Nor is it just (even if Jews don’t wear cowboy boots) George W. Bush’s Texas accent – Lyndon Johnson had a heavier one. It’s not merely the president’s small-town folksiness, either; Bill Clinton came from Little Rock and could sound like an Ozark hick when he wanted to. It’s not even just Mr. Bush’s religious beliefs. Jimmy Carter, after all, was a born-again Christian too, and though American Jews were never in love with him, neither did he ever give them nightmares.
What it is, I think, is a combination of all these things. Any one or two of them are Jewishly tolerable. But take them all together – Republican, Christian, populist, small-town-America – and you get a mixture that sends instinctive shivers down Jewish spines. You might call it the fear of the rural redneck, except that rednecks in America have never done Jews any harm. It’s more the age-old fear that the image of the redneck inspires – which is to say, the fear of the non-Jewish Other, of the Polish or Ukrainian peasant, of the anti-Semitic goy.
In America today this is largely an unconscious fear, and even Jewish Bush-haters are not so absurd as to think of the president as anti-Semitic. Yet they do perceive many of his voters as being potentially if not actively so, and deep down, in the atavistic corners of their souls, they do not believe that the Christian Right can be anything but.
The fact that the Christian Right in America descends from the one branch of Christianity that has historically been not anti- but philo-Semitic – that of the dissenting English Protestant sects of the post-Reformation and of the American Puritanism that grew out of them – is lost on America’s Jews.
If it weren’t, they would understand that George W. Bush has been so pro-Israel not in spite of who he is but because of it. Then they might give him credit for being arguably the best president that the Jews of America have ever had.