Dennis Prager, himself a Jew, points out that virtually all -isms, except Nazism, were founded or led disproportionately by Jews: Marxism, humanism, feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQism, etc.
I do not deny Jewish involvement in all of these movements and in some cases that involvement was disproportionate to the Jewish population as a whole. But I also think Prager is exaggerating for effect.
For example, Jews played a role, but a small one, in the initial rise of Western feminism. Mary Wollstonecraft was not a Jew. Neither were Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony. Neither were second tier leaders like Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, and Alice Paul. The Jews involved in the early feminist movement in America are not household names and actually experienced quite a bit of anti-Semitism. Stanton in particular believed that Judaism was a source of female oppression.
I asked Grok about this and the answer squares with my own sense of history:
“Yes, some Jewish women were notable leaders and activists in first-wave feminism (roughly 1840s–1920s, centered on suffrage, property rights, and legal equality), but they were not the primary architects or dominant leaders of its rise. The core founders and strategists were overwhelmingly Protestant Christian women of British or Northern European descent. Jewish participation grew stronger in the later phases, especially among immigrant working-class communities in the U.S. and parts of Europe, but it was secondary to the movement’s origins…The movement’s origins and top-tier direction were driven by non-Jewish (primarily Protestant) women. Claims of Jewish “control” or primary leadership overstate the evidence and ignore the broader historical record.”
Ernestine Rose Would be the only Jewish woman of note in early American feminism and the suffrage movement. Quakers had a larger role in early American feminism than Jews.
Of course, several Jewish women did become prominent in later waves of feminism, especially Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Bella Abzug, beginning in the 1960s. But there were and are plenty of non-Jewish women who promote feminism as well. And the household names on the list of prominent feminists were late to the party, long after things like women’s suffrage were established.
What about communism? Marx was from a non-religious Jewish family that had converted to Christianity before his birth. Marx became an atheist and never showed any interest in Judaism or Christianity. Jews were certainly heavily involved in the Bolshevik movement in Russia, but the principle leaders in implementing Marxism in Russia, like Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and later Joseph Stalin, were not Jewish. It would really not be accurate to call Marxism a distinctively “Jewish” movement. In 1917, Jews made up about 4% of the Bolshevik party and most Jews were more moderate politically (though still leaning towards a kind of socialism). As the communists came to power, Jews were initially overrepresented in positions of power compared to their share of the overall population, but were always a minority. Stalin went on anti-Semitic purges in the 1930s, which largely eliminated Jews from positions of leadership.
I asked Grok why Jews were over represented in the early communist movement and got this response:
“Historians (e.g., Yuri Slezkine in The Jewish Century) note Jews as a highly urban, mobile, literate “service” minority historically drawn to idea-based fields and radical universalism—escaping tradition and discrimination via secular ideologies like Marxism. This mirrors overrepresentation in capitalism, academia, or media. Religious/traditional Jews largely rejected communism as atheistic. Most Jews worldwide were never communists; many were anti-communist (e.g., American Jewish Committee during the Red Scare).”
Again, that squares pretty well with my own sense of the history. Jews were involved in a significant way, but most Jews were not, and many non-Jews were also key leaders in the movement. To further complicate the picture, many Jews in America have been explicitly anti-Marxist.
Jews certainly played a huge role in the rise of Cultural Marxism in America, where members of the Frankfurt school settled in at Columbia University in the 1930s. But they were welcomed there precisely because Columbia (and other elite American institutions) were already moving in that direction. The Second Great Awkening created key shifts in American religion and society, producing theological liberalism and social gospel utopianism in the north, and creating fundamentalism in the South. After the Civil War, the North was largely given over to forms of socialism and liberalism. In other words, the table was already set for Cultural Marxism before the 1930s – and Jews played virtually no role in that preparation. The Jewish Cultural Marxists at Columbia were going with the grain of a culture already moving in that direction.
But even then, we have to keep in mind that Jews are all over the political and cultural spectrum in the 19th and 20th centuries. For example, Judah P. Benjamin was a practicing/religious Jew from Louisiana in the 19th century. He was a Senator before the Civil War, then a leader in the Confederacy, earning the nickname “the brains of the Confederacy” while serving as Secretary of War under President Jefferson Davis.
There is no question secular Jews have been disproportionately represented in the entertainment industry (eg, Hollywood) and the porn industry. They were involved in getting obscenity laws diluted. They were major players in the rise of smut. No question.
Why did Jews gravitate to various forms of the entertainment industry in America? Jewish immigrants and their descendants entered stigmatized fields with low barriers to entry, like the film industry, largely because it’s where they had opportunities. Jew Reuben Sturman became known as the “Walt Disney of Porn.” Jew Al Goldstein pushed porn on society in all kinds of ways and often bragged about Jewish involvement in the industry. But note that the most famous American pornographers, who were on the cutting edge of pushing all facets of the Sexual Revolution, Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, and Bob Guccione, were not Jewish. It’s been pointed out that that the man who turned OnlyFans into a big business, Leonid Radvinsky, was a Jew and major AIPAC donor. True enough. But the founder of OnlyFans, Tim Stokely, was not Jewish.
I could keep going, but this is my overarching point: Jews are sinners. Gentiles are sinners. Apart from Christ, people will do what sinners do, often without restraint. But when we survey the great evils of modern progressivism, the evils that have largely wrecked the culture of Christendom, we find that the wreckage was generally a collaboration of evil people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. It’s common today for many to point the finger at Jews as if they are uniquely malevolent. It is quite popular to scapegoat the Jewish people as the source of feminism, communism, and pornography. Filtering the evidence in a certain way could lead to that conclusion. But if we are honest with the totality of the evidence, we will have to conclude something a bit different: the destruction of the Christian West, like the crucifixion of Christ, was a Jew/Gentile collaboration (cf. Psalm 2:1-3, Acts 4:27).
The importance of the Jewish Question is vastly exaggerated. The contributions of Jews to various evil movements tends to be overly exaggerated. There are all kinds of Jews, all along the political and cultural spectrum. Many Jews, for a mix of cultural and genetic reasons, are high achievers for good or ill. That means when they go bad, they go really bad. I am not denying the terrible and subversive influence many Jews have had on the modern West in general or on America in particular. The facts are what they are.
But Gentiles have their own culpability; it is simply an effeminate flight from responsibility to scapegoat the Jews for our problems. Jews did not make America progressive. And even if they were major players in the rise of progressivism, we’d have to admit non-Jewish Americans were either evil enough to go along with it or dumb enough to fall for it. Neither presents a flattering picture of us. Whatever the case, the game of “blame the Jews” so many are playing today is not bearing good fruit. And it can’t bear good fruit because it is not a form of repentance. Looking for a scapegoat is not the same as confessing sin.
It’s common today to point at NT passages that describe the wickedness of first century Jews and use that as a prop for Jew-blaming today. Passages like 1 Thessalonians 2:14-15 are getting a workout. But consider what the NT says about the Gentile way of life outside of Christ in texts like Romans 1:18ff and Ephesians 4:17ff. Gentiles are perfectly capable of going off the rails into socialism/communism, feminism, and porn with or without Jewish help.
Which way, Western man? Will we begin to take responsibility, confess our sin, repent, and change course? Or will we double down on buck-passing and blame-shifting?
This X post has the Prager quote I started with:
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