מאַכן אַמעריקע גרויס אביסל Machen America Grois Abissel
For the past three years some of my fellow Jews have been telling me that I’m not a very good Jew because I happened to vote for the presidential candidate of a major American political party. Putting aside the possible naivete in my beliefs that we live in a good country filled with mostly decent people, regardless of their political ideologies, and that it’s virtually impossible for a truly monstrous person to get through the years-long vetting process of getting nominated, let alone elected, I’m a bit perplexed. The last time I looked, not one of the 613 commandments (yeah, there are way more than the big ten) that God gave the Jews in the Torah obligates me to vote for a particular person or party.
Even more perplexing is the fact that the Jews telling me that I’m not a good Jew hold mutually contradicting beliefs about Jewish identity and for the most part are nearly complete ignoramuses about Judaism, Jewish culture and Jewish history.
I suppose if I’m critiquing others I should lay out my bona fides when it comes to my own relationship with Judaism and the Jewish people (two related but different concepts that I’ll address later). The term I prefer to use to describe myself is “unorthodox Jew.” I’m descended from a long line of people who think they can argue with the Supreme Being, and win the argument. The synagogue I don’t go to, when I don’t go, is an orthodox shul. When I do go to services I have my choice of a half dozen minyanim within a five minute walk, but I typically pray at the nearby kollel, a post-ordination seminary that I can see from my house. There have been times in my life when I’ve been Sabbath observant, Shomer fuckin’ Shabbas as Walter Sobchak would say, and times when I haven’t been so. It’s not that I don’t believe the mitzvot, the commandments, are binding. My position is similar to career criminals who say “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.” Let’s just say the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Who among us always lives up to our highest values?
Anyhow, I have orthodox Jewish grandchildren so I can honestly say that whatever my failings are as a Jew and as a person I’ve done my part in the chain of our heritage. Speaking of which, what does President Trump have that many of his Jewish critics don’t have? Jewish grandchildren. Thank you. I’ll be here all week. Try the veal, it’s kosher l’mehadrin.
I went to a Hebrew day school for K-9 and while going to a public high school I simultaneously attended a local community run Jewish college. As an adult I’ve been affiliated with a number of Jewish institutions. I have been a professional staff member of Jews for Judaism, a non-profit Jewish outreach organization. Outside of my Jewish education and affiliations, I majored in Studies in Religion at the University of Michigan, where my thesis advisor was David Noel Freedman, general editor of the Anchor Bible. Dr. Freedman and a couple other of my professors were students of William Foxwell Allbright, the great biblical archeologist.
All three of my children went to orthodox Jewish parochial schools for their K-12 educations and my son attended the South Bend Yeshiva for high school. One of my daughters works professionally in Jewish education.
I’m fluent in Hebrew, have a passing knowledge of Aramaic, and if my study partner goes slowly enough, I can learn a little Talmud, but I’m far from a Jewish scholar. I do, however, include a number of great Torah scholars among my friends and acquaintances, so if I have a question, I know who to ask, and they’ll likely tell me where on what page of what volume the answer can be found.
Thus, while I’m no talmid chacham, I’m also not a complete ignoramus when it comes to Judaism. Oh, and I also produce custom embroidered Judaica.
The thing is, though, the Jews telling me that I’m a bad Jew don’t know enough about Judaism to be able to tell me just how bad of a Jew that I am. If they had any formal Jewish education, it likely was some kind of very part-time afternoon or Sunday school (at most 2 or 3 hours a week) that probably ended soon after their bar or bat mitzvah ceremony. According to surveys, that describes the formal Jewish education of 75% of American Jews. Very few Jews outside the orthodox community engage in any kind of adult Jewish education (and many who do, use orthodox resources like Partners in Torah). When the hours are added up, they’ve spent about as much time engaged in learning about their Jewish heritage as the elementary school classroom hours spent by a 7 year old in the middle of second grade. Consequently, they have a rather juvenile perspective on one of the world’s great religions and a foundational culture to western civilization. If I gave them a simple quiz on Judaism, Jewish culture, or Jewish history that my 7 year old grandson (who attends an orthodox parochial school) could probably pass, they’d fail, while indignantly questioning who am I to evaluate their own Judaism (ignoring the fact that they’ve done the same to me by saying that if I support Trump I’m a bad Jew).
