Many individuals and groups harbor deep-seated fears - real or imaginary - that go to the core of their existence and identity. Superman fears green kryponite. The Kennedys fear banishment from the political spotlight. My dog fears thunderclaps.

What do American Jews fear most? What existential or personal threat consumes virtually their every waking (and perhaps, sleeping) moments? Is it the 4:00 am knock on the door from a nouveau Gestapo? Is it a latter day pogrom carried out in Westchester or Silver Spring? Is it the unmasking of a family name from "Gainsborough" to "Ginsberg?"

What strikes fear into most Jewish hearts in America is none of the above. Rather, it lies in the fear that someone might identify them as "Right Wing". This term is, beyond all others, the most dreaded term of opprobrium in the western Jewish world. And, through a combination of Jewish Left Wing propaganda and Arab and Muslim deception, support for Israel has become synonymous with "Right Wing politics." This mark of Cain has gained added potency by the ascension of Barak Hussein Obama and his coterie of '60's leftists from David Axelrod to Elena Kagan.

Sadly, the roots of "left" and "right" have become virtually meaningless and forgotten in the current Crucible-like, finger wagging culture of the Obamatons.  Originally, the designations were assigned to members of the pre-Revolutionary French Assemblee Nationale in which the King's supporters were seated to the President's right while those opposed (Jacobins) were seated on the left.  From there the trajectories of left and right were pretty much guided by allegiance to - or hatred of- the ancien regimes.

If we were to divide "Right" from "Left", the historical, doctrinal lineup would follow something like this schema:

In Germany of the mid 19th century, where progressive parties gained a foothold in support of Bismarckian unification, the Jewish Reform movement adhered itself to these parties, having long experienced Catholic and Lutheran antisemitism of the conservative parties . In eastern Europe and Russia, Jewish progressivism took on a distinctly more violent character, resulting in the endorsement of Marxism, Nihilism and eventually Bolshevism as the road to liberation. In any case, Jews came to position themselves in the vanguard of the European Left, a movement that, in theory, promised them a new order which would erase class, religious and ethnic differences.

In the West, these transplanted Jewish radicals spanned the political spectrum from anarchism to the hyper-assimilation of the American Reform Movement. Whatever Progressive movement developed, from feminism to anti-globalization to Green Parties, Jews could be found in their vanguards. After the Soviet Union imploded, "Communism" and "Socialism" were no longer in vogue, but the old sweet song of the Left morphed into a more palatable one: "Social Justice."

As Irving Howe chronicled the epic of Jewish emigration to the New World in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was not foremost the world of shtetl and shtiebel that found its way to America, but the world of Bundists and Social Revolutionaries that came to dominate Jewish life in America.  David Axelrod's heritage is not one of Talmud/Torah, but one of PM, the New York Stalinist magazine of the 1940's for which his mother wrote.

Socialist movements in Europe promised to break open the intellectual and professional ghetto gates for Jews in the New World as well as the Old. Zionism, in its early incarnations, was primarily populated by Socialists who viewed Palestine not as the ancient, divinely promised land of their forefathers, but as a brave new world in which the social and economic theories of Marx and Lenin would come to fruition.

Add to this utopian vision the difficult reality of Israeli independence, constantly reaffirmed by Jewish historical, cultural and archaeological reality, the Pan Arabism of Mohammed Abduh, George Antonius et al. and what was produced resembled a bizarre Jewish affinity for movements that while appearing to be third world liberation struggles were, in reality, proto-fascist, antisemitic - and this is paramount - extreme Right Wing movements.

Consequently you have the current situation wherein groups like J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace actively support Arab and Muslim causes as a result of their effective Left Wing branding. Arab and Muslims like Joseph Massoud of Columbia and Tariq Ali know precisely which levers to operate to gain Jewish Left Wing support. In perfect Pavlovian fashion, American Jews of the Left salivate when they hear the words, "Apartheid" and "Racist" while ignoring the mountains of corpses produced by Islamic Right Wing organizations.

Groups and cultures that have embraced Islamism with all its concomitant theo-fascist elements (homo-cidal edicts, blatant antisemitism, anti-feminism, anti-socialist - in effect, most of the programs outlined above that define "Right Wing") - have seduced the Jewish Left by the simple technique of labeling themselves "Progressive."

American Jews are no strangers to betrayal. If, in the 1930's and '40s they could have abandoned their brothers and sisters to Hitler (remember, most of the hard American Jewish Left attributed the Nazis' hatred of Jews to "Jewish capitalists"), imagine how quickly they will now betray them when they perceive the hate as coming from their kindred brothers of the Left. There is ample evidence for this: Chomsky embracing Sheikh Nasrallah, Norman Finkelstein embracing Hamas are but two notable ones. Hezbollah, Hamas and their allies - if you proceed down the laundry list of Right Wing tenets - could not be further from the core principles of the Left - and yet, much of the Jewish American Left have become their witting allies.

Remember, there are currently four ways Jews can react to antisemitism:

1. To pretend it doesn't exist
2. To"unbecome" a Jew (e.g. Madeleine Albright, Richard Gere)
3. To become complicit in antisemitism itself (Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Avraham Burg)
4. To fight it - intellectually and physically.

Because antisemitism has become masked by the catchphrases of the Left, number 3 is tragically - and, incredibly - becoming more popular.

If, as Lenin declared, "imperialism is the final stage of capitalism", then the Jewish alliance with Islamism is the final stage of collective insanity.

[Crossposted from JStreetJive.]