The Democratic Party has decided it’s okay to use the law in bad faith to persecute and jail its political opponents. The Democratic Party has destroyed Americans’ faith in the federal courts, the Department of Justice, and the FBI. The Democratic Party allows an invasion of millions of unvetted aliens across the border, quite a few of them possibly bent on making mayhem here as global tensions careen into hot war.
If they really want to repair the world, it’s time for Jewish Americans to get out of the Democratic Party and re-assimilate into an American common culture — a consensus about reality — that is consistent with running a successful, orderly, and just society.
James Howard Kunstler
“In a world that is not conforming to the narrative of continuous Progress, the response from self-declared progressives has been to try to rewrite our past into the multicultural utopia that they wish to see realised. This will not end well. The war on reality cannot be won.” — Luke Dodson
Clusterfuck Nation
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At this moment, when there is an awful struggle over the Hebrews’ place in the world — so dire that you’re waiting for World War Three to vaporize everything you’ve ever cared about — one observes the Jewish American scene with trepidation. Since I am a Jewish American, I’m just going to flop this one on the table like so much meat to see what kind of animals it brings out of the woodwork to fight over it.
The Hamas war has exposed a deep current of animosity against Israel and against Jews generally world-wide, even here. This, you understand, is happening at a time of what we might call epic global political mental illness. A mass formation psychosis appears to grip many population groups, each in its own way, but often expressing itself as a longing for death, ranging from the economic suicide of Western Europe to the rise of Jihad to the desolate nihilism of American nose-ring youth.
Jewish Americans have played a leading role in American intellectual and political life through the 20th century and into this one. We Jews increasingly dominated the arenas of literature, academia, medicine, law, news media, and show biz. Business and government, too. In America, we mostly overcame (or seemed to) the deep, old-world superstitions against us, thanks to successful near-total cultural assimilation. I, for example, came from a Jewish family far more interested in baseball than Talmud, who put up a Christmas tree in the living room, and ate sweet-and-sour pork frequently. Perhaps this made us “bad” Jews, but frankly, it was more important to be good Americans — that is, people who cared more about our country than our ancestral origins.
American Jews have also been major players in the political Left through the past hundred-odd years, and especially within the Democratic Party. Lately, it appears that the Democratic Party is bent on destroying the country, so one is naturally left to wonder how this happened and what is the role of American Jews in this. I will offer a hypothesis.
Old World Jews, scattered in diaspora among alien nations, were united for centuries by the longing to return to Jerusalem, the ancestral homeland. “Next year in Jerusalem!” is the toast that concludes each Passover seder. The modern activist manifestation of that, starting in 19th century Europe, was Zionism, the political movement to reinhabit the Bible land of the Middle East. The label Zionism has recently been confabulated with a notion that it stands for Jews wielding a disdainful sense of superiority against non-Jews.
This is, of course, a false understanding. Mostly, it is an envious projection because Jews succeeded so well in America, and they succeeded, as I averred above, largely because they assimilated so completely. How else can you explain a Jew such as Samuel Goldwyn (born Szmuel Gelbfisz, later Samuel Goldfish) of Gloversville, New York, rising to run Hollywood’s MGM studio and turning out movies like Gone with the Wind that showed the rest of the nation what America was about? Or Irving Berlin who wrote God Bless America?
For the Jews who arrived here in the late 19th and early 20th century, America became even more of a promised land than that sliver of Biblical real estate on the Mediterranean. They succeeded here beyond their wildest dreams. Why dream idly about returning to the Middle East when the USA turned out to be the real Land of Milk and Honey? Hence, a revision in American Judaism became necessary. Next year in Jerusalem was replaced as a central animating principle by an alternate shibboleth: tikkun olam.
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