Remnick
In The New Yorker that came out Monday, David Remnick wrote that Newt Gingrich’s goal is the Jewish “vote.” He didn’t say it once, but four or five times (emphasis mine):
Late last week, as part of a Republican pander-fest for the Jewish vote… Newt Gingrich… called the Palestinians an “invented” people…
The Palestinian vote will not decide swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, or, above all, Florida; a considerable shift in the Jewish vote could.
Gingrich and his fellow Republicans have sensed a potential softening in the Jewish vote. In 2008, only African-Americans were more solidly behind Barack Obama, who, according to exit polls, won seventy-eight per cent of the Jewish vote. But the Republicans are hoping to woo at least the more conservative sector of Jewish Americans—those who feel that Obama has been too hard on Benjamin Netanyahu.
Chemi Shalev of Haaretz, the leading Israeli newspaper, then interviewed Remnick about his story and ran an interview Tuesday. Here’s Shalev’s first question and the beginning of Remnick’s answer. Emphases mine.
Q. How do you view the extraordinary presence of Israel in the Republican race?
Remnick: Well, it’s not unprecedented. Israel even figures into things like New York mayoral races, as if the New York mayor had a foreign policy. So it’s not surprising that it would make an appearance to some degree or another, but you’re right, it’s a larger one this time around.
The reason is very simple: it is the hope of the Republican Party that the criticism of Obama regarding the Middle East and Netanyahu and everything related to it will somehow translate into a softening Jewish vote, that last time gave Obama 78%, second only to the African American community.
The Republicans won’t get a majority [of the Jewish votes] but they hope to get more votes in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and especially Florida. And I think they are also hoping to see if they can get some money from the obvious corners in the Jewish community. It’s not a secret to them that in terms of campaign contributions, Jewish Americans give quite a lot of money.
Remnick has been a leading voice on the issue in the last year, but in his New Yorker piece he is obfuscating, and the reason is obvious; Remnick is concerned that talk about Jewish money will arouse anti-Semitism in the United States. NPR’s Robert Siegel did the same obfuscation last May. These men don’t trust their audience. I’m reminded of Tom Friedman’s interview with Ari Shavit in 2003, in which he said that the Iraq war was the war that a neoconservative “elite” wanted, something he wasn’t going to write in his column: “I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.”
The question of why Republicans are pandering on Israel is not a trivial question, it’s an important one. A lot of us, including Remnick, went into this business because we thought the American people had a right to know.
Remnick wrote a superb piece on Mike Tyson once . I can’t remember where I saw it. He’s a great writer. But he needs to be honest with thinking Israelis. They know their country is falling apart.
So now you think you have an answer to the question: American politicians pander to Israel because Jews contribute money to their campaigns in a disproportionate manner.
So, what needs to be done is clear. You need to counter this by raising more money so that the money coming from Jews will not be that significant. What is the problem to do that? Jews are only 2% of the population in the US. Surely the other 98% can outspend them easily. That they don’t do it is not the problem of the Jews. It is the problem of the people that are stingy in their donations.
Just to be clear, I think your diagnosis is completely wrong. American politicians pander to Israel because that is what American voters want. The money helps, but without the grass roots support for Israel, it would be meaningless.
Of course you are right. But I can understand, even sympathise, with Remnick’s hesitation to talk about the real reason why these people pander so hard on Israel – donors. Jewish money inevitably bring the topic of Jewish power, which is verboten in the discourse of the American media(and who owns the NYT, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, the LA Times and so on?) since many, many decades.
To a large extent, I can understand that. On other issues than Israel, why would it matter that Jews to a large extent own and control the major media in this country?
It would be very strange why someone would bring it up all of a sudden. But on Israel, it is no longer irrelevant. Israel, as the Jewish state, is getting coverage so favorable in the U.S. media which it isn’t even getting in Israel.
If, say, Jamaicans owned most of our media and Jamaica was getting goldplated aid and endless praises from the politicians and anyone who even dared to question this extreme show of support would then be cast as a racist; you’d be right to ask what has caused this fervent support. And noticing the that to a large extent Jamaicans are active in political donor circles and have very prominent positions in the media, and often owning them, would of course be natural, even if controversial. Because power, especially power so fraught with history, does not like to be investigated or questioned.
Old canards about Christians Zionists or general sympathy just won’t cut it. Just look at immigration. Very unpopular with the voting masses but that’s completely ignored among the major media.
The notion that if something has a large base of support among the population must somehow make it’s ways into the media, is a false one, which immigration as well as other issues demontrated. How popular was affirmative action when it began? Forced bussing? De-segregation?
On many of these issues we would today say that they were right or we would at least concede that they have many pros to them. But when they began, the very few liked them. It was worst in the South, of course, but the general sympathy in the North was hardly much better.
This also dovetails the discussion that somehow Christian Zionists are behind the pro-Israel orthodoxy nearing comic levels. But as you rightly point out, this pattern crosses party lines. Who cares about pro-life positions in the Democratic party? Christian evangelicals are largely Republicans.
Of course it’s the donors that matter in the end, but then you’d have to talk about Jewish power in general and that’s simply not a point many leading U.S. Jews are comfortable with. And for good historical reasons, I’d like to add.
Unless I have somehow missed it in my search of the two print issues, this Remnick piece on Gingrich neither appeared in the most recent New Yorker (double edition for Dec. 19 & 26), which I believe would have been mailed out on Monday and which I received on Tuesday, nor in the previous issue, dated Dec. 12. As far as I know, the piece on Gingrich has appeared only on line, with a dateline Dec. 11.
Remnick is concerned that talk about Jewish money will arouse anti-Semitism in the United States.
i have to part ways with you on this one phil. i think remnick doesn’t want to deal with attacks from the right flank directed at his magazine. he doesn’t want to end up on lists from critics like josh block or abrams:
https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2011/12/when-the-late-great-creator-of-the-joker-took-on-the-dastardly-elliott-abrams.html/comment-page-1#comment-402967
eluding to congress being influenced by jewish money is slandered as anti semitic in this country. he’s looking after his own ass and the new yorkers.
we have to trust the american people can get a little dose of anti israel (the result of Chemi’s last paragraph here) without us all turning anti semitic.
you can say that stuff in israel tho without risking your career because everyone understands how this process works, or they should by now.