Why So Many Jews Support The Left - And WhyThey're So Anti- Israel

 

A good friend of mine forwarded me some questions from someone she knows whom is absolutely baffled.

He's certainly no anti-semite. But in his contacts with Jews, he finds that many of them while quite intelligent engage in behavior he finds both irrational and inexplicable. Here's what he basically had to say:

"What baffles me is everyone of them put Obama in office during his first election, and couldn't understand my disdain for the man. These are intelligent people. Lawyers, investment bankers, stock brokers, etc..They have been voting Democrat for all their lives. {...}

These people are so unfriendly to all things Israel I just don't understand it. It's as if they are trying to destroy the country of their origin, or a death wish, I don't know. They all hated Bush and he loves Israel. I'm confused, because the trouble I see in Israel right now is partly due to them. I feel bad because I so admire Israel and I know if they fall we will be next or at least deep in the fight. Please, enlighten me."


I only get asked this once a week or so...but I thought I'd share my answer to him with you.

Hello ---

Actually, I have a decent perspective on this, as I'm a Jew, a native Californian (gasp!) and someone whom grew up in a home of liberal FDR Jews who always voted Democrat, except for two occasions which I'll get to shortly and which shed a bit of light on the matter at hand.

You're actually asking a lot of different questions here, which I'm going to try and sort out. Here's what I think you're asking, and forgive me if I seem to be putting words in your mouth.

Why are so many Jews lefties when they seem to be so smart? Why do they vote Democrat even if it seems to be against their interests? And why would so many vote for Obama, especially when they've seen how anti-Israel he is?

That about cover it?

A lot of it has to do with history. Many lefty Jews today are not only rigorously secular, but disdainful of those Jews whom are religious. That also explains why so many of these overtly secular Jews dislike Evangelicals, Mormons and other religious, pro-Israel Christians. To these Jews, all religion represents not only something they're trying to get away and distance themselves from, but way down deep, a secret source of shame for many. You don't destroy a part of whom you are without sustaining some damage.

Read this and see if it clears up the history a bit. The short version is that many Jews, once they were freed from the ghettos by Napoleon that they'd been literally locked up in for centuries made a determined attempt to assimilate. They really wanted to be good Germans, French, Austrians, Poles, what have you. It failed utterly. The majority of Europeans simply wouldn't allow it.

A number of these Jews made the obvious connection and allied themselves with the Left, especially the Marxists. They stupidly thought that their religion was the only basis for the psychotic hatred they faced, and that religion itself was the reason they were treated the way they were. So they not only gave up all semblance of their own religion, but turned to an ideology that likewise despised all religion while it was essentially creating its own.

To expand that a bit, here in America while there was never legal, government sponsored Jew hatred as there was in Europe and Muslim countries, there was quite a bit of de facto anti-semitism during the period when Jews were heavily migrating to America...say, the 1880's to about the 1920's or so and well into WWII.

 

So just as in Europe, some of these immigrants and quite a few of their offspring born here dropped the Orthodox Judaism they were raised with and much of their religious practices because the emphasis then was on assimilating..being, you know, real Americans like everyone else. That didn't work so well with many of the Republicans of that time or a lot of other people, but the Left was a somewhat different story, especially once FDR came on the scene. Ironic, of course, since he was instrumental in instituting quotas to stop too many Jews entering the Ivy League.

As for the communists, they were more than willing to recruit what Lenin aptly referred to as useful idiots.Conservative author David Horowitz, whom grew up as a 'red diaper baby' in a home where both parents were communists and under what was referred to as Party Discipline gives us an illuminating look at how this worked in his autobiography 'Radical Son.'

What changed things when it comes to the issue you're talking about was the Holocaust and the recreation of Israel. Realizing that much of the world either participated at worst or at best ignored what amounted to a war against defenseless Jews simply because they were Jews was a traumatic event that changed everything for Jews in places like America whom escaped.

It was a unique event in history for reasons I'm happy to explain to you any time if you'd like me to. In many quarters, it made openly expressed Jew hatred socially unacceptable, at least for a while. And it shamed the world into finally keeping the agreements made after WW I in the original League of Nations Palestine Mandate and the subsequent 1923 San Remo Agreement to create a Jewish State in their ancient homeland on the remaining 22% of the Palestine Mandate that was left after Jordan was given to the Arabs as their Palestinian State..

