The author of a best-selling biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor who resisted the Nazis, he is literate in Jewish history, and knowledgeable about our struggles.
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| Image: The Daily Beast |
Source/Credit: The Daily Beast
By Mark Oppenheimer | August 6, 2016
Eric Metaxas, the acclaimed biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, believes Trump is actually “culturally Jewish” and his bigotry is just “shtick”
Over the past several election cycles, there has been an increasingly vocal, and financially generous, class of Jewish Republican donors, men drawn to Republican fiscal policy and what they perceive as warmth toward Israel. And in their giving, they have often resembled conservative evangelicals, who are typically to their right on matters like abortion and gay rights but with whom they share a love of the free market, a fear of government intrusion, and strong support for Israel. Yet this time around, major Jewish conservatives—Sheldon Adelson and Bernie Marcus being prominent exceptions—have abandoned Donald Trump, rightly seeing in his campaign the kind of enmity toward immigrants, aliens, and underdogs that historically has boded very badly for Jews.
Meanwhile, evangelicals, for all their putative love of Jews, for all their pro-Israel rhetoric, are heavily in for Trump. According to polls, the vast majority of evangelicals will vote for the twice-divorced, biblically illiterate lapsed Presbyterian who has refused to say if he was ever involved with a woman who had an abortion. And not just the masses in the pews. Many of conservative Protestantism’s leading spokespreachers, like Richard Land, Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell Jr., and James Dobson, have come out for Trump. (None of these men would speak with me.) This split between Jewish and Christian conservatives is troubling, not because I am rooting for conservative unity—as a liberal, I’m not—but because of what it says about Christians’ real agenda when it comes to Jewish interests. Despite serious Jewish misgivings about Trump, and despite the ominous historical parallels his campaign conjures, his status as the not-Hillary is what really matters.
Consider, for example, the strange case of author Eric Metaxas. He really should get Jews. The author of a best-selling biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor who resisted the Nazis, he is literate in Jewish history, and knowledgeable about our struggles. As the host of Socrates in the City, a New York speaker series that mostly features conservative men talking about the big questions of life, Metaxas has hosted live discussions with, in addition to Christian usual suspects like Mike Huckabee, religious Jews like physicist Gerald Schroeder and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. And as a New Yorker, as a Yalie, as a media guy, Metaxas lives and works with Jews all the time.
Yet Metaxas came out for Trump last month, and has spoken widely of his support since. Metaxas’s cultivated persona—pocket squares are involved—and his demonstrated interest in the well-lived life make him an oddity as a Trump supporter, doubly odd because of his familiarity with Jews. But while most of the Jews I know—even the Republicans—are terrified by Trump, I was curious that, in interviews, Metaxas, in effect a historian of fascism, didn’t seem to perceive a conflict between his Jew-friendliness and his Trump support.
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Read original post here: Perspective: The Holocaust Historian Who Loves Donald Trump | Mark Oppenheimer
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