Jewish Republicans as an oppressed minority

[Phx_Dem]

This year, I've decided to do something about bigotry, starting with my own. I want to examine and root out some of the most deep-seated of my personal prejudices. This week, for example, I am resolved to take a look at the irrational queaze I feel when I consider the idea of Jews voting Republican.

As oppressed minorities go, the Republican Jew may appear to be anything but downtrodden. The stereotype, that of the upwardly mobilized breathing the rarified air of the American Dream, was already in place in the early 1960s, when satirist Allan Sherman set the tune of "Hava Nagila" to a family saga that took a New York Jewish couple from relatively humble Kennedy Democratic activist beginnings to the shiny Jaguar poolside lifestyle of Lalaland:

snip

For the sake of Jewish unity, I have looked deep within myself, and have re-educated the inner child. I have gotten over the idea that Jews should vote Democratic as a matter of course. I now believe that Jews should vote Democratic as a matter of principle.

I believe that there is a reason why the members of this miniscule but crucially important minority, just two percent of the population of the United States, still vote Democratic by a factor of three to one. They believe that there is something to be said for a society which favors the common good over the corporate good, compassion over competitive wealth, respect for opportunity over respect for rapacity,

There are many ways of looking at the American Dream. There was a time when the Jewish way held that the dream should be offered to as many people as possible, people of all races, religions, socio-economic backgrounds. Perhaps, in this era which enshrines bonfires of a range of vanities, we have left the underclass to sink in its morass of unsafe and unsupported public schools, its plagues of drugs and despair and darkness.

Perhaps the Republican way has begun to suit us, after all.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/914004.html

[Ian David]

1. Only 14% of Jews vote Republican. Yet 33% of gay people voted for Bush in 2004. n/t