroy the Jews, and everything they did was in vain.

(An election poster of the General Jewish Labour Bund hung in Kiev in 1917. The heading reads, "Where we live, there is our country!" While most members of the Bund died during the Holocaust, the surviving members fled to the Soviet Union, where the Bund was disbanded and its former leaders were discriminated against. Many antizionists cast themselves as modern-day Bundists, although they rarely know the history of the Bund post-1930.)