1. Judaism is indeed preoccupied with social justice (as well as with holiness and personal morality), and many Jews believe that the only way to achieve a just society is through leftist policies.

Here Prager's on solid ground. He agrees with Jewish liberals that there is a connection between authentic Judaism and social justice; the weak (or disputed) link in the chain is the question of whether "leftist policies" are a valid means of achieving a "just society". It would also be appropriate to point out that while social justice is an important part of Judaism, it is not the whole of it; that is, it is a necessary but not sufficient element. And so Prager (again rightly, in my view) finds some truth in the quip that "There are two types of Jews -- those who believe Judaism is social justice and those who know Hebrew."

2. More than any other major religion, Judaism has always been preoccupied with this world.

Quite so.

3. Most Jews are frightened by anything that connotes right-wing -- such as the words "right-wing" and "conservative."

Now, here's where we start running into problems. This statement is both hyperbolic and tautological. Why are Jews liberal? Because they're not conservative! No, wait - they're not just not conservative, they're afraid of conservatives! In fact, they're frightened by the very word "conservative".

Just plain silly. But it only gets worse, as Prager tries to answer the question without really answering it:

Especially since the Holocaust, they think that threats to their security emanate from the Right only.

I want to say, "This statement is both true and false", but I have to ask myself, "Which statement? The Jewish perception of threats from the Right, or Prager's perception of that perception?" Prager evades addressing the question of anti-Semitism on the Right directly.

In fact, Prager has an important point here - many liberal Jews do perceive anti-Semitism as coming "from the right only". But how would they get that idea?

Here's how Dennis Prager answers that question -

(It is pointless to argue that Nazism stood for National Socialism and therefore was really a leftist ideology. Whether that is theoretically accurate doesn't matter; nearly everyone regards the Nazis as far Right, and, therefore, Jews fear the Right.)

- or rather, doesn't answer it. Instead, he quibbles about the "right-wing" designation of the Nazis. What a pointless display of content-free verbiage. A more honest and courageous approach would have been to acknowledge that the Nazis did purport to represent certain "conservative" ideals - nationalism, tradition, discipline, and of course anti-Communism - and to take the barbarity of the Nazi regime as an object lesson in the dangers that may lie in the perversion of these ideals. (Just as the honest liberals of today must acknowledge that Communism claimed to represent the "liberal" ideals of equality, secularism, and ... yes, social justice.)

Anti-Semitism is neither a stranger to the Right nor to the Left. But what Judith, Patti, and other Jewish liberals have been noticing in recent years is the leftward migration of anti-Semitism's center of gravity. Here's Judith, way back in 2002, on the positive side of Jewish liberalism:

Judaism is the original social justice religion - every Shabbat in shuls all over the world some Bar Mitzvah kid is chanting a selection from the Prophets. Jews stand out as the one ethnic group in America which keeps voting liberal as it grows more prosperous. Jews have made up a large percentage of the labor and socialist movements of the early 20th century, and their children became "Red-diaper babies": Freedom Riders, SDS members, libertarians, feminists, ACLU members, experimental artists and their patrons. In the Jewish world 2 degrees of separation is more common than 6, so most "conservative" Republican-voting Jews have family affiliated with these groups and attitudes, and many are proud of their activism if not their exact views.

After all, compassionate rules of war, tithing, sharing wealth as an act of justice rather than charity, challenging God ("Yisrael" means "God-wrestler"), respecting other religious paths, intellectual debate, raising children to value study and intellectual exploration, mandating pleasurable sex as a wife's right, speaking truth to power - all these attitudes are hard-wired into our religious practice and mythology. Even totally secular Jews are very conscious of and proud of the social justice part of our heritage. ...

Go read the whole thing at the link as soon as you get the chance.

Now here's Patti at White Pebble in February 2005:

Another article which makes me realize that I never so much changed my views away from liberalism — it’s that liberalism itself moved.

And she links to this article by Daniel Pipes:

Developments since World War II and the Holocaust have been especially fast-paced and portentous. Here are four of the most significant shifts:

From right to left: For centuries, anti-Semitism was the hallmark of the right and merely episodic on the left. To take the ultimate examples of these trends, Stalin's Judeophobia was peripheral to his monstrous project, but Hitler's was central to his. Even a decade ago, this pattern still basically held true. But recent years have witnessed a rapid and global realignment, with the mainstream right increasingly sympathetic to Jews and Israel and its leftist counterparts cooler and more hostile. ...

And in September 2004, Judith followed up her earlier post this post about Party A and Party B:

I have defended this honorable legacy to long-time conservatives, vociferously and in great detail. But it's not 1940 anymore. The global initiatives of that legacy, as well as the will to justify and defend that legacy, have been picked up by the neo-conservative movement and is now being carried forward by the other party. Change comes hard to any minority group which has so wholeheartedly identified its salvation with a certain ideology. (Blacks have this problem too, and are shifting their alliegances just as gradually.)

Recent immigrants don't have the burden of this ideological legacy. The huge Russian Jewish community in NYC is overwhelmingly voting for Bush, and Eastern European immigrants in general have fond feelings for Republicans, based on the party's support for entrepreneurship and Reagan's facing down the Soviet Empire.

Go read it all. It's an excellent pre-buttal (is that a word?) to Prager.