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But Tuesday night, voters decisively handed the seat to Bob Turner, an Irish Catholic Republican, by a margin of 54-46. At 71, Turner is a retired cable-television executive previously most famous for creating The Jerry Springer Show. His previous political experience was to serve as the GOP’s sacrificial lamb against Weiner in 2010. But Turner defeated the Jewish Democrat because voters believed he was the pro-Israel candidate.

Yes, yes, there were other issues. Though Weprin keeps kosher, attends synagogue daily, and boasts of his countless relatives who live in the Jewish State, he had voted in favor of same-sex marriage, which didn’t sit well among Orthodox Jewish voters. That same constituency might have forgiven support of gay marriage from a more secular Jew like Weiner, but they couldn’t abide someone who they perceived as selling out the faith. The barrage of robocalls to voters from various Orthodox leaders on the matter couldn’t have helped. Nor did endorsements of Turner mixed into Talmud-study groups. Of course, the continuing economic malaise and high unemployment made matters worse. And Weprin wasn’t a strong campaigner. But the issue on voters’ minds was Israel.

**

Ben’s Best Kosher Deli in Rego Park is located on an otherwise typical Queens Boulevard strip of Bukharian Jewish restaurants and pornography stores. The customers I spoke to at the Queens landmark during lunchtime on Election Day had all voted for Anthony Weiner in the past, but this election was different, they explained over corned beef, kreplach, and kishka. Fran Alper, an older woman eating lunch with her husband, told me she was voting for Turner “because Obama is against Israel.” Another geriatric Jewish couple, Carol and Larry Samuels, were even more savagely against Obama’s Israel policy. They were appalled not just that the president wants to return Israel to its 1967 borders, they said, but that the president “refused to take a photo with Benjamin Netanyahu.” (The first part is not quite true—Obama said this summer that an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians should be based upon the 1967 borders, with land swaps—and the second part refers to Netanyahu’s Washington visit in March 2010, which did not include the traditional joint photo op.) Carol said she wanted to physically shake fellow Jews who still voted for Democrats—even as she admitted that she’d previously voted for Weiner and Spitzer.

Up until the last minute, the Weprin campaign tried to win over such voters. At a senior center in the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills at noon on Election Day, State Sen. Toby Ann Stavisky, campaigning for the Democrat, offered the weak line that if they wanted to send Obama a message on Israel, they should call the White House. Andrew Hevesi, a Democratic Assemblyman from Queens, tried to turn the elderly crowd against Turner by describing him as a “scary, scary man.” He, along with a full array of Jewish elected officials from the borough, claimed Turner wanted to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and abolish the Department of Education. This parade of horribles culminated when Weprin himself claimed that Turner even wanted to abolish the Department of Agriculture. Never mind that there are no farms, let alone forests, in Forest Hills.

Still, this approach proved effective among senior citizens I spoke to who fondly remembered FDR and relied on their Social Security checks. Others who weren’t motivated by fear of Turner’s “radical Republicanism,” in the words of one voter, explained that they were faithful Democrats who wanted to support the party despite a lackluster candidate. One loyal voter in Forest Hills bragged about voting for Adlai Stevenson from Korea in 1952 and told the volunteer at his door that “he wasn’t voting for Weprin, he was voting for the Democrats.”

**

The question, of course, is what this Republican victory portends for the president in 2012. The Obama camp was quick to dismiss the results of the special election as, well, special. In a statement, Rep. Steve Israel, the Long Islander who serves as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, noted that “special elections are always difficult—they are low turnout, high intensity races” and said he was confident that “the results in NY-09 are not reflective of what will happen in November 2012.”

Others see Turner’s victory as the beginning of the end of the New Deal Coalition: the marriage between Jews and the Democratic Party consummated by Roosevelt 80 years ago. Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf believes Weprin’s defeat signals a major realignment of the Jewish vote. There’s a “new Jewish vote that is observant and communally based,” Sheinkopf told me Monday. Secular liberal Jews are intermarrying and thus, he argues, losing their connection with Israel. Those that remain in the community are more observant and behave politically more like Catholics, Democratic-leaning swing voters, than reliable Democrats as Jews traditionally have been.

