Jewish Republicans are suddenly alarmed that with Eric Cantor gone, there won't be any Jewish Republicans in Congress anymore. Keep in mind there are plenty on the Democratic party side, including DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and NY Sen. Chuck Schumer, but Cantor was it. And that's got Jewish Republicans kind of upset.
The stinging defeat last month of Eric Cantor, the House majority leader and the highest-ranking Jewish politician in American history, has created the possibility of Republicans having no Jewish representation in the House or Senate for the first time in more than a half-century.
“Sometimes, a Jewish person just wants to be able to go to Congress and speak with a Jewish person,” Beverly Goldstein, a Republican donor from Beachwood, Ohio, explained in the hotel lobby after a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
“And Chuck Schumer is not it for us,” she added, referring to the Democratic senator from New York.
Excluding the soon-to-be-retired Mr. Cantor, there are now 31 Jewish members of Congress — 30 of them Democrats and an independent senator from Vermont, Bernard Sanders, who generally votes with Democrats.
And of course, the party of right-wing Christian Dominionist theology is having trouble figuring out why there's no room for non-Christians in it.
Decades after a Reagan era that was relatively rich in Jewish representation on the Republican side of both the House and the Senate, Republican Jews are grappling with what it means for a party that casts itself as the protector of Israel to potentially not have a single one of its children in Congress. Some Democrats, of course, depict Mr. Cantor’s loss as the removal of a final fig leaf from what has become a homogeneously Christian party with little room for religious and ethnic minorities. Others said the loss of Mr. Cantor, a conservative standard-bearer deemed insufficiently conservative by voters who preferred a Tea Party challenger, revealed the Republicans’ exclusion of moderates of any stripe.
There are Jewish candidates running for Congress on the GOP side this year. Meet Adam Kwasman, proud Tea Party Republican.
Mr. Kwasman, a product of Jewish day school in the Tucson suburbs who says he tries to make Shabbat dinners with his parents whenever possible, is the Jewish candidate most affiliated with the Tea Party, opposing gun control and any form of amnesty on immigration and talking about bringing “Kosher Tea” to Congress. He was endorsed by Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County sheriff who has been the subject of a Justice Department investigation because of his crackdowns on undocumented workers. House analysts consider Mr. Kwasman the underdog against a more moderate Republican in the August primary.
No room for moderates here, regardless of your religious creed. Maybe that's the message.
Right up there with the Log Cabin Republicans - odd how there aren't very many openly gay GOP congresscritters, either. It's almost as though the GOP primary voters don't believe in allowing non-Christians or gays to have any rights.
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