Who Are the Jews Behind Palin in 2012?
By Gal Beckerman
Published April 28, 2010, issue of May 07, 2010.
When Sarah Palin was asked by Barbara Walters late last year whether she supported a freeze on settlement growth in the West Bank, Palin issued an emphatic no. But her reasoning confounded many: “More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”
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Her Moment: Palin at the GOP national convention in 2008. She has garnered plaudits from prominent neo-conservatices, including William Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Seth Lipsky.
Who were these Jews, and why were they “flocking”? Those predisposed to be critical of the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee, such as writer and blogger Jeffrey Goldberg, saw Palin’s evangelical Christian roots showing. She was clearly expressing some kind of end-of-days theology, he said, that demands the ingathering of Jews before the Second Coming and its accompanying rapture (an event that doesn’t bode well for the Jews).
But Goldberg’s reading, though certainly the dominant interpretation, was not the only one. Benyamin Korn, a Philadelphia-based activist and former editor of the Jewish Exponent, heard something less apocalyptic in Palin’s words.
“If you work with Nefesh B’Nefesh, then you know exactly what she meant,” Korn said, referring to the Zionist group that facilitates North American immigration to Israel. “She understands that Zionism, which means the Jews should live in the Land of Israel, is a vital force. That’s all.”
Korn is the founder of a new group called Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin, and his efforts are part of some recent Jewish support that has been trickling in the direction of the hockey mom from Wasilla. Even though American Jews have repeatedly disapproved of her in large numbers in poll after poll, giving her abysmally low approval ratings, her recent high-profile jabs at the president have earned her support from some of the most prominent Jewish conservatives today.
Not only does she continue to receive the hearty backing of William Kristol, editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard and contributor to Fox News, but at the end of March, Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary and godfather of the neoconservative movement, took to the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal to offer a “defense of Sarah Palin.” He compared the ridicule that has greeted her arrival on the national scene to the laughter at Ronald Reagan’s expense when Reagan became the Republican presidential nominee. Podhoretz’s argument boiled down to this: “What she does know — and in this respect, she does resemble Reagan — is that the United States has been a force for good in the world, which is more than Barack Obama, whose IQ is no doubt higher than hers, has yet to learn.”
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