In the recent elections, Democratic candidates garnered a somewhat smaller-than-usual percentage of Jewish votes. One interpretation of these results not only distorts them drastically but reflects an increasingly misguided mindset about the necessary affinity between Jews and liberalism. Seth Mandel writes:
Just as Darron Smith [in the Huffington Post] thinks blacks who don’t vote for Democrats are in some way voting against their “blackness,” and Ann Friedman [in New York Magazine] can write that Republican women aren’t “truly pro-woman,” the idea undergirding [Emma] Green’s conclusion [in the Atlantic] is that liberalism is political Judaism. That’s insulting to those who take their Jewish faith seriously, and . . . it’s also, crucially, wrong. There has been no major swing of the Jewish vote away from Democrats, and there likely won’t be. But incremental gains [of Jewish votes] by the GOP are not evidence of Jews being less Jewish; they’re exactly the opposite. . . . [Green’s] analysis is just one more example that modern liberalism requires its adherents to sacrifice all other aspects of their identity for The Cause.
Read more on Commentary: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/11/14/the-midterms-the-jewish-vote-and-liberalisms-price-of-admission/