My Life In The New Left
By Kevin MacDonald
The first time I became aware of leftist Jews was when, as a reporter for The Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper, at the University of Wisconsin, I was assigned to cover a meeting of the Committee Against the War in Vietnam. This was around 1965, just after the war started heating up. In my short career as a reporter I had also covered a meeting of the Young Republicans, and the contrast couldn’t have been more striking. The Young Republicans were all dressed up—men in suits and ties, women in dresses—and looked like they were attending a business meeting at the country club.
Even though the Young Republicans were all white and most of them came from Wisconsin, I can’t say I related to them much. But I felt even more alien at the meeting of the antiwar committee. The attendees were dressed in a much more Bohemian style and there was a lot of intense talk about politics. And they were Jewish.
I wasn’t the only one to notice the Jewish flavor of radical politics at Wisconsin. In their academic study of the New Left Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians and the Left, Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter quote an observer of the New Left scene at the University of Wisconsin: “I am struck by the lack of Wisconsin-born people and the massive preponderance of New York Jews. The situation at the University of Minnesota is similar.” His correspondent replied: “As you perceived, the Madison left is built on New York Jews.”Things changed for me when I moved in with two Jewish roommates and suddenly became immersed in the radical Jewish subculture of Madison. Living in an environment where radical politics was an unquestioned assumption, I soon became a radical myself. A social psychologist would probably explain it as conforming to a new set of social norms—when in Rome, do as the Romans do. In some ways I was probably prepared for the plunge into radicalism. I had been politically liberal, a Democrat, and a strong supporter of the Civil Rights Movements. But there was a very large gap between being a liberal and being a radical, especially in those days.
Shortly thereafter, I remember telling someone from my hometown that I had become “alienated” from the culture. And now that I recall that incident, it calls to mind a passage from Chapter 6 of my study of Jewish involvement in 20th Century intellectual and political movements, The Culture of Critique:
“[The New York Intellectuals conceived themselves as alienated, marginalized figures—a modern version of traditional Jewish separateness and alienation from [non-Jewish culture. [As Norman Podhoretz described them, “They did not feel that they belonged to America or that America belonged to them.” … Indeed, Podhoretz … was asked by a New Yorker editor in the 1950s “whether there was a special typewriter key at Partisan Review with the word ‘alienation’ on a single key.”
Without really realizing the ramifications, I had been acculturated into a Jewish intellectual and political milieu of alienation—and antipathy to the small-town Wisconsin milieu (Irish and German, Catholic, lower middle class) in which I grew up.
http://www.vdare.com/macdonald/090318_madison.htm