Why Are Jews Liberals?

That question is often asked of me by non-Jewish friends and acquaintances. I am usually at a loss for an answer.

In a lucid and insightful piece in The Wall Street Journal, Norman Podhoretz, icon of what has come to be known as "neo-conservativism," gives his best shot at an answer. He admits that during the campaign of 2008 he harbored hopes that Jews would vote Democratic in significantly fewer numbers than usual owing to John McCain's strong and consistent pro-Israel stance and Barack Obama's troubling associations with an anti-Semitic pastor (Jeremiah Wright and a pro-Palestinian intellectual (Rashid Khalidi). Alas, Jews were undeterred, voting for Obama over McCain by 78% to 22%.

Podhoretz covers familiar ground in explaining that American Jewish fealty to the Democrat Party grew out of the religious-ethnic coalitions forged by FDR in the 1930s (itself almost inexplicable when one uncovers the true extent of FDR's antipathy towards Jews and his despicable Anti-Jewish Holocaust policies). But unlike all other members of that coalition save for blacks, Jews have steadfastly refused to break from the party of their hero, even as that party has drifted ever leftward.

Podhoretz hits his stride as he posits that without a belief in the Bible and a G-d who controls the universe, American secular Jews have created their own religion, with a liturgy and catechism all its own. That religion is liberalism, and its dogmas--"social justice," abortion, gun control, gay rights and environmentalism--are pursued with an evangelical fervor. (I would add that universal health care is the holy grail of liberalism, which is why its would-be deliverer is nothing short of a messiah). These Jews have convinced themselves that the pursuit of their beloved liberal ideals is the highest expression of "Jewish values."

Yet it is those Jews who are most familiar with real "Jewish values" as expressed in the Bible, the Talmud and the rest of the body of Jewish thought who are least likely to become smitten with liberal causes and thus most likely to vote Republican. Orthodox Jews are many times more likely to vote for conservatives and Republicans than are secular Jews precisely because they reject liberalism's supposed link to Jewish sensibilities. It makes you wonder whether non-religious Jews are so removed from the faith of their fathers and grandfathers that they have forgotten what "Jewish Values" really are. (Hint: abortion and gay rights are not among them).

Sadly, what American Jews share with many liberals is a deep distrust of American values and traditions. They see intolerance and injustice and oppression at every turn, and tend to look to other cultures and societies--even totalitarian ones--as models for our own. And yet, says Podhoretz, it is America that has offered Jews the greatest material and spiritual opportunity of any nation in history:

American Jewry surely belongs with the conservatives rather than the liberals. For the social, political and moral system that liberals wish to transform is the very system in and through which Jews found a home such as they had never discovered in all their forced wanderings throughout the centuries over the face of the earth...Surely, then, we Jews ought to be joining with its defenders against those who are blind or indifferent or antagonistic to the philosophical principles, the moral values, and the socioeconomic institutions on whose health and vitality the traditional American system depends.

After suggesting that there are encouraging signs that American Jews are beginning to develop "buyer's remorse" when it comes to Barack Obama, Podhoretz concludes: "I am hoping against hope that the exposure of Mr. Obama as a false messiah will at last open the eyes of my fellow Jews to the correlative falsity of the political creed he so perfectly personifies and to which they have for so long been so misguidedly loyal."

Having waited myself for some sign of a Jewish awakening to reality, I share Mr. Podhoretz's hope. But I would suggest that neither of us hold our breaths.

Full article here.