September 2009 Norman Podhoretz has been writing for COMMENTARY for 57 years, was its editor in chief for 35 years, and was its editor at large for 14 more. In his 12th book, COMMENTARY’s venerable lion of disputation addresses the question he says he is asked more frequently than any other by his fellow conservatives:Why Are Jews Liberals? In a dispassionate effort to answer the question honestly, Podhoretz traverses the history of the Jewish people, from the Romans through the evolving views of the Catholic Church and Christianity in general, the Enlightenment, the rise of 19th-century nationalism, and the totalitarian calamities of the 20th century. He demonstrates that throughout the past two millennia, the scattered Diaspora found its only succor and support from universalist ideas that, because of their universalism, were placed on the port side of the ideological divide. It is for this reason, he argues, that American Jews have been the only definable well-to-do cohort over the past 40 years that has not moved to the Right, even though the evolution of the American Right has been in a frankly philo-Semitic direction—and among whose ranks come the most ardent non-Jewish supporters of the state of Israel in the world. To note the publication of Why Are Jews Liberals? later this month, COMMENTARY has asked six notable American Jewish thinkers to reflect on its themes. Their contributions appear on the following pages, in reverse alphabetical order. DAVID WOLPE Norman Podhoretz has offered us an elegant, condensed political history of the Jews. He recounts how beleaguered Jews have repeatedly looked in two places for solace: to the heavens and to the government. As religiosity waned, government was viewed as the sole power capable of restraining the savagery of localized violence. Since nature abhors a spiritual vacuum, Podhoretz concludes that the religion of liberalism—that is, faith in the powers of government—has replaced Judaism in the hearts of Jews. The lesson of Rabbi Chanina inPirkei Avot became the dominant political motif: “If not for the government, people would eat each other alive.” Why, asks Podhoretz, do Jews cling to this belief if it no longer serves our interest? One possibility is that convictions linger as evolutionary adaptations do, past their usefulness. Evolution and history combine to upend us: Jews still eat rich foods and still vote liberal. But there is another possible understanding of why Jews cleave to their political faith: it may be a product of kinship stronger than any ideology. It may not be about whom we vote for but whom we vote with. Politics is full of arguments, yet how many arrive at their politics through argument? While it may not quite meet British idealist F.H. Bradley’s definition of philosophy as the “finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct,” there remains a large residue of instinct in political alignments. Walking into a congregation, the first question a prospective worshipper asks is not “What is the theology here?” but rather “Is there anyone here like me?” Much of politics is like religion; it, too, answers the question “Who is like me?” And those who look for Jews to identify with others in their economic class make a mistake. Jews have felt wealthy for a relatively brief time. They have felt like outsiders for three -millennia. No matter how powerfully Jews asserted their loyalty to successive governments in various countries, there was a note of hysteria in the patriotic fervor. They were more Hungarian than Magyars, more German than the Junkers. Somewhere in the Jewish soul, there lurks a scintilla of suspicion as to our Americanness. Not because we do not love the country but because we are not used to being, and being accepted as, part of the great collective. Whether labeled Jewish Americans or American Jews, “Jewish” always pulled at the purity of the other half of the compound word. This tension, of course, has long been an accusation of our enemies. But it is not an issue of divided loyalty; that is a canard. Rather, the sense of disquiet is a natural accompaniment to being the outsider, the marginalized one who does not feel fully at home. When the Bible speaks of the ger toshav, the resident stranger, the Hasidic preacher named the Maggid of Dubno glosses this as teaching that one should not feel too much of a resident in this world, where we are all strangers. To be estranged is a natural human condition, epitomized in the experience of the Jew. If I may be allowed so vast a sweep of generalization, Republicans, conservatives, are the party that feels comfortably at home. We need not attach a value to this observation; you may approve of this sensibility or not. But for Jews, unease is our mother tongue. Why are the arts so often allied to liberalism? One explanation—without claiming this as the only reason—is that artists see themselves as outsiders. Yes, this is often just a fashionable pose, but that does not diminish the alliances it suggests. Pace the few artists, like Chesterton or T.S. Eliot, who contradict the pattern, art and alienation are very left wing. Whether tailors or couturiers, Jews