BY BARRY WENDELL
Cal Thomas (DP-Tuesday) finds it a mystery that Jews stick with the Democratic Party, especially after the recent comments of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., about Israel and its influence on the United States.
I’m Jewish by birth and by choice and a Democrat since I was able to vote, at age 21, in the 1970 election.
American Jews are not united on Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under a cloud of corruption, like our president in the United States. I love Israel, and I’ve visited there three times. I don’t love its government. It’s unconscionable that the Arabs in the West Bank have been living under a military occupation for more than 50 years.
Still, Israel doesn’t want to end up like Syria, destroyed by a brutal dictator compounded by a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, with help from Russia and the United States. It’s offensive to accuse Israel of genocide, and before I would sign on to a boycott of Israel, I would boycott China, which has a much worse record on human rights for its Muslim community. I’m not giving up the Apple computer on which I am writing this, “Assembled in China.”
My father’s grandfathers were first cousins from a coal mining area in Russian-occupied Poland. They came to the United States early in the last century, each with eight children. My mother’s grandparents came from Russia as well, from present-day Poland, Belarus and Ukraine.
The one couple that married in the United States met at a night school English class in New York around 1890. When I lived in Los Angeles a century later, I saw immigrants from Mexico and Central America lining up at my neighborhood middle school to study English at night. I felt a bond with them.
When I saw our Republican president demonize immigrants, right from the start of his campaign, it scared me. Fear-based politics and demonizing certain groups led to the destruction of the Jews in Europe, and we Jews say “Never again.” That’s not just for us, but for everyone.
Jews have a long memory. At Passover, when we retell the story of the Exodus, we always say “We were slaves in Egypt,” never “they.”
I was born four and a half years after the liberation of Auschwitz, and any time a particular group of people, not necessarily Jews, is attacked, alarm bells go off for me. Anyone with a conscience would be appalled by scenes of children being ripped from their mothers’ arms at the border and sent to detention camps, but for Jews in particular, this was an awful reminder of what totalitarian states do.
In Jewish circles, people have been worried about “dog whistles,” not openly anti-Semitic sayings, but Republican speeches about “coastal elites,” “Hollywood liberals” and “New York bankers.” Blaming George Soros, a Hungarian-Jewish survivor of World War II concentration camps, for all the troubles in the world, has become a trope for authoritarians everywhere, including our own would-be authoritarian president. While he demeans many people with name-calling that would shame an eighth-grader, Jews particularly note “Little Shifty Schiff” for Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and “Crying Chuck Schumer” for the senator from New York.
Then there is the Bible. We read in Exodus 23:9, “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger, seeing you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” And in Psalm 82, we read “Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the poor and the oppressed. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”
I didn’t see “Cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; deny the poor medical attention in order to give tax cuts to the very rich.”
It’s no mystery why Jews follow the Democratic Party; the mystery is why some Christians follow the Republican Party.
Barry Lee Wendell is a member of Morgantown’s City Council. This commentary should be considered another point of view and not necessarily the opinion or editorial policy of The Dominion Post.
