• Shmuel Rosner notes that Jews aren’t trending toward the Republicans so much as away from the Democrats (and toward independent status). He also notes that in the context of this Pew poll, the 2011 results actually see an uptick in Jewish identification with the Democrats over the 2010 results. It’s still down since President Obama’s election, though.

• Jonathan Tobin has no proof for his contention that Israel is the prime reason that, since Obama’s election, Jews have disproportionately turned away from the Democratic Party … but I largely buy it. What else would it be? (How many lefty Jews disgusted by Obama’s various compromises, for example, would have identified as Democrats in the first place? Also, c’mon?) I also agree that this is important because Pennsylvania and Florida are going to be in play.

• Tobin also writes, “Liberal Jews remain far more afraid of conservative Christians than Hamas terrorists.” I suppose this is technically, semantically true, but I think there is probably a fairer way of putting it, hmm?

• If we saw Jews turn away from a sitting Democratic president, the operative word might not be “Democratic” but “sitting”: as Dan Klein reported in Tablet Magazine, since Nixon, and excepting George W. Bush, Jews have disproportionately turned against every elected president running for re-election.

• The 2011 poll had a Jewish sample size of 330 and a margin of error of 6.5 percent.

Jews Shift Toward GOP, Survey Claims [Forward]
Related: Do We Now Have Proof Jews Are Trending Republican? [Jewish Journal Rosner's Domain]
Obama’s Israel Problem Cause of Democrat Losses Among Jews [Commentary Contentions]
Sitting Duck [Tablet Magazine]

• Republican opposition to a motion that would prevent a London-based company with ties to Iran from having a stake in an American mining company raises questions about the Republican position on sanctions against Iran. [Washington Jewish Week]

• Poland has reopened investigations, abandoned while the country was under Communist rule, into crimes committed at Auschwitz during World War II. [AP]

• An investigation by the pro-choice organization NARAL into “crisis pregnancy centers”—which are not medical facilities—reveals, among other things, that a Jewish woman who visited five different centers was encouraged by volunteers at each center to convert to Christianity. [Think Progress]

• Oprah visited Crown Heights, Borough Park, and Brooklyn Heights for her new show. Her visit to Brooklyn Heights included a tour of a mikvah. [Chabad]

• Photos (with recipes!) of the most intricate bite-size reproductions of Jewish deli food you’ve ever seen, ever. Borscht bite, anyone? [The Polymath Chronicles]

Taking the stage frequently in a recent series of televised debates, the contenders clawed at each other and growled at President Barack Obama. An ambitious group, they also took the time to contest reality. Take, for example, Rick Perry. “The fact is,” the Texas governor said when asked about global warming, “to put America’s economic future in jeopardy, asking us to cut back in areas that would have monstrous economic impact on this country, is not good economics and I will suggest to you is not necessarily good science. Find out what the science truly is before you start putting the American economy in jeopardy.”

And what might the science truly be? Perry claims to have found out. In an August town hall meeting in New Hampshire, he sang his gospel. “There are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects,” he said, “and I think we’re seeing weekly or even daily scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

Just where these intrepid scientists air their grievances daily, Perry didn’t say. It certainly isn’t in any credible academic publication: According to a study published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, between 97 and 98 percent of the world’s 1,372 scientists “most actively publishing in the field” of climate research are quite certain of the idea of anthropogenic climate change, or climate change brought about by human actions.

But don’t expect the candidate who doesn’t lose sleep over the possibility of executing the innocent to lose heart when faced with the facts. And don’t expect his fan base to let science get in the way of a good story, either: As a survey released last week by the Yale Project on Climate Change shows, supporters of the Tea Party aren’t too troubled by global warming because a majority of them, 53 percent, believe it isn’t happening at all.

None of this, of course, is new. Radical ignorance has been in vogue with Republicans at least since a George W. Bush aide mocked his political foes for belonging to the benighted “reality-based community” while Bush and his followers answered to a higher power. “We are not this story’s author, who fills time and eternity with his purpose,” Bush said in his first inaugural address, referring to God. “This story goes on. And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.”

And herein, precisely, lies the problem. The Republican insistence on rejecting this reality for another, intangible one isn’t just bad science; it is, quite literally, bad faith.

Moses knew all about it. In this week’s parasha, he delivers yet another fiery speech to the Israelites, who are now standing on the doorstep of the Promised Land. But Moses isn’t interested in the immediate future; he’s more concerned with the recent past. “You have seen all that the Lord did before your very eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, to all his servants, and to all his land,” he says, “the great trials which your very eyes beheld and those great signs and wonders. Yet until this day, the Lord has not given you a heart to know, eyes to see and ears to hear.”

It’s an odd epistemological argument: Even though you’ve seen God’s miracles with your own eyes, Moses tells the people, it is only now that you’re capable of true knowledge. And forget about the yiddisher kop; true knowledge comes not from the head but from the heart.

At first glance, Moses’ speech reads a bit like Stephen Colbert’s introduction of his famous term, truthiness. “I don’t trust books,” Colbert said in one of his show’s more memorable segments. “They’re all fact, no heart.” But Moses is smarter than that, and he knows that facts and heart work best when they work together. It’s not hard to guess how the Israelite leader came by his views. We can only imagine what went through his head when he descended from the mountain only to witness the golden calf; here, after all, were people who, just a few weeks before, had witnessed with their own eyes the glories of God, but, impatient with their absent leader, waited barely a month before fashioning a more tangible deity out of precious metals. In Sinai, the Israelites knew God with their minds, but not with their hearts. They realized that the Almighty was real and present, but they did not yet believe in him.

We mustn’t blame them. God is a mighty difficult idea to grasp. Proof of his existence doesn’t make it any easier. Faith is required. Because faith, Moses knows, is more than believing in things we’ll never know for certain exist; faith is also the wisdom to believe in things we know for certain do.

Which brings us back to the Republicans. The adherence of so many in the party to counterfactual narratives is often explained away by faith. Just what kind of faith Rick Perry repeatedly makes clear. In a speech in Virginia earlier this week, he said that his “faith journey is not the story of someone who turned to God because I wanted to. It was because I had nowhere else to turn. I was lost spiritually and emotionally.”

