Ron Kampeas, Washington bureau chief of JTA, indignantly tweets:
.@TzipiHotovely calls US Jews “people that never send their children to fight for their country,” classic anti-Semitic trope. Off the top of my head there are 6 ex-Jewish servicemen just among those running for office. https://t.co/47uckZxa8y— (((Ron Kampeas))) (@kampeas) November 22, 2017
JTA reported her words in a bit more context, where Hotovely was describing one fo the reasons for a divide in attitudes between US and Israeli Jews:
“The other issue is not understanding the complexity of the region,” she said. “People that never send their children to fight for their country, most of the Jews don’t have children serving as soldiers, going to the Marines, going to Afghanistan, or to Iraq. Most of them are having quite convenient lives. They don’t feel how it feels to be attacked by rockets, and I think part of it is to actually experience what Israel is dealing with on a daily basis.”
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: There were, in 2009, just 4,515 Jewish soldiers in the US military. If you assume 5 million Jews in the US and each household having 4 people on the average, that means that about 1 in 270 US Jewish households have a soldier now. Multiply that by 10 or so to account for vets, and I think it would be generous to say that 1 in 25 American Jewish families have a soldier or vet as members.
The military experience is foreign to most American Jews. This is not a controversial position to take, Ron Kampeas knows this as well as anyone.
It is one thing to misrepresent what Hotovely said. It is despicable to imply that her reasonable observation about most American Jews is antisemitic.
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