The American Spectator

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The Joys of Republicanism

5.9.05 @ 12:01AM

POLITICAL TABLES
Re: Jackie Mason & Raoul Felder's Love is Blind, Deaf, and Dumb:

Wow! Jackie and Raoul really let us Jews have it -- to the point where it the article reads more like a caricature than the real thing. However, have the two of them take heart, there are lots of Jewish Republicans, just take a look at this super website.
-- Lana Fayman
San Diego, California

I think it worth mentioning that Messrs. Felder & Mason omitted two very substantial reasons for Jews being loyal to the Democratic Party, aside from some of the shopworn arguments they offered. Reasons which are directly relevant to today's Republican Party. Specifically the quality and quantity of its outreach.

When Jews first came here, like all other minorities, it was the Democrat ward healers that gave them a place at a political table. Not a meaningful place mind you, but a place in exchange for votes at election time. What, if I may ask, did the Republicans offer the Jews? Trading illusory favors they had no right to bestow, the Democrats got the Jewish votes. Starting low and slow, Jews have steadily climbed the ladder to political power in the ensuing five decades. Coming from Europe where Jews more often than not had no votes at all, no rights, no power, and no prospects for any of the above, not to mention human survival. To them, the Democrat's pathetic largess must have seemed like manna incarnate. I hasten to remind that many of that generation are still alive today, and in possession of excellent memories. Having fought their way to the apex of the Democrat hierarchy, why on earth would Jews be interested in swapping that position for lower seniority rungs of Republican power?

It also needs to be pointed out that the majority of Jews arrived more recently than most other minorities who have undergone conversion to Republican supporters. Like the Irish, English, Germans etc. The definition of a Republican as a Democrat that has been mugged, is only true over time. A long time. Republicans need to recognize that an effort to bring the Jewish voter into our tent will take time and much patience. Anger and resentment will not work.

If the Republicans keep giving bupkes to immigrants, that's what we will keep getting from incoming minorities. I'm sure that if the Republican Party could produce an iota of evidence that we welcomed the Jews more, or shunned them less than the ugliness of the Democrats as alleged by Felder & Mason, it would have received much attention by now. But I fear we can't, and that's the bottom line.

I sympathize with the frustration of Felder and Mason, as well as the dangers to Israel. But fully understanding the history, especially as it concerns what the Republican Party did and did not do is important. Democrat big wigs may have behaved like disgraceful pigs, but what did we do to counteract or capitalize on that? I enjoyed and largely agreed with their gripefest, but Mason and Felder could have offered some constructive ideas as well as a little more balance in their chronicle of the how and why. On the brighter side, world events and the increasingly dishonorable radicalism of the leftward tilting Democrats may well accomplish for us what our Party neglected for so long. Let us all hope it will not require the loss of too many human lives.
-- Christopher Keefe (print subscriber)
Riviera Beach, Florida

Your authors' generalization about the double-edged Jewish fixation on the Democratic Party and hostility towards the Republican Party stands up well as a generalization. I hope they don't imagine that they discovered it. It is in every book of political enquiry on the shelf.

But the savage, mindless, diatribe against the most decent President of the twentieth century is off the wall.

As one who has researched thoroughly the record -- not the gossip, but the record -- of the Truman-Jacobson connection I am appalled by this slanderous caricature. Only someone who has read nothing of the record of the wall-to-wall contempt for Zionism within the whole Foreign Policy establishment -- including the principal Cabinet Offices responsible -- could display such total ignorance of the significance of Truman's heroic efforts on behalf of the Jews of the world. Harry Truman's devotion to the Jewish people in their hour of greatest need followed from humane instincts nourished in his childhood in his father's home and in his Sunday School.

"It is a historical fact," say your authorities, "that Truman never invited his partner to his home." The historic fact is that Harry Truman didn't have a home until after he left the Presidency. Through all the years of his friendship with Harry Jacobson, he lived in the home of his mother-in-law, who set the terms for admission through the front or back doors. Every standup comic that ever was knows that you don't denounce a man for the vices of his mother-in-law.

They say: "He [Harry] never even asked him [Eddie] if he was happy or healthy... etc." Comedians don't do their own research, as we know. But our scholars could not so much as glanced into the large box of Truman-Jacobson correspondence, covering about thirty years and which is on deposit at his Presidential Library. Every page illustrates a frank, affectionate, tone; every letter ends with enquiry into the health of wife, mother, daughter, etc.

Where do they get this stuff about "the vulgarity of the language with which Truman reacted to Eddie Jacobson's pleas for the recognition of Israel [which] would add up to enough filthy words to produce five pornographic movies?" Where is any of this written? I have read every word of the record, and I defy my learned friends to give me the box and file number. Truman never uttered a pornographic word in his life. In all of Truman's published correspondence the researchers, trying as hard as they can, have found only a couple of offhand lines reflecting a weakness for racial stereotypes that drifted around rural Missouri at the turn of the century. He regretted these remarks the moment they were out of his mouth.

And who is Jackie Mason, of all people on earth, to impugn anybody, living or dead, for an occasional, offhand, racial slur?
-- Paul Merkley
(author of three scholarly books on Christian attitudes towards Zionism, the Jews and Israel, of which the most recent is American Presidents, Religion And Israel (Praeger, 2004)

Depend on it: The Democratic Party will forsake the Jews and Israel as soon as American Muslims contribute more votes and money than do American Jews. Then, only the Republican Party will stand between Israel and the engulfing sea of Muslims.
-- David Govett
Davis, California

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