I am a Jewish conservative and I will try to explain what that means, and why that perspective or orientation makes sense to me, and why I think it should to others. There are many kinds of conservatives. There are small government conservatives, who believe that an economy works better when more of it is in the hands of private rather than public enterprise. I consider myself a small government conservative. Small government conservatives believe that lower tax rates on employment and capital spur an economy and promote work and entrepreneurship. The alternative is the nanny state-where government seeks to control and provide more services, and tax rates are far higher to support this.

In Europe, the fastest growing economies are all the low tax model countries, many of them in Eastern Europe, countries which have had their fill of collectivism, and state control. The slow growing economies, with high unemployment and little new job creation, are in Western Europe, following the high tax, social welfare model. The new leaders in Germany and France are finding out how difficult it is to combat an entrenched culture and laws developed over 50 years that penalize work and job creation even though this model has produced sustained high unemployment levels and slow growth for decades.

The European system has also affected immigrant absorption. Compare the integration over time of immigrants to this country with those who have arrived in Western Europe. In European cities, we see immigrants without jobs, supported by the welfare state, remaining outsiders, and growing increasingly alienated from their societies. Alternatively, those who come to America to work, almost always find it, and over time, are integrated into American society.

The two countries in the world which have had the greatest track record in terms of integrating immigrants into their societies are America and Israel, which should for all of us be a source of pride. The starkest contrast between the relatively free market, lower tax rate American economy, and those of Western Europe is reflected in the flow of people, and population levels. Since 1950, the US population has doubled from150 to 300 million people, with substantially higher real wage and income levels achieved over that half century. In Europe, the population of the largest countries has barely budged the last 30 years, and in many countries, the population is now declining, as birth rates approach one per woman of child bearing age, barely half the American birth rate. In Russia, the trend has gone the furthest; on average, there are 3 births and 4 deaths every minute. That is a dying country.

And of course immigrants are not flocking to Russia either. The average life expectancy for men in Russia has dropped below 60 — 20 years below the American male life expectancy. For years, some delusional Americans were advocates of the superiority of the Soviet system, and many of them still occupy chairs in our prestige academic institutions.

Even within our own country, we see the dynamic I have just described at work. The fastest growing states in terms of population growth, economic growth rates, and job growth are, for the most part, states with lower tax rates, and fewer regulations on business. New York State, Pennsylvania, most of the Midwest, New England, Louisiana, West Virginia are all stagnant in terms of population, and slow growing economically. The Sunbelt and the mountain west are growing rapidly.

In my opinion, the big government European model has produced a continent with many selfish people — the ultimate me generation, choosing to enjoy the fruits of their society, but not pass them on to a new generation. Families with no children are now a very common thing in Europe. Who can forget a few summers back, when ten thousand elderly French people died in their un-airconditioned apartments in a sweltering month of August while their children, not caring to be bothered, remained on vacation.

One criticism that I often hear is that the United States does not give as much aid to poorer countries as a percentage of GDP, as many countries in Europe, so we are the selfish ones. That is nonsense. In Europe, almost all foreign aid or aid to the poor is government aid. There is very little private charity. As with so much else, people in Western Europe assume the government will do it for them. In the US, most of the aid and philanthropy is from individual charity, not from the government, and the combination of public and private charity from the United State dwarfs that of any other country in the world on a total or per capita basis.

We are the most generous people in the world, in part because we live in a society that values individual effort, and achievement, and we have more of our money left over after paying the tax man to make choices about how to use it. We don’t delegate all philanthropic decisions to government. The American model, the smaller government model, expands personal freedom, and choice. Of course we have some Americans, liberals for the most part, who would prefer that our society more closely resemble those of Western Europe. They would trade growth and opportunity for a greater measure of security. I would not make that trade.

Which brings me to another branch of conservatism: social conservatism. The debate over social issues in this country is heated — not only between liberals and conservatives but even among individuals of the same faith. Orthodox Jews and reform Jews, for instance, do not agree on abortion policy. Abortion is always the central issue behind debates over Supreme Court nominees. But the conservative argument over abortion is not strictly one of its legality, but how the right to abortion was established. Prior to Roe v Wade, several states had adopted legalized abortion policies for their residents through legislation. Roe v Wade made abortion a national right, relying on dubious links to a constitutional right to privacy, and utterly bypassing the legislative process. Going even further, the Justices produced a trimester delineation over when abortion was protected and when not. Regardless of one’s feelings about whether abortion should be legal, I believe that had abortion rights grown in the United States through acts of state legislatures, or even Congress, the issue would be far less contentious today. A conservative principle, judicial restraint, recommends that we leave for legislatures the job that is theirs: creating new laws.

