Cantor and the Jews

This story, on the Religion News Service, struck me as slightly off kilter.

When Virginia Republican Eric Cantor becomes House Majority Leader next month, he will become the highest-ranking Jewish member of Congress in history.

And for many Jewish advocacy groups in Washington, it’s a mixed blessing. 

It proposes that Cantor has a less than comfortable relationship with Jewish organizations because most Jews lean left, while he leans right.

I don’t think anyone outside of the left side of the pro-Israel community thinks the blessing of Cantor’s rise is at all mixed. There are certainly apprehensions about the new GOP majority in the House, but if anything, Cantor’s seniority alleviates these fears.

The story — and it’s one that I, Jim Besser, and others in the Jewish press have written about ad nauseam — is that Jews have a complex relationship with the GOP overall. 

It’s a story that touches on Jewish mega-issues, in terms of how Jews now identify. The GOP is now the more comfortable party for the mainstream pro-Israel community, having essentially stamped out its Charles Percy wing, which argued that support for Israel is not always in the American interest. (Not that the Democrats have been taken over by their Fritz Hollings wing, but such arguments persist on the Democratic margins in a way that they no longer do among Republicans.)

But Israel is not the sole marker of Jewish identification in the political arena, and in other areas, the Jewish-GOP relationship can be fraught. Look today for example to the Jewish Federations of North America statement blasting Congress for not including funding for programs for the elderly in its continuing resolution keeping government funded until March. The JFNA statement does not directly blast the GOP, but the CR — by definition, a bare-bones bill intended only to keep government afloat — is the result of the party essentially nixing passage of funding bills.

And then there’s church-state, and its myriad devolutions into abortion, evolution and creches.

So yes, the relationship with the party is complex and at times vexed — but that does not mean Cantor is alienated in any way from the community. On the contrary — what I hear from most Jewish groups is that "his door is always open."

That doesn’t mean you get agreement when you walk in, but it would be kind of weird if that was the expectation.

One example: When Cantor proposed just before the election that the new Congress could pull Israel funding out of overall foreign aid funding, there were, for sure, concerns. But not because anyone believed that this proposal was tied to Cantor’s leadership; instead, the pro-Israel community recognized that it was his attempt to reconcile Tea Party support for Israel with the insurgency’s slash and burn approach to spending. And he eventually pulled back, precisely because pro-Israel types could — and did — reach him. (That said, the issue has yet to be fully resolved, and things could get interesting next month — but again, that would be the case whether or not Cantor was a leader.)

The point is, the lines are open — and it’s hardly a "mixed blessing" when they’re open to one of the most powerful politicos in the land.