I have written countless times about how
many North American Jews are liberals first and foremost but just happened to
have been born Jewish. This is really the primary explanation for why so many
Jews vote Democrat in the US and Liberal in Canada.
I also believe that assimilation (and
assimilating into the religion of liberalism) is today’s Jewish utopianism.
Instead of facing the hard and harsh realities of anti-Semitism, looking
squarely at where it is now coming from and being realistic about how to deal
with it, most left-leaning Jews prefer to bury themselves in a cloak of
assimilation. It’s Joseph and His Multicoloured Multicultural Dreamcoat. And it
is a dream-more like a fantasy that will always end up in a nightmare.
No matter how much Jews assimilate,
Jew-haters will still see them as Jewish first. Many try to buy and assimilate
their way out of their Jewish identities but it never really works. Even when
Jewish nationhood is at risk, and when the Jewish state and the Jewish people
face repeated existential threats, they defer to their liberalism, rather than
their Jewish roots.
Here is an example of a Jew deferring to
the Holy Grail of liberalism (abortion), Debbie
Wasserman Schultz who cannot find a single reason for Jews to support Obama,
other than the abortion issue.
I do not think for a moment that vast
numbers of Jews are going to abandon the Democratic party and liberalism completely,
or even partially. However, there are some interesting things happening with
respect to Jews and politics in America, and clearly, I’m not the only person
noticing them.
This is a very interesting piece by
Lawrence Solomon in the National Post that suggests that Jews are getting
miffed with Obama for publicly villainizing the wealthy, yet wanting and still
expecting a steady stream of Jewish wealth to flow into his re-election
coffers. (The
Obama wedding registry has apparently been a bust.)
It should not surprise
anyone that this is a more polarizing issue for these Jews than Obama’s disdain
for Israel. Most liberal “solutions” require vast amounts of other people’s
money to “fix”.
Unfortunately, the Obama campaign cannot even
spell “Israel” correctly.
Now this article also deserves your
attention. The
Pritzker family is forsaking Obama.
This is quite a significant
development. No mention of Israel in the article, but I suspect this might be
an issue for the philanthropic family.
Lastly,
I would urge you to read this very
thoughtful piece by Rabbi Dov Fischer. It is absolutely excellent.
He asks: So why do so many American
Jews not get it?
(He answers the question, too.)
I
actually can’t pick out my favourite nugget because the whole piece is
excellent.
But here’s one good one:
“Centuries of
anti-Semitism bred in many Jews a desperate need to find ways to escape the
hate -- or just to escape their Jewishness. The kind of irrational
hate that sees a person targeted from the moment of birth, no matter what he
does or believes the rest of his life, leads to many reasonable and many other
strange strategies aiming at just being left alone. One painful approach that
gained sway among children of the American Jewish immigrants a century ago was
to assimilate into America's "melting pot," to move away from
authentic Jewish teaching and practice, the ways of Torah life, and to try
hiding among the greater population.”
Exactly.
Here’s one of
the best summaries and de-bunking of the “Jews loyal the Democrats because of
FDR” memes that I have ever seen:
“Through a quirk of modern history,
American Jews mistakenly misinterpreted an historical coincidence as reflecting
that Roosevelt was their friend. Because Adolph Hitler was elected
Germany's Chancellor in March 1933, only months after Roosevelt led a liberal
sweep of the White House when he won his first term in November 1932, a
false coincidental perception arose among the large body of uninformed American
Jewish immigrants that the liberal FDR was a freedom fighter courageously
leading the war against the Jew-hater Hitler. In reality, FDR was
nothing of the sort."
“However, he just-so-happened to be
President on December 7, 1941 when Japan hit Pearl Harbor nine years after his
first election, and he consequently was left with no choice but to defend
America militarily against the Japan-Mussolini-Hitler axis. So a quirk
of history convinced the unsophisticated that liberals are the bulwarks against
tyrannical Jew-haters.”
“Once liberalism had set in among
American Jews, they naively passed their liberalism down to their kids...”
The
good Rabbi thinks the tides are changing. I hope he’s right. There is
certainly an interesting ebb and flow in the news nowadays about the Jews, politics and the upcoming American elections.
We’ll
see how things play out.
Stay tuned.