As to the substance of the debate over social issues, while I do not include myself in the class of social conservatives on all issues, I have great admiration and sympathy for those who support a culture of life. In our own congregation, we have Dr. Leon Kass, , who has shown great sensitivity on issues of life and death in his role as an advisor to the Bush Administration on the issue of stem cell research and in his writing on these and related subjects. Choice on abortion is not the same as choice in selecting a toothpaste brand.

Just to show you that I am not avoiding sensitive subjects, let me spend a minute on the abortion issue. When the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade and then affirmed it in the Casey decision, they established that in the first two trimesters of a woman’s pregnancy, abortion was legal. In the third trimester, it could only be performed if the mother’s life and health were at risk. In 1973, fetal viability before six months of pregnancy was pretty much unheard of. Today it is not. Premature infants are kept alive who have been delivered after but 20 weeks of pregnancy.

I find it impossible to rationalize how our society can permit abortion on demand after a time when fetal viability has been established by modern medical technology. At that point in the pregnancy cycle, if not earlier, we have to think very carefully about what choice means. Evidence of the kind of thinking that disturbs me in this debate was a conversation between a reporter and California’s very liberal Senator Barbara Boxer at a time when the Senate was debating restrictions on a procedure known as partial birth abortion. The reporter asked Boxer what she believed were a woman’s rights if a partial birth abortion went bad — in the sense, that the fetus was delivered alive. Just describing this event in this way is pretty disturbing. Boxer, who may be a hero to some in this room, responded that she believed the woman retained her right to choose.

To choose what pray tell? To club the newborn to death?

Finally, I am a conservative because of foreign policy — in particular American national security and support for Israel. For me this issue trumps all the others. In fact, I am not just a conservative, but a neoconservative. Which means that I personally was the one who brought you the Iraq war. Funny, right? Actually, not. For Israel’s enemies in the United States, on the right, and even more so on the left, make precisely that charge: that supporters of Israel in America led us to war against Iraq in service to Israel’s Likud Party. And capitalizing on that charge at a time when the Iraq war is unpopular, these critics are now arguing that America risks being led into another war, taking action against Iran’s nuclear program at the behest of these same pro-Israel advocates. Some of those who make these charges claim that they are the real conservatives, and that the neocons are inauthentic conservatives (hence neo), since many were once on the left. One wonders howthis brand of conservatives hope to win a governing majority when they reject those who switch to their side on most other arguments. These Israel critics on the right are known by some as paleoconservatives. In their ranks are folks like Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak. But the fiercest attacks on the neocons have come from the left.

The very term neoconservative has become to a certain extent a slander, when uttered by a cable TV talk show host such as Chris Mathews or a writer like Michael Lind. For many left wing critics of the Iraq war, the term is used as virtually synonymous with Jews, and in particular, with the group of Jews who they believe encouraged or supported the Bush Administration in going to war in Iraq. Among the names often associated with the necoons are: Charles Krauthammer, Joshua Muravchik, Bill Kristol and his father Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and his son John Podhoretz, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Richard Perle. These individuals I just named are all Jewish.

There are non-Jewish neocons: Jeanne Kirkpatrick, John Bolton, and William Bennett, among them. Those who blame the neocons for the Iraq war generally exclude the non-Jewish members since a core part of their argument is that the American neocons were all doing Israel’s bidding, and it is more convenient to blame Jews for this. The charge I think is preposterous. The idea that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Don Rusmfeld, Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell are shrinking violets who needed a push from a group of neocons, some in government, some political writers outside of government, to decide to go to war, strains credulity. And of course none of the Administration figures have ever suggested that they needed any push from anybody else to take action in Iraq.

What is disturbing I think is that so many American Jews have been completely oblivious to the rank anti-Semitic undercurrent in the charge and the danger to American support for Israel that is tied to the effort to associate the neocons, meaning the Jews and Israel, with the Iraq war. The effort by anti-Iraq war critics on the left to tag Israel and its supposed agents (the neocons) with causing the war, has picked up steam recently with the publication of a new book by Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt called The Israel Lobby. It was also seen in the vicious attacks on Senator Joe Lieberman last year when he ran for re-election and was rejected by his own party in the Democratic primary.

. . . more