Ben Shapiro: Why Jews Vote Leftist?

4 Comments / 4 Comments

1. @ ArnoldHarris:

   That’s why you can’t predict the future – because you cant accept the present.
   I find Woody Allen and Sarah Silverman are hilarious quite often, Notwithstanding I feel like I want to wring Sarah’s long beautiful neck when I hear her politics. Humour is understanding the human condition, if politics interferes with your basic appreciation of life and art you are a flatlined person.
   This attitude reminds me of the restrictive approach of Jiang Qing’s “Eight model plays” in the cultural revolution – art as patriotic national image is art for the shallow mindwashed.
   ..
   Shapiro didn’t explain anything to my satisfaction. He’s got an obvious agenda.
   Not being religious does not alone make a leftist. G-d help humanity or Israel if they have to rely on G-d or the belief in G-d!
   Also the situation is complicated because they may have voted for economic reform and there is a false equivalence of certain domestic policies and foreign policies being on one platform and called “leftist” they are only equivalated this way because the parties are artificially split this way. The one party ticket idea as a political spectrum is false. It leads to having to support absurd ideas.
   ..
   IMO the problem is that they are from the American high end middle class and are too used to the “doce vita” ie the soft life – that is what make a “foreign policy isolationist leftist”. G-D doesn’t find too many such leftists in foxholes , agnostics or not.

   Most of them will stop being leftists after the next WMD attacks on America and their arrogance (the attitude that it’s nothing to do with them) is gone, But the question is, will it then be too late?

2. I never have been able to connect with the work or even the persona of Woody Allen; partly because I have no appreciation or room in my life for Jews who make a living glorifying fretful and insecure nebbishes.

   My Jewish role models are authentic heroes, not sly worms who use their exalted position as motion picture directors to take advantage of young actors for sexual reaffirmation of whatever sense of real manhood they seem to long for.

   Arnold Harris
   Mount Horeb WI

3. Something about me and my background has always been radically different from most other American Jews I have encountered. My own father taught me to despise socialism as just another warped political philosophy. I learned the rules of my life from him, and not from my mother, an English Jewish girl from a small shipbuilding town in northwest Britain, who came from what most people would call a liberal-leftist family background utterly different from the Russian Jewish peasants and small-town people of my grandfather’s family. That greatly affected my political leanings and connections with Judaism and the Jewish nation.

   In my last year in high school in Chicago in 1951-1952, I joined the school’s conservative club. A group of us signed up to work at the Republican national convention in 1952, which was held that year at the old Stockyards Inn auditorium. Our particular group was there to work as “gofers” for Republican delegates pledged to vote for Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, who was the leading conservative in the United States Senate. Senator Taft lost the nomination to General Dwight David Eisenhower, “I Like Ike” beat his liberal Democrat opponent, Governor Adlai Stevenson in the general election that year.

   In any case, my political loyalties were locked up for life, and I have voted accordingly. I never have voted for a Democrat for the US Presidency, the US Senate, or the US House of Representatives. Moreover, most other causes that I favor, are those of conservatives and even Tea Party members.

   I served for many years as an election volunteer coordinator (EVC) for the National Rifle Association, and I provided testimony before the Wisconsin State Legislature for some 16 years before we elected Governor Scott Walker and a Republican-controlled state legislature, which got us the shall-issue concealed carry law legislation that is now on the law-books of this state and nearly all others.

   I never got involved in so-called civil rights issues, because, frankly, the only civil rights in which I have any interest are the rights of the Jewish nation. I served this country in the United States Army for three years — two years active duty and one year in the US Army enlisted reserves, during and after the Korean War.

   I’m mostly a secular Jewish nationalist. But my wife and I make a regular Shabat evening dinner, with two candles, with the stipulated m’kadesh HaShabat, n’tilat yadaim, lechem min HaAretz, and when the mood strikes us, Stefi and I read Tora from the copy of a Soncino Chumash that we got from the local Chabadnikim. Occasionally, I put on tfillim and recite the shmoneh esreh. And all that actually gives me profound sense of satisfaction that my Aristotelian linear brain cannot explain to me.

   In 1972, after Stefi and I were married, we made plans for an extended overseas trip. We decided to travel first to her home city of Zagreb, the capital city of Croatia, then part of Tito’s Socialist Federation Republic of Jugoslavija, and from there to Israel by way of Italy. We both had applied for grants for a single year of graduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on the western campus not far from the Knesset building. Our grants were supposed to be extendable, but the money ran out, and we had to leave after the first year and we returned to the USA.

   My Jewish education, such as it has been, came to me from multiple sources.

   First, from Aron Rine, the Orthodox Jewish rav in Chicago who schooled Stefi in basic Judaism before we formally entered into Jewish marriage before we left Chicago. I met him once again 15 years later, when he presided over the Brit HaMila for our youngest son Ze’ev Stjepan Harris, who was honored for life that day, because the Sandek was none other than the great Rav Meir Kahane, who was due to arrive in Chicago that day for a debate with some liberal quasi-Jewish idiot, but booked an early aircraft ride to arrive in time for the religious service.

   Second, from Dr Yisrael Eldad, one of the commanders of Lehi — the Stern Gang that had fought the British imperialists who before 1948 had ruled Eretz-Yisrael and who had unfailingly favored the Arab enemy over the Jews. He taught me what I needed to know about authentic Jewish nationalism.

   Third, from Rav Meir Kahane, whom I served as editor of his English-language Kach Newsletter and as publisher of his own Kahane Magazine, and as maintainer of his American and Canadian mailing list.

   Fourth, from the local Chabadnik rav in Madison, Wisconsin, whose parshot I carefully listened to in manu a Shabat morning service at his little shtibl near the University of Wisconsin campus.

   Firth, from more than a few of you fine people who comment on Israpundit.

   Anyway, that’s my Jewish nationalist and conservative American story, for whatever it’s worth.

   Arnold Harris
   Mount Horeb WI

4. Jews can vote anyway they want, but the herd syndrome is a huge problem.
   We visited Sharon’s ranch some years back.
   The family grows sheep from very young age. Two of his holding corrals are near the kitchen entrance to his home. There were some 200 young sheep in one of them.
   All was tranquil until one sheep suddenly broke ranks and rushed out to the rear fence, nowhere. The rest wasted no time to follow… trampling one another.
   Familiar uh?