Hatikvah is Israel’s national anthem, but since the ethos of the Israelis and American Jews is so different, it might be appropriate to find a separate one for the latter. My own candidate for a new Jewish-American anthem is Lookin’ For Love in All the Wrong Places (sung by Johnny Lee in Urban Cowboy).
A lot of people, most of them reflective Jews, have been puzzled by the twentieth century Jewish infatuation with the Left. The excellent periodical Commentary, for example, ran an entire symposium on the theme Why Are Jews Liberal? and there were as many answers, all of them plausible, as there were contributors. We don’t want to get trapped into the “single-cause” assumption, so I suspect that the truth is that all of those proffered explanations are involved in the phenomenon to varying degrees and among different sub-populations. There is, though, one pervasive factor that seemed to have been missed in that symposium, which is what leads me to dip my own oar in the water on this question.
The Jews have lived with the consciousness of being hated and despised wherever they have gone for more than two thousand years. And this hatred crystallized into very specific libels and stereotypes of evil. In particular, Jews were hated for being greedy and money grubbing, for being insular and clannish, and, in general, for being just plain bad. You’ve got to admit, tough or not, this is bound to get you down eventually. Sooner or later, you’re bound to develop neurotic reactions to this treatment. Some of them seem pretty obvious.
The most obvious one, it seems to me, is that Jews would become neurotically preoccupied with persuading people that they were not at all bad, that they were, in fact, good.
As it turned out, since their behaviour was neurotically determined, not determined by a rational assessment of the situation, their efforts at persuasion have always been doomed. Since they were not hated because of the characteristics they were alleged to have, getting rid of those characteristics did not serve to reverse the situation. People hadn’t hated Jews because they were bad; they hated them, and, because of that, believed them to be bad. More specifically, the fact that the hate came first, the rationale second, was given a theoretical foundation during the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe. While previously the Church and others allowed for a Jewish “redemption” through conversion, this ended with the doctrine of racial, as opposed to religious, anti-Semitism. This was a crucial moment in history, since it set the stage narrative-wise for Hitler’s “Final Solution.” The Jews had to be exterminated because, according to the new doctrine, their evil was not remediable. Since one can change one’s religion, a person who is bad because of their religion can become good by simply changing it. But, as the Nazis maintained, if a person is bad because of what they are (metaphysically), they can never be made good. And the only remaining remedy is to exterminate them.
And since people continued hating them (or they believed that people were still hating them), they continued to work even harder at being publicly and conspicuously GOOD. My point is that Jewish liberalism must be, among other things, a psychological reaction to the situation of Jews in history.
Here are a few elaborations on this theme.
First, this strategy was not going to work with the dominant Protestant population. As Max Weber famously argued, the Protestants developed the acquisition of wealth as a theologically based God-given holy task necessary for the doing of good works. There was no way that these money-grubbing Protestants would not see the Jewish acquisitiveness and efforts at philanthropy as anything other than an attempt to ingratiate themselves (which, on my hypothesis, they largely were).
But not all Jews had philanthropy or good works available to them for proving that their hatred was undeserved. Certainly the Jews of pre-revolution tsarist Russia did not. Therefore, these Jews sought the only other option available, they sought to make common cause with the other sub-groups being mistreated, thinking to persuade at least them that Jews are not evil, but actually good.
But they were looking for love in all the wrong places.
The Russian upper classes despised them; but so did the Russian peasantry; and so, to their shock and horror, did the Russian revolutionary class. They tried the same thing later in Germany, with much the same result. The German socialists used the Jews when they were useful, and murdered them when they were not.
As in the case of all compulsions, the American Jews have never learned from their own history. They have continued to seek the love and approbation of their non-Jewish environment through philanthropy and good works. It hasn’t worked.
They desperately tried to make common cause with American blacks during the civil rights movement. They contributed their money, they contributed their brains, they contributed their influence, and sometimes they even contributed their lives. And, of course, predictably, anti-Semitism is nowhere more entrenched than among American blacks. The blacks used (and use) the Jews when they are useful, and reject them when they are not. Think Jesse Jackson and the Rev'rnd Wright.
But, in addition, a habit born of psychological compulsion does not cease to work when either the causes of the compulsion or even the compulsion itself ceases to exist. What was once a mere compulsion can acquire all the trappings of a moral-philosophical mantra, it can become an auto-biographical narrative, and this has certainly happened in the case of the American Jews.
Just as native Americans have become the environment-loving, spiritual, noble victims of European aggression and vice, and American blacks the poor victims of white racism, so the American Jews have become the modern warriors for right and good. Where self-identification is involved, the game du jour is Let's Pretend.
A further point that is consistent with this thesis is that American Jews have seen fit to reject the affection of possibly the ONLY population in history for whom the Jews have been flavour of the month: the American Evangelicals. This should be no surprise, from a psychological point of view.
The mechanism that underlies the Jewish search for love necessarily involves the conversion of hate into love. Freely offered love is worthless; only a love that has been dearly earned through suffering is satisfying. And so the American Jews keep snuffling around the American black population, and keep being harassed and assaulted, and, at the same time, turn up their noses at friendly overtures from the Evangelicals.
Groucho Marx captures the American Jewish neurosis perfectly in his clever quip:
Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.
I end this discussion with this.
The American Jews voted by a vast majority for Obama despite everything that was known about him that should have warned them, including what he explicitly stated. To them I say: How’s that been working for ya?
I doubt that Johnny Lee is Jewish, but any American Jew could sing:
I was lookin' for love
In all the wrong places
Lookin' for love in too many faces
Searchin' their eyes, lookin' for traces
Of what I'm dreamin' of
Hopin' to find a friend and a lover
I'll bless the day I discover
Another heart lookin' for love.
Voting for what is clearly and transparently against your own interests is only explainable in terms of mental pathology.
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