Perry, then, assumes that if he trusts in God, God will tell him what to do. He believes, if we take him at his word, that he is capable of interpreting the precise and unerring will of the Creator. This is the opposite of Moses’ brand of faith. For Perry, faith comes first, and proof is unnecessary; for Moses, proof comes first, and faith must follow. Perry was lost until he found God; Moses found God first and then made his people wander in the desert for 40 years, until they were ready—intellectually as well as emotionally—to embrace what faith meant.

And what faith really means is responsibility. Because we are incapable of knowing God’s mind—and by “we” I mean decent people of all political persuasions who are humbled by their belief in God—we’re left grappling with life’s greatest mysteries by ourselves. We try, like children playing a game with rules they don’t entirely understand, to make sense of what might seem, to the unbelieving, like a cruel and random existence. All we can do is our best, and our only guide is our heart and its call for compassion.

The Israelites at Sinai didn’t understand this idea at first. They yearned for a god they could grasp, a shiny golden god, a god they believed could redeem them. It took them four decades in the wilderness to learn that only they could redeem themselves, and that faith isn’t, in itself, salvation, but merely its engine. The Republicans are now learning the same lesson. Let us hope that they, too, are headed to the wilderness, where they can wander and wonder about the true nature of faith and the dictates of personal responsibility. If they don’t, if they allow the Tea Partiers in their midst to prevail, we are all looking at decades of false idols and bad faith.

It’s a compelling story, but it’s also dead wrong. Obama hasn’t let us down; it’s we who have disappointed him.

Our betrayal of the president might have been more ontological than political. It has to do with the way we perceive ourselves. Modern liberals, for the most part, are the children of Emerson. We believe, as our spiritual father wrote, that “He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”

We absolve us to ourselves on occasion, as my friends and I did in 2008 when we went canvassing for Obama among Pennsylvania’s undecided voters. The night Obama was elected, I was huddled with hundreds of strangers in a hotel ballroom outside Philadelphia, feeling elated. This, I thought, is how movements were forged, by scores of mindful men and women sticking together in the heat of a big idea. I hugged a lot of people that night. I never saw any of them again.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the political spectrum, movements are defined differently. For conservatives, politics are played not in four-year intervals but weekly, like football, in churches and school boards and living rooms, where a great number of people congregate to define for each other and for themselves the values worth living by and fighting for. A 2010 Gallup poll, for example, found that while 27 percent of self-described liberals frequently attended a house of worship, the number among conservatives was 55 percent. For these Americans, there’s a lot out there that’s far more sacred than the integrity of their own minds.

This may explain the occasional, and maddening, discrepancies in public opinion polls. A recent New York Times/CBS poll, for example, found that while 72 percent of respondents “disapproved of the way Republicans in Congress handled the negotiations” over the debt ceiling crisis, 44 percent echoed Republican calls for more spending cuts by saying that “the cuts in the debt-ceiling agreement did not go far enough.” You could explain such contradictions by arguing that many Americans may be misinformed, or, less charitably, by proclaiming them irredeemably illogical. Another explanation may be that movements are agnostic when it comes to facts, and that what really matters to tea partiers when they congregate isn’t trying to resolve their ideological tensions—like the discrepancy, say, between railing against big government on the one hand and supporting invasive legislation pertaining to abortions or abstinence on the other—but rather celebrating their successful congregation.

Movements are selfish; they want to survive. If they stopped to question the viability of their arguments, they’d drown in a shallow pool of self-doubt. Instead, they make up slogans and pass resolutions and produce other simple and clear badges for their members to wear to distinguish themselves from non-members. As anyone who has ever attended any brand of religious school and was forced to come to terms with the inscrutable actions of God very well knows, sometimes the answer to the most difficult theological questions is “just because.” It’s not a sophisticated answer, nor is it satisfying for those of us inclined to explore each thought and idea for ourselves, but it’s not a categorically bad answer. When we march under a banner, when we identify the group’s interests with our own, when we belong to a movement, we do so, often, just because.

And by we, alas, I don’t mean liberals. They—we—demand explanations. We’re willing to get behind Obama, but only for short bursts at a time, and only provided that he act in a way we perceive of as befitting the image we have of him, that of our knight and savior. That’s no way to build a movement.

When he faces the Republicans, the president knows that his is a battle of one against many. “In similar circumstances,” Westen wrote in his Times essay, “Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right.” True, but FDR had the support of the unions, then still a growth industry, as well as that of various well-organized political machines and ethnic minorities—Jews, blacks, Catholics—likely to belong to communal organizations in far higher numbers than they do today. When he talked tough, he knew he had in his corner millions of Americans who met each week and cherished their communal bonds and listened to their rabbis or priests or foremen. Obama has no such privilege. Without it, his power is greatly diminished. A president is still a politician, and a politician whose voters show up once every four years finds himself, in the remaining 1,459 days, forced to bend before his better-organized, more numerous foes.

A church-going man, Obama can, perhaps, find some solace in another leader of a stiffed-necked people, Moses. In this week’s parasha, the dying patriarch teaches the Israelites about the perils of political paralysis. He warns his followers not to perceive their triumph over their enemies and their entry into the Promised Land as a sign of entitlement. “Not because of your righteousness or because of the honesty of your heart do you come to possess their land,” Moses roars, “but because of the wickedness of these nations, the Lord your God drives them out from before you, and in order to establish the matter that the Lord swore to your forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

The message is clear, and it is twofold: First, if the wicked inhabitants of Canaan had once incurred the wrath of God and were punished by extinction, then the land’s new custodians can expect the very same fate should they neglect their duties. And second, as the land was once inhabited by wicked nations and is now being delivered to the Israelites by way of wars and conquests, it is, by definition, an earthly place: Canaan is not Eden, and the only thing that makes the Promised Land promised is the willingness of its inhabitants to work hard at justice and compassion. Put simply, Moses is telling the Israelites about to enter Canaan the same thing that Obama should have told me and my friends at that Pennsylvania hotel, as well as all of his supporters, on the eve of his election—winning was the easy part, and the hard work is only now beginning.

Whether or not Obama secures a second term next winter is largely irrelevant. If we want real change—the kind we can believe in—we’re going to have to write our own story, and America’s, by committing ourselves to a movement on an ongoing basis. We can take heart from Wisconsin, where more than 100,000 members and supporters of unions—for many of us, still churchlike institutions—banded together to oppose Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to slash collective bargaining rights for public sector unions. Walker got his way, but a well-organized progressive movement succeeded in bringing about numerous recall elections and taking two seats away from Republican elected officials. They didn’t win control of the state senate, as some had hoped, but they kept the spirit of organization inflamed with calls, meetings, rallies, and the other movement mainstays. That’s a stellar start.

