Letter to the Editor: Rachele Fruit

The Socialist Workers Party raises its working-class voice against the Jan. 15 cyberattack against the annual MLK Shabbat service at The Temple synagogue in Atlanta. This was the 13th year that the city’s Jewish and Black communities have honored together the legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Unlike any other form of racism or discrimination, anti-Jewish hatred is a unique form of scapegoating that aims to take working people’s eyes off the capitalist system as the source of the worsening conditions we face. Anti-Semitism is a mortal threat to the working class. It is one of the tools the rulers have and will again use to try to smash a rising working class movement.

For help in understanding why Jew hatred and anti-Semitic violence persist today, I urge readers to turn to “The Jewish Question: a Marxist Interpretation,” by Abram Leon, published by Pathfinder Press. Why is there “no solution to the Jewish question under capitalism, just as there is no solution to other problems before humanity,” without revolutionary struggles that will transform us as we fight to transform the world?

Leon, a communist and Polish-born Jew, wrote the book as he took part in leading the underground working-class movement in Nazi-occupied Belgium in the 1940s before being captured by the Gestapo and sent to his death in the Auschwitz gas chambers.

Today, as the boycott of the Jewish state breaks apart in the Middle East especially, there are renewed openings to press for immediate talks to recognize both Israel and a contiguous, sovereign Palestinian state and for the rights of Jews everywhere to take refuge in Israel in the face of the global rise of anti-Semitic violence.

Rachele Fruit, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Atlanta