Obama Holding Onto Liberal Jewish Voters Despite Israel, Iran Concerns Comments

Lougjr1

Wed, 3 Oct 2012 23:49:13 +0000

Everyyhing is ok, it has been taken care of. Thanks

Lougjr1

Tue, 2 Oct 2012 02:46:40 +0000

Thank You Raphael Ennis, They evidently had to edit some of my message , but thats ok because I think everyone got the message. If you saw it then many more of my fellow Anericans must have seen it also. So thank you for your reply!!!

Beatrix139

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 05:12:56 +0000

Israel is important to Jewish Americans as Ireland is to Irish Americans, and Italy is to Italian Americans. It's our heritage. It means we belong somewhere. We're not in America because we have no where else to go---we're here because we choose to be. We are accepted in America because of Israel. There is no comparison in the way Jews were treated before Israel and they way we're treated now.__Jews take it for granted that the liberals and Democrats will support Israel because they always have. That's they only reason it's not a priority_

RoseSpice

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 02:15:14 +0000

Every single tribe and ethnic group on earth has their own share of suicidally masochistic fools. No tribe or ethnic group is clean of them.

Cynic

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 14:15:03 +0000

\" However, that does give the GOP some hope for improving their lot in the future, since the Orthodox are the fastest growing sector of American Jewry. \"

Yes, but the next four years could be critical for America and the GoP.

SpartaRan

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 14:08:50 +0000

Other than Gallup and Rasmussen, most polls use outdated data models that are not considered relevant for November. That aside, before they cast their ballots on Election Day, how many of my fellow Jewish brothers and sisters have or will consider the implications raised in the documentaries, "2016" and "The Project" or Dinesh D'Souza's latest literary effort, "Obama's America"? Who supports another term for a president recently chastised by The New York Times as being uncomfortable with fostering closer relationships with Congressional and world leaders necessary to overcome Washington gridlock? Who is completely comfortable voting for four more years of a failed foreign policy, demonstrated by the administration's attempts to dismiss worldwide Muslim rioting and the murder of Americans in Libya on 9/11 as a "spontaneous" reaction to a mostly unseen Youtube video, rather than a miscalculation by the State Department following the death of Osama bin Laden? Think it over before Election Day.

Elie

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 08:32:00 +0000

Question for MainesMichael:

Where, may I ask in your view is the most cohesive and quality Jewish Community in Canada.
I\'m guessing we are talking about Eastern Canada more than British Columbia or Alberta. Perhaps Montreal or Quebec City, Toronto, maybe.

MainesMichael

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 04:03:23 +0000

Excellent. Really good. Being a dual Canada/US citizen, originally from Canada, I can attest to the surprisingly large difference between Canadian and American Jews regarding identity, and 'groundedness'.

blackparrot

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 03:04:24 +0000

Antidote to all these "opinions," not one of which has much to back itself up: a new book buy Robert Wistrich, " From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel (Studies in Antisemitism)." This book is about us. What most of us don't want to face is that most Jewish Americans are looking for the exit-door. That's the reason most of our ancestors emigrated. They wanted "out!" Imagine, if there had been no anti-Jewish bias, hatreds, "restricted communities" and "restricted golf clubs" in America, how quickly most of our ancestors would have gladly "forgotten who they were, where they came from!" "Pass the cheesburgers!" would have immediately replaced "Next year in Jerusalem!" Instead, it took two or three generations. Even so, we marvel at how quickly our lot "assimilated." But do we care to admit why this was so? We would rather not know, because the truth is that most of our relatives learned new ways and adopted them wholesale---as a means of not "being Jewish." Judaism? It's an ancient mystery religion, not what's practiced in the reform "temples." By contrast, Rabbinic Judaism is in part a reflection of the religion of Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and David. It's the religion of the rabbis, with a focus on the theocracy set in place by Solomon and his priestly allies, the Levites. I am not advocating for it. It is what it is, and our ancestors were largely all swimming in the Rabbinic Sea when they came to America. Today, the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans have very little to do Rabbinic Judaism. How could they? Why would they? But Israel is a "religious thing," not a piece of geography in the eastern Mediterranean. For the Jews, it's the "Land God gave us, the Land of the Covenant, the Promised Land." Why would most Jewish men and women in Los Angeles, Chicago or NYC, who are wondering which Ivy League school to send their kids to, adhere to an ancient mystery religion and inhale the mysteries at its core, among them the Covenant? Israel is the place we long for---only if we have immersed ourselves in biblical and talmudic texts, only if we accept that the Covenant---like the sacrifice of Isaac---defines who we are. A man covers himself in a prayer shawl so he can immure himself in that reality, that sense of identity, which stretches backward through the ages. He wraps his tefillin, in order to cement the connection. What is that for 90% of Jews here? Nothing at all. But there’s your dilemma, and there is no solution for it. The majority of Jews in America find "meaning" in leftist "social justice" rather than in the Ethics of our Fathers. I don't blame them, but they are heading down a dangerous path, if history is our guide. Surprisingly, it is the Jews of America and the UK who are most disconnected from Israel, and who long not to be who they are! Australian Jews, Canadian Jews, even French Jews---they are far more into "being Jewish." For them, Israel is "theirs," and so they are willing to fight for it, and certainly willing to "vote" for it! Here in the US, we're mostly "just Jews," not all that interested in "being Jewish," and actually somewhat embarrassed and put off by such an "affront" to our "individuality." Why would any group like ours care about whether Jerusalem is Jewish or Moslem? Most Jewish Americans wouldn't. And, most don't, no matter what they tell pollsters.

