Re: Michael Mukasey And Jewish Conservatism

Re: Michael Mukasey And Jewish Conservatism

Monday, 17 December 2007, 2:55 pm

Column: Lawrence R. Velvel

Dear Colleagues:

I shall write relatively briefly today on a matter which touches a subject I've

long, but perhaps wrongly, considered sensitive. The sensitive subject is

the turn of American Jews toward conservatism. The matter relating to this

is Michael Mukasey on waterboarding.

The overall subject has in recent years been sensitive, I've thought,

because so many of the neocons who brought us the Iraq war were Jewish. The

men at the very top weren't: bush II, Cheney, Rumsfeld. But several people

just below, or with influence, were: Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams, Perle,

William Kristol. To bring up the American Jewish turn toward conservatism in

such circumstances seemed to me likely to simply fan the ever present, if

often banked, fires of anti-Semitism, fires which have certainly not been

diminished by the leftish view that Israel is responsible for our problems.

Yet recently, when my views toward Mukasey began boiling over to the point

that I have felt a need to do a radio show on the question of Jewish

conservatism, and have begun reading materials on the subject in

preparation, I found that there is a perhaps surprising amount of writing on

the subject. So maybe it is not as sensitive as I thought. Or, if it is,

people have decided to write about it regardless.

At present, I have not yet read widely enough to feel reasonably educated in

the premises. My views largely still stem from growing up in the home of

Russian Jewish immigrants who had a strong belief in social justice and

great sympathy for labor (even though a union was more than a little

responsible for the destruction of my old man's small business). My folks,

before I was born, had themselves been part of the laboring class for a

reasonable period, my mother a milliner and my father a laundryman. I grew

up with certain values, obtained from them, from their friends, who had

similar or identical backgrounds, from reading, and from the fact that

people of their stripe invariably voted for the Democrats -- for FDR and

Truman -- and favored what the New Deal was trying to accomplish.

It always seemed to me, quite wrongly and very naively I'm now sure, that

several of the inculcated values were necessarily ones which stemmed from a

Russian Jewish, semi socialistic background. But in later years I came to

believe that several of the values I hold dear are, to a very major extent,

signposts as well of the Protestant rural America of the 1800s and well into

the mid 20th century, of the working class of all racial and ethnic groups,

of Scandinavian American Midwest culture, of much Asian American culture,

and others. I am speaking here of values such as hard work, modesty, honesty

and a sense of fairness to others. The only group, as it were, that one

might think gravely lacking in such attributes is, sad to say, the group

which controls America today: the white collar class in business, the

professions and government.

I am, of course, not praising or indicting every member of any of the

aforementioned groups or others, but am speaking in broad generalities that

I think cannot be readily dismissed as obviously incorrect.

Which brings me to Michael Mukasey. Mukasey is Jewish -- he even went to an

Orthodox Jewish (if possibly modern) prep school. He belongs to a people

that often has been viciously persecuted for 1,500 or 2,000 years. They have

been slaughtered, tortured and dispossessed, time and time again. Long

before Hitler there was the Spanish Inquisition -- which used waterboarding

(and may even have invented it). Coming from this background, and growing up

in a period (the 1940s and 1950s) when the human (and humane) attitudes of

the general Jewish community favored social justice (as indicated by

overwhelming support for FDR and Truman), Michael Mukasey nevertheless does

not know if waterboarding is torture? The son of a bitch cannot bring

himself to say that a technique used in a Spanish war against his own

people, a technique considered torture for 500 years, is torture? I imagine

it must be my background, as described earlier, but I just cannot understand

how someone who comes out of Mukasey's background can say what he has been

saying. I can understand it when some crumb from the Wall Street Journal's

editorial page tells me in emails that we are not doing torture, or when a

lying bum like George Bush claims it. But a Jewish guy who even went to a

Jewish religious school? -- he claims it is possible that waterboarding is

not torture? This is just too much for my poor mind to grasp. I cannot grasp

it even if one were to say Mukasey has acted out of ambition to become

Attorney General. It seems to me like a desertion of the most basic human

values that a Jewish guy from New York City, and from a religious prep

school no less, must have been exposed to all the time.

And it brings up the broader question I adverted to earlier, the question I

am in process of reading about. How is it, and why is it, that so many Jews

have become so conservative? What are all the reasons? And this implicates

another, conceivably even broader question. How is it and why is it that so

many American of all creeds, faiths and types -- Americans, for God's

sake -- have come to accept torture as just one of those things?

Maybe, though, I am to some extent focusing through the wrong end of the

telescope. Maybe the focus should be on the fact that so many Americans of

all faiths, creeds and types never accepted torture, and an increasing

number of them seem to be rejecting torture as time moves on. Yet, if that

is true, it only causes me to wonder the more about a guy like Mukasey and

about the wing of conservative, even neocon, Jews whom he may represent.

This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R. Velvel. If you

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