There's a very rare species that lurks within the five boroughs of New York City. While the creature is practically extinct in Manhattan (with the notable exception of a leper-like colony on the Upper West Side), it flourishes in several self-contained ecosystems within the city's outer boroughs where it lives openly and reproduces profusely. Such special environments are located in certain crowded sections of Brooklyn and Queens, where males dress in white and black cover the heads with large black velvet skullcaps, while their female counterparts opt for kerchiefs, wigs or both and wear thick dark stockings from the age of three.
Scientifically designated as Homo Judaicus Republicus, this upright creature is colloquially known as a Republican Jew. It represents a tiny fraction of the city's voting population, where the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 5:1. Broadly assuming that a) the same ratio holds among Jews, and that b) half the city's 8+ million citizens are eligible to vote, and also that c) the city contains about one million Jews, then the species population should be around 100,000, or 1.2% of the city's total population. I'm one of those lepers on the Upper West Side, which are led by the now (unfairly) denigrated Neocon crowd.
To the casual observer, my membership in this species would be considered particularly strange considering my birth in Beatnikville USA, (Greenwich Village), followed by childhood on the (relatively prosperous but still embarrassed-being-rich leftist) Upper West Side, and current residence in the (historically Bolshevik) Lower East Side. Daily, my eyes feast on an icon of 20the century American-style socialism, the Forward building, dominating the downtown view outside my bedroom window. This was once the headquarters of the socialist Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish (now weekly English) newspaper. Recently transformed into luxury lofts, four enormous round relief busts remain proudly embedded in its façade like huge coins. Two of the profiles are those of Marx and Engels.
It would be understandable then if a glance at my profile were to result in me being tarred as a prototypical violently secular, extreme lefty Jew, which was what my fellow lepers were in the distant past; I never was. On the other hand, it would be difficult to label me conservative, neo or otherwise. Growing up in Manhattan generates several variations on Republicanhood. Throw Jewishness into the mix, and you get even more mongrels. So what being a Jewish Republican means is debated endlessly, and if ifs not it ought to be.
Shmendriks on campus
My adult political odyssey began in college in the early to mid 1980s. My campus wasn't particularly political, but every now and then, many of my fellow students would attempt to engage in activities in a manner they felt college students maybe should. That usually meant acting and talking lefty. Someone, it could have been the head of the food co-op, took it upon herself to gather a gaggle of grizzled males and proto hipsterettes for a few protests where participants were encouraged to foam at the mouth and raise angry fists at the evildoing United States and fascist dictator President Reagan.
These sad attempts at proletarian solidarity were simultaneously amusing, bizarre and slightly irritating. Perhaps I wouldn't have minded these displays if these supposedly high-minded protesters were at least as concerned with the true evil of Communism and the suffering of its victims. Reagan was obviously evil, but Mao, well, he was kind of cool. Lenin was a visionary, no dount about it; it was Stalin that screwed things up. Pol Pot, well sure, maybe he was sort of a meanie, but a meanie that was a product of US policy. The moderate among them blithely equated this country and the Soviet Union as flip sides of the same coin.
At an anti apartheid rally I chatted briefly with an exchange student from West Germany. The chick was pretty cute but had legs that she declined to shave, refusing to surrender to bourgeois sensibilities. I asked if capitalism was so horrible, then why not move to East Germany? She replied something like: "I vant to change my own society from vithin", which is to say that she had no intention whatsoever of relinquishing the free education and handsome government stipends she had been enjoying for seven years by then.
This mass of spoiled but unshowered childishness was a collection of hungry souls in search of some new sixties-style cause, a vessel into which they could spill their explosive sexual frustration. So why go to all this trouble, I wondered, stapling cardboard signs, screaming on campus, yelling anti-apartheid slogans when no one really listened? The college really was largely apolitical. To this day I think that any of the protestors would have dropped their signs on the spot, if only they had a date. Lets face it: there was only one, single reason that Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin organized all those Vietnam antiwar rallies: to get laid. The chicks dug guys with Afros, slogans and megaphones.
