My friend Charlotte, in New York, was startled to hear the extent of anti-Semitism from the Left in San Francisco. Charlotte hasn't seen it in New York. I immediately phoned my brother in Seattle to see what has been happening there and he says Seattle Lefties are exactly on the border of anti-Semitism and they could easily cross the line anytime.
San Francisco is the most Lefty city in America, followed by Seattle, Santa Monica and New York. (I've excluded Berkeley and other college towns from my list.) It shouldn't be surprising that San Francisco has gone the furthest into Lefty anti-Semitism.
One consideration that has protected New York and Santa Monica is that both cities have strong and influential Jewish communities. Fear of Jews in those cities might restrain Lefty anti-Semities. That assumption is why I phoned Seattle to check out the situation there. Lefties are strong in Seattle and the Jewish community is small.
Jews are an old community in San Francisco and our power is not highly visible. Jews were among the first settlers. My great-grandfather Jacob Phillips came to San Francisco in 1852. He settled in the biggest nearby city of the time, Petaluma, and rapidly assimilated with the name Jack Phillips. Jack helped form the first synagog in Petaluma. The Jews met in the Masonic Lodge. The Lodge is still in the same place. Jews were so powerful and assimilated in San Francisco in the late 1800s that they founded the Bohemian Club. The Club is now considered the most elite networking club in America by Marxist class analysts. Jews left such an impact on San Francisco, over a century, that their names are on nearly everything in San Francisco from parks, to streets, schools, businesses and countless buildings.
In the recent past, San Francisco has become the epicenter of public anti-Semitism. I would give one reason.
We are a Lefty community with an assimilated local Jewish community that doesn't frighten the anti-Semities. In these conditions, the Left automatically becomes anti-Semitic. Lefties hate Starbucks, global commerce, America, big corporations, the elite, the media -- the only thing missing to hate are Jews.
The photo at the right shows how Left San Francisco is. We just had an election where the winner, Newsom, is a liberal Democrat who favors expanded low income housing for the homeless. Many posters against Newsom portrayed him as a fascist Republican. The photo shows a poster in a window of the greediest man in the TV sitcom, the Simpsons, as a supporter of Newsom. The election was two weeks ago; the poster is still up.
The locus of Lefty Jew hate is pretty easy to identity: San Francisco State University.
As an aside, I can testify to the Leftiness of SFState. I was student body president in 1960. (That story will be told some other time.) The Lefty political group that started that year was called Slate. Slate started a year later at UCBerkeley and organized the free speech campaign. My fellow SFState students in 1960 were the ones famously hosed down the stairs of S.F. City Hall while protesting the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. The wet students were nearly all from SFState, not Berkeley as the press erroneously assumed at the time.
The first big SFState anti-Semitic act that attracted my attention was in 1996 when a black painter created an official mural for the Associated Student Body organization that had an Israeli flag, swastika and dollar sign prominently on it. I went to see it and photographed the crowd which was virulently anti-Jew. The school never did anything about the mural except take it down during the Summer vacation.
From that time on, S.F State has been a center of anti-Jew hatred. Google 'San Francisco State and swastika' and you'll get 251 entries. Google 'San Francisco State and anti-Semitism' and you'll get 1,850 entries. Palestinians and other Arabs have regular joined a coalition of Lefties in anti-Israel, anti-zionist and anti-Jew riots. It happens almost monthly. The school has gotten into the habit of apologizing publicly. Some of the Google comments by Jews on the hatred they face at SFState are very poignant.
I have two Jewish friends who were professors at SFState. They both quit in the past four years because of the level of anti-Jew hatred in their classes and the absence of support from the faculty or the adminsitration.
SFState anti-Semitic hatred is found throughout the City.
The first peace marches last fall included many groups marching with pro-Palestinian signs and Arafat kafia's and chanting "Palestine from the Jordan to the Sea." There were thousands of people in these anti-Israel groups. When the speakers started, the speakers were even more vocal and called Jews 'Nazi's' in an endless series of tirades.
Most of my peacenik Jewish friends never went to another peace march. The two rabbi's who spoke at the first march never went back to another one. (Michael Lerner, a pro-Palestinian Jew, who spoke at the second big peace march was not allowed back to the third.) There were many signs in the crowd denouncing "the Jew media."

In December last year, two local gay supervisorial candidates were divided on only one issue -- Bevan Dufty was pro-Israel and the other, Eileen Hansen, was anti-Israel. Enough Jews voted to elect Dufty. Two weeks later Dufty joined me at a protest at the Rainbow Grocery Workers Coop which was refusing to stock items from Israel (only Israel, no other countries were banned).
The embargo was formally lifted six months later by a slim majority of the Coop's employee members.
In the late Spring of this year, a women's shelter called San Francisco Women Against Rape became visible following the discovery that interns and volunteers were required to participate in “political education discussions” that included “taking a stance against Zionism.”
In a July 9 email to the S.F. Jewish Bulletin, Nina Jusuf, the center’s executive director, described SFWAR as “an anti-Zionist organization.” Of course Jews didn't know that. There were many Jews among the volunteers and a few among the clients.
Since the City of S.F. funds the women's shelter, the City wrote the 2004 funding contract to ban anti-Zionist training.
This is just a taste of San Francisco Lefty anti-Semitism.
I repeat my opinion. Lefty ideology is inherently anti-Semitic -- the more vigorous the leftism, the more anti-Semitic the adherents. Anti-Semitism, for a thousand years, has portrayed Jews as commercial vampires, business fiends and the elite of global capitalist imperialism.
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