Few American Jews Were Communists, and Many Fewer Were Spies

David Evanier’s portrait of Morton Sobell, the last survivor of the American Communist cold-war spies, who died late last year at the age of one-hundred-one, is a devastating and depressing reminder of the political blindness and moral vacuity that long held in thrall a small but significant portion of the American Jewish community. Sobell may well have been more obtuse about the Soviet Union, and personally more manipulative, than most of his fellow Communists, but his brand of fanaticism was unfortunately shared by others.

How many others? It’s important to be clear about this. Although Jews made up a disproportionate share of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA)—perhaps as much as 40 percent in 1939—the party itself never held more than 100,000 members. So, in an American Jewish population of several million, a tiny percentage were Communists. Of course, this is not to count the many sympathizers and “fellow travelers,” drawn by the Soviet Union’s war against Nazism and its seeming opposition to anti-Semitism.

But there was also among Jews a greater number of fierce enemies of Communism than is sometimes credited. In the socialist garment unions, the Zionist enclaves, and the religious world, Jews who understood that Communism was a pernicious doctrine waged a continuous war against its influence. Indeed, for most of the Jewish community, the highly visible presence of so many Jews in the CPUSA, amplified by the location of so many of them in New York, the cultural and intellectual center of American life, was a constant source of tension and embarrassment.