It’s clearly true that if there’s anything worse than drinking and driving it’s texting and driving. And worse than that may be downloading an iPhone app while driving. But that’s what I did this evening while chugging North on the 405 to the Skirball Cultural Center to hear a talk by Norman Podhoretz. Tennis nut that I am, I just had to know who was ahead in the US Open final between Roger Federer and Juan Martin del Potro. Having seen del Potro dismantle a wounded Rafa Nadal the previous day, I suspected that King Roger was going to have his hands full with the twenty-year old Argentinian.
But I couldn’t find a single radio channel covering the event in anything close to real time. Desperate, I reached for my trusty iPhone and, although not really stalled in traffic, typed the US Open into the search function and downloaded the app. Mirabile dictu, it had a streaming podcast from the Open. I know. Tennis is terrible on the radio, but that’s how desperate I was. Happily, Del Potro proved my prediction right just as I pulled (safely!) into the Skirball. But do not, as the saying goes, try this at home – or on the 405.
As for Norman Podhoretz, he was pretty good too, though somewhat older than Del Potro, discussing his new book Why Are Jews Liberals? He will be in the PJTV studio Tuesday morning to discuss the same thing with me on our virtual set. It’s a pleasure to have such a distinguished fellow. If you have any interesting questions for him, put them down here and I’ll try to check them in the morning if I’m not too bleary-eyed.
Thomas Sowell has written about white guilt as a powerful motivator for our surrender to the racial charlatans. Since Jews invented guilt, a case can be made that our guilt, and our fear of the majority’s envy, are important unconscious factors in Jewish liberalism, that political philosophy that attempts to minimize envy by equalizing outcomes. How significant is the Jewish propensity for guilt and the secondary fear of envy, for “congenital” Jewish liberalism?
I have not yet read the book by Norman, but my answer seems almost axiomatic.
1) Persecution
2) Exclusion
3) Relative size
4) Tradition
No single people on the face of the planet has suffered a more consistent, unrelenting, determined and unrestrained persecution over thousands of years, than have this one religious tribe of people.
When persecution becomes not just a passage of historical suffering, but an identity emblem, an attempt to find “belonging” to a larger group in which to find safe harbor, protection, resistance…is not only expected, but inevitable.
Throughout history, the powerful picked out the small, defenseless, targets…and conquered them. In order to justify the “need” for such conquests, “blame” was a useful tool. Slander, just as well.
“Christ killer” became de rigeur. Children of pigs and monkeys, worked for some as well.
It makes sense then, that such a group of folks might find solace and comfort in the embrace of “pacifists”, who spoke out against all violence and making war. And into the arms of the “anti-establishment” crowd, …the “people” raging against the vast machine of leaders. Populist notions turned on their heads, by socialist and communist organizers hell bent on hiding behind the fraudulent skirts of “open” society…in order to build the most closed one ever invented.
Add to the persecution cocktail, a dash of exclusion. Anti-semitism among conservatives is real, rampant and often rabid. Has been for long before I was born. Country Clubs didn’t allow Jews. Certain universities had “quotas”. It’s a fact and it cannot be denied any more than the Holocaust…it impacted more people, but it did not kill them…only wounded their pride and sense of “belonging”.
If you are excluded “here”…and you are included “there”…where would you turn? This lead to the “branding” of liberals as compassionate, open, soft-hearted, gentle, erudite, …even nuanced.
One would think with all the signs and signals out in the world today that it would be readily apparent that leftists are complete frauds, hypocrites and among the worst anti-Semites in modern existence. But branding sets harder than cement or ceramic.
When a Jew looks around him, he sees Christians and Muslims numbering in the billions. His number worldwide makes a nice family picnic. Wipe out 16 million of each tribe in a catastrophic event, two of them lose a couple percentage points, one of them suffers a near genocide.
It is imperative to the future existence to bond together tightly, of one mind, one thought, one existence. Splintering is not just a threat to the community, it is a threat to the individual.
Some heritage groups have little connection with their history. Most Americans can’t even point to the city in which their ancestors came from the old country.
Jewish tradition is among the strongest left on earth, among those living in modern Western countries. Tradition is not only important, it is nearly sacred. Topol screams it from the top of his lungs. Once something has become imprinted as the “Jewish” way…one is hard pressed to eliminate it from the Jewish soul.
The anarchists, communists, agitators…all know the notes to play on this violin. Israel, ironically…suffers from the disharmony played on these instruments. The entrenched media worldwide has its way with Israel…and the Jewish soul…imprinted with leftism…suffers cognitive dissonance to the nth degree.
