Although pundits have praised it as a courageous stab at bigotry, Franklin Foer says that Gore’s choice of Lieberman is safe, not bold, because “the more traditionally

Jewish you are, the less anti-Semitism you’re likely to

incur. ” He argues that there have historically been two strains of hatred for Jews in America. The first is an “elite bigotry” toward the unassimilated immigrants focusing on Jewish “clannishness, bad manners, and resistance to modernity.” The second strain is by contrast the “populist and envious” hatred of assimilated Jews who had shed the religious strictures and customs that had kept them separate and targeted them for their “secularism, capitalism, rootlessness, and disproportionate influence,” threatening community and tradition through financial or cultural power. The second strain, Foer states, is the one largely in sway today, especially among the economically displaced — he cites the demagoguery of America’s most prominent anti-Semite, Patrick Buchanan, as illustrative — and the one which Lieberman’s orthodoxy greatly deflects. He also says that Lieberman’s moral stringency undermines “another pocket of extant American anti-Semitism…, the anti-Semitism of Al

Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan and those who see Jews

as imperialists abroad and class oppressors at home.” Bizarrely, though, Foer labels this “the anti-Semitism of the left” because it appears to be informed by the rhetoric of class struggle, as if it might characterize most leftists… The New Republic