Posted by
J-GOP on Sunday, March 09, 2008 1:54:06 PM
Jewish Republicans can thank William F. Buckley for making the Republican Party a "Big Tent". Let us all remember this great American for his contribution to making the party a better place for Jewish and other minority voters. Excerpts of this blog post come from the article in Jewish World Review, called "
Bill Buckley and the Jews" by Jonathan Tobin:
Though much has changed in the 53 years since the debut of The National Review, most Jews are still, at the very least, reliable supporters of the Democrats, if not hard-core liberals. Most likely most have not noted the passing of its founder, William F. Buckley without emotion.
But aside from the focus on Buckley and his influence in the convserative movement, and his affiliation with Reagan-style Republicanism, there is one other aspect of his amazing career that deserves mention. It is the fact that as much as any other person, Bill Buckley cleared the way not only for a conservative movement where Jews would be welcomed, but that it was his leadership that set the stage for an American politics in which anti-Semitism was confined to the fever swamps of the far right and far left.
Buckley specifically chose to rid its ranks of people who espoused the sort of anti-Semitism that once was inescapable on the American right. As National Review took flight in the late 1950s, anti-Semitic writers found themselves on the outside looking in. So, too, did apologists for the extremist John Birch Society. Buckley made his journal, and by extension, the movement for which it served as an unofficial bible, off-limits to the anti-Semitism that was commonplace in the world in which he grew up.
Though he didn't always agree with all of its policies, Buckley was also a consistent supporter of Israel. A staunch anti-Communist, he was also deeply supportive of the movement to free Soviet Jewry at a time when many in this country (including some Jews) were loath to speak out because it might be interpreted as opposition to a policy of detente with Moscow.
Long after he chased the Birchers and its supporters out of NR, Buckley found himself forced to confront the issue again. When longtime colleagues Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran used their bully pulpits on the right to bash Israel and stigmatize Jews for their support for the state, it was again Buckley who took on the haters.Buckley repudiated Sobran's writing, which he labeled anti-Semitic, and pushed him off the magazine's masthead.
As the issue continued to percolate in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war in December 1991, he devoted an entire issue of the magazine to an essay titled "In Search of Anti-Semitism" (which was also the title of the book he later published on the same subject), in which he took on Buchanan, who was preparing an insurgent run for the White House against the first President Bush.
His conclusion was damning: "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it," Buckley wrote. Though Buchanan would continue to snipe away on television, it was largely Buckley's doing that he and others like him would do so from outside a perch in one of our two major parties rather than inside it.
By remaking the conservative movement in his own image, in which the emphasis was on anti-communism and a libertarian skepticism of government power, he ensured that it, and the Republican Party, which it came to dominate, would be a place where Jew-haters were unwelcome. In terms of practical politics, Buckley's rout of the anti-Semites made it possible for the sort of bipartisan consensus in favor of support for Israel that we now take for granted. He replaced the Buchanan-like world of American conservatism that existed before National Review with something that was not only more successful, but purged of Jew-hatred.
His was a political faith that most Jews never embraced, but as we survey a political spectrum in which our enemies are confined to the margins, we should all remember the unique achievements of this American original. May his memory be for a blessing for all who love liberty.