American Jews are anything but monolithic in opinion.  The first great conservative leader of postwar America was also the only major party nominee of Jewish descent: Barry Goldwater.  During the Cold War, individual American Jews made enormous contributions to the cause of liberty.

Admiral Rickover almost single-handedly created the most effective part of our Triad Defense System: nuclear submarines.  Morris Childs, the highest-ranking FBI agent in the Communist Party USA, provided our government with priceless intelligence collected within the Kremlin’s inner sanctum, knowing that if caught he would be tortured to death.  AT contributor Herb Meyer, when in the Reagan CIA, was the first man to fully embrace bloodless but total victory against the Evil Empire.

Milton Friedman articulated free-market benevolence as well as anyone in the twentieth century, and Ayn Rand, with literary genius and an incisive, uncompromising mind, made the case for Libertarianism in ways that connect to young people as well as any other thinker has in the last fifty years.

It remains, however, a stubborn and frustrating fact that a preponderance of American Jews feel sympathy with American leftism.  The origin of this sympathy has never been rational and has been, instead, an emotional reaction to the perception of American conservatism. 

Consider social conservatism.  This is almost invariably portrayed by the left as crazy Christians,  yet true Christian social conservatism rests entirely upon Judaism.  It is the left that rejects the inestimable gift of traditional Jewish morality, and it is the right that embraces that gift.

Consider sympathy for the poor and oppressed.  The dependency of the black underclass is cruelly calculated by leftist political bosses who profit with power from the misery, despair, and poverty of these pathetic vote-slaves.  As Charles Krauthammer noted recently in explaining his conversion to conservatism, virtually every objective analysis of federal programs intended to help the poor in fact have made things worse. 

True charity, the voluntary contributions by individuals out of their own pockets to help others, comes from conservatives, not leftists.  Those values that truly elevate lives out of poverty – proficiency in English, stable marriages, strong work ethic – are mocked by the left and endorsed by conservatives.

Many Jews who have felt that they “ought” to support the left have quietly drifted away from the profoundly destructive nature of leftism in practice.  The tipping point for these American Jews, however, may be the grotesque abandonment of Israel by Obama and his viscerally anti-Western cronies in this dreadful presidency.

Radical Islam is an existential threat to Israel, and not just in the form of a nuclear Iran.  It is an existential threat to civilized Europe and to that final bastion of Judeo-Christian values, America.  The war by radical Islam today is waged on many fronts, with merciless ferocity against Jews everywhere but also against Christians everywhere.  The bland amorality that the pseudo-sophisticated left in Europe and here in America images will assimilate or otherwise tame this great evil is as gutless and silly as the appeasement of Hitler or the odious “non-Communist” neutrality so many leftists expressed during the Cold War.

The notional division among Christians or between Christians and Jews is to our common enemy nonexistent.  Iran has long called America the “Great Satan” and Israel the “Little Satan.”  This is just like the Soviet designation of America as the “Main Enemy” or, lesser known, the Nazi insistence that the ultimate foe in its struggles was America.

As I explain in my book, Sinisterism, the totalitarian evils of our times, which are basically the same but manifest in myriad forms, see Israel, America, Christians, and Jews as implacable enemies.  Those American Jews who have clung with more nostalgia than thought to leftism may see – we must all hope, shall see – in this noxious misology appeasement of an evil equal to Nazism by those who care no more for the Jewish people than the most unsavory apologist of Hitler.

It will take all of us to prevail in this war swirling around our world today.  Every American Jew who does not see or confront this endangers not only himself, but also his values, the lives and hopes of his children, and all the sacrifice, the courage, and the victories of his ancestors.   The stakes today are infinite.