I have been dealing with certain health matters the past two months, so have been a bit absent from these pages. But the news of Pres. Joe Biden’s Easter sacrilege, coming on top of the outrageously disgraceful performances these past two weeks by New York Sen. Charles Schumer and some Hollywood guy who got awarded for making yet another movie leveraging the Holocaust — this one, a Holocaust movie bereft of Jews — and then leveraged the Six Million to “refute” his Judaism and Israel, brings me to the keyboard to discuss apostasy.
I have much to say below about my own religious community’s shameful apostates, but I also wonder about others. Biden proclaims himself a devout Catholic. Nancy Pelosi often began her political comments with the words “As a Catholic. . .” And, “As A Catholic,” both Biden and Pelosi — and a massive host of other public Democrat Catholics — promote and have legalized abortion on demand, gay marriage, transgender human-torso sabotage, secular anti-religiosity, and so much more that flies in the face of the Catholic Church’s teachings.
Nor is it only Biden and Pelosi but one prominent Catholic lawmaker after another: former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, former Secretary of State John Kerry, Sen. Cory Booker, Sen. Tim Kaine, Texas Rep. Robert (“Beto”) O’Rourke, Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, Sen. Dick Durbin, the Kennedy family of Massachusetts, Sen. Patty Murray, Sen. Ed Markey, Sen. Jack Reed, Sen. Bob Menendez, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, dozens of pro-abortion House members like Ted Lieu of California, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and just so many others among American leftist celebrities, entertainers, and media personalities.
As a Jew who often is asked by non-Jews about George Soros, Ben and Jerry, Bernie Sanders, Schumer, and other despicable apostates, I likewise ask: So what’s with that?
Or why did America’s most conservative voting bloc of all — White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Southerners — continually elect exclusively Democrats, only Democrats, nothing but Democrats, to the United States Senate and their respective governors’ mansions for 120 years from 1860-1980?
I have posted this list before. During the Civil War, Lincoln and the Republicans wanted to end slavery, while the Democrats wanted to preserve slavery. As a result, understandably, the South became uniformly Democrat in the 1860s. However, as another four score and seven more years passed, and then decades more, Deep South Christian conservative loyalty to Democrats made no sense. The Democrats had abandoned them and became the party of the Left, while the Republicans had become the party of social conservatism and religious faith.
The Deep South was socially, culturally, religiously, and politically conservative — the Christian “Bible Belt.” Yet, incomprehensibly, Dixiecrats still ruled the South for 125 consecutive years as Southern White Protestant conservatives kept electing only Democrats until the 1980s. As a representative “snapshot,” consider these unfathomable results listing all the key statewide winners in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana through 40 years from the 1940s and through the entire decade of the 1970s:
Alabama:
Gov. Frank Dixon, Gov. Chauncey Sparks, Gov. Jim Folsom, Gov. Gordon Persons, Gov. Jim Folsom, Gov. John Malcolm Patterson, Gov. George Wallace, Gov. Lurleen Wallace,Gov. Albert Brewer, Gov. George Wallace, Gov. Fob James, Gov. George Wallace,
Sen. John H. Bankhead II, Sen. George Swift, Sen. John Sparkman, Sen. Howard Heflin, Sen. J. Lister Hill, Sen. James Allen, Sen. Maryon Pittman Allen, Sen. Donald Stewart
Mississippi:
Gov. Paul B. Johnson, Sr., Gov. Dennis Murphree, Gov. Thomas Bailey, Gov. Fielding Wright,,Gov. Hugh White, Gov. James Coleman, Gov. Ross Barnett Gov. Paul B. Johnson, Jr., Gov. John Bell Williams, Gov. William Waller, Gov. Cliff Finch, Gov. William Winter, Gov. William Aillain,Gov. Ray Mabus
Sen. Theodore Bilbo, Sen. James Eastland, Sen. Wall Doxey, Sen. John Stennis, Sen. James Eastland
Louisiana:
Gov. Sam Jones,Gov. Jimmie Davis, Gov. Earl Long, Gov. Robert Kennon,Gov. Earl Long, Gov. Jimmie Davis, Gov. John McKeithen, Gov. Edwin Edwards, Sen. William Feazell,Sen. Russell B. Long, Sen. Allen Ellender, Sen. Elaine Edwards, Sen. J. Bennett Johnston
There were approximately 50 statewide winners for governor or United States senator in deeply red conservative White Protestant Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana during the 40 years and more between 1940 and 1980. (Some, like the Wallaces of Alabama, won more than once, as they returned from enforced hiatus after being temporarily “termed out.”)
