It's STILL not about Alan Dershowitz (Part Three and Final!)

Okay, one more glimpse at Alan Dershowitz's
visage...sorry!

In the first part of this series of posts, I told why I could relate to Alan Dershowitz.  First, he has his BA from Brooklyn College, where my mother (z"l) studied, albeit Mom graduated a decade before Dershowitz.  But when he wrote about his early life in Brooklyn, including his years in Brooklyn College, I recognized his world as the world my mother came out of.  Additionally, as someone who grew up as a liberal Jew in postwar America, I understand the world that Dershowitz came out of, the world that shaped his worldview and his political affiliation as a Democrat.

James Baker, the Secretary of State to President George HW Bush, is alleged to have said in private, in reaction to American Jews' anger at his President over his treatment of Israel after Operation Desert Storm, "F**k the Jews; they didn't vote for us."  As nasty as the comment - which has never been truly confirmed - was, the second clause of the sentence was absolutely true; in 1988, Bush 41's first election to the White House, only 27 percent of Jewish votes went to him.  His predecessor, Ronald Reagan, garnered more than half the Jewish vote when he ran against Jommy Carter in 1980, but when Bush, Reagan's Vice President, ran, Jews returned to their historically strong preference for the Democrat Party.  In Bush's re-election bid in 1992, only 19 percent of Jews voted for him.

I remember reading an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post about the time of the Jews' particular anger at Baker and Bush.  I wish I could find that piece and its author, because what he wrote was pretty profound.  He wrote that the Jews have no right to expect more from the Republicans, because they are going to vote overwhelmingly for the Democrats no matter what.  Well, I wouldn't agree completely with the no matter what; they voted for Reagan when it became clear that Jimmy Carter, despite being celebrated for managing the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt, was starting to sound just a bit like an Anti-semite.  It also hadn't helped that Carter was seem as an incompetent President.  But his point was well-taken, at least by me.  He pointed out that, as long as the American Jews' voting patterns were so fixed, indicating a sort of electoral immaturity, it was hard to sympathize with them for their complaint that the administration which would not receive their votes no matter what, was not listening to them very hard.

It wasn't just Bush and Baker who alienated Jews from the Repubican Party.  I had a friend, an Orthodox Jew, who was running as a candidate for city council in Lakewood, New Jersey, a very Jewish town east of Philadelphia.  I asked him if he was running as a Republican, knowing that his political views were definitely right-of-center and that he should naturally find his home in that party.  He told me no, he was running as a Democrat.  I asked him why.  He told me that, whilst the Republicans would surely make a logical ideological homeland for him, the Republicans "will never run a Jew for office."  Now, in the anecdotal sense there seems to be some truth to this.  Certainly in the US Congress, there have historically been very few Jewish office-holders with an 'R' after their name, and almost none - Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor briefly being a lone exception - in the party's national leadership.  That has changed some in the ensuing years, particularly after George W Bush famously employed several Jews among his senior advisors - not at the cabinet level, but immediately below.

President Trump famously has a number of Jews - including his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner - in his inner circle, and there are a few more Jews in the Rupublican caucus today, but Jews still overwhelmingly prefer the Democrat Party.  Jews have affiliated Democrat in large percentages since the 1930's, when the Democrat Party became the ideological home of trade unionists, as Jews were very prominent in the trade union movement.  This preference was cemented in 1960, with the ascent ot Democrat John F Kennedy to the presidency, and his successor, President Johnson's embrace of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Great Society anti-poverty reforms in 1964-5.  These legislative actions resonated strongly with Jews.  Never mind that LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act with 80 percent of the Republicans, and only 6o percent of the Democrats in the House.  In the Senate, about two-thirds of Democrats voted for the legislation, but 83 percent of Republicans did.  Because of LBJ, the Democrats became known as the party of Civil Rights even though that was only partly true.  (I'm not going to get into the point that the Republicans are the party of Lincoln and the Democrats opposed every initiative of his to end slavery, or Dinsh D'Souza's well-documented case that the Democrats were the founding fathers of the Ku Klux Klan.  But these aspects of the historical record do strongly detract from the Democrats' narrative that they are the Party of Civil Rights.)

