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Day 3 (Paul Gottfried): Is it Time for Jews to Vote Republican?

by
January 5, 2007

Jonathan,

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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Paul Edward Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute. He is the author, most recently, of The Strange Death of Marxism, as well as numerous books and articles on intellectual history, paleoconservatism, and political theory. His next book, Making Sense of the American Right, will be published by Palgrave-Macmillan in early 2007.

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