K2K

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 01:32:15 +0000

do you really think anyone agreeing to respond to a survey for Jewish voters is going to be representative??? Besides, it is not as if any voter has any confidence in either Party for the last eleven years. I am counting on the Arctic ice melt to end my despair before 2016. btw, those of us who are Jewish by birth, but non-observant of the rituals, really feel unwelcome by the incessant blasting that we must be liberals.

Beth Martin

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 23:57:54 +0000

Moral choices are always difficult. Unfortunately, moral choices are unavoidable. Is it comfortable considering the idea of a moral divide and picking sides? It never is, but it is unavoidable, so we must pull on our big-girl and big-boy pants and decide where we stand. Americans' worries are mild compared to much of the world population. Only in America do the least prosperous among us have cell phones, free food, free doctors, tvs on the walls plus cable, air conditioning, and so forth. We'd like everyone to do very very well, but it hasn't worked out, has it? Has this utopian ideal ever worked out anywhere, anytime, in any century? Utopia distracts us. Let's pay attention to real life, even though attending cocktail parties with fellow idealists makes our endorphins pop, pop, pop, and we feel like the best humanists ever born. Bubbles are lovely, but people who think in bubbles might miss it when evil holds the knives and H-bombs ready. Is it fair or wise for the United States to throw under the bus an important ally and its citizens: Israel and Israelis? Can anyone who does so deny moral culpability for what happens next? Why do "the Germans" hold the guilt card for the 1940s holocaust with no reprieve in sight? What about the next holocaust which is now brewing? . Who will hold the guilt card for a 21st century holocaust? Certainly the perps. But what about those who had the ability to know, but didn't know or didn't care? Choices are not nice. But we all have to make them. I have a favorite 20th century villain: Josef Mengele. It's been 60 years since Dr. Mengele practiced medicine on German prisoners. How are we to regard Josef Mengele from the vantage of 21st century values? Is he a villain who killed tiny twin fetuses and babies? Or is just another HEROIC pro-choIce MD? History WILL judge us. Could each of us be viewed as Mengeles one hundred years from now?

Yitzhak_Shapira

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 23:11:43 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MpiFGcKuy0&fe...

Gfinoaktown

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 22:41:31 +0000

1) Abortion 2) Gay Marriage 3) Combatting Nazis, roughly defined as GW Bush and any believing Christian 4) Supporting Black anti-semites and illegal immigrants who loathe Jews 5) Oscars and sub-par Weinstein flicks 6) New York Times 7) LA Times 8) Free healthcare for non-tax-payers 9) Palestine 10) Giving a shit if Tel Aviv is nuked Top Ten Priorities of American Jews (as an SF Bay Area resident, believe me, I know).

watsa46

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 22:41:22 +0000

The Democrat Jews are more concern about their dhmni status in the US than the condition of the Jews in general. The idea that you can be a loyal US citizen and support IL is foreign to them even anathema. They believe that by rejecting or ignoring IL they are better American citizen.