They are rarely religiously observant, and I’m not just saying they aren’t orthodox. They typically aren’t very observant of Jewish law and ritual as taught by their own Reform and Conservative denominations. They might attend synagogue or temple services twice or three times a year, and they’ll pontificate about Judaism (yeah, I know) to those who go three times a day. They’ll talk about their childhood congregational rabbi as a big influence, or mention some platitude they learned in Hebrew school, usually as validation of their current political beliefs, but they end up sounding like a Jewish Oswald Bates or Norm Crosby with their mispronunciations and malaprops. While there are politically liberal orthodox Jews, among them friends and relatives of mine, they typically know enough about Judaism to not judge me as a Jew based on my secular politics. The same cannot be said about heterodox and unaffiliated Jews.
They’re the kind of Jews who say they are dedicated to “Tikkun Olam,” repairing the world, but they’d never affirm (or actually know) the full context of that ancient phrase, tikkun olam b’malchut shaddai, the repair of the world under the kingdom of God, nor the Aleinu prayer from which it comes, because it’s all about praising and submitting to the Lord.
I realize that for many of them, what little exposure they’ve had to “Judaism” has come from politically left wing Reform and Conservative rabbis so it’s understandable that they think Judaism is some kind of cross between the Declaration of the Rights of Man and whatever the Democratic party platform is this year. When you question their politics, they take it as an attack on their deepest held religious beliefs, which is what their politics are.
They insist that they are proud to be Jews, eager to attack Jew hatred as long as it isn’t coming from the political left, yet I’m not sure exactly how they define themselves to be Jews. They disavow most Jewish religious beliefs and practices, and regard orthodox Jews, particularly chareidim and chassidim, to be troglodytic embarrassments. They’ll mock sheitels and shtreimels, while praising the “bravery”, cultural loyalty, and modesty of Muslims wearing niqabs and hijabs. “Jewess” is verboten*, while “Muslima” is almost an honorific.
While they reject the Jewish religion for the most part, at the same time they also seem to reject the notion of Jewish nationhood. When the New York Times recently mischaracterized President Trump’s executive order extending Civil Rights Act Title VI protections to Jewish students on college campuses as redefining Jews as a nationality (Trump was actually giving EO imprimatur to policies of previous chief executives including Barack Obama), leftist Jews were in high dudgeon, loudly insisting that Trump was literally acting like Hitler, defining Jews as their own nationality, not Americans. Notwithstanding what appears to be the NYT’s deliberately erroneous spin on the president’s order, the simple fact is that Judaism indeed teaches that the Jews are a nation, a people. The New Concordance by Even-Shoshan on my shelf has seven fine-text pages of citations of the Hebrew word Ahm, nation, in the Hebrew bible, many, perhaps most of them references to the Hebrews.
While Judaism says that a child of a Jewish mother is a Jew, regardless of their religious beliefs or actions, I’m not sure how these leftist Jews define themselves as Jews. I may consider them to be Jews, not quite good Jews actually, but Jews nonetheless, but how do they consider themselves to be members of the tribe? They don’t follow the Jewish religion and they reject Jewish nationality, so what makes them Jewish? Bagels on Sunday morning with the New York Times? Chinese and a movie on Christmas?
They’ll characterize President Trump kibbitzing and schmoozing Jewish real estate tycoons laughing at his barbs, as “anti-semitic”, while ignoring verifiable Jew haters like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib because they see them as being on their own political team.
Just how did the Jews survive for 3,000+ years before Palestinian nationality was invented in the mid 20th century?
They’re the kind of Jews who join If Not Now, a Soros funded pressure group of irreligious leftist Jews just a couple of degrees of separation removed from the Muslim Brotherhood. I’m writing this on the third day of Chanukah, Jewish festival of lights. The other day, Tlaib sent the Detroit chapter of If Not Now a video with Chanukah greetings wherein she complained about the Jewish occupation of Palestine. Complaining about the Jewish “occupation” of “Falastin” while supposedly celebrating Chanukah gives a new definition to the word chutzpah. Tlaib ostensibly honoring Chanukah while decrying Jewish “occupation” of the Holy Land puts the moron in oxymoronic. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect too much intellectual rigor from Congresswoman Tlaib. After all, when two black religious nuts in Jersey City recently killed a cop and then shot up a kosher grocery store, killing two Chassidic Jews and a Hispanic employee of the store, Tlaib tweeted blame on “white supremacy”.