There’s no other way to succeed save for this serious commitment to a deeply imperfect political vehicle. It’s not going to be easy—we’re likely to find many of our fellow travelers repellent, and we will likely be forced to make some decisions that would leave us less than pure. It’s not going to be much fun—there are more thrilling pastimes in life than canvassing, phone banking, lobbying, or serving on community boards. But when it comes to politics, it’s the only story worth telling.

Usually, any sign of cognitive progress among elected officials is greeted with derision. Tracking the etymology of the term “flip-flopping,” the late William Safire found evidence of the phrase being in use as early as the 1880s. Sometimes referred to as “somersaulting,” any deviation from previously stated dogmas was seen—then as now—as the ultimate signifier of political perfidy.

Which is why, the Sunday after the vote, State Sen. Mark J. Grisanti felt the eyes of fellow congregants at Buffalo’s St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church silently stabbing him in the back. A Republican representing a largely Democratic district, Grisanti had previously vowed that he would remain unalterably opposed to same-sex marriage; when time came to pass the legislation, however, his opposition—along with that of three other Republican lawmakers—was altered. “I cannot legally come up with an argument against same-sex marriage,” he said before voting yes. “Who am I to say that someone does not have the same rights that I have with my wife?”

Ann Deckop, sitting across the aisle from Grisanti at church that Sunday, was not convinced. “I voted for him,” she told the New York Times, “and I’m writing a letter indicating that I will not be voting for him in the next election.”

As Grisanti may soon learn, Deckop is not alone among Republican voters. As a recent Gallup poll found, while support for same-sex marriage jumped 9 percent among all likely voters during the previous year—and 13 percent among self-described Democrats—Republicans remain unfazed, with 72 percent of them still in opposition, exactly the same number as last year. Republicans, God bless them, aren’t fond of changing their minds.

God, as it happens, is: In this week’s parasha, he happily reverses his position on gender-based land ownership, bringing about a major coup of social legislation. The story begins with the five daughters of the deceased (and unimprovably named) Zelophehad petitioning Moses. “Our father died in the desert,” they say, “and he had no sons. Why should our father’s name be eliminated from his family because he had no son? Give us a portion along with our father’s brothers.”

Moses is confused. According to the Lord’s commandments, a portion—meaning a plot of land—could be distributed only to a man’s sons in the event of his demise or, if he had no sons, to his brothers. Unsure of what to do with the unusual request before him, Moses takes it up with the Lord. Without thinking too much, God replies: “Zelophehad’s daughters speak justly. You shall certainly give them a portion of inheritance along with their father’s brothers, and you shall transfer their father’s inheritance to them. Speak to the children of Israel saying: If a man dies and has no son, you shall transfer his inheritance to his daughter.”

This is the very model of the ultimate lawmaker: Compassionate, attentive, ready to address private suffering by passing universal edicts, and unafraid to reconsider an earlier decision in light of shifting consequences. That’s politics as they ought to be.

Unfortunately, we’re still far from the divine ideal. While New York’s recent legislation represents a major achievement, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals are still fighting an uphill battle. Like the daughters of Zelophehad, they’re more likely to face peril when it comes to making a living: While the number of companies that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation continues to rise—the number of Fortune 500 companies that earned top marks from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index, a leading benchmark of workplace equality, shot from 13 in 2002 to 305 last year—there’s still no federal legislation in place to safeguard this most basic of rights.

Not for lack of trying: Every Congress since 1994 has been presented with some version or another of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that would prohibit discrimination against employees on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity by companies of organizations with 15 employees or more, religious institutions excluded. It has failed each time, dying once in the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, another time in the House Subcommittee on Employer-Employee Relations, a third in the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and so on, mostly due to fierce opposition from Republican lawmakers. Another iteration of the bill is currently under consideration in various committees, with President Barack Obama’s explicit support.

It’s as necessary as ever. According to Degrees of Equality: A National Study Examining Workplace Climate for LGBT Employees, released in 2010 by the Human Rights Campaign, 51 percent of gay or transgendered workers still feel compelled to hide their sexual orientation at work, and 58 percent report being occasionally subjected to derogatory comments.

If Republican voters, who traditionally profess a stronger affinity to religious faith, want to do something truly godly, they should follow the spirit of this week’s parasha and learn to change their minds. We must fully—and federally—protect the rights of all Americans to be who they are, not only at the altar but also, and more important, in the office.

A Gallup poll released last week found that President Barack Obama’s approval rating stood at 60 percent among Jewish Americans—an 18 point drop from the 78 percent of Jews who voted for him in 2008.

“The question,” suggested the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Ron Kampeas “is whether Obama’s Jewish popularity dip since ’08 stems from the same cause of his fall generally—America’s persistent economic problems—or whether it has to do with the president’s policies on Israel.” He continued: “Apparently the interpretation depends on who is answering. Democrats and Gallup say it’s the economy; Republicans say it’s Israel.”

Yet Kampeas’ either-or reasoning may have missed a more fundamental and intriguing point: Jews almost always turn against a sitting president.

If Barack Obama flew to Israel to offer Benjamin Netanyahu a back rub, he would lose Jewish voters. If he raised, lowered, or kept taxes the same, he would lose Jewish voters. If he learned Yiddish or put a menorah on the flag, he would lose Jewish voters.

For more than 30 years, every incumbent president running for re-election, with a single exception, has lost Jewish supporters in his second campaign.

Running against the unelected incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter won 50 percent of the popular vote and 71 percent of the Jewish vote. Four years later, when he was defeated in his re-election campaign by Ronald Reagan, Carter won 41 percent of the popular vote, a decrease of 9 percentage points, and only 45 percent of the Jewish vote, a remarkable drop of 26 percent points.

In 1984, a wildly popular Reagan won re-election with 59 percent of the popular vote, an 8-point increase over his 1980 share. But Reagan’s percentage of the Jewish vote decreased by 8 percentage points from his first election to the second—which meant he underperformed among Jews relative to the general voting population by 16 points in his re-election effort, just as Carter had in his unsuccessful try four years earlier.