Prominent Turner endorser and former New York City Mayor Ed Koch wasn’t looking for a realignment of the Jewish vote, just the opportunity for Jews to make a statement that the “Democratic Party and President Obama [shouldn’t] take Jews for granted.” No single person determined this election more than Koch, who prominently endorsed Turner in July and then served as a crucial surrogate among seniors to refute Democratic charges that Turner wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare. Koch thought a Weprin defeat would force Obama to reassess his views and policies toward Israel.

“The president thinks that Jews just were compensated with Israel to make up for the Holocaust, and Obama doesn’t appreciate that it’s the historic home of the Jewish people going back to Abraham,” Koch told me. But more than appreciating Israel’s historical importance, to Koch, the obstacle to peace is the Palestinian Authority. If Hamas and Fatah don’t want to negotiate, Israel shouldn’t have to negotiate with them. All Obama needs to do is recognize this fact and Koch would return to the Democratic fold, he said.

Unlike Koch, Turner does not seem to have given much thought to U.S. policy in the Middle East. When I interviewed him Tuesday at his campaign headquarters, the Republican thought that the message Jewish voters were sending was merely that Obama should be friendlier toward Israel. Turner fumbled when I asked about specific policy measures that the administration should take to show this friendliness. Finally, he settled on moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, an issue that Koch dismissed as “not a big deal.” Yet, Turner continued to play up Israel as an issue on election night, putting an Israeli flag along with the American flag on stage at his campaign event. But it was clear that his advocacy for the Jewish State was not a political opportunity that he found, but a political opportunity that found him.

David Weprin was not a good candidate. He’s a nebbish-ey mustachioed man with a limp handshake and what appears to be a toupee. After his nonconcession speech last night at a bar in Queens, crowded less because of the press of supporters than because of its cramped size, he was quickly hustled out, lest he have to interact with the media, let alone supporters.

But his failings as a retail politician weren’t what did him in. When the Orthodox Jew loses an election because he can’t attract the pro-Israel vote, something else is going on. It may be a vast shift, or more likely the type of quirk that puts the special in special elections. Either way, for the next year, the Zionist congressman from the Jewish district in Queens will be a devout Catholic from the Rockaways.

CORRECTION, Sept. 20: This article originally dismissed the allegation that Obama refused to take a photo with Netanyahu as “an urban legend with about the same veracity as allegations of the president’s Kenyan citizenship.” While the two men have been photographed together on several occasions, at least one visit by Netanyahu to Washington pointedly did not include any joint photo opportunities. This error has been corrected.

The larger principle that obtains, according to AIPAC and its allies, is that U.S. international engagement generally is good for U.S. support for Israel, and a pullback from that engagement is bad (we saw this also when AIPAC came down against Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s since-retracted suggestion to separate Israeli foreign aid from other foreign aid; “a robust foreign aid budget is a strong signal of U.S. leadership around the globe,” AIPAC said at the time).

According to JTA, AIPAC has been even more direct in private meetings with Republican officials. “AIPAC sees foreign assistance as a package that benefits the U.S.-Israel alliance,” the news service reports.

Coalition Including AIPAC Criticizes Proposed GOP Budget Cuts [JTA]
Earlier: GOP Mostly Undivided on Israel
Cantor’s Foreign Aid ‘Trial Balloon Is Popped

“David is, I think, the most important man in America right now,” Beck said in July, introducing one of Barton’s many appearances on his show. In addition to being a frequent TV guest of Beck’s, Barton is also one of three professors at Beck’s online school, Beck University. He was a member of the expert panel that created Texas’ controversial new history standards, which played down Thomas Jefferson and played up John Calvin. In September, he spoke at a rally for Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, where he was billed as a “constitutional scholar.” Later this month, he and Newt Gingrich will headline a meeting for Nevada pastors at a Las Vegas resort, meant to mobilize them ahead of the upcoming elections.

“Barton’s role in the Tea Party movement is much like it’s been in the Republican Party for the last decade,” says Dan Quinn, communications director of the Texas Freedom Network, a civil liberties group that has watched Barton for years. “He is acting as an intellectual resource for them. He gives them the words in their increasingly extremist vocabulary. On the right he has become this great icon of American historical scholarship, when he’s anything but.”

