“Republican Jews Alarmed at the Prospect of a Void in the House and Senate”, by Jason Horowitz, is currently #7 in the NYT:
“Sometimes, a Jewish person just wants to be able to go to Congress and speak with a Jewish person,” Beverly Goldstein, a Republican donor from Beachwood, Ohio, explained in the hotel lobby after a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Naturally, libs are framing the dearth of GOP Jews as something of a new incarnation of Christian polemics:
Decades after a Reagan era that was relatively rich in Jewish representation on the Republican side of both the House and the Senate, Republican Jews are grappling with what it means for a party that casts itself as the protector of Israel to potentially not have a single one of its children in Congress. Some Democrats, of course, depict Mr. Cantor’s loss as the removal of a final fig leaf from what has become a homogeneously Christian party with little room for religious and ethnic minorities. Others said the loss of Mr. Cantor, a conservative standard-bearer deemed insufficiently conservative by voters who preferred a Tea Party challenger, revealed the Republicans’ exclusion of moderates of any stripe.
“It is a very right-wing party, more so than in the past,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York. “And by so doing it is alienating most of the Jewish electorate, and becoming an increasingly monochromatic party without minorities of any kind.”
Can Kristallnacht not be far behind?
More between the lines stuff:
Mr. Kwasman, a 31-year-old Arizona state representative, was speaking last month after the donor-rich event at the St. Regis. After schmoozing with high-powered “machers” who are worried about the scarcity of Jewish members and a growing isolationist streak in the Republican Party, he unfolded the Menorah Psalm, with commentary, that his mother had given him to read on the flight to Washington…
The Jewish Republican candidate that congressional analysts give the best shot at winning is State Senator Lee Zeldin of New York, who is taking on Tim Bishop in Suffolk County, Long Island. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Zeldin, a baby-faced Iraq war veteran, sipped coffee across the street from Fox News’s studios in Manhattan, where he had just finished a brief appearance on television in which he criticized President Obama’s foreign policy. His face rendered even smoother by the television makeup, Mr. Zeldin said he had come to appreciate how vital a bridge Mr. Cantor had been to “Jewish organizations, pro-Israel, philanthropists.” Since the majority leader’s defeat, he said, those organizations were looking for another strong connection to Congress…
While concern for Israel drives much of the eagerness to elect Jewish Republicans, there are intangibles, too. Michael Goldstein, who is married to Ms. Goldstein, the donor from Beachwood, acknowledged at the St. Regis that his viewpoint was well represented by conservatives in Congress. “So why do we need Jews?” he asked. “It makes me feel better. You want your own people there.”