George H.W. Bush fared 24 percentage points worse among Jewish voters in his unsuccessful 1992 re-election effort, while Bill Clinton’s take of the Jewish vote dropped by only 2 percentage points from 1992 to 1996. But because Bush’s performance among the general population also decreased from his first election to his second while Clinton’s improved, both men underperformed by 8 percentage points among Jewish voters relative to the general electorate.

All that said, the majority of Jewish voters are loyal. Even in a very bad year, a Democratic presidential candidate can be assured of at least 45 percent of the Jewish vote. Another 14 percent of Jews—like those who voted for third-party candidates like John Anderson in 1980, who got 14 percent of the Jewish vote, or Ross Perot in 1992, who polled 9 percent of Jews—might not vote for a Democrat but still won’t vote for a Republican. There’s 10 percent of American Jews who will reliably vote for a Republican presidential candidate, plus 9 percent who may vote independent but won’t vote for a Democrat, based on this historical data.

That leaves about 22 percent of Jewish voters up for grabs, most of whom at least lean Democratic. In 2008, Obama won 82 percent of these toss-up Jews. This gave him 78 percent of the Jewish electorate compared to the 53 percent of the general electorate.

The most obvious conclusion to be drawn from all this—that Obama will inevitably lose Jewish voters in 2012—will make a fine talking point for Jewish Republicans. But Democrats of a more optimistic bent might look to recent history for hope. In 2004, George W. Bush bucked the trend and increased his initially scant Jewish vote by 5 percentage points, compared to a popular-vote increase of 3 percentage points. (Republicans would likely argue that Bush’s increase in Jewish support was hardly an accident, but rather the clear product of his stance as Israel’s leading supporter and an unshakable friend of its former prime minister, Ariel Sharon.) Perhaps that will become the new trend; after all, from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first re-election through Richard Nixon’s resignation, Jewish support for incumbents increased as predictably as it decreased from Watergate to September 11.

Gingrich gamely tried to project optimism. “I am running for president to lead a movement of Americans who will insist on changing Washington so we can renew America,” he announced from the podium. But he made no bones about the straits he is in, and he borrowed from William Faulkner’s Nobel speech to cast himself as a martyr.  “I will endure the challenges,” Gingrich said. “And with the help of every American who wants to change Washington, we will prevail.”

The dominant story line about Gingrich’s campaign implosion last week is that his aides had despaired of weaning him from the influence of his third wife, Callista, whom he chose to squire on a Greek cruise rather than going on hayrides through the cornfields of Iowa. But it is also clear that the mass defections were, as Politico put it, “all about the Benjamins”—or, more specifically, the lack thereof. Campaign finance records aren’t due to be released before July, but according to the Washington Post, the Gingrich campaign didn’t have the $25,000 it needed to enter the crucial Iowa straw poll in August, let alone another $30,000 to buy voter lists, while Gingrich was insistent on flying chartered planes for as much as $500,000 a pop. Gingrich had declined to set up a dedicated finance committee, the paper added, and he wasn’t used to fundraising under the rules passed since he left Congress more than a decade ago—and, in the meantime, he has grown accustomed to enjoying Adelson’s largesse.

In the absence of federal filings, it isn’t clear how much Adelson, who Forbes ranked in March as the fifth-richest man in America, has contributed to Gingrich’s campaign so far. But he has been the top donor to Gingrich’s political advocacy group, American Solutions Winning for the Future, giving more than $7 million, or about 13 percent of the $52 million the group has raised since its inception in 2007. Adelson has been sufficiently invested in promoting Gingrich, especially within the American Jewish community, that he took the time last month to call the editor of New York’s Jewish Week to complain about an article he found unfair.

Yet editorial decisions at local Jewish newspapers have far less chance of influencing the Gingrich candidacy than Adelson’s own fortunes—and, as it happens, Las Vegas Sands, the source of the casino mogul’s immense wealth, is currently under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The probe stems from bribery allegations lodged in a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed by the company’s former operations head in the Chinese enclave of Macau. Las Vegas Sands says it is cooperating, but since the disclosure, the company has lost more than $3.5 billion in value, or more than 11 percent, and last week Deutsche Bank booted the company off its list of short-term buy recommendations.

In other words, the largest single source of Gingrich’s backing is now, at least to some degree, both less flush than he used to be and newly at the mercy of the Obama Administration—a situation that can’t have improved the mood of Gingrich’s cash-strapped strategists as they wondered about where their next paychecks might be coming from. Last year, a person familiar with Adelson’s thinking told me that he wasn’t going to commit to new philanthropic expenditures until Sands stock hit a certain price, though it wasn’t clear just what that price was. At the time, Sands shares were hovering just below $30—a far cry from their 2007 highs of $140 but a vast improvement over their 2008 lows of less than $2—but it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that, if the market really starts to tank, Adelson might wind up sidelining himself politically, too.

As it turned out, Adelson was a no-show at the Beverly Hilton Sunday night. His wife, Miriam, told the audience that he was fighting a bad flu—“He is really suffering, leaking from every corner of the eyes, his nose. Not his ears!” But she conspicuously failed to give Gingrich a shout-out during her turn at the dais, where she accepted the evening’s Ronald Reagan Award for her husband. Earlier in the evening, when Gingrich emerged from a VIP reception to face a horde of television cameras swarming the pre-dinner cocktail bar, she went the other way, a blur of ice-blond hair and brilliant white pantsuit click-clicking through the hotel lobby. “Pay attention to the speech. It is so good. He is such a lover of Israel,” Miriam Adelson told me, in a brief interview near the front entrance. But what about his presidential ambitions? “Let’s not talk about politics,” she said, giving a Mona Lisa smile and shaking her head as she walked away.

It was a response far short of the full-throated, fighting endorsement Gingrich might reasonably have expected from the wife and proxy of his biggest fan—at an event almost expressly designed to facilitate matchmaking between the candidate and Adelson’s fellow Republican Jewish Coalition board members and activists. Gingrich, who characteristically chose to give a 40-minute-long lecture about the history of the Middle East conflict rather than a barnstorming campaign speech, was warmly received by the audience, which obligingly booed mentions of Obama’s name and cheered Gingrich’s repeated statements about not brooking any accommodation with Hamas. But that doesn’t do much to answer the question of who, especially among fiscally conscious Republican donors, would start giving money to Gingrich’s campaign now, in the absence of a credible campaign team. (The pollster Frank Luntz managed to punk Republican Jewish Coalition head Matt Brooks into tweeting, just before Gingrich took the stage Sunday, that he would be taking over the Gingrich command.)

