Will President Obama lose the Jewish vote after complaining about Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu? Probably not.
This latest snafu follows Obama’s May 2011 remarks calling for Israel to withdraw to pre-1967 borders as part of a Palestinian-Israeli peace settlement. Obama tried to get British Prime Minister David Cameron to exert similar pressure on Israel, without success.
And in September 2010, Obama suggested a freeze on Israeli settlements.
Meanwhile, Obama has been far less vocal in calling on the Palestinians to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to halt repeated rocket attacks and suicide bombers against Israel.
But Jews are surprisingly short-sighted in their choice of political leaders. Seventy-eight percent voted for Obama in the 2008 presidential elections, and the vast majority are registered Democrats.
Reform and Conservative movements vote Democrat as a matter of liberal faith—even though liberal dogma frequently clashes with Jewish law and is against Jewish self-interest.
Norman Podhoretz, author of Why Jews are Liberals, explained it this way in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal in 2009,
‘The upshot is that in virtually every instance of a clash between Jewish law and contemporary liberalism, it is the liberal creed that prevails for most American Jews. Which is to say that for them, liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right.’
(Source: Daily Mail UK)
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4 Responses
Why are you bothering with the Daily Mail. At least look for an American source for American politics.
The article doesn’t take demographic changes in the Jewish community into account (frum are growing due to higher birth rate) or how the American electoral system works (increases the important of Jews who live in Jewish neighborhoods over those who are scattered elsewhere)- probably because the foreign author doesn’t understand USA politics and Jewish demographics.
To #1:
You live in either BoroPark or Lakewood and look out the window and you see so many frum yidden so you think the world is mostly frum. Wake up and leave your “daled amos” and you’ll see that most yidden are overwhelmingly not frum.
“The upshot is that in virtually every instance of a clash between Jewish law and contemporary liberalism, it is the liberal creed that prevails for most American Jews”
Jewish Law? From my vantage point, the problem is that in virtually every instance of neoconservative and tea party extremism intolerant Yiddisdhe psychofants dress up the extremism in false cloaks of distorted Halacha.
This article went wrong in the first sentence of the second paragraph, when it said: “This latest snafu follows Obama’s May 2011 remarks calling for Israel to withdraw to pre-1967 borders as part of a Palestinian-Israeli peace settlement.” Putting aside the lack of an antecedent for “This”, it is absolutely false that President Obama ever called for Israel to withdraw to its pre-’67 borders. He expressly stated that the pre-’67 borders should be a starting point to be supplemented by mutually agreed additional territory. Right-wing Jewish publications, including Yeshiva World News, have persistently distorted President Obama’s statement on this matter.
As for the supposed dichotomy between liberalism and Halacha, and the choices of non-frum Jews, that is a topic for an extensive op-ed piece, at the least.