Champion of the “victim”, associating with the oppressed…and hypnotized into no longer recognizing their antagonizers. The Jewish heart beats with compassion and is stabbed by the traitors they have been trained to recognize as friends.
Not a question so much as a comment: I just finished reading Norman’s book. I thought the first half did a pretty decent job of summarizing Jewish history, and showing how Enlightenment thinking vis-a-vis the Jews wasn’t particularly enlightment. In so doing he was obviously laying the groundwork for the argument that Jews shouldn’t necessarily trust today’s equivalent of the Enlightened ones. What struck me, though, in reading the second half, Norman’s personal account of his journey from Left to Radical Left to Neo-Con, was that Republican presidents had abouot as spotty a record re Israel as did Democratic ones. The inference I, a former leftist who now self-identifies on the Right, drew from it is that, up till now, a President’s being on the Right or on the Left had little to do with his inclination to support Israel. And while George W. Bush, the most vocally pro-Israel president ever, may have been clear in his preference for Israel over the Palestinians, he’s the guy who insisted on elections which brought Hamas to power (and who at the time described these elections as being a “positive step”). He’s also the guy on whose watch the wretched “Road Map” (a non-starter if there ever was one) came to be, and whose supposedly intelligent Secretary of State was convinced there was a parallel between pre-Civil Rights era Mississippi, where she grew up, and the Palestinian situation.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that citing the past actions of presidents isn’t likely to persuade Jews to veer right, because, aside from Nixon, who literally saved the day for Israel in ’73, and GWB, who said lovely things but who ended up seeming feckless and impotent due to the ever-Arabist State Department, the Republican presidential record isn’t anything to write home about.
I don’t think there’s any way to get Jews to support the Right; as Norman rightly shows, Leftism is a kind of religion/religious calling that no arguments, no infusion of reality will likely change. (A relative of my husband’s, an otherwise intelligent, well-read chap, remarked prior to the last presidential election that “even if Adolf Hitler were running for the Democrats” he’d still be voting Democratic–so there you have it.) That said, I think they only way to persuade any fence-sitters to jump ship is to harp on the clear and present–nay, existential–danger to Western civilization posed by the Leftist-Islamist alliance (since the presidential thing isn’t at all persuasive).
I believe that the problem is with the definition of the “liberal”. This is a gross misnomer to call Pelosi, Reid, Van Jones, Rahm, ACORN members, etc. liberals. What is so liberal about their ideology? Forced unionization of labor? Stiffling the discussion about Anthropogenic Global Warming? Muzzling of opposition? Nationalizing banks and industry? Support of 3-rd world dictators? Election fraud? Lying media?
Support of democratic criminal members of Congress and Senat?
I believe the above list of questions can be very long.
On the other hand many of the above issues are squarelly on the leftist agenda. So if we rename these liberals as leftist, the question “Why So many Jews tend to lean/support left?” will become very perplexing.
First of all, Jewish empathy for black victims of white racism had nothing to do with white guilt or Jewish guilt. It had everything to do with the Jewish experience of racist persecution.
The American Jewish 4 to 1 vote for the racial charlatan Obama wasn’t out of guilt or fear, but the enraptured, well-meant sentimentality of useful idiots on the one hand, and utter hatred for Israel, America, and for Jews, by deracinated Jewish zombies on the Left.
n no way could the collective brain power of the community at Wakebook wish to possess the intellect of a great Jewish conservative such as Norm Podhoretz, the author of “Why The Jews Are Liberal,” and while we commend him for his academic generalization of all the liberal Jews on our website, it is with a wanton displeasure that we carry the burden of informing Mr. Podhoretz that his contribution to the conversation is as valuable as the dung heap left in Obama’s Yard by his cowboy from Crawford and he has been let go.
As Mr. Podhoretz has taken it upon himself to classify all of the Jewish liberals in the United States as well as misguided children of God, it naturally follows that this Editor In-Chief, an Obama Voter, supporter of Israel and Ashkanazi raised by Sephardim, is assumed to be a top client. Furthermore, as we were not aware that Mr. Podhoretz was involved contractually with us and indeed most of my friends, it has taken some time for me to adhere to the advice of my attorneys and ask for Mr. Podhoretz’s resignation, effective immediately.
The matter arose almost surreptitiously as this Editor ended his evening at home with his wife. We had just finished with a wonderful Rosh Hoshana dinner in Beverly Hills. In retrospect, now having known of Mr. Podhoretz’s erudite and yet unnecessary and incessant, subtle racism, I would have never hired Mr. Podhoretz in the first place and indeed raced home to sever the relationship.