Why It’s Necessary to Bring Jewish Communism into Full View

David Evanier has done a great service in profiling Morton Sobell, one of the American Jews who spied for Stalin’s KGB. Though Evanier had already covered some of this ground in his 1991 novel Red Love, his account in Mosaic gives us facts and information unadorned by the arts of fiction.

The biggest fact is this: the Soviet project was founded on falsehood and sustained and exported through deceit. In some ways, the export version has been more successful than the native one. It has been easier for post-Soviet Russia to clean up after Chernobyl than for Americans to clean up from the decades-long Soviet infiltration into American politics, society, and culture. The only antidote is truth.

“Many of these American Communists were Jewish,” writes Evanier, truthfully, about the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), which recruited agents and followers in many branches of culture as well as industry. He credits his own disaffection from Communism to his 1962 stay in an Israeli kibbutz where the combined presence of Holocaust survivors and dedicated pioneers jolted him into a fresh appreciation of his own Jewishness. By contrast, Sobell and his cohort showed no interest in “Jewish history, culture, or the birth of Israel”—or in their own complicity in Soviet crimes, including crimes against their fellow Jews. There is likewise no reason to think that most former American Jewish Communists and fellow travelers experienced Evanier’s thoroughgoing change of heart.