Sticking with Barack Obama

Did you know that Richard Nixon saved Israel during the 1972 Yom Kippur War? Arnold Steinberg writes that Nixon's friend

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir called in the middle of the night; Nixon unilaterally overruled the Pentagon to airlift massive military supplies to our beleaguered ally.

In the last generation or two, many younger, alienated Jews, raised in post-Holocaust cynicism and ignorant of Mideast history, have fallen victim to the propaganda that Zionists are colonialists and racists who unjustly occupy Palestinian territory. At some point, hopefully not too late, they will learn that Islamists (as the Nazis did) want to kill all Jews, even politically correct Jews who are Israel-bashers. The silver lining is that perhaps the attacks on Jews in Europe will awaken Jews here to their heritage and its political derivative, American conservatism. After all, many of the major American figures in libertarian philosophy and the conservative movement were Jewish.

But for now, many “Jews” attend the Progressive Church, or they remain atheists, agnostics or religiously unobservant. Indeed, compared to others, Jews have the lowest affiliation or attendance rate with a house of worship. Generally, the more orthodox (religiously observant) a Jew, the more likely he is a conservative or a Republican. While the ranks of orthodox Jewry grow, they remain very small.

More background — the Holocaust itself had produced a postwar disaffection among Jewish baby-boomers who were raised by parents in permanent recovery mode. These Jews, now middle-aged and older, tacitly rebelled against Judaism; how could God permit the extermination of millions of their pious ancestors? At the risk of irreverence, I would suggest that Jews in Europe should have been less trusting and better armed, and maybe God now wants American Jews to support the Second Amendment and oppose gun control.

Liberalism/progressivism repudiates Judaism, because it rejects the permanent things, especially tradition and prudence and, most of all, the ordered liberty that posits this: an individual must be free to choose virtue, not coerced into it by government. “Tikkun Olam” (Hebrew for “repairing the world) has become the Jewish equivalent of the humanism of the National Council of Churches or the liberation theology of activist Catholics. Simply put, the political Jews, like the political Protestants and political Catholics, see social justice as defining not the relations between man and man, but between man and government.

In other words, many leftist Jews who do attend synagogue are like many leftist Christians who attend church. They repudiate religious teachings that urge “you” to pursue a virtuous life. Instead, they want government to do it all. And that’s why many of them are sticking with Barack Obama.

Read more here.

Thanks to Maggie's Farm for linking to the Steinberg piece.