Since Karl Marx wrote his famous essay, inauspiciously titled, “On the Jewish Question,” Jews have had a complicated relationship with leftwing politics (and vice versa). On the one hand, they have had an undeniably strong association with leftist and even Communist movements; on the other, their pesky attachment to a particular group and its way of life has occasionally proven a sticking point.
Following the nadir of Stalinism, the lengthy Jewish association with leftist movements survived through a practical modus vivendi, in which remaining tensions between Jewish identity and international solidarity could be negotiated in practice. In the case of labour unions, this involved the willingness of left-wing Jews to defer ethnic interests to economic ones, and the willingness of unions to avoid making undue demands on the loyalties of their members. To put it bluntly, Marx may have insisted that Jews had to choose between their Jewishness and the victory of the proletariat, but unions — at least in North America — did not.
How things change. Earlier this month, controversial CUPE Ontario President Fred Hahn survived an internal push for his resignation due to accusations of antisemitism. Hahn has been a vocal critic of Israel and advocate for prioritizing solidarity with the Palestinian national movement, and his more controversial activities have included one online post celebrating Hamas during its massacre of Israelis on October 7th and another that featured a video depicting a Jewish Olympic athlete turning into a bomb. Such public messaging by the union’s leadership, along with a particularly strident anti-Israel turn in the official rhetoric from various chapters, have reopened this old issue, effectively requiring Jewish members to abnegate their identity as the price of membership in the labour movement.
This entire business must seem bizarre to anyone with any historical picture of organized labour. What does this have to do with maintaining strong wages for autoworkers and stevedores? But with the decline of blue-collar industries in North America over the past 50 years, unions increasingly moved in on professional-managerial-class sectors. As a result, their political interests began to converge with the progressive commitments of academics, NGOs, and certain media elements, opening unions up to a variety of broader international causes far removed from their traditional missions.
This in turn has introduced new (but also old) complications to the internal politics of the labour movement. More telling here than Hahn’s personal behaviour was CUPE’s official statement exonerating him and rejecting the arguments in favour of his ouster. The chilly formality of this response is particularly striking in light of the exquisite sensitivities the same organization has displayed for the faintest whiff of bigotry in other instances. No such deference is due to the concerns of Jewish members.
The other tell here is how quick CUPE is to equate antisemitism with “anti-Palestinian racism,” which feels rather like a red herring, given that there are no allegations of the latter in the first place. Indeed, the equation is a jarring one, given the dramatic asymmetry of the history of the former. Either way, the intent seems to be to minimize and contextualize any inconvenient indications of antisemitism.
Finally, the emphasis on “education” and “training” — the last refuge of HR scoundrels — implies that the organization is being confronted with some novel challenge requiring expert consultation. But of course, there is nothing new about antisemitism. What is new is that organized labor has made itself into a vehicle for the continuation of foreign conflicts on Canadian soil. The rise of anti-Jewish behavior, along with its tacit acceptance by major institutions, is not an expression of some atavistic hatred deep in the Ontarian soul. It is a tactic employed by those who view Jews in Canada and elsewhere as legitimate targets in the prosecution of a larger radical struggle, and it has become condoned by ideologically sympathetic organizations like CUPE despite being a distraction from its nominal mission.
This is also why Hahn’s own response to the controversy — “I utterly reject the charge of antisemitism; anyone who knows and works with me knows it to be a lie” — misses the point. The problem is not a function of what lies in the hearts of CUPE executives; it is that having merged their institution’s focus with a sectarian agenda that is itself rife with antisemitism, they have implicated organized labour in a discourse that was once foreign to it.
The result is profoundly illiberal. It involves its members with distant causes, whether they like it or not, and damages the possibility of civil disagreement (that it does so while collecting dues from those same members only adds insult to injury). And, in the certainty of its own righteousness, it licenses all manner of gross behaviour in the service of the cause — from Hahn’s tweets to the targeting of Jewish businesses in Canada by demonstrations that CUPE has officially supported. The final irony is that it does virtually nothing to benefit actual Palestinians.
It’s no accident that these illiberal tendencies are illuminated by their treatment of the Jewish question. Nor is it an accident that over the course of a decade, in which the senior figures in the labour movement prioritized every notionally progressive cause under the sun, the material fortunes of actual workers precipitously declined.
As it happens, I had a front row seat to these developments in my capacity as a member of a CUPE graduate student union. All of it was already highly apparent years ago: the obsessive focus on distant or niche political issues; the radical rhetoric out of all proportion to the material problems being discussed; and in general, a kind of revolutionary LARPing that took precedence over the more prosaic concerns of the average union member.
The difference is that I had the option of graduating and leaving these abstruse debates behind me. Many CUPE members today — Jewish and gentile both — are not so lucky.
National Post