There’s an easy—yet inaccurate—way to describe the current relationship between the two political parties and their Jewish voters: Democrats win Jewish votes on all issues relating to domestic affairs, including antisemitism, and they lose Jewish votes when it comes to their policy toward Israel. On the flip side, Republicans win over Jewish voters thanks to their stance on Israel, but they have a blind spot for antisemitism that works against them.
It’s been a few days since the House of Representatives voted 420-9 to approve the billion-dollar aid package for replenishing Israel’s Iron Dome rocket defense system, and hopefully emotions have cooled down just enough to allow a more sober look at this political kerfuffle.
Ahmed Shaheed led the charge on the United Nations’ first-ever stand-alone human rights report dedicated solely to antisemitism.
The progress of equality is arguably the mainspring of modern political history. Alexis de Tocqueville considered the spread of equality to be the inexorable tendency of Western societies, and the 20th-century wars with Nazism and Communism can be interpreted as struggles over the principle’s validity and scope: Nazism fought to establish racial hierarchy in place of equality, while Communism fought to extend equality to the economic sphere, at least in theory.
Following the tradition of speaking to Jewish communal leaders on the eve of the High Holidays, President Joe Biden made his first such call last Thursday.
