The Jewish Alibi Market in American Politics

In Times of Israel you can’t write from “nowhere.” So I’m writing from the only place that is honest: my own name. The topic is not “the community as One,” but the way Jewish signs are used as reputational currency.

There is a comfortable story that keeps failing, and we keep repeating it because it saves us the work of thinking. The story says: if someone is publicly “pro Israel,” they are safe. If someone has Jewish friends, Jewish donors, a rabbi in the background, a photo op, a foundation connection, a network of “contacts,” then accusations about their ecosystem are probably exaggerated. If someone is toxic, surely it has nothing to do with us.

That story is false. Not because Jews are uniquely cynical, and not because America is uniquely corrupt. It is false because modern politics runs on an alibi economy, and Jewish presence has become one of the most useful tokens in that economy. This is not a metaphor. It is a description of transactions that can be observed in real time.

A basic condition of honesty comes first. American Jews are not a bloc. They are internally stratified by religiosity, class, geography, media ecosystems, and by how Israel is placed in a hierarchy of priorities. Any analysis that treats “the Jews” as a single political subject deserves the trash. The scandal is not that “Jews support X.” The scandal is that outsiders still treat Jewish proximity as a moral stamp, and insiders do not always refuse the role of issuing purity certificates.

Mechanism one is banal but decisive: priority bundling. People rarely vote on a single issue. They vote on packages: courts, schools, taxes, deregulation, immigration, security, culture war, anti........

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