Of those 50 elected statewide in the Deep Red South, all but one were Democrats.
So none of this makes sense, and yet it makes perfect sense. Once a demographic attaches to a party, it sticks to it like barnacles. It was the same in Israel, where even religious right-wing Sephardic immigrants from Arab lands regularly voted for the elite Ashkenazic socialist mafia that hated and excluded them — until the 1977 “revolution” that saw them turn to Menachem Begin and the right.
I do not feel comfortable, as an Orthodox rabbi, overly commenting and opining theologically on the rot that finds the Biden White House declaring Easter Sunday “Transgender Day of Visibility.” I am disgusted by it, and I deeply empathize with people of the Catholic faith whose holiest day was thus desecrated at the highest echelon of government.
I know what it has felt like for Jews to wake up on Yom Kippur (1973) or the Shabbat of Simchat Torah/Shmini Atzeret (last October 7) to learn that Israel has been sucker-punched by war on those holiest of days.
If I were an American Catholic leader, I suppose I would declare Monday a day of national fasting and mourning. But that is not my place.
Instead, I address the matter of my own community’s apostates. Bernie Sanders is a communist. I am not calling him a pejorative. That simply is what he is. He has excluded himself from Judaism. He associates warmly with Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and other anti-Semites of their ilk. It is what it is. I have written about him here.
I also have written about Schumer, warning years ago that he is an ethnic Jew but godless. He is affiliated with a “reform Judaism” temple whose spiritual leader, Rachel Timoner, is an ultra-woke lesbian, conducted the lesbian marriage of Schumer’s daughter, and other Schumer life-cycle events. As reported by investigative journalist Daniel Greenfield: “Rachel Timoner is an activist with such anti-Israel groups as J Street, T’ruah and co-founded the New York Jewish Agenda leftist organization alongside Sharon Kleinbaum who faced an exodus from her ‘temple’ after saying Kaddish for Hamas terrorists with a mission of fighting the city’s Orthodox Jews.”
Schumer manipulates the accident of his Jewish birth for political value. As a Brooklyn politician, he needed to be a Jew to climb the first baby steps up the ladder of political cronyism in his ethnic enclave. So he succeeded Stephen Solarz, of Syrian Jewish heritage, to the New York State Assembly and then Elizabeth Holtzman to Congress when she vacated her seat to seek the U.S. Senate. In time, he used that same Jewish ethnicity to garner Jewish votes from New York Jews when he sought his U.S. Senate seat. He came up with a false campaign line, saying that “Schumer” is a name that sounds like the Hebrew word for “Guardian”: “Shomer.” And he told his pro-Israel Jewish electorate that’s what he is: Schumer the Shomer Yisrael — the Guardian of Israel.
The Bible, in the Psalms of David, tells all who know its contents that there is but One Shomer Yisrael, but One Guardian of Israel: “Behold, the Guardian of Israel [G-d Almig-ty] neither slumbers nor sleeps.” Psalm 121:4.
But what of the surname “Schumer”? What, then, does “Schumer” mean? From Ancestry.com:
Schumer Name Meaning
Swiss German: probably an occupational name for a dairy man from his activity of milking cows which produces foam from Middle High German schūm German Schaum. North German (Schümer): nickname from Middle Low German schumer ‘good-for-nothing vagabond’. North German (Schümer): habitational name for someone from Schümm in Rhineland.
Source: Dictionary of American Family Names 2nd edition, 2022 (Italics added.)
Good-for-Nothing Vagabond. We report; you decide. (Please note: I never mock or comment on people’s names, but Schumer has made a public career off mistranslating that name.)
So what is with Jews like Charles and that other fellow who made that practically judenrein Holocaust movie that is now outside my zone of interest?
The truth and reality is that, like most stereotypes, facts often conflict with assumptions. Jews all over the world actually tend toward conservatism because authentic Judaism inclines that way. Jews in the United Kingdom overwhelmingly have been voting Conservative over Labour. Jews in the former Soviet Union helped bring down Communism by fleeing from the U.S.S.R.; those millions are the most anti-Communist people in the world. And the country most associated with Jews — Israel — is regularly panned by America’s leftist media for being “extreme right-wing.”
