Your recently arrived letter to “the American People” will get sympathy juices going among some of our journalists and politicians. You invoke honored buzzwords such as “human dignity” and “compassion,” and you talk about “respect for the rights of the human being.” In so doing you link yourself to nice people everywhere.

You are distinguished from nice people, however, by your apparent intent to develop atomic weapons for offensive use. You also lavish support on Islamic terrorists, deny the Nazi murder of European Jewry, and commit yourself to the destruction of “the Zionist entity.” Still, you are skillful with the noble buzzwords. Many will be persuaded.

Personally, I doubt we have anything to gain from a dialogue with you. Better that we bomb your nuclear facilities to dust, provided this is not part of a war to force American civics lessons upon your society.

I’m skeptical about our correspondence in part because you revive a suspicious precedent—going back to Stalin, Castro, and other unpleasant tyrants—of appealing to “people” while pointedly ignoring their elected government. Yet in view of the manipulated election that you won last year, it is doubtful that you speak for a majority of your nation. Your claim to be heading up a people-to-people movement may still be taken seriously at Elizabethtown College, where I am a professor and which features a “Global Citizenship Center.” But it will be mocked wherever serious people congregate.

Your predictable linking of our poor relations with you and other Muslim states to
the lingering Palestinian problem is further evidence of your bad faith. You expect us to believe that if the Israelis can be made to give the Palestinians whatever their leaders want, all obstacles to international peace will be removed. But of course most of the tumultuous strife in Muslim countries has nothing to do with Israel, no matter how compulsively Zionist aggression is invoked in order to justify taking sides in local bloodbaths.

Struggles in the Middle East between secular nationalists and Islamicists, Shiites and Sunnis, and Turks and Kurds would still be raging even if the “Zionist entity” had never existed. Nor will the strife-ridden Middle Eastern landscape be softened if Hamas and Hezbollah are successful in eliminating Israel.

The Israelis will never sign a “peace agreement” that will not be observed and that may endanger their existence. Peace requires a Palestinian state strong enough to enforce treaties. This does not mean a democratic Palestine, infused with Wilsonian values—the non-solution pushed by neoconservatives in the national press—but rather a Palestinian government with a monopoly on violence in its own territory.

You have done nothing to promote this. Instead, you have blathered about the eradication of Israel, thereby delegitimating any possible settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians. “Mutual understanding” must be less dear to you than you claim.

Finally, it seems pointless to correspond with you given that you belong in a loony bin. Of course, you are hardly the only national leader of whom this is true. When I hear European heads of state argue that the flood of Islamic militants into their countries poses less of a danger than white Christian intolerance, I am reminded that you do not stand out as a uniquely delusional world figure. But you are mad all the same.

So I believe that the “noble American people” should proceed as though you had never written your bizarre letter to us. I recall receiving, when I was a kid, similar appeals from the geriatric despots running the Soviet Union. Except for the useful idiots who never found anything to criticize about Communist tyranny, no one paid much attention. Our mass indifference was appropriate, and I hope your own letter meets the same reaction. You are not the first unhinged foreign dignitary to disturb the American people with his prattlings, nor will you be the last.

Yours, Paul Gottfried

Next: "Your Hate for Everything I am Brings Darkness to My World"

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Jonathan,

The American intervention in the Balkans, under President Clinton, was even less warranted than the invasion of Iraq. Exhaustive studies have shown that the media in France, England, and the U.S. glaringly exaggerated Serb “massacres,” while playing down those committed by their Muslim foes. Thus a military confrontation between the two sides at Racak, Kosovo, in January 1999, was spun to place all the blame on the Serbs and to justify NATO bombing of the Serb forces.

Please note that I am not defending Serb behavior. I am rather suggesting moral parity between them and their Muslim enemies. On the other hand, I would not suggest anything of the kind between Saddam Hussein and those whom he victimized.

You seem to believe that my parents’ generation’s failure to object to public displays of religiosity came from their insecurity. You think this older generation of Jews was afraid of not being regarded as sufficiently American and therefore failed to stand up to bigoted goyim.

My own read is entirely different. Firstly, none of the people in question would have been offended by the Religious Right’s opposition to gay marriage or partial-birth abortion, or its desire to invoke the deity in public classrooms, since among my Jewish acquaintances no one thought differently on any of these matters. Although I knew Jewish “liberals” who protested segregation in the American South or the puniness of the minimum wage, and although some of my parents’ friends were effusively grateful to the Soviets for having fought the Nazis, I never met any Jews of my parents’ generation who professed the views of tod
ay’s secular liberals.

