Marches Not Equal, It Seems
The Jewish Exponent’s left-leaning political bias is clearly evident in what it reports, and what it fails to report. On the front page (and continuing for an additional 1⅓ pages) of the Jan. 25 issue is an article about the second Women’s March in Philadelphia. The article emphasized the anti-Trump attitude of the marchers and speakers. “Once the speeches began at the museum steps, the crowd roared and denounced the Trump administration for its positions on issues such as reproductive rights, immigration, equal pay, LGBTQ rights, health care, the Black Lives Matter movement and sexual assault.” There was very little in this article tying the march to any issue affecting Jews or Israel.
The Women’s March article begins with a quote from a woman who felt that Trump had suggested something “way too similar to what happened in Nazi Germany against the Jews.” According to the article, one of the Women’s March speakers was from Planned Parenthood. I submit that Planned Parenthood’s dehumanizing of the unborn is all too similar to Nazi Germany’s dehumanizing of the Jews.
Unreported in this or any other issue of the Exponent was the March for Life that occurred in Washington, D.C., within days of the Women’s March. So a march supporting abortion gets favorable coverage in the Exponent, but a march opposed to abortion is ignored.
Howard Lurie | King of Prussia
Don’t Overlook Republicans’ Role
Overlooked in the editor’s otherwise excellent column Feb. 1 (“Rooting for the Underdog”) is the salient role of the Republican Jewish Coalition as acidic catalyst in corroding the heretofore bipartisan political support for Israel.
Keep in mind that RJC is not a Jewish advocacy/defense group that happens to vote Republican; it’s a GOP organization that targets Jews for outreach. In other words, the objective of the RJC is not to raise Republican awareness of a Jewish community consensus on a given issue, but to persuade Jews to accept the Republican consensus.
Indeed, as reported by Politico, the RJC even admits that its function is to “educate the Jewish community” about (the GOP line on) “domestic and foreign policy issues,” not to — in addition — educate the GOP about Jewish communal interests and social values.
Thus, an elective (pun intended) affinity between the RJC and the Christian right.
According to none other than the late veteran Republican consultant Arthur J. Finkelstein, “the political center has disappeared, and the Republican Party has become the party of the Christian right more so than in any other period in modern history.”
And who, you might ask, is Finkelstein, and why does his opinion matter? Because he is the individual whom no less estimable a source than the Washington Jewish Week identified as the RJC’s exit survey pollster in 2012. As to his conservative bonafides, Finkelstein served as a pollster for both Ronald Reagan and Benjamin Netanyahu.
In short: J4J and the RJC both answer to the same authority — the Christian right, which funds messianic Judaism and, these days, largely controls the GOP. Interestingly, Jews for the Christian right yields the acronym JRC, which is an anagram of RJC. Coincidence? Hardly.
Stas Cohen | Newark, Del.
Yasher koach, Stas Cohen.
Further corroboration of your insightful analysis: Support for embryonic stem-cell research (and the belief that full human life does not begin at conception) unites Jewry across the board – from the ultra-Orthodox to secular humanists and everything in-between: even more so, than the welfare of the state of Israel and how best to safeguard it.
But when President George W. Bush issued his restrictions on stem-cell research, RJC head Matt Brooks defended it.
Howie Lurie’s Feb. 7 gripe that “Marches Not Equal, It Seems” bespeaks a distinctive Jews-for-Jewish sensibility.
He “submits that Planned Parenthood’s dehumanizing of the unborn is all too similar to Nazi Germany’s dehumanizing of the Jews.”
The term unborn is standard Christian, not Jewish, usage; not only is it unHalachic, it is vigorously anti-Halachic!
As Rabbi Charles Feinberg summarizes the consensus Jewish position on this fraught subject: “Jewish rabbinic authorities, starting with the Middle Ages, say that a fetus is not a person,” Judaism has always said abortion is never murder. It may not be permitted, depending on the circumstances — how far along the pregnancy is, how seriously ill the mother-to-be is — but it is never murder. It only becomes that once the baby is born.” (The Washington Post, Jan. 29, “Clergy gather to bless…)
Only actual, fully-formed persons can be “dehumanized.”
Judaism allows abortion (as does current U.S. law); for it to become prohibited — as Lurie and his Catholic and Evangelical Protestant confreres at the March for Life would prefer — would constitute an abridgment of Jews’ First Amendment right of religious freedom.
I’ll leave Lurie’s blasphemous and despicable Holocaust analogy for others to rebut.