Jews and Immigration:

There has undoubtedly been a marked change in American Jewish attitudes toward immigration since 9/11, with a much larger percentage of Jews expressing ambivalence or hostility toward liberal immigration policies. The unease Jews feel about immigration these days, with fears that American cities will become more like Paris or even Toronto or Montreal in terms of how safe Jews feel, has not yet filtered from the grassrooots into the American Jewish organizational hierarchy’s agenda. A new, somewhat overwrought, paper by Dr. Steven Steinleight called “High Noon to Midnight: Why Current Immigration Policy Dooms American Jewry,” addresses these concerns:

American Jews already live in a state of heightened threat. A visit to New York, home to America’s largest Jewish population, provides striking evidence that Jews no longer live in safety. Virtually every high-profile Jewish institution in New York is surrounded by concrete barriers to prevent car bombs exploding too close to the building, while being checked by security guards and passing through metal detectors are now a routine a part of attending religious services. Such vigilance is not confined to New York. Throughout the country, in communities with a substantial Muslim presence, security is a critical part of planning any sort of Jewish political or communal event — especially those intended to demonstrate support for Israel. An address by a representative of Israel or a speaker known as a critic of Islamism ensures an armed police presence.

Reality is dawning on many American Jews that something is amiss, although it seems lost on some of the country’s most venerable Jewish organizations. There’s a sad, if comic irony associated with the fact that employees at organizations like ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the Presidents’ Conference must pass through a gauntlet of concrete barriers, armed guards, metal detectors, and double bulletproof anterooms as they come to work each morning to protect them from radical Islamic terrorists, in order to spend their days studying and disseminating reports on the “threat” posed by Evangelical Christians. Meanwhile, the legislative affairs staffs of these organizations are directed to lobby against immigration reforms that could minimize the danger.

After 9/11, Jewish organizations began devoting more attention to the activities of Islamic radicals in the United States. Their web sites document the ties many of these groups have to terrorists. Amazingly, however, these watchdogs fail to employ the most basic logic and ask the most obvious question: How did they get here? Not one has been willing to examine the impact of mass immigration, including mass Muslim and Islamist immigration, on American Jewry, much less take a position calling for changes in U.S. immigration policy.

As a related aside, to me, the most interesting “Jewish” statistic in the next election will not be what percentage of Jews vote for Bush over Kerry, but what percentage of “Jewish Jews,”–the ones who attend synagogue regularly, go to programs at Jewish Community Centers, foresee their great-grandchildren living as Jews, basically the kind of people who are being regularly exposed to having to go through unprecedented various levels of security at Jewish institutions nationwide, and are inevitably concerned about what this means for the future of American Jews–will vote for Bush over Kerry, in sympathy with the War on Terror.