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Moses Hess at the Nexus of Marxism and Zionism

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  Radically as Marxism and Zionism would part ways in the twentieth century, it is interesting to observe that the two ideologies’ early histories are intertwined in the person of Moses Hess (1812-1875), a Jewish radical Hegelian thinker and contemporary of Marx whose 1862 Zionist manifesto, Rome and Jerusalem , predates Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State by more than three decades. Hess, like Marx, was born in Germany’s Rhineland to a merchant father who intended for his son to pursue a life of religious study. As Hess recorded in his diary, however, “the Talmud utterly repelled me” [1]. His adolescent intellectual awakening saw him drawn to French socialism and to the works of Baruch Spinoza and G.W.F. Hegel, whose thought would in different ways shape the course of Hess’s philosophical and political development. Under the influence of Hegel, Hess would in his early years stand out as a “dialectical Idealist” as opposed to a dialectical materialist, as his fellow left Hegelian Mar...
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Lenin's Second Death

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For anti-Semitic students of history, Marxism and the Zionist endeavor represent twin conspiracies that vied with each other for Jewish hearts and minds in the early twentieth century. Each achieved a milestone in November of 1917 – the Zionists with the publication of the Balfour Declaration and the communists with the Bolshevik Revolution. While Zionism serves an undisguisedly Jewish purpose, historians continue to deny the Jewish nature of Bolshevism. “Jews joined the RSDRP” – the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party – “to discard their Jewishness,” Soviet-born Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern contends, for example. Otherwise, he reasons, they would have joined an explicitly Jew-centered organization like the General Jewish Labor Bund or a Zionist group [1]. Petrovsky-Shtern neglects to consider the possibility that Jewish resentment and racially motivated efforts to undermine the host society could take forms other than those that were openly based on ethnic solidarity, and his insistence...
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Let’s Get Retarded; or, Tucker Carlson and the Illusion of Independence

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Masa tortilla chip spokesman Tucker Carlson, like Syria’s President Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa (nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Julani), is a man of many appearances. Whereas Sharaa transitioned from turbaned ISIS fanatic to Zelensky-style military-garbed rebel leader and finally suit-and-tie statesman with White House access, the protean Carlson has gone from bow-tie-clad free-trade neoconservative nerd to polished prime-time dissenting Trumpian populist and now a rustic YouTube conspiracy-peddling cabin dweller whose Bass Pro Shops aesthetic and twangy banjo intro music herald him as the folksy millionaire voice of the American people who also happens to have White House access. “Since the early days of his [2016-2023] tenure as a Fox prime-time host, Tucker Carlson’s unabashed championing of white grievances earned him the accolades of neo-Nazis, who praised him as a ‘one man gas chamber’ and complimented the way he ‘lampshad[ed] Jews on national television,’” writes Madeline Peltz at ...
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