A JEWISH REPUBLICAN AT THANKSGIVING

Bruce Bialosky is an extremely accomplished financial analyst and writer, married to an extremely accomplished woman.

But he and – based on his latest column, excerpts of which are below – his wife, are conservative Republicans.  And Jewish.

Mr. Bialosky has decided to chronicle the difficulty in being a conservative Republican in a Jewish family by writing about this year’s family gathering.

Here, as promised, are a few excerpts:

We arrived for Friday night Shabbat services and then went to a family dinner immediately after.  We were seated randomly at a table of older family members who are bred as quintessential East Coast liberals.  They would be bereft if their children did not go to the right college and get a proper advanced degree.  Though they had spent eight years belittling George W. Bush, they have special venom for the heathen Trump.

They first went after my wife for Trump’s comments on the Access Hollywood Tape.  They were chastising her for not properly denouncing Trump.  Of course, short of disembowelment, nothing would be proper treatment in their eyes.  The sad thing is they really did not know who they were addressing. 

My wife was previously awarded the Young Leadership Award for the Women’s Division of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation. After starting her own business, she then went on to become president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO-LA).  From there she became president of an even higher tiered women’s business group, Organization of Women’s Executives (OWE). She is a model of a modern woman and raised two wonderful children.

Yet somehow, because she did not light her hair on fire because during the presidential campaign someone released a tape of a deplorable remark Trump made in private about a potential interaction with a woman, these old liberal men had a better perspective on the matter than my wife.

Next they lurched into every liberal’s favorite – Trump embracing Nazis.

The liberals then went into psycho-analyzing Trump.     The interesting aspect here was the one doing it is a psychiatrist. 

I calmly reminded him that his professional rules preclude him from analyzing anyone without having met that person and done proper procedures.  That one really set him in a tizzy.  He called that horse dung, saying the rule exists only for avoiding legal liability –even though I was left trying to pinpoint the liability that one would be exposed to.  I wanted to ask if he would then do a free analysis of some of the people at the table.  Since he was performing his profession for free on Trump, why not do the same for the others?

Last, one of the younger set joined the table and started to try and go after me.  That is not easy as my wife always warns those on the other side “He knows your arguments better than you do.”  We ended up having a civil conversation mainly about the struggles of the Black Community and then I educated him about particular challenges of the American Indians.

The fascinating thing is I invoked some right-of-center blacks and he, of course, had no clue who they were. These are not minor people.  Thomas Sowell and Walt Williams are true giants.  I threw in Jason Riley who writes for the Wall Street Journal and he still did not know any of them.  I shouldn’t be surprised; he lives in a bubble.

I feel for you, Bruce.

Not because I’m a conservative.  I’m not.  I have views all over the lot, some of them conservative and some staunchly liberal.  It depends on the issue.

But experience has taught me that, especially with my family (structurally interchangeable with yours) and certain friends, to express anything but complete, unblemished leftward orthodoxy is to be seen as a hopelessly right wing mouth-breather, desperately in need of re-education.

If that is my status, I can only imagine what yours is like.

My advice (not that you need it)?  Stick to your guns.

There’s only one you.  And if you become what other people want you to be, there isn’t even that many, because you become them instead, which brings the number of you down to 0.