The incontrovertible historical fact is that Chanukah celebrates the Hasmoneans (aka Macabees) throwing off Seleucid Hellenic hegemony and reasserting Jewish political sovereignty and religious rights in Judea, Samaria (the so-called “West Bank”) and the rest of the land of Israel centuries before the Romans exiled the Jews and renamed the region Palaestina, after the long-disappeared Philistines.
As with their Tikkun Olam fellow travelers, If Not Now appropriates a term from traditional Judaism, in this case a well known aphorism of the great rabbi Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I? If not now, when?” (Pirke Avot, Ethics of the Fathers, 1:14). Leftist Jews tend to ignore the “if I am not for myself” part, just as much as they ignore or reject the 99% of Hillel’s teachings that disagree with their religious and cultural views. They certainly don’t give much credence to Hillel wanting them to be shomer Shabbas and keep a kosher diet.
On second thought, though, perhaps it was appropriate for Tlaib to send such Chanukah greetings to If Not Now. As much as the Macabees fought a war against the Seleucids, that conflict was also a civil war with Hellenist Jews, Jews who had abandoned traditional Jewish practices, aping Greek culture, seeking affirmation and approval from the hegemonic Seleucids, in some cases even trying to reverse their circumcisions. How’s that for craven? The leftist Jews of If Not Now have likewise abandoned traditional Jewish practices and beliefs in their quest for affirmation and approval from the intersectional left. Had they been around in the time of the Macabees, they would have called Judah and his brothers religious fanatics and nationalist xenophobes just as surely as they call me a bad Jew for voting for Donald Trump.
*When a young Jewish woman told me that the word Jewess was “sexist”, I asked her, “What about dominatrix?” She replied, “Well, that’s a job title,” to which I said, “So feminine suffixes from French are sexist but feminine Latin is okay because it doesn’t sound like “princess”?”
30 Comments
Awesome read! Not being Jewish, and possessing only limited knowledge of the Jewish religious variances, I learned a bit. At first it appeared it was going to be difficult, but the read continued to get easier as the writer explained his various narrative points. I would recommend this read to friends, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and anyone who fails to understand what appears to be an endorsement of leftist ideology by a majority of Jewish people.
Unlike Schreiber, most Jews are acutely aware of history. When you have a demagogue standing before a crowd roaring their approval when he attacks minorities or calls white supremacists “good people,” memories of the millions of people who were killed by like-minded people do cause some unease among Jews and even gentiles I suggest you read Richard J. Evans three volume history of Nazi Germany if you really want to gain some insight into Jewish thought
I think the phrase you’re looking for is “fine people”:
https://www.scottadamssays.com/2019/04/30/the-fine-people-hoax-funnel/
Zipster, thank you so very much for demonstrating exactly the phenomenon I was discussing in the original post. You’re likely an ignoramus about Judaism and Jewish history yet you think that by virtue of however you define yourself as Jewish you have standing to lecture someone who actually knows something about our faith and our history.
I read Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich decades ago, but why on earth would I want to read a history of Nazi Germany to find out about Jewish thought? You think Jewish thought is all about worrying about Jew haters? R’ Meir Kahane taught me much of what I need to know about Jew haters, but you didn’t like him either, did you?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to study, you know, actual Jewish thought if you wanted to gain some insight into Jewish thought?
I already listed a brief CV concerning my Jewish education in the original post. Are you willing to take a Jewish history challenge with me?
You might find out that Jewish history is more than worrying about another holocaust. I sincerely hope that your own Judaism is informed by more positive things than worrying about Jew haters.
I wonder, what was the last positive Jewish experience your children had? Have you been in a synagogue in the last month? Ever make your own Judaica? Ever visited Israel? Can you read and understand Hebrew?
