Compiled by Lewis Loflin
In my earlier article, Immigration Policy and Identity Politics, I highlighted Stephen Steinlight’s critique of the Jewish Left’s political correctness, which blinds them to the pervasive anti-Semitism within Hispanic communities. This willful ignorance—often in the name of "progressive" ideals like open borders—ignores a harsh reality: Hispanic anti-Semitism, rooted in historical and cultural biases, poses a significant threat to Jewish communities, both in the U.S. and abroad. The Jewish Left’s refusal to confront this issue, as Steinlight notes, is akin to selling the rope to their own hangman. Below, I compile evidence of this unmentionable bigotry, starting with a firsthand account from a Venezuelan Jew and followed by Steinlight’s analysis of the broader implications of mass Hispanic immigration.
Hugo Chavez, like the equally antisemitic Daniel Ortega, remains a hero to the left. Ortega destroyed the Jewish community of El Salvador, and the Jews of Venezuela have faced a similar fate. The attitudes of antisemitic Leftism, combined with classical pre-Vatican II Spanish anti-Semitism, are simply ignored by the Jewish Left.
One Jewish woman recalls the hell of Venezuela:
I came to Venezuela in 1991 to be with my husband, who was born there and whom I met while he was living and studying in Israel. In Caracas, he worked as a fashion designer and managed a chain of clothing stores. The family business prospered, as did many other local Jewish businesses. Of course, the regime that preceded Chavez was not lacking in corruption, but at least it did not treat Jews with a heavy hand and allowed us to conduct our lives in peace. All this changed in 1999 when Chavez was elected president.
Chavez’s many anti-Jewish statements in the media—like calling Jews pigs, denying the Holocaust, and accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians—contributed to an atmosphere of anti-Semitism that grew worse year by year. Suddenly, it became frightening to walk down the street after dark for fear of being harassed.
Our synagogues and Jewish community buildings were spray-painted with swastikas and antisemitic slogans, and there was a feeling that Chavez was egging on the populace and speaking the "people’s language" against the Jews. He was always quick to say that Venezuela’s large businesses are controlled by Jews "stealing the nation’s money."
The harassment, restrictions, and overall atmosphere made my life as a Jew in Venezuela unbearable. But I hoped that the nation would have its say and replace Chavez with another leader.
What finally broke my resolve and "persuaded" me to leave everything behind and accede to my husband’s urgent pleas to leave was a law passed by Chavez concerning children. This law stipulated that children up to the age of 3 belong to their parents; afterward, until the age of 10, they move to a school under government control; and from 10 until age 18, they study in a military boarding school.
From that moment, I understood that my future and the future of my children lay elsewhere. Almost all of our family agreed to come to Israel with us, and the rest fled to the United States, Spain, Peru, and other countries.
Ref: Israel Hayom
Dr. Stephen Steinlight is hated by both the Jewish Left and David Duke, so he must be doing something right. As he notes, the Jews seeking to use Hispanics for their political ends are blinded by their own political correctness. To quote:
The Progress by Pesach campaign supported amnesty, a cessation of ICE raids, and "comprehensive immigration reform." The core of that legislation is an exponential increase in legal immigration. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation estimated the increase that would have resulted from the stillborn 2006 "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act" (S.2611) would have been in the range of 66–100 million within 20 years.
Since the principal engine driving immigration is extended family reunification or "chain immigration," the greatest part of the increase will come from the country whose residents have already established the greatest number of familial and socioeconomic networks in the United States—Mexico. This is cause for profound concern to Jewish Americans on parochial as well as patriotic grounds.
Yet apart from anxious commentary that accompanied two polls ADL released in 2003, nowhere within the Jewish Establishment does one find any echo, let alone explicit mention, of this well-grounded anxiety. Leadership may express fears behind closed doors but rarely does so publicly. There is, simply, no leadership on this burning issue within the ranks of the Establishment.
The disinclination to confront this huge problem may stem, in part, from the nonsense that was gospel in dialogues on race for decades: "People of color" cannot be racist because they lack power. Some of this owes to denial—always a strong element for those who engage in intergroup relations (so much of which is based on duplicity and self-deception on both sides)—and part is fear of further provoking antisemitic Hispanics. Whatever the reason, this gigantically important fact is left out of the equation.
Anti-Semitism is pervasive in Latin American societies. In fact, it is so high that the only group survey research has shown to harbor more anti-Semitism than foreign-born Hispanics are Muslims. Even among Europeans, we have noted that anti-Semitism is highest in Spain, the mother country of Hispanic culture.
Those who come from the country that is by far the largest source of contemporary immigration, Mexico, are steeped in a culture of theological anti-Semitism that has defied the post-Vatican II enlightenment of European and North American Catholicism. Foreign-born Hispanics lack a mitigating history of familiarity with Jews, have little knowledge and no direct or familial experience of the Holocaust, and regard Jews simply as among the most privileged of white Americans.
To these sources of prejudice, one must add the impact of "Liberation Theology," which identifies with the Palestinians and regards Israelis and their Jewish supporters as fascists and "running dogs" of American imperialism.
