Jewish Left

The term "Jewish left" describes Jews who identify with or support left wing, occasionally liberal causes, consciously as Jews, either as individuals or through organizations. There is no one organization or movement which constitutes the "Jewish left," however. Jews have been major forces in the history of the labor movement, the settlement house movement, the women's rights movement, anti-racist work, and anti-fascist organizing of many forms in Europe, the United States and modern-day Israel.

The Jewish people have a rich history of involvement in socialism, Marxism, and Western liberalism. Although the expression "on the left" covers a range of politics, many well-known figures "on the left" have been of Jews, for instance, Karl Marx, Moses Hess, Herbert Marcuse, Murray Bookchin, Saul Alinsky, Tristan Tzara, Leon Trotsky, Leon Blum, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Eric Hobsbawm, Harold Laski, Betty Friedan, Abbie Hoffman, or Howard Zinn, who were born into Jewish families and have various degrees of connection to Jewish communities, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition or the Jewish religion in its many variants. It also includes such people as rabbis Michael Lerner and Arthur Waskow: religiously devout and culturally identified Jews. It includes as well many secular, cosmopolitan people who nonetheless remain connected to Jewish culture, such as Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, Rose Schneiderman, Muriel Rukeyser and Susan Sontag. Views regarding Zionism among those either identified or self-identified as being among the Jewish left can be quite varied, and are often independent of their other political and social views.

While there is a slight increase of Jews "on the left" connecting their politics to their spirituality, this is a somewhat new phenomenon, when contrasted with the long history of secular socialist and communist Jewish activist history (e.g., The Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring) as well as Jewish anarchist activism which was not only explicitly secular but had from time to time denounced religion. From the late 1880s through the mid-1950s, there was a range of Jewish left newspapers (and other publications) in Yiddish that covered the spectrum of Jewish left-wing political and cultural expression in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as both North and South America, and in Mandate Palestine's Yishuv, as well as the early years of the State of Israel.