Now whether this ragtag band of protestors supported the (child molesting and incestuous) Sandanista Daniel Ortega, or Yasir Arafat (another obscenity), ultimately didn't matter in my daily routine. There were however other policies dear to their collective hearts that did happen to affect me personally. Take affirmative action in particular: many students with SAT scores inferior to mine were admitted to college ahead of me because they were either black or Hispanic. I was sort of poor, yet they got to enjoy government stipends for which I could never be eligible only because I was white.
After graduating (not sure how I pulled that one off) I returned to a city torn by raging crack wars and exploding crime rates. My coalescing views on law and order (for it), affirmative action (against it) and communism (hated it) translated into one word – Republican. Of course there were and are many other issues, but these three were pretty basic and effectively reflected my worldview.
And it wasn't easy being a Jewish Republican. My eventual (correctly liberal suburban Jewish) in-laws lost their appetite upon hearing that their daughter was dating a republican, and visibly recoiled when they finally met me. They probably would have felt more comfortable with, say, a Barack Obama type, or maybe a younger Clint Eastwood, so long as it was agreed that any grandchildren wouldn't be baptized.
Republican (?)
I was being pigeonholed once again. Jewish liberals have two interchangeable caricatures in their collective minds of what republicans are. One is essentially a rifle-toting, megachurch attending Christian fundamentalist pyromaniac with a specialty in abortion clinics. This republican prototype is a semi-retarded redneck, confederate flag sticker emblazoned on pickup bumper (the retard knows how to drive) and/or tattooed on right buttock. The father of this model republican is a former serial lyncher if not a Ku Klux Klan wizard.
The alternate version is a New England blueblood country club member ensconced in a mansion on the Rhode Island coast. Both (to quote Yitzhak Shamir when discussing Poles) suckle Jew hate in their mother's milk. So when the in-laws met me that day, they didn't really know what to do with me, and were sure their daughter had gone completely insane.
I'm a research analyst with interests across a broad swath of areas, from international affairs to higher biblical criticism, from archaeology to genetic anthopology, energy issues, astronomy...the list goes on.
Mr. Silber writes of a serious issue that I believe will become more pervasive as the new Democratic Capitol takes hold of issues and policies. Choosing sides as a Democrat or as a Republican today, according to the rules dictating the traditional politics we've become anesthetized with, has come to be a zero sum game – which is the worst way to run a government or to elect a leader.
Chris Rock has a funny line about this, he said that could not vote for someone who chooses all of his or her issues based on the platform of the associated party.
"Everybody's so busy wanting to be down with the gang 'I'm conservative, I'm liberal,.... B%$# S*(&! Be a f#@!%^& person! Lis-ten! Let it swirl around your head. Then form your opinion. No normal, decent person is one thing, ok?
I've got some s*&t I'm conservative about, I've got some s*&t I'm liberal about. Crime, I'm conservative. Prostitution, I'm liberal!"
Mr. Silber's ideological process is probably not that different from the average American's. Few people are all for one mantra, and most want to more diversity of opinions. It's ok to be a Republican who supports abortion or a Democrat who is fed up with taxes. Once our legislators realize this, and the "vote as you believe" policy is adopted, perhaps the world can change.
Of course, reality sets in and we all know that in order to make deals, compromises must be made. The standard is that a party holds firm on their entire platform so the members can negotiate it to get the half that they really want anyway. Lately, however, the politics of the left and the right have become bitter pseudo ideological wars; combine that with the massive egos that fight primarily for the bravado and fundraising capacity it brings, and all too often everyone gets battered and the electorate becomes disillusioned in the process.
Thanks for raising this uzi.
by
Juda S. Engelmayer (5 articles, 4 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 6 comments)
on Tuesday, January 9, 2007 at 1:40:48 PM
1 comments
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