The Myth of the Marxist Mishpacha

There is a story the American Jewish left tells about Jewish immigrants, and it goes like this: Your grandparents were radicals. They organized. They marched. They believed in the collective. They were, at heart, Marxist socialists and communists.

It is a useful story. It gives today’s progressive politics a Jewish pedigree, wraps guilt around anyone who strays from the coalition. It invokes the sacred authority of the immigrant generations to settle arguments that generation never had.

It is also, in any serious sense, wrong.

Yes, there were Jewish communists. There were Jewish socialists, Jewish anarchists, Jewish labor organizers who used the language of the international left. Some of them were genuine ideologues, and some of what they did was genuinely radical. They struck against industries that would sooner have had them killed than unionized. But the radicalism was in service of getting in, not burning down the U.S. and its institutions. Most of them were workers in dangerous industries who wanted safer conditions and a living wage — which is a rather different thing than wanting to overturn the American system.

There were, no doubt, famous Jewish communists — Jews have a way of being famous. Emma Goldman preached anarchism from the lecture circuit. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went to the electric chair for passing atomic secrets to Moscow. Morris Hillquit ran for mayor of New York on the Socialist Party line, and Meyer London represented the Lower East Side in Congress as a Socialist. But there are at least as many examples of Jewish capitalists, and they were just as Jewish and just as immigrant.

Julius Rosenwald built Sears, Roebuck into a retail empire and gave away much of his fortune building schools for Black children in the Jim Crow South. The Guggenheims built a mining and smelting empire. And for every Rosenberg there was a Jacob Schiff — the Gilded Age investment banker who ran Kuhn, Loeb & Co., financed American railroads and was a lifelong Republican who spent a good part of his fortune fighting the Bolshevism that some of his fellow Jewish immigrants romanticized. Jewish scientists, Jewish lawyers, Jewish shopkeepers who never organized a picket line in their lives — these were at least as representative of the immigrant generation as the men and women who make it into the documentaries.

What the Jewish immigrant generation overwhelmingly wanted was to get in. To the country, to the economy, to the middle class. They wanted their children in school and their grandchildren in the professions. They wanted the mortgage and the suburb and the seat at the table that Europe had refused them. The labor organizing was a means. The destination was the American dream, pursued with a ferocity born from knowing what happened to Jews who had nowhere to go.

They voted overwhelmingly Democratic because the Democratic Party of the mid-20th century stood for the things they needed: public schools, accessible universities, home loan programs and a growing social safety net that made upward mobility possible. They were not voting for a vanguard. They were voting for a ladder.

The Jewish love affair with the Democratic Party was, at its core, a middle-class love affair. It was about security, education and the possibility of a life better than the one your parents had. It was, in the deepest sense, a conservative set of values pursued through liberal politics. The goal was never transformation. The goal was arrival.

Which makes it curious to consider what those grandparents would make of what they are now invoked to support.

The Jewish immigrant who organized for a 40-hour work week did not do so to give his grandchildren a politics that asks them to feel guilty for their education, their professional success or their attachment to a Jewish state. The woman who pushed her children toward college so they would never be dependent on a factory floor like her did not intend her sacrifice to be recruited, decades later, as evidence that Jews belong on the revolutionary left.

The immigrant generation was not marching toward Bernie Sanders. They were marching toward Scarsdale.

The myth persists because it is convenient. For non-Jewish progressives, it provides a certificate of Jewish authenticity — a way to tell Jews who have drifted from the coalition that they are the real apostates, the ones who have abandoned the tradition. For Jewish progressives, it offers something more personal: the comfort of believing that their politics are not as much a choice but an inheritance, not an argument they are making but a legacy they are inheriting.

But an inheritance built on a misreading of the will is not an inheritance as much as it is a forgery.

Of course Jewish Americans can and many will support far-left politics. They can and should support any politics they choose — that is, in fact, one of the things the immigrant generation was after. But they should do so on the merits of those politics, not by conscripting grandparents who wanted nothing more complicated than a safe place to raise their children into poster children for a movement those grandparents would have found, at best, baffling.

Our grandparents were not radicals. They were strivers. Confusing the two isn’t memory, it’s marketing.

Todd L. Pittinsky is a professor at Stony Brook University (SUNY).