Which raises, for the Republican Jewish Coalition, the uncomfortable possibility that, just as Gingrich’s dependence on Adelson may turn out to be his Achilles’ heel, the group’s willingness to follow Adelson’s lead in favoring Gingrich so early on may ultimately leave it without the influence it craves over a GOP presidential field that remains highly fluid—and whose leading members like Mitt Romney and even the famously pro-Israel maybe-candidate Sarah Palin were elsewhere, enjoying other audiences.

One might think that the vote of one octogenarian and often cranky former New York City mayor may not be a big deal, but Koch has a long and eventful history of involvement with presidential campaigns. He almost perfectly captures the views of a certain type of older—often but not always Jewish—Democrat who is nonetheless skeptical of his party on national security issues. While Koch usually backs his party’s candidate, he also seems to have an uncanny ability to back a Republican—tacitly or explicitly—when the Democrats are going to lose.

In 1980, during his first term as mayor, Koch tortured Jimmy Carter over Carter’s position on Israel. At one point, Carter’s people reached out to Koch and asked him not to say anything about a particular administration action until the president had had a chance to explain himself. Koch obliged and went down to the White House for a meeting with Carter. Unsatisfied with the explanation Carter gave, Koch then continued criticizing the administration, infuriating Carter. In Carter’s White House Diary, he recalled that “Ed Koch made a disgraceful statement in New York, referring to [Secretary of State Cyrus] Vance, [National Security Adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski, [U.N. Ambassador Donald] McHenry, and [Assistant Secretary of State Harold] Saunders as a Gang of Four out to destroy Israel. Cy called him and had some heated words. Koch is almost acting like a fanatic this last couple of days.”

As Carter stumbled toward his 1980 electoral drubbing, Koch demonstrated a particular skill at getting under the president’s skin. Koch later recalled that Carter pulled him aside at a fundraiser and said, “You have done me more damage than any man in America.” One of Carter’s aides told Koch that what was going on inside Koch’s head was more hotly discussed in Washington than the thinking of the Ayatollah Khomeni.

Koch never actually pulled the lever for Ronald Reagan. “I never voted for him, but I loved him,” Koch wrote. In his book Mayor, Koch recounts an appearance with President Reagan at which Koch said: “I am not here to defend Ronald Reagan. But I’ll tell you, I like him. He’s a man of character.” Koch’s approach to Reagan differed from that of Democratic Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, who had denounced Reagan on the same day that Koch praised him. Koch recalls that the difference was not lost on Reagan aide James Brady, who told Koch, quite pointedly, “Now, which one of them do you think we’ll try to help more?” Koch even ran for reelection on the Republican ticket in 1981, although he ran as a Democrat as well. He won overwhelmingly.

Koch was not nearly as sympathetic toward the next Republican president, George H.W. Bush, or to his Secretary of State, James Baker. It was Koch who revealed to the world in a newspaper column Baker’s now infamous remark regarding Jews: “F— ’em. They didn’t vote for us.” Bush himself took notice of the column, writing in a letter to Koch that “I never ever heard such ugliness out of Jim Baker.” (Perhaps he hadn’t, but Koch’s source, the late Jack Kemp, apparently had.) This incident harmed Bush among Jews, but more broadly as well. Bush won only 11 percent of the Jewish vote in 1992, a significant drop from the 39 percent Reagan had attained in 1980. Not coincidentally, with Koch on his case, Bush lost his reelection bid in 1992 to Bill Clinton, whom Koch both “supported and admired.”

The next time Koch bucked his party to back the Republican presidential candidate was also the next time that the Republican candidate won the popular vote. In 2004, Koch backed George W. Bush over John Kerry because of Bush’s stances on the War on Terror, on anti-Semitism, and on Israel. “I believe the issue of international terrorism trumps all other issues,” Koch said and added that he did not “believe the Democratic Party has the stomach and commitment to deliver on this issue.” The anti-Semitism issue was also important. Bush had selected Koch to head the U.S. delegation to an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe conference on combating anti-Semitism in Berlin in 2004. On the third key issue, Israel, Koch wrote that he was “convinced that President Bush will never trade Israel’s special relationship with the U.S. in exchange for political support, be it domestic or international.” At the same time, he “doubt[ed] that John Kerry and the ‘Deaniacs’ who now embrace him would have the same resolve.” Koch added that “most Jewish leaders will concede that of all U.S. presidents, Bush 43 has been the most supportive and protective of the security of the State of Israel.”

In contrast to his more tacit support for Reagan, Koch explicitly endorsed Bush, as he said repeatedly, “even though I don’t agree with him on a single domestic issue,” and spoke on Bush’s behalf in Jewish enclaves in Florida. Koch’s efforts helped Bush improve his showing in the Jewish vote from 19 percent in 2000 to 25 percent in 2004. This improvement in the Jewish vote contributed to Bush’s victories in both Florida and Ohio, two states without which Bush would not have been reelected.

While some Democrats dismissed Koch as a turncoat after 2004, he remained in his mind a loyal Democrat. Although he had supported Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, he endorsed Barack Obama in September of that year. In a prepared statement, Koch said he “concluded that the country is safer in the hands of Barack Obama. Protecting and defending the U.S. means more than defending us from foreign attacks. It includes defending the public with respect to their civil rights, civil liberties and other needs.” And while he had liked certain Republicans in the past, his good feelings did not extend to vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who “fails miserably with respect to her views on the domestic issues that are so important to the people of the U.S., and to me.” In addition, he noted: “Frankly, it would scare me if she were to succeed John McCain in the presidency.”

But as Jimmy Carter learned in the 1970s, getting Koch’s endorsement and maintaining his support are very different things. The first indications of trouble came in an August 2009 Koch column on Real Clear Politics titled “Falling Out of Love with Barack Obama.” In this item, Koch’s concern was not Israel or a security-related issue, but Obama’s approach to health care. Koch expressed concerns about losing “the continued right to purchase and have available insurance that will permit me, no matter my age and physical condition, to purchase with my own money all the medical care I can afford.” His concerns at the time were not enough to drive him away from Obama, though. He saw “falling out of love” as “hopefully, a reversible process.” Indeed, as recently as April 25, he wrote, “I now believe President Barack Obama will be reelected, and although anything can happen between now and Election Day, I expect to be casting my vote for him.”

