Jewish Communists sometimes betrayed remarkable

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Prof. MacDonald emphasizes that although Jewish Communists preached both atheism and the solidarity of the world's working people, they took pains to preserve a distinct, secular Jewish identity. He reports that Lenin himself (who had one Jewish grandparent) approved the continuation of an explicitly Jewish identity under.

Communism, and in 1946 the Communist Party of the United States voted a resolution also supporting Jewish peoplehood in Communist countries. Thus, although Communism was supposed to be without borders or religion, Jews were confident that it would make a place for their own group identity. He writes that despite the official view that all men were to be brothers, "very few Jews lost their Jewish identity during the entire soviet era."

Particularism. Prof. MacDonald quotes Charles Pappoport, the phone number list French Communist leader: "The Jewish people [are] the bearer of all the great ideas of unity and human community in history... The disappearance of the Jewish people would signify the death of humankind, the final transformation of man into a wild beast." This seems to attribute to Jews an elite position incompatible with "unity and human community."

Prof. MacDonald argues that many Jews began to fall away from Communism only after Stalin showed himself to be anti-Semitic. And just as Jews had been the leading revolutionaries in anti-Semitic pre-Revolutionary Russia, Jews became the leading dissidents in an anti-Semitic Soviet Union. A similar pattern can be found in the imposed Communist governments of Eastern Europe, which were largely dominated by Jews. The majority of the leaders of the Polish Communist Party, for example, spoke better Yiddish than Polish, and they too maintained a strong Jewish identity. After the fall of Communism many stopped being Polish and emigrated to Israel.