Aug 5^th

Mona Charen is hoping, rather desperately, for a few Jewish Democrats to sink the Iran nuclear deal.  She does have some difficulty digesting the fact that American Jews are disproportionately in the Democratic camp and, of course, she isn’t. Clearly, all those other Jews are mistaken.

She says, “No, the short explanation of Jewish liberalism is straightforward. Jewish Americans tend to be disproportionately urban, secular and educated. Each of these categories is highly correlated with liberalism and membership in the Democratic Party…” No Mona, that’s not an explanation; that just describes the fact that there is a relationship between intelligence, education and liberalism and that this relationship extends to Jews. It does not explain why that relationship exists in the first place.

Mona goes on to tell us that, based on percentages attending services, Jews are more secular than Christians and much more secular than Muslims. But not all Jews fit this liberal secular mold. The Orthodox Jews are quite different, according to Mona; they are more religious and more likely to be Republican. She claims that 57 percent of Orthodox Jews are Republicans in contrast with just 22 percent of the non-Orthodox Jews. This jump in the number of Orthodox Jews, their allegiance to Israel and their concern about the Iran is supposed to give Democratic Jewish Senators pause if they vote for the Iran agreement. Not likely!

There are some difficulties here: there are only about 6 million Jews in this country of whom only about 6 percent are Orthodox; that comes to a grand total of about 360 thousand votes if all orthodox Jews voted as a block; they won’t. It is true that many Orthodox Jews take voting instruction from their religious leaders just as the take other instruction; even so those numbers will not put fear into the heart of any Senator who has not already decided how to vote on the merits of the issue.

There are two additional considerations, both unfortunate: Yeshivas, the religious schools of the Orthodox Jews often, but not always, concentrate so exclusively on religious instruction as to eliminate much science, mathematics and foreign language classes once the student has reached high school. (Note the unfortunate similarity to the instruction provided by some Madrassas where many Muslim children find little is taught beyond memorizing the Koran.)

In Israel we have a new and interesting political cancer; we have ultra-Orthodox Jewish terrorists. Recently at a gay rights parade a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl was stabbed by an ultra-Orthodox gang member. The previous day a Palestinian home was torched by this same gang and an 18 month old child was burned to death, his parents injured as was his four year old brother. There have also been arson attacks on Catholic churches. These attacks are engineered by Meir Ettinger, the grandson of Meir Kahane. Kahane was behind the extreme ultra-Orthodox movement a few years back designed to eliminate any non-Jewish settlers in Israel. This would be done by buying out any non-Jews and forcibly removing any who would not sell. Christian churches were considered idolatrous. As this movement grows in Israel, sympathy for Israel will probably diminish; Mona Charen never mentions these people so we don’t know about her attitude toward them.