So for even aggressively secular, left leaning Jews like my parents, Israel was the issue that crossed all lines. It did so because they were the generation that was closest to the Shoah and they realized how important Israel's creation was to Jews in the Diaspora and their comfortable lives there. And yes, there was also some residual guilt involved, because many of the Jews surrounding President Roosevelt took an active part in successfully combating Jews who wanted the make the ongoing Shoah a major public issue and push FDR to make attempts to stop or at least slow down the carnage of Jews in Europe.

That Jewish identification with Israel especially became apparent after the miraculous Six Day War when Jews around the world suddenly realized they might have lost Israel and had to experience a second Holocaust while the world again watched and did nothing.

I mentioned that there were two times my devoutly Democrat parents didn't pull the lever for Democrats? One occasion was in 1972 when the Angry Left took over the party and the anti-Israel George McGovern was their candidate for president. The other time was in 1980, when Jimmie Carter ran for re-election.

My parents literally hated Nixon and Reagan and they weren't too pleased with yours truly either when I cast my very first vote ever for Ronaldus Maximus. But they simply weren't going to vote for anti-Israel candidates. So they just voted for a straight Democrat ticket otherwise and passed up voting for president in those elections.

So what changed that closeness to Israel? Well, three things - the birth and maturity of two generations much further removed from the Holocaust, the ascendancy of a center right government in Israel when the Labor party was literally tossed out of office after the Yom Kippur War fiasco and most of all, the continued movement of the Democrat Party to the far left.

As you no doubt know, many times political preferences are inherited. If Mom and Dad and most of the people you know vote Democrat, it's likely you will too when the time comes. As the party moved further and further left, many Jews migrated with it. Israel wasn't such an important issue to them any more. It was even even an embarrassment to them in some circles, especially as Israel's socialist beginnings were largely tossed aside along with the Labor government after the Yom Kippur War. A country with an entrepreneurial, capitalist culture, allied with the US against the Soviets, with a proud military history and religious underpinnings?

Is it any wonder a lot of Jews on the Left react to Israel the way a vampire does to garlic?

Leftist politics is their new religion and their new affiliation, not Israel. Especially now, after President Barack Obama, their new idol, was so successful in making support for Israel a partisan issue. This was a goal of his from the very beginning, which is why he and George Soros collaborated in forming and funding J-Street to attract far left Jews as an umbrella and a cover for themselves against accusations of anti-semitism.

There are quislings and traitors in every group. Intellectual smarts in a narrow field or a degree (especially given what today's universities are mostly turning out) not only doesn't change that, it doesn't necessarily square up with common sense or even self-preservation.

At this point, after the Iran deal and numerous other related doings by this president a few of these Jews are finally getting the message, now when it's too late. But many aren't, for the reasons I mentioned. Nor will they, and there's little reason to make the effort to change their minds or to worry overmuch over the fact. The Useful Idiots still exist, and many of them will remain their own worst enemies, as always. Think of it as sort of a Jewish Stockholm Syndrome.

Once President Obama essentially paved the way for the genocidal Iran regime to obtain nuclear weapons, a very common theme emerged among many of these people. They now called upon the same Jews who opposed the Iran sellout that they'd been demonizing for months to 'make up now and unite.'

There's a quaint Brooklyn expression my father (Z"l) of blessed memory used to use to address folks like these in similar situations. I'll just say that wasting any of my precious time with people like this is far from my mind indeed.

This sort of division is nothing new. As Sun Tzu once said, you're better off with ten men that show up on the battlefield than a hundred whom don't.

I don't know if you've ever been to a Passover Seder, but there's a part in it that goes back centuries and discusses four types of Jews, the Parable of the Four Sons - one Wise, one Wicked, one Simple and One Whom Does Not Know How To Ask.

The Wicked Son is characterized by his sneering arrogance and his distancing himself from his fellow Jews and from anything to do with G-d and from G-d's mitzvot, His commandments. The Haggadah, the Holy Book used in the Seder tells how the Wicked Son is rebuked and told that the rituals surrounding the Seder and G-d's miracles that freed the Jews from bondage were not meant for him, and had he been in Egypt then, he would not have been redeemed.

To plagiarize Solomon in Ecclesiastes just a bit, there's nothing new under the sun..only the player's names change.

Oh, and while we're on the subject, yes, please pray and pray hard, but remember this about Israel. It's very existence is a modern miracle, and the Almighty has it under His Divine Protection. And as usual, He knows what He's doing.

The Jews are finally home, and they're staying.

Warm Regards,
Rob Miller