Those Oppressed Jewish Republicans October 22, 2007

I learned something very important while reading Bradley Burston’s piece today on Ha’aretz. Mr. Burston, like me, is unsatisfied knowing that he still harbors vestiges of bigotry and ugly prejudice inside. He took it upon himself to analyze one of his lingering prejudices: as he puts it, the “queaze I feel when I consider the idea of Jews voting Republican.”

I am also no stranger to this “queaze”. I also find it hard to believe that corporate exploitation, the absolute degradation of poor communities and of poorer populations, debacles like Iraq and Katrina, and felonious Congressional and Presidential conduct can just be overlooked and swept under the rug with a “at least they support Israel!” To me, it’s akin to being robbed by someone who, while poking the gun in your chest, is explaining all the wonderful things he’s done for your cousins. Supporting Israel is great — but “unwavering support” for Israel does not impact the grief of now over 4,000 families whose prides and joys have died in Iraq, nor does it put food on the table for the millions of families for whom S-CHIP coverage is slated to become a lost dream.

Burston calls Jewish Republicans an “oppressed minority”, and while I am loath to place the “oppressed minority” tag on the political engine dedicated to helping the rich stay rich and get richer, many of his propositions are intriguing:

All too often, the price paid by Jewish Republicans for their political choice has been the need to shoulder a high tolerance for intolerance. The intolerance of their party chiefs, that is. All too often, Jewish Republicans have been forced to swallow - or worse, perhaps, to explain away - the manifest Jew hatred of certain of their party superiors.

The most familiar of these, of course, is an observation by the first president Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker,who was widely quoted as having told a colleague prior to the 1992 elections: “Fuck the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway.”

To the dismay of Jewish Republicans, Baker’s remark proved to be one of the most effective of self-fulfilling prophecies. In the next election, Bill Clinton would garner 78 percent of the Jewish vote to a bare 15 percent for George H.W. Bush.

But Baker’s irritation with the Jews pales when compared to the level of grand old anti-Semitism revealed by Oval Office audio tapes of Richard Nixon.

“Most Jews are disloyal,” Nixon told his aide H.R. (”Bob”) Haldeman in a 1971 conversation. The president would cite as exceptions his national security adviser Henry Kissinger, his White House counsel, Leonard Garment, and speechwriter [now New York Times columnist] William Safire. “But, Bob,” he then continued, “generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you. Am I wrong or right?”…

The Jewish Republican of today would be expected to shrug off these comments - not without justification - as ancient history, irrelevant to the current reality. In fact, the Jewish Republican of today might well argue that the Republican incumbent of the presidency is the greatest friend Israelis have ever had in the White House. Depending on what Israelis might be looking for in a president, the Jewish Republicans might just be right. That same Republican would be expected, no less, to wave away the John McCain’s recent characterization of America as a Christian country, and Ann Coulter’s vision of an ideal America where Jews are “perfected” into accepting Jesus as their lord and savior and all Americans are Christians.

…In retrospect, moreover, the Iraq debacle has proven especially bad for the Jews. Not only because “the Jews,” in the person of the neo-con corps, were unjustly blamed for instigating the war. Primarily, the war was bad for the Jews because it strengthened and emboldened Iran as a regional power, at the same bolstering Hezbollah and paving the way for Lebanon II. It was also the Bush White House, it may be recalled, which pushed for the elections that brought Hamas to power.

And so there goes that “unwavering support of Israel” and being the “best friend Israel has ever had.”

Burston ends his article by proffering that maybe “we have left the underclass to sink in its morass of unsafe and unsupported public schools [and] its plagues of drugs and despair and darkness.” One is forced to perform textual acrobatics to fit the words of such a view into the words of the Torah — “f**k the poor” has never been a Jewish viewpoint, or a viewpoint looked upon kindly in Jewish Law. However, as Scripture tells us in Ecclesiastes, “money answers everything” — the drive to hoard and retain wealth will give one justification for almost any atrocity, and apparently here, “he’s Israel’s best friend” was the justification for the decomposing bodies of infants cascading through toxic waste in the summer Louisiana sun. Are buzzwords like “war on terror” a sufficient antidote to the poisons of no-bid contracts and flagrant violations of human rights — as we see from our very own gulags?

It is my sincere hope that these words once spoken in jest, do not prove to be the mantra for the lamentably growing right-wing Semitic clique of our generation:

The stereotype, that of the upwardly mobilized breathing the rarified air of the American Dream, was already in place in the early 1960s, when satirist Allen Sherman set the tune of “Hava Nagila” to a family saga that took a New York Jewish couple from relatively humble Kennedy Democratic activist beginnings to the shiny Jaguar poolside lifestyle of Lalaland:

Harvey and Sheila moved to west LA
Harvey and Sheila flew TWA

Traded their used MG for a new XKE
Switched to the GOP
That’s they way things go.

I would hope that Jews aren’t seeing, en masse, the messages on the media and thinking “wow, these Republicans are the best friends Jews have ever had!”. Every statement made by a candidate is a calculated marketing decisions, designed to put forth “brand attributes” which are intended to trigger a “consumer response”, i.e., your vote. Anyone who thinks that one of the candidates is “their friend” has a PR company to thank for that, not the candidate.

I would not be so naive as to suggest that the Democratic party is this yedid nefesh which would never legislate anything bad for the Jews, far from it. But what we need to do is look for the proof in the pudding — the main yardstick for a candidate should be, what type of America are they advocating, and how would life be in said America?