Koch’s latest piece, however, makes it seem as if the process of falling out of love may now be close to irreversible, especially after the events of the last week. Obama’s tough speech on Israel was followed immediately by strong criticism of Obama even from Democrats and an overwhelmingly positive bipartisan reception for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress. Obama not only lost some face in the back and forth, but he appears to have lost Koch’s backing as well. Given Koch’s long and accurate record of picking presidential winners, this could portend poorly for the president. We are still a long way from the 2012 election, and the Republican field is far from set, but Obama should beware. When Ed Koch goes against his party’s presidential candidate, it is often a very bad sign.

Tevi Troy, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, was a senior White House aide in the George W. Bush Administration.

But the Times, for whatever reason, decided not to delve into the messier parts of David Barton, like his white supremacist past, in which at one point he aligned himself with the Christian Identity movement, which holds, among other things, that the first Jew was born out of Eve’s coupling with the Satanic snake (apparently, there really are no truths outside the gates of Eden). Barton subsequently condemned racism, which he then laid entirely at the feet of liberals. So anyway, if you want to learn about Barton’s embarrassing kookiness, stick with the Times. If you want to know what he is really about and what presidential aspirants like Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Michelle Bachmann are associating themselves with in seeking his consultations, read Michelle Goldberg’s Tablet Magazine profile. Like, now.

Using History to Mold Ideas on the Right [NYT]
History Lesson [Tablet Magazine]

But if every new administration makes mistakes, and learns from them, President Barack Obama’s self-appointed task of bringing peace to the Middle East may get more difficult with the mid-term elections Tuesday, when the House, and perhaps the Senate, will fall into the hands of a Republican party that is poised to push back against an administration that is commonly perceived as less friendly to Israel than its predecessors.

House Republicans have pitched their rhetoric high. Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, for instance, described the current White House as “the most anti-Israel administration in the modern history of the state of Israel.” Indeed, there’s some concern in pro-Israel circles that the bipartisan nature of support for the Jewish state is starting to show cracks. Fifty-four Congressional Democrats (but no Republicans) signed a letter urging Obama to “press for immediate relief for the citizens of Gaza” suffering under Israel’s blockade. A few months later 78 House Republicans wrote a letter to the Israeli Prime Minister expressing their “steadfast support” for him and Israel. The same divide seems to hold true with the electorate as well. An October poll conducted for the Emergency Committee for Israel showed that of “those intending to vote Republican this fall, 69 percent would be more likely to vote for a candidate who was pro-Israel” while only 40 percent of Democratic voters are more likely to vote for a pro-Israel candidate. It appears that the new Congress will be very much in line with the man likely to become its new majority leader, Virginia’s Eric Cantor, the House’s lone Jewish Republican, who recently told the White House that playing “hardball” with Israel “jeopardizes our national security.”

The emergence of Israel as a partisan political football is representative of not only a political difference but a philosophical one as well. One segment of the American political class sees Israel as an exceptional, and like-minded, ally and the other sees it as merely another nation-state—and a problematic one at that. Obama, it seems, is of the latter camp. He came to office with the hardly novel idea that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the Middle East’s central issue and that ending the conflict would cool off the Muslim masses whose hatred of the United States is supposedly tied to Washington’s “unconditional support” for Israel. A peace deal would also be a powerful means—perhaps the only available means, given the improbability of any kind of further American military action in the Middle East—of reducing the strength of the region’s radical actors, especially Iran.

The president pushed the Israelis hard, which only gave the Palestinian Authority incentive not to negotiate but rather to wait for Obama to deliver the Israelis. Domestically, the administration’s bullying of Israel angered some key Democrats, like New York Sen. Charles E. Schumer and many Jewish Democratic donors. Once the midterms are over, Obama will have at least six months before he has to worry about alienating Jewish fund-raisers for his 2012 re-election campaign. Then, as one source in Washington’s pro-Israel community puts it, “we will see what the administration has learned in 18 months; if they’ve understood that the way to move the process forward is to make the Israelis feel confident by embracing them in friendship, and not club Netanyahu like a fish you’re reeling in.”

It’s not clear yet how, or if, the divide over Israel within the administration has been resolved. Both the pro-Israel faction and the faction less friendly to the Jewish state have lost prominent figures (including former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel from the former and James Jones, the national security adviser, from the latter). In another internal fight, it appears that Dennis Ross is gaining the upper hand on George Mitchell, who has dropped his chief of staff, Mara Rudman, who was famously in favor of ratcheting up the pressure on the Israelis. But it was the secretary of State who gave perhaps the clearest indication of where things stand in the administration with one of the most sober assessments in the history of American Middle East diplomacy. “The future holds the possibility of progress,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told guests at the American Task Force for Palestine’s annual banquet last week, “if not in our lifetimes, then certainly in our children’s.”

If the State Department is clearly chastened by the failures of the past 18 months, the fact is that the president makes foreign policy. And this particular commander-in-chief has shown not only a reluctance to delegate important matters to subordinates (as Bush handed off all Middle East policy, save Iraq, to Condoleezza Rice), but also that he is willing to stand his ground to do what he thinks is right and only he can get done, regardless of the political cost. For their part, the Republicans will do what they can to put on the brakes.

Already Eric Cantor has touched off a minor crisis by suggesting that a Republican majority would seek to remove Israel from the foreign operations budget. Cantor’s proposal is to move aid to Israel over to the Pentagon in order to protect it if the GOP seeks to attack the president’s foreign aid budget by cutting funds for states that they believe do not merit U.S. aid. The fact that New York Rep. Nita Lowey, a strong supporter of Israel, has slammed Cantor’s proposal as reckless indicates that this is not about Israel but a political instrument to tie down the executive’s prerogative in making foreign policy.

It’s unlikely the Republicans will push their agenda, or counter-agenda, too far, for in the end their options are quite limited. They can call hearings on Capitol Hill, and they can challenge the White House’s Syria policy by maintaining there a hold on the appointment of the ambassador to Damascus, but too many fights with the administration will stretch the time and resources of the majority. The GOP will need to muster its strength for more pressing concerns than a moribund peace process. Despite the relative quiet in Washington over the last few months about the Iranian nuclear program, this is still a major issue for the GOP as is the deadline for the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan looming in July. The reality is that even when Obama was at the height of his powers he couldn’t force the peace process—not because of a lack of will power and volume, but because there are other political energies at work, some of them far outside the Beltway.

