Great Jewish leaders formed the core foundation of the creation of Communism and Socialism, and many Jewish leaders and academics are active in Communist and Socialist thought to the present day.
Glenn Beck, in his daily tirades against "evil" Socialism and Communism and his linking these great schools of thought to Barack Obama and his parents and mentors, is sounding the thinly-disguised dog whistle of anti-Semitism.
Jews have a long and active role in the formation of Communism and Socialism. In Germany before World War I, the Socialist Party (the SPD) was founded by Ferdinand Lasalle, who was Jewish. Eduard Bernstein and Otto Landsberg, both Jewish, were its main leaders. Its Socialist theorists Adolf Braun and Simon Katzenstein were Jewish, as were its leading journalists.
In Russia’s first communist government, there were 13 ethnic Russian Commissars and more than 300 Jewish Commissars out of a total of 384 Commissars. The revolution’s chief financier was Jacob Schiff, the billionaire New Yorker of Jewish descent. Of the six members of Lenin's first Politburo, three were Jewish: Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev.
Beck bashes the great thinker Karl Marx daily, and spits his name as if Marx were the incarnation of evil and anti-Americanism. Marx was born in Trier in the Lower Rhine to a father, Heinrich Marx, who was born a Jew but converted to Lutheranism in part to advance his career as a lawyer in those dark times. Karl's Jewish mother, born Henrietta Pressburg, was from the Netherlands converted upon the death of her parents. Karl was baptized when he was six years old, again to escape the very persecution we see today in Beck’s hate speech.
Jewish leaders and thinkers have given us the advanced systems of social organization that are Socialism and Communism. The benefits of these humanitarian systems are seen today – even in "capitalist" America. Glenn Beck is seeking to destroy and discredit the Jewish leaders and founders of these socialist and communist systems in his hateful daily tirades. It’s time for his dog whistle anti Semitic tirades to stop.