James Carville and the Jews

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James Carville thinks Yiddish should be the language of voter outreach. Well, kind of.

In an interview with Vox, the longtime political consultant and “Muppets” cast member expressed his concern about “jargon-y language” surrounding subjects like race, suggesting a more accessible form of messaging for Democrats.

“I always tell people that we’ve got to stop speaking Hebrew and start speaking Yiddish,” Carville said. “We have to speak the way regular people speak, the way voters speak. It ain’t complicated. That’s how you connect and persuade. And we have to stop allowing ourselves to be defined from the outside.”

Which is a nice sentiment — if a very antiquated one.

While Yiddish was certainly the lingua franca of Ashkenazi Jews for some time, the analogy makes very little sense in the 21st century. Most regular Yiddish speakers now are Haredi, numbering around half a million to a million people according to YIVO.

While there are plenty of non-Haredi speakers, too, Modern Hebrew is spoken by about 9 million people, no small few of them learned it in Hebrew school to the neglect of other Jewish languages. While Lashon Hakodesh was once the domain of the synagogue, and Yiddish the vernacular of everyday life, the Hebrew revival movement, begun in the 19th century and boosted by the founding of the state of Israel, has completely changed the paradigm.

Still, it’s kind of amazing that Carville had a deep enough knowledge of Jewish history to make such an analogy given how far removed we are from Yiddish’s pervasiveness. But that makes it all the more bizarre as a clarifying analogy for speaking in terms everyday people understand, given how few folks might understand it.

It was, to put it mildly, foolish of the veteran Democratic party strategist James Carville to say the other day, when asked about the pro-Israel position of the great majority of Republican voters, “It’s really about the racism that drives the thing. . . . The reason I suspect that most of these people describe themselves as pro-Israel is because the Jews [in Israel] are whiter than the Palestinians.”

As was pointed out in the wake of Carville’s remarks, Israelis are not demonstrably “whiter than Palestinians”; nor, since both groups vary greatly in skin color, would it be feasible to come up with a metric that might enable a comparison to be made. There are light-skinned, darker-skinned, and dark-skinned Palestinian Arabs, and light-skinned, darker-skinned, and dark-skinned Israeli Jews—and while Israelis and Palestinians can usually tell at a glance which of the two groups one of them belongs to, they do not do so on the basis of skin color. What they instinctively look for are other indicators, such as body language, facial expression, hair style, clothing, and head garb, and sometimes they guess wrong.

Longtime Democratic political consultant James Carville said in a June 4 episode of his “Politics War Room” podcast that “really wealthy Jewish fundraisers” tell him all the time that they can’t continue to support the Democratic Party given the Jew-hatred at Columbia University.

“What the [expletive] did the Democrats have to do with what happened at Columbia?” Carville said. “They tell me that. They look me right in the eye, and I said, ‘No, you just want your [expletive] tax cut now.’”

“Please tell me this is not true, that it is fake news,” stated Abraham Foxman, director emeritus at the ADL. “James Carville spews forth classic antisemitic garbage. I always knew antisemitism in America exists and is serious, but felt people, or at least public persons, especially centrist liberals, were constrained by history, morality, values and fear of consequences to publicly spout it.”

Mark Penn, CEO of the marketing firm Stagwell, who was a pollster for former U.S. President Bill Clinton, wrote that Carville’s comments “are classic antisemitism.”

“Accusing ‘wealthy Jewish donors’ of voting for ‘Deutschland’ to get a tax cut is a typical antisemitic trope accusing Jews of greed because they are Jews, as though wealthy donors of other religions would be different,” he stated. “This is really disappointing, and he should apologize for it.”

I see how this could be interpreted as playing into a stereotype of "greedy Jews."

But my impression is that he actually must have meant something rather different, something more like: Many wealthy white Jews used to be less greedy, and more sympathetic to various marginalized minority groups, than most wealthy non-Jewish white folks; but recently they have become as greedy as most wealthy non-Jewish white folks.

The latter interpretation would be more in line with the reality (of which I'm sure Carville is aware) that Jews have traditionally been more likely than most white people to donate money to the Democratic Party.