Eleanor Lipson

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 22:14:38 +0000

This phenomenon demonstrates the truth of a statement made by a dear friend who happens to be an Orthodox Rabbi. He said: "When a Jew strays from the path of Judaism, there is no limit to the depth of the pit into which he/she falls."

yamama

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 21:02:13 +0000

http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/09/27/samuel-... ad was put together by the jewish council for education and research.

Norman Berdichevsky

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:40:26 +0000

The Democrat world-view that still holds an anachronistic stranglehold on many Jews has to be reminded that no ethnic vote is cast in stone, that Jewish support for Republican or Fusion candidates like Jacob Javitz and Fiorello La Guardia turned its back on the corrupt Democratic Tammany political machine in New York in the 1940s and 50s.

Jews, from the time of the first post-Civil War election until 1932 traditionally voted Republican or even Socialist rather than for the party identified in large parts of the country until the 1960s with Sunday “blue laws,” discrimination against blacks, and segregation.

Even as late as 1948 American Jews were still sufficiently sober and proud to give a deserved slap in the face to the Democrats in the run up to the presidential election of 1948 in spite of their idealization of FDR. By early 1948, Truman had been cowed by his State Department advisers to abandon the partition proposal for Palestine and were preparing to announce that U.S. preferred “international trusteeship”– meaning no Jewish state.

White House adviser Max Lowenthal urgently warned Truman that if a Jewish state were proclaimed without U.S. recognition, Republicans, the left leaning American Labor Party and the newly formed leftwing Progressive Party under former Vice President Henry Wallace would lead a chorus of protests and capture the Jewish vote. The administration would pay a high political price in Jewish votes for it is especially important in the upcoming presidential election. Truman received crucial phone calls from Bronx Democratic leader Ed Flynn and former New York governor Herbert Lehman, warning about the electoral repercussions in New York if he abandoned the Jews. A Congressional vote in the Bronx had already unseated a veteran Jewish Democrat to fill a vacant seat and Truman realized he had to make good on his original pledge of partition and recognition of Israel.

Under Democrat President Wilson, with his dismissal of Blacks from federal jobs, apathy to lynching, restrictive immigration policy, attendance at a special festive showing of the racist film Birth of a Nation in the White House, sympathy for the Ku Klux Klan and promotion of the notorious sedition laws (‘red scares’) in which thousands of East European and Jewish immigrants were deported and imprisoned for their stand against American entry into the war, caused a revulsion among Jewish voters. In 1920, they threw out two Democrat Jewish congressmen and elected 10 Republicans and two Socialists to Congress. This information that no ethnic vote is cast in stone hasn’t yet been absorbed by Jewish dinosaurs who can swallow any insult and proclaim that black is white or that Jewish values mean same sex marriage and unlimited abortion as long as the democrats have proclaimed that it is “progressive.”

Many Jewish liberals whose identity had been stamped three generations ago by their grandparents under FDR, continue to picture themselves as enlightened and the true inheritors of the mantle of Jewish concerns for “social justice,” followed Obama wherever he led, rather than view the candidates with an open mind. This election will see the pot boil over for those Jews who need no more evidence. They will have to face up to taking the cure or remain partners in their own demise as an influential and respected community.

clarespark

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:37:59 +0000

I regret the very conception of a "Jewish vote" for reasons I explained here: http://clarespark.com/2011/06/17/the-famed-jewish.... "The Famed Jewish Vote." I stress family loyalties to grandparents who were immigrants and who struggled. It is easy for successful persons of Jewish descent to identify with a gentile elite that is skilled in co-opting and containing threatening movements from below. The latter elite were the "socially responsible capitalists" and they put up with Jews as long as they behaved, swerving neither to the Right nor to the Left.

MrPrinciples

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:30:44 +0000

It's time to send Back conservatives instead of Jewish conservatives to Florida,

michaelmas12

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 19:50:42 +0000

Jonathan, why do you keep on falling for those false polls? You write "the margin of error is fairly large at five percent". FAIRLY LARGE???? this could amount to a swing of ten percent, for heaven's sake! You add that Israel ranks low on their priorities- 4.5 percent, even smaller than abortion!! Now, anyone thinking this way is not worthy of being considered a Jewish vote. It should now be accepted that there is no Jewish vote- because the vast majority of "Jews" in this country think that the security of Israel is of less value than abortion !! Do you understand now why the reform and Conservative branches of Judaism have made no headway in israel? They are just not considered jewish.