The Washington Post is a hotbed of secularism. In yesterday’s paper, Richard Cohen attacked Mike Huckabee for "his obdurate and narrow-minded religious beliefs"–his positions on abortion, stem cells, gun control. Today the Post editorial page justifiably lands on Mitt Romney for saying that there is no freedom without religion.
So far, so good. But when is the Post going to scrutinize the role of religion in American Jews’ support for Israel? Ed Koch has said that Israelis "have the right to live on the West Bank." The Jewish Forward prints Hillel Halkin’s columns notwithstanding the fact that Halkin says that the Bible is a deed to the West Bank for Jews (and he has lately written in Commentary on "the achievement" of the settlements). These religious attitudes are also "obdurate and narrow-minded," and unlike abortion and stem-cells, they are inflaming the Muslim world and distorting our politics (c.f. Hillary’s antediluvian position on Jerusalem).
There are two reasons, one political and one cultural, why the Post doesn’t focus on the religious left. 1, The religious left has pitched its tent mainly in the Democratic Party of Lieberman, Hillary, Lantos and Schumer, and the Post shares that political persuasion. 2, Liberal Jews like Cohen and myself are all over the media and we know many, many Jews who share these feelings. We’re even related to some of them. Dan Schorr’s mother was a Zionist, my mom’s best friend made aliyah in ’68, Nathan Klugman’s aunt sent money to Palestine (in Goodbye, Columbus, the Roth novel). It’s part of our culture, unlike the stem-cell-hating megachurches, that we see on television. It’s a lot easier to focus on the mote in someone else’s eye than the beam in your own.
