From Communist to Neoconservative: The Ethnic Blindness of David Aaronovitch
A sepia-tinted picture of life in the Communist Party in post-war London is painted in Party Animals, a memoir by neoconservative journalist David Aaronovitch whose father was a full-time communist organiser and whose non-Jewish mother was equally staunch.
Today Aaronovitch is a fashionable neoconservative who backed Britain’s involvement in George W Bush’s wars and now rails against a variety of predictable targets from boycotts of Israel to Vladimir Putin. He flits easily from perch to perch in the establishment media and is currently a feature writer with The Times.
It is a fairly predictable progression for this modern day establishment figure. His family lived in the well-to-do, leafy Hampstead in a neighbourhood filled with like-minded Jewish families. The Communist Party life was a world within a world with its own travel agencies, daily newspapers, and bookshops. There were party doctors, dentists, plumbers — all overwhelmingly Jewish. It was a Jewish subculture of the sort that sprang up throughout the Jewish diaspora in the West: The comrades were born into it, married within it, and died within it. And yet the strangest thing is that no-one ever seems to have asked — “Hang on? Why is everyone Jewish? Isn’t this all a bit like a Polish shtetl?” Read more






