The New Criterion

Were I the editor of this timely and thought-provoking book, I would have suggested that one short word be added to the title—thus changing it to Why Are Jews Still Liberals? After all, as Norman Podhoretz himself acknowledges, during most of their history on these shores American Jews had the best of reasons to support the forces of political liberalism. Millions of poor and previously oppressed European Jews began arriving in America in the late nineteenth century, believing fervently, almost religiously, that this liberal republic would become their “goldene medine” (golden land)—and it was the big-city Democratic machines that welcomed Jewish support and inclusion. The Democrats stood for Jewish-friendly policies such as opening up the professions and the universities and pushing for expansive immigration policies. Republicans and conservatives were tainted by association with the country’s nativist and isolationist movements and even with outright anti-Semitism. And then there was the Jews’ almost messianic attachment to Franklin Roosevelt because of the New Deal and the victory over Nazism. It’s a political legacy that has become almost embedded in the Jewish DNA.

Even Norman Podhoretz’s own life story reflects this natural embrace of liberalism and the Democratic Party by the Jews. He recalls growing up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in the 1930s and 1940s and never meeting a Republican until he was in high school. As a teenager, he wrote an impassioned eulogy for FDR and even supported Henry Wallace in the 1948 election (though he was not yet old enough to vote). In 1960, the thirty-year-old Podhoretz was appointed editor of Commentary, the distinguished liberal magazine published by the American Jewish Committee. For the first few years of his tenure at the magazine, Podhoretz—in tune with the spirit of the radical 1960s—pushed Commentary even further to the left. (He now describes his politics of that period as “New Left.”)

Repeating themes from his previous autobiographical books such as Breaking Ranks and Ex-Friends, Podhoretz recounts several unanticipated political events of the late 1960s that created, for him, “a certain anxiety” (the title of an article by Podhoretz in Commentary) about the Jewish situation that began his transition towards neoconservatism. First, there was the Left’s growing hostility to Israel following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Then came the eruption of anti-Semitism by black community activists during the 1968 New York City teachers’ strike; even more shocking to Podhoretz was that the quintessential liberal mayor of New York, John Lindsay, sided with the black activists. Meanwhile, many of the city’s liberal intellectuals were denouncing the striking Jewish teachers as racists. After breaking ranks with the Left over these primarily Jewish issues, Podhoretz eventually developed a sustained critique of contemporary political liberalism itself. Soon Commentary became the flagship publication of the fledgling neoconservative movement.

Of late, and particularly since the Iraq War, neoconservatism has been denigrated by its enemies as a political movement dominated by Jews, designed to promote parochial Jewish interests. But as Podhoretz notes (and bemoans) in these pages, it is an easily proven fact that American Jews continue to defy all political logic and remain solidly in the liberal camp. Certainly the Jewish community has never followed where neoconservatives like Podhoretz intended to lead them. That refusal was poignantly illustrated by a dramatic confrontation in the spring of 1971 when Podhoretz was invited to address the sixty-fifth annual convention of the American Jewish Committee, the oldest and most prestigious of America’s Jewish defense organizations. Already concerned with the rightward political direction in which Podhoretz had taken the magazine they were subsidizing, the AJC delegates were now further discomfited by Podhoretz’s provocative remarks about the political allegiances of the American Jewish community.

Because of the threats to Jewish interests revealed by the Left’s response to the Six Day War and the New York City teachers’ strike, Podhoretz proposed that Jews (and implicitly this included the AJC) reconsider their traditional political alliances. “The worst enemies of the Jews were [no longer] to be found on the ideological Right,” Podhoretz argued. Rather, the main source of anti-Semitic propaganda and hostility to Israel now was being generated primarily on the political Left—in Europe, the Middle East, and America.

Podhoretz wasn’t proposing (at least not yet) that Jews join forces with the Right, but merely called for “recogniz[ing] the ideology of the radical Left for what it was: an enemy of democratic values in general and a threat to the Jewish position in particular.” The reaction from the audience, Podhoretz recounts, “ranged from stunned silence to a furious anger that could not contain itself.” One speaker after another denounced the editor for cozying up to the forces of reaction and for having the gall to urge other Jews to abandon their long-held liberal and humane values.

Almost four decades later, it should be self-evident that Podhoretz was extraordinarily prescient about the direction that the major threats to Jewish interests and security would be coming from in the future. Even establishment organizations like the AJC no longer deny that the most virulent political assaults on Israel and Zionism now originate from the European Left, and only somewhat less so from sectors of the American Left. Even more amazing is how accurate Podhoretz has turned out to be about the growing support for Israel and other Jewish concerns by the conservative political movements. While publications like The Nation and The New York Review of Books question Israel’s moral justification and regularly describe it as a malignant occupying power, it is National Review and the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal that provide a principled defense of Israel as a bulwark of democracy and freedom in a sea of retrograde dictatorships. Nor is it merely on the question of Israel and Zionism that conservatives reliably support Jewish interests while liberals and the Left equivocate or worse: The same political dichotomy tends to occur over issues like affirmative action and criminal justice.

Podhoretz doesn’t waste any time saying I told you so. Instead he is more interested in revealing how little Jewish political behavior has actually changed over the past four decades as a result of these troubling new realities and threats. After a few minor blips during the two Reagan elections, Jewish loyalty to the Democratic party has returned almost to the heights of the Roosevelt era. President Obama received an astonishing 78 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008, almost eleven percentage points higher than his share of the Hispanic vote. Jews voted overwhelmingly for Obama despite a number of troubling questions about the candidate’s associations with the anti-Semitic Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi; despite John McCain’s impeccable record of support for Israel and other Jewish interests; and despite his pledge not to allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. It is now becoming abundantly clear that this Democratic president is more determined than any of his predecessors to pressure Israel into making dangerous concessions to its enemies. Still, American Jews seem willing to give him a pass because of his aura as a transformational liberal political figure in the mold of FDR.

Readers shouldn’t expect to find a straightforward answer to the question posed in the book’s title—that is, why do American Jews still so enthusiastically align themselves with a political party and a political philosophy that no longer seem to have their own material interests at heart? Nevertheless, Podhoretz does provide a coherent historical narrative that allows us to understand current political behavior that might otherwise seem merely perverse. To arrive at that understanding, he deftly ranges over some of the formative historical experiences of the Jews in exile. The one possible explanation for the historical Jewish commitment to liberalism that Podhoretz easily disposes of is the contention—often put forward by Jewish liberals and radicals themselves—that Jewish religious sources (particularly the Hebrew prophets) incline the Jewish people to social justice and to taking the side of the underdog. But if this were true, as Podhoretz convincingly argues, we would also expect the most religiously orthodox Jews to be the most politically liberal. That is so obviously not the case that we can reject the idea of Jewish liberalism as some sort of fulfillment of the biblical commandments to do justice.

A far more likely connection to current Jewish political behavior might be found through the Jews’s profoundly transformative experience with the European Enlightenment. As Podhoretz reminds us, the Enlightenment both liberated the Jews and created a unique conundrum for them. There was a price to be paid—the demand made by key Enlightenment figures like Voltaire that the Jews give up their separateness and sense of peoplehood. At the same time, emancipation led to the seductions of another kind of “heaven on earth.” As Podhoretz puts it, for many newly emancipated Jews, Marxism “had the feel and the force not of an abandonment of Judaism in favor of a wholly secular philosophy, but rather of a conversion from Judaism to another kind of religion.”

In the end, not even Podhoretz can fully solve the riddle of the continuing Jewish commitment to liberalism. But in this lively book he gives us an accounting of its costs and consequences to Jews, both here and in the Jewish state.