Jews To The Left of Me, Jews To The Right

Phoebe Maltz comments on The New York Times's discovery that many European Jews are finding new virtues in the European right's political parties. In addition to the considerations Phoebe and the Times bring to bear, it seems worth pointing out here that the contemporary European right isn't much of a right wing. As readers will have noted, I'm pretty firmly on the left in American politics. As readers will also have noted, there's an awful lot of room in conceptual space to the left of where I am. I haven't made a detailed study of it, but it seems to me that in most other countries I would likely find myself on the moderate right or as a swing voter.

Here in the United States, the right has a tendency (once, but mostly no longer, found on the European right) to serve up a mixture of hostility to intellectuals, Hollywood, journalists, academics, and residents of big cities along with valorization of farmers, soldiers, and small-town life that I, at least, find remarkably uncongenial to the values of American Jewry. I rather doubt, at this point, that there's any actual anti-semitism lurking beneath this murky cauldron of anti-semitic tropes, but still, there they are. Or to put it another way, granting that pretty much nobody on the American right seems to hate Jews as such, pretty much everybody on the American right seems to hate the things that, in practice, American Jews do. While remaining unimpressed with the tendency of many on the American (and more on the European) left to see Israel as simultaneously the most evil state in human history and also the root cause of all evils everywhere in the world, I'm equally unimpressed with the Christian Zionist view that Israel must be supported in order to encourage all Jews everywhere to move there in order to hasten the end of the world as we know it.

Like most Jewish Americans, I like America just fine, and am pretty inclined to see my family and I stay right here doing our thing. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that my family (including its non-Jewish element) lives up so happily to stereotype. We all live in the Washington-Boston corridor. We've all worked in the journalism/academia/entertainment complex except Uncle Andy who does have his PhD. Looking all squinty-eyed at our home region while extolling the virtues of Boise and "character" over actual knowledge is not increasing our comfort level. In Europe (or Canada) where such things no longer seem to be a big part of rightwing politics, and where such rightwing support for Israel as exists is less driven by bizarre theological considerations, the left's belief that Ariel Sharon stands next to Pol Pot in the pantheon of history's criminals would carry more weight.

But perhaps I'm just paranoid. I've mentioned this before, but there's an astoundingly awesome passage in American Exceptionalism (pages 172) about American Jewish paranoia:

San Francisco provides strong evidence of how some Jews can totally ignore reality. Polls taken by Earl Raab among contributors to the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation have found that one third agree that a Jew cannot be elected to Congress from San Francisco. His survey reported such results in 1985 when all three members of Congress from contiguous districts in or adjacent to the city were Jewish, as were the two state senators, the mayor, and a considerable part of the city council.

Funny, that. But I think the point stands. San Francisco is good for the Jews, and the Republican Party is bad for San Francisco. The fact that anti-SF sentiment is more likely motivated by hatred of gays and lesbians than of Jews is of little comfort, since we seem likely to get caught in the crossfire. Other Jewish fun facts from Exceptionalism Chapter 5:

Although never more than 3.7 percent of the population, and now 2.5 or less, they have been given one third of the religious representation. In many public ceremonies there is one priest, one minister, and one rabbi [ED: this was written in 1996, have they now been joined by an Imam?]. Strikingly, non-Jews greatly overestimate the size of the American Jewish population. A 1992 national survey conducted for the Anti-Defamation Leage by Marttila & Kiley found the median estimate of the percentage of Americans who are Jewish is 18. Only a tenth perceive them as less than 5 percent. . . .

An analysis of the four hundred richest Americans, as reported by Forbes magazine, finds that two-fifths of the 160 wealthiest Americans are Jews, as are 23 percent of the total list. Jews are disproportionately present among many sections of elites, largely drawn from the college educated. These include the leading intellectuals (45%), professors at the major universities (30%), high-level civil servants (21%), partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, DC (40%), the reporters, editors, and executives of print and broadcast media (26%), the directors writers and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982 (59%), and the same level of people involved in two or more prime time television series (58%).

One notes that while, generically speaking, the Republican Party is very friendly to rich and successful people, the specific brands of success here correlate extremely closely to American conservatism's most-loathed occupational categories. Lawyers, professors, intellectuals, civil servants, and the dastardly cultural elite.