Jews’ Great Historic Failure: Picking Friends

Over the centuries history can play real tricks, flipping the script on just about anything. In antiquity, for example, it was the rich with kitchens in their homes who ate in and the poor who ate out, as evidenced by the street front fast-food counters at every turn amid the ruins of Pompeii. Jewish civilization though was ancient already when Romulus and Remus were being nursed by a she-wolf, so it’s seen its fair share of turnarounds, betrayals, reversals, cruel surprises and everything in between.

Jewish history is immensely long, grandiose and awe-inspiring, but replete too with a disheartening number of false confidences that resulted in the greatest miseries and setbacks. The promise of the good graces of kings, princes, cardinals, dukes, emirs, pashas and earls—those who prided their word as inviolable as their pride and honor—was broken shamelessly with Jews, the ignominy punctuating the chronicles in pogroms, expulsions, confiscations.

While the opprobrium falls fully on riotous mobs, sometimes acquiescent religious leaders, an aristocracy that turned from friend to enemy with the winds, out of control crusaders, and the like, it’s fair to at least wonder how the Jews themselves could have been deceived so often, in so many places, to such great expense. No matter what the local hetman told them, it can’t have been too surprising for Eastern European Jews to witness, yet again, Cossack horsemen riding into their village with torch and sword. The Jewish people have been double-crossed, back-stabbed, sold down the river like none other, and whatever that says about their false friends it doesn’t paint a great picture of Jewish acumen in choosing allies.

This is hardly a moot subject dredged out of the past; to the contrary, Jewish-Americans are doing it—right now, again. And this time the reproach isn’t earned so much by Judaism’s current enemies, but by the Jewish people who will have finally brought it upon themselves by actively hitching their wagons to the most astoundingly overt anti-Semites, those who live and breathe, eat and sleep, hoping for nothing more than the destruction of Israel abroad and the treading underfoot of the culture of Jewry in the West. Everyone with eyes can see it, except the Jews themselves.

The “liberals” blocking roadways screaming “River to the Sea!”, tearing down posters of Jewish hostages in Gaza, burning Israeli flags, denying the horrific mass sexual assaults and baby murdering atrocities of October 11, aren’t the same liberals of a century ago, decent democratic everymen who honestly stood for the downtrodden, the unionist, the working man. Yet because the liberal of 1924 wouldn’t think of blackballing a Jewish applicant to a posh country club, a hundred years later in spite of Al Sharpton, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Keith Ellison, Linda Sarsour, in the face of decades of leftist progressive thought moving inexorably from support of Jews to now openly vilifying them in 2024, a staggering 75% of the Jewish-American electorate is still voting Democratic, and has every two years for the last three-quarter century.

It’s long past time calling that what it’s become: collective suicide. The Democrat Party cannot make it any more plain that their new rank and file—who tout pregnant men, decry “racist!” math, who consider America’s founders villains rather than heroes—is no friend of devout, hard-working, law-abiding, family-oriented Jewish-Americans and a bitter enemy to the death with regard to the Jewish state. It’s a party that left Jews a long time ago and it’s a great disgrace to witness the extremely rare laziness of Jewish intellectual thought exposed in this unusual instance: the refusal to accept that former friends are now dangerously vicious enemies.

History has turned not just the page but the chapter. It’s not 1924, Calvin Coolidge isn’t president—and the party that is bursting at the seams for Palestine and spewing forth such intense hatred of Israel doesn’t deserve a single Jewish-American ballot cast in its direction.