The brilliant Ruth Wisse wants me to apologize, so I do. I apologize for my whole family past and present; I apologize to all Americans who love America.
Ruth points out in several articles that a large swath of Jewish immigrants, beginning around 1890, came to the United States with fervent communist ideas. That is understandable since they came from tyrannical worlds and could see no other political solution to their miserable pogrom-dominated lives. The problem is that this tidal wave of immigration to New York grew to the millions; concentrated in a new world ghetto, this cluster of Jews never learned why America was a better alternative to communism. They never really assimilated to their new political paradise.
This cluster of communist Jews, living in America, millions of people, never learned how attached to a horrible outmoded ideology they were. In the 1930’s they were a dominant group in the American Communist Party and its thousands of colluding front organizations. After WWII they remained aligned with communism and the Left. Even as the murders of Soviet Jews became public they never denounced communism. Even as the murderous rampages of Stalin and the Gulag become public knowledge, American Jews never publicly recanted their alliance with ultimate evil.
To this day American Jews are predominantly Lefties, unapologetically still in the same evil tradition. The prototypical left-wing Jew is Bernie Sanders.
My mother and father were extreme Lefties. My father became a rabbi to evangelize for Left Liberalism. Even though his family were Californians from the 1850s and certainly were Republicans ( one of the second generation, my grandfather’s generation, was named Abraham Lincoln Phillips). My grandfather named my father Wendell after the great Boston abolitionist.
My father became a Lefty at the U. of California and joined my mother’s New York communist clan in his 20’s. He was so Left that I joked with him that he believed Adlai Stevenson (Democrat candidate for President twice) was more important than Moses.
My mother’s family were the heirs to a Prussian sect of Judaism, Ethical Culture, that was a Leftist coven. Her brother Fred Hart was an actual Marxist. Fred made money in the stock market and was the sustaining donor of the National Guardian, a Russian communist front in the 1950s, later to become a Chinese Communist front in the 1960s. History has no record and no way of knowing that Fred provided all the Guardian’s sustaining funds from 1952 to 1972.
My mother and her brother were the first American tourists to visit China in the mid 1960s, thanks to Fred’s vital role at the Guardian. In that period I asked my mother why she wasn’t disturbed by the nightmares of Stalin, the Gulags and Mao. Her reply was the same as Lefties today: “Real communism has never been tried.”
How deep was this communism? I asked my close friend Ruth Kadish, in the mid 1990s, part of the Jewish Lefty clan, whether she had changed her mind about the guilt of Julius Rosenberg the Soviet atomic spy once the KGB files were made public. “No, you can’t trust the anti-Soviet crowd,” she replied.
I abandoned my Lefty family tradition at age 20, having learned about the American genius from reading the Federalist Papers, Democracy in America, Animal Farm and living on an Israeli Marxist kibbutz.
It is now time for me to apologize for the terrible Lefty hogwash and blind ideology that my family, a part of the disgraceful pattern of American Jewry, have spread in this great American land. I apologize to all Americans who love and appreciate America for my family's guilt.