The Jewish Question

By Alex Markovsky

Winston Churchill called Jews, “..the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.” We are remarkable all right. When you have a smart Jew he predominates with his intellectual prowess over the rest of the human race, but when you have a dumb Jew, he is an insult to human intelligence.

As a Jew, I was perplexed which of those remarkable Jewish-Americans voted for Obama in 2008; to me, it was completely obvious that the alternative choices for president in 2008 were clear and unambiguous. On the Republican side was a war hero, a strong supporter of  Israel, an experienced politician with a strong track record and a commitment to public service. On the other side, for the Democrats, was a young man of Muslim background, an inexperienced politician with no track record of accomplishment whose personal files were mysteriously sealed. Moreover, this man had dubious connections with anti-Semites and America-haters.

I was even more baffled in 2012. This time, the choice was between Obama and Romney,  a friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, supporter of Israel, and a man with impeccable business and civil service credentials. What could Obama do for Jews that Romney couldn’t or wouldn’t do? What was it in the Democratic Party platform that was so appealing to the Jews? What was I missing?

After the shocking outcome of each election, I asked “Why?” many times, of many Jews.

The typical answer I received was “I did not (???) vote for him, but I am not going to vote for him this time.” You ask a Jewish question, you get a Jewish answer. But they lied, and did vote for him  again in 2012. As prominent Zionist Zev Jabotinsky once said, “Logic is an art of the Greeks; a Jew has his own logic. Jewish logic is the logic of catastrophe. Jews do not detect danger; they face it when it comes.” A Jew will ignore the weather forecast and forego buying an umbrella. He will get wet and contract pneumonia and then tell you that, as he has already survived pneumonia, the umbrella can wait. The old saw, “There are two types of Jews—those who believe that Judaism is about social justice and those who know Hebrew,” contains more than a kernel of truth. By and large, orthodox Jews voted for McCain in 2008 and for Romney in 2012.

Social justice, in terms of helping the sick and the poor, is deeply embedded in Judaism; for Jews it is a case of irrational obsession, and many of them believe that the only way to achieve a just society is through leftist policies. The problem is that their religion is not Judaism; it is almost every other possible ism (with the exceptions of conservatism and fascism), such as liberalism, socialism, feminism, environmentalism, and Marxism.

Speaking of which, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia that brought so much suffering to the people of Russia, including Jews, was in fact a Jewish revolution. Based upon socialist theories developed by a Jewish philosopher and economist, Karl Marx, the principal inspiration, organization, and driving power of the revolution came from Jewish leaders. Most of them changed their Jewish names to Russian ones to conceal their Jewishness, such as Trotsky (Bronstein), Zinoviev (Apelbaum), Kamenev (Rosenfeldt), Sverdlov (Rubenstine), Larine, Uritsky, Steclov (Nakhamkes), all of whom later assumed major positions in Lenin’s government. In effect, Jews founded and shaped the Soviet state. Yet these same Jewish Bolsheviks quickly became the first victims of the Soviet state. Over the next twenty years, by 1937, practically all of them had become targets of Stalin’s repressions and were executed or murdered abroad, like Leon Trotsky. Still, they would not abandon their devotion to socialism.

In the late 1920s, German Jews voted for Hitler’s National Socialist Party, only to become victims of the Holocaust a decade later. They chose to ignore Hitler’s anti-Semitic rhetoric, believing that it was merely for domestic consumption. They doubted that Hitler could be bad, much less evil. After all, he was a socialist!

Jews passionately supported and continue to admire FDR, who denied entry for Jews seeking asylum from Nazi extermination just before World War II. The most telling is the tragedy of the German ocean liner MS St. Louis, whose captain, Gustav Schroder, tried to save 937 German Jewish refugees after they were denied entry to Cuba, by bringing his ship to Miami only to learn that the U.S. refused his Jewish passengers a safe harbor. Finally the Jews were accepted by various European countries and eventually ended up in Auschwitz and Sóbibor, where half of them perished. By refusing to allow Jews to enter the United States Roosevelt offered Hitler a propaganda coup: justification of the persecution of Jews. The Nazis could say that they were not alone in their hatred of Jews; the rest of the world, and especially the United States, did not want them either. Nevertheless, Jews voted for FDR and still love him—after all, the New Deal was a giant step toward socialism.

The Jewish love affair with socialism that began in Russia continued in Germany and endures in today’s America. An examination of the current socialist Obama administration reveals a similar Jewish pattern. Living in ghettos for two millennia, the Jewish people have been struggling to reconcile their tragic history with the logic of contemporary reality. They have a difficult time coming to terms with the freedom and equal opportunities that America offers. They continue to fight for social justice, refusing to recognize that, as far as Jews are concerned, what they have accomplished in this country goes well beyond their wildest expectations. Sons and daughters of the first immigrants, who dug trenches and washed dishes in New York, became doctors, lawyers, senators, bankers, industrialists, and influential politicians.

Unfortunately, the descendants of the first immigrants inherited the genetic memories of their ghetto ancestors. They appear to have nurtured and maintained a sense of guilt, even in the face of their success; they feel guilty for achieving a standard of living as good as or better than any other ethnic group in this country. They are constantly seeking forgiveness for their survival. They are prisoners of insecurity. The guilt associated with their own success has led them to take on, and support, the cause of every underdog and liberal movement in sight, no matter how undeserving, no matter how irrational or against their own interests or even survival. As Jewish sociologist Milton Himmelfarb observed, “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” Over the last century, no social macrocosm in America has more consistently voted against their own interests.

Socialism, which began with the fanaticism of the grandparents, has been transformed into fear in the parents and subsequently into habits in the children and grandchildren; it is embedded deeply in the Jewish DNA.

The Jewish unequivocal commitment to the Democratic Party makes them irrelevant during the elections. Republicans do not care about Jewish interests because Jews do not vote for them regardless of whether or not Republicans address their concerns. Democrats take the Jewish vote for granted and essentially do not care about Jewish votes because the Jews will vote for them regardless of their position on Jewish issues. Even among the Jews who emigrated from the Soviet Union there are many supporters of Obama and his socialist policies. That confirms the Russian saying, “You can take a Jew out of socialism but you cannot take socialism out of a Jew.”

Despite the obvious, Jews continue to disregard the teachings of Karl Marx, their fellow member of the tribe, that socialism is about redistribution of wealth. Redistribution means taking from one group of citizens and giving it to others. Bolsheviks took from the bourgeoisie; Nazis took from the Jews. The contemporary American Neo-Bolsheviks aim at taking from the rich, even though there are many Jews among them.

Immediately before the 2012 election, I was in a Las Vegas restaurant with some of my Jewish friends, talking politics over dinner. At an adjacent table was another Jewish gathering. One of them turned around and asked one of my friends if he really was going to vote for Romney. My friend replied that he would vote for a cock roach if it ran against Obama. I thought that perhaps this expression, which I personally enjoyed, reflected a glimmer of hope that the Jews might emerge from their intellectual ghetto and commence a wave of voting based on logic, not habit. In the end, however, habit proved to be stronger than logic and, once again, emotional attachments trumped Jewish interests. In retrospect, I was picking up the dinner tab, which may have tilted the table in my philosophical direction.  How else can I explain it.