“Senator Lieberman is looking at the same Jewish texts that we are, and reaching opposite conclusions,” Mark Pelavin, associate director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, told The Forward, a leading Jewish weekly. “I’ve spent a lot of time in talks with Senator Lieberman, and he is not an easy person to sway.”…
Such high-minded [religious] talk [by Lieberman] grates on many Jewish leaders, who see passing health care reform as integral to the Jewish principal of tikkun olam, or repairing the world, which undergirds much of Judaism’s longstanding tradition of social and political activism, mainly of the liberal variety.
Other factors are at play as well: Jews are immigrants whose history of persecution and constant exile have made them especially sensitive to the plight of the marginalized, and as a minority they know that liberal social policies that protect the weak from the strong can help them, too; Jews also tend to be better educated and wealthier than most Americans, both markers of socially progressive views. (And something that makes the fierce band of neo-con Jews like Norman Podhoretz, author of the recent “Why Are Jews Liberal,” even more furious than Lieberman’s liberal critics.)
Join the conversation as a VIP Member