You think the Nazi Holocaust was something unique? The Romans killed about a third of the Jews who were alive in the 1st and 2nd centuries. The Chmielnitzki pogroms killed a quarter of a million Jews. Crusaders effectively wiped out Jews living in the Rhine valley. Muslims virtually expelled three quarters of a million Mizrachi Jews from the countries of their births starting in 1948. As an aside, I’ll piont out that not one of those Jews was a victim of white supremacy as we know the term today, but please, go ahead and make the SPLC richer if it makes you feel morally superior to me.
Jewish history extends a lot farther back than the Holocaust. How many books about Jewish history do you have on your shelves? It doesn’t have to be anything scholarly, it could be something popular. Cecil Roth perhaps? Paul Johnson? Ever read “This Is My God” by Herman Wouk? His brother Victor was an electric and hybrid car pioneer.
Anyhow, since you questioned my knowledge of Jewish history, it’s only fair to see how much of that history you, yourself know.
What was the Dreyfuss affair?
Who was Rashi?
Who was Gluckel of Hamlin?
What happened in York in 1190?
What major event in Jewish history took place in 1492?
What was the Pale of Settlement?
When did the kingdoms of Israel and Judah split?
What happened in 1648-49 in the Ukraine?
What’s the significance of the Israeli city of Petach Tikvah? (Extra points if you know where the name comes from).
What did Yoseph Karo write?
What secular knowledge did Abraham Ibn Ezra introduce to Europe?
What were the first three countries to politically emancipate Jews?
What classical Jewish text was the product of the scholars of Yavneh?
And, since this site is sort of devoted to cars, what Jewish automaker popularized front wheel drive?
Just finished reading “This Is My God”. It was a good read for a Christian as well.
The Cantor at my schul defines a Jew as one who struggles with G_d. I think that somewhat matches your thoughts. Also in spite of the 613 mitzvot my co-religionists love to debate as your thoughtful article clearly demonstrates. Nice piece (I wish I could write so well).
Thank you.
And I learned something as well.
Not Jewish but I also learned something. Thank you
Great article, Ronnie! I am one of those non-observant, Hebrew-school-only American Jews you referenced above, but I like to think that I have an open mind regarding politics. I have a friend who is part of Chabad, and he always talks (quite forcefully) about many of the same things you mentioned. He revels in the fact that Trump has Jewish grandchildren, he has great appreciation for Trump’s executive order related to Title VI (and is happy that Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem), he laughs at the Democratic party for its conundrum regarding how to reconcile the beliefs of Reps. Omar and Tlaib, he calls Bernie Sanders a self-hating Jew, and he is saddened by the increase in anti-semitism. But his most controversial contention is that he will support any U.S. president who supports Israel and Judaism, even if he (or she) simultaneously denounces or expresses disdain or even hatred toward other races/religions.
Great piece Ronnie!
The point about 75% of the people taking any formal Jewish education and promptly forgetting most of it is like the joke where a Lutheran pastor is consulting with a member of his church who runs a pest control company about a problem:
Pastor: “Morning, Jed! The other day, after services, I heard a commotion in back, which I traced to the bell tower! When I looked up there, three bats flew at me, and they had made a mess on the floor! What would you charge to remove these bats from the building?”
Jed: “C’mon, Pastor, you don’t need my services—you can do this yourself! Just go into the bell tower, get those bats together, then baptize and confirm them! They’ll leave, and never come back!” 😂😂😂
This could probably apply to any Christian denomination. After high school, church attendance is a crapshoot: lots of kids stick with their faith, but some don’t, or return later in life.
With the garbage that they’re peddling at the liberal indoctrination-centers formerly known as universities, the only saving grace is that most of the Protestant denominations are just as liberal as the colleges!
>>Protestant denominations are just as liberal as the colleges
As a Lutheran, when someones else says that they’re Lutheran too, I tend to assume that they’re a secular left-wing nut job until proven otherwise.
One things that frustrates me is that is that these people are great at corrupting – but seemingly can’t make anything of their own. If there was a civilization of socialist gender confused dog worshipers I could be persuaded to give them some credence – but we all know they’ll never be one.
The version I heard was about the young Rabbi and the old Rabbi and the squirrels in the space above the synagogue ceiling: “Just Bar-Mitzvah them! I guarantee, you will never see them again!”
I was going to post that, except you beat me to it.
