People often ask me at what age I knew I was different—at what age I realized that I wasn’t like all the other kids at the Jewish day school I attended through eighth grade. Was it the moment I snatched a Michael Dukakis doll from a kindergarten classmate? Was it the time I felt that now-familiar twinge of discontent in my gut upon noticing the Clinton-Gore posters plastered on the walls of my fourth grade classroom? Or was it the morning after the Republicans retook both houses of Congress and the New York governorship in 1994, when I walked into my sixth grade classroom with a big, braces-laden smile on my face?
To be sure, there was no moment of epiphany, but rather a series of events that told me by the time I was an eighth grader—debating in favor of Bob Dole’s presidential candidacy before my entire school—that I was a Republican. And I have remained so ever since. As a high school student, I was active in the New York City Teenage Republicans, volunteered for Rick Lazio’s 2000 U.S. Senate campaign, and, before college, served as the chief campaign aide on a Republican City Council campaign. During my four years at Harvard, I was a vocal conservative on campus and, perhaps at times, “that guy” in a few lectures. Since graduating, I have moved to northern Virginia and finally found my place in a “red state” as a member of the local Republican club. Call it an aliyah of sorts.
As I see it, the 76% of American Jews who voted for Kerry in 2004 completely missed the boat. Contrary to their vision of Judaism as a liberal-minded “tikkun olam”—roughly translated as “social justice”—religion, our tradition actually embraces a fair amount of conservative ideology. Indeed, Judaism endorses the death penalty—be it death by stoning (for murderers), earth-swallowing (Dathan), or morphing into a pillar of salt (Lot’s anonymous wife). It further opposes negotiating with terrorists (Amalek), frowns on social promotion (Esau), and doubts the efficiency of bilingual education (Tower of Babel). And while the tradition supports far-reaching welfare programs—such as the biblical decree to leave the corners of one’s field unplowed for the poor—it supports these programs on the basis of a flat tax: Jews, regardless of their social class, give ten percent of their earnings to charity.
More seriously, however, Jews—liberal and conservative—are generally united in a belief that faith should be largely divorced from civil politics. This is the typical strategy of a minority group: the pursuit of equal political access by subverting the very trait that deems it a minority. American Jews know that any attempt to introduce religion-based solutions for civil issues would only encourage other groups to do the same—a strategy that would quickly work to the disadvantage of a group comprising less than two percent of the population.
So why is there still such a strong correlation between being liberal and Jewish? This is a bigger discussion than this essay permits. Suffice it to say, however, that this outcome—coupled with my own political choices—has often made me a pariah at Jewish dinner tables across America. The upside is that Jewish pariahs still get matzo ball soup—though I’ve been known to bring along a taster for security.
Ultimately, the greatest consequence of being a Jewish Republican is that I have virtually been forced to interdate and, in the likely future, intermarry. A dearth of like-minded Jewish women almost guarantees that, as a person who values Jewish continuity, I will inevitably marry a Democrat. The good news, of course, is that in Republican ideology, the children are raised according to the politics of the father, whose last name they traditionally take unhyphenated.
