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Notes -
Yes, well put. I don’t think the “woke establishment” has a good play here insofar as large swathes of the vanguard progressive movement are actually anti-Semitic by normie standards, while large swathes of the journalistic, financial, and political leadership of the movement are themselves Jewish and many of them feel betrayed by the wider left in the wake of October 7th.
I see two main possible outcomes. Either the leadership reins in the vanguard and has an anti-semitism purge as per Starmer in the UK. The effect of this would be disillusionment in the vanguard and a sense of betrayal. Many of the most passionate and/or psychotic progressives will splinter off. Alternatively, if the leadership is too weak to rein in the vanguard, then a lot of powerful Jewish Americans will splinter from the woke fringe (a la Luciana Berger in the UK), probably mostly flocking to centrist Democrat spaces.
Either way, it’s not a fight that can be brushed under the rug.
You know it really has surprised me that the US left seems to be more resistant to a purge than the British left (which is both less Jewish and more pro-Palestinian). I think in part it’s that Starmer’s purge wasn’t really about antisemitism but about drawing a line under the failed Corbyn era, with antisemitism a useful cudgel to purge the party of all the hard left Seamus Milne types (who were anti-Zionist out of their leftism, really). There’s also the fact that, with the exception of a few Cynthia Nixons, most anti-Zionist political types on the US left are POC, whereas in the UK they were largely white Brits on the hard left.
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