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In September, National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) President Nancy Ratzan's High Holidays message to supporters urged them to "answer the call of the shofar" -- traditionally associated with repentance -- by pledging to "work for positive social change."

That "positive social change" included advocating for a health care reform bill that would establish a government-run insurance program, "a critical and strong piece of reform" in Ratzan's words.

But when the bill passed the U.S. House of Representatives, it contained an amendment prohibiting taxpayer-funded abortions as part of the government insurance plan, but allowing them to be part of private insurance plans.

Ratzan responded by calling the abortion restriction "an enormous step backward for those who believe in the separation of religion and state."

Ratzan's call to use the Jewish High Holidays to advocate for a government-run health insurance program, combined with her criticism of pro-life policies as a violation of church-state separation, would seem to raise an obvious question: If Jewish values are only applicable when they conform to left-liberal public policy, what is the difference between the Torah of groups like the NCJW (and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, etc.) and the tenets of modern political liberalism?

This question is not meant rhetorically. But it is at the heart of the answer, according to Norman Podhoretz, to the question he receives more often than any other, and which is the title of his most recent book: "Why Are Jews Liberals?"

Podhoretz, longtime executive editor (now editor-at-large) of Commentary magazine, posits that American Jews follow a "Torah of liberalism." According to prominent pollster Steven M. Cohen, surveys tell us the following: "Most Jews attend synagogue four times a year or less"; yet almost half say that "being Jewish" is "very important" to them.

So what does "being Jewish" entail in the daily lives of these American Jews, if not practicing Jewish laws and rituals? Podhoretz, summing up and quoting the data, gives this answer: "In other words, for most American Jews, ethnic 'Jewishness takes precedence over Judaism.' But insofar as these ethnic Jews pay any mind to Judaism at all, they regard it as, in 'essence,' liberalism by another name. Hence in their eyes being 'a liberal on political and economic issues' is equivalent to being 'a good Jew'."

Pyrrhic emancipation

The book begins with the establishment of Christianity, and from there serves as a skin-deep timeline of the Jewish communities' role in the political and religious culture of each society, culminating with the U.S., at which point Podhoretz delves into more detailed analysis.

One drawback of this approach is that Podhoretz misses early indicators of the threat that certain historical movements posed to Jewish survival until after Franklin Roosevelt.

For just one example of this, take the French Revolution. Podhoretz calls the French Revolution the end of the first phase of "Jewish emancipation," referring to the call by Enlightenment leaders that Jews be accorded the same rights as everyone else.

The problem is that the French Revolution was viciously anti-organized religion, but explicitly religious in character, and admittedly so: the philosophers behind this movement called it "natural religion."

Podhoretz recognizes this, and doesn't mince words. The French Revolution, Podhoretz writes, "produced a fairly well-established set of conditions that the Jews would be required to meet if they were to be accepted as full-fledged citizens" and that these conditions essentially required that "the Jews altogether cease being Jews... or, at the very least, that they find some way of remaining Jewish without seeming to be so" by ditching their unique look and religious rituals.

This is an early form of the "Torah of liberalism," so why doesn't Podhoretz draw the intuitive line from there directly to the modern Torah of liberalism (I'll cease using the quotes at this point)? The answer, it seems, is that he puts blinders on at key moments. Throughout the book, Podhoretz operates under the assumption that Christian anti-Semitism is one of the main reasons Jews were suspicious of the political Right, because in the past the political Right was Christian in makeup.

But Podhoretz misses when that ceased to be the case. When Podhoretz writes about the 1930s, he writes about Christian anti-Semitism and includes a paragraph detailing the news and views of the infamous Father Charles Coughlin, who had a popular radio program. Coughlin decried Roosevelt as a "tool of the Jews," praised fascism, and expressed support for Hitler's efforts to stem the tide of "world Jewish domination."

What goes unsaid in Podhoretz's writing is the fact that Coughlin was a man of the Left. He even attacked Roosevelt from the president's left. Thus, the leading American (Christian) anti-Semite was a supporter of fascism and a leftist-liberal to the core. And what of Roosevelt's hostility to the Jews, expressed in his closing of the American borders to Jews who would be sent back to gas chambers?

According to Podhoretz -- and this is greatly detailed and supported in the book -- it was Roosevelt who established the Jews as overwhelmingly loyal to voting Democrat. Given that Jimmy Carter's anti-Jewish behavior while in office pales in comparison to Roosevelt's, this issue -- the genesis of the Jews' near-total devotion to voting for the Democratic Party in national elections -- begs for more inspection.

Unconcerned as Israel burned?

Podhoretz's break with the Left comes in the 1960s, when he no longer believes the liberal agenda benefits the American Jewish community -- and certainly not enough to retain its loyalty.

At this point, Podhoretz no longer even understands Jewish loyalty to the Democrats, except to the degree it conforms to his concluding thesis regarding the Torah of liberalism. There are moments in the book when Podhoretz's confusion morphs into palpable frustration, such as with regard to the administration of Richard Nixon.

