God’s people in a very special sense— they cannot be wiped out, as
recent history has shown, as our attempts to convert them have
shown.
Not being Christian in a world that hates the Jew , the homosexual, the castrated male, haunts the post-Holocaust Jew : he has seen the future and it is annihilation. Especially the contemporary Jew
is fighting for his m asculinity. In the camps Jew ish men were castrated: some, only some. The castration was literal for individuals; two thirds of the world’s Jew ry was exterminated, which castrates
the people as a whole rather effectively. Nothing threatens the
Jewish male now more than a perception of him as being deficient
in m asculinity. For this reason, Israel is a m ilitarist nation: no one
will ever again accuse the Jew s of being soft. For this reason,
Amerikan Jew ish writers are apostles of machismo and pimp masculinity. And for this reason, there is a growing segment of the Amerikan Jew ish population that is part of the Christian evangelical Right.
First, there is the trade-off. On television, a rabbi and a priest
were talking. T he priest said: we feel about abortion the w ay you
feel about Israel. I think we can talk, said the rabbi. It is in the
interests of male Jew s (the power structure) to increase the population of Jew s. The trade-off— abortion for Israel— is in the interests of Jew s both for the sake of Israel and for the sake of rebuilding a
Jewish population in the easiest w ay— through male domination.
Second, there is the effort to dissociate the Jewish men from any
perception of fem ininity, being less masculine. Israel, of course,
makes Jew s more male: owning land, controlling a state, having a
nation, having an arm y, having borders to defend and to transgress. In associating with the Christian Right, there is a repudiation of homosexuality, liberal social tolerance of it (still blamed on Jews), a strong move against women (reestablishing male dominance), and in general making an alliance with the rulers— with the
Christians who run a Christian country.
Third, there is the fact that suffering has not made Jews good,
which means that there are greedy Jews who think that power
means safety and also who take pleasure in power. The Christian
Right offers Jews not only a means of dissociation from homosexuality but also real dominance over women, if the social order the Christians want is effectively legislated.
Fourth, there is the fact that suffering has not made Jews good,
which means that there are Jews who hate homosexuals, women,
blacks, children, reading, writing, air, trees, and everything else
the Christian Right seems to hate.
Fifth, the right-wing emphasis on the importance of property
offers Jews a way of changing the history of Jews with respect to
property—whether the property is Israel or land or housing or factories or farms. The protection of property suggests to Jews that they will not be driven off what they own.
Sixth, religious conservatism has its analogue in social conservatism, in that both particularly uphold the rights of men to ownership of women and children. Right-wing Jews who are religiously orthodox see the secular pluralism of Western society in general and the United States in particular as taking Jews away
from Judaism: this, despite the emphasis that Judaism puts on
learning, makes them hostile to secular learning, secular intellectuals, secular Jew s, any education that is not strictly and explicitly Jewish. This brings them into a harmony of values with Christians
who do not like Jews because Jews represent learning: the right-
wing Jews are under the illusion that they and the Christian Right
dislike the same Jews for similar reasons.
Seventh, strangely enough it is in this quasi-religious coalition
with the Christian Right that right-wing Jews seek to find the assimilation that has always been the hope of Jews. We feel the same way you do, they say; we have the same values you have, the same