remained the designers of outsider chic. Podhoretz’s book is meant to explain why Jews do not vote their self-interest. I would say it is because they vote their self-conception, which is a very different thing. Jews identify with those who see themselves as on the margins: African Americans, immigrants, various minority interest groups. The blue-collar poor may feel angry, but they also feel that America is in some deep sense “theirs.” They don’t need to claim it, although they may wish to reclaim it. But for all those who suspect deep down that no matter how patriotic they may be, no matter how much they may contribute, the Daughters of the American Revolution will always see them as arrivistes, it will remain attractive to make common cause with those on the margins. As Podhoretz writes, the Right has, of late, been more supportive of Israel. And conservatism, with its emphasis on a “complex of traditions, principles and institutions,” is the inheritor of a Burkean vision that accords well with religious traditionalism. Those observations might lead one to expect a political realignment. But I suspect that until conservatism convinces most Jews that they have a sympathy and practical program for those who are real or putative outsiders, it will remain, among Jews at least, distinctly the minority movement. _____________ JONATHAN D. SARNA England’s famous American-trained chief rabbi Joseph H. Hertz would have been astonished by the title and central assumption of Norman Podhoretz’s Why Are Jews Liberals? “Jews are by nature conservative,” he wrote in his commentary to the Authorised Daily Prayer Book, which hecompleted during World War II. He explained that “loyalty to the State is ingrained in the Jewish character” and that “in all those countries in which persecution has not embittered their life,” Jews “are no more radical than the non-Jewish members of the social class to which they belong.” Hertz was something of an apologist, but his analysis of Jewish political behavior has much to recommend it. The late Jewish historian Ben Halpern—himself a secularist, political liberal, and Zionist—reached the same conclusion. Jews learned from the Diaspora experience “that their safety always depended on political and social stability,” he wrote in an issue ofAmerican Jewish Historical Quarterly devoted to the exploration of Jewish liberalism. “They depended for their lives on the authorities, on the persons and groups who exercised legitimate power.” Halpern concluded, in another work, that “the natural Jewish political attitude, the attitude that truly expresses a continuous tradition up to and including the shtetl,is one of conservatism.” The majority of American Jews, of course, failed to uphold this “natural Jewish political attitude” over the past century. COMMENTARY, under Podhoretz’s distinguished editorship, sought to change that, and when Ronald Reagan captured almost 40 percent of the Jewish vote in 1980, Milton Himmelfarb, writing in these pages, declared it “a watershed for Jews.” But that election proved to be an aberration. A generation later, in 2008, the Jewish love affair with liberal politics and the Democratic party seems as ardent and passionate as ever, with more than three-quarters of all Jews voting for Barack Obama. In response, a chastened Podhoretz is now throwing in the towel. Jews, he declares in this book, “remain caught in the Tertullian-like grip of the Torah of liberalism . . . there is no sign that this will change in the foreseeable future.” The question, of course, is why. Many, before Podhoretz, have offered ingenious hypotheses. For example: Liberalism reflects prophetic Jewish values; it is Judaism secularized. Liberal proclivities form part of Jews’ genetic inheritance; they are biologically predetermined. Conservatism has long historic ties to anti-Semitism; Jews reflexively recoil from it. A “radical subculture” from Eastern Europe created and sustained the Jewish love affair with the Left; these immigrants socialized their descendants into liberalism, and they their descendants. And so forth. Wisely, Podhoretz steers clear of such explanations. They are either completely unsound (if Jewish values are so liberal, why aren’t fervently Orthodox Jews the most liberal sector of Jewry?) or far too limited to account for the near 30-point spread between Republicans like Ronald Reagan, who won significant support from Jews, and those like George Bush in 1992, who did not. Instead, Podhoretz points to history and religion as key explanatory factors. He begins with a quick chronological survey of “How the Jews Became Liberals”—a 17-chapter romp through Jewish history beginning with the birth of Christianity and ending with the 1968 defeat of Hubert Humphrey. “It is the historical experience of the Jewish people that turned them into liberals,” he concludes. Liberals, he shows, tended to favor Jewish emancipation and equality, while conservatives, by and large, preferred the old status quo that kept Jews restricted and confined. His section on America’s history overlooks the fact that Jews in this country were politically divided into the early 20th