Violent assaults targeting Jews in the U.S. and worldwide are sharply expanding, shattering illusions that the Jewish people will be protected from abuse and attack by Washington and other “democratic” imperialist powers. These assaults go side by side with the more and more open embrace of Jew-hatred by forces on both the left and right of capitalist politics, presenting a crucial challenge that working people must take head on.
Firstly, we need to discuss with fellow workers why our unions should take responsibility for mobilizing to physically defend Jews and to build actions that protest Jew-hatred and violent attacks. It falls to our class to expose every one of the lies used as a pretext for antisemitic attacks, from blood libels to the claim that assaults on Jews are somehow an inevitable product of Israel’s fight to defend itself as a sorely needed refuge from Jew-hatred and pogroms.
Secondly, workers need a clear class explanation of where attacks on Jews come from, both in the past and today. Neither of the bosses’ two main parties — the Democrats and Republicans — are capable of clarifying this.
Jew-hatred is an inherent product of the capitalist social relations the bosses’ parties defend. It’s a product of the endemic financial crises, social upheavals and wars built into the imperialist epoch.
For more than a century, capitalism has ceased to be a rising progressive system. Its deepening crises have already produced two world wars. And again today national ruling classes are driving to rearm in preparation for new wars against each other to redivide the world and advance their plunder of its resources and exploitation of its peoples. In the course of these bloody conflicts, Jews are blamed for the crushing burdens ruining the middle class and layers of demoralized workers. They’re scapegoated to divert attention from the real cause of the problem — the exploitation of the toiling majority by the propertied ruling families.
As workers’ struggles grow in response to the oppression bred by capitalism, the rulers will turn to fascist forces — organized under the banner of Jew-hatred — to crush the unions and fighting workers in a last ditch effort to protect their power. This is the lesson of the rise of the Nazi movement in the 1930s.
Jew-hatred and pogroms will not last forever. Leon Trotsky, a leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and of the fight to build revolutionary working-class parties worldwide in the face of the counterrevolution in Russia headed by Joseph Stalin, explained this before World War II.
“Now more than ever, the fate of the Jewish people — not only their political but also their physical fate — is indissolubly linked with the emancipating struggle of the international proletariat,” Trotsky wrote.
As long as capitalism exists there will be more pogroms, like Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel. That slaughter announced to the world that the repeated threats by Hamas and Tehran to carry out another Holocaust are not rhetoric, but a deadly goal.
Preventing that horrific prospect requires overturning capitalist rule in the Middle East and most importantly in the U.S. It requires bringing to power the one class that has no interest in Jew-hatred and national oppression of any kind — the working class.
Working-class parties, with leaders tempered in the class struggle, can be built here and across the globe to lead millions to take power and carry through socialist revolutions. Workers need a party that is proletarian in program, composition and in the conduct of its members.
We don’t have to start from scratch. The Socialist Workers Party already exists, join it!