When I moved from Los Angeles to Nashville more than five years ago, I immediately joined a club to play tennis because it’s my passion and a good way to stay fit as you age.
So over those years I developed friendly relations (swallowing my losses!) with 10 or so guys with whom I play doubles regularly.
Almost all of them are evangelical Christians of one stripe or other.
After they got to know me for a while, some asked me, politely and genuinely puzzled, as a Jew, “Why do so many Jews hate Israel?”
Many of these men had been there themselves, some more than once, and loved it.
I didn’t have a ready answer, other than my “Fiddler on the Roof” explanation that I'll get to anon, so I mostly made a joke and picked up my racquet.
These days, however, after the atrocities of Oct. 7, followed by a rise in antisemitism the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Nazi era, I’m tempted to say Jews who continue to identify as liberal (and a sizable number apparently do) are lying to themselves, are basically crazy, or both.
These are people who still rely on The New York Times as their bible after two straight years of the most obvious and deliberate Trump/Russia prevarication that was no more than equally obvious journalistically disqualifying propaganda.
They remain blindly faithful to the Democratic Party, even as manipulated, uneducated, and racist pro-Hamas rioters fill the streets, screaming the genocidal phrase “From the river to the sea,” often without any idea which river or which sea.
These same objectively pro-terror “demonstrators” were and continue to be applauded by a number of Democratic legislators while even more stay silent, hoping to not be challenged for their ideals or lack thereof.
Meanwhile, our most august campuses, many others as well, have seemingly turned into recruiting offices for Hamas, with Jewish students cowering in their dormitory rooms or hiding any public acknowledgment of their religion as if the Bill of Rights never existed.
There’s something seriously wrong with Jews who are still conventionally liberals in the face of this. It’s something close to a cognitive disorder, a form of denialism nearly as destructive as Holocaust denial.
President Joe Biden, it’s worth recalling, disregarded Congress’s Taylor Force Act immediately on obtaining the presidency. That legislation, enacted under President Trump, suspended payments to the Palestinian Authority (PA) until the PA ended its lifetime stipends, using U.S. taxpayer dollars, to families of deceased terrorists, essentially giving a bonus for murder and encouraging more of the same. President Biden started those payments rolling all over again.
“Secretary of State Antony Blinken has announced visa restrictions on Israelis in response to ‘settler violence.’
“Britain and Belgium plan to follow suit, and other European Union countries will likely jump on the blacklist bandwagon.
“The United States frequently uses such visa restrictions to block those guilty of gross human-rights abuses, tyrannical foreign despots and nationals of state sponsors of terrorism.
“But this is a far cry from that—it’s simply a big step in the Obama–Biden administrations’ deep delegitimization of those who oppose a ‘two-state solution.’”
They’re punishing people who simply think that solution is moribund—a “solution” I believed in for years but of which you become skeptical when you hear “From the river to the sea” echoing across the globe until your ears explode.
In fact, many of the ones swept up in this visa restriction, announced by a very liberal Jewish secretary of state, aren’t violent but merely believe in the original documents of their faith, aka “The Bible.”
Meanwhile, the same administration allows others to flow in over our southern border by the millions, unrestricted, from 150-plus countries, including many where genuine violence is a common occurrence.
How does that look post-Oct. 7, my “liberal” friends?
Now, I realize the word “liberal” doesn’t have much meaning anymore. Almost all have receded into shells, incommunicado, if they haven’t already been co-opted into progressivism and are prepared to put rape and baby killing into a “context.”
Do they really believe that, or are they just trying to please their donors? Or perhaps their offices don’t have windows so they can look outside at the real world.
I recognize that a change of views, genuine acknowledgment that one has been wrong, is extremely difficult for most people. A strong fear component exists—fear of alienating friends and family, fear of job loss if you don’t conform to the now-accepted views of those around you. I’ve experienced this myself.
A desperation to be liked also plays a role, although history tells us that’s almost always self-defeating, as is a will to fit in with polite society. The Nazis sent the most assimilated Jews to Auschwitz along with the Hasids with their earlocks and 18th-century attire. It made no difference to the Gestapo.
It’s capitalized because that’s the title of a book I read and admired in 2010, when I interviewed its author, Norman Podhoretz, for PJTV on its publication.
Reading it a second time now, I appreciate it even more. Mr. Podhoretz, for many years the editor of Commentary, was a leading neoconservative in his day, but he has recognized, like many of us, that the belief that the Iraq War would turn that country into Denmark was, to say the least, mistaken.
He devoted the first half of his book to a history of the oppression of the Jews. Although there were exceptions, most of it, until recently, did come from the right, from conservative royalty or their tribunes such as the infamous Tomás de Torquemada.
The response of many Jews was to turn to the left for succor that was only intermittently given.
This also accounts for their attraction to communism, what I called earlier my “Fiddler on the Roof” explanation.
If you remember the musical, we’re asked to sympathize with the young man, Perchik, who wants to abandon Tevye’s world of “tradition” for the revolution.
He was a prototype for the turn of the 20th-century era. In real life, many Perchiks went off to join the Bolsheviks in the hope that there would be no more religious persecution when all were atheists under communism.
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
And that’s only the tip of a particularly unpleasant iceberg.
The Perchiks were sweet and well-meaning—some of them, anyway, such as the character in “Fiddler”—but they were incredibly naïve. Others turned out to be clever, yet vicious, ideologues, such as Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein), who was the founder of the Red Army.
Yet the dreams of the Perchiks persist to the present day here in the United States, albeit in watered-down—one could even say extremely watered-down—form.
Whether Wall Streeters, doctors, lawyers, college professors, teachers, social workers, or entertainers, most middle-, upper-middle-, or upper-class Jews identify, to some degree anyway, as supporters of the left.
It’s a living, breathing example of the cliché of old habits dying hard.
Most aren’t utopian revolutionaries anymore—it’s hard to be that after the millions of deaths attributed to Marxism. And only a minority still support the most noxious radical groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa (although most do little to oppose them or any aspects of the pervasive reactionary identity politics).
But most still like to think of themselves as good guys and gals, healing the world (in a misreading of the Jewish tradition tikkun olam) as they go about their comfortable, extremely bourgeois lives.
Some of us, of course, have outgrown this. Looking back at our more radical pasts, we wonder why we could even have thought or identified with anything so absurd in the first place, but we did.
We were probably Perchiks, too, looking for a pat on the head for healing the world.
The writer David Horowitz is to be commended for being the first to recognize this pattern and get out.
It would be fascinating to read an update of Mr. Podhoretz’s book for the past decade.
Now, in this era when so much evil has come to the surface, when college kids are in danger of being beaten or even shot for wearing a Star of David to class, liberal Jews must face a different reality.
It’s those on the left who are their dedicated enemies, like it or not.
As the cartoon character Pogo put it during the Vietnam War, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
If the liberal Jews don’t change now, it’s likely they never will.
You either hide who you are or stand up for who you are.
