Can You Blame the Jews for Hating Palin?

Why do the Jews hate Sarah Palin? Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin posed that leading question in the most recent issue of Commentary and her answer has provoked a backlash from other Jewish writers from both ends of the political spectrum. Rubin argued that, politics aside, Jews have a "palpable and largely emotional" disdain for Palin based on their own intellectual snobbery, their preference for "credentialed thinkers over those with "a more instinctual skill set." On top of that, she accuses them of just not getting hunting, athletics, or the military.

Jonathan Chait of the New Republic calls it a “classic anti-Semitic trope,” the claim that "Jews hate Palin because they distrust Real Americans," and he finds it “beyond strange” to see in a Jewish magazine. And former Bush aide David Frum points out that Jews aren’t alone in hating Palin, who polls poorly among the young, women, and independents. “If American Jews have a problem with Palin,” he writes on his blog, it’s “that they—we—doubt her intellectual capacity for the job.” (More Sarah Palin stories.)