If you’re Jewish, and you move in politically conservative Gentile circles, you will eventually get The Question. No, not why you don’t believe Jesus was the Messiah, why you haven’t moved to Israel, not why you keep kosher even though we now have refrigeration.
No, the question is “why….”
And I wearily respond, even before they have finished asking their question, “I don’t know why.” I know they are asking, despite all the evidence suggesting a different course of action would be wise, why a large majority of American Jews still vote Democratic. It has never been more perplexing in this year, when a former president who did so much for Israeli security, whose own daughter is an observant Jew, whose granddaughter’s bat mitzvah was held at Mar-a-Lago, is facing off against a party that is celebrating and humoring pro-terrorism in its ranks. The only prominent Jewish politicians to speak at the DNC convention this week will be the tame ones who don’t harp on Israel let alone the tolerance of anti-Semitism by key Dem Party constituencies. Senator Fetterman, who is not Jewish, is staying away, to his credit.
You will see nothing at the DNC convention of sincere American patriotism let alone the commitment to Zionism, Israel, and the hostages that permeated the Republican convention. The media probably will not televise the intifadist speeches, which will at best be slathered under moral equivalency, as if the savages who burned families alive in their homes and beheaded a man with a hoe are the same as Israelis who let every Gazan civilian know they’re in danger before the bombs start.
All right, back to the Question. Historians say that medieval Jews trusted the king to protect them from bloodthirsty lords, leading to ingrained affection for the State. Or I could blame the romanticism of early 20th century immigrants and unionists who loved FDR, even as he refused to bomb the railway tracks to Auschwitz. The love affair with his welfare state has outlasted the need of most American Jews to rely on its benevolence. During the civil rights movement, Jews gladly allied with black Americans to demonstrate our goodwill under the umbrella of alleged shared marginalization.
Most American Jews still see themselves as victims or part of the kaleidoscope of oppressed groups. But most non-Jewish Americans find this claim to victimization dubious, given that we are more prosperous and educated than the general public, and have played outsized roles in government, business, and the arts. When a moronic DC city councilman from the city’s poorest ward accused the Rothschilds of manipulating the weather to make money, the liberal Jewish elites forced him to visit the Holocaust Museum, trying to get him to realize, “oh, the Jews are oppressed too.” He escaped quickly to text on the sidewalk. He wasn’t buying it. (this week he has been indicted for bribery, which I would link to his stupidity rather than to the vengeance of Jehovah).
Until last year, no one could claim that the government—federal or local—was oppressing Jews or allowing such oppression to occur.
After the evil of 7 October, if anything we expected justice. Terrorists are bad, right? Israel is our longstanding ally, right? Didn’t anyone remember the patriotic consensus after 9/11? It turned out 22 years is a long time, and young people indoctrinated in public schools, with no knowledge of the Bible and almost none of world history, were susceptible to hate-filled invective and feel-good protesting. The doctrine of Intersectionality had occupied heads largely empty of more serious ideas, let alone what river and sea they were screaming about. The chaos on campuses and the deprivation of civil rights have largely met with US government indifference, except for some Republican congressmen who have at least called hearings. The Democrats even snubbed Prime Minister Netanyahu when he visited Washington in July.
The irony is that liberal Jews had no objection to intersectionality writ large, with its insistence on a world divided into the virtuous oppressed and the privileged oppressors. They had staffed the institutions through which Intersectionality had marched. They had lent their support to blacks, gays, feminists, Hispanics, refugees, Asians, and yes, Muslims. Now the time had come to lay claim to the support of their Intersectional Allies.
And it did not come. If anything, those allies revealed a vicious anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that had never been voiced in this country, even in the era of Gentleman’s Agreement. They voiced it under the rubric of Intersectionality, but this time Israel was the Oppressor, as was anyone who defended it, and the Palestinians were the Virtuous, no matter how many women Hamas had raped and abused, or how many children its “militants” had dragged into their subterranean lairs.
I watched knowingly, ruefully, as my bewildered Jewish friends lamented their abandonment. They just didn’t get it. I was in a better frame of mind, since I had the support of dozens of friends and social media contacts who adopted Israeli flags as their avatars, and put said flags in their yards. This was no surprise; it corresponded to the existing division between American patriots on one hand and vicious Marxist mobs on the other.
Last week, I attended a meeting of our synagogue’s Sisterhood Board. During our usual “good and welfare” finale, I told my Sisters that my husband and I were about to go to Israel for a mission sponsored by the Jewish National Fund, the famous Zionist organization best known for planting trees in Israel. I noted that I would tell Israelis that headlines notwithstanding, most Americans supported their cause.
And then the woman who wore a pro-abortion T-shirt in rainbow colors (I don’t make these things up) essentially said, “great for Israel, but we have problems here in Fairfax (County),” where the woke school board headed by the childless gay guy has failed to check pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic harassment. Another woman, a politically moderate veteran, suggested that local Jews bring their case to our Attorney General and offices set up to counter anti-Semitism. We noted that here in Virginia, we have a sympathetic ear in Governor Youngkin’s administration and that might not last.
This caused a great fluttering of “oh, no politics please!” and the suggestion sat untouched, but this is what happens when the liberal left is struggling with cognitive dissonance. Another woman, a teacher, said, faintly, “The Board’s better this year.” These women still think that nicely begging the powers that be for a Jewish slice of the Intersectionality Pie is the way to fix the situation. But secretly, they know it won’t. Politics actually is the answer.
I note the irony that the Intersectional Mobs have finally proven that Jews are oppressed. And then back to the original question, “Why….”
When you cannot honestly acknowledge your objective situation, because it will force you to adopt political stances that you have staked out as reprehensible, like asking Republican governors for help or voting for Republicans, you will suffer. And given the usual female predisposition to be liked and exist in harmony, you will silence yourselves. The GOP share of the presidential vote will tick up significantly this year, but probably not over 50 percent. Orthodox Jews, who are a smallish minority, will vote overwhelmingly Republican, but these are not the secular Jews with whom most Gentile Americans interact.
And I still don’t have an answer to that question. Because I don’t want to say to non-Jews that a lot of American Jews are stupid. I still have some ethnic pride.