liberal politics as the new Torah

Excerpts from Marvin Olasky's excerpts of his interview with Norman Podhoretz in World...

(To hear the complete interview, click here.)

Q: But in the 1960s everything changed. . . The real problem arose, as I date it, after 1967...a very dramatic reversal of roles between right and left, not just in the United States but everywhere in the world....This reversal has developed further and further, until today you could say without any equivocation that the most passionate supporters of the State of Israel in the United States are the evangelical Protestants, probably even more than the Jewish community itself by now.

...What I try to explain is that liberalism has become much more than a set of political opinions for political Jews: It has become a religion in its own right, with its own Torah of liberalism and its own set of commandments....To the point where whenever they conflict, the new Torah will always trump the old. The devotion of three-quarters of my fellow Jews in America to liberalism and the Democratic Party is as passionate and scrupulous and faithful as the devotion their great-grandparents had toward the Torah of Judaism. They are very loyal to it, and they regard any move from left to right, or from liberalism to conservatism, with the same horror that their grandparents and great-grandparents felt about conversion to Christianity. There was a time when Orthodox Jews would actually go into mourning if a child converted. Many of my friends on the left went into their form of mourning when I became an apostate as a neo-conservative. They didn't know that they were aping their grandparents, but that's what they were doing.