Explaining Why Jews are liberal?

by Dennis Prager


The most frequently asked question I receive from non-Jews about Jews is, why are Jews so liberal?


The question is entirely legitimate since Jews (outside of Israel) are indeed overwhelmingly liberal and disproportionately left of liberal as well. For example, other than blacks, no American group votes so lopsidedly for the Democratic Party. And the question is further sharpened given that traditional Jewish values are not leftist. That is why the more religiously involved the Jew, the less likely he is to be on the Left. The old saw, "There are two types of Jews -- those who believe Judaism is social justice and those who know Hebrew," contains more than a kernel of truth.


In no order of importance, here are six reasons:


1. Judaism is indeed preoccupied with social justice, and many Jews believe that the only way to achieve a just society is through leftist policies.


2. More than any other major religion, Judaism has always been preoccupied with this world. The (secular) Encyclopedia Judaica begins its entry on "Afterlife" by noting that "Judaism has always affirmed belief in an afterlife." But the preoccupation of Judaism has been making this world a better place. That is why the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) is largely silent about the afterlife; and it is preoccupied with rejecting ancient Egyptian values. That value system was centered on the afterlife -- its bible was the Book of the Dead, and its greatest monuments, the pyramids, were tombs.


3. Most Jews are frightened by anything that connotes right wing -- such as the words "right-wing" and "conservative." Especially since the Holocaust, they think that threats to their security emanate from the Right only. (It is pointless to argue that Nazism stood for National Socialism and therefore was really a leftist ideology. Whether that is theoretically accurate doesn't matter; nearly everyone regards the Nazis as far Right, and, therefore, Jews fear the Right.) The fact that the Jews' best friends today are conservatives and the fact that the Left is the home of most of the Jews' enemies outside of the Muslim world have made little impact on Jews' psyches.


4. Liberal Jews fear most religion. They identify religion -- especially fundamentalist religion and especially Christianity -- with anti-Semitism. Jews are taught from birth about the horrors of the Holocaust, and of nearly 2,000 years of European, meaning Christian, anti-Semitism. They therefore tend to fear Christianity and believe that secularism guarantees their physical security. That is what animates the ACLU and its disproportionately Jewish membership, under the guise of concern with the Constitution and "separation of church and state" (words that do not appear in the Constitution), to fight all public expressions of Christianity in America.


5. Despite their secularism, Jews may be the most religious ethnic group in the world. The problem is that their religion is rarely Judaism; rather it is every "ism" of the Left. These include liberalism, socialism, feminism, Marxism and environmentalism. Jews involved in these movements believe in them with the same ideological fervor and same suspension of critical reason with which many religious people believe in their religion. It is therefore usually as hard to shake a liberal Jew's belief in the Left and in the Democratic Party as it is to shake an evangelical Christian's belief in Christianity. The big difference, however, is that the Christian believer acknowledges his Christianity is a belief, whereas the believer in liberalism views his belief as entirely the product of rational inquiry.


The Jews' religious fervor emanates from the origins of the Jewish people as a religious people elected by God to help guide humanity to a better future. Of course, the original intent was to bring humanity to ethical monotheism, God-based universal moral standards, not to secular liberalism or to feminism or to socialism. Leftist Jews have simply secularized their religious calling.


6. Liberal Jews fear nationalism. The birth of nationalism in Europe planted the secular seeds of the Holocaust (religious seeds had been planted by some early and medieval Church teachings and reinforced by Martin Luther). European nationalists welcomed all national identities except the Jews'. That is a major reason so many Jews identify primarily as "world citizens"; they have contempt for nationalism and believe that strong national identities, even in America, will exclude them.


Just as liberal Jews fear a resurgent Christianity despite the fact that contemporary Christians are the Jews' best friends, leftist Jews fear American nationalism despite the fact that Americans who believe in American exceptionalism are far more pro-Jewish and pro-Israel than leftist Americans. But most leftist Jews so abhor nationalism, they don't even like the Jews' nationalism (Zionism).


If you believe that leftist ideas and policies are good for America and for the world, then you are particularly pleased to know how deeply Jews -- with their moral passion, intellectual energies and abilities, and financial clout -- are involved with the Left. If, on the other hand, you believe that the Left is morally confused and largely a destructive force in America and the world, then the Jews' disproportionate involvement on the Left is nothing less than a tragedy -- for the world and especially for the Jews.


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Addendum by - W.W.


