Maybe they went to college and got indoctrinated by the leftist ilk...
Why Israeli Jews are Conservative and American Jews are Leftist
The Left lost in Israel, but still rules over American Jews.
March 17, 2016
Daniel Greenfield
...
That’s part of the story. But it’s also not the whole story. To see the rest of it, we have to look at American Jews. You can predict the politics of American Jews based on their religiosity.
60 percent of Jews who attend weekly religious services disapprove of Obama. Only 34 percent approve. Among those who don’t attend religious services, approval stands at 58 percent to 38 percent. In Israel, the left finds its greatest support among secular Jews and the right hits its best numbers among religious Jews. left-wing identification in America is 50% higher among Jews of no religion. The number of American Jews of no religion has tripled since 2001. Meanwhile the Israeli secular population is declining.
Twice as many Israeli Jews as American Jews believe in G-d. What do American Jews who don’t believe in G-d believe in? Usually the answer is Obama. Or in Israel, a fantasy of peace with Islamic terrorists.
Secularism does not in and of itself translate into leftist politics. Even secular Israelis are more likely to identify with the right than with the left (though by a much smaller margin). But secularism does create a vacuum that the left is quite adept at filling with its cults of personality, political messianism, pseudoscientific doomsdays and apocalyptic struggles for the future of mankind.
The American Jewish left is the product of a spiritual vacuum. It is a decadent movement of the directionless, of the neurotically unhappy needing validation and narcissists clamoring for attention. It has no real challenges to grapple with and so it immerses itself in borrowed sufferings and ennobles itself by lecturing others. There is nothing Jewish about the Jewish left. That is the whole point.
American and Israeli Jews exist in fundamentally different political, economic and religious contexts.
Both American and Israeli Jews have an immigrant narrative, but their narratives are very different. The Israeli immigrant narrative began with a pioneer story of settlers clearing land for settlements and fighting off savages. This resembles the American pioneer narrative, but has little in common with an American Jewish narrative of modern urban immigration. While American Jews also went west, built cabins, farmed, mined and were scalped, their narratives were discarded for social justice reasons.
To many American Jews, land is not finite and there is no reason to fight anyone over it. But tell that to a Jewish farmer or herder on a plot of land overlooking a terrorist encampment. His life has less in common with New York than with a Texas outpost before a Comanche Moon or Afghanistan.
The next phase of the immigrant narrative ended very differently in America and Israel. In America, the left won its struggle with poor religious Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe whose descendants became secular leftists raised to think of the Democratic Party as their religion. In Israel, the left lost its struggle with poor religious Jewish immigrants from the Middle East despite using every dirty trick.
The fall of the left in Israel reflects a country where the struggle between religion and the left, between immigrants and political elites, ended with a fundamentally different outcome than it did in America.
Generations of American Jews have been indoctrinated to think of left-wing ideas as elementally Jewish. They are unaware of any conflict between their ideas and their origins. But to many Israeli Jews, left-wing agendas are antithetical to Jewish values. Middle Eastern Jewish refugees and Soviet Jews had to defy the left to remain Jewish.
Finally in the economic context, Israel has opened up economic opportunities by moving away from the left to a more open economy. Americans have never lived under Socialism and so are more willing to believe the empty promises than people who have suffered under the real thing.
American Jews define themselves by a progressive narrative of struggling for equality. In Israel, the struggle for equality for a majority of Jews was a struggle against the left. The left has taught many American Jews to view religious devotion and nationalism as evils. In Israel, they are virtues.
...
And so the left lost in Israel, but still rules over American Jews.
Why Israeli Jews are Conservative and American Jews are Leftist
Why Israeli Jews are Conservative and American Jews are Leftist
The Left lost in Israel, but still rules over American Jews.
March 17, 2016
Daniel Greenfield
...
That’s part of the story. But it’s also not the whole story. To see the rest of it, we have to look at American Jews. You can predict the politics of American Jews based on their religiosity.
60 percent of Jews who attend weekly religious services disapprove of Obama. Only 34 percent approve. Among those who don’t attend religious services, approval stands at 58 percent to 38 percent. In Israel, the left finds its greatest support among secular Jews and the right hits its best numbers among religious Jews. left-wing identification in America is 50% higher among Jews of no religion. The number of American Jews of no religion has tripled since 2001. Meanwhile the Israeli secular population is declining.
Twice as many Israeli Jews as American Jews believe in G-d. What do American Jews who don’t believe in G-d believe in? Usually the answer is Obama. Or in Israel, a fantasy of peace with Islamic terrorists.
Secularism does not in and of itself translate into leftist politics. Even secular Israelis are more likely to identify with the right than with the left (though by a much smaller margin). But secularism does create a vacuum that the left is quite adept at filling with its cults of personality, political messianism, pseudoscientific doomsdays and apocalyptic struggles for the future of mankind.
The American Jewish left is the product of a spiritual vacuum. It is a decadent movement of the directionless, of the neurotically unhappy needing validation and narcissists clamoring for attention. It has no real challenges to grapple with and so it immerses itself in borrowed sufferings and ennobles itself by lecturing others. There is nothing Jewish about the Jewish left. That is the whole point.
American and Israeli Jews exist in fundamentally different political, economic and religious contexts.
Both American and Israeli Jews have an immigrant narrative, but their narratives are very different. The Israeli immigrant narrative began with a pioneer story of settlers clearing land for settlements and fighting off savages. This resembles the American pioneer narrative, but has little in common with an American Jewish narrative of modern urban immigration. While American Jews also went west, built cabins, farmed, mined and were scalped, their narratives were discarded for social justice reasons.
To many American Jews, land is not finite and there is no reason to fight anyone over it. But tell that to a Jewish farmer or herder on a plot of land overlooking a terrorist encampment. His life has less in common with New York than with a Texas outpost before a Comanche Moon or Afghanistan.
The next phase of the immigrant narrative ended very differently in America and Israel. In America, the left won its struggle with poor religious Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe whose descendants became secular leftists raised to think of the Democratic Party as their religion. In Israel, the left lost its struggle with poor religious Jewish immigrants from the Middle East despite using every dirty trick.
The fall of the left in Israel reflects a country where the struggle between religion and the left, between immigrants and political elites, ended with a fundamentally different outcome than it did in America.
Generations of American Jews have been indoctrinated to think of left-wing ideas as elementally Jewish. They are unaware of any conflict between their ideas and their origins. But to many Israeli Jews, left-wing agendas are antithetical to Jewish values. Middle Eastern Jewish refugees and Soviet Jews had to defy the left to remain Jewish.
Finally in the economic context, Israel has opened up economic opportunities by moving away from the left to a more open economy. Americans have never lived under Socialism and so are more willing to believe the empty promises than people who have suffered under the real thing.
American Jews define themselves by a progressive narrative of struggling for equality. In Israel, the struggle for equality for a majority of Jews was a struggle against the left. The left has taught many American Jews to view religious devotion and nationalism as evils. In Israel, they are virtues.
...
And so the left lost in Israel, but still rules over American Jews.
Why Israeli Jews are Conservative and American Jews are Leftist
