US Jews Feel Threatened by Religious Right

By Michael Conlon
Reuters

Thursday 15 December 2005

Chicago - U.S. Jewish leaders say they are increasingly worried that Christian conservatives want to turn America politically and culturally into a country that tolerates only their brand of Christianity.

"There is a feeling on all sides that something is changing," said Abraham Foxman, director of the New York-based Anti-Defamation League.

"The polls indicate a very serious thing - that over 60 percent of the American people feel that religion and Christianity are under attack," he said on Thursday in an interview.

"Some are saying we are attacking (Christianity). This whole movement is not anti-Semitic or motivated by anti-Semitism. But sometimes unintended consequences are much more serious than intended" he added.

Foxman recently arranged a meeting in New York involving six Jewish organizations to discuss the problem. He said that while participants did not agree on the exact level of the problem, they felt a strategy was needed.

"It's not a war room strategy," he added. "It's to understand what's out there."

He said Jews are a people of faith but are opposed to anyone who would say only they know the truth and want to impose it on everyone else.

While every December brings disputes over what to call the "holiday season" and its trappings, the level of lobbying by those who fear Christmas is becoming something generic has been particularly high this year.

But the issues raised by Foxman and others goes much deeper into American society, ranging from challenges to teaching evolution to bans on abortion and same-sex marriage or deciding

What kind of people who should serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Every room (from bedroom to classroom) in the American mansion is under assault to impose either de facto or de jure a Christian theocracy - I call them Christocrats," said Rabbi James Rudin, former head of interreligious activities for the American Jewish Committee.

"They are people who believe there should be a legally mandated Christian nation, where the concept of separation of church and state is weakened or abandoned," he added.

Rudin said he has met pastors "who say that Jesus Christ is the ultimate leader of America and that God's law trumps the Constitution ... I'm very concerned."

While far from all evangelical Christians hold those views, he said, the influence of those who do is strong.

Rudin, whose book "The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right's Plans for the Rest of Us" will be published in January by Avalon, said those with a theocratic agenda are not anti-Semites, and in fact some of them are among the strongest supporters of the state of Israel.

But he said they are Christians who see secular humanists and globalists as their enemies and who feel they are being attacked.

Mathew (cq) Staver, general counsel of the Florida-based Liberty Counsel, a group which backs conservative Christian causes in court and which has been particularly active in Christmas-related issues, says "there is absolutely no effort that I'm aware of to theocratize America or put down other faiths to expand Christianity."

He credits the increased activity surrounding Christmas issues this year to three years of building an organization over the matter.

"People have said enough is enough," he said, citing such incidents as naming Boston's Christmas tree a "holiday tree" and the publication of a sales catalog by a major retailer which featured Kwanza and Hanukkah gifts but made no mention of Christmas.

President George W. Bush, who describes himself as a born-again Christian, also faced criticism recently for sending out cards wishing people a happy "holiday" season.

"This clearly demonstrates that the Bush administration has suffered a loss of will and that they have capitulated to the worst elements in our culture," William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights told the Washington


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DECLINE OF JEWISH SOCIAL CONSCIENCE

LARRY DERFNER , JERUSALEM POST - As an American-born Jew who grew up in
an East European immigrant, Left-liberal household, I'm very happy to
say that democratic socialism has become the rising tide in South
America. . . There was a time, up to about 30 years ago, when I would
have been part of a worldwide Jewish rooting section for the South
American socialist upheaval. What's more, the assumption would have been
that South American Jews were heavily involved in the movement, and Jews
all over would have been worried for their safety at the hands of the
continent's old, wealthy, fascistic elite.

But world Jewry has changed, in Israel and everywhere else. Today its
voice is the voice of wealth and power. The strongest Jewish reaction to
what's happening in South America - to the extent that influential Jews
know what's happening there - is alarm. Fear. Fear that this poor
people's movement could spread to other parts of the world, and endanger
the wealth and power of all the Jews whose attitude toward the poor is
more or less the same as the Bush administration's.

I know - 70% of American Jews vote Democrat. But they don't offer much
dissent anymore on the subject of poverty. When Jews were struggling
immigrants in America, their economics was socialism. For their children
and grandchildren, it was liberalism. Today, for the immigrants'
great-grandchildren, it's conservative, businessman's capitalism.

When the American labor movement was born in the early 20th century, New
York's Jewish immigrants were indispensable to it. This week, with the
city's subway workers going on strike, the dominant voice of New York
Jewry seems to be that of Republican billionaire Mayor Michael
Bloomberg. "This selfish strike is illegal," he warned. "We live in a
country of laws where there can be severe consequences for those who
break them. Union members are no different."

And in South America, the only Jews who might gain the sympathy of world
Jewry are the prosperous, those who would stand to lose some of their
wealth, even if only by higher taxes, in the new economic order. . .

When I came to this country 21 years ago, being a socialist - as
distinct from being a communist - was a solidly Israeli thing to be. The
prime minister at the time, Shimon Peres, made a point of describing
himself as one. Israelis weren't saints, they weren't monks - they
envied the wealth and comforts of Western Jewry. But fighting this envy
was the pride they took in the lack of pretension and nonsense in their
way of life, and the contempt they felt for the shallow, selfish lives
of wealthy Jews abroad. Yeah, well, times have changed, haven't they?
Today Diaspora Jews and Israelis are of like minds, all going for the
gelt, all looking out for No. 1, all agreed that the poor will always be
with us, so let's maybe throw them a bone (and put up a plaque). Most
important, we are all agreed that the world is divided into the haves
and have-nots, and we - Jews of the Diaspora and Israel together - have
become the natural allies of the haves, and the natural enemies of the
mobilized have-nots.

And it's not just the Palestinian issue or radical Islam that divides
world Jewry from the Third World. It's also the assimilation of American
Jewry into the conservative economic and political establishment of
their country, and Israeli Jewry's identification and connection with
it. You can add the Russian Jewish oligarchs to the mix. You can also
throw in the leadership of Jewish organizations across the Diaspora,
which are basically plutocracies - societies ruled by the rich. . .

I don't know if Amir Peretz is as pure as he makes himself out to be. I
don't agree with everything he says, I don't know if his policies would
work, I don't know if he would make a good prime minister. But I do know
that for the first time in a long time, there is a mass Jewish movement
that stands for something the Jewish people once stood for, but don't
any longer: Compassion for the weak. Identifying with the weak,
instinctively, in their fights against the powerful. I grew up with the
understanding that this, above anything else, is what it means to be a
Jew. It's the social meaning of our history. We've forgotten it, and
it's time we remember it again.

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