In fact, Barton doesn’t have any historical training all. His sole academic degree is a bachelor’s in religious education from Oral Roberts University—though given the right’s rampant populism, his fans are unlikely to care about his lack of credentials. Barton’s past association with white supremacists and Holocaust deniers might be more damaging, if anyone paid attention. Still, he’s gotten much more sophisticated about race over the last two decades. These days, he’s more likely to be hurling accusations of racism than fending them off.

Barton built his career by arguing, via a selective reading of documents from the Founding Fathers, that the Constitution is rooted in biblical values and that the founders never intended to separate church and state. He claims, falsely, that 52 of the 55 founding fathers were “orthodox, evangelical Christians,” and that they always intended for Christianity to shape American government. Public secularism, in his view, constitutes an unconstitutional tyranny that is systematically robbing the country of its religious heritage.

This is in many ways an old story. People who write about the religious right—myself included—have often marveled at the intricacy and resilience of the movement’s carefully wrought alternative history. The Anti-Defamation League was criticizing Barton as far back as 1994, writing in one report: “This ostensible scholarship functions in fact as an assault on scholarship: in the manner of other recent phony revisionisms, the history it supports is little more than a compendium of anecdotes divorced from their original context, linked harum-scarum and laced with factual errors and distorted innuendo.”

Yet Barton just keeps getting more powerful and more mainstream. His public career began in the late 1980s when, he has written, God ordered him to the library to investigate the ostensible correlation between the end of state-mandated school prayer and declines in SAT scores. “I didn’t know why,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1988 America: To Pray Or Not To Pray?, “but I somehow knew that these two pieces of information would be very important.”

The next year he published The Myth of Separation, a farrago of quotes torn from context and outright misinformation. It claimed, wrongly, that Thomas Jefferson described the wall of separation between church and state as “one directional,” keeping the state out of the church while maintaining “Christian principles in government.” It also falsely attributed a quote to James Madison, that the government’s future was “staked upon the Ten Commandments.” He later issued an extended correction for these and other mistakes, though that hasn’t stopped them from being repeated endlessly online.

Barton found an eager audience for his Christian nationalist history on the right-wing fringe. In 1991, as the ADL has reported, he spoke at a summer gathering of Scriptures for America, a group founded by Pete Peters, a pastor in the Christian Identity movement. Christian Identity holds that Anglo-Saxons are the true children of Israel, while Jews are the Satanic offspring of Eve’s liaison with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Black people, according to Christian Identity theology, are a separate species of “mud people.” Other speakers at the meeting were Holocaust denier Malcolm Ross and white supremacist Richard Kelly Hoskins. Barton was advertised as “a new and special speaker” who would ask, “Was it the plan of our forefathers that America be the melting pot home of various religions and philosophies?” (One can assume that the answer was no.) On November 24 of that year, Barton spoke at another Christianity Identity gathering, this one in Oregon. According to the ADL, his self-published books were advertised in “The Watchman,” a Christian Identity publication.

Soon, though, Barton’s star started rising on the mainstream right, and he denounced Christian Identity, claiming that he hadn’t known he was addressing racist groups when he appeared at the movement’s meetings. That sounds implausible—it’s hard to imagine how one might speak at two white supremacist summits in five months by accident. Still, the association didn’t seem to hurt him. By the middle of the 1990s, every major religious right organization marketed Barton’s self-published books. In 1994, Newt Gingrich, then the House minority whip, praised Barton’s “wonderful” and “most useful” work, and, in 1997, Barton was elected vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party. The Bush campaign hired him to do clergy outreach in 2004.

In recent years, Barton has pioneered a new kind of historical revisionism, one that absolves conservative Republicans of any complicity in American racism, which he lays entirely at the feet of Democrats. He points out, correctly, that before 1964, many of the country’s most virulently racist politicians were Democrats. He neglects to mention that they fled to the GOP en masse after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Indeed, in one astonishing document, he attributes Strom Thurmond’s break with the Democrats to his “dramatic change of heart on civil rights issues,” as if the former Dixiecrat had turned Republican out of outrage at segregation. In an equally audacious reinterpretation of history, he paints the founding era as a golden age of racial comity, denying that racism was ever an essential part of America’s DNA.

