To some, the political left appears to be a natural home for Jews; for others, it appears a source of endless betrayal, anti-Semitism, and hostility toward Israel. A recent book by Philip Mendes attempts to make sense of the history. David Hirsh writes in his review:
[W]hile a significant minority of Jews were influential within the radical left, a substantial majority of Jews remained outside of it. . . . A contemporary imbalance follows: while a large and influential proportion of left anti-Zionists are Jewish, only a very small percentage of Jews are anti-Zionists.
On the other hand, argues Mendes, the left, broadly conceived, did have a number of contact points with the wider Jewish communities. The left’s universalist tradition of equality coincided with the interest in emancipation of the Jews; many Jews in Europe and Russia were poor and the left championed the poor; there was a Jewish tradition of literacy and intellectualism which fed easily into the left and that attracted some Jews; Jews moved toward the towns and cities early and the left was a significantly urban movement; Jews often had an ambiguous place in relation to the identities of the emerging nationalisms among which they lived, as did the left, so notions of cosmopolitanism had the potential to become a shared value, as well as a source of particular hostility from the outside. . . .
When movements came to power in Russia and Eastern Europe which described themselves as socialist, they were also pioneers of state-imposed anti-Semitism; the experience of Nazism did little to inoculate Communist states against anti-Semitism, it only drove them to articulate it in slightly different formulations.
Read more on Fathom: http://fathomjournal.org/book-review-jews-and-the-left-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-political-alliance/