The Honorable Ms. Tlaib And The Demise Of American Jewry

Democratic party’s embrace of open anti-Semites and anti-Zionists with full acquiescence by American Jews spells the doom of American Jewry.

What is the least influential group in American politics? Native Americans? Inuit? Native Hawaiians? Winners of hot dog eating competitions? Knuckle ball pitchers? No, it’s actually African Americans. With between 10 to 12 percent of the general population, all of them being perfectly legal citizens, many residing in critical swing states and districts, African Americans could easily be by far the most influential group of Americans when it comes to dividing up the American pie. Instead, they are the least influential. Why is that? Simple: because they fail to coalesce around a single issue that matters to them the most and vote for any candidate, Democratic or Republican who promises to address that issue and then hold that candidate to account and vote against his or hers opponent should they fail to deliver. If, for example, African Americans voted for candidates who promised to heavily invest in inner city development and crime prevention, Detroit wold be Singapore by now. Instead, they choose to be in the pocket of often corrupt Democratic politicians, voting for them as a block with 95% consistency no matter who they or their Republican opponents may be, what policy positions they advocate, and what they actually do once in office. This makes African Americans and their many needs exceedingly easy to ignore. It brings their level of influence form 10% down to virtually zero instead of elevating it higher. It makes them punch way below their weight.

Once upon a time there was a group of Americans who punched way above their weight. That group was the American Jews. Never amounting to more than 3% of the population, they were, however, wealthy, disproportionately occupied important positions in mass media and the law, lived in swing states like Florida, but most of all, were united around one single issue: support for Israel. This unheard of explosion of political prowess was the result of a perfect storm, a trifecta of events that came together as perfectly as if they were guided by Divine hand. First, the modern Democratic party was born during with the JFK/LBJ presidencies. This new party abandoned its erstwhile political base in the white Christian South and moved northwards and most importantly to the coasts to places like California and New York where Jews and their money were just becoming more influential than ever. The Boomer Jews were not content with exercising behind the scenes power like their parents had done; they wanted out into the open. They wanted justice, equality, and above all, power. They were ready. That was the second prong of the trifecta. For the third, we must cross the Atlantic. While American Jews were having power lunches around Hollywood pools and oak-paneled Manhattan members-only clubs, their cousins in Israel, often sharing the same set of great grandparents and the same surnames, were hoarding body bags in preparation for an all out Arab invasion. Panicked IDF brass was in Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s (Shkolnik’s) office telling him that if he didn’t order a preemptive strike, a new Holocaust was sure to follow. Six days later, the Arabs were dust and Israel a regional power.

The miraculous Israeli victory in the 1967 Six Day War, the touching pictures of (Ashkenazi) Jewish boys, machine guns at their hips, blond hair flying, staring awe-struck at the Western Wall they had just liberated from the Jordanians, all of that gave American Jewry a cause to flock to, a tribal hearth to coalesce around. Israel was cool. Israel was strong! Jews were not only good with money or with brainy stuff like medicine or the law, they were good with GUNS!!! Jews could beat the “goyim” at their own game, the game of naked, bare-knuckle force. No more the bespectacled Jewish boy bullied by a big Irish Catholic brute for his lunch money as many of the American Jews were, these were the new Jews, the “Sabres” (nickname for Jews born in Israel, after the prickly pear cactus, whose inner sweet flesh belies the tough outer thorny skin). American Jews, of course, had no desire to learn from their Israeli cousins how to be physically tough or how to use firearms; they were happy to admire them from afar and help them with something they had plenty of: money. Help them also politically, economically, and militarily by exerting massive political influence on the American government.

There was something Israel needed even more than money, arms, and political cover. That something was people. With a population of just under three million many of whom were recent immigrants from poor North African countries and from Yemen, people who would require a generation of massive investment to become full contributors in a modern society, Israel desperately needed an influx of educated, Westernized Jews who would want to make Israel their home. Alas, after Hitler’s nearly “successful” Final Solution there were only two places where such Jews were still found: America and the Soviet Union. American Jewry’s commitment to Israel did not extend to abandoning their cushy homes on Long Island and emigrating to a poor country in which one had to fight for his or hers very existence. But they were perfectly willing to use the full measure of their influence leveraged via the world’s leading superpower to force the Soviets who relied on American and Canadian wheat imports to feed their population to “let their Jews go”. This was the perfect cause for American Jews. It had everything: human rights, virtue signaling galore, crucial support for Israel, and fighting the evil Soviet Empire. The author of these lines is eternally grateful to the generation of American Jews and Gentiles alike that adopted the cause of the release of Soviet Jewry as their own. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to leave that grungy totalitarian hellhole to spend my life as a free man in Israel and in North America.

