Jews and guns
I gave a synagogue talk a few weeks ago and was asked by a member of the audience why Jews seem to be so averse to guns and in favor of gun control. I gave a quick and I thought not bad answer: Jews have no real cultural history of hunting, and, with some notable historical exceptions, have had an ambivalent relationship with military service.
The laws of kashrut pretty much assured that Jews, even those living in rural areas, didn’t do much hunting. Kosher-keeping Jews can’t eat an animal that isn’t slaughtered according to kashrut. As for hunting for sheer sport, the rabbis put a kibosh on that. Rabbi Ezekiel Landau of Prague (18th century) wrote that killing an animal in order to satisfy “the enjoyable use of [a person's] time” is “sheer cruelty.” As Rabbi Joseph Telushkin explains, Landau’s response has long been considered the “normative Jewish position on hunting.”
Telushkin also suggests that the Jewish aversion to hunting is a matter of sympathy and transference, and quotes Heine: “My ancestors did not belong to the hunters as much as to the hunted.”
As for military service, Jews have a long and proud history as soldiers, going back to biblical times and including service in the armies of wahtever country they happened to be living in. Don’t get a Jewish war vet started on the idea that Jews don’t fight. And Israel has proven that when it comes to defending themselves, Jews take a back seat to no one.
But the Jewish relationship with the military has always been ambivalent. Many of the immigrants who fled Russia and the east in the 20th century did so to escape forced conscription for terms of two decades and more. The military could also be a hotbed of anti-Semitism, as Dreyfus learned so memorably. Through much of the last century Jews in the U.S. military academies spoke of their struggles for acceptance; those are the kinds of stories today’s adult Jews grew up on.
Put the two together and you don’t get a very hospitable climate for raising gun lovers.
Today I got a release from Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, touting a paper by Rabbi Dovid Bendory and Alan Korwin titled “Why Jews Hate Guns.”
They sum up their arguments thus:
Our research identifies ten reasons why these Jews feel the way they do about self defense in general, firearms specifically and your own right to keep and bear arms.
The adamantly anti-gun-rights Jews are bowing to:
1. A desire for utopian moral purity
2. A disproportional incidence of hoplophobia
3. A quest for power through victimization of peers
4. A utopian delusion that if guns would just “go away,”
crime would end and the world would be a peaceful safe place
5. Self hatred and a wish to be helpless, acting out guilt-based
behavioral problems that develop in childhood
6. The Ostrich Syndrome
7. Garden-variety hypocrisy
8. Adulterated religion — Jews In Name Only (JINOs)
9. Feel-good sophistry
10. Abject fear that yields irrational behavior
(Hoplophobia, I learned from the paper, is an irrational fear of guns [as opposed to ballistophobia, or fear of being shot].)
The authors, needless to say, don’t appear to be very proud of their fellow Jews. An inability to face reality, they suggest, has tempted Jews to embrace the words of Isaiah: “they shall beat their spears into pruning hooks.” The authors much prefer Talmud, Berakoth 58b: “If a man comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first.”
The paper isn’t likely to change anyone’s mind, but it’s interesting reading.
UPDATE: Two other things occur to me: The Jewish aversion to guns, like so many of the behaviors Jews claim for themselves, comes out of a desire to distinguish ourselves from the gentiles. Kashrut, for all its biblical justification, is clearly a system for marking a boundary between us and them. It’s also a template for folk markers to come: There is no good reason why Jews don’t bring flowers to a funeral, but its assocaition as a gentile custom probably kept it from gaining a foothold among us. Hunting too falls under the category of goyishe naches; that is; what they do. In Arthur Szyk’s famous protrayal of the Haggadah’s Four Sons, the wicked son wears hunting gear. 
I also don’t think Bendory and Korwin account for how much the sanctity of private gun ownership is a very American phenomenon, and a fairly recent one at that, as Jill Lepore demonstrated convincingly in the New Yorker. Instead of wondering why so many Jews remain so supportive of gun control, you might wonder why the zeal for gun ownership has taken on the sort of passion and defensiveness usually associated with religion.
Advertisement
JustASC is written by Andrew Silow-Carroll, Editor-in-Chief of the 
June 7th, 2012 at 9:54 am
Last year I had a conversation with a 30-something year-old Orthodox guy from Teaneck. He revealed that he was a gun owner. I asked him (I shamefully confess that this provides some insight into my own chauvinist stereotypes) what his wife thought of this.
‘My wife?’ he replied earnestly, ‘She has her own gun. And she’s a better shot than I am!’
After several similar conversations, most in shul (maybe I should cease talking in shul), I stopped being surprised by how many people in Teaneck – or so it seemed – are gun owners.
When I have asked these gun owners why the have purchased one, the response tends to be that these folks feel as if they cannot reliably depend upon local police for protection. Upon some drilling down, the Holocaust is inevitably invoked as an example of Jewish powerlessness and its catastrophic result.
Perhaps it is an outgrowth of Kahane’s militant post-Shoah aggressive Jewish empowerment merged with the (uniquely?) American right to bear arms and the relative ease with which one can obtain them.
One last thought: I would suggest that traditional Jewish unease with hunting begins much earlier than the 18th century: try Esau, described in Genesis as “a skillful hunter” while Jacob – our hero – is described “as a peaceful man.” Esau, the grandfather of Israel’s arch-enemy Amalek, has been associated with many historical oppressors of the Jewish poeople and most of his attributes are criticized by rabbinic literature.