Also, most of the older Jews I knew had escaped from the Nazis by their skin of their teeth; they were not likely to equate having to pass a nativity scene on public property with running into Nazi hooligans or with incitement of a pogrom. Most importantly, those Jews did not have to reinforce their collective identity by fantasizing about or exaggerating a white Christian danger to their group. Their strong ethnic identity allowed them to function collectively without reference to a convenient adversary.

Last year I was thunderstruck when I received a message from the national Hillel organization providing advice on how to tell gentiles that one is not coming to class or work because of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur holidays. Apparently some of the respondents had worked themselves up strategizing about this problem.

Although I am now almost 65 and have spent most of my life in predominantly non-Jewish areas, never once have I encountered the Christian wall of prejudice and insensitivity that these young Jewish students are being helped to confront. In fact it is hard for me to imagine that these supposedly anxious people are being racked by fears of anything as counterfactual as what they suggest is out
there. What may be happening is that going into fits about antisemitism has replaced more traditional expressions of Jewish identity.

In my early thirties, I belonged to a synagogue in Westfield, New Jersey, whose members became livid when a Protestant missionary crossed public school property to hand out copies of the New Testament. These concerned members then distributed a statement of outrage that was intended for a local official. When asked to sign it, I shocked everyone by refusing. I joked that given the foolishness that went on at local schools, the copy of an ancient text might help to concentrate the minds of students. But I was also genuinely astonished by this disproportionate reaction to the offer of a mainstream religious text to students who could easily turn it down.

Being then naïve, I did not know that the missionary’s misstep violated the most important constitutional protection for my fellow congregants, albeit one based on a selective reading of a privileged phrase of the judicially privileged First Amendment. This phrase, prohibiting Congress from establishing a national religion, has been turned into a vehicle for making secularism into the national religion. And while the Jewish contribution to this process cannot be understated, the Jewish liberal elites that have pushed both the secularization of the U.S. and various forms of multiculturalism were simply not part of my youth.

In any case, I thought that my fellow Jews in Westfield were acting more weirdly than the missionary against whom they were taking up arms. When I spoke about this a few days later to an Israeli friend, he shrugged his shoulders in amusement and then explained to me: “That’s what happens when life is too good. These American Jews should try to live with our neighbors.”

Dad

Next: Jews are opposed to Christianism, not Christianity

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Your comments about the legality of Clinton's pummeling of the Serbs (an act which Republicans predictably applauded and which you set against W's reckless invasion of Iraq) raises questions about international agreements aimed at attacking another country. Clinton’s action was politically correct but not particularly decent. It involved joining other left-of-center governments to commit an act of aggression against a people who had done them no harm. The Clinton regime and the “international community” supported Albanian Muslims in unleashing destruction against Serb Christians—who in some cases but not others were ethnic cleansers. The unhappy results were the expulsion of Serbs by Albanians from their homes in Kosovo and the consolidation of Arab terrorists in European Muslim territories.

As for the growing anxiety of American Jews about militant Christians here, one might note that not all shrieks of terror are derived from verifiable dangers. In the 1950s American Jews (and ethnic Catholics) still suffered various forms of social discrimination; nonetheless, the Jews among whom I grew up praised the U.S. and its Christian majority for their tolerance. We recited the Lord’s Prayer every day in public school and sang Christmas songs in front of a crèche on state-owned property. The parents of the Jewish students, except for isolated eccentrics in the ACLU, did not protest this situation; nor did they view overtly Christian society as a threat to their right to drink kiddush wine.

As Peter Novick stresses in The Holocaust in American Life, most American Jews in the fifties, when asked, stated with apparent sincerity that the Nazis had been anti-Christian as well as anti-Jewish. It was not until the 1960s that one heard overblown and often historically dubious charges linking the Holocaust to the history of Christianity. I can still recall my sense of outrage when I read Leonard Dinnerstein's study of Jews in America, which was selected as a Jewish Book of the Month choice in the late eighties; Dinnerstein argued that the waning of antisemitism in America came as the result of triumphant secularism. The book was methodologically flawed in a thousand ways, often confusing simple WASP snobbery against both Catholics and Jews with the prolongation of medieval antisemitism. But it argued a position that Jews wanted to hear. It provided the basis for a strengthened Jewish identity, at the expense of serious Christians, who were cast as the heavies.

