It's the Morality, Stupid: Jews for Gingrich

WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 — If the views of Rabbi Daniel Lapin are any indication, the long-standing monopoly liberalism has exercised over Jewish loyalties is crumbling. Lapin and the organization he founded, Toward Tradition, sense that we stand on the verge of a major shift in the political history of American Jewry, and Lapin is working actively to hasten that shift.

In the past, Jews - seared by centuries of persecution - fought to heighten the wall keeping Christianity from encroaching on, or influencing the sphere of public policy or governmental affairs. As a religious minority, Jews believed that religion was best kept far from the reins of political authority.

But, according to Toward Tradition, the tide is shifting as Jews realize that liberalism, along with its ideological partners - relativism and secularism - actually poses a far more pernicious threat. For liberalism, say Jewish conservatives, has shown itself responsible for this country’s moral rot which threatens to undermine the very values of ethical decency which Jews stand for and rely upon. Toward Tradition declares that “Judaism and its eternal values have little in common with modern American liberalism,” and more in common with believing Christians.

This was essentially the message of a major conference held September 21 to 23 calling itself “Toward a New Alliance: American Jews and Political Conservatism,” the second such conference organized by Toward Tradition, attracting about 300 to 400 participants to Washington.

The conference, with a touch of happy irony, coincided almost exactly with the capital’s AIDS Walk, drawing its diverse crowd of an estimated 25,000 to within a block of the staunchly conservative gathering. (The next day’s Washington Post amusingly featured a photograph of two members of the “Atlantic States Gay Rodeo Association” participating in the walk.)

Jack Kemp (Bush’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and ex-Vice Presidential candidate) began the conference by insisting that “those of us who share these values, Jewish or Christian, must be on the same side.” He also emphasized the religious roots of the American nation, claiming, for example, that “the great events of American history were led by men and women of faith,” taking the Revolution, the Abolition, and the civil rights movement as his examples.

Ralph Reed, former Executive Director of the Christian Coalition, said: “We read the same Scriptures; we seek the same things for our children and our nation,” and vowed that the evangelical Christian community, unlike the liberal American Jewish community, “will never walk away from Israel.”

Secularism vs. Conservatism

Rabbi Lapin, in his charismatically cadenced keynote address, proposed that the ideas of liberalism, though not necessarily those who espouse them, are the “condensed essence of evil.” Citing, among others, the late Columbia University literary critic Lionel Trilling as evidence, he proposed that “the central thesis of the liberal project is to dismantle the root of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

In Lapin’s view, one is confronted with a stark philosophical choice: one must choose either the religious, theocentric ethic, divinely inspired, or the atheistic ethic of “rampant secularism and total materialism.” This is essentially the choice of which Deuteronomy 30 speaks: “See, I have given before you today life and good; and death and evil . . .” If one chooses the latter, one chooses the materialistic view of the human being which declares him to be not qualitatively different than the animal. Making just this choice, socialism governed its subjects as zookeepers manage the animals in their care, as if to say: “We’ll distribute your food/goods equally. We will look after you, but in return, we will rightfully take the products of your labors just as we sheer the sheep of its wool.”

Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA), introduced as “the most pro-Israel Speaker in American history,” also spoke of a basic divide in American society between those who recognize a higher Being and transcendent meaning, and those who do not. Clearly, Gingrich continued, the Founders did have this recognition, a recognition enshrined in the Declaration’s references to “self-evident” natural law truths, to rights “endowed by the Creator,” and to “Divine providence.”

He also sharply criticized the “continuous onslaught to drive God out of the public arena,” and spoke of welfare reform as “a moral cause,” and of affirmative action quotas as “morally wrong.”

In Dennis Prager’s view, the deep crisis which so afflicts contemporary American society and culture is rooted in the fundamental atheism and irreligiosity of its liberal ideology.

