Posted on 02/13/2007 10:00:19 PM PST by Mount Athos
It is no secret that Jews in America have historically not favored the Republican Party. Several polls estimated that only 25 percent of Jews voted for Bush in 2004. Although disputed for of its small sample size, the National Jewish Democratic Council's 2006 poll showed only 12 percent of Jews voted for the GOP. The Jewish Community Relations Council estimated that Bush got just 19 percent of the Jewish vote in 2000.
Commentators in the Jewish community and party pollsters debate endlessly why Jews are not more favorably disposed toward the GOP. Jews are wealthier and more educated than the average American, generally oppose affirmative action and favor strong support of Israel. On these counts the GOP should, many say, have greater appeal.
Is it because Jews have an historical affinity for FDR and the party of immigrants and the "little guy"? Is it because of Jews' religious devotion to "tikkun olam" — repair of the world — which they translate to support for governmental social services? Maybe some of each but perhaps something else is at work
The dustup over the location of Mitt Romney's presidential announcement — the Henry Ford Museum — may be revealing. For Jews over the age of 40 or so, the name Ford means more than Mustangs and American innovation. Ford, of course, was a notorious anti-Semite, publisher of the International Jew (an update of the Protocols of Zion), and an apologist for Hitler who received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Hitler's Nazi government in July 1938. In many Jewish homes, owning a Ford was verboten.
He was no cultural icon.
Fast forward to today. As soon as Romney announced that he would make his presidential announcement at the Ford Museum, the accusations and statements started to fly. The National Jewish Democratic Council came out first, chastising Romney for making a pilgrimage to the site of this famous anti-Semite. Republican Jewish Coalition Executive Director Matt Brooks fired back in a press release today, saying, "I'm saddened and disappointed by the attack today by the NJDC against Gov. Romney."
Pointing out that former President Clinton had once said nice things about Ford, the RJC said that "The RJC believes that the NJDC does a disservice to Gov. Romney's strong record of support for the Jewish community and to their own reputation by their actions."
The NJDC responded, ""Presidential campaign announcements are as much about symbolism of the location as the substance of the speech. Mitt Romney went to a museum named after the most premier anti-Semite and xenophobe in American history. But his choice of location suggests that he should do his homework on basic American history."
It is doubtful either of these groups believe Romney is really an anti-Semite. Democratic consultant Dan Gerstein perhaps said it best: "I don't think Romney is guilty of anything other than obliviousness.
But you could argue that obliviousness is indicative of a broader problem with the social conservatives Romney is trying to court, which is a lack of sensitivity to the concerns many Jews have about their place in American society."
Indeed, the incident may say something not only about Romney but about the GOP's problem with Jews. In his boatload of advisers, Romney apparently did not have anyone to say, "You know, a lot of Jews really hate Ford, and it might mess up your message. Let's try Edison's lab to make a point about American innovation."
The GOP has become a rural, overwhelmingly Christian and Southern party. It is not populated by urban ethnics who, even if they aren't Jewish, understand Jews' cultural references and sensibilities. Ask an Italian New Yorker in October why the restaurants are empty, and he'll say "It's Yom Kippur, silly." You would never catch a Greek from Chicago saying, as a Republican from southern Virginia just did, that asking the state to apologize for slavery was like "asking the Jews to apologize for killing Christ."
In short, the Republicans are not just our kind of people, many Jews say. They don't sound like us, they don't talk like us and they don't understand us. Unless and until that changes, Jews likely will likely be voting overwhelmingly Democratic for years to come.
Some might say Jews have been unfairly persecuted for thousands of years, so their instinct as a people is for self-preservation.
This instinct is the basis for an affinity for an intellecutal framework -- liberalism -- which promotes perpetual discord in the United States, by means of the ACLU and big media, primarily. As long as the United States is politically conflicted and culturally directionless, it's much less likely that a mass movement like that which committed the Holocaust can form. Thus, they are safe.
That's one point of view, anyway.
Tikun Ha Olam Wiederherstellung der Weltb'shem Yah'shua
the cabbalistic conception of the Tikun Haolam—consisting of collecting the shattered pieces of a broken world and liberating the sparks (Nizot) which are encapsulated in those fragments—with the survivors’ endeavour to become anchored anew in life and to restore their shattered world in spite of the experienced destruction of their outer as well as their inner world.The repair of the world
But if you are an atheist, the accepted way is with Marxism
When humans are concentrated in large numbers, their actions inherently are more likely to affect their neighbors. The exercising of freedom is more likely to infringe the freedom of another. Therefore, more rules of conduct are needed. Since the Democrats are the socialist party, they are the ones with all the rules. Hence, city dwellers vote for them, to get the rules. My view.
That demographic fact spoils many FRObsessions.
I have worked in the automotive industry for 20 years, and there are more religious Jews employed at Ford than at the other auto companies. When I worked at GM I never saw another Jew.
People vote how they vote. You just make your choice and move on without them.
Resentment toward Henry Ford, and thus the corporation itself, is fairly common among Jews. Henry Ford was apparently very public about his antisemitism, some have not forgotten.
Very funny, but true. When I point this out to my liberal friends, they sputter.
So they drive BMWs and Mercedes instead. Makes sense :-)
Since 79% of Americans are urban dwellers, I find your theory wanting.
While it's true that enough city dwellers have at times voted for Republicans to ensure their victories, their tendency is still to vote left of rural dwellers, as the red/blue maps of the last presidential elections made so clear. My theory is certainly unverified, though I like its logic, but there is no arguing the voting patterns.
That urban dwellers vote left and vote Democrat in higher proportions than do rural dwellers is beyond question, I believe. The red/blue maps show pretty conclusively that all the large urban areas in the US went Dem in the last 2 presidential elections.
