The Agony of Being a Jewish Conservative

The Agony of Being a Jewish Conservative
Burt Prelutsky
Monday, May 30, 2011

I am not overly surprised when the majority of American Jews continue to support Obama, but I know it confounds Christians. What they fail to grasp is that Israel’s survival is not only a low priority item for the president, but for a great many Jews.

My fellow Jews, by and large, are far more connected to liberalism than they are to Judaism, far less familiar with the Talmud than with “Dreams of My Father” or “The Audacity of Hope.” The more religious a Jew is, the more likely he is to be a political conservative and to be concerned with Israel’s security.

On the other hand, the younger and more secular a Jew is, the more likely he is to identify with Israel’s sworn enemies and the more likely he is to prioritize green energy, socialized medicine, same-sex marriages and federally-funded abortions.

It is no mystery that so many iconic figures on the left are secular Jews. They would include Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Saul Alinsky, Noam Chomsky, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Barney Frank, Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Barbara Boxer, Charles Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Henry Waxman, Barbra Streisand, Brad Sherman, Norman Lear, Jon Stewart, Alan Colmes, Anthony Weiner, Bernie Sanders, Steven Spielberg and George Soros.

I’m afraid that attending synagogue once or twice a year, sprinkling one’s conversation with the occasional “schlemiel” and “schmendrick,” and having a taste for corned beef or pastrami does not a Jew make. In liberal circles, however, all it takes is voting for the most left-wing candidate on the ballot.

Any Jewish Democrat who takes umbrage at that list will, if experience counts for anything, label me a self-hating Jew. But I think, in my own defense, I need only share a few additional facts to make my case. There are, I believe, 154 Catholics in Congress, 24 in the Senate and 130 in the House. Of the 154, 84 are Democrats, 70 are Republicans.

There are 70 Baptists and Southern Baptists in Congress, 10 in the Senate and 60 in the House. Of the 70, 26 are Democrats, 44 are Republicans.

There are 47 Presbyterians in Congress, 15 in the Senate and 32 in the House. Of the 47, 16 are Democrats, 31 are Republicans.

When you realize that the Republicans in Congress currently out-number the Democrats 287-246, you can see that the 145 to 126 Republican advantage in those three major religious groups is nearly perfectly in sync with the overall makeup of the legislature.

However, there are 33 Jews currently in Congress, 12 in the Senate, 21 in the House. Of the 33, 32 are Democrats, while Eric Cantor constitutes the entire Republican contingent.

Even though Barack Obama has displayed bias towards the Arabs and Muslims ever since he entered the Oval Office, whether it was demanding that Israel stop erecting housing in the so-called settlements, going back to its 1967 borders or glowering at its prime minister as if he’d just nuked Chicago, he’s not the first president who has held Israel to an impossible standard while giving the Arabs a pass. At least since Carter, they’ve all behaved as if the stumbling block to peace is that Israel is just too damn big. Why else would every “path to peace” invariably begin with Israel’s being asked to cede land? Inasmuch as Israel is by far the smallest nation in the region, it suggests that each of them, but especially Obama, would have insisted that if it had been up to him, David would have had to first hand over his slingshot, and then fight Goliath from his knees with one arm tied behind his back.

It’s a strange form of amnesia that causes the world to forget that in 1948, it wasn’t the Jews who banished the Arabs; it was Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, the invading coalition, that suggested to their friends that they temporarily vacate the premises while the Arab legions finished the job that Hitler began. These weasels were told it would be over in a day or two, and they could then return to divvy up the spoils.

The world also tends to overlook the fact that for decades before Israel achieved statehood, the Zionists had been buying up land at wildly inflated prices from the local Arabs. The world also ignores the fact that thousands of Jews had lived there since biblical times.

Yet another inconvenient truth the world turns a blind eye to is that it was the Arab and Muslim nations in 1948 that banished their Jewish populations and, for good measure, confiscated their money and property.

As if all of that weren’t enough to sway public opinion in their favor, 20% of Israelis are Arabs, who not only have the vote, but have seats in the Knesset, Israel’s legislature, and whose wives and daughters actually have the rights and freedoms they’re denied everywhere else in the sewer known as the Middle East.

Within a few years following the end of World War II, all the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust had found homes, mainly in Israel, Europe, Canada and the U.S. But 63 years after they voluntarily abandoned Israel so the Jews could be slaughtered without any collateral damage to themselves, the so-called Palestinians continue to be “refugees” demanding the right of return, although how one returns to where one has never been is a mystery best left to science fiction writers.

The reason that there are still “refugees” six decades after the fact is that not a single nation in the region wants the riffraff inside their borders. Far better for Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and the rest, to keep them right where they are, to be used as pawns in their attempt to scapegoat the Jews for the hunger, unemployment, ignorance and oppression, rampant in their own countries.