Jewish concern with the Christian Right is a silly diversion from dangers that should concern us, particularly Muslim antisemitism. In France and Germany Islamicism has benefited from European Jewish organizations’ pro-immigration policies and unrelenting attacks on European Christian heritage. Here we see at work the untimely invocation of the preferred enemy, which is always white and Christian, as opposed to the enemy whom Jews actually face. Jewish social liberals in the U.S. are absorbed in the same anachronistic nonsense when they attack opponents of gay marriage or abortion as Christian fanatics. The height of this foolishness came when Abe Foxman of the ADL complained that American Christians have still to accept responsibility for the Spanish Inquisition. Ralph Reed, now a Republican advisor and then an administrator in the Christian Coalition, expressed his agreement concerning this lamentable lack of American Christian sensitivity.

Though it is impossible to figure out what Reed, the descendant of English Baptists, had to do with the misdeeds of a fifteenth century Spanish Catholic dynasty, Jewish liberal Democratic columnist for the New York Times Frank Rich protested that Reed’s apology had come too late and was much too brief. Like others with the same fixation, Rich cannot let go of his now non-existent enemy. In any case, a bit more sacramental wine may improve his humor.

Dad

Friday evening: Where ethnic cleansing is involved, we have a duty to intervene

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Jonathan,

Reading your spirited, penetrating response, I must admire the genetic endowment that your mother and I have bestowed on you. Despite your verbal adroitness, however, I feel obliged to challenge a few of your points.

Contrary to the attacks made on the Republican Party by former Vice President Gore, the Democrats opposed the Kyoto Accords on global warming as much as the Republicans did. On July 27, 1999, the Senate voted against ratifying those accords by a score of 95 to nothing. That figure included all of the Democrats in the Senate as well as the Republicans on the other side of the aisle. Russia, China, India, and Brazil—all of which are happily polluting the environment—also refused to accept the Kyoto restrictions on fuel emissions. According to the research of S. Fred Singer—the physicist who developed the instruments for measuring the temperature of the ozone layer—the reduction of global warming would be no more than 0.02 degrees even if the Kyoto agreements were put into effect.

From what I recall, President Clinton did not hesitate to engage in his own “nation-building” and did so with brute force in Kosovo. Moreover, his secretary of state Madeleine Albright and his security advisor Sandy Berger organized pressure against Austria in 1999 to keep the rightwing anti-immigrationist Jorg Haider out of its government. (Similar actions, to my knowledge, have not been taken to keep communists out of any Western or Central European government since the end of the Cold War.) Although Clinton did not stumble into any engagement quite as disastrous as the Iraqi War, (bombing an aspirin factory, in order to divert attention from his impeachment proceedings, may have been quantitatively less stupid) he certainly meddled beyond our borders. His would-be successor was the preferred presidential candidate of the New Republic, an honor that devolved on Gore for his deserved reputation as a zealous nation-builder. If Bush has taken over traditional Democratic slogans about human rights for the world, Gore held the same instruction book even earlier.

I’m also not sure that Jewish voters in Alabama are all that similar to their Christian white neighbors. In all likelihood, most Jews in Alabama, like Jews in other states, identify with social positions that are more radical than those held by their Christian co-residents. From looking at Gallup Polls since the 1960s, it seems that American Christians have moved leftward on a wide range of social issues but that Jews have done so even more dramatically.

Going from my liberal Protestant college environment to a synagogue service is like plunging from a gathering of fairly standard left centrists into an editorial meeting of The Nation magazine. The reason for this seems clear. According to Anti-Defamation Leage (ADL) surveys, American Jews believe, without serious evidence, that Christian antisemitism is on the rise in this country. Thus they combat the remnants of a Christian, bourgeois society, presumably as a form of self-protection. (Jews do not act this way out of malice but are reacting to genuine anxiety.)

I suspect that Alabama's Jews, except for the handful of Orthodox ones, are as horrified by the Evangelical Right as are the Jews of the Northeast. This revulsion is undeserved since what is called the Christian Right is effusively philosemitic and passionately pro-Zionist.

Jewish dislike for this group seems based on nothing more substantial than conservative Christian opposition to the use of public education to change sexual mores and to Evangelical resistance to the removal of Judeo-Christian symbols from the public square. Although I am not comfortable with all of the Religious Right’s political positions, particularly its passion for President Bush’s nation-building, the attempts to present it as antisemitic are baseless and even outrageous.