That’s not to say Obama won’t keep pressing. Sources close to Netanyahu’s office say that Obama is already pressuring Israel to extend the freeze. In Washington, some believe that Netanyahu will have a very hard time justifying his refusal. If he could do it for 10 months, what is it about 60 more days that imperils his coalition? If he doesn’t, Israeli sources say, the White House has threatened that it will do nothing to block the Palestinians from unilaterally declaring statehood at the United Nations.

Yet apparently Washington was just showing Jerusalem the instruments of torture while it did the same to the PA—and Abbas, who has much weaker domestic support than Netanyahu, appears to have backed down first. Instead of seeking recognition for a state within the 1967 borders, the PA will present a resolution to the Security Council stating that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal and must be evacuated. The Palestinians recognized they would lose U.S. support if they stepped out on their own and maybe even understood that very few of the member nations that matter most were predisposed to recognize such a state; they would have had more support from, say, Norway than Jordan.

In other words, the PA is trying to force an error from the White House with empty threats of its own. “Unilaterally declaring a Palestinian state is one of those things that comes up often,” says Martin Kramer, the Wexler-Fromer fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. “The other is the prospect of impending violence, the next intifada.” However, as Kramer explains, were another intifada to erupt, Abbas and Salam Fayyad understand that the protection and the foreign cash that have created the West Bank’s economic boom would all go away, and they would be left alone to face Hamas.

The peace deal that Obama wants is already out of his hands. The real check on his ambitions is not a Republican majority in the House but the political forces that rule the Middle East. Fayyadism, or that combination of U.S.-sponsored transparency and accountability, is working on the West Bank—at least until Hamas decides to pull the plug on the PA, which is not going to happen so long as the IDF is sitting there. Insofar as Obama believes the status quo is unsustainable, the only other option is chaos—a chaos that he can bring about by forcing the issue yet again.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is in stasis, for the time being anyway, which presents a golden opportunity for a president faced with a hard-line opposition in control of one or both houses of Congress. Let Obama keep his peace process envoys on the run, going back and forth between Ramallah and Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, and Riyadh, and keep expectations low. Even the smallest concessions will be chalked up as groundbreaking—if, for example, the PA agrees to recognize Israel as a Jewish state or Netanyahu gives more time on the settlement freeze—and if nothing gets accomplished, he can blame it on the Republicans. In the political arena, at least, the end of Obama’s grand ambitions may make him the winner of the next few hands of the Middle East poker game.

“I was in the middle of eating a kosher pastrami sandwich. While I was eating it, they come running and they say, ‘Paladino became gay!’ I said, ‘What?’ And then they showed me the statement. I almost choked on the kosher salami.”

(Let’s pause and note that Levin was eating a pastrami and salami sandwich. I don’t care how kosher it was, he’s about to be dead.)

As for Paladino’s having cited the concerns of his gay nephew? “He discovered now he has a gay nephew?” Levin replied. “Mazel tov! We’ll make a coming-out party!” Sources say he was being sarcastic.

Rabbi Breaks With Paladino Over Apology [NYT]
Earlier: Rabbinic Svengali Quits Paladino

Eric Alterman has a nice response:

Barack Obama, like pretty much every Democrat before him, remains more popular with Jews than with just about any other ethnic group in America, save blacks. His approval rating among Jews, steady in the low 60s, is about 15 percent higher than it is with the goyim. Neoconservatives have been predicting a Jewish turn toward the Republicans since George McGovern only got about two-thirds of the Jewish vote—that’s right, only two-thirds—and yet it never happens. … Even so, on what authority does Blow have it that most American Jews decide their vote purely on the issue of Israel, or that Obama’s policies toward Israel are particularly unpopular with Jews? Blow may be without doubt on these points, but he is also without any reliable evidence.

I don’t think Obama’s somewhat tougher stance on peace-process issues is unrelated (and nor, I’d bet, does Alterman, though he also notes that the Obama administration has facilitated unprecedented military aid and cooperation between the United States and Israel). But the dominant dynamic this year is: Fewer Americans are Democrats; Jews are Americans; therefore, fewer Jews are Democrats.

Oy Vey, Obama [NYT]
Obama’s Silent Jewish Majority [The Daily Beast]
Earlier: Poll Finds Jews Trending GOP

Is this the beginning of a trend? Is it significant even to the midterm elections? Ron Kampeas is skeptical. Though Pew polled over 3000 people, only 60 identified as Jewish, and, according to Kampeas, “mainstream pollsters regard numbers below 250 respondents as unreliable.” On the other hand, that 60 figure represents two percent of the overall sample, closely reflecting Jews’ proportion of the population.

If there were nothing you could point to as an explanation for the jump, you might be more inclined to dismiss the figure. But given the reaction of some in the Jewish community to President Obama’s outreach to the Arab world and calls for an Israeli settlement freeze, as well as what the same poll told us about the (incorrect) suspicions over the president’s heritage, well, it just seems to make sense.

Most importantly, it is overall the most Republican-leaning year since before 2006 (since well before 2006, I’d argue): It would be weird if that didn’t show up in the Jewish polling numbers. While more comprehensive polls will hopefully come out soon, if I had to bet on it, though, I’d say the GOP-friendly trend is real.