BTW, I once heard a Catholic priest, in a sermon, state that there were 617 precepts or injunctions or commandments in the Five Books of Moses.
What a moron.
The reason nobody should ever make that mistake is that:
6 + 1 + 3 = 10.
In other words, the 613 commandments are summed up in the 10.
And, Ronnie, great direct hit with the witticism about Trump and his Jewish grandchildren.
American Jews have the highest rate of exogamy (choosing spouses outside their faith) ever recorded.
BTW2, one of my sisters got her degree in Religious Studies at Brown, and she was one of the last of R. Jacob Neusner’s advisees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Neusner He is one of the most published authors in history: he wrote or edited more than 900 books. Puts that little pup Metropolitan Hilarion in his place with his measly 600 publications.
john
This was a good read. How is a non Jew to view the idea that so many Jews view their hard left political views as a central part of their sense of self as a Jew. Yet turn around and recoil to the idea that there is any dual loyalty.
If you have ever read Phillip Roth it can be seen in American Pastoral. The main character Seymour/Swede destroys himself by trying to hard to fit in to the American dream/ American Pastoral with his lifestyle and gentile pretty wife.
Swede’s father rails against Nixon as a dime store Hitler for not doing enough for Jews. The war aid to Israel counts for nothing in his eyes. Yet there is no self reflection that he himself was closing his factory to move it overseas to better moneygrub and his own granddaughter is literally an anarchist terrorist. What was he doing for the America that took him in and offered him so much opportunity? Just fiction but just close enough to reality to really hit home.
“…what little exposure they’ve had to “Judaism” has come from politically left wing Reform and Conservative rabbis so it’s understandable that they think Judaism is some kind of cross between the Declaration of the Rights of Man and whatever the Democratic party platform is this year”
It’s the same at the local Presbyterian church in my hometown, where the pastor is a diligent SJW who has managed to decimate the congregation regurgitating DNC party narratives. Only at his convenience, of course, which means he’s big into his local Muslim outreach initiative (my mom, a church elder, says the outreach is glaringly one-way) and illegal immigrant sanctuary activism but suspiciously quiet about late-term abortion policies that are all the rage in the deeply blue states. Although, I’m sure it won’t be too long before Democrats figure out a way to convince the left wing Christians that, along with Obamacare and abolishing ICE, abortion is probably something “Jesus would do”.
Don’t worry about Omar or Tlaib… that’s just the strength of our diversity reflected in our representative republic. Maybe one day I’ll return the favor, move to Somalia and vote Republican. You can vote in Somalia, right?
Great essay Ronnie. Jews have given the world so many wonderful gifts in the scientific, cultural, and business worlds, but from what I can see their political contributions have been largely negative and Leftist and originate entirely from secular ethnic Jews (aka Marx, Trotsky, Alinsky). As Ben Shapiro says, Trump has almost universal support from the Orthodox Jewish community, but is hated by the mostly Leftist secular Jews, but again the same could be said of mainstream (“liberal”) Christian religions, which have moved further and further Left, while “conservative” evangelical sects are Republican and Trump supporters (and the most vehement supporters of Israel). And yet, it is the Right that is always labeled Nazi or white supremacist, even though it was Republicans who freed the slaves, and the actual historical Nazis and the vast majority of 5,000 odd modern day white supremacists are actually Leftist when it comes to their political policies (i.e. support for state run health care, highly redistributionist tax policies, abortion, and general dislike for Capitalism). In fact, if Hitler hadn’t been such an anti-Semite with all the Kristallnacht and Final Solution stuff, his Nazi party would have ironically almost certainly enjoyed strong support among the secular Jews in Germany and occupied territories.
I would be interested in your theories about why orthodox Jews (and evangelical Christians) veer Right, while secular Jews and many mainstream (“liberal”) Protestants and Catholics veer Left. My guess is that the traditional (conservative) Judeo-Christian traditions are based on personal responsibility (to obey religious commandments) and hence personal (local and voluntary) charity is the mechanism for helping the less fortunate, while the secular/liberals believe that society is responsible for all personal mischief/misfortune and that centrally controlled (coercive) government redistribution is the mechanism for taking down the too-fortunate who haven’t checked their privilege. Thus my feeling is that the “religious” Left is built on Envy and the religious Right is based on true Charity, and the political leanings and preferences follow.
