ABSTRACT
As Karl Kautsky and the AustroMarxist Otto Bauer emphasized at the turn of the century, Zionism and Jewish nationalism stood in contradiction to the only truly progressive solution of the "Jewish question"—namely, assimilation of the Jews in the classless society of the future to be created by Socialist revolution. For if one thing united traditional left-wing thinking on the Jews (in both East and West) it was the assumption that Judaism was bound to disappear according to the laws of historical development, that the final emancipation of the Jews implied the dissolution of any Jewish group identity. The extreme left in Western societies is in fact more radical than the Soviet Union, which has been careful, even as it infects the bloodstream of its own population and that of the Third World with the antisemitic virus, to proclaim its respect for the 1948 borders of Israel.
