Commentary, Norman Podhoretz’s work home for almost 60 years, describes its former editor (he held the position from 1960 to 1995) as a “venerable lion of disputation.” The disputatious lion is famous for, among other things, his political migration from left to right in the late 1960s, and his subsequent championing of the neoconservative cause, along with his wife, Midge Decter, son John, son-in-law Elliott Abrams, fellow travelers such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, and organizations like the Committee for the Present Danger and Project for a New American Century, in addition, of course, to the pages of Commentary.

Podhoretz has just published a new book, Why Are Jews Liberals? , in which he asks, in essence, why haven’t more Jews made the same exodus from the Democrats to the Republicans, like I did?



According to Commentary, Podhoretz wrote the book to try to address “the question he says he is asked more frequently than any other by his fellow conservatives.”

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.

That description is from the magazine’s September issue, in which it asked “six notable American Jewish thinkers” to write about the question Podhoretz’s book poses.

“Why do Jews remain liberals?,” asks William Kristol, one of the respondents. “God only knows.”

Why has He chosen to allow Jews to stay mindlessly attached to a liberalism that is no longer beneficial or sympathetic to them? Why has He chosen to harden Jewish hearts against a conservatism increasingly welcoming to Jews and supportive of the Jewish state? Perhaps there are some questions that simply can’t be answered by unassisted human reason. Norman Podhoretz has made a valiant attempt to answer these questions. But at the end of the day, and at the end of his fascinating and illuminating book, one is left still shaking one’s head. Indeed, Norman is left shaking his head, first at the fact that “liberalism has become the religion of American Jews” and then at the further fact that “they can remain loyal to it even though it conflicts in substance with the Torah of Judaism at so many points, and even though it is also at variance with the most basic of all Jewish interests — the survival of the Jewish people.”

Another respondent, Jonathan Sarna, writes:

[Podhoretz] shows . . . 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.

Michael Medved says that “for most American Jews, the core of their Jewish identity isn’t solidarity with Israel; it’s rejection of Christianity.”

This observation may help to explain the otherwise puzzling political preferences of the Jewish community explored in Norman Podhoretz’s book. Jewish voters don’t embrace candidates based on their support for the state of Israel as much as they passionately oppose candidates based on their identification with Christianity—especially the fervent evangelicalism of the dreaded “Christian Right.” . . . Those who seek to liberate the bulk of American Jews from their reflexive and self-defeating liberalism must do more than show the logic of conservative thinking. They should recognize that Jews, like all Americans, vote not so much in favor of politicians they admire as they vote against causes and factions they loathe and fear. Jews fear the GOP as the “Christian party,” and as the sole basis of Jewish identity involves rejection of Christianity, Jews will continue to reject -Republicans and conservatism. Podhoretz poignantly describes the way many Jewish Americans have adopted liberalism as a substitute religion. A more positive, engaged attitude with our real religious tradition would lessen the resentment toward religious Christians and, in an era when even Albania, Moldova, and Iraq have built functioning multiparty democracies, introduce for the first time in nearly a century a true two-party system to the Jewish community.

Ron Rosenbaum, writing at his own site, offers his own answer to “why this Jew is liberal (but no longer left),” though first, as is his wont, he digresses:

First of all, I should disqualify myself to some extent. I’m not an observant Jew, I don’t regard the Bible as the word of God, I’m an agnostic about the existence of God. So some may say I don’t have a place in this conversation. But Isaac Bashevis Singer was an agnostic, you gonna say he’s not a Jew? I’m a Jew like he’s a Jew, forever arguing about what it means to be a Jew, forever arguing with a God you’re not sure exists. I feel Jewish, I certainly am identifiably Jewish, and I have expressed myself on the subject of Jews changing their names. I feel an unshakeable identity with Jews and Jewish culture, have explored the source of the Holocaust in one book (Explaining Hitler) and have edited an anthology about the current threat of anti-Semitism (Those Who Forget the Past).

