exercise this right. We American Jews enjoy the freedom which a gracious Providence has bestowed upon
our country — our lives have indeed fallen in pleasant places.
Why i am flabbergasted by seymour siegel
Arnold
Jacob W o / /
The Jewish right has come up with two parade examples of hutzpah (hybris, to the more assimilated
readers of Sh 'ma, otherwise Hear magazine) in recent
months. One is the unique name of Rabbi Meir
Kahane's new magazine. It is not called Never Again
or even Defense but, simply and finally: Kahane. The
other is Seymour Siegel's warning to us of the Jewish
peace camp to beware of what we say because Spiro
Agnew might misuse it. Spiro Agnew? In the name of
Heaven, Spiro Agnew is a creation of Siegel and his
ilk. We didn't beget Agnew. We surely didn't make
him Vice President of the United States. We didn't
carry his spear or remark his witticisms. And now we
are supposed to be careful about what we say because
Agnew might turn our proposals against the Jews.
Shouldn't Siegel be more careful about whom he supports for Vice President — and I do mean Mr. Robert
(Nixon's National Chairman) Dole.
Now comes Rabbi Siegel again to urge us to vote Republican for the sake of Jewish security. Like some
closet oleh (immigrant to Israel) he sees America with
a queer kind of Israeli distortion. Ford is more
hawkish, so he'll probably be better in the defense of
Israel. Carter wants to cut down on defense spending
so he may be dangerous to the Jewish State (although, presumably, not to millions of poor people in
America who will never get what they need unless the
B-l bomber and its siblings are destroyed on the
drawing board). One sometimes wishes that Siegel
would keep his ethnocentric choices to himself, since
goyim might somehow crack the code and get his
message. Of course, he does cover himself by supporting other equally vicious positions of Gerald Ford,
but we know his real reasons, don't we?
How can an ethical jew support gerald ford?
After W—gate and V— N~ and the CIA making
counter-revolutions and the veto of bills that even
his own party's congresspeople could see were essential to children and the old who are in trouble in
America, after pandering to Reagan and reappointing
Brown and Butz and telling police chiefs that juvenile
offenders should suffer adult punishment, after documented incompetence and undocumented but dead
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certain muddle-headedness, the Nixon Pardoner is unacceptable to all but the most resolute of Republicans.
It is not really important why, in our debates over the
past decade, Siegel has almost always been wrong and
I have almost always been proved right. I wish I could
say that it is due to my superior wisdom and character. But I believe otherwise. Seymour Siegel is a
brilliant Jewish scholar and a fine person. The real
question is how he could have been wrong so often
and still be wrong in the present. This is the issue for
Jewish ethics: how could three thousand years of
tradition labor and produce — Gerald Ford?
Some have said that Siegel's past errors make him
dangerously irrelevant to future ethical decisions and
that he should therefore be suppressed. I don't agree.
I don't oppose dissent, even when it comes from the
mouths of horses with a bad track record. I still want
Seymour Siegel to speak and to be heard. And I also
want all of us to figure out just how he got that way
and what we can do to avoid getting that way ourselves. It is hard for many of us to make a choice between a candidate we know nothing about and one
about whom we know too much. But Rabbi Siegel
apparently lacks the sensitivity to grasp even so unpleasant and so gross a dilemma. Back to the drawing
board for him!
Why i am voting for jimmy carter
Richard
N . Levy
The first question one should ask when discussing the
presidential choice of candidates for President is:
does it matter? The view persists among a number of
active Jews these days that the American presidential
election is goyishnachas, beneath the concern of
serious Jews because it both takes time away from
Jewish pursuits and strengthens the assimilationist
notion that Jews should be concerned about "universal" ideas, as opposed to strictly Jewish ones.
While this view is surely in the minority in the Jewish
community, its existence to any articulated degree is
cause for dismay. Unconcern about the direction of
the government under which we live has not always
been our norm, whether we remember the early days
of the Reform movement, when the destiny of
America was seen to reflect the will of God, or
whether we merely recall that the prayer for the government inserted in the Torah service was meant not
only to protect us from pogroms but to contribute
what as Jews we could to the presence of the divine
hand in the government which ruled us. In recent