Europe’s Jews fear the left most

Long supporters of progressive parties, Jews are now sensing antipathy from the left, partly over Zionism. It is leading to a strange romance with the far right

Tweet image from October rally in NYC

The past weeks’ British and French parliamentary elections surfaced an interesting Jewish angle: Many Jews seem to much more fear the left than the far right – which is a historic shift that reflects a bigger story about world politics.  

It’s all quite remarkable for me, since I’m old enough to remember the Jewish revulsion about 40 years ago when French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen was emerging as the world’s most unapologetic prominent antisemite. He made waves as far as the suburban US by dismissing the gas chambers as a “detail” of World War II and being skeptical about the scale of the Holocaust.

His daughter Marine Le Pen is now running the National Front party he launched. She has rebranded it as the National Rally and spruced it up a little, including by sidelining her unpresentable dad, but it’s still fascist-adjacent, and it is now a major force in French politics. The twist is that it got that way by targeting Muslims, not Jews.

Indeed, much of Europe is being swept by an anti-Muslim message that seems more related to real-life problems than classic antisemitism ever was, reflecting growing concern about the influence of Muslim minorities, especially after the 2010s exodus from wars in the Middle East. Alongside standard-issue racism there are not-unreasonable fears that the newcomers will alter Europe’s culture and reject central values like secularism, tolerance and liberalism. The irony, of course, is that the backlash benefits far-right parties that represent a stream in Europe that is itself far from liberal.

In another time, Jews might have been especially sensitive to any whiff of xenophobia, even against other groups. But today many of them fear hostility from these surging Muslim communities most (something similar is happening also in the US — see above tweet). There have been terrorist attacks on Jews by Muslims (and, of course, terrorist attacks by them in general); the dynamic that emerges may be called “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” – that friend being, in a bizarre historical twist, the likes of Le Pen.

Although there are no polls measuring this, the anecdotal evidence is unequivocal. It is perhaps best represented by Serge Klarsfeld, the renown Nazi hunter, advising Jews to back Le Pen over the left in last week’s election.

Conversely, the left – in France and elsewhere – is bleeding Jewish support because that is where the core of sympathy for the Palestinians (along with  apologism and even backing of Hamas) can be found.