Bruce Epstein writes: "You paint Jewish opposition to Obama as having “little to do with his policies or his political ability”. You are correct that this opposition is not based on Obama’s policies, since he has never done anything. Therefore, determining his positions on Israel is speculative. However, it is far from “unjustified”. Based on his associations, his own statements, his advisors, and his supporters, it is quite justified for all those who support Israel to worry about an Obama administration and to have opposed his candidacy. I hardly think that Jewish opposition to Obama is based on a simplistic view of good vs evil or is determinative of one being a “Jewish redneck”."
YY writes:
I also find it curious that the writer is constantly equating “educated” with the forces of light. This is classic liberal thinking but far from grounded in solid evidence. In fact we find some of the most educated people today are heading virulent anti-zionist campaigns! Let alone all those wonderfully educated Nazis…
Similarly I’m taken aback at how easily you determine whose a “good” man. Personally I’m also impressed by how nicely he comes accross as being genuinely caring. Still I’ve picked up plenty of signals that he’s as politically calculating as the best of ‘em. So who knows.
That you want to encourage us to give him a chance to prove himself – Sure. %100. That we should be particularly careful to not err on the side of superficial, skin associations – Absolutely. But all this is a far cry from guilt-tripping us into lusting after the worldliness that you find so ennobling!
Nachum posts:
Someone who lives in Canada has a lot of chutzpah to tell Americans how they should feel about their politicians.
It’s not the first time I’ve encountered self-righteous Canadian Orthodox Jews telling us in the US that we’re a bunch of racists, but it’s still troubling.
And I say this as someone who, while strongly opposing Obama from day one, recognizes that there’s a lot of racism out there. But there are boundaries, just because many frum Jews seem not to recognize them. I don’t tell Canadian Jews about their Muslim problem…
David N. Friedman writes:
I surely share Rabbi Menken’s problems with the liberal attacks against the Orthodox community in the wake of the Obama election as “racist.” Mr. Obama presents our nation with quite a load of questions, skeletons and contradictions. I am not at all sure that merely electing a man who is partly black is any sign of anything positive and it is perhaps more troubling that we are witnessing quite an avalanche of star worshiping which threatens our first amendment and our democracy. Jews are very quick to be suspicious of charisma and demagoguery.
At the root of Obama’s success is perhaps a need to love a President. I feel this is a very poor impulse and in overlooking the fact that this man is unique in our political history is his success in hiding his past–I cannot help but fear this will serve the nation poorly when the facts are finally released. If there is some international crisis when the country is best served with a united front and we finally learn some mystery concerning why he kept his university transcripts sealed, it will not reflect poorly on a candidate, it will harm our national posture at a critical time.
Rallying behind a leader who seeks to unify the nation makes sense and it certainly seems to me that conservatives tend to be much more gracious in defeat than the liberal side. We can be reminded that the left was out to defeat President Bush at any cost after his two victories, his most recent four years ago commanded nearly as many vote as Obama garnered earlier in the month. And yet, this victory is “momentous” and a supposed landslide (by electoral standards–it was much bigger). I will support Obama if and only if his policies make sense and there is no reason to expect that this candidate will be a centrist since this contradicts everything we know about him. The mere fact that intelligence reports validate President Bush’s strategy does not mean that Obama will follow suit.
Obama comes to office with such a large halo, it seems mean spirited to say anything about this highly controversial figure. His race has helped insulate him from normal criticism and the honeymoon period he will obtain is way out of proportion to the decisions he will likely make. President Clinton famously dubbed Obama as “unelectable” and he said this without regard to his race but with a focus on his radical policies, his reckless foreign policy stand that promised to pull out of Iraq as quickly as possible, and his inexperience. The Orthodox community would not think more of Obama than a Clinton, and far less since we also disagree with the leftist stand of any Democratic candidate.
Obama went to madrassas and was born of a Muslim father which makes him a Muslim to the same degree as a Jew born of a Jewish mother is “Jewish” despite living as a non-Jew. Worse, in the eyes of the very radicals who wish to kill us, Obama is going to be the apostate leader of the infidels which means they now have an even greater motivation to attack us.
Regarding his birth certificate, he was sued to produce an *original* copy of his birth certificate to prove that he was born in HI and is therefore constitutionally qualified. Instead of laughing and blowing his opponents away with the original copy–he fought the suit and refuses to produce the original. Speculation as to why he has chosen to keep this document secret produces quite a bit of justified anger. He also will not discuss anything about his cocaine addiction and when he last used cocaine and no medical records beyond a one-page summary. He produced no information at all concerning how he made it into Harvard law school with Columbia grades under the influence of drugs and alcohol abuse.
Americans all over the country are rightly crazed about Obama’s failure to explain himself and Andy Martin has nothing to do with it. It is a matter of basic honesty, courtesy and transparency.
