The Daily Signal - BONUS | Orthodox Rabbi Debunks Claim That Conservatives Want to Force 'Christian Values' Down America's Throat

Episode Date: March 11, 2023

Some on the Left claim that it violates the separation of church and state to be pro-life or pro-family, Rabbi Yaakov Menken says. His organization, the Coalition for Jewish Values, demonstrates that conservative values have a broad appeal beyond Christians. The coalition represents Orthodox Jews who often feel rejected by Jewish organizations that adopt the Left's agenda. Relevant Links Listen to other podcasts from The Daily Signal: https://www.dailysignal.com/podcasts/ Get daily conservative news you can trust from our Morning Bell newsletter: DailySignal.com/morningbellsubscription   Listen to more Heritage podcasts: https://www.heritage.org/podcasts Sign up for The Agenda newsletter — the lowdown on top issues conservatives need to know about each week: https://www.heritage.org/agenda Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a Daily Signal bonus episode. I'm Tyler O'Neill. I spoke at CPAC with Rabbi Yacov-Mankin, who is the managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values. He and I spoke about the left's claim that conservatives want to force Christian values down American's throats, and he debunked the idea. Stay tuned for my interview with Yaakov-Mankin.

For over 35 years, the Heritage Foundation Job Bank has been helping conservatives at all professional levels find employment in key positions in Washington, D.C. and across the country. We can help you connect with positions in the administration on Capitol Hill, in public policy organizations, and in the private sector. To learn more about the Heritage Foundation Job Bank, go to heritage.org slash job-dash bank. Well, this is Tyler O'Neill, a managing editor at The Daily Signal, and I'm joined.

Honored to have Rabbi Yaakov Mencken, who is managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, really stalwart voice for traditional Jewish values in the public square, pushing back against woke ideology, and specifically some of the attacks of the ADL. But most recently, you had a great moment of impact. regarding Ilana Marr. Yes, exactly. Yeah, so talk a little bit about the letter that you sent to House Speaker McCarthy. Yeah, because we had sent three letters.

First of all, thank you so much for having me. Oh, yeah. We had three letters sent to Speaker Pelosi in previous. Since the day that she was nominated to be on that committee, Representative Ilan Omar to be on Foreign Affairs, This is tolerating anti-Semitism in Congress. And with Representative McCarthy, obviously, it hit home in a very different way. We know that the WIPS office sent it out to every legislative director on the Republican side

had a copy of, or at least knowledge of, our letter. And that meant that several of the people who were saying that they, you know, obviously they said, no, we're going to vote against. We're not going to remove her. It looked like Representative McCarthy did not, Speaker McCarthy, did not have the votes. And then it turned out that he did after our letter. So at least according to others, we were somehow responsible or partially responsible for that happening. And the Coalition for Jewish Values represents over 2,000 rabbis in the United States.

Can you talk about your organization's beginnings and what you're looking forward to now, how you're advocating on their behalf? Well, the start of our organization was a group of rabbis realizing that there was nobody speaking out on behalf of Jewish tradition, that all you were hearing was partisan leftism disguised as if it were Jewish values. You know, Tikun Olam, repairing the world. Anything I want to do is repairing the world. So my own personal ideology is therefore Judaism. Yeah. Which makes as, you know, it means you can be on two sides of an issue and both claim to be representing Jewish values. It doesn't work that way, obviously. And the whole point of the Bible

is there is a moral standard that everybody's supposed to follow, and you don't get to remake it on the fly. So what happened is we recognize that there's certain issues where in order to be a traditional rabbi, you have to come out a certain way. And that people don't realize that the overwhelming majority of rabbis in America are on the right wing. very conservative in their values, as compared to the average Jew, you could be a Jew and not believe in Judaism. Right. So the Christian who doesn't believe in Christianity, they no longer call them Christian, right? That's the atheist left.

But when it comes to the Jewish community, they still are Jews. And so thus, you have this image of the Jews as being all on the left, whereas the involved Jews and the rabbis, those who actually know Judaism and those who let Judaism, drive their values are on the right, and they needed to have a voice. Well, and that's why you get these Jewish leftists arguing that abortion, for example, is a religious freedom issue. Yeah, the Jews for feticide. Yeah, right. It's unbelievable.

I mean, first of all, the idea that an elective abortion is a religious obligation is obviously asinine. It doesn't begin to make logical sense. But these are not people who actually care about religious liberty, because this is profoundly dangerous. If everything becomes a religious liberty issue, then nothing is a religious liberty issue. And a shout out to my friend, the lawyer Howie Slew,

at the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, which is a legal outfit that files amicke and the like in behalf of religious liberty from a Jewish perspective. They're great allies. He is the one who pointed out, he says, if your religion only has one obligation, that's when it's time to doubt the sincerity of that religion. If it just happens to be that the one thing that government doesn't want to let you do, like smoke pot, is the only religious obligation your religion has, it might be that you're making up the religion as it goes along.

