Subscribe to Breaking NewsRuby-Sachs: Jewish voters and McCain
As a kid, I was always taught that being Jewish meant going to school for as long as possible, never worrying about asking too many questions and fighting against discrimination and subjugation of all people.
It made sense to me that a group who took pains to remember their own exclusion and suffering at many times since the days in the desert would worry about the same prejudice against others.
No wonder I am proud to be Jewish.
But on Friday, the GOP in Pennsylvania sent out a letter to Jewish voters encouraging them to vote for McCain because an Obama presidency would threaten the existence of Israel.
They likened the vote next week to the mistake many families (including some of my own) made when they didn’t flee Germany in the 1930s.
This kind of scare tactic is nothing new, but it never fails to infuriate me.
There is a perception that American Jews choose their candidate based on Israeli foreign policy issues and nothing else. Now no doubt Israel is one important issue, but to relegate a people to that kind of over-simplistic knee jerk voting is its own kind of discrimination.
To equate Barack Obama (a candidate who supports Israel) with Hitler presupposes that Jewish voters are just plain stupid.
If we want to talk about similarities between this election and past historical wrongs we could intelligently discuss book censorship (Palin supported it, so did the Nazi party) or the relegation of a group of people to second class (gay people who can’t marry and can’t adopt know something about that).
We could expect Jewish voters to care about these kinds of injustices and vote for a candidate who promotes equality and free speech rather than hindering it.
But let’s also keep in mind that blanket comparisons to the Holocaust are not useful because they are too general and not powerful because they ridiculously characterize the great tragedy of that time as equivalent to a difference in foreign policy experience between two candidates who have promised to protect and support Israel.
Jewish voters are not dumb, knee-jerk or simplistic in their political analysis.
They won’t fall for that kind of ploy.
Well, there is some truth to the GOP’s reasoning…
McCain probably might be slightly better for Israel, at least in the sense that he would be less likely to pressure Israel into being more proactive about dealing with the settlers and other social problems related to its hostile neighbors. I suppose telling us to vote for McCain would thus be a valid strategy if that’s the approach we want to the issue.
I haven’t read the letter, but I don’t imagine that the GOP thinks that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the only thing on the minds of Jewish voters. It’s probably just more of a ‘Oh, look, this issue interests your community, and our candidate is better about it!’
Of course, the problem with that reasoning is the GOP is assuming that all American Jews are zealots for the State of Israel, which we are not. There are plenty of American Jews who oppose the State’s existence completely, and far more than either extreme just in the middle wondering why Israel and its neighbors can’t just learn to play nice and get along. (I personally fall into the middle-ground category.)
Frankly, the Jews who would be swayed by the letter are already probably voting for McCain anyway for reasons unrelated to candidates’ approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict, so it doesn’t make much difference either way.
Not being a member of the Jewish community, this is the first I have heard about this. Thank you for sharing the information and your insightful opinions.
I was, however, aware that Sarah Palin sat in her home Church not too long ago while a Preacher gave a rousing testimony from the pulpit in which he claimed that all the troubles of Israel were a result of the Jews not accepting Jesus. He went into some shocking detail. There is video of this event on YouTube.
Sarah Palin has yet to answer what her take on that sermon was, and how, if anything, she supports it.
In contrast, Obama has been dragged over hot coals for comments his former Rev. made while he was not even in attendance. To this day people bring it up, despite the fact that he had the integrity to confront and denounce those comments.
It’s a strange, strange world.