The State As A Rootless Transient (Mark Steyn On Israeli Jews As The Pepe Le Pew Of Mankind Alert)

Jerusalem Post ^ | 08/07/06 | Mark Steyn

[goldstategop]

The Jews are now blamed for being "too European," "too cosmopolitan," "too Western" - in a word, uppity. Uppity for having their own state and having the temerity to insist on behaving like every other nation on earth. There's the irony in the current view of the Jew: once despised as outsiders, they're now despised as the ultimate insiders. Damn them for their pushiness! Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, though eliminating Jewish homelessness would win the Jews more acceptance and esteem. If anything, it earned them more hatred and scorn now that they do have a nationality. No matter what Jews do, it never quite seems to be enough to change their condition as the Pepe Le Pew of mankind. For me personally, Czernowitz is a place that has ancestral echoes. I see my father's family refracted back to that place where they once in lived in Mark Steyn's brilliant essay on how the Jew now extinct there, now in Israel with an independent nationality is still perceived as a subject the world talks about either in drunken rants or hushed whispers and not at all in a sense meant to be complimentary.

(Go Israel, Go! Slap 'Em Down Hezbullies.)

[Lurker]

With hindsight, even the artful invention of the hitherto unknown ethnicity of "Palestinian"

I see that the inestimable Mr. Steyn got my letter.

L

[prov1813man]

I am sure I have asked this before. So please be patient, since I still don't have the answer.

Why are American Jews predominantly democrat/liberal when the American right in general and President Bush in particular are the best friends Israel has ever had ?

[Mr Ramsbotham]

In Moab on a mountain once,
I took my stave in hand,
And gazed out wistfully upon
The hoped-for promised land.
Then bade me Death my eyes to close,
And drew me far away,
Behind a rampant stallion,
In heaven’s formless dray.
When here I stopped, in bonds of flesh,
I bound myself to earth,
Again (who have with Pharaoh walked)
To know the dread of birth.
And have I come thus, far in time,
My bootless rod in hand,
To sigh upon a mountain-top,
For you, my Promised Land?

[goldstategop]

I'm sure you have. Its that baggage from Europe. Jews carry it like a memory and things are slow to change. Jews are changing but I wouldn't look for a change in partisan identification/political outlook til much of the 60s radical generation is gone.

(Go Israel, Go! Slap 'Em Down Hezbullies.)

[Lorianne]

Interesting. Thanks for posting this.

[okie01]

Once again, Steyn has made a profound point with grace and wit.

This piece was like the movie which leaves the audience stunned and speechless at the end, resulting in a palpable pause before the audience starts to file out...silently.

Thanks for the post.

[yatros from flatwater]

Why are American Jews predominantly democrat/liberal...? Here's Don Feder's answer.

[AZLiberty]

The situation has flipped. It's now the stateless Muslims who are insinuating their way into European countries. The real threat of Islamism has replaced the imagined threat of Zionism.

[syriacus]

For me, it comes down to these three facts...
1. Israelis make good neighbors
2. Members of Hizb'allah don't make good neighbors
3. It's a small, small world.

[expatpat]

Who wrote that?

[goldstategop]

There's also the fact most secular American Jews are liberal and for them liberalism is their religion. Its replaced Judaism and they do not think for the most part, first and foremost as Jews. They think as liberals and that explains the continued voting loyalty of most American Jews to the Democratic Party, even when it runs counter to Jewish interests in both continued Jewish survival and in Israel's welfare.

(Go Israel, Go! Slap 'Em Down Hezbullies.)

[xzins]

There is no rational basis for it that I can think of other than that a democratic administration was in charge of fighting WWII. That was the dawn of 20th century democratic party power, and it probably had a lot to do with Jewish support of democrats, and then liberals, and then socialists.

[TChad]

Why are American Jews predominantly democrat/liberal when the American right in general and President Bush in particular are the best friends Israel has ever had ?

Some American Jews see the religious right as Jew-hating fanatics.

[garbanzo]

This isn't about who's right and who's wrong: there are regional flare-ups all over the map and, regardless of the rights and wrongs, for the most part the world just sits back and lets them get on with it.

You can pretty much throw a dart blindfolded at a map of subsaharan Africa and find a spot in crisis or warfare or upheaval but that's no crisis, as far as Europe or the rest of the world is concerned. No UN-sponsored cease-fire agreements, no wall-to-wall coverage on CNN. It's apparantly just the Israel question that needs to be decided by outsiders.

[caspera]

Upwards of 70% of the religious right are fully supportive of Israel in the current conflict. With enemies like that, who needs friends?

[yatros from flatwater]

Indeed, the Democratic Party is THE secularist party. So, that secular Jews find a political home there is hardly surprising. If one no longer trusts G-d, then one builds a 'god' of the state.

[Civ]

I think this is changing.

When I was 14 years old (I'm Jewish), my grandparents got me a subscription to The Nation, which, as you may know, is a far-left publication that is sacred to many liberals.

By the time I was 19, I was a College Republican, and an assistant editor for a conservative monthly campus paper.

Now, 14 years later, I have convinced my dad and other members of my family to vote GOP, at least in the national election.

Socialism runs deep in Jewish families. It's not an antisemitic slur when someone mentions that Marx and Trotsky and many others were Jews. The concept of the kibbutz, of communal living, of sharing and working in family units once drew many Jews to the left. Moreover, there was a strain of conservative that, up until 20 years ago, wasn't very friendly to Jews.

The net result is that the left has benefited greatly from Jewish volunteers and from money from Jewish donors. We tend to be very active politically (we have to be), and with a lot of successfully Jewish professionals and businessmen (and women), there are a lot of financial resources there.

But in the last 15 years, things have changed. A rabidly antisemitic left that has found common cause with radical Islam means that, except for the most deluded, this love-affair between the Jews and the left is over.

[Alouette]

FRmail me to be added or removed from this Judaic/pro-Israel/Russian Jewry ping list.

Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.

[TChad]

Upwards of 70% of the religious right are fully supportive of Israel in the current conflict. With enemies like that, who needs friends?

I don't think that the viewpoint is particularly rational, and I don't know how widely held it is. The other side of the coin is that Jews know that they don't have to vote Republican to receive Republican support for Israel.

That said, I wonder how many American Jews really give a damn about Israel. I've known quite a few Jews who didn't seem to care about Israel, or even about Judaism.