The End of the Affair?
Michelle Goldberg looks at the growing discomfort of leading Jewish organizations with the Christian Right in today's Salon. Weirdly, she doesn't mention the Anti-Defamation League's earlier dust-up with the religious right over Mel Gibson's How the Jews Killed Christ or whatever it's called.
Last month I finally got around to reading Philip Roth's superb (as always) The Plot Against America, and although I tried not to read too much of the book as a commentary on today's politics, the novel kept popping into my head while I read Goldberg's description of comments by Rabbi Yechiel Z. Eckstein, chairman of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Goldberg writes:
When I spoke to Eckstein, he had just gotten off the phone with someone from Focus on the Family. Christian leaders, he said, feel hurt and victimized by [ADL head Abraham]Foxman's speech. And he feared what might result: "Rhetoric can create an anti-Jewish feeling among good Bible-believing Christians," he says. "Certainly in the evangelical world they're very focused on their leadership. It's very different than the Jewish community -- most of the Jewish community doesn't care what Abe Foxman says. If their pastor says that black is white and white is black, well, the pastor said so. If leaders themselves start to say it's the Jews who are preventing us from having a moral society in America … that's what we saw in history."Goldberg dismisses Eckstein's argument as contradictory. "You can't on the one hand make a claim that we don't need to defend ourselves because we are essentially in a good place, and at the same time argue that we shouldn't defend ourselves because we are so vulnerable that we could lose everything in a minute," he says.
In fact, neither is true. Jews in America aren't endangered, but the power of the religious right has clearly reached a point where a great many feel exceedingly nervous. The fear is not of pogroms or outright discrimination; rather, it's of the disappearance of the secular civic culture that allowed Jews to feel like full citizens of America rather than a tolerated minority.
You know who ought to be really scared? Those sinners in Dover, Pennsylvania. Pat Robertson says that God's about to smite them, and he should know.