The term "Jewish left" describes Jews who identify with or support left wing, occasionally liberal causes, consciously as Jews, either as individuals or through organizations. There is no one organization or movement which constitutes the "Jewish left," however. Jews have been major forces in the history of the labor movement, the settlement house movement, the women's rights movement, anti-racist work, and anti-fascist organizing of many forms in Europe, the United States and modern-day Israel.

The Jewish people have a rich history of involvement in socialism, Marxism, and Western liberalism. Although the expression "on the left" covers a range of politics, many well-known figures "on the left" have been of Jews, for instance, Karl Marx, Moses Hess, Herbert Marcuse, Murray Bookchin, Saul Alinsky, Tristan Tzara, Leon Trotsky, Leon Blum, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Eric Hobsbawm, Harold Laski, Betty Friedan, Abbie Hoffman, or Howard Zinn, who were born into Jewish families and have various degrees of connection to Jewish communities, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition or the Jewish religion in its many variants. It also includes such people as rabbis Michael Lerner and Arthur Waskow: religiously devout and culturally identified Jews. It includes as well many secular, cosmopolitan people who nonetheless remain connected to Jewish culture, such as Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, Rose Schneiderman, Muriel Rukeyser and Susan Sontag. Views regarding Zionism among those either identified or self-identified as being among the Jewish left can be quite varied, and are often independent of their other political and social views.

Ronald Radosh (b. 1937, New York City) is an American writer, professor, historian, former Marxist, and neoconservative. He is known for his work on the Cold War espionage case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and his advocacy of the state of Israel.

His most recent book, co-authored with his wife, scholar Allis Radosh, is "A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel", published by HarperCollins in 2009.

Radosh was born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His parents, Reuben Radosh and Ida Kretschman, were Jewish immigrants from Russia. He has stated that his earliest memory is of being taken to a May Day parade in New York's Union Square.

During the 1940s and 1950s, he attended the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School, both of which were private schools attended mainly by the children of New York's Communists. He also attended the Communist-run Camp Woodland for Children in the Catskill Mountains. His memoirs vividly describe school-day encounters with Mary Travers, Woody Guthrie and Peter Seeger. On June 19, 1953 he demonstrated in Union Square with other members of the Labor Youth League against the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Michael Walzer (pronounced /ˈwɔːlzər/; March 3, 1935) is a prominent American political philosopher and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, he is co-editor of Dissent, an intellectual magazine that he has been affiliated with since his years as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics, including just and unjust wars, nationalism, ethnicity, economic justice, social criticism, radicalism, tolerance, and political obligation and is a contributing editor to The New Republic. To date, he has written 27 books and published over 300 articles, essays, and book reviews in Dissent, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, "Harpers," and many philosophical and political science journals.

Moishe Postone (b. 1942) is a professor of History at the University of Chicago, where he is part of the Committee on Jewish Studies.

He received his Ph.D. from Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in 1983. His research interests include modern European intellectual history; social theory, especially critical theories of modernity; twentieth-century Germany; Anti-Semitism; and contemporary global transformations. He is editor of Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives and author of Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory. He is also co-editor with Eric Santner of Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, a collection of essays that consider the meaning of the holocaust in twentieth-century history and its influence on historical practice. Postone's work has had a large influence on the Anti-Germans (communist current). He was originally denied tenure by the University of Chicago's Sociology Department, but later granted it by the History Department.

Harvey E. Klehr (born December 25, 1945) is a professor of politics and history at Emory University; he is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist movement, and on Soviet espionage in America (many written jointly with John Earl Haynes).

He was born in Newark, New Jersey. He received his undergraduate degree from Franklin and Marshall College in 1967, and his doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1971.

He has received a number of awards, including Emory's Thomas Jefferson Award (in 1999). He was a member of the National Council on the Humanities, served a term that expired in 2010.