By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, March 27, 2015
‘I don’t understand how Jews in America can be Democrats
first and Jewish second and support Israel along the line of just following
their president,” vented Representative Steve King (R., Iowa) on Boston Herald
Radio last week.
It was a small controversy in the grand scheme of things,
easily overlooked during a week when: a German pilot turned a routine flight
into a murder-suicide mission, Ted Cruz drove the media batty by announcing he
will run for president as Ted Cruz, an Army sergeant and Taliban captive the
White House touted as a hero was charged with desertion, and America joined
forces with Iran in Iraq to kill Sunni jihadists while allying with Saudi
Arabia in Yemen to kill Shiite jihadists (who are backed by Iran).
Still, King’s comments did enrage a lot of people,
particularly people eager to make political hay. “I was shocked and horrified
when I heard the remarks made by Representative King today stating that we are
‘Jewish second,’ and implying that Democrats are anti-Semitic,” responded Greg
Rosenbaum, chair of the National Jewish Democratic Council.
Representative Steve Israel (D., N.Y.) took his hissy fit
to Twitter. “I don’t need Congressman Steve King questioning my religion or my
politics,” he tweeted. “I demand an apology from him & repudiation from
GOP. #dangerous.”
That “dangerous” hashtag — no doubt a rich mix of
sincerity and opportunism — is intriguing to me. What is the implied danger?
After all, King’s lament is that American Jews don’t care
about Israel enough to break with president Obama.
“In a bizarre way,” left-wing writer Paul Waldman noted
in The American Prospect, King’s remarks were “almost reassuring.” They
highlight “just how rare anti-Semitism has become in America. An American Jew
is more likely to be exposed to weird conservative philo-Semitism than to
actual anti-Semitism.”
It’s a good point. On both the far right and among vast
swaths of the left, the longstanding complaint against American Jews is that
they’re guilty of “dual loyalty” — i.e., they care as much or more about Israel
as they do the U.S. One need only spend a few minutes in the swampier quarters
of the Internet, or at, say, UCLA, to find this sort of bigotry. Just this
month, a Jewish student applying to be a member of the UCLA student council’s
judicial board was asked, “Given that you are a Jewish student and very active
in the Jewish community, how do you see yourself being able to maintain an
unbiased view?”
But here’s Steve King, a passionate defender of Israel,
complaining that American Jews aren’t being Jewish enough.
Part of the confusion is that being Jewish and supporting
Israel have never been wholly synonymous, and regrettably they are getting less
synonymous all the time. This is a source of great consternation in many Jewish
circles, and a source of profound confusion and frustration in conservative
circles. Just as right-leaning non-Jews are embracing Israel, left-leaning Jews
are pushing it away.
That’s not a coincidence. The reason American Jews are
disproportionately liberal is complex — because there is no single reason for
it. I can rattle off a dozen or so with ease, including: FDR’s outreach to
Jews, Harry Truman’s recognition of Israel, the historic necessity for Jews to
seek protection from central authorities, the tendency of urban populations to
be liberal, anti-Semitism in the old (and much more liberal) GOP of the
1920s-1960s, the timing of Jewish immigration from central Europe in an era when
socialism was in its heyday, and the very secular worldview of most
non-orthodox Jews.
Political scientist Kenneth Wald largely disagrees with
these and other explanations, save for the last point. In a new article, “The
Choosing People: Interpreting the Puzzling Politics of American Jewry,” Wald
argues that American Jewish liberalism is derived chiefly from the fact that
American Jews want a strict separation of religion and politics. He argues that
Jewish support for Democrats intensified in large part because of the GOP’s
embrace of Protestant Evangelicals, even though Protestant Evangelicals are
wildly pro-Israel and philo-Semitic (i.e., the opposite of anti-Semitic). I
think that’s empirically true, even if it gives short shrift to the deeper
roots of Jewish liberalism.
One reason Jews are still liberal is that ideological and
partisan affiliations die hard. They tend to be passed, like religion itself,
from parent to child, generation after generation. But such loyalties aren’t
static either. And while Steve King could have phrased it better, he was
absolutely right that at some point — now or in the future — support for the
left and support for Israel must conflict. And King is right to lament it when
Jews choose the former over the latter.
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