Nationally-prominent social commentator Dennis Prager, a Jew, has written extensively about his journey from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican.  He makes that case that he didn't change his ideological underpinnings one bit since the Kennedy era when he was a student at Columbia University.  Rather, what these labels meant changed radically.  As he tells it, if the Democrat party and liberalism were still the ideological home of the liberalism of JFK, he would likely still be a liberal Democrat.  But he asserts that what changed was not this ideology of a strong military and foriegn policy, service to country, low taxes to expand the economy, and reverence for the life of the unborn.  Rather, what changed was that people with such values in the early 1960's were known as liberals and found their home in the Democrat Party, whereas today those who would agree with those premises are known as conservatives and find their home in the republican Party.

I remember listening to Dennis Prager in dialogue with Alan Dershowitz on his radio show.  I won't say the two agreed on everything, but their disagreements seemed less significant than their agreements.  Although Prager was too polite to say as much to Dershowitz, his guest whom I take it is also a friend, I remember thinking:  So why does Dershowitz still belong to the Democrat Party?  When he speaks, certainly about Israel, he sounds more like a Republican.

Support for Israel among Democrats has been steadily waning in recent years.  When Democrats say that they are pro-Israel, it is almost always with very strong caveats.  Given the way that Democrats talk about any Israeli government that isn't Labor-led - and the Labor Party has been in the opposition, not in the ruling coalition, for most of the past 41 years - it becomes clear that Democrats only support Israel when she is seen as Left-leaning.  And since about the year 2000, and the beginning of the "Al Aksa Intifada" (Intifada Round Two), the Left virtually collapsed as a viable political force in Israeli politics.

The result of all this, is that Jews on the Left - which is still most American Jews - feel less and less connected to Israel despite that many will say that this is not the case.  They feel connected more to an early vision of Israel as a secular, leftist utopian polity, than to any reality of Israel in recent years.  Michael Oren, an American Jew who immigrated to Israel, became a noted historial, and served as Israel's ambassador to the US from 2009-2013, in his book Ally, used the American Jews' continuing support and embrace of President Obama even as he pushed the Iran Nuclear Deal, as evidence of his hypothesis that American Jewish liberals were conflicted between thier traditional support of Israel, and Israel's ever-increasing unpopularity among the polical Left, in the USA and the rest of the world.  When I read his book, I could not but agree completely given the evidence.  But liberal American Jews were incensed that Oren would call them out in such a way.

The truth is that the deligitimization of Israel on the political Left, has been underway for a long time.  Thanks to successive Right-wing governments in Israel, where the Right is popularly seen as the only political force that can provide a robust response to very real, existential threats from the Arab/Islamic world, and growing sympathy on the Left for even such Arab elements as Hamas and Hizb'allah, Jewish liberals find themselves ever more conflicted over their support of the Jewish State, and their membership in liberal circles and the Democrat Party.

Alan Dershowitz has always been a strong advocate of Israel's right to self-determination and self-defense.  And he has always been a strong advocate of the individual American's right to freedom of speech and due process.  He has not changed over the years.  But the party and people amongst whom he once found ideological agreement and comfort, have changed.  As I wrote in Part One of this series, I'm not up in arms that his former friends are shunning him socially.  But I think that his detractors' jabs that he is some kind of crybaby for defending President Trump and then still expecting to be in the embrace of the community that has beeen his ideological home for over a half-century, are very telling.  I believe that Alan Dershowitz, and others who stand for what he does, should take a good look at the two major parties in American politics and what they stand for today.  If they're not big fans of President Trump, they aught to look beyond that antipathy.  (As I've said before, I'm a somewhat reluctant supporter of President Trump.)  If they do, I believe they will find that, just as with Dennis Prager, as with Rabbi Don Levy, and as with many American Jews today, their logical home is in the Republican Party.  No, it's not really about Alan Dershowitz.  It's about whether people with views like those of Alan Dershowitz - including Dershowitz himself - really agree with what's coming out of the Democrat Party today.