“To some people, banker is a code word for Jewish; and guess who Obama is assaulting? He’s assaulting bankers. He’s assaulting money people. And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there’s – if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.”
In my new book, "Why Are Jews Liberals?", I argue that it no longer makes any sense for so many of my fellow Jews to go on aligning themselves with the forces of the Left. I also try to show that our interests and our ideals, both as Americans and as Jews, have come in recent decades to be better served by the forces of the Right.
In the course of describing and agreeing with the book the other day, Rush Limbaugh cited a few of the numerous reasons for the widespread puzzlement over the persistence of liberalism within the American Jewish community. And while discussing those reasons, he pointed to the undeniable fact that for “a lot of people”--prejudiced people, as he called them twice--the words “banker” and “Wall Street” are code words for "Jewish." Was it possible, he wondered, that Obama’s attacks on bankers and Wall Street were triggering a certain amount of buyer’s remorse within the American Jewish community, which gave him 78% of its vote? Finally, taking off from my observation that many Jewish liberals like to call themselves independents, he wondered whether a fair number of the self-described independents who deserted Obama and voted for Scott Brown might actually have been Jewish liberals. If so, he concluded, Brown’s “victory could be even more indicative of an even bigger change in the political temper of the country than has so far been recognized.”
For this, Rush Limbaugh has been subjected to a vile attack by Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. Of course, Mr. Foxman has a long history of seeing an anti-Semite under every conservative bed while blinding himself to the blatant fact that anti-Semitism has largely been banished from the Right in the past forty years, and that it has found a hospitable new home on the Left, especially where Israel is concerned. This makes Foxman a perfect embodiment of the phenomenon I analyze in "Why Are Jews Liberals?" Now Foxman has the chutzpah to denounce Rush Limbaugh as an anti-Semite and to demand an apology from him to boot. Well, if an apology is owed here, it is the national director of the Anti-Defamation League who should apologize for the defamatory accusation of anti-Semitism that he himself has hurled against so loyal a friend of Israel as Rush Limbaugh.
I would point out that Rush Limbaugh has history of making vile, inflammatory, intemperate remarks.
1. Some prejudiced people derogatorily refer to Jews as "bankers," and associate Jews with "Wall Street."
2. American liberal Jews, many of who consider themselves to be independents, may have been upset with Obama's recent "attacks" on the banks and bankers that derailed America's economy and almost threw the entire world into a global great depression.
3. (That those "attacks" were on said banks' obscene profits and obscene staff bonuses earned with our money – money that bailed them out and kept those banks from complete ruin just over one year ago – or that Obama's "attacks" are in fact a presidential commitment to enforce existing bank regulation and to close loopholes in it that could unclosed lead to another banking crisis, Podhoretz doesn't bother to include in his calculus.)
4. Therefore, all Limbaugh did is legitimately speculate that Massachusetts Jewish liberals may have voted for Brown and not the Democrat based on Obama's "attacks" on…Jews.
5. To cement this vile notion, Podhoretz closes by praising Limbaugh's commitment to Israel.
6. Nowhere in Podhoretz's statement is anything positive about President Obama, and there is no attempt made by Podhoretz to say Obama is not an antisemite.