The troubling percentage of Hispanics willing to embrace antisemitic stereotypes is documented in the largest survey of intergroup attitudes undertaken in the United States, Taking America’s Pulse II (a project of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, NCCJ), carried out in 1992. It surveyed just under 3,000 respondents in phone interviews lasting 28 minutes, with significant oversampling for Hispanics, Muslims, African Americans, and Jews.
In their responses to the four negative stereotypes of Jews in the survey, Hispanics were, overall, the group second most likely to affirm their validity after African Americans, and they exhibited the highest anti-Semitism of any group that is predominantly foreign-born. Thus, 43 percent of Hispanic respondents, a plurality, agree that "When it comes to choosing between people and money, Jews will choose money;" 44 percent agree that Jews "are more loyal to Israel than to America;" 49 percent, the highest of any group, agree that Jews are "too preoccupied with their history of persecution, such as the Holocaust;" while 37 percent agree that Jews "have too much control over business and the media."
The findings show African Americans are most likely to hold these classic anti-Jewish views (an average of 47.25 percent), but Hispanics are not far behind with an average of 43.24 percent. A smaller survey (1,000 respondents) conducted by the ADL in 2002 reported almost identical findings as NCCJ with regard to foreign-born Hispanics, showing strong anti-Semitism among 44 percent of respondents.
Among U.S.-born Hispanics, 20 percent had antisemitic attitudes, a finding ADL chose to hype as hopeful. While the improvement seems impressive at first glance, given the constant replenishment of foreign-born Hispanics from Mexico and Central America—and the possibility of an exponential increase in the foreign-born population as a result of "comprehensive immigration reform" (a policy supported by ADL!)—the purported "progress" seems ephemeral at best.
Home-country attitudes will be reinforced and reinvigorated by the continuous arrival of the foreign-born into tight ethnic enclaves. It is also the case that a rate of 20 percent still makes Hispanics nearly three times more antisemitic than the average American.
At a time when the American-Jewish community was fixated on Black anti-Semitism and mourning the collapse of the "Black/Jewish alliance," it was startling news to find Hispanics registering almost equal hostility, an attitude that quickly inspired attempts at outreach by Jewish Establishment organizations.
I attended several of these early meetings with Hispanic leadership groups and produced the first publication on Hispanic/Jewish relations for AJC. It was clear what they wanted from us: Jewish support for open-borders immigration and amnesty; far less clear was what, if anything, Hispanics were prepared to offer in return.
The Jewish Establishment may seek to justify its support for open-borders immigration as an effort to lessen Hispanic anti-Semitism and buy favor with the Hispanic community—or, rather, not the community at large so much as the leadership cadres with which it meets from time to time.
But considering the outcome of mass immigration will mean the inevitable nullification of Jewish political power by a group with very high levels of anti-Semitism and a wholly different set of policy priorities, it’s hard to view the Establishment’s support for mass immigration other than through the lens of Lenin’s parable about the capitalist who will sell the rope with which he will be hanged.
Defenders of Jewish Establishment policy argue that when Mexican interest in naturalization increases—currently fewer than 20 percent of the huge number residing here have chosen to become U.S. citizens, most being in effect transnationals rather than immigrants—they will inevitably undergo the process of Americanization that greatly lessened the anti-Semitism of many Europeans who came during the Great Waves.
This line has been advanced by ADL in response to its own grim findings about Hispanic anti-Semitism. But the optimism is entirely unfounded because the institutional structures and ideology that facilitated the process in the past no longer exist. It seems almost quaint to have to point out that there are no longer "Americanization" programs. Groups like the National Immigration Forum, headed by Gideon Aronoff, regard Americanization as "racist," "dominant culture supremacist" claptrap.
Our brave new world of multiculturalism is founded on the assumption that we aren’t a nation at all and need no common language. It is not only the metaphor of the melting pot that has been tossed into the garbage; the "salad bowl" has joined it there. We have no current metaphor regarding immigration that speaks to the notion that all of us ultimately share a sense of national belonging, that assimilation is a good thing.
In addition, from 1924 until 1965, when the nation’s immigration law was radically changed, there was relatively little new immigration to the United States, allowing time for immigrant groups to acculturate, internalize American values, and discover how to live together as fellow Americans.
The civic education we have banished from school curricula played a powerful role in this, as did a host of ethnic pride organizations—from the Steuben Society and the Knights of Columbus to the Workman’s Circle, now largely gone or barely surviving with an aged membership—that served as a halfway house between a particular ethnic/cultural identity and a larger sense of national belonging. While they promoted ethnic pride, the balance was on fostering American patriotism.
Finally, given Mexico’s contiguity, the deliberate policy on the part of successive Mexican governments to maintain the national loyalty of Mexicans, and the ceaseless nature of immigration from that country—not to mention the exponential population increase we will experience if "comprehensive immigration reform" becomes law—it is not assimilation we can anticipate so much as the constant reinforcement of some of the most atavistic attitudes from that culture, strong anti-Semitism among them.
Extract from "No 'Progress by Pesach': The Jewish Establishment’s Usurpation of American-Jewish Opinion on Immigration" by Stephen Steinlight, August 2009.
Acknowledgment: I’d like to thank Grok, an AI by xAI, for helping me draft and refine this article. The final edits and perspective are my own.
