Norman Podhoretz's Why Are Jews Liberals?

The following are extracts (for review purposes) from Why Are Jews Liberals?, Norman Podhoretz, 2009:

In addition to the extracts, I also think the high level of education which Jews possess leads to an economic preference for life near large cities, which in turn contributes to preferring liberalism.

"[T]he authoritative Declaration of Principles formulated by [Reform Judaism's] Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 included:

" 'We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel's great messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men.' " [emphasis added] – p. 89

"[I]n the history of Jewish emancipation[,] the first period covered the 150 years leading up to the French Revolution (1640–1789), and the second, lasting about ninety years (1789–1878), was marked by the achievement through fits and starts of emancipation throughout Western and Central Europe. In the third period, which got under way in 1878, further progress was made in the extension of emancipation to Eastern Europe.

"In each of these periods the opposition to granting legal equality to the Jews was based on a different rationale.

"At the start of the first period, the prevailing justification, left over from the Middle Ages, was religious: the Jew was debarred from equal treatment simply by virtue of the fact that he was not a Christian. But as creeping secularization began undermining the religious rationale, a new one, political in nature, was developed that would ultimately take precedence[.] Now Jews were to be denied equal treatment because they were an unassimilable minority—'a nation within a nation.' But by the time the second period ended, the political objection—even in de facto collaboration with the religious one in those circles where 'nation' meant 'Christian nation'—had proved itself unable to prevent full legal emancipation from being enacted everywhere in Western and Central Europe. In spite of this failure, the political rationale remained very much alive even while pride of place was being given to yet a third rationale that was more suited to the times: that the Jews were neither a religious community nor a nation but a race." – pp. 105–6

"In the late nineteenth century (as witness the claims of the Marxists, the Freudians, and the social Darwinians), a theory needed to be deemed scientific before it could win widespread acceptance—and so it was with the racism that became the latest and most up-to-date basis for opposition to, or rather rollback of, Jewish emancipation." – p. 106

"In 1879, at the very onset of the third period, a journalist named Wilhelm Marr...founded the first popular political organization devoted entirely to defending 'Germandom' from the Jewish threat. He called it 'The League of Anti-Semites.' Because this previously unknown term jibed so well with the new racism, it immediately caught on and became the name of choice for the many anti-Jewish organizations and political parties that followed[.]" – pp. 106–7

"The...situation in the cultural realm, which would prove to be more decisive than the political, was anything but reassuring. In the years leading up to the Dreyfus Affair, assimilated Jews, along with Christians of Jewish origin (who in spite of having been baptized continued generally to be regarded as Jews), had been growing more and more prominent in every area of European culture. They were journalists, they were writers, they were musicians, they were painters and sculptors. Many of them had imagined that so thorough an immersion in[,] and so deep a devotion to[,] the languages and the traditions of the surrounding societies would be welcomed as a mark of how faithfully they were keeping their part of the bargain under which emancipation had been granted. Yet it was becoming increasingly clear that the opposite was the case—that the more complete the integration, the more resentment it was engendering.

"In its early stages, this manifested itself in a nationalist unease over the 'takeover' of the culture by people who, however much they might pretend otherwise, were not really flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone and therefore had no right to speak in 'our' name[.]" – p. 114

"Once the new racism took hold, such feelings...—that the Jews, being a 'nation within a nation,' were unassimilable—...were provided with a much more powerful rationale in the idea that Jews were not merely foreign but mortally dangerous, and all the more so when they strove to assimilate. Richard Wagner, who argued that Jews were incapable of artistic creativity because they were by nature rootless cosmopolitans, did not stop with this essentially nationalist (or 'Voelkisch') argument [but] reinforc[ed] it with the new racism[.]

"[W]hen, in 1897, the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler was appointed to head the court opera in Vienna, a storm of protest erupted against giving so important a musical post to a Jew. Under the older anti-Jewish dispensations, the fact that Mahler had converted to Catholicism would have deflected or at least lowered the temperature of any such protest. But in the eyes of the new Voelkisch-racist anti-Semitism, Mahler was, and would always remain, a Jew, and therefore incapable of understanding and conveying the true spirit of German music." – p. 115

"It would be a mistake to think—as did many German-Jewish intellectuals who, even after the Holocaust, were unable to rid themselves of the conviction that German culture was superior to all others (especially American)—that only similiterate thugs fell for the Voelkisch-racist view of the Jews." – p. 116

"Roosevelt had become far more than a popular politician or even a great leader to the Jews of America. To say that he was the Messiah would be going too far, but not by all that much." – p. 127

"The reason Jews had been attracted to the Democratic Party in the first place was that it represented the closest American counterpart to the forces on the Left that had favored Jewish emancipation in Europe—just as the Republicans seemed to represent an American version of the conservative forces that had opposed equal rights for Jews in the past." – p. 142

"As the mantra that became familiar in the '60s had it, 'war, racism, and poverty' were America's three great afflictions[.]

"On racism..., the position of the liberal establishment was that the way to solve the 'Negro problem' was through 'integration,' and against this idea, too, we radicals mounted an assault....There was no unified position on the Left as to a viable alternative. [One] faction was advocating 'positive discrimination' or, in its later iteration, 'affirmative action[.]'" – pp. 151–2

"[T]he two decades that followed the end of World War II constituted what some of us were calling a 'Golden Age of Jewish Security'....To the extent that...the Jewish defence agencies...still spent time on anti-Semitism, they largely devoted it to attacking the 'radical Right' and its Christian allies. Yet in an article titled 'The Radical Right and the Rise of the Fundamentalist Minority,' David Danzig, then the program director of the AJC [American Jewish Committee], could find no open or outright anti-Semitism in either the secular or religious components of this movement. He simply took it for granted that such a movement must necessarily represent a danger to Jews. It was an assumption that fit in well with The Authoritarian Personality, a study sponsored by the AJC in 1950 in which the authors, in investigating the psychological roots of totalitarianism, focused entirely on the political Right and never even bothered to consider whether the same qualities might exist on the political Left (which they most certainly did)." – pp. 157–8

"In my talk [to the AJC],...I then quoted the warning of Daniel P. Moynihan (who, although a Democrat, was at that point in his career serving in the White House as Nixon's chief advisor on domestic affairs) that if, under the guise of 'affirmative action,' the merit system were replaced by a system of proportional representation according to race or ethnic origin, the Jews, constituting a mere 3 percent of the population, would be 'driven out.' Yet such a replacement was precisely what was being advocated in powerful circles that continued to regard themselves as impeccably liberal in outlook. To put the matter brutally, in the name of justice to blacks, discriminatory measures were to be instituted once more against the Jews." – pp. 162–3

Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.