“The people here, liberal people, will not vote for Obama because of his attitude towards Israel,” Ms. Weitz, 83, said, lingering over brunch.
This appears early in Jodi Kantor’s piece on Florida Jews and the election. Since Obama’s “attitude towards Israel” is roughly 100 percent supportive, it’s hard to know what Ms. Weitz means. But it becomes clearer further down in the piece:
“His father was a Muslim and you can’t take that out of him,” said Ms. Chotiner, 51, who said she would still vote for Mr. Obama, out of Democratic loyalty. “Do I have very strong reservations? Yes, I do,” she said.
Ok, still a vote for Obama, but imagine the sentence as, “His father was a Jew and you can’t take that out of him.” It could come from the mouth of a Klansman.
It needs to be said that as a community, American Jews defy easy assumptions. There are Jews with yarmulkes who are to the left of Obama. There are secular Jews who’d think nothing of scarfing down pork on Shabbat who are nonetheless implacable Zionist hardliners. As for Florida’s old guard, they’re stuck in the past on the subject of Israel, and their words reflect not so much political analysis as Pavlovian response. Tom Friedman and Jeffrey Goldberg, in separate NY Times editorials this past Sunday, did much to clarify what’s wrong with the assumptions embedded in many of the statements in the Kantor piece. Hopefully these arguments will make a dent between now and November.
I don’t agree with Goldberg on everything, but I like the fact that he’s a target of scorn on the radical left and the radical right. One hard-right blogger, Pamela Geller (imagine Ann Coulter with a lobotomy), has attacked Goldberg as a “Jewicidal jihadi.” She has almost no capacity for rational thought — and over six million page views.
I want to say things are looking good for Obama, but a serious battle lies ahead.
[Meanwhile, here’s Jeffrey Toobin on McCain’s insidious agenda for the Supreme Court.]
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