Jewish Freedom Fighters Were at John Brown’s Side!

There's a new term of abuse I just heard in leftwing circles: "closet tribalist." Which is to say, if history goes our way, and we really enter a postracial period, then some day 30 years from now people will denounce me regularly as a closet tribalist because I display an ugly exceptionalism about the Jewish people, and I will be some crank left over from the last great struggle. I admit it. So I'm out of the closet. And I'm working on it, comrade.

Anyway, today a closet-tribalist friend sent me the following link from the Center for Jewish History about John Brown, the radical abolitionist from Upstate New York (1800-1859):

In contrast to Brown, whose ancestors arrived in America on the Mayflower,
Bondi’s family emigrated to St. Louis in 1848, in the aftermath of an
unsuccessful democratic revolution in Austria. Bondi had been a member
of the student revolutionary movement in Vienna and his idealism
carried over to his adopted country. In 1855, he moved to Kansas to
help establish the Free State movement there.

There is of course a parallel to Jewish freedom fighters in the South in the 1960s, whom Obama extolled at AIPAC in June, and pro-Palestinian Jews like Adam Shapiro, who last night screened a documentary about the Nakba of '48 and had trouble even using the word Israel. CJH will have an exhibit on Adam Shapiro and his brave family some day (can we do some fundraising around that exhibit now?). Note that John Brown died 4 years before a Realist imposed a solution on the American south: the Emancipation Proclamation. A long struggle. But the tide is ours.