Jews in the Senate

UPDATE: See correction at bottom

On Friday, when Stephen Harper appointed five new Senators, my Liberal frenemy, Jason Cherniak, wrote the strangest thing:

waiting for expressions of disappointment that Harper is not appointing Senators active in the Jewish community

Cherniak, readers will recall, is one of the last 100 Jews in the Liberal Party.

Well, it’s true that in those five Senatorial appointments, none were active in the Jewish community – or at least none were Jewish. But Harper has already appointed three Jews to the Senate, all of whom are very active in the Jewish community and philanthropy: Linda Frum, Judith Seidman and Irving Gerstein. Add to that Harper’s appointment of a Jew to the Supreme Court, and you’d think the man was trying to start a synagogue on Parliament Hill. And, to the chagrin of anti-Semites like the Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui, Harper has appointed a Jew as the chairman of the GONGO Rights and Democracy, and a Jew-loving Gentile as its new president. (That’s really what all the opposition hullabaloo is about: R&D is no longer going to be allowed to send cheques to Palestinian terrorists.)

I pointed out some of this to Cherniak, who responded by listing a number of great Jews in the Liberal Party, most of whom are now in their 70s and 80s, and some of whom have actually been dead for quite some time.

In other words, the golden age of Jews in the Liberal Party – if it ever existed – is long past.

(I dispute that it ever existed; it was the Liberal government during the Second World War that turned back ships of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, with the motto “none is too many.” Liberals have mythologized and sanitized their party’s anti-Semitic past, the same way modern U.S. Democrats have willfully forgotten that theirs is the party of the KKK (including the lovely Senator Robert Byrd) and that the Republicans are the party of Abe Lincoln.)

But that’s the past. What’s the future? In my own travels, I find that on most Canadian campuses, the Hillel or Jewish students clubs are overwhelmingly Conservative. That’s the future.

Cherniak asked me: who is “the Jewish Senator” in the Conservatives, and I actually replied. But that’s a mistake. Even accepting the concept of “the Jewish Senator” is to agree to the ghettoization of Jews and to relegate being pro-Israel to the level of an ethnopolitical hand-out, not a function of a principled foreign policy. More than that, it accepts that a Jew's only place must be on "Jewish issues". The Liberals have so conditioned Cherniak into thinking that being pro-Israel is a ghetto issue, that he believes it: he thinks his place is to have one token in Parliament. Maybe he thinks it’ll be him, if he really serves the party loyally.

This also makes the false assumption that any one Jew can speak for the community – a fallacy proved every day by the “Official Jews” who run the Liberal-sympathetic Canadian Jewish Congress.

I’d rather have a government run by principled Gentiles like Jason Kenney, Stockwell Day and Stephen Harper, to name just three, who are pro-Israel for reasons of conservative principle, than a government stacked with either the “Jews of Silence” as Izzy Asper called the Official Jews, or worse. And by worse, I mean that according to Cherniak’s litmus test, a party dominated by Naomi Klein, Judy Rebick and Noam Chomsky (the NDP, I guess) would be the bee’s knees, but a party run by Israel-loving Christians wouldn’t.

There are plenty of Jews active in the Conservative Party. Much more importantly, there are people in the Tories, Jewish and non-Jewish, who for reasons of principle, not ethnicity, support democracy and liberty, be it in Israel or Taiwan or Iran.

But let me close with a little bit of research that I did, on a whim.

Cherniak is upset that Harper has only appointed three Jewish senators. Jews, of course, make up about 1% of Canada’s population, but Harper has made them 9% of his 33 appointees.

How about Jean Chretien? How did he do?

In ten years as prime minister, unless I'm missing someone, he didn’t appoint a single one.

And Paul Martin? Unless I’m missing someone, the only Jew he could find to appoint was a Conservative named Hugh Segal, Brian Mulroney’s former chief of staff.

I say again, simply counting Jews isn’t the right way to measure a party’s commitment to Jews or Jewish issues. But even on that basis, Chreniak’s desperate apology for his increasingly Jew-free party fails.

UPDATE: A correspondent points out that the Senate website to which I have linked to do my count only lists Senators who are currently sitting, so it excludes Jewish Senators who were appointed but have since retired. So, for example, a seventy-year-old named Yoine Goldstein was appointed for a short term by Paul Martin -- a little token for a little token.

Here's the full list of all Senators appointed by Paul Martin -- it's just Segal and Goldstein.

And here's the full list of all Senators appointed by Jean Chretien. It includes a three-year stint for Sheila Finestone, and that's it.

Seriously in ten years as prime minister, with 75 appointments, he chose one Jew for three years. That's Jason Cherniak's Jew-loving party for you.

I'm also advised of the hilarity that ensued when "Goldstein's seat" -- or as Liberals would say, "the Jewish seat" -- came open. The Official Jews around the country all busied themselves campaigning for "their" Official Jew -- they're power broker, their choice for "the seat".

Imagine the gnashing of the teeth when Harper ignored their official choices and picked his own. I can't tell you how happy I am that none of Harper's Jewish picks have the CJC hechsher.