The Democrat Party and Jews Continue to Part Company? (2024)

In the wake of the surprising selection of Minnesota Governor, Tim Walz by Kamala Harris as her VP pick – and more specifically the rejection of the far superior choice of Pennsylvania Governor, Josh Shapiro (** reasons at the foot of this post) – even Democrat commie doyen of Obama, Van Jones, felt he had to talk on CNN about how some “Darker” Elements Of Anti-Semitism Have Been “Marbled In” To The Democratic Party.

That from a guy who regularly pals around with Al Sharpton!!!

Admittedly there’s PR and spin coming from within the Shapiro camp about how the interview with Harris and company didn’t go well, from others that Shapiro raised hackles by show-boating as the “obvious” VP pick, and that he dropped out because of links to sexual harrassment problems and even what seems to be a murder coverup.

Of course it could be that he made the same decision as Governors Whitmar (Michigan) and Cooper (North Carolina) to drop out because he doesn’t think Harris can win this year and doesn’t want his shot in 2028 to be tarnished.

But as Jones indicated, jew-hatred inside the Democrat Party had to be an factor, especially since groups referred to as “the youth, Muslims and activists” had started a campaign against Shapiro specifically because of his past support for Israel (including a stint in the IDF), including the nasty little tag of “No to Genocide Josh”. And Jones wasn’t the only CNN guest who hinted at the real reason:

Left Wing sympathy for Jews has long been an anomaly, at least since the Six-Day War, and very much so with the rise of the Identity Politics Left. Religion, tradition and attachment to a particular piece of land are the hate objects of ID Leftist thinking (at least with regard to indigenous Western peoples) but are the distinctive features of Judaism.

But the real break cracked open in the 1970’s when the Socialist control of Israel that had existed since its founding in 1948 (all those little Kibbutzim as the ideal of Socialist communes) fell to the Right Wing with the Likud Party gaining a Knesset majority in 1977. Since then PM’s from the Right have held office for 39 out of 47 years and the nation has become less secular and leftist and more Jewish in its culture, with facets that are repellent to Leftist ideology.

Leftists in the USA have also become much more antagonistic towards their own nation for various reasons (capitalism, colonialism, White Supremacy, etc), so naturally any ally gets it in the neck as well.

And then there’s the strange association that has grown between the Left and Islamism. I say strange because the latter can’t stand many of the other “identities” favored by Leftists and are absolutely not interested in “Intersectionalism” – and they really hate Jews. All this can often come as a shock to Liberal American Jews, like this TikTok “influencer” who went into the West Bank to conduct interviews with ordinary Palestinians:

[Fox] was in Israel to create content when a member of his production team offered him the opportunity to enter the West Bank alongside a Muslim producer and cameraman. Fox knew it could be a dangerous project…Fox was able to pass himself off as Italian in ancestry and entered the West Bank to speak to locals and gauge the actual level of support for Hamas and, presumably, Hamas’s actions against Israel.

I laughed at the fact that the interview with the middle-aged chap in the coffee shop, was a pre-arranged meeting done because the guy was “very smart and civil….somewhat moderate” thinker with a Master’s degree and speaking good English. Sounds like a perfect future commander of a Hamas Einsatzgruppe.

That man’s education is a good reminder that poverty and oppression are not really driving all this. Neither is wealth, as shown by the recent selection of super model Bella Hadid to advertise for Adidas sport products at the Paris Olympics. Ms Hadid is viciously anti-Israel celebrity who has used her platform to advancepro-Hamas propaganda:

Bella’s sister Gigi is also an Israel-hating supermodel. Their father is Mohamed Hadid, a super-rich anti-Semite of epic proportions. In addition to his Jew-hatred, Hadid has been harassing pro-Israel Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres with increasingly psychoticracist and homophobicmessages. “Make sure you dress as KKK to hide that ugly gray colored face of yours,” he wrote in one. In another, he suggested Torres “get a job as bouncer at gay bar.” Another published by theNew York Post: “You are just unusual Black and colorful mouth for Israeli and AIPAC and looking for payday of over 500K.”

That’s some family, and a very poor marketing decision by Adidas to go with the one they made in designing the shoe that Bella was supposed to advertise, which was a “throwback” edition of one used at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the games where eleven Israeli athletes and one West German policeman were murdered by Palestinian terrorists. You’d think that a German firm intimately tied to the Nazis in its early days would be smarter in marketing itself in Europe.

How much all this will break Jews away from the Democrat Party is hard to say since they have been strongly bound to the Party for decades (see Will Left-wing Jews get aclue? and Lefty Jews still sleepy, butawakening). Part of the problem with making a break is that inside Judaism itself there has been over a century of intellectual resistance to the concept of Zionism – and thus Israel. Kenneth Levin looks at this history as he explores the background of Jews stepping forward “As-a-Jew” to publicly denounce Israel and even call for its dissolution:

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as the possible extension of civic rights to Jews was first being raised in central European nations, among the objections of those opposed to such rights was that the Jews were a separate nation. Some Jews sought to assuage the anti-Semites behind this objection by arguing that Jews had now become an exclusively religious community, foregoing their earlier national consciousness. They even formed reformist Jewish congregations that stripped the liturgy of references to longing for Zion and for Jerusalem. They argued further that this divesting themselves of the accoutrements of national identity was somehow an ethically superior course.

And the Jewish immigrants to America bought that with them and actually thought that such a rejection of Zionism would prevent potential anti-Jewish responses in their new home, and as Zionism developed further, that denouncing it would counter the new accusations of “dual loyalty” that many saw as the inevitable outcome of the Zionist project.

Given things were pretty good for Jews in America it seemed a reasonable argument. But they also applied it to Europe as things got worse for Jews there (with some allowing that maybe a traditional homeland in the Middle East might be useful for European Jews escaping the place) and in a look to the future, made the same claims about the Arab world, with two prominent Jews to the fore, American Reform Rabbi Judah Magnes and a member of the German Jewish elite in America, Felix Warburg:

Both, for example, perceived the 1929 Arab assault on and massacre of Jews in the Mandate, including the murder of 67 Jews in Hebron, as an opportunity to cast the Jewish quest for a state as the source of Arab enmity and to undermine that quest. In October 1929, Magnes met with a confidant of the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had instigated the massacre. He formulated with the Mufti’s representative a proposal for the establishment of an Arab-controlled government in the Mandate and the abandonment of Jewish aspirations to a state.

Naturally they opposed the 1937 Peel Commissionplan to create Arab and Jewish states and even as news of the Holocaust began to spread in 1943-44, pushed back against the idea of a Jewish state (often via the New York Times), seemingly overwhelmed by the fear of dire consequences for American Jews.

It was pretty cold-blooded, but it’s perfectly echoed by American Jews today, a century later, who blame Israel for all the problems in the Arab world, just as non-Jewish Leftists do. Those Jews probably cheered the rejection of Josh Shapiro as lustily as any Islamist.

===============

** The reasons why Shapiro was the better choice for Harris than Walz are simple:

• He’s the popular (61%) governor of the key swing state of Pennsylvania, which is a “purple” state, meaning balanced between the Republican and Democrat Parties.
• He’s achieved that by being truly bi-partisan in his legislative work with the GOP, including allowing things that the Far Left of the Democrats don’t like elsewhere in the USA.
• He’s smart but can deliver answers on his feet without seeming like a policy wonk. Voters can understand him.
• He comes across as authentic in all his encounters without straining anything.

All of which would have been a terrific contrast/cover for Harris, who is weak on all those things, as well as being a smart Electoral College play.