View from America: Do 'Jewish ties' really matter?

What we need from candidates are actions, not testimonials from Jewish friends.

By JONATHAN TOBIN
tobin 88 (photo credit: )
tobin 88
(photo credit: )
For those who thought that the discovery several years ago of the fact that Hillary Clinton had a step-grandfather who was Jewish (yes, her grandmother's second husband) was the low point in the history of attempts to influence the Jewish vote, there is good news. The Republicans have gone their Democratic rivals one better while introducing vice presidential pick Sarah Palin to the public. Palin does not have a long history of stands on Jewish issues. Why should she? Neither the town of Wasilla, Alaska, nor the 49th state where she has served as governor for the last two years have large Jewish populations or much of a foreign policy. But Gov. Palin does have a little Israeli flag in her office. Or at least did last winter. I know that because in an e-mail forwarded around the world, Jewish Republicans were quick to point to the flag as a sign of her interest in the Jewish state. For those of you who want to check this out yourself, the evidence can be found at alaskapodshow.com/index.php/2008/02/20/my-visit-to-juneau-alaska. It is the Web site of an Alaskan HDTV hiking show, which featured an interview with the athletic veep hopeful in February. The tiny flag can be seen on the far right of the picture at the edge of the window. It isn't much, but in politics you go with what you've got. PALIN IS obviously a sharp and articulate woman with a thin political résumé that has been offset by a winning style and a record as a reformer that skyrocketed her into a spot on a national ticket. But her introduction to the big leagues has illustrated two points - one Jewish and one general - about our current political culture these days. First, Sarah Palin's little flag and the subsequent obligatory kind comments about her from Alaskan rabbis, whose events she has graced with her official presence, illustrate what should have become obvious a long time ago: The partisan impulse to pretend that all candidates are longtime bosom buddies with the Jewish community is getting a little silly. Unlike 2004, when just about everyone running for president except George W. Bush was producing a Jewish relative of some sort, the two nominees, John McCain and Barack Obama, aren't pretending to be members of the tribe. Not every pol running for office who wants Jewish votes or money grew up in a Jewish neighborhood like former New York governor Mario Cuomo, who used to like to boast to Jewish audiences that he served as the shabbes goy for a synagogue in the South Jamaica section of Queens, where he was raised. Nor can a politician who is not from the Northeast and has not worked on foreign-policy issues match a record of stands on Israel such as the one that Palin's Democratic counterpart, Sen. Joe Biden, can offer. Like McCain, Biden has a paper trail a mile long on Jewish issues which, ironically enough, has allowed some critics to mine from it comments criticizing specific Israeli policies, in trying to tarnish the Democrats' spin. Like McCain's stands, Biden's history of engagement with Jews and the pro-Israel community is a reasonable argument to be made by those who advocate his election. But the fact that the top of the Democratic ticket couldn't match Biden's record on Israel won't stop Jewish Democrats from voting for Obama. Instead, they have chosen to judge the candidate on the positions that he has articulated during the course of the campaign. Since Obama has, more or less, jumped through every rhetorical hoop the pro-Israel community has asked him to jump through, they have every right to now claim that their candidate is every bit as entitled to the label "pro-Israel" as anyone else. ALL OF which ought to serve as a reminder to those partisans whose job it is to spin the candidates to the Jewish public that what we need is substance, not nonsense. Whether or not some of McCain's or Obama's or Biden's or Palin's "best friends" were or are Jewish isn't really material. This is not 1948 when, as the story goes, intervention by president Harry Truman's former business partner and army buddy, Eddie Jacobsen, helped influence White House policy on the creation of a Jewish state. Nowadays, the people most likely to effectively lobby wavering presidents to stand up for Zionism are evangelical Christians. Whether Palin - the evangelical the Republicans are nominating for vice president - will help further that cause remains to be seen (though her statements regarding her strong belief in support for Israel to members of AIPAC attending the Republican convention this week were every bit as convincing as those of Obama), but the outcome probably won't depend on whether or not she has attended as many bar mitzvas as Biden. What really matters is whether these people will adhere to the nonpartisan and nondenominational tradition of sympathy for Zionism that has deep roots in the history of American religion, culture and politics dating back to the earliest years of our republic. What we need from them are credible pledges to avoid pressuring Israel and to support its right of self defense, as well as tough action on Iranian nukes, not testimonials from Jewish friends. In other words, the entire genre of "Jewish ties" in discussions of the candidates is not all that it is cracked up to be. SECONDLY, THE reaction to the Palin nomination by the bloggers and the Internet fruitcakes, much like the Internet whispering campaign against Barack Obama, demonstrates just how low the political debate in this country is getting. The same site on the Internet that the Republican Jews were so proud of because it showed the flag in Palin's office was deluged with postings alleging that the interview "proved" that Palin had faked her pregnancy, which resulted in the birth this spring of her fifth child, who suffers from Down syndrome. It was in reaction to this sort of vile stuff posted - not just on the Alaska HDTV page, but on influential leftist political sites such as the DailyKos - that Palin was forced to reveal that her 17-year-old daughter was pregnant. To his credit, Obama, who has been stung himself by the radical right-wing Internet onslaught putting forward the fantasy that he is an Islamist "Manchurian Candidate," asked his followers to back off. But the nature of political jabbering in our current universe of 24/7 cable news and Internet postings in which every nitwit can self-publish lies about anyone and anything means that nothing can stem the ugly flow of slander. Mudslinging is hardly new in American politics, but the Internet has given it a place in the mainstream that it has never gotten before. Some partisan Democrats feel that they can say and do anything in the cause of halting what they falsely claim is a Republican effort to destroy democracy and institute fundamentalist tyranny. In turn, some Republicans think anything goes in the cause of keeping what they worry is a man who will deliberately lose the war on Islamist terror out of the White House. In such an atmosphere of hate and screaming talking heads, rational debate seems to be harder to find than a minyan in Wasilla, Alaska. The writer is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia. jtobin@jewishexponent.com