Modern Mitzvot, a progressive blog I read, recently posted a review of a book titled Righteous Indignation. One of the editors posted in the comments that “the goal of this book was to give intellectual and spiritual ammunition to activists who seek a stronger Jewish language to talk about their work, especially in the face of those who try to monopolize religion for right-wing ends.” She further adds that, “hope you and your readers will consider joining our campaign to voice social justice and environmental issues as Jewish/religious community priorities.”
Hooray! Let’s have Judaism counterbalance as the Ying to the right-wing Christian fundamentalist Yang. All of which misses the point completely.
For us non-extremist moderates who don’t have our heads up our asses because we neither live in liberal La-La land (aka California) or the land where Jesus dies a thousand deaths a week so that straight white men may bear their 2nd amendment right to arm so they can help defend against the evil non-white hordes invading the Motherland from Mexico and the Middle East (aka the Bible-belt), the problem is the mixing of religion and politics in the first place! If there is any doubt which group gets on my nerves more it should be apparent by the length of the descriptions I just shared. The reason the right-wing fundamentalists irritate me is their sanctimonious mixing of religion and politics. “My politics aren’t just my own personal values, but they come from G-d Himself!”
Likewise, I think it is a very bad idea to transform Judaism into a left-wing version of Christian fundamentalism. From what I’ve seen this form of Jewish thought relies heavily on the ethics found in the Prophets (care for the stranger and the poor, etc.), but at the expense of other parts of the Bible. Judaism doesn’t begin and end with ethics. If I had to identify the two major strains of thought in Judaism I would label them thusly: ethics and obedience.
Obedience, of course, tends to be very conservative. However, trying to identify whether obedience = conservative values and ethics = ”progressive” values is a waste of time. I think the better answer is that neither equates with a political position. Just as many atheists will point out you don’t need G-d to be ethical, ethics doesn’t automatically equate to politically Left either (despite what that particular group of people might tell themselves). In fact, there is a long history of the political Left doing many unethical actions; not to mention many Jews in the 20th century learned the hard way that Marxism was not the panacea they had hoped for in defeating European anti-Semitism and its other ills. Alas, too many Jews still haven’t learned from history.
Trying to simplify political positions into a simple dichotomy of Left versus Right which seems to happen way too much on Modern Mitzvot never works out very well. Some of the commentators have deluded themselves into believing most the Jews in America are Left-wing. Well, in all fairness her actual words are “vote left.” A more accurate statement would be the majority of Jews in America vote Democrat.* Although the Democrats tend to be associated with the left-wing, both parties include plenty of moderates. I remember having discussions where it was pointed out that most democrats and republicans are flip-sides of the same coin. In other words, most of them with a few exceptions, are really moderates who lean left or lean to the right, but are still pretty much centrists when you get down to it.
Unsurprisingly one national study vindicates my belief that most Jews are in fact moderates. A quick look at the study will show that it breaks down political affiliations into: extremely liberal, liberal, slightly liberal, moderate, slightly conservative, conservative, and extremely conservative. As far as these sub-groups go the largest single political affiliation for Jews is with moderates with 32 of the respondents. The next largest is liberals. The third largest is slightly liberal. Fourth is conservative. And fifth is slightly conservative.
Now one criticism of my claim that most Jews are moderates might be to say that you need to add up all the liberal categories and all the conservative category to discover the true number who are ideologically left or right. Adding all the liberal categories up gives you a total of 43, while adding up all the conservative categories will you give you a number of 25. In this case it would seem most Jews do lean to the Left rather than the Right and outnumber the moderates. However, I think slightly liberal and slightly conservative should probably be counted with moderates rather than the left or right wing since they probably have more in common with the center than their far left or far right counterparts and probably fit my definition of “moderate.” So if we count those groups as moderates as well (but also keep them in the liberal and conservative counts for comparison purposes) and add them your total number of moderates is: 56. Most Jews in America, according to this survey, are moderates who are not given to extreme Left or Right politics, although there seems to be a large minority of Jews in both.
In conclusion, the politics of Jews are complex. There is a huge danger in hiding behind facile binaries when speaking of the Jewish community or even trying to define so-called Jewish positions. Certainly my Jewish identity and religious convinctions inform some of my political beliefs, but in general religion and politics should be kept far away from each. I am fairly consistent on this point, feeling the same way about what goes on in academia as well. Scholarship before politics, not politics before scholarship. I had always wished more of my peers and professors had agreed with that statement. Should certain discoveries from my studies lead me to certain political conclusions then fine. But let’s be honest, too often people manipulate the results or data or text (depending on your discipline) to match what they want to believe about the world. That’s precisely what the Right does with religion, let’s not start doing that with Judaism. So please keep your politics out of my religion and ethnicity, people. Thank you!
Notes:
* This article claims 87 percent of Jews voted Democrat in the last election. I know I’ve read elsewhere that placed it at 70%. This article listing Jewish vote percentages for President confirms these numbers further. Safe to say somewhere between 70-80% of Jews vote Democrat.
# It should be noted that I have not read the book Righteous Indignation so I have no opinion necessarily about the actual contents and arguments within the book. As I make clear in this post, I do find the use of religion, though, to justify political positions whether Left or Right to be problematic.
Edit: I forgot to link to a post and my comments that followed didn’t make as much sense without being able to go to the post. So I fixed the link.
Edit 2: I decided to add a few sentences and change around some punctuation because I didn’t feel I was being clear enough.