Jewish Democrats may be willing to give Obama high marks, but fortunately there are others who have a clearer vision. Which is why some wag has seen to it that the following piece of fiction has gone viral in recent weeks. Claiming to be a message to Obama from Netanyahu, while on his way to the U.S., it reads: “Tens of thousands of ordinary Mexicans were driven out of their homes, the only homes they had known for centuries, and forced to live in poverty and squalor south of the border, thanks to American aggression. This festering wound will never heal until America takes steps to return to the internationally accepted lines of 1845. Clearly the settlement activity that’s taken place in occupied Mexico since then is illegal. When I meet the President tomorrow, I will tell him to halt all building activity in Texas immediately. Two lands for two people, yes, but not on land taken by force from Mexico.”

It’s a shame that it never happened. At least if it had, it might have made sense why, at their get-together the next day, Obama had glared at Netanyahu as if he had caught him trying to swipe the silverware.
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Larry Gelbart: An Appreciation
by Burt Prelutsky

It was a little over 30 years ago that I first laid eyes on the remarkable Larry Gelbart. The occasion was our high school’s 50th anniversary. I had been selected to host the celebration in the auditorium. It was also my duty to talk about what Fairfax High had been like when I was there during the 1950s. It was Larry’s job to report on the 1940s. As I recall, producer Mike Frankovich handled the 30s and singer Martha Tilton recalled the 1920s. Although I got to introduce Gelbart to the audience, we didn’t actually meet.

Several months later, in a weekly column I was then writing for the L.A. Times, I took exception to the constant trashing of TV. For all its obvious faults, I pointed out that over the years TV, not Broadway, books or the movies, was the place to find the best comedy in America. I went on to mention ten or twelve of the anonymous men most responsible for writing the funniest lines. Naturally, Larry Gelbart was one of the names on my list.

The next day, I got a phone call. It was Larry and he started out by apologizing. He said that he and his wife, Pat, had dreaded going to the Fairfax High bash, but that I had been very funny and they had had a terrific time. It seems he had meant to call me the very next day, but it had slipped his mind. Now he was calling to thank me for mentioning him in my article.

Oddly enough, I was anxious to get off the phone. Although I appreciate compliments as much as the next guy, I’m the guy who prefers them in writing. Even when I receive them over the phone, I feel like I’m blushing and have lost the power of speech. After being praised, just saying “Thank you” seems terribly lame, while trying to return the compliment seems awfully phony. But just before I was able to mumble my thanks and hang up, I heard him say, “I understand you sometimes write for TV. If you ever come up with an idea for a ‘MASH’ script, just shoot it over to me. I’m here at 20th.”

It had long been my wish to write comedy for TV, but I had not been able to break through, only managing to accumulate credits on “Dragnet” and “McMillan & Wife.” So, while I was greatly motivated, my problem was that I wasn’t a fan of “MASH.” I hadn’t liked the movie and the one time I had watched an episode, it just seemed like all those other lousy service comedies, like “Don’t Go Near the Water” and “Operation Petticoat,” that I had already come to loathe.

But, at the time nobody else was inviting me to write a comedy or anything else, so I sat down with my steno pad and prayed for a miracle. The miracle came in the form of an idea about an injured soldier showing up at the 4077th, claiming to be Jesus Christ.

“Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler?” led to seven additional MASH scripts, a shot at several other sit coms and ultimately swung open the doors to writing TV movies.

Because I owed Gelbart a debt that I could never hope to re-pay, I was grateful when he called one day and asked for a favor. It seems the WGA was hosting a tribute to Larry that very evening and Mel Shavelson, who was scheduled to emcee the event, had taken ill. Larry wondered if I would agree to fill in.

Inasmuch as my responsibilities would be pretty much limited to pointing to people in the audience during the Q&A session, and in some cases repeating their questions into a microphone, I felt I was up to it, if just barely.

Larry was his usual droll and hilarious self. The most memorable moment, though, came during the intermission when Larry and I left the stage to sit with Pat in the front row. A young fellow came down the aisle and kneeled next to Larry. As expected, he began by saying what a great fan he was, and how, being a writer himself, he regarded Gelbart as a role model. Larry, far more adept at handling compliments than I because no doubt he had had so much more experience, was smiling and nodding graciously. The big surprise came when the young fan concluded his remarks by saying, “And that’s why I’m so excited to be re-writing ‘Rough Cut’.”

“Rough Cut,” you see, was a script Gelbart had been writing for Burt Reynolds and David Niven. Until that moment, he didn’t know that he’d been replaced by the producer.

So, forget all the stuff he wrote for the movies (“Tootsie,” “Oh, God!” “The Wrong Box”); the stage (“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “Mastergate,” “City of Angels”); and TV (“MASH,” “Your Show of Shows,” “Caesar’s Hour,” “Weapons of Mass Distraction,” “Barbarians at the Gate,”). Forget that at the age of 16, while still attending Fairfax High, he would go, still wearing his ROTC uniform, to write for “Duffy’s Tavern” and, later, Bob Hope on the radio. After all, anyone with the appropriate amount of God-given talent, wit and staying power, could do the very same thing for 65 years.

But the fact that he could listen to this pisher break the news to him that he had replaced him on a writing project and keep on smiling, shake his hand and wish him luck, tells you all you need to know about what sort of mensch Larry Gelbart was.
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To read another article by Burt Prelusky, click here.