Having worked through all that, Rosenbaum goes on to identify the source of his liberalism:

I consider myself both a Jew and a liberal and if I had to name one factor that would make it so, it was the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s. . . . For we were slaves in Egypt once, right? How could we not be at the forefront of protests against racist former slave-state sponsored segregation in the South and racism in the North? I saw conservatives and Republicans staunchly opposed to anti-segregation legislation and anti-racist movements. I still see conservatives and Republicans still unashamedly profiting electorally from the racism-lite “Southern strategy.” I was glad to read of William F. Buckley Jr. expressing regret for the anti-civil rights stance of the early National Review, but I don’t hear of many other conservatives expressing regret that their movement stood in solidarity with racists and continues to profit from Southern strategy racism. . . . I won’t say that it isn’t difficult, that there aren’t contradictions with being Jewish and liberal, but I’d rather associate my political orientation with those who supported the Civil Rights movement than with those who have yet to repudiate the racism behind the Southern strategy. Some have. Talk to me about conservatism when more do.

At his site, Robert Stacy McCain says of all the six participants in Commentary’s forum, Michael Medved “nailed it.”

The demonization of the “Religious Right” was a project developed by Norman Lear and others during the Reagan era, after Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority played such a key role in the 1980 election, and this theme has defined the politics of the Democratic Party ever since. As a political tactic, it is both amazingly effective and fundamentally false. The Republican Party is chiefly devoted to political policies having nothing specifically to do with evangelical Christianity. Yet there is an entire industry of liberal propagandists who specialize in seeking out various outre pronouncements of “Religious Right” leaders and presenting these views as if they would become firm policy in the next Republican administration. . . . Depicting the “Christian Right” as an especially benighted and menacing component of the Republican Party has, as Medved notes, a particular value in discouraging Jewish Democrats from reconsidering their political loyalties. To any liberal, the conservative is always the Other. But by depicting the GOP as dominated by the “Christian Right,” the Otherness of conservatism is effectively doubled — if not, indeed, magnified exponentially.

McCain goes on to discuss what he sees as a relevant factor — the “town-and-country divide in American politics.”

Although the trend to suburbanization has somewhat ameliorated this generalization, most American Jews are fundamentally urban in their orientation, while most American conservatives are fundamentally rural. Think of Reagan, riding horses and clearing brush at his ranch — it is an image that appeals to the “country” side of the town-and-country divide, embodying as it does the antique ideal of the American frontier homesteader. This “rugged individual” ideal, the self-sufficient property owner zealously guarding his freedom, is intrinsic to what American conservatism is all about, and it is an ideal quite alien to the urban lifestyle. The city-dweller is inherently dependent on public services. He doesn’t draw his water from a well, doesn’t go out with a chain-saw to supply firewood for the winter, doesn’t augment the grocery budget by hunting deer or growing his vegetables.

Which brings McCain to a suggestion:

If Messrs. Podhorhetz, et al., wish to promote conservatism among American Jews, let them find some way to encourage Jewish families to move to small towns in the Heartland, where their kids can grow up hunting, fishing and hot-rodding the backroads. A guy with a gun rack in the back window of his four-wheel drive truck may occasionally vote Democrat, but he’s extremely unlikely to be an out-and-out liberal.

“Maybe I’m too touchy about this,” responds blogger DougJ at Balloon Juice, “but I’m profoundly disturbed by the idea of relocating intellectuals, especially Jewish intellectuals, so they can learn about real values. Isn’t that exactly what Stalin and Mao did? Is there any Maoist/Stalinist/Leninist idea that the American right hasn’t embraced?”

Writing at Vanity Fair, James Wolcott is not so taken with McCain’s idea either: “This loose-hinged proposal does carry a dank odor of Nazi/Stalinist/Red Chinese population removal/reducation programs (with the unpleasant suggestion that real values are rooted in the soil, the higher forms of intellect prone to decadence).”