But then there are... So this is Jews who do not believe. that observing the Sabbath is a religious obligation. This is Friday, and I turned you down for a Saturday interview. Oh, yeah, of course. I'm not going to be on front of a mic and a camera tomorrow. They're not the ones who believe that keeping kosher as a Jewish obligation. They certainly don't believe that living in Israel fulfills a Jewish obligation.

But, oh, yeah, having access to an abortion, that's our religious obligation. Right. Right. There's a little problem with that. And you've spoken out in the past against the way that the activist left pushes LGBT ideology in a way that threatens religious liberty, the religious liberty of Jews as well. Would you address that? Yeah. There's new respect for Marriage Act.

Actually, there's a really an interesting descriptor of our influence, besides the Alonamar letter, is the fact that when ADF did a letter to the Republican side begging them to please do not. allow the respect for marriage act to pass, which sadly they did. And there were some amazing sellouts there, and I was really surprised by that. But be that as it may, on the front page of that letter with 80 signatures, there were only 10. Nine out of 10 were multi-million dollar household name organizations like Heritage Foundation that everybody has heard of. That 10th organization, the only one that wasn't a multi-million dollar corporation,

was us. And that is because these values causes need a Jewish voice. They need diversity. Actually, bang for buck, as it were, we're way in excess of anybody else because we're like a force multiplier. The left will immediately claim that only Christians believe this. Therefore, you're trying to shove Christian values down America's throat. Therefore, it's a violation of church and state.

to be pro-life or to be pro-family or any of these things, which, guess what, you know, the Jewish left in one of the early hit pieces against us said, you guys, about us, they describe this as espousing positions more often associated with evangelical Christians, to which our unwritten response was, well, yeah, where do you think the evangelicals got them from? So on that line, I want to talk briefly about the Southern Poverty Law Center. You guys were leading... Oh, just our favorite people, really? Well, I wrote a book about them called Making Hate Pay, the corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. And you guys had a very important letter to Amazon telling them not to rely on this group to exclude people from Amazon's smile.

Another great success of ours. They shut down Amazon's smile entirely. No, sadly, during the time of Amazon... on Smile, they were relying on the SVLC's hate map, even though that hate map has been used to commit an actual hate crime. An act of terror. Yeah, an act of terror against Family Research Council. By the way, somebody just called me the Jewish Tony Perkins.

Oh, no. Well, I take that as a compliment. I mean, he's really, you know, he's out there fearlessly espousing basic traditional values. Yeah. And he does it on the Christian side, and I'm the one on the Jewish side. And he gets smeared for it. And he gets... You know, you face it, too.

We are Orthodox Jews. Anything the woke left calls hateful, bigoted, and racist, we do. Now, my daughter got married last year in a hotel, ballroom. Congratulations. Public accommodation, right? With a divider between men and women. And no, you didn't get to decide which you are when you come in. So, according to the equilateral...

Act, that was like, if not for the religious exemption, that's a hate crime. Oh, my. Yeah. Like, what? You know, so I'm not actually exaggerating when I say, you know, and the truth of the matter is that anybody that hues to traditional values, the woke left, is now calling you a bigot and trying to drive you from the public sphere. And we're like, okay, but we're Jews.

We have 3,000 years of experience with other governments telling us we're wrong. You know, this is not a new experience for us. And, you know, therefore we were just, you know, I know that when I go home, the other rabbis on my block are like, good going. That was good. You said the right things. So we don't get silenced by the left.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Rabbi Mencken. And we look forward to. I appreciate this opportunity. You've been a dear friend for years. I mean, really, you know, your reporting has gone with. way back on our behalf. And, you know, bringing some of these stories to the public is really important.

And so we appreciate you as much as you appreciate us. And how can people follow your work? Well, me personally, I'm at Y. Mencken on social media and C.J. Values is the organization, including CJValues.org. Or if you like typing, Coalition for Jewishvalues.org. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. If you haven't gotten a chance, be sure to check out our evening show right here in this podcast feed where we bring you the top news of the day.

Also, make sure you subscribe to The Daily Signal wherever you get your podcast and help us reach more listeners by leaving a five-star rating and review. We read all your feedback. Thanks again for listening. Have a great day. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. Executive producers are Rob Lewy and Kate Shrinco. Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asheris. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop.

To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.