So it turns out that America is the outlier when it comes to Jews. But, first, don’t forget that a great many prominent American Jews are socially, politically, or religiously conservative and traditional. Mark Levin is a proud Jew. And Dennis Prager. And Ben Shapiro. And Michael Savage. And the 1,000 synagogues of the Orthodox Union. And the 150 synagogues of National Council of Young Israel. And the 2,500 rabbis of the Coalition for Jewish Values. And the 1,000 rabbis of the Iggud HaRabbonim / Rabbinical Alliance of America. And all the others whose press releases the leftist mainstream media blackout.
But, still, what about the apostates?
There is much to say, more for a book than an article. But we begin with reflecting on the tragic mistake of the Republican Party of a century past, when the 3.25 million Jews who comprise more than 90 percent of American Jewry arrived here from Eastern Europe. The Democrats welcomed the immigrants with open arms, as Democrats do when more sophisticated Americanized voters abandon them, and the ultra-snooty white-shoe crowd of Republicans barred Jews from their hotels and country clubs, barred Jewish attorneys from their law firms, and barred Jewish doctors from admittance to practice in hospitals. (It is said that Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a Christian born of a Jewish father, once was barred from an exclusive golf course when he tried to join with three associates as a foursome for 18 holes. He retorted: “Only one of my parents was Jewish, so can I play nine holes?”)
So Jews lined up as Democrats. Makes perfect sense. And once that happened, Jews behaved exactly as did American White Anglo-Saxon Southern Christians, attached to a political party like barnacles even though that party long since abandoned them while the other party opened its doors warmly.
And so we see the Jewish move beginning to the GOP, just as it took 120 years in Dixie for the Bible Belt to get the memo. Orthodox Jews voted for Trump by 83-14 percent in 2020. A Pew study confirmed that Orthodox Jews register as Republican over Democrat by 75-20 percent. The Orthodox community is the harbinger of the rest because the non-Orthodox fall off and disappear within a generation or two.
There is one more thing. Jews like Charles the Good-for-Nothing Vagabond Guardian and that guy who directed that Holocaust movie outside my zone of interest are caught in a bind. So are Bernie Sanders and Ben and Jerry. They are Jewish. Everyone around them knows they are Jewish. They waited too long to dissociate publicly. But they want so much to fit in with their woke progressive friends. Movie directors need to be woke to win Hollywood awards or even just to get funding. Schumer needs to be as far left as possible to hold his seat as chief Senate Democrat. At this late stage of his public career he cannot hide that he is Jewish. And he knows that the likes of Dick Durbin are only a step away from taking the reins from him if he is “too Jewish,” too pro-Israel in a party that is in turmoil, where maniacs are throwing around words like “Genocide” as though it were a card game or a TV show without any regard to the definition.
So people like Schumer and the Hollywood apostate will do what they will to downplay and negate their Jewishness, whether by “refuting” their Judaism or demanding of Israel what they never would demand of any other country on earth: that the voters in a democracy allied with the United States tear down their freely duly elected government and force new elections. In this era when being Jewish is not an attractive birthmark in the intersectionalist world of the Left, Jewish does not resonate with the assemblage of The Oppressed: BIPOCs, LGBTQIAs, Muslims, Aborigines, Albinos, the Squad. So, even if Vladimir Putin should not interfere with our elections, nor should China and TikTok, Schumer would insert himself from the Senate floor into Israel’s Knesset.
For Jews who desperately want to be loved by their woke Hollywood colleagues or find acceptance in academia among “The River to the Sea” crowd, but who cannot deny they are Jewish, their only escape valve is to attack all other Jews — the 95 percent-plus who know that Zionism is an integral part of Judaism — by saying: “You see? I’m not one of them. I’m different. Accept me as one of you. I refute them. I call on them to overthrow their duly elected government. Now will you accept me? I can even help with the books.”
But it never works. It didn’t work for Trotsky, who got axed, and all the other Jewish Marxists who got lined up and shot by Stalin. It won’t work for Kamala Harris’s Emhoff husband, whose daughter publicly denies being a Jew (which actually is correct) and is a hero among the anti-Israel crowd. It won’t work for the Holocaust movie guy, no matter what he “refutes.” And it won’t work for The Vagabond.
Adapted by the writer for Arutz Sheva from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator at bit.ly/43LVlqM
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