Spot on. Thank you for making a terrific observation that harks back to the classical teaching of virtue and vice.
Now that the Zionists finally got their Iran war, what else is there they can possibly get from the man that he hasn’t already surrendered to them? Does the author really think Hillary wouldn’t have delivered the same goods with no resistance?
That a mere three congresspeople have evaded lock step with AIPAC, and are eternally vilified by the media for rather uncontroversial views should alert people as to who controls the government and medias. Of course Jim Traficant, Gus, Savage, and Cynthia McKinney were even more open about this last century to little avail. Expect the squad to be silenced in the manner of the last two in short order.
The revolutionary government of Iran has been waging war on the United States since it took our diplmats hostage in 1979. I guess you just don’t like it when we fight back. You don’t care that Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iranians, Iraqis, Lebanese, and Americans as long as he killed a few Jews while he was at it.
If you weren’t a coward, you’d live up to your values and boycott anything and everything that Jews have developed or invented.
Given the internet’s memory, there is no shortage of Obama era Trump tweets openly mocking the utter stupidity of inciting war with Iran and potentially starting another front in the Middle East. And yet here we are. ‘America First!’ (?)
Having sons approaching at the very least selective service age, I want no part of this. The boomer armchair chickenhawks can stuff it.
Someone once succinctly identified the Jewish political dialectic as having two camps, one for war and one for sodomy. Ronnie is clearly a war Jew. Does anyone dispute that the neo-conservatives are a bunch of Trotskyites that got enough integrity to realize that their liberal ideals were in deep conflict with Zionism and jumped ship to pretend to be conservatives?
Besides immigration, the main differentiation of candidate Trump from his opponents on both sides was that he was against needless foreign entanglements. The American people are generally not dupes for the jingoism at this point.
Obama was terrible at most things but I miss his restraint with Israel. Remember that he prevented their attempt to assassinate Soleimani back in 2015.
Aw, you mean I miss out on all that fun sodomy stuff?
Shorter rambo forum : “I don’t have much use for black folks, unless they hate Jews like I do.”
Keep repeating the dreck you kneel for and swallow eagerly. If you ever had an original thought in your mind, the rest of what few neurons you have left would go silent in shock.
Zionism is simply the notion that Jews have the right to be self-determinate in their homeland. Funny how the idea that out of hundreds of countries in the world that there might be one solitary Jewish country gets your gynomastic tits in a ringer.
It would be nice if we weren’t the ones fighting for their alleged homeland. Is it not enough that US taxpayers pay for their weapons?
Michael Savage and I agree that the Jewish State should grow up and fight their own battles.
As I heard it put someplace—maybe by my Dad, but perhaps Rush Limbaugh or a work colleague of mine: Israel is the only entity that has ever had to literally give back land taken in battle.
It would be nice if we weren’t the ones fighting for their alleged homeland.
Israel has never asked for Americans to fight for them. Of course, back in the 1930s and 1940s, before there was an Israel, if you were around you would have been complaining about not needing to fight the Jews’ wars. Any excuse will serve a Jew-hater.
Let me ask you, what would give you more satisfaction, actually killing Jews, or just vicariously cheering on their deaths, as you currently do?
Ronnie, I thought we Catholics were the only faith to gleefully indulge in intramural criticism! Anyway, thanks for a fascinating and educational read. You’re a mensch.
Remember, the Jews being attacked deserve it for being Jews and Trump. Because everyone knows that their attackers are being triggered.
Nice of you to join the conversation Reverend Sharpton – your insightful point of view is most welcome. By the way, how is the tax problem working out?
I think dejal forgot a /sarc tag.
Of course, this isn’t exactly a new problem. The entire biblical account of the Jewish people is time and time again a “stubborn and stiff-necked” people tries to assimilate in the cultures around them and finding other Gods and losing their place and relevance until they return back to YHWH.
Thanks Ronnie. I still don’t know much about the Jews (I can’t digest all you wrote here) and although I may know some Jews, I don’t know if I do. Doesn’t matter that much to me either way.
One thing I never understood is why Jews seem to support things that want to destroy them. There’s enough of that going around without Jews helping it along.
God bless you and yours.