Trailing in Polls, Sarkozy Counts on Jewish Support
By Robert Zaretsky, THE FORWARD
Like the United States, France will choose a president this year. Little more than two months away from the elections, the conservative president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is running behind the Socialist candidate, François Hollande. Several other candidates are polling well: Marine Le Pen of the extreme right-wing Front National hovers at about 20%, followed by the centrist candidate, François Bayrou, and by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who represents a coalition of parties to the left of the Socialists.
If this were the United States, the Jewish vote would fall heavily on the left side of the spectrum. After all, American Jews have historically voted in overwhelming numbers for Democratic presidential candidates; in 2008, Barack Obama won nearly 80% of the Jewish vote. American Jewry’s attachment to liberalism seems to be one of the constants of politics in our country— even when it seems against that population’s economic interests. In a way, the corollary to the question “What’s wrong with Kansas?” is “What’s wrong with the Upper West Side?”
It is equally tempting to ask “What is wrong with Paris?” A recent article in the newspaper Le Figaro announced that the French-Jewish vote falls mostly toward the right. During the previous election, held in 2007, it appears that a significant number of French Jews, particularly those living in Israel, voted for Sarkozy. According to Jérôme Fourquet, director of the French polling organization IFOP, there remains a “pronounced preference” for the right among French Jews. In fact, after observant Catholics, Jews (observant or not) represent the strongest pillar of support for Sarkozy. More than 40% plan to vote for the UMP, Sarkozy’s party, far outstripping the party’s general support, tottering at a feeble 26%.
Is it possible, then, that “Jewish vote” is, like “French toast,” a phrase that gets lost in translation somewhere over the Atlantic? Not surprising, there is little agreement on the answer. Arthur Goldhammer, a veteran commentator on French politics, thinks the term isn’t really an apt one for describing how French Jews vote.
“Among my French Jewish friends,” he observed, “the range of political attitudes is quite wide, much wider than among my American Jewish friends, all of whom are liberal democrats.” But, he noted, there is a far greater range of options in France. “Apart from the Front National,” he suggested, “there is nothing that is ‘beyond the Pale’ in the way that American Republicans have become for many Jews (although I suppose American neoconservative Jews stand as an exception to this rule).”
Along with the greater variety of political parties, the variety of Jews is also great. As much as half of the French Jewish community, which numbers about 600,000, is Sephardic, and they tend to have their ancestral roots in Muslim countries, North Africa in particular. As a result, their attitude toward the Middle East, not to mention toward French Muslims, differs dramatically from that of their Ashkenazi peers. This is one reason that French and American Jewry seem to come from two different worlds: Quite simply, they do. For Pierre Haski, editor-in-chief of the French online journal Rue89, the difference is telling: American Jews, he notes, “have a very remote relationship with the Arab and Muslim world, even if the dividing line of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the same.”
Born in a Tunisian-Jewish family, Haski moved to France as a teenager. As a student he started on the left — he jokes that in the 1960s, he “felt more Maoist than Jewish” — and during his long and distinguished career in journalism he has remained on the left: Rue89 has been a merciless critic of Sarkozy’s government; yet Haski is an outlier. Many of his fellow “Tunes,” which is the moniker given to French-Tunisian Jews, have moved steadily toward the right over the past 20 years, as have their Algerian and Moroccan peers. Jolted by the experience in 2005 of rioting youths, many of whom were of North African ancestry — setting ablaze cars and buildings, convinced that the French left’s criticism of Israel’s policies in the occupied territories is a stealth form of anti-Semitism and worried that France’s growing Muslim population threatens its secular traditions — these Jews are rallying to law and order politicians on the right, like Sarkozy.
For this reason, Haski insists on the reality of a “Jewish vote” in France. Of course, he acknowledges, this is tantamount to heresy in his country. “It’s supposed to be an infamy to reason in community terms in relations to political choices in secular France.” Of course, if IFOP is right, 40% hardly represents a monolithic, or even near-monolithic, vote. It is equally important to recognize that just as there were Roosevelt Jews in the United States, there remains an enduring tradition of Mitterrand Jews in France. One need only invoke the name of Léon Blum to recall the historical attachment between French Jews and socialism.
