Liberal guilt.
Why did NY Jewish voters oust Sen. Damato who did more for the Jewish people of NY than anyone, in favor of Chuckie Schumer?
I voted Bush and I am a jewish voter. I can't imagine why any jew would vote Kerry unless he or she were against the right of Israel to exist and defend itself. If you are pro-Israel, you should consider Bush to be your best friend.
Both saddening, maddening, and so predictable.
Much like that person you know that you dare not ask "how are you doing?" ... for fear they will tell you and tell you and ... ;)
Too many years of worshipping at the feet of FDR, who saved them from the Germans. The Jews as a group have never realized that FDR didn't give a fat rats' behind about them. So they vote 'Rat today out of loyalty to FDR.
In the voice of Tevye from 'Fiddler on the Roof'...
Tradition!
Where is the data that supports your theory?
And what is the excuse for tens of millions of non-Jews who voted for the party of appeasement after the WTC was knocked down and the pentagon was attacked?
Why? Because sadly they fear Christian conservatives more than they fear militant Arabs.
Death wish.
Jews have one thing in common with the Republican elephant, very long memories.
Well, if you really want to know why...it's just tradition that the majority vote 'liberal'.
Bush did, as did Reagan, very well among Orthodox and Conservative Jews.
Without Jews Bush would have lost Florida.
The Jew-obsessed need to get lives.
They didn't "reject" Bush per se; they just voted for the democratic party, or against the republican party, whichever way you want to look at it. If Bush was a democrat and Kerry a republican I daresay the result might very well have been flipped around.
http://www.thejewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=4996
The Bush Conundrum: Why America`s Most Pro-Israel President Is Reviled By American Jews
By Hillel Halkin
What is it with American Jews? No one expects them to become Republicans or to rejoice that George W. Bush is in the White House. But why do so many of them revile him so?
I was in America last month, along with Ariel Sharon. That is, I wasn`t actually with Mr. Sharon, who was at President Bush`s Texas ranch. But while Israel`s prime minister was as usual getting the warmest possible reception from the president, the American Jews I talked to were as hostile to Mr. Bush as ever.
Most of them simply couldn`t abide the man. Indeed, they seemed less able to abide him now than they could when he was elected in 2000 or reelected in 2004.
“But why is that?” I said to one of them after another — all political liberals, many of them academics, all Jewishly knowledgeable and committed people. “You don`t have to love Bush in order to see what he`s done for Israel. He`s the first American president to adopt the Israeli position that meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians cannot be held as long as Palestinian terror persists. He`s the first president to agree with Israel that Palestinian democratization must be an integral part of the peace process and to prove he meant it by shunning Yasir Arafat. He`s the first president to side with Israel on the question of its future borders by stating that all areas of the West Bank in which Jewish settlers are heavily concentrated should be incorporated into Israel.
“And needless to say,” I went on, “Bush has also been the first president to order the military dismantling of an Arab dictatorship that was a strategic threat to Israel. The toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, though this was not its primary intention, has contributed more to Israel’s security than any other presidential act since the Nixon administration’s arms airlift during the 1973 war.”
The fact is that, in regard to Israel, Mr. Bush has been the kind of president that one would once have considered an impossibility. Given America`s global interests, and its economic stake in the Arab Middle East, it has always been axiomatic that the best Jews could hope for from an American government was a balanced approach toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. The optimum was a president who, like Lyndon Johnson or Ronald Reagan, had enough sympathy for Israel to keep from tilting toward the Arabs rather than a president like Dwight Eisenhower or Jimmy Carter who didn`t. A president who was openly and unabashedly pro-Israel was quite simply unimaginable.
And yet, as I kept repeating to my Jewish interlocutors, this is exactly what George W. Bush has been.
“But he`s imposed a radical right-wing Christian agenda on America!” they retorted.
“He`s wrecked the economy to give tax breaks to the rich!”
“He`s out to destroy Social Security!”
“He has the worst record on the environment ever!”
“Let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re right about every one of those things,” I tried answering. “There`s still Israel. Doesn`t his stand on it mean anything to you?”
“I don’t believe it’s real!”
“He`s just backing Sharon — and I don`t trust Sharon either!”
“Just wait and see: When the disengagement from Gaza is over, he`ll show his true colors!”
There was no arguing with them. The president just can`t do anything right, not even when he backs Israel to the hilt.
Where does this animus come from? It`s clearly more than a matter of American Jews’ economically paradoxical Democratic predilections, as summed up by Milton Himmelfarb’s famous quip that Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans. Jews didn`t vote for Nixon or Reagan either, but they never despised them.
Nor is it just (even if Jews don’t wear cowboy boots) George W. Bush`s Texas accent — Lyndon Johnson had a heavier one. It`s not merely the president’s small-town folksiness, either; Bill Clinton came from Little Rock and could sound like an Ozark hick when he wanted to. It`s not even just Mr. Bush’s religious beliefs. Jimmy Carter, after all, was a born-again Christian too, and though American Jews were never in love with him, neither did he ever give them nightmares.
What it is, I think, is a combination of all these things. Any one or two of them are Jewishly tolerable. But take them all together — Republican, Christian, populist, small-town-America — and you get a mixture that sends instinctive shivers down Jewish spines. You might call it the fear of the rural redneck, except that rednecks in America have never done Jews any harm. It’s more the age-old fear that the image of the redneck inspires — which is to say, the fear of the non-Jewish Other, of the Polish or Ukrainian peasant, of the anti-Semitic goy.
In America today this is largely an unconscious fear, and even Jewish Bush-haters are not so absurd as to think of the president as anti-Semitic. Yet they do perceive many of his voters as being potentially if not actively so, and deep down, in the atavistic corners of their souls, they do not believe that the Christian Right can be anything but.
The fact that the Christian Right in America descends from the one branch of Christianity that has historically been not anti- but philo-Semitic — that of the dissenting English Protestant sects of the post-Reformation and of the American Puritanism that grew out of them — is lost on America`s Jews.
If it weren`t, they would understand that George W. Bush has been so pro-Israel not in spite of who he is but because of it. Then they might give him credit for being arguably the best president that the Jews of America have ever had.
Hillel Halkin is a prolific author and columnist living in Israel. His work has appeared in a number of publications including Commentary and The New York Sun, where this column originally appeared.
these would be the same folks to "support" a National Socialist Democratic Workers Party. In order to insure security they would be willing to have "religious extremist" locked up, take guns out of the hands of citizens and generally put down anybody willing to die for freedom.
They are the descendants of the people you've seen on the old grainy video that show men jogging to the end of an open pit and standing in front of it while the Germans gun them down. They are the descendants of the "Good Germans" that willingly got unto the cattle cars refusing to fight. They refused to fight for fear of fighting and refused to leave for fear of losing their "monetary stuff".
Liberal Guilt, you see they can't help themselves. They are no more "Jewish" than black americans are "African". They've got to realize that their best hope for freedom is with conservatives.
I also might point out that Ken Mehlman, head of the RNC is Jewish. As is Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, William Safire, Dorothy Rabinowitz, and lots of other Conservative journalists and pundits.
Anbody remember a guy named Lieberman?
I grew up on Long Island, in educational circles. I knew and spent a long time talking to lots of Jews about their lives (as an evangelical, I always was interested in their spiritual lives).
My guess would be educational elitism. Jews worship education. They will impoverish themselves to educate their kids. They are culturally tied into the liberal/college attitude.
I once met a Jewish woman who had two sons. One was a athlete, one a thoracic surgeon. She would always sigh before saying the first ones name.