Are Jews Really Liberal?

In time for the High Holidays, Daphne Merkin examines the hot air rhetoric in Norman Podhoretz’s new polemic, Why Are Jews Liberal?, and comes away unconvinced.

The first magazine I ever wrote for, straight out of Barnard, was Commentary, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and edited by Norman Podhoretz from 1960 through 1995. (Podhoretz, of course, was crucial to the repositioning of the magazine in the early 1970s from a mouthpiece of the New Left to one of the New Right, otherwise known as neoconservatism.) Although the magazine and I went our separate ways more quickly than not—on my novice assignment as a movie-critic, I failed to view Looking for Mr. Goodbear as a cautionary tale about the counterculture—a quote from a New Yorker review I did of Podhoretz adorns the back of Ex-Friends. And although I am a registered Democrat, I can’t abide the self-satisfied liberal pieties of the sort endorsed by the insufferably smug Keith Olbermann. Suffice it to say that I at some time or other have subscribed to every magazine on Earth (except The Nation) and I am an ardent Zionist.

Other than his chums, I can’t see who will be persuaded by a book that deals in ham-fisted assertions about the Christian right and sweeping observations about liberals (a term that is always used in the pejorative sense), many of them backed up by little other than a bunch of straggling statistics and a manhandled fact or two.

So by all indications I should be the perfect reader for Podhoretz’s latest book, Why Are Jews Liberals?  As someone who keeps her politics limber and does not believe that living on the Upper West Side with a fair amount of money means that you’re more morally accountable than someone who lives on the Upper East Side with the same amount of money, I ought to be ripe for conversion—or at least a shift starboard. Yet after reading Podhoretz’s stoutly argued polemic, it seems clear to me that the conversations on both the left and the right are sealed-off affairs, lacking the charge that would come from a cross-pollination of ideas.

Why Are Jews Liberal? By Norman Podhoretz. 352 Pages. Doubleday. $27. I suppose it is inevitable that wars of words enjoy immunity from flesh-and-blood clashes; neocons sup with neocons, liberals dine with liberals, and never the twain shall share so much as an haricot vert. Still, it seems to me a pity that Podhoretz has here opted to preach to the choir rather than make an effort to win over the wayward. Other than his chums, I can’t see who will be persuaded by a book that deals in ham-fisted assertions about the Christian right and sweeping observations about liberals (a term that is always used in the pejorative sense), many of them backed up by little other than a bunch of straggling statistics and a manhandled fact or two.

Why Are Jews Liberals? sets itself up as a sweeping inquiry into what are presumed to be the bewilderingly wrong-headed voting patterns of American Jewry. The book consists of two parts—a cobbled-together history of “How The Jews Became Liberals” followed by a memoir-esque exploration of “Why the Jews Are Still Liberals,” which is written in a boastful first-person voice—and begins with a quip by Milton Himmelfarb: “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” (Podhoretz, who praises with the same mysteriously adduced and ringing authority with which he attacks, describes this crass quote as “a brilliant and deservedly famous epigram.”) It goes on to examine the “ideal of tolerance” that came to mean so much to Jews and that was associated with a liberal ethos (“what would soon be characterized as the left”) by offering a quick overview of traditional sources of anti-Semitism, starting with “the birth of Christianity out of the womb of Judaism.”

We read of the anti-Semitic massacres that blighted the early years of the church during the First and Second Crusades and the creation of Jewish ghettos in Poland during the Middle Ages. From there, Podhoretz takes on the Enlightenment, with its anti-Christian and purportedly pro-Jewish bias, bringing to our attention the frequent lapses in fraternal affection of the great philosophes, ranging from Diderot to Voltaire. While Diderot declared that the Jews were “an ignorant and superstitious nation,” the supposedly level-headed Voltaire went further and dismissed them as “the most detestable [nation] ever to have sullied the earth.” Although the Jewish espousal of Enlightenment principles is generally understood to come out of benign self-interest, Podhoretz assesses it as “partaking of the pathological”—the reason being that, as he sees it, the Age of Enlightenment was not willing to accept Jews as Jews any more than was the medieval world. The one wanted them to convert to the “Religion of Reason”; the other to Christianity.