Yet 40% remains a significant number. The irony implicit in Haski’s claim is that the French-Jewish vote is the mirror image of the American Jewish vote. And the French reflection might soon be distorted even further to the right. In her quest for respectability and support, Marine Le Pen has distanced herself from her father’s anti-Semitism — a distance that Jean Marie Le Pen, with his repeated verbal “gaffes,” nevertheless keeps shortening. Her recent trip to the United States, when she met the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, and her desire to travel officially to Israel are just two signs of her efforts to gather the support of French Jews.
Official Jewish organizations like CRIF, the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions, continue to reject Le Pen’s efforts at a rapprochement, but that may change when the CRIF’s own leadership changes over the next few years. Moreover, Le Pen’s calls for an alliance have not gone unrequited in other quarters. An organization that calls itself Union des Français Juifs was recently created for the express purpose of supporting Le Pen’s presidential ambitions.
Whether this new organization has the support of anyone other than its founder, Jacques Rosen, is unclear. Still, its very existence, along with the rightward movement of French Jewry in general, does raise an important question. If liberalism is the religion of secularized American Jews, is it possible that illiberalism will become the religion of greater numbers of secularized French Jews? This spring’s elections may offer an answer.
Robert Zaretsky is a professor of history at the Honors College at the University of Houston. His most recent book is “Albert Camus: Elements of a Life” (Cornell University Press, 2010).
Yamit, you should long ago have written off most of the American Jews, unless you want to be counted as self-delusional. Most American Jews are little more than ass-kissers for this or that leftist gang seeking national power. Obama comes from a family background that makes him one of the most anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish presidents in recent US history. But who kisses his ass the most, if not the liberal Jews of this country? These people are not made of the stuff that Zionism really needs, and having known them and their kind for almost 78 years, I doubt they ever will change.
Get this through your head, Yamit, now and forever more. Israel is an independent state, brought to life by the blood and sacrifices of the Jews who came into the country in the before, during and after Israel’s War of Independence, along with the successive aliyot that followed in the past 60 years. You can count on nobody outside Israel — Jews or otherwise.
Stop depending on America, Yamit. The US government, whether it is headed by a Barack Hussein Obama Jr, a George Washington, a Calvin Coolidge, or a Ronald Reagan, is mainly concerned about American interests and American issues. Start leaning on them a little too much, and you will learn that you are leaning on a weak reed.
And stop dreaming of turning into Zionist heroes our particular American version of the Jewish leftist toadstools you find all across the diaspora. Only relative handfuls of them ever will migrate permanently to Israel.
Instead, grow your own aliya right there in Israel, preferably right there in Yehuda, Shomron, Golan and Yerushalayim ha-shalem. The Jewish population of Israel doubles approximately every 35-38 years. In time, well before the end of this century, it can be doubled first to more than 12 million, then to about 25 million. The never-ending impossibility of ever coming to serious peace with the Arabs will foment the armed attacks against you that will give you the excuse — and the imperative — to invade the Arab lands from which these attacks are launched, seize more and more of these lands, run off the Arabs, annex these as territories of the State of Israel, then populating them with the increasing numbers of the future Israeli population. That is the only way you ever will have defense in depth against your permanent Islamic enemies.
That suggestion may not sound nice to liberals, but who gives a damn what they think?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
“The lemming is a small animal, about the size of a rat. The lemming is a strange animal with a very strange custom. The lemming, every few years, gathers together with a great many other lemmings, and they all march together – to the sea. The lemming and all the other lemmings march shoulder to shoulder and when they reach the sea they do a very strange thing: They jump in and drown. The lemming is a very strange animal and no one can understand it.”
