The Left has lost me

Anti-Semitism is a deal breaker for me.

Because of the time I was born, the things I've seen, the books I've read, the people I've known and the myriad of positions I've taken throughout my life, I cannot support any organization or ideology that advocates or condones any form of hatred for Jews.

The Holocaust happened. Pograms happened. The Inquisition happened. The insidious persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union happened. I don't know why these events happened. I will never understand this sick, deep-rooted obsession, but I recognize that it has existed for a long time, that it continues today and that it can flare up at any time, in any place, among the most unremarkable of people.

Anti-Semitism has even happened here, in the magical land of diversity.

My mother used to tell me about her summer jobs in Ontario's resort country, when she would walk down the streets and see signs forbidding Jews from visiting this store, or patronizing that restaurant. She complained that they would walk in groups, these Jews, and force you off the sidewalk. Pushy, you know. Yet she never linked these sidewalk hogs to the gentle, soft-spoken couple she worked for. They were Italian Jews with two young children, who had landed in Canada after a horrific run across Europe, fleeing for their lives from Mussolini's Italy. She quite liked them, enjoyed the children and admired the talented young doctor. Maybe she saw them as cultivated Italians rather than pushy Jews. I don't know.

She never linked these quiet, worthy people with the hateful signs she saw in the streets. As far as I know, she never wondered how those signs made them feel.

That's why it pains me when the Left fixates on the misdeeds of Israel. I listen to the stories of the Left very carefully. And my spidey senses tingle. Maybe I'm overly sensitive, but I can feel a a familiar undercurrent. There's an echo of stories told before the Pograms and the ghettos and the hand-lettered signs telling Jews they were not welcome. The old stories of financial and political control. The old tales of cunning clannishness. Jews who push their way into places they don't belong, whether those places are in the Middle East, or Berlin, or on the pre-war sidewalks of Jackson's Point.

This would, of course, be of little consequence to me if I were not a lifelong liberal who had once found a happy and comfortable home on the left. Today, however, I find myself drifting and homeless.

So I still long for social justice, agitate for workers' rights against corporate power, promote the enlargement of democracy, push for liberal values and advocate equality. But I must do it without the Left.

Because anti-Semitism will always be a deal-breaker for me, and the Left, I fear, has strayed into a place I will not go.

And I don't know where that leaves us.