Interestingly, the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the primary pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington DC and I are the same age. Both of us were born in 1963, just before the heady heyday of the American Jewish influence in Washington, a long heyday that came into its own during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the exact day I immigrated (repatriated) to Israel and lasted for two full decades until the 1993 Oslo Accords. Ever since then, for the last quarter century, Jewish influence in America has been in decline. Today, it is in free fall. What broke the once indomitable power of American Jewry? Simply put, Israel, like much of the rest of the world including America, never lived up to the expectations of the Boomer Jews. They expected Israel and Israeli Jews to only PRETEND to be strong and independent. In reality, they wanted them to be, just like the American Jews have always been, weak and feckless; always walking away from a fight, without the lunch money, but with the consolation of having held the “higher moral ground” and not, God forbid, having engaged in violence, even in self-defense. American Jews enthusiastically supported the insane Oslo Accords that saved the prototypical terror organization, the PLO form oblivion in Tunisia and brought it to Ramallah and to Gaza. When in exchange for its reckless generosity Israel was predictably “rewarded” by wave upon wave of suicide attacks against its civilian population, not in the so-called “occupied territories”, but in Haifa and in Tel-Aviv and in Netanyah, when, as a result, Israeli public opinion shifted sharply to the right, American Jews started losing interest.

But this was only one of the arrows that caused the demise of American Jewry. Just as with its rise, its downfall was also the result of a perfect storm of three major developments. The second one was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting repatriation of about one million Soviet Jews to Israel. Combined with more free-market oriented economic policy, this influx of highly motivated and educated people created a bona fide economic miracle in Israel, drastically reducing if not eliminating its need for American financial support, both public and private. This confluence of events gave rise to the Startup Nation phenomenon, making Israel punch way above its weight in world affairs and making it much less dependent on outside support. However, it was the third arrow that delivered the fatal blow to the American Jewry and as often happens, it was entirely a self-inflicted wound. The Boomer generation with its liberal globalist ideals failed to download to its children the intellectual property package we call Judaism. Judaism is exclusive; they wanted their kids to be inclusive. Judaism is all about boundaries; Boomer Jews wanted a borderless world. Judaism is strong, like the legendary strength of Jewish mothers who saved their babies in the Holocaust; Boomer Jews celebrated weakness. As a result, new generations of American Jews are experiencing rates of intermarriage that spell the very near doom of American non-Orthodox Jewry. Even within non-mixed marriages, birthrates are unsustainably low. Finally, the American Jewish addiction to maintaining the elusive “high moral ground” at all costs, even at the cost of one’s own demise, led them to give up their support for Israel and for Israelis, people who value their own survival above anyone else’s. Thus the unifying cause for American Jewry, their support for Israel, was lost and with it their political influence. With seven out of ten American Jews voting Democratic no matter what even if Democratic Party leaders like Clinton and Obama openly take pictures with “Hitler was a great man” and “Jews are termites” Louis Farrakhan, even if the newly minted stars in the Democratic Party firmament like Ms. Tlaib literally erase Israel from the maps in their offices. American Jews today are an endangered species, fast approaching extinction. They are reduced to moralizing and preaching to the American public in the mold of CNN’s Jake Tapper, or simply staring at the (so far) upward movement in their 401(k)’s, courtesy of the man they so love to hate, President Trump.

And as to Ms. Tlaib? Just a few days ago, I stated on these pages that I was not outraged by Ms. Tlaib’s blatantly anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic actions and rhetoric. She is a Palestinian Arab, and as such, her actions and opinions are a foregone conclusion. I could have definitely been called a racist for saying so, had it not been Representative Tlaib herself who, in response to accusations of anti-Israel bias leveled at her by her political opponents simply responded as follows: “Yes, I am a Muslim and a Palestinian. Get over it.” In other words, Ms. Tlaib agreed with me that her anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic attitudes are simply a part of her because of WHAT she is: a Palestinian Muslim. Ms. Tlaib was elected by her constituents, Muslim Arabs who occupy the her Dearborn, MI district. She is their faithful representative. She is also fully embraced, her attitudes towards the Jewish People and the Jewish state notwithstanding, by the hierarchy of the national Democratic Party, many of whom are Jewish. Seven out of ten American “Jews” prefer her to President Trump, who moved the American Embassy to Jerusalem and who appointed to the role of US ambassador to Israel a person who could have easily been a member of Knesset for the Likud. American Jewry, RIP.