century and that leading American Jews, including the great leader of the American Jewish Committee, Louis Marshall, were stalwart conservatives. Still, his basic interpretation rings true: many Jews voted for liberals for the same reason that many blacks voted for the party of Abraham Lincoln. They learned lessons from their past. The more interesting question, for Podhoretz, is “why the Jews are still liberals.” He shows, in his book’s second part, how he personally shifted his politics in the face of new political realities, and he wonders why the majority of his fellow Jews failed to follow his lead. Blacks, after all, now vote overwhelmingly Democratic, having long since abandoned the politics of their (Republican) past. Jews, meanwhile, still largely vote the way their grandparents did. The answer, for Podhoretz, lies in religion. Liberalism, he argues, “is not, as has often been said, merely a necessary component of Jewishness: it is the very essence of being a Jew. Nor is it a ‘substitute for religion,’ it is a religion in its own right, complete with its own catechism and its own dogmas and . . . obdurately resistant to facts that undermine its claims and promises.” Jewish liberalism endures, Podhoretz concludes, because turning conservative, in liberal eyes, is nothing short of heresy—or worse, apostasy. One wonders, however, why outside the United States liberalism is nowhere near so dominant a faith among Jews. In -Israel, to take an obvious example, Jewish liberals and Jewish conservatives are fairly evenly matched. English Jewry has likewise shifted rightward recently. For three decades following World War II, British Jews overwhelmingly supported the Labour party. As Labour adopted a pro-Arab position in the 1970s, however, Jews abandoned the party in droves, many of them becoming strong supporters of the Conservative Margaret Thatcher. Today British Jews are about evenly split between the two parties: neither can take the Jewish vote for granted. And the same is true in Australia and Canada. While Jews in both communities once reliably voted for liberal candidates, today many have transferred their allegiance to the conservative camp. In both countries, the Jewish vote is divided. Why then should Jews in the United States uphold what Podhoretz calls “the ‘Torah’ of liberalism” so much more zealously than Jews elsewhere in the world? I would point to two factors that distinguish the American situation from what obtains elsewhere. First, Reform Judaism is much stronger in the United States than in any other country, and adherence to Reform Judaism strongly correlates with liberal voting behavior. Reform today is the largest of America’s Jewish religious movements, and all surveys agree that Reform Jews vote Democratic more reliably than any other large body of Jews. There is no need to seek out the “Torah of liberalism,” for Reform Judaism is the engine that drives the liberal train in the United States; additional explanations are unnecessary. Second, the rightward move in all Diaspora countries outside the United States was propelled primarily by repulsion. Jews became disaffected with liberal politicians, usually because of their anti-Israel animus, and shifted to the opposition. So it was in England, Australia, and Canada. In the United States, however, pro-Israel sentiment has always been much more powerful than elsewhere, thanks largely to evangelical support for Israel, and prudent liberals have therefore been as supportive of Israel as have their conservative opponents. The single exception, Jimmy Carter, proves the rule. Tens of thousands of Jewish liberals abandoned Carter in the election of 1980 (which is why Himmelfarb described that election as a watershed), and the president was driven from office, the first Democrat in 60 years not to win a majority of the Jewish vote. Liberal candidates since then have been sedulously careful not to make the same mistake. Podhoretz, after so many years of waiting, no longer anticipates with a perfect faith the coming of a conservative Jewish majority. American Jews, it seems, have tarried too long and embraced Barack Obama too tightly to be redeemed in his eyes. He consigns them, “for the foreseeable future,” to a liberal fate. Maybe so. But then one looks at the growing number of -Orthodox Jews in America, who do not bow down before the “Torah of liberalism”; and at the growing political maturity of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the most politically conservative voting bloc within the American Jewish community; and at the Democrats, who, with their powerful majority, are recklessly challenging and criticizing the state of Israel, potentially alienating American Jewish voters; and at all the other major Jewish communities in the world that vote for conservative candidates in significant numbers—and then one wonders at Podhoretz’s pessimism. “The natural Jewish political attitude” may reassert itself sooner than he imagines.Why Are Jews Liberals?—A Symposium
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Saturday, 6 March 2010
A Symposium
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