Nixon is remembered most for Watergate and for his reputation as a manipulative executive, but there's something else Nixon should be remembered for: He is, without any doubt, the American president most beneficial to Israel. Nixon's efforts during the Yom Kippur War are by now public knowledge, and the fact is he came closest of any president to single-handedly saving Israel from destruction.

Those efforts did not, however, win him the Jewish vote, in part because the Jewish communal organizations were by 1973 far less concerned with Israel's survival than were Nixon or the Congress. One senatorial aide complained that the Washington, D.C. representative of one of the major Jewish organizations was, as quoted by Podhoretz, "very good in working on what amounted to very marginal Jewish interests. These are the traditional liberal interests in civil rights, integration, housing, and all that. As far as the gut issues -- Israel and Soviet Jewry -- are concerned, [this Jewish organization's] input has been zero."

Buckley banishes anti-Semitism

A pair of incidents concerning anti-Semitism in 1986 made clear to Podhoretz on which side of the political isle the Jewish community's true friends could be found. First came the March 22, 1986 column by Gore Vidal in The Nation, a liberal ideas magazine. The column openly encouraged nearly every vile anti-Semitic stereotype ever constructed. "Vidal's piece impressed me and many other people as the most blatantly anti-Semitic outburst to have appeared in a respectable American periodical since World War II," Podhoretz writes.

The response from the Left was almost complete silence. When Podhoretz finally inquired to the liberal intellectual community as to why there were no complaints, Podhoretz himself was attacked as a McCarthyite reactionary.

The second incident came when a series of Israel-suspicious columns that finally ventured into the territory of anti-Semitism appeared by the conservative columnist Joseph Sobran. The reaction from the Right, however, was far different.

Though the columns at issue never appeared in the leading conservative journal National Review, Sobran was associated with the magazine. National Review's editor, William F. Buckley Jr., responded with an editorial that explained that readers of the columns in question "might reasonably conclude that those columns were written by a writer inclined to anti-Semitism.... Accordingly, I here dissociate myself and my colleagues from what we view as the obstinate tendentiousness of Joe Sobran's recent columns."

That is, the conservative movement made clear it wouldn't tolerate anti-Semitism on the Right, even among friends. The Left, however, was willing to accept anti-Semitism in their ranks in the name of intellectual privilege.

The 'As-a-Jews'

Last week, former New Yorker writer Dan Baum sent an email to all the Jews on his address list, asking them to complain en masse to Sen. Joseph Lieberman about his stated opposition to the proposed government-run insurance program. Baum suggested sending a message to Lieberman that began, "As a fellow Jew, I am appalled by your threat to filibuster the health care bill now working its way through the Senate."

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg was one of the recipients of Baum's email. Though Goldberg supports the government option, he criticized Baum's tactics.

"Baum may have revealed himself to be an 'As-a-Jew,' a particular Semitical sub-type," Goldberg wrote on his blog. "As-a-Jews are people who invoke their heritage only when they feel a need to dump on another Jew, or a Jewish organization, or the Jewish state." What is inherently Jewish about the government insurance option? Nothing, Goldberg points out. Podhoretz's theory about the Torah of liberalism is the spot-on explanation for Baum's "Jewish" appeal to support something specifically liberal.

For those who doubt Podhoretz's theory, consider Rabbi Michael Lerner, the influential liberal editor of Tikkun magazine who is a frequent critic of Israel and traditional Judaism. Some years ago, Lerner took the al chet prayer from the Yom Kippur liturgy -- an immensely serious prayer in which we admit our sins to God and ask for forgiveness -- and decided it needed some editing. Lerner's updated version of the al chet prayer was subsequently reprinted by the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture and MyJewishLearning.com.

Here are some excerpts from Lerner's new al chet prayer, to be said on the holiest day of the Jewish year, during an especially solemn moment in prayer: "For the sins of accepting the current distribution of wealth and power as unchangeable... For the sins of not doing enough to save the environment; And for the sins of not doing enough to challenge sexist institutions and practices; And for the sins of turning our backs on -- or participating in -- the oppression of gays and lesbians... For the sins of not recognizing the humanity and suffering of the Palestinian people and the injustice they face living under the unwanted occupation;" etc.

Yes, yes: environmentalism, the Israeli occupation, redistribution of wealth, "Don't ask, don't tell." Surely this religion that Lerner is preaching -- with its prophets Al Gore, Edward Said, Karl Marx, and Gloria Steinem -- isn't Judaism, is it? No, it is the Torah of liberalism.

Is there hope for Jewish political independence? Podhoretz thinks so. And here he and I are in complete agreement, especially as he characterizes and modernizes the classic Augustinian idea of the Jew as "witness."

"This time, through the unique benignity of their experience in the United States, the Jewish people bear witness to the infinitely precious virtues of the traditional American system," Podhoretz writes. "Surely, then, we Jews have an obligation to join with the defenders of this system against those who are blind or indifferent or antagonistic to the philosophical principles, the moral values, and the socioeconomic institutions on whose health and vitality it depends."

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.