It surely seems we have quite a lot to worry about with this leader and it would have taken very little to comply with standard procedures. (Incidentally, if Hillary C was the nominee–she would have needed to explain how her husband garnered so many tens of millions of dollars in speech fees from Arab countries. By comparison, the ticket of McCain-Palin had nothing to explain.)
…it is best for Jews to live in a land where civil laws contain strong influence of Jewish law. It is easy to argue that this is why Jews worked so hard to come to America in the first place since Early America had a very strong fidelity to Biblical precepts and Biblical law and this influence continues to the present day.
The libertarian position you have articulated that allows for freedom ignores the fact that we want life-affirming freedoms and not simply any freedom. America is not dominated by idol-worshipers and blasphemers and if atheists came to dominate the social order, it would be a much more chilly place for the Jewish people than one dominated by Christians.
Our community does not exist in a vacuum and if marriage was extended to same-sex couples, it would directly affect our marriages. Live and let live is perfectly fine while stating that all behavior is equal is not benign. This is why people rightly object to law regarding imminent domain– such thievery affects us all. To argue that any two people can form a marriage denies the complimentary nature of the genders and the reason we are made male and female. The Canaanites were bad, we are told, because they wrote marriage contracts for men and it is one thing to live in the diaspora and another to live in states that honor fundamental practices at odds with Jewish morality. We understand that only Jews keep the Sabbath and it does not stop us from being shomer Shabbot. By contrast, the legalized theft Pres-Elect Obama will bring forward with greater “progressive” taxation coarsens public morality. Gay marriage threatens to weaken not only the fragile state of marriage but other morality as well.
You raise the specter of laws requiring business to be closed on Sunday as if this could actually happen in America today. In fact, it was the law of the land in a few states in Early America. There is no incompatibility between fundamentalist Christians and their laws and Orthodox Jews and our laws in an American context since both communities allow for tolerance.
Therefore, the status quo on homosexual marriage is a blend of both those American traditions; both tolerance and morality. Changing the definition of marriage is no greater statement of tolerance and involves state-sponsored immorality.
FRUM FROM BROOKKLYN POSTS: "I am Orthodox, and I’ve LIVED in the Orthodox community my whole life. I can say without the least bit of hesitation that the frum community is shot through and through with racism. Just this past shalos seudos I heard the rav of a brand-name local shul call Obama a racial slur and say that “he’s an animal.” I can’t go a week in in my community without hearing a dozen bigoted comments. The non-Orthodox Jews I know from work and the neighborhood have NEVER said anything like that, and would be shocked if they knew about it. So don’t you try to weasel about this. It’s totally true that the Orthodox world is more racist than the liberal Jewish world. I am meyid to it and I’ll swear to it on a sefer torah. It’s disgusting, it’s prevalent, and it’s totally true."
RAV ADLERSTEIN WRITES:
Prop 8 was approved, causing a bit of rain to come down upon the Election Day Parade of Change. Voters listened not to the editorials, but to what they heard from – perish the thought! – religious leaders. A consortium of Catholic, Mormon, Protestant Evangelical and Orthodox Jewish groups took to phone trees, the pulpits, and the airwaves, to urge people to support traditional marriage. (At one point a group of heterodox rabbis realizing that over two hundred and fifty rabbis had signed on to a petition opposing Prop 8, calling on Jews to them in the name of Jewish values. After all, this huge number of rabbis had all joined to throw the weight of Jewish thought behind gay marriage. To their consternation, in the days just before the election, Orthodox Jews took out advertising space to announce that they held a better poker hand. They would meet the bet, and raise it by 150. Four hundred traditional rabbis urged Jews to support Prop 8. The buzz around LA continues to be that the heterodox rabbis are furious at this obvious distortion of Jewish values by the arrogant Orthodox! To the best of my knowledge, all stripes of Orthodoxy supported Prop 8, with only one Orthodox rabbi who identifies with the left margin of Orthodoxy opposing it.
…There was no “frum anti-Obama campaign” that I am aware of. Individuals offered their opinions, which is what Americans are supposed to do. Most people I ran into supported McCain, but everywhere I turned there were some Obama supporters in the same shuls. I suspect that the same held true on the Upper West Side, although there the numbers were reversed.
There were some people who stooped to primitive and hateful racism in making the case for their candidate. No one can apologize for those actions other than those who committed them. I didn’t, so I can’t. Frankly, I find their thinking so beneath contempt that I’m not so interested to hear what they now have to say.
Like many others, I am concerned about the course of a presidency in the hands of a leader without a proven track record, and without a regard for Israel that inheres in his political philosophy. Nonetheless, I can remember passing through Selma Alabama as a teen, quickly aware of the fact that those who hate black people usually hate Jews as well. Whatever happens in the future – and I wish the President-elect well – I believe that getting America to the point of electing a black President was one of America’s finest hours.
YM WRITES: "The most racist aspect of this election was that 97% of blacks supported Obama."
