Michelle Goldberg Explains Why Jews “Recoil from the GOP”

Emma Bloksberg-Fireovid — July 25, 2011 – 5:33 pm | Barack Obama | Domestic Policy | GOP Presidential Candidates 2012 | Israel | Reproductive Rights | Republicans | Separation of Church & State Comments (1) Add a comment

Newsweek’s Michelle Goldberg published an article today in Tablet detailing why today’s Republican Party repels a majority of American Jews. In the article, Goldberg explained that the Republican Party’s coziness with radical Christian factions makes Jews uneasy. She criticized Republican claims that Jews are leaving the Democratic Party as one of the “perennial canards of American political commentary.” Using historical facts about Jewish voting patterns, she emphasized that the majority of Jewish voters are unlikely to vote Republican because many in the GOP define America as a Christian nation and advance extreme right wing policies intended to achieve that conception of America.

Goldberg explained why the values of the Republican Party conflict with those of most American Jewish voters:

This latest iteration is part of a long history of nonsense, built on a constant, almost willful overestimation of the commonality of interest between American Jews and evangelical Christians. Both of these groups care a lot about Israel. Both see anti-Semitism as a profound evil and a worldwide threat. But American evangelicals and Jews have very different ideas about Israel’s future. Besides, lots of evidence suggests that when it comes to identity politics, American Jews are most concerned with the place of Jews in America. They don’t trust people who want to turn their country into a Christian nation, even if those people swear to protect the Jewish state….

That fact is, many American Jews might consider voting for ‘someone else,’ but only a fraction would consider voting for the type of person that the GOP is likely to nominate. American Jews have shown, again and again, that they care more about social justice and a defense of American pluralism than a zealous defense of Israeli maximalism. They might get anxious about liberal criticism of Israel, but this anxiety tends to pale beside their abhorrence of the Christian right.

Republican politics have never been so fully Christianized. The Tea Party was initially mischaracterized as a libertarian movement, but it is deeply imbued with religious fundamentalism, and polls show that a majority of its members believe that the United States is a Christian nation. It’s no accident that, upon taking over statehouses nationwide, Republicans elected with Tea Party support enacted a record number of abortion restrictions-80 in the first six months of 2011, compared to 23 for all of 2010.

And:

In the end, American Jews care most about America. They are unwilling to assume a role in their own country that’s in any way analogous to that of Arab citizens of Israel—a people with legal equality who are nonetheless excluded from their nation’s raison d’être. Jews know they can never be full citizens of a Christian nation.

She described how President George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign marked a Republican failure to woo Jewish voters:

Fast forward to the first George W. Bush campaign. Once again, Republicans had a candidate whose fierce Zionism derived from his evangelical convictions. And once again, Republican strategists thought they had a shot with American Jews. A Jewish Telegraphic Agency story asked, ‘Can George W. Bush Win the Jewish Vote?’

The answer, of course, was no-Al Gore won 79 percent of the Jewish electorate.

On the topic of currently declared and undeclared GOP presidential candidates, Goldberg discussed Sarah Palin and Representative Michelle Bachmann (R-MN):

Jewish aversion to Palin has been clear to observers across the political spectrum. Rubin, author of the Jerusalem Post piece predicting a Jewish defection from the Democrats, acknowledged it in a Commentary article titled ‘Why Jews Hate Palin.’ The piece would have read as vaguely anti-Semitic if a gentile had written it ... Rubin had a point when she wrote, ‘If one were to invent a political leader designed to drive liberal, largely secular, urban, highly educated Jews to distraction, one would be hard pressed to come up with a more effective figure than Palin.’

At least, she had a point at the time, because since then, just such a leader has emerged—Michele Bachmann. Bachmann is even more rooted in the evangelical right than Palin is. Indeed, while at Oral Roberts University, she was the research assistant on a book by John Eidsmoe titled Christianity and the Constitution, which argued that the United States was founded as a Christian theocracy and that it should become one again. ‘The church and the state have separate spheres of authority, but both derive authority from God,’ Eidsmoe wrote. ‘In that sense America, like [Old Testament] Israel, is a theocracy.’

Bachmann, like many evangelicals, believes in the scriptural imperative to restore the entire biblical land of Israel to Jewish control….

This sort of thing has endeared her to some Jewish conservatives, but if history is any guide, it will not sway the community at large. (Her mispronunciation of ‘chutzpah’ won’t help.) American Jews are savvy enough to realize that evangelical support for Israel does not necessarily imply concern with Jewish safety.

She also examined how Mitt Romney’s affiliation with the Republican Party will leave him out of line with Jewish voters:

Of the serious Republican presidential candidates, the only one who is not entirely aligned with the Christian right is Mitt Romney.

Yet he is running for the nomination of a party dominated by religious literalists; the majority of Republicans, for example, don’t believe in evolution, and more than half of them believe that humans were created in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. In his desire to appeal to the GOP base, he has already forsworn his earlier pro-choice position and now opposes not just legal abortion but also stem-cell research.

Goldberg concluded by offering her personal insight on the future GOP nominee:

Whoever is ultimately the nominee, we can be sure that he or she will reiterate Romney’s accusation that Obama has ‘thrown Israel under a bus.’ We can be sure that he or she will support the religious right’s agenda in domestic politics. And we can be relatively certain of what will matter most to Jewish voters.

Click here to read Goldberg’s full article in Tablet.

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