Why so many American Jews mistrust Sarah Palin

Some evangelical Christian friends of mine were genuinely surprised to hear that many American Jews were scared of Sarah Palin. (After all, she loves Israel. How could we be frightened?) In the following email, written today, one day before The Election, I tried to explain:

As for Palin... I don’t think her being a strong woman is a negative for the typical Jewish voter. After all, Israel had women in the military long before the US did, and Israelis revere Golda Meir. You ask why Jewish voters are scared by her. Speaking very, very generally: As a whole, Jews in this country tend to be liberal. So, when Palin expresses a strong (and to her credit, uncompromising) pro-life stance, most Jews are immediately turned off -- especially older Jews who remember the pre-Roe v. Wade era. Choice tends to be a fundamental issue for Jewish voters, and that alone is a deal breaker for most Jews considering a McCain-Palin ticket.

Jews tend to have few qualms about birth control, and we’re frequently comfortable discussing sex with our kids. While no one wants their teen daughter to become pregnant, Palin’s abstinence-only beliefs seem unrealistic and naïve to us.

As Jews, we tend to revere education and intellectualism. (Sex education, as education, fits in there somewhere.) In the diaspora, it’s been necessary to flee from country to country from time to time, and you can’t take land or even a small business with you. Education, however, transports nicely, and the rabbis spent centuries exercising their minds parsing and critiquing the Torah. (To critique is to be Jewish?) The point is that when we hear that Palin struggled to get through community college, and took 5 tries to get through college altogether, a teeny tiny little red flag goes up for us. And when we hear that she believes that dinosaurs coexisted with humans within the last 6,000 years -- which flies in the face of scientific evidence and the theory of evolution -- we wince. When she discounts 99% of scientific opinion and says that climate change is not caused by humans, we are disturbed. When Katie Couric asks her what publications, newspapers, magazines, etc. she reads and Palin can’t come up with a single one, a huge red flag goes up for us. (No, those are not red, Communist flags. Contrary to what Rush Limbaugh may believe, liberalism and communism are not synonymous.)

Having suffered injustice for thousands of years, American Jews are keenly attuned to matters of civil rights and Constitutionality. So when we hear Palin misstating the duties of the vice president and bizarrely attacking the media for trampling her first amendment rights, the flags grow larger.

Jews have a long tradition of activism and community organizing; many Jews fought in the civil rights movement. So when we hear Palin belittling Obama for his own work as a community organizer in no less a predominantly African-American community, we are turned off.

When we learn that Todd Palin was a member of an Alaskan separatist movement, many of whose members hold views to the right of John Birch -- and we learn that Sarah has addressed these separatists and given them her blessing -- alarm bells go off.

We are also alarmed when we learn that the founder of Jews for Jesus spoke to Palin’s Wasilla congregation and described terrorist attacks on Israel as God’s judgment on Jews for not embracing Christianity.

It’s not necessarily fair to attribute such beliefs to Sarah Palin herself, but all these little flags together make Jews nervous. McCain had said, on his own, prior to selecting Palin as VP, that America is a Christian nation, and I believe that most Jews were willing to chalk that up to rhetoric. But with Palin on the ticket, such statements take on considerably more weight. Obviously Jews do not believe that America is a Christian nation. Judeo-Christian maybe, but not Christian. But the upshot is that we end up feeling excluded -- in our own country.

The huge irony here is that if Obama were Jewish (and white), he would be the ideal son-in-law for most Jewish parents: Ivy League educated, president of the Harvard Law Review, professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, published author, devoted father of two great kids, etc. To quote Joe Biden, he’s clean and educated.

I’d be curious to hear from you guys why evangelicals are so frightened of Obama, whose pro-choice views match Lieberman’s (whom you like), and who is more Christian and church-going than McCain (who admitted to not being very religious). I would have thought that a practicing Christian candidate would trump a non-practicing Christian candidate, and certainly a Jewish candidate.

Whew. I ended up writing a lot. Anyway, I enjoy this sort of dialogue, and wish there were more of it in our country. To quote Obama (and you’ll have to forgive me): “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America.”