The only Jewish institutions that were allowed to exist were Yiddish publications that did nothing more than tow the party line, leaving fuck-all for the non-Ashkenazim in the Soviet Union. Synagogues, yeshivot (schools), the Bund, Zionist organizations, and basically any Jewish thing that was proudly Jewish was forcibly shut down. Ethnically Jewish sections of the Communist Party were organized to harass Jews into abandoning Jewishness in all it's forms. Things were okay for a while, but the Soviet Union's antitheistic policies affected Jews badly. You can't just end that with the flick of a switch. But antisemitism was ingrained in the Russian psyche as antiblackness is in America. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, they legally emancipated the Jews and made antisemitism illegal. However, with the exception of a few, many of the OG Jewish revolutionaries were avowed atheists and had little to no connection with the Jewish world. Blaming Jews for wanting to overthrow the Czar is like blaming black people for wanting to overthrow the Confederacy. Russia didn't legally emancipate it's Jews until 1911. Pogroms left and right, and the Czar was in kahoots with the Black Hundreds, a notoriously antisemitic group of people. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that Czarist Russia was built on rivers of Jewish blood. There were many Jewish leftists in Russia. You're no comrade of mine if you claim solidarity with the victims of fascism in Pittsburgh and Christchurch but somehow call for the abolition of Judaism and Islam at the same time. But I would rather have the honest antisemitism of the right than the fair-weather friendship of the left. Antisemitism is a bug of the left, it's a feature of the right. I'm an observant Jew, and I'm also an avowed leftist. I was banned from r/rcommunism101 when someone asked for critiques of the USSR and I gave them this. But many of their policies either outright or basically endorse it. The Left has an odd history with antisemitism. Because if history weren't complicated, it wouldn't be history.

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