Lenin's Second Death
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...