Such rhetorical maneuvers have been particularly useful to Beck, obsessed as he is with secret histories and a prelapsarian version of the American past. Over the summer, Beck hosted a series of shows he called “Founders’ Fridays,” revisionist forays into American history guided by Barton. Under the guise of teaching black history, Founders’ Fridays argued against the idea that black people had been oppressed by the Revolutionary generation. On July 5, for example, Barton presented a newspaper from the late 18th century that featured the obituary of a black man who had fought in the Revolution. The obituaries, Barton pointed out, were “not broken out black and white. … It’s telling you who’s died, didn’t matter whether were you black or white or anything, you’re a citizen.”

Denying the racial sins of the Founding Fathers makes it easier to deify them—and, in turn, to promote faith in America’s Christian destiny. “In learning about the founders and seeing the heroes that were involved, it only strengthens my view that this was a divine document, the Declaration of Independence,” said Beck at the end of one show. “For the most part, these guys were amazing. And they struggled in their time to do the right thing. You say that they’re not Christians. They were Christians. And they fought for people who weren’t. The same thing with [saying] they were all white. Well, they fought for people who weren’t.”

Barton has given American history an immaculate conception, one that turns slaveholders into civil-rights heroes. He’s helped recreate a myth of a golden age of unimpeachable American righteousness. “[T]he national motto is e pluribus unum, out of many we became one,” said Barton during one of his appearances on Beck. “And we have tried for 20 years to make it e unum pluribus, out of one we’re going to be all these groups.” In some ways Barton hasn’t changed much at all. He’s still making the case against diversity, and coating it in divinity.

Michelle Goldberg is the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World.

This is bad news for Jewish Republicans. The Tea Party movement hearkens back to the old anti-immigration movement, to the Ku Klux Klan, to the George Wallace movement in the 1960s. Lurking behind all of these was the idea of 100 percent “pure” Americanism—and of taking America back from the “outsiders.”

The Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman told Besser, “It’s not a danger at the moment, but it bears watching.”

Well, those watching last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference will have noticed, as Besser did, that the potential presidential candidate favored by attendees in a straw poll was … Texas Rep. Ron Paul (Mitt Romney won second; Sarah Palin came in a distant third).

Forget the cultural cues that infamously makes Jews “hate” Palin. Paul opposes sanctions on Iran and aid to Israel, and has compared Gaza to a “concentration camp.”

“Yes I know,” Besser concludes,

the tea party movement is a big, churning and somewhat diverse collection of people, including some conservatives who think Israel is cool.

But as almost all the political scientists I talked to said, the insurgent movement also includes elements that are likely to scare the heck out of Jewish voters.

At least regarding his extreme-isolationist foreign policy views, Paul is probably not exactly whom Besser was talking about. He represents a totally different type of knot.

Ron Paul, Tea Parties, and the GOP’s Jewish Problem [JW Political Insider]

Tea Party Revolution Could Undermine Jewish Republican Outreach [Jewish Week]

Earlier: Why We Hate Her

What made Britain’s first and only Jewish prime minister so prescient? Adam Kirsch, fresh off his absorbing biography of Disraeli, observed that what his subject and Obama have most in common is literary origin. Both men used their writing as a “laboratory” in which to test to the same question that would mark their political careers: “is it possible to genuinely belong to, and even lead, a society that shuns people like you?” Yet while Obama is no doubt the elegant yield of an evolved zeitgeist, it remains to be seen if he can precipitate the next stage in that zeitgeist’s evolution. Disraeli’s great virtue was to understand that the world of the 19th century, of which he was that paradoxical oddity—a romantic conservative, a baptized Jew—was changing under the dual engines of industrial capitalism and colonial expansion, and that the Tories must also change or perish. Rather than remain fixed in some curmudgeonly idyll for a feudal past, responsive only to cooked-up resentments against so-called “elites” (he proudly was one), he fashioned a pragmatic materialism that set about to answer what Thomas Carlyle called the “condition-of-England question.” Acting out of a mixture of principle and expediency, Disraeli pioneered the Third Way, avant la lettre.

