Posted on 09/08/2009 4:01:29 AM PDT by Scanian
Norman Podhoretz's extraordinary new book --"Why Are Jews Liberals?" - is a reflection on the question he says he has been asked more often than any other: why do so many Jews cling to the Left and vote in such extraordinary percentages for the Democratic Party?
The book offers an historical and cultural analysis, addressing in the first half how the Jews became liberals and in the second half why they still are. Podhoretz concludes with a chapter devoted to "what I believe really explains why American Jews are still committed to liberalism" -- and it is an answer that goes far beyond the usual explanations involving the Jewish commitment to repairing the world, the historic anti-Semitism on the Right, and the heritage of FDR.
Those explanations are relevant, but in the end insufficient. Podhoretz is after a deeper answer, something that will explain the propensity of Jews to vote regularly against what might well be perceived as their own self-interest, and their seemingly congenital unwillingness to align themselves not simply with the Republican Party, but with conservatives at all.
Nowhere is that conundrum more apparent than in the general Jewish reaction to the support of Israel by the religious Right. Podhoretz writes that:
Most Jews, including most Jewish liberals, care deeply about the security of Israel, and there is no group in America (not even the Jews themselves) that is more passionate in its support of Israel than the conservative Christian community. Yet instead of forging a political alliance with this community, Jewish liberals look for ways to justify their refusal to do so. At the same time, they are perfectly willing to make common cause with the "mainline" denominations, despite the fact that unfriendliness and even outright hostility to Israel have become pervasive in that sector of the Protestant world.
The answer to how Jews have ended up in this pretzel of political positions turns out to be "a very long and complicated story" -- one requiring a knowledge of history going back much further than the FDR administration, which served as the formative American political experience for a generation of Jewish immigrants and then was passed on from generation to generation.
Podhoretz tells the story with short, fact-filled chapters, describing the evolution of Jews into liberals over nearly 2,000 years of history, through the Jewish relationship to Christian society, the secular world that appeared to welcome them in the Enlightenment, and the modern phenomenon of political anti-Semitism -- "three great and related puzzles in the story of how and why Jews became and have remained so attached to the Left." It is in fact a complex story, involving the relationship of Jews to Christianity, to their own Jewishness, and to the outside worlds in which they found themselves.
One of Podhoretz's trademark literary virtues is letting the story tell itself, through frequent use of primary sources that enable readers to judge the narrative for themselves without reliance solely on the author, and to experience it more directly. Podhoretz quotes, for example, the advice given to the Jews of his time by Moses Mendelssohn, the 18th century German Jew who was the father of the Jewish "Haskalah" (Enlightenment) movement that responded to the new religion of Reason:
"Adopt the mores and constitution of the country in which you find yourself, but be steadfast in upholding the religion of your fathers, too. Bear both burdens as well as you can. True, on the one hand, people make it difficult for you to bear the burden of civil life because of the religion to which you remain faithful; and, on the other hand, the climate of our time makes the observance of your religious laws in some respects more burdensome than it need be. Persevere nevertheless; stand fast in the place which Providence has assigned to you."
It is advice that, with the hindsight of the subsequent Jewish experience in Europe, has a special poignancy that Mendelssohn himself could obviously never have imagined. Within that short quotation is an abundance of issues whose history must be recounted in order to address the question that is the title of Podhoretz's book.
Stopped right there. Hitler was left - case closed.
Considering the author, all he needs to do is ask himself or ask at the dinner table.
yes, but his supporters here (prior to WW II) weree on the right.
Also, Most of the US Jews came over from Russia at the end of the 19th C and supported the communists when they overthrew the czar.
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