The Palin Conversation Continues

David Streeter — January 11, 2010 – 4:26 pm | Election 2012 | Republicans | Women's Issues Comments (0) Add a comment

The conversation about Palin’s relationship with Jewish voters continues to gain participants. In particular, Jonathan Chait of The New Republic has some harsh criticism of Jennifer Rubin and her latest article in Commentary about the less than half-term governor turned Fox News contributor:

... in summary [according to Rubin], Jews are snobs. They’re hung up on academic credentials, biased against rural Americans, gun owners, the military, and the working class. This, of course, is a classic Bush-era trope against liberals. (It’s actually a trope that opponents of liberalism everywhere have employed, from the Czars to Mao to Stalin.) The liberal as a cosmopolitan, effete, disdainful of regular people, not a real American (or Russian, or Chinese, whichever the country in question may be.)

But it’s also a classic anti-Semitic trope. Indeed, in Europe, anti-liberals traditionally incorporated anti-Semitism into this line of attack, using the disproportionate presence of Jews among the liberal intelligentsia to help give weight to this attack. When American conservatives revived this trope during the Bush era, they scrubbed it of all anti-Semitic content. The target was Blue State America, the tiny, unrepresentative cloisters of educated secular snobbery where real America was totally foreign.

It’s beyond strange to see this argument explicitly targeted at Jews, in a Jewish publication of all places. Rubin cannot hide her contempt at the snobbery of her co-religionists. “Jews are not about to cast aside their preference for those leaders whom they perceive as intellectually worthy-and socially compatible,” she concludes. Jews hate Palin because they distrust Real Americans. Fortunately, we have a few enlightened souls at Commentary able to rise above such petty prejudice.

 

 

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