But my larger point, Jonathan, is that American Jews are not as fully assimilated into American society as you suggest. Most continue to think of themselves as marginal and threatened and continue to appeal to public administration and the courts against traditional American religious attitudes. Although Jewish Republicans may suffer from some of the same mishagasim, their switch to the Republican Party indicates a more secure relationship with the white Christian majority. I offer this not as a bill of health for their party of choice but as moderate praise for the Jews who have joined it.

One last point: Orthodox Jews and religious Christians in Alabama do not share the sociological or cultural overlap you suggest. The reconstruction of an Eastern European Jewish communal lifestyle in metropolitan areas does not remind me at all of a Southern rural or smalltown Protestant ambience, even if the Jews and Protestants both occasionally cite Hebrew scriptures. Their only common ground is a sense of being threatened by the moral transformation of the U.S., a process in which the courts and public administration have both played key roles. Religiously traditional groups increasingly support the Republican Party as the national party less likely to push forward revolutionary moral and social changes. Whether the Republicans deserve this reputation is of course a separate issue.

Dad

Next: Jews have an interest in a secular society; the Christian Right does not

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Paul Gottfried is Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and a firebreathing paleoconservative much admired by the Pat Buchanan crowd. His son Jonathan is a French-speaking Harvard Law graduate who fiercely resists his father’s entreaties to join him on the Dark Red side.

For the next four days, each of them will send us one e-mail per day, as they debate the question: “Is it time for Jews to Vote Republican?”

From: Paul Gottfried To: Jonathan Gottfried Subject: Jewish liberals are still running from the Goyim

Jonathan,

Asking me to explain why I think Jews should embrace the Republican Party is like asking Hillary Clinton to write George W. Bush’s campaign speeches. My profound disagreements with the neoconservatives, who are today the intellectual pillars of the Republican Party, are already well known. (The unwillingness of prominent neoconservatives to exchange views with me on Jewcy or anywhere else is enough proof of their hostility toward me.) Beyond this unwelcome neocon influence on the GOP, I really don’t see much difference between the positions of our two national parties. They are both big-government, patronage machines, which represent no threat to administrative overreach, political correctness, or the expansion of American empire.

As a small-government Robert Taft Republican, I feel disgusted by what the onetime party
of limited government has become since Taft’s death in 1953. The GOP not only aids and abets runaway government, like the other party, but even more despicably, it lies about its intention. The Republican Party pretends to be getting “government off our backs” while doing at least as much as the other side to worsen our servile condition. That the Republican National Committee often acts thus because it is “reaching out” to Democrats does not make its lies any more tolerable. Whether you want quotas and set-asides for minorities, laxness in dealing with illegals, or the advocacy of reparations for blacks, you can count on Republicans to serve Democratic causes. Thank heavens that President Clinton decided to phase out welfare! I can't imagine Bush doing anything so courageous, anything that might have so offended black voters.

The Republican leadership’s enthusiastic support for the very liberal Senator Joseph Lieberman in his bid for reelection in Connecticut was exactly what I have come to expect from the GOP. His exuberant Republican devotees forgave every leftist stand he ever took because he voted with the administration on the Middle East. I cannot imagine the principled social leftist Senator Schumer fawning on Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson because they agreed with him on Israeli security.

Having vented my contempt for the Republicans currently in power, I am nonetheless pleased to see Jews joining the party. The Republicans are the party of Americans who do not flaunt minority grievances or protest their ethnic disadvantages. If Republicans trip over their feet trying to be sensitive to ethnic whiners, they do so while thinking of themselves as normal Americans—not as victims.

Most Republicans are white-bread WASPs who have neither anger nor a sense of entitlement in relation to other groups. Most Jewish liberals, however, feel insecure about the goyim—that is, about white, traditional Christians—and for that reason throw in their lot with gays, black activists, and feminists.

In my synagogue, most of the members agreed with a fake newspaper headline that suggested the US government had actively collaborated with Hitler to exterminate European Jewry. One would have to be a low-grade moron or absolutely paranoid to believe that. But those of my friends whom are Jewish professionals and fervent party Democrats have no trouble accepting this nonsense.

None of of my Jewish Republican acquaintances would have believed this spurious report. This is not because my Republican acquaintances are more intelligent, but because they are less inclined to fear gentiles. This may be true for Orthodox Jews as well, who increasingly vote Republican and who do not run around panting over the presence of Evangelical Christians. The Orthodox are trending this way only in part because they believe in Old Testament morality, or its Talmudic formulation. Equally significant is that they do not fear the gentileness of the surrounding society in which they live.

Dad

Next: Jewish Democrats are not stuck in the shtetl

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