Following Edmund Burke, he believed that the customs and institutions that were already in place in England, and had been for centuries, could be harnessed to lessen the plight of the working-class, who might otherwise threaten those customs and institutions with violent revolution. This philosophy used to guide the thinking American Right in its heyday—the 1950s—so much so that up until Richard Nixon, some of the most sweeping civil rights and healthcare initiatives were undertaken by Republican presidents. Whittaker Chambers, once a revered sage on the National Review masthead—not least because he was the most famous ex-Communist in existence—termed his own brand of activist conservatism “Beaconsfieldism,” after the peer title Disraeli was given in 1876, and luxuriated in until his death a few years later.

Of course, to hold the current mealy crop of GOP leaders and tacticians to the standard of Beaconsfieldism is to be laughably disappointed. It is impossible, for instance, to imagine Queen Victoria’s favorite politician, who was a student of the blue book and the dark, Satanic mill, calling England a “nation of whiners,” as Senator Phil Gramm did in reacting to the financial market crisis last year. Nor can one envision Disraeli kowtowing to crass demagogues such as Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, who today burble on overpriced airwaves that any and all attempts to expand the role of government is “socialism.” Disraeli would have looked at his watch or sighed extravagantly in the face of such witless bloviation. He was by no means a socialist, but nor was he afraid of heeding the warnings of his radical opponents in order to undermine their revolutionary goals with gradualist measures. He was one of 5 MPs to vote for leniency for the leaders of 1830′s Chartism, probably because he sympathized with their chief plaint for universal male suffrage, which is why, three decades on, he railroaded the Second Reform Bill of 1867 through parliament despite party pressure not to do so (the Tories were then in opposition).

Indeed, a full hundred and fifty years before John Edwards coined the phrase “Two Americas”—itself borrowed from Michael Harrington’s seminal work The Other America—there was Disraeli’s concept of “Two Nations,” consisting of the rich and poor. In his novel Sybil, which was subtitled “The Two Nations,” Disraeli explained that these two binary constituencies were “as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones; or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by different foods, are ordered by different manners, and are governed by the same laws.” Everything that informed the sentimental fiction of Dickens and the hard-nosed non-fiction of Orwell is captured in that diagnosis, and it’s a wonder, knowing the man who ventured it, that Engels could write to Marx in 1867, a year that saw industrial workers vote overwhelmingly Conservative, “Once again the English working class has disgraced itself.” Had it?

During his second term as prime minister, beginning in 1874, Disraeli passed a whole tranche of progressive legislation that caused Alexander Macdonald, one of the first Labor MPs, to conclude that “the Conservative party have done more for the working classes in five years than the Liberals have in fifty.” These bills included the Artisans Dwellings Act, which mandated slum-clearing and public housing works; the Employers and Workmen Act, which made it legal for trade unions to strike; the Rivers Pollution Act, which regulated the disposal of waste; the Sale of Food and Drugs Acts, which established standards of safety and purity; and the Factory Act, which limited the work hours of women and children. “Tory men and Whig measures” was how one of the characters in Sybil satirized such an approach to governance. (Today, anyone on the right who advocated similar policies would be sneeringly called a “RINO,” Republican in Name Only, by a pundit or blogger determined to keep the GOP out of power for the foreseeable future.) All told, however, this list of accomplishments was more than what Disraeli’s career-long rival Gladstone could ever boast in terms of social welfare reform.

There aren’t many Disraelian figures dotting the landscape at present, although the Canadian David Frum, who has become a preeminent gadfly of movement conservatism, has done his part to uphold a kind of Beaconsfieldism modified for the 21st century. In a Newsweek cover essay he wrote last March, directed primarily against Limbaugh, Frum argued that the Republican Party was about thirty years out of date and almost autistically out of touch with popular demands. Instead of placing free market healthcare reform at the top of the economic agenda, the call of the hour was for more tax cuts. Instead of acknowledging that the rising generation of voters was quite comfortable with gay rights and incorporating new immigrant groups, the response was to drum up populist hysteria about a liberal assault on American “values.” (Disraeli also understood how minorities should be conscripted, not alienated by the right. “[T]he persecution of the Jewish race,” he wrote, “had deprived European society of an important conservative element and added to the destructive party an influential ally.”)

In the face of a seemingly unstoppable Democratic majority, what conservatives need most, according to Frum, is “every resource of mind and heart, every good argument, every creative alternative and every bit of compassionate sympathy for the distress that is pushing Americans in the wrong direction.” What they need, in other words, is a refresher course on the most eminent of Victorians.