For Prager, (popular talk show host, essayist and lecturer) if there is no God, then life is meaningless. The threat of such meaninglessness compels the atheistic individual or society to look elsewhere for meaning; hence the two great evils of our century, Nazism and Communism. “Why would I want the decline of Christianity in America when I know what it brought in Europe: Stalin and Hitler?!”
If there is no God, Prager said, then there must be only orderless chaos, a chaos reflected today in the arts. In fact, Prager continued, the most chaotic beliefs propagate themselves in the drivel and stupidity of that secular temple known as the university, “where more nonsense is believed in than anywhere.” (Later, Rabbi Meyer Schiller called universities “Stalinist loonybins.”)

If there is no God, Prager concluded, then sensitivity to the holy, to the metaphysical, to the transcendent, disappears, and a materialistic emphasis on physicality predominates. Hence, the American preoccupation with health. And hence, a culture more concerned with pollution of the environment than with “pollution of the soul.”

Liberal Jews - The Enemy

For Jewish conservatives, it is as sadly ironic that Jews, charged with bringing God to the world, are instead at the forefront of keeping the Ten Commandments out of America’s classrooms and courtrooms as it is lamentable and embarrassing that American Christians have become the voice of traditional morality in our society. For this reason, many of the more vehement condemnations were aimed not at liberalism per se, as much as at liberal Jews.

One speaker announced to stirring applause that liberal American Jews are “the enemy . . . the intellectual backbone for everything that’s wrong about this country.”

Another compared the 20% of American Jews who identify themselves as Republicans with the courageous one-fifth of Egyptian Jewry who (according to one interpretation of the word va’chamushim) left with Moses for the Promised Land.

Don Feder, syndicated columnist for the Boston Herald, accused the self-selected Jewish establishment leadership and the “regrettably misnamed” secular organizations which include the adjective “Jewish” in their names (e.g. American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee) of hillul Hashem - desecration of God’s name. “In general, when the AJC and ADL say one thing,” Feder said, “the Torah says precisely the opposite.” Elliot Abrams (former Assistant Secretary of State) concurred and said of these organizations: “They are not secular because liberal, but liberal because secular.”

Global Conservatism & GOP Gedolim

The conference, it is true, sometimes digressed from its strict agenda and forayed into more general conservative topics. Dinesh D’Souza spoke persuasively against affirmative action, William Kristol (editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard) rather monotonously meandered through modern conservative history, and Rabbi Meyer Schiller (MTA rebbe and hockey coach) spoke of the steady decline of “European civilization” and of “Anglo-Saxondom” caused by the left, which, in his opinion, represents “egalitarianism, secularization, global destruction of white peoples,” and the “third-worldization” of America and Europe.

And expanding the conservative discussion beyond its domestic American confines, Dan Polisar asserted that in its political culture, Israel is stuck in the late 1960’s. Just as during that period the New Left thought the United States to be imperialist and exploitative, so today the liberal Israeli intellectual elite believes that Israel was born in sin and compounded that sin by occupation and rejecting offers of peace. “The Oslo Accords,” he said, “read like a confession of guilt.” Indeed, Israeli liberals “want to strip Israel of all its nationalism, of all its Judaism, of all its heritage.”

Also gracing the conference with their speeches were a group of what the Forward newspaper called “GOP gedoylim”: Senators John Ashcroft (R-MO), and Slade Gorton (R-WA); Representatives Jon Fox (R-PA, one of four Jewish Republicans in Congress), Ernest Istook (R-OK), Jennifer Dunn (R-WA), Chris Cox (R-CA), and Tom DeLay (House Majority Whip, R-TX); and Jim Nicholson (a life-long Catholic and Chairman of the Republican National Committee).

As a piece in the Washington Times concluded: “Conservative political discourse has always resonated with the categories of Christian thought and law. But this may well be the first time Jewish law and reasoning has offered itself to the conservative movement as something more than the vague Judeo of the Judeo-Christian heritage.”