Uh oh, Governor Perry has a big problem with the Jews. Well, it’s not really all about the governor…it’s about any high profile Christian Republican. The recent excitement amongst conservatives that Jews may suddenly flock to the republican cause is, of course, ill-founded.
I was talking to an amalgam of liberal Jewish friends who noted that Governor Perry, and others like him, were the kind of “God people” who’d historically forced gays and Jews into the gas chambers, and implied that they’d do it again. Aghast at my support for these conservative would-be butchers they ironically proclaimed “God forbid they should be elected.” Feeling accused of being a gleeful accessory to genocide, I foolishly demanded an apology. But my friends’ perspective shouldn’t have surprised me. I’ve long maintained that we Jews, despite our reputation for being clever, are actually amongst the most self-defeating group in the history of the universe. No other cultural group has achieved so much (think Adam Sandler and the Three Stooges) and experienced such great loss and misery (think 6 million). Sarcasm aside, many theories have been posited to explain this historical disconnect—but all have failed to convincingly explain the disparity between Jewish liberals’ supposed fear of annihilation with their puzzling voting record in presidential elections.
What seems roundly ignored by the Jewish liberals is that over the past 100 years, godless leftist centralized societies like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and communist China committed more atrocities than any Republican candidate could ever conjure up. Jewish liberals accept the overt anti-semitism and anti-Israel bias that has plagued the Democratic Party, and its supporters, for years (think Cynthia McKinney, John Dingell, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, William Ayers, and Jim Moran). In a study of who people thought were to blame for a bad economy
Democrats were especially prone to blaming Jews. Since Rick Perry embraces Jews and Israel, distaste for anti-semitism and anti-zionism can’t be why Jewish liberals fear Rick Perry.
My Jewish liberal friends worry that Christian support of Israel and the Jews comes with a divine string attached which somehow constitutes a threat to our existence. But for 300 years Jews lived in this country, dominated by bible believing Protestants to a far greater extent than now, and never suffered any violence at their collective hands. The only pogrom against Jews in American history came not at the hands of the fundamentalist right, but in Crown Heights in the 1990s.
What about support for abortion, the cause that informs Jewish liberals’ political world view more than any other? Sure, they oppose conservative vehemence, but the right to obtain an abortion is the law of the land. Jewish liberals will always be able to obtain a safe abortion. So, that can’t be why they loath Rick Perry.
It seems odd that Jewish Liberals would be enamored with an ideology that tolerates, even accepts anti-semitism, is soft on Israel, and embraces a procedure that decimates our numbers—20,000 Jewish abortions/year. After having lost 6,000,000, why embrace your continuing destruction? Alas, moral dilemmas can be enraging—especially when at some level, you suspect you’re wrong. And therein lies the real reason for Jewish liberal hatred of the Christian right: Christians correctly but inconveniently force us to challenge our own moral constructs—and they refuse to keep quiet about it. When people are proven wrong, they scapegoat imagined adversaries and cling to what they know best. The Nazis were great at this. Jewish liberals are sadly complicit in their own demise…and like other human beings, don’t like it when they know they’re wrong. This can be the only reason for their push-back at conservative Christian candidates, whom they should be embracing.
Jewish liberals have trouble acknowledging the one ideal that can prevent their real destruction—life. But dealing with ambivalence and embarrassment by attributing genocidal designs to Rick Perry won’t help our cause. You won’t find any such ambivalence in Rick Perry. He supports Israel, and defends our right to perpetuate our race. It was godless leftist societies that made Jews the gypsies of the 20th century, not Rick Perry.
So to my Jewish friends who worry about being shoveled into gas chambers by conservative zealots, this psychiatrist would advise serious self-reflection. Either love yourself, your people in Israel and oppose abortion, or reject Israel, your faith and heritage and embrace cultural and literal self-destruction. Scapegoating innocents takes us Jews back to a bad place. Rick Perry and other Christians want to preserve our humanity. It’s tough to see the genocide in that.
Marcus J. Goldman, M.D. is a Harvard trained psychiatrist, author of “The Joy of Fatherhood,” and a Taekwondo instructor. His work has appeared in the Washington Times.
