Conservative talk-show host talked to the Republican Jewish Coalition recently, reports Current Jewish Issues. He was not optimistic when it came to the next presidential election.
People look back at the 1980 election, Hewitt told his audience, and remember only that it was a landslide. But, of course, in fact it was a close-run thing and Reagan only began to break away in the last week. Hewitt remembers. He was there.
The 2008 election is going to be just as difficult.
[I]t is going to be a long and difficult and often bloody 20-30 years ahead of us. That’s a very tough hard message to sell in 60 seconds . . . especially when Democrats insist on saying it’s not so, and that we can retreat from Iraq without the carnage following us home, and that we can pretend that the radicalization of the Islamic population in Europe is neither far advanced nor continuing.
Sooner or later, rank-and-file Jews are going to break conservative and Republican. Jewish intellectuals have been a major force in the conservative movement. Jews are prominent in conservative talk radio. But most Jews are still hesitant to join a party that is identified with Christianity, the scourge of Jews for a thousand years.
But Jews have survived the progroms, and they have done it by being adaptable. They have never known from where the next progrom would come. For over a century they have thought that the Enlightenment and secularism have been the safest place for the Jews.
But now we see rising anti-Semitism among western secular elites and the secular rank-and-file. Is there really safety for Jews on the left?
What will flip Jews into the Republican column will be a defining event in the Middle East. Let us hope it is not the destruction of Israel.
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