June 21st, 2012 at 10:41 pm
Today is Thursday, June 21, 2012 RSS feed
Guns and Moses
Posted on June 21, 2012 by Ammoland
Tags:Jews For The Preservation Of Firearms Ownership|JPFO|New Jersey
Original article from New Jersey Jewish News.
by Andrew Silow-Carroll
NJJN Editor-in-Chief
Jews For The Preservation Of Firearms Ownership
Washington, DC –(Ammoland.com)- At a synagogue talk a few weeks ago, a member of the audience asked me why Jews seem to be disproportionately in favor of gun control.
I gave a quick and I thought not-bad answer: Jews have no real cultural history of hunting and an ambivalent relationship with military service.
Kosher-keeping Jews can’t eat an animal that isn’t slaughtered according to kashrut. As for hunting for sport, Rabbi Ezekiel Landau of Prague (18th century) wrote that killing an animal in order to satisfy “the enjoyable use of [a person’s] time” is “sheer cruelty.” As Rabbi Joseph Telushkin explains, Landau’s response has long been considered the “normative Jewish position on hunting.”
As for military service, Jews have a long and proud history as soldiers. Don’t get a Jewish war vet or an Israeli soldier started on the idea that Jews don’t fight.
But the Jewish relationship with the military has always been rocky. Immigrants fled Russia to escape forced conscription for terms of two decades and more. The military could also be a hotbed of anti-Semitism, as Dreyfus learned so memorably. Through much of the last century, Jews in the U.S. military academies spoke of their struggles for acceptance.
I find these sorts of “cultural DNA” arguments very satisfying. Of course, I don’t “get” guns or why anyone who isn’t a hunter or a jeweler would want to own one. For folks on the other side, this isn’t culture – it’s intransigence. Last month I was sent a copy of “Why Jews Hate Guns,” written by Rabbi Dovid Bendory of Livingston and Alan Korwin on behalf of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. The paper is dripping with disdain for the Jews, who, “with such a stunning history of oppression and murder by humanity’s villains,” nevertheless “hate guns and fear gun ownership.”
The authors list the mindsets they believe contribute to Jewish “hoplophobia” (which, I learned, is an irrational fear of guns). These include a “desire for utopian moral purity,” an embrace of victimhood, and that old standby: self-hatred.
The authors also find justification for gun ownership in the Torah. Unable to face reality, misguided Jews embrace Isaiah: “They shall beat their spears into pruning hooks.” The authors much prefer Talmud, Berachot 58b: “If a man comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first.”
In fact, there is a gun culture among segments of Modern Orthodox Jews. The One Israel Fund and the Teaneck-based Golani Rifle and Pistol Club hold an annual “Guns and Beef Night” (which I like to call “Glock and Glatt”). Bendory gives shooting lessons to fellow Orthodox Jews.
Bendory and Korwin also hold with a belief, prominent in conservative circles, that many members of the non-Orthodox Jewish majority are “Jews In Name Only.” These “JINOs,” they write, “have replaced their previous religion with a popular new one: so-called social justice.’”
It’s the same point made by Norman Podhoretz in his 2009 book Why Are Jews Liberals? The “Orthodox oppose the politically correct liberal positions taken by most other American Jews precisely because these positions conflict with Jewish law,” wrote Podhoretz.
These debates over guns and politics raise a more fundamental question: Who is a Jew? One side dismisses polls showing Jewish support for Democrats by saying many of those Jews have, for all intents and purposes, stopped being Jews, at least as measured by the positive Jewish choices they make in their lives. The other side looks at the conservative minority and wonders how they can engage in behaviors so “un-Jewish”: voting Republican, toting guns, allying with Evangelical Christians. I am always surprised by the degree to which highly assimilated Jews still hold onto the idea of “goyische naches” – that is, the things only gentiles do.
The culture that gave rise to Jewish liberalism is not Judaism “in name only,” unless you are willing to write off the last 150 years or so of Jewish culture, politics, and social activism as a historical blip. Yes, many Jews defined themselves over those decades in terms of the causes they took on, from the labor movement to civil rights to secular Zionism. But they did so with a deep indebtedness to their Jewish identities. Even in a period of decline – and surveys show non-Orthodox movements in retreat – the conflation of Judaism and liberalism persists, certainly enough to frustrate Podhoretz and the Jewish pro-gun lobby.
Thus, some conservatives did a victory lap after last week’s release of the New York Jewish population survey, which showed huge gains by the fervently Orthodox community and declines among the non-Orthodox movements.
“There’s little doubt this means the Jewish community of the future will be far less liberal,” wrote Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin.
I agree that we are going to lose a lot more non-Orthodox Jews and secular Jewish culture before the assimilationist trend bottoms out. But I also think the cultural patterns that gave rise to Jewish liberalism are a powerful force and will continue to be transmitted despite the generational drift. Whether that force survives or fades depends on the will and ability of non-Orthodox Jews to assert their Jewishness and make the choices that assure there will be young Jews like them. To those who care deeply about Judaism in all its varieties, I say: Stick to your guns!
Andrew Silow-Carroll is Editor-in-Chief of the New Jersey Jewish News. Between columns you can read his writing at the JustASC blog.
About:
Jews For The Preservation Of Firearms Ownership Mission is to destroy “gun control” and to encourage Americans to understand and defend all of the Bill of Rights for everyone. Those are the twin goals of Wisconsin-based Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO). Founded by Jews and initially aimed at educating the Jewish community about the historical evils that Jews have suffered when they have been disarmed, JPFO has always welcomed persons of all religious beliefs who share a common goal of opposing and reversing victim disarmament policies while advancing liberty for all.
JPFO is a non-profit tax-exempt educational civil rights organization, not a lobby. JPFO’s products and programs reach out to as many segments of the American people as possible, using bold tactics without compromise on fundamental principles. Visit http://www.JPFO.org – Copyright JPFO 2011
Read more at Ammoland.com: http://www.ammoland.com/2012/06/21/guns-and-moses/#ixzz1yUBzMceT