"Marx Was a Jew" [poem by David Lehman]

"Marx Was a Jew "

It’s the turning point of The Stranger (1946),
the moment Edward G. Robinson
wakes up in the middle of the night
knowing Orson Welles gave himself away
by saying “Marx wasn’t a German,
he was a Jew.” Only a Nazi
would make the distinction, he reasons.

On the other hand, in “On the Jewish Question” (1843),
Karl Marx wrote that money is the jealous god
of the Jews, turning men into commodities,
hucksters all, look at them haggle.
“The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew,”
he wrote, and the road to a free world requires
“the emancipation of humanity from Judaism.”

So are you saying that a Jew can be anti-Semitic?
Or that the Left has a love-hate history with the Jews,
the hate reserved for (or projected onto) Israel,
itself a concept in a cloudy world of concepts
rather than a state containing millions of souls?
And along comes a smartass academic pronoun to explain
Marx’s essay is actually a critique of anti-Semitism.

-- this poem first appeared on August 20, 2024, in Tablet magazine.

Comments

[AndreiCodrescu]

so “Marx was a Jew” pops on my phone at AYANSOM Coffee on 8th st @ Sixth ave — and the barista tells me this is a Jews for Jesus coffee house — and I just read to my wandering rebbe LJ (on his way to Burning Man) the line from my poem “Where is CNNs Poppy?”: “it’s not news! Catholics kill protestants. Everybody kills the Jews” Oy. We are back on the news we never left