Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 18, 2015
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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
Clip on a nametag, pick up a paper cup of lukewarm water and you can sit down in the audience at a thousand liberal Jewish establishment panels where the likes of Peter Beinart or Jeffrey Goldberg will sanctimoniously lecture their bored audience on the growing gap between American Jews and Israel.
Yawn through the usual references to “settlements”, “democratic character” and “one state solution.” Wake up just in time for the sales pitch for J Street and tough love BDS for the Jewish State.
And then go out and get some fresh air.
The gap isn’t between Israeli and American Jews; it’s between American Jews and the rest of the world.
The J Street gang is selling the myth that Israel is becoming isolated. That Israelis have retreated into their own concerns while having little in common with the progressive views of the rest of the world.
It’s not Israel that’s becoming isolated.
Netanyahu’s reelection doesn’t show that Israel is out of step with the concerns of Diaspora Jews. A poll showed that two thirds of British Jews [2] would vote for Netanyahu.
In the last UK election, 70% of British Jews polled [3] as voting conservative. Only 22 percent backed Labour. It didn’t help that Labour’s Ed Miliband was ethnically Jewish because he was anti-Israel. Even the former director of Labour Friends of Israel [4] announced that she was voting for Cameron.
The gap is not just between Israel and American Jews. British and Israeli Jews stand together. Jewish liberals in America are left out of the picture.
And the British and Israeli Jews don’t stand alone.
In the 2011 election, Canada’s Conservatives picked up 52 percent of the Jewish [5] vote. The Jewish vote lagged behind the Protestant vote by only 3 percent. Experts cited the key element as being Prime Minister Harper’s support for Israel. That and growing concern among Canadian Jews [6] about Islam.
British, Canadian and Israeli Jews stand on one side. It’s American liberal Jews that are isolated.
In Australia’s last election, it was reported that there was a near consensus among Jewish community leaders in favor of the more conservative Liberal Party over Labor. A majority of Sydney’s most Jewish electorates [7] are held by Liberal party candidates.
So make that Israeli, British, Canadian and Australian Jews standing together… while liberal Jews in America sit through venomous leftist panels muttering spitefully about Israel becoming isolated.
French Jews are also voting to the right. Sarkozy did better among Jewish [8] voters than the general population. Even Marine Le Pen’s National Front has increased her number of Jewish votes.
So make that Israeli, British, Canadian, Australian and French Jews who are standing together. American Jewish liberals are the ones who are isolated and out of step with the rest of the Jews of the world.
Jewish leftists hiss that Israelis are out of step with their political agenda. Jews, at least the ones they know, are moving further to the left. And Israel must surrender even harder to the terrorists to accommodate them. But American Jews are not the rest of the Jewish world. They are an aberration.
They have become a leftist blip in a community turning to the right. Their politics are not the product of commitment, but a lack of it. They turn left because of apathy and the loss of their Jewish identity.
Around the world, it’s the liberal Jews in America who are out of step with the Jewish people.
When the parties of the left in the UK, Canada and Australia tilted against Israel, Jewish voters left them. It’s only in the US that Jewish liberals pathetically cling to the raddled corpse of the Democratic Party. They continue to cling to it despite Jimmy Carter, who has done everything but don a Hamas headband, and Obama. They continued voting Democrat even as a violent anti-Semitic racist like Al Sharpton not only got a speaking gig at the Democratic National Convention, but became a key Obama ally.
Fewer American Jews voted for Obama the second time around, but every vote was still one too many.
American Jews used to be noted for their self-confidence; instead they now appear weak and fearful. American Jewish organizations used to take the lead on anti-Semitism. These days organizations in the UK, Israel and France do the work that American Jewish groups won’t do. No American Jewish establishment organization is willing to stand up to Obama even as he signs off on an Iranian bomb.
The Jewish establishment is far more concerned with holding on to their grandchildren who are drifting left than to do anything meaningful about left-wing anti-Semitism. Meanwhile every anti-Semitic BDS group can find Jewish figureheads to Jew-wash its hatred. The establishment has moved to accommodate a dying “new generation” of young Jews who tilt left and don’t care much about Israel.
That’s not who the future Jews of America are. Those Jews who don’t care about Israel, also don’t care about staying Jewish. They may be the future of the left, but not of the Jewish people.
Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz whined that Jews should vote Democrat because of abortion. She recently claimed that [9] Jews overwhelmingly favor gay rights. Schultz insists that “Democrats’ values are embedded in our Judaism”, but what happens when American Jews no longer share her version of Judaism which puts abortion ahead of Israel?
Three-quarters of all Jewish children in New York City are Orthodox. A pre-election Siena College survey showed Jewish support split [10] roughly between Obama and Romney. Obama’s worst performance [11] occurred in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods where Romney won more than 90 percent [12] of the vote.
Similar results could be seen in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in the 2008 [12] election.
Orthodox Jews are a minority within a minority, but they are a fast growing minority [13] because they don’t share the abortion and gay rights values of the Democrats.
Liberal American Jews are becoming an endangered species. Their children and grandchildren are swiftly vanishing into the unaffiliated side of the column. Even as the left has managed to take over much of the Jewish organizational establishment, it is within a decade of losing its New York City base.
Its activists will have to retreat, the workshops and panels falling back from Jewish communities they can no longer represent, squawking about how out of touch Israel is, even as they lose touch with the changing demographics of a new American Judaism that cares about Israel, not gay marriage.
Israel isn’t isolated. They are.
By voting conservative, Israeli Jews are acting much the way that Jews from the UK, France, Canada, Australia and parts beyond have done by putting community ahead of ideology.
American liberal Jews are swiftly becoming the last of their kind. Israel doesn’t need to adapt to them. They have a choice between joining their Jewish brothers and sisters or going down with a suicidal left-wing ideology that cannot offer them any sort of future, national, ethnic or religious.
The Jews of the world have made their choice. It’s up to American Jews to save their own future.
BDS, Open Hillel and J Street are not the future of the Jewish people. They are the dying gasps of a discredited ideology desperately assembling a last stand against the Jewish State and the Jewish people.
That ideology has lost as it will always lose. The embittered Jewish Communists who oversaw the murder of Rabbis and the destruction of synagogues lived just long enough to see their children dancing joyfully [14] on Simchat Torah in Moscow and protesting to be allowed to move to Israel.
Those American Jews who cling to the left may live long enough to witness history repeat itself.
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