The Jewish left has never much cared for Rosa Luxemburg. It was alleged that she was insufficiently Jewish—an assimilationist or, worse still, a self-loathing Jew. The proof-positive is a letter to her close friend in which she disclaimed a partisanship to the “special suffering of the Jews.”
I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the Blacks in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch…. [Their cries] resound within me so strongly that I have no special place in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.
Ever-brooding social critic Michael Walzer poured scorn on this passage: it was Rosa’s falsely prideful declaration that “she had made the … break with her own past and her own people; now her heart was equally open to everyone’s sorrows.” But did she distance herself from “her own people”? Rosa’s collected works are currently being translated into English. One volume is devoted to her chronicle of the 1905-6 Russian revolution.[1] This popular insurgency was met with brutal repression by the Russian autocracy. One of
— source normanfinkelstein.com | Norman Finkelstein | Jan 15, 2023