True Jews are not small animals the size of a rodent. 😉
Harris you could be my poster child for why Israelis should write you Americans off. We Jews here in Israel have been imbued with a false belief and conception that while we intuitively if not cognitively, Israeli Jews understand we can never depend on the non Jew, but believe we could depend on other Jews.
Having grown up in America and in-light of our recent history that is no longer the case.
IMO; Any Jew whose first and primary loyalty is not to other Jews and the Jewish nation is not a Jew. Most of those like you TG, will be gone within a generation or two.
There is no difference between Jewish Lemmings who always vote Democratic and Jewish Lemmings who always voted Republican.
Conservative manure stinks just as much a Liberal manure. That you are proud of your past political voting picks does you no credit. That you are proud to be an American first with your national loyalties puts you and all other similar Americans in the ‘Chabdahu v’chashdehu’ – meaning, ‘honor them and suspect them.’ , category!
One of the reasons Some Jews had for military avoidence was in WWI when Loyal German and Austrian Jews fought for their respective countries against Loyal French, British and American Jews fighting for their countries. Result being Jews killing other Jews. Most of the Jews in the Abraham Lincoln Brigades fought against Fascist Spain but did not lift a finger for Jews in the Holocaust or in Israels war of Liberation in 48′.
They may be many things but were lousy Jews.
MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.
TEKEL: You have been weighed in the balances, and
found wanting;
The first US presidential election I was permitted to vote in was in 1956, when I was 22 years old. Back in those years, nobody under 21 years of age could vote. In that and all succeeding presidential elections, I voted Republican. That means Eisenhower, Nixon three times, Goldwater, Ford, Reagan twice, GHW Bush twice, GW Bush twice, McCain. It also means I will be doing the same this year, preferably for Romney, but if I have to, then either Santorum or Gingrich.
But irrespective of my right-wing Jewish nationalism, the first question I ask is: “Which one is best for the United States of America?” If I lived in Israel, then the question would be: “Which one is best for Medinat Yisrael?”
I have no clear idea why so many Jews got infected by socialism or its modern successor, slush-mouth liberalism, or that urine-coated stuff about tikun ha-olam. Being exactly what someone once described me as an “ordinary garden-variety delicatessen Jew”, I never developed any interest whatsoever in fixing the world; only in taking care of myself, my family, my community, my people, my country. More or less in that order. And when I served in the US Army for three years, back 60 years ago, my concerns were limited to myself, and my buddies in the same unit, and keeping clear of officers. Nor do I have any apologies for any of that whatsoever. I’m as selfish as they come, with flags waving and banners snapping in the breeze, as some author once wrote.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Within the US there are also quite different voting patterns among different Jewish groups. Russians, former Israelis, Persians, Syrians, Cubans and the Orthodox, all vote to the right of the third and fourth generation Eastern European secularized majority. The above groups all ask themselves, what my great grandparents asked in Yiddish, “Is it good for the Jews?”
But who speaks Yiddish today? Certainly not the readers of “The Forward”!
In Canada, Harper does well with the Jewish vote too.
Yea….but roughly 70% are, and that is just a fact of life. At the end of the day,it’s ironic, when it concerns the survival of Zion,isn’t it?
Right and Left.. Both Enemies of Jews
There is a story about a wagon driver for one of the Rebbes in Europe.
He was asked the difference between left and right in politics.
As the wagon approached a pile of horse manure he said, “the wagon wheel splits the pile in two but the left half and the right half stink the same way”.
French Jews Side With Sarkozy
Trailing in Polls, Incumbent Counts on Jewish Support
Read more: http://www.forward.com/articles/151738/#ixzz1n7xWFgYO
Three observations:
A-With ‘Friends’ like ‘Sarkozy’, who needs enemies?
B-Jews in the diaspora have a lot in common. They will fight to their last breath to stay in the exile and thus in the end are doomed.
C- They can’t be depended upon and should be written off by Israel and Israeli Jews.