.... Written about during Trump's impeachment has been the overzealous and disproportionate Jewish involvement in the impeachment process. This has resulted in, the often suggested, increased antisemitism in recent times. It all began with the Washington Post Headline by Matea Gold, the day of Trumps inauguration in 2017 up to 2020. Of course there is Schiff and Nadler both department heads, their three Jewish “constitutional experts”, and numerous other Jewish players. The most recent being at time of this writing is Laurence Tribe."

Just Who Is Bernie Sanders?

by Dennis Prager




Bernie Sanders is a non-Jewish Jew. If you want to understand Sen. Bernie Sanders (and others like him), this is what you need to know:

He is the quintessential modern identity-free man. He is a non-Jewish Jew and a non-American American.


In Sanders' speeches and interviews, there is virtually no mention of his being a Jew (unless he's asked about it), and -- what's truly amazing for an American presidential candidate -- there are few mentions of America, except to lament American inequality, Wall Street corruption and other American evils.


The term "non-Jewish Jew" is not mine. It is generally attributed to a Jewish historian, Isaac Deutscher, who wrote an essay by that name in 1954. The term describes individuals who are born Jews (Judaism consists of a national identity and peoplehood identity, not just a religious identity) but identify as citizens of the world rather than as Jews, either nationally or religiously.


Once the walls of Jewish ghettos broke down and European Jews were allowed to leave Jewish enclaves, many Jews became non-Jewish Jews. In most cases, either they or their children assimilated into the societies in which they lived.


However, a small but significant percentage became radicalized. They loathed religion (especially all Judeo- and Christian-based religions), traditional middle-class ("bourgeois") values, capitalism and all Western national identities (they supported anti-Western national identities), and they particularly hated the Jewish religious and national identities.

What, for example, do socialist Karl Marx, Soviet politician Leon Trotsky, linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky and billionaire George Soros have in common? They were/are all radicals who were born to Jewish parents, had/have no Jewish identity and did/do harm to Jews and non-Jews.


Marx was the grandson of two Orthodox rabbis (his father converted to Christianity), yet he wrote one of the most significant anti-Semitic essays of the 19th century, "On the Jewish Question" in 1844. In it are such statements as:


"Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face which no other god may exist. ... The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. ... The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism."


Trotsky, born Lev Bronstein, was the intellectual father of Russian, and later Soviet, communism. He, along with Joseph Stalin and three others (two of whom were also non-Jewish Jews), fought to succeed Vladimir Lenin as leader of the Communist Party.


When Trotsky was head of the Red Army, Moscow's chief rabbi, Jacob Mazeh, asked Trotsky to use the army to protect the Jews from pogrom attacks. Trotsky reportedly responded, "Why do you come to me? I am not a Jew," to which Mazeh answered: "That's the tragedy. It's the Trotskys who make revolutions, and it's the Bronsteins who pay the price."


Chomsky is hostile to the two identities with which he was born. He has devoted much of his life to working against America and Israel. To cite but one example, he traveled to Lebanon to appear with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and lend his support to a group that is committed to the annihilation of Israel, which the United States lists as a terrorist organization.


Soros is another man who was born Jewish and later became a radical world citizen, a man who was alienated from America and his Jewish origins and damages both. Martin Peretz, former editor-in-chief of the New Republic, described Soros: "George Soros is ostentatiously indifferent to his own Jewishness. He is not a believer. He has no Jewish communal ties. He certainly isn't a Zionist. He told Connie Bruck in The New Yorker -- testily, she recounted -- that 'I don't deny the Jews their right to a national existence -- but I don't want to be part of it.' "


Soros supports Palestinian nationalism. A consistent belief of radicals is that anti-Jewish and anti-American nationalisms are good, and Jewish and American nationalisms are bad.


Sanders is a milder version of these radical non-Jewish Jews. He, too, is alienated from his Jewish and American origins.


And that explains his attitudes and policies. People with no national or religious roots who become politically active frequently seek to undermine the national and religious identities of others, especially those in their own national/religious group. In the case of Sanders, that means those with Jewish and American identities.


That's why non-Jewish Jews are far more likely to work to weaken Christianity in America than Jewish Jews, especially religious Jews. Religious Jews celebrate religious Christians. The same holds true for American non-Jews who have rejected any identification with Christianity, many of whom in fact seek to weaken Christian influence and identity in America.


Non-Jewish Jews like Sanders are alienated from Jews who strongly identify as Jewish and Christians who strongly identify as Christians. And non-American Americans like Sanders and others who identify as "world citizens" more than they identify as American citizens, are alienated from Americans who strongly identify as Americans.


The radical non-Jewish Jew and the radical non-American American love humanity, but they hurt real humans, especially Jews and Americans.






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