Why Are Jews Liberal?
By Norman Podhoretz

Doubleday. 379 pp. $27

Reviewed by Leonard Boasberg

Norman Podhoretz is baffled, bewildered, frustrated, mystified, indignant, infuriated.

Why are Jews liberal? Why in national elections do they generally vote as much as 3-1 for the Democratic candidate for president even when the rest of the country is voting for the Republican? Why do they vote contrary to their own self-interest? If Jews are so smart, why are they so stupid? Why don't they agree with him?

Well, why doesn't he agree with them?

To most American Jews, he declares, "liberalism is not, as has often been said, merely a necessary component of Jewishness: it is the very essence of being a Jew. Nor is it a 'substitute for religion'; it is a religion in its own right, complete with its own catechism and its own dogmas, and, Tertullian-like, obdurately resistant to facts that undermine its claims and promises."

This is arrant nonsense. It is defamation by definition. I am Jewish, and I am a political liberal. Liberalism is my politics. Judaism is my religion. (Tertullian, Podhoretz instructs, was the third-century church father who said that one Christian doctrine was believable precisely because it was ridiculous.)

If there is anything liberalism is not, it is dogmatic. There is no "liberal agenda." Liberals disagree, just as conservatives do. According to Podhoretz, Jewish political behavior contradicts the most commonplace assumption - "that people tend to vote their pocketbooks." As Milton Himmelfarb's epigram put it, "Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans."

Droll, but the assumption is only a half-truth, if that. People vote for many reasons other than their economic interest. We base our votes on our personalities, parentage, prejudices, experience, habit, party loyalty, ethnicity, religion, and often all these things combined. For some voters, a single interest triumphs over every other. Guns, pro and con. Abortion vs. choice. The environment. Civil liberties. Israel.

In Podhoretz's view, all sins are forgiven if you support Israel. Pat Robertson, for example, subscribed to "crackpot theories . . . about a conspiracy between Jewish bankers and Freemasons to take over the world." In one of his books he relied on unquestionably anti-Semitic sources. Nevertheless, "all this was trumped by Robertson's unwavering support for Israel."

To provide a background for how Jews became liberal, Podhoretz goes over the well-trodden ground of centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, during which it was the Right, religious and secular, that denied equal rights to Jews, the Left that favored them. Now, he asserts, there is a "radically new set of circumstances": It is the Right that is pro-Israel, the Left where, "(with some exceptions) attitudes toward Israel range from unsympathetic to passionately hostile." That may be true, to a degree, in Europe. It is not true in the United States, not if he means Democrats (and he does). You can criticize Israel's policies without being anti-Israel. Israelis do it all the time. I do it.

His polemical wrath boiling over, Podhoretz accuses liberalism of being "at variance with the most basic of all Jewish interests - the survival of the Jewish people."

Podhoretz edited the monthly Commentary for 35 years; his son, Jon, took over when he retired. The American Jewish Committee sponsors the magazine but gives the editor a free hand, sometimes to the discomfiture of the AJC. Podhoretz, 79, started out as an extreme left-wing radical. He attacked the "liberal establishment" over the Vietnam War. Then, along with others who came to be called neoconservatives, he turned to the right in the early '70s.

According to Podhoretz, there is nothing in the Jewish religious tradition to justify Jewish liberalism. True, the Torah is a religious document, not a political platform. Still, "he that oppresseth the poor to increase his riches, and he that giveth to the rich, shall surely come to want." (Proverbs, 22:16.)

Every Passover, we Jews recall that we were slaves in the land of Egypt; is it mystifying that Jews have been in the forefront of the civil rights movement? Or that, considering our history, we believe in the separation of church and state (as did the Founding Fathers of the Republic)?

It is, says Podhoretz, "an intellectual absurdity to assume that the Torah actually endorses a specific policy like the minimum wage (which in any case has time and again been shown to do more harm than good to the poor)." In fact, studies have shown that the minimum wage benefits the poor, but never mind. In the Jewish tradition, social justice is a paramount command.

Podhoretz touches on but otherwise ignores another Jewish tradition that might explain to him why Jews tend liberal and Democratic. It is "the reverence for learning . . . that became a universally recognized hallmark of the Jewish people." That is why so many Jews go into science and medicine, and believe in the scientific method. You will not find many liberals who favor teaching creationism in the public schools, who consider global warming a hoax and oppose stem-cell research on religious grounds. Those are issues of the right wing, the Republican "base."

Podhoretz concludes by saying he cannot give up hope that Jews will break free of their political delusions and "begin to recognize where their interests and their ideals both as Jews and Americans truly lie" - that is, with the Republican Party.

I checked, and I found nothing in the Torah endorsing either the Republican or the Democratic Party.

Leonard Boasberg is a former Inquirer staff writer, now retired. Contact him at lboasberg@gmail.com.