Luckily, we (still) have the Electoral College, which gives greater weight to rural areas than actual population would seem to dictate. Our founding fathers found a way to prevent one area of the country, the urban in this case, from running roughshod over everyone else's interests. So we can still elect a conservative president, luckily.
A major reason for the distrust among American Jews of conservative Christians stems from their background in central and eastern Europe, in nations where the predominant brands of Christianity are Catholic, Lutheran, and Eastern Orthodox. Nationalist and traditionalist political movements in those nations tended to be anti-Semitic to one degree or another, whether it was the Black Hundreds of Tsarist Russia, the Arrow Cross movement in Hungary, or the Iron Guard movement in Romania. The most extreme anti-Semitic movement in that region was the nationalist (although not traditionalist, but neo-pagan) National Socialists of Germany. Most American Jews are the descendants of people who left Eastern and Central Europe before World War I, when these nationalist movements were on the rise. In the aftermath of the rise of Hitler and World War II, a smaller, but significant, wave of Holocaust survivors arrived in America.
Even in the United States, nationalist and Christian oriented groups in the period between the World Wars, like the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the Silver Shirts and the Christian Front in the 1930s, and men strongly identified with those groups, like Henry Ford, Charles Coughlin, and Gerald L.K. Smith, blamed the Jews or Jewish influences for many of the problems of the country.
The post-World War II conservative movement was largely free of these influences, and several of its leaders, such as Frank Meyer and Milton Friedman, were of Jewish background. The most prominent conservative political leader, Barry Goldwater, was an Episcopalian with paternal Jewish ancestry. However, the conspiracist fringe of conservatism espoused theories of international intrigue (e.g., the 1971 book promoted by the John Birch Society, None Dare Call It Conspiracy) that seemed like the old Nazi and Tsarist tales of Jewish intrigue, sanitized of overt anti-Semitism. Additionally, even the mainstream conservative movement, even while it rejected and mocked the conspiracists, was never fully comfortable with the state of Israel, due to the socialist faction involved in its founding and the movement's financial and historical links with the oil and gas industry (William Buckley's father was an oil man), with its ties to Middle Eastern energy production.
The Democrats, OTOH, had a strong history of support for Israel. Harry Truman immediately recognized Israel's independence, to the chagrin of Arabists in the State Department, including his own close adviser, Dean Acheson. President Johnson strongly supported the Israelis in the Six Day War of 1967, vs. Eisenhower's opposition to the attempt by the British, French, and Israelis to seize the Suez Canal in 1956. Even the buffoonish draft dodger, Bill Clinton, told a Jewish audience that if Israel were threatened, he would grab a rifle and go into the trenched to defend that nation.
Unlike the fundamentalists and evangelicals in the U.S., who have been strongly influenced by dispensational eschatology, which holds that God's promises made to the Jewish nation in the Old Testament are still valid in the church age, Catholics, Lutherans, and Eastern Orthodox believers adhere to the position that the promises are invalid in the present age and that the Christian church has inherited the promises made to national Israel. This position is called covenantal, or replacement, theology.
Calvinism, like the other Christian groups, also holds to covenantal theology; however, Calvinist states, like Holland, England, and several American colonies, tolerated and respected Jews and their religion, even though, in England and the Northern colonies (except Pennsylvania), Catholicism and groups like the Quakers were suppressed by law during the 17th and 18th Centuries. Dispensationalism is, to a great extent, an offshoot of Calvinism, as its early leaders, like Scofield, Chafer, Ironside, etc., were former Presbyterians or Congregationalists. Like the Calvinists, the dispensationists supported a literal interpretation of the Bible under the principle of Scripture interpreting Scripture, as opposed to the primacy of prior church teachings, the method preferred by Catholics, Eastern Orthodox believers, and, to a lesser extent, Lutherans. They applied this principle to the area of eschatology and developed several positions, such as the premillenial return of Christ, a Rapture of believers taking place prior to the Second Coming, and the continuing validity of the divine covenant with the Jewish nation, that were distinct from the other branches of Christianity. Dispensationalism spread very widely beyond its Calvinist roots into Arminian Baptist groups, as well as charismatics and Pentecostalists. By 1960, dispensationalism became the majority camp among American evangelicals and fundamentalists.
The strong support for Israel among the evangelicals and fundamentalists impacted conservatism with the rise of the Christian Right. The second strand of conservative support arose in the neo-conservative movement, made up of former liberals who rejected the excesses of the Great Society, the antiwar movement, and the counterculture, and came in time to agree with some of the provisions of American conservatism. Many of its leaders, such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, were of Jewish background, although their influence is evident in many non-Jewish politicians such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. These two elements of the conservative movement transformed American conservatism from at best lukewarm support for Israel to strong advocacy of its right to exist.
However, it appears the more recent history of American conservatism has not registered with the Christian community. Like it or not, many American Jews see Pat Robertson or John Hagee, pro-Zionist though they may be, and visualize the shades of Henry Ford or Charles Coughlin. I don't know that this problem can be overcome through persuasion. Unfortunately, Jewish opinion will change only if a future Democratic Administration seriously betrays Israel or does little or nothing to stop domestic anti-Semitism from American blacks or Middle Eastern immigrants.
Read post 46 and 85 please.
Agreed, there is more to it than that. But I do think the urban tendency to be left of rural dwellers in voting at least contributes.
Why? Its the same logic being applied to get to those demands.
Exactly....
However, it appears the more recent history of American conservatism has not registered with the Christian community. should read However, it appears the more recent history of American conservatism has not registered with the Jewish community at large.
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