Responses to Podhoretz

Letters to the editor responding to Podhoretz' piece on why Jews are liberal.

...Most Jews are liberal for a very simple reason: Modern liberalism is consistent with traditional Jewish values, Mr. Podhoretz notwithstanding, while conservatism is not....

...Mr. Podhoretz overlooks the prime motivation behind Jewish liberalism: the continued pervasive existence, world-wide, of virulent anti-Semitism. This makes American Jewry unique among upwardly mobile minorities in that American Jews see themselves as endangered in perpetuity. Traumatized by the Holocaust and justifiably fearful of Islamic radicalism, they inaccurately see liberal ideology as a doctrine of such tolerance that it will provide the maximum security for "outsiders," presumably including those of a different religion. ...

...The rabbis who wrote the Talmud could be seen as quite liberal in the context of their day. Most notably, their collective nemeses, the Sadducees, were textual literalists who argued that there was little room for progressiveness in the interpretation of Jewish ritual. But the rabbis of the Talmud won this historical battle and created a body of law that protected the rights of women and slaves on an unprecedented level. They also rendered the death penalty and other violent rules of the Old Testament essentially impossible to execute.

Jewish liberalism is, in fact, deeply rooted in the heritage of Jewish values. A nonselective view of our history clearly reveals that....