Tablet Mag ( Jewish ) : Jews won't abandon the Democratic Party - Jews recoil from the GOP’s overt Christianity - Jews feel horror of a Republican Party dominated by Christian Right, Ignorance, Bigotry, Ethnicism, Racism, Intolerance

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Jewish Horror of Palin, Bachmann, Rick Perry, Tim Pawlenty and the Christian Bigoted Right. More important than GOP's Hypocrite False Lies about supporting Israel in any purpose or action.

Tablet Mag ( Jewish website )
Christian Wrong

Republicans are once again arguing that American Jews will abandon the Democratic Party. But it won’t happen, because Jews recoil from the GOP’s overt Christianity, even when it comes with staunch pro-Israel views.

July 25, 2011

By Michelle Goldberg

Michelle Goldberg is a senior writer for Newsweek/The Daily Beast and the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World.

Christian Wrong


Some excerpts :

The notion that Jews are on the verge of deserting the Democratic Party is one of the perennial canards of American political commentary.

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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.

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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—among other things, she suggested that Jewish women were turned off by Palin’s decision to give birth to a baby with Down Syndrome because they “couldn’t imagine making a similar choice.” But 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. She first went to Israel after high school, on a trip sponsored by the evangelical group Young Life, and she talks about Israel in the language of premillenial dispensationalism, the influential theology that holds that the second coming of Christ depends on the return of the Jews to their homeland. “If we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play,” she told the Republican Jewish Coalition last year. “And my husband and I are both Christians, and we believe very strongly the verse from Genesis, we believe very strongly that nations also receive blessings as they bless Israel.”

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. After all, the dispensationalist scenario culminates in a third world war in the Middle East and the consignment of unconverted Jews to hell before the messiah returns. For those who truly see Israeli politics in terms of evangelical prophesy, an apocalyptic battle on Israeli soil is not something to be avoided at all costs. Instead, it’s the portal to paradise.

Yet this chiliastic theology is only a small part of the reason that Jews will likely remain wary of the Christian right. 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.

And 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.

Of the serious Republican presidential candidates, the only one who is not entirely aligned with the Christian right is Mitt Romney. Indeed, his campaign has gone out of its way to point out how, as a fellow member of a religious minority, he understands Jewish concerns. 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. Should he win the nomination, he will almost certainly do what McCain did and choose a running mate meant to energize the Republican base. Some consultants are already speculating about a Romney-Bachmann ticket.

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.

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