Of course, there will always be detractors—especially people online who see anything done in support of Donald Trump as devious.
In truth, in my Golus mind, I am also uncomfortable with the Jewish world aligning itself with any political party- since our needs can not be trusted to any one party.
Nevertheless, I realize that for decades we were inseparably tied to the Democrats. In the online interview that Jacob Breuer (and some other familiar names in our community) gave to the Center for Jewish History (Leo Baeck Institute) in the early 1970s, he describes our voting habits as liberal and how a momentary adoration for Mayor Lindsay, at that time, quickly soured.
To oversimplify, I remember my mother taking me into the voting booth with her when I was a small boy and telling me, “We vote for the Democrats because the Republicans are anti-Semites.” Of course, she would never actually reveal who she voted for, even when it was obvious. “Secret ballot!” was her line.
(Her real reason was that she feared someone would disagree with her choice, and she considered talking politics futile.)
Anyhow…While I still believe that vocally “taking sides” is not something we have the luxury to do in Galus, recent trends in the Democrat party are nothing short of alarming. And I don’t mean the “Squad”.
Several distinguished politicians who have made a career for themselves by standing with Israel have become viciously antagonistic in a way that seems forced and scripted.
Truth be told, fringe voices on the right have made alarming alignments with Holocaust denial and the like. Still, my pragmatic mind tells me that, facing two evils, it is less likely that the Southern extremists will get on their motorcycles and start a populist uprising. The ability to whip the masses into a frenzy is currently with the Left. They did it in 2008 (Occupy Wall Street) and they did it in 2020 (BLM). Both of these movements were nationwide, punctuated by mob rule and stand-down orders for the police, and- ominously- were laced with anti-Semitic rhetoric at the top and the bottom.
(In case you think I am a blow-hard extremist, you may want to know that I marched in 2020 in solidarity with victims of police brutality in a venue that was meant to be free of BLM signage. (Picture below.)
Still, the Left is pushing the Center to ignore our safety, to marginalize Israel, and by extension, Jews all over the world. Perhaps one can be anti-Zionis without being anti-Semitic; it just never seems to play out that way.
In Professor Marc Shapiro’s book on Rav Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg zt’l he includes a rare and haunting letter written by the leaders of our own FFAM Austrit Gemeinde to the German Nazi government of the late 1930s. The letter reads like the last-minute plea of Raban Yochanan ben Zakai to Vespasian. RYBZ explained that the extremists had control of the city and that the Perushim had no desire to rebel against the Romans.
Similarly, the FFAM community explained that the economic racially motivated laws that were placed on the Jews were unbearable. The propaganda and defamation were suffocating. And the implementation of various laws would lead to an eradication of German Jewry from the body politic.
Rabbi Dr. Ehrmann adds that the Jews were courageous fighters in the First World War and that the Orthodox were neither Secular Marxists, nor Materialists.
The letter ends with a request. If Herr Hitler was trying to root out the Jews, then the community would like to know, but if it was not his intention to bypass the ways of justice, then he ought to be informed that the people he was persecuting were loyal German citizens.
The ominous letter, dated 1933, was signed by all the Orthodox Vereinungen, their representative rabbis (including Rav Joseph Breuer ztl), and the Agudah as well.
Ominously, Shabbos Kestenbaum is the one standing up right now and saying that positions that have become so mainstream that they were espoused by the presidents of the largest American universities in the hallowed halls of Congress are stifling and dangerous to our community- and, if the Democrat party wants to stand behind these ideals, we would prefer that they issue an outright manifesto against our community than allow these ideas to infect the American psyche under the guise of normative political ideas.
