ABSTRACT
After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the foreign-born Jewish intellectual then directing American foreign policy paid his first visit to Saudi Arabia, where Henry Kissinger was obliged to listen to what was widely known as King "Faisal's standard speech. Its basic proposition was that Jews and Communists were working in parallel, now together, to undermine the civilized world as we knew it". In the late 1920s the Comintern supported Arab rioters against Jewish settlers in Palestine. In the 1930s the Stalinist purges claimed uncounted thousands of innocent Jewish victims, and Foreign Minister Molotov proclaimed in 1939 that Fascism was merely "a question of taste". The Jewish contribution to radicalism is all the more striking because of its unattractiveness to so many other Americans. In the United States, intellectuals were less driven to such extremism; but their presence gave the Jewish labor movement much of its distinctiveness.
