When I was a kid, which was just about before everyone reading this column was born, Jews were Democrats and goyim (the Yiddish word for non-Jews) were Republicans, and that was the way things were.
Jews also drank Pepsi because Coca-Cola was run by a bunch of anti-Semites, and for the same reason no self-respecting Jew ever drove a Ford.
It goes without saying, of course, but I’ll say it, that Jews would never be caught in a Volkswagen, which happened to be the only German car imported into the United States after World War II. One day a friend parked his Volkswagen minibus in front of our house and my father told him to move it down the street.
Oh, you also didn’t shop at the A&P. They were also anti-Semites, although God knows where that one came from.
It was also understood that Jews couldn’t live in certain suburbs because that’s where Republicans lived. And of course, if you were Jewish you weren’t about to be invited to join the local country club.
Think I’m making this all up? I’m not. Banks didn’t hire Jews, ditto insurance companies, ditto Wall Street firms. Some of the brokerage houses had one Jewish broker who handled all the investment accounts opened by Jews, but he sat quietly in a corner and kept his mouth shut except when he answered his phone.
For all the talk about anti-Semitism on ‘elite’ college campuses, when I taught at Columbia in 1985, one of my friends in the History Department was the first Jewish member on the entire campus to have received tenure. When I was a graduate student at Northwestern in 1967, the History Department had just hired its first Jew.
All that being said, the world has changed. In 1990 or 1991, I was invited to play a round of golf at a country club on Long Island which was what we called a ‘Jewish club.’ When I drove into the parking lot, I could count the number of cars that weren’t BMW’s or Mercedes. I don’t know whether it was intentional or not, but the two Ivy League University Presidents who couldn’t bring themselves to denounce anti-Semitism on their campuses last week may have been the only non-Jews running Ivy League schools.
And by the way, just to make it clear where I stand on this issue, as far as I’m concerned, notwithstanding Elise Stefanik’s vulgar attempt to raise the issue of campus anti-Semitism, she’s still what Grandpa would call a ‘shonde fin dem goyim,’ (read: a Jew whose behavior in front of non-Jews is shameful) because this is a Member of Congress who never misses an opportunity to kiss the fat ass of an anti-Semite named Donald Trump.
And if you think that Donald Trump isn’t anti-Semitic just because he had a Jewish accountant and a Jewish lawyer, then you don’t really understand what anti-Semitism in America is all about. Because it’s not about lamenting the Holocaust or making some nice, cozy comment about Hanukah or some other Jewish religious rite.
Ready? Anti-Semitism and anti-liberal are the same thing. And when a young shithead like Stephen Miller crafts a speech for Trump about how we have to protect America from all those non-Whites that George Soros is bringing into the country, it simply proves that Miller is a self-hating Jew.
Meanwhile, I notice that campus anti-Semitism has become the lead story on virtually every Fox News show. Because if the GOP can shake Jews loose from their traditional liberal moorings and move them into the Republican camp, this may not only result in flipping a few House and Senate seats from blue to red, but even more important, loosen up some of that Jewish money to flow to the Right instead of to the Left.
Seven in ten Jews still consider themselves to be Democrats, which is the largest percentage of blue voters of any ethnic group.
But here’s where things get sticky, because even though the Republican-led House pushed through a resolution saying ‘anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism,’ moat of the Democrat(ic) caucus abstained, which means that supporting Netanyahu’s ‘scorched earth’ policy in Gaza may end up as an issue which doesn’t swing many Jewish votes.
I’m sorry but having been raised to regard any kind of racial or ethnic hostility as being something that Jews cannot condone; I’m not buying into the GOP’s sudden concern to make college campuses safe for Jews.
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