Growing Number of Americans Say Obama Is Muslim [Pew]
Poll Suggests Surge in Jewish Support for GOP [JTA]
Earlier: Israel Unmentioned in Sestak Profile
Related: In Defining Obama, Misperceptions Stick [NYT]

• The most prominent elected U.S. official to criticize the Obama administration was Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Virginia). He is the House Minority Whip, a GOP rising star, and the son of an Israeli. [JPost]

• In private, many pro-Israel Jewish politicians have expressed sympathy with Obama and frustration with Israel; at the same time, many have been reluctant to espouse these views all that publicly. [Laura Rozen]

• AIPAC asked its supporters to spread the word that the Obama administration went too far in its criticism of “our partner Israel.” The group’s annual conference begins Sunday in Washington, D.C. [Ben Smith]

• Sarah Palin, who has studied this issue long and hard from her perch on the Council of Foreign Relations, called for a “reset” of U.S.-Israel relations. [Ben Smith]

• The Democratic Party’s official Israeli branch has forcefully criticized Netanyahu and used the opportunity to try to register more Democratic U.S. voters living there. [JPost]

• Reps. Christopher Carney (D-Pennsylvania) and Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) sent a joint letter to Obama arguing he should back off. [Ben Smith]

• Part of the reason more Congressional Democrats have not been behind the administration is they feel it has done a poor job bringing them in on these decisions; many specifically would like a phone call from envoy George Mitchell. [Laura Rozen]

• Rep. Howard Berman (California) and Sen. Ben Cardin (Maryland)—two hawkish Jewish Democrats—stood by Obama and chastised Israel. [Ben Smith]

• Last, but maybe not least, J Street collected over 18,000 signatures on a White House-bound petition, “demonstrating,” the group said, “that large numbers of pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans agree with the Vice President when he says, ‘Sometimes only a friend can deliver the hardest truth,’ and urging the administration to turn this crisis into an opportunity for progress on two states.” [Haaretz]

(By the way, in case you can’t tell, you should really be reading Ben Smith’s and Laura Rozen’s Politico blogs if you want to keep up with this story.)

• The Monsey, N.Y., Beit Din investigating Rabbi Leib Tropper filed a civil suit to get him removed from one yeshiva’s bank accounts. [FailedMessiah]

• A Republican research document, apparently geared toward winning over Ohio’s (not insubstantial) Jewish community, is titled, “Buck-Oy State” and in one place reads, “Ohio Dems Are All Verklempt Thanks to Obama’s Meshugeh Health Care Experiment.” [Ben Smith]

• Paul Krugman notes that Israel’s central bank has, with great success, intervened in its currency in the way America fears China will intervene with its own. [The Conscience of a Liberal]

• Researchers want access to sealed records that, they say, prove that the Catholic Church aided Adolf Eichmann’s escape to Argentina. [JPost]

• Gawker takes down Dan Senor, the Jewish former Bush speechwriter who is considering a run for Kirsten Gillibrand’s Senate seat in New York. [Gawker]

The premise of the piece—titled “The New American Jew on Israel”—is that “what it means to be ‘pro-Israel’ is changing, particularly among younger Jews.” And the corollary of this paradigm shift is that traditional definitions of “pro-Israel”—as represented, say, in polls—have not yet caught up, which could explain the meager 48 percent of Democrats who say they “support” Israel.

For Singal, the organization that epitomizes this New American Jew is, of course, J Street. He reports from a talk J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami gave at the Harvard Hillel:

fear of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wasn’t, for the most part, what had brought them to Cambridge on a rainy February evening.

Rather, they were worried about the grim prospects that face Israel if it can’t make peace with the Palestinians. Given the region’s demographic patterns, absent a two-state solution, Israel will soon have to choose between being a Jewish state and a democratic one.

While J Street does strongly oppose the possibility of Iran getting nuclear weapons, the demographic crisis, not an attack from Iran, is the greatest threat facing Israel, said Ben-Ami.

Some are skeptical about this logic, but: if you support the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish democracy; and you think that the biggest threat to Israel is the demographic problem; and you think that current Israeli settlement policies are forestalling a Palestinian state and therefore a solution to the demographic problem; then you could very well tell a pollster that you don’t “support” Israel in its refusal to freeze West Bank settlements.

Anyway, at some point the argument becomes one of semantics. But just as the Democratic Party would be foolish to tolerate opposition to Israel beyond criticism of specific policies among its prominent politicians, Republicans should be concerned with alienating the increasing number of Jewish voters who see unconditional support for Israel as no support at all.

The New American Jew on Israel [Boston Globe]
Earlier: Is the GOP The Pro-Israel Party?

Well, this is not about that happening, exactly, but a candidate in a California Democratic congressional primary has called for a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict—a decidedly left-wing position that, many say (and I’d be among them), would represent something like the end of Israel. (Oh good, I’ll get both sides angry at me today!) Marcy Winograd, the candidate, has called the two-state solution—the notion of an Israel and a Palestine side-by-side on the land—“unrealistic” and “fundamentally wrong.”

So why isn’t this about the Democrats turning away from Israel? Because Winograd is in a decided minority even among the Democrats, and is not in power, and is likely not going to be in power. In fact, her opponent in the primary, Rep. Jane Harman, is a strong defender of Israel known for wanting to take a harsh line on Iran; she is supported by the very powerful California Democrat Henry Waxman, who, though generally to the left of her, is a staunch two-stater who says, “In Marcy Winograd’s vision, Jews would be at the mercy of those who do not respect democracy or human rights.”

Waxman also said, “I think liberals and progressives should reject” Winograd. I think liberals and progressives do reject Winograd: I think that the poll, which showed only 48 percent Democratic “support” for Israel, reflected tepid support among Democrats for some of Israel’s current policies, not for its continued existence as a Jewish democracy. And as long as Democrats continue to reject Winograd for the most part, then, as I wrote before, Democrats should be unashamed, unembarrassed, and largely unconcerned.

Israel and ‘One-State Solution’ Dominate U.S. Congressional Race [Arutz Sheva]
Earlier: Is The GOP The Pro-Israel Party?

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

• The report also concluded, in stronger language than past agency statements, that the mystery Syrian compound that Israel famously bombed in 2007 was possibly a reactor. [Haaretz]

• Publishing and real-estate tycoon Mort Zuckerman, a very active member of the institutional Jewish-American community, has met with New York Republican Party chair about a Senate run this year. [Ben Smith]

• The “Orthodox Compulsive Disorder” phenomenon, which is just what it sounds like. [New York Jewish Week/Failed Messiah]

• Israel’s United Kingdom embassy has a little fun on Twitter (apropos our previous post). [The Awl]

How Did Christie Do Among Jews? Still Not Totally Sure [JTA]
Earlier: N.J.’s Christie Wins in Deal, Too [Tablet]

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.

Bill Kristol, on his Weekly Standard blog, chose to see the results as more evidence that American Jewry is “foolishly” maintaining “allegiance to a party that includes lots of people who don’t like them much (and who certainly don’t like Israel much).” But, Bill, doesn’t that argument, if it’s true, work against the whole country?

State of the Nation [Boston Review]
Democrats, Republicans and Jews [Weekly Standard]