“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” – Eric Hoffer

Ben Shapiro gave the keynote address to Right to Life Michiana on Thursday October 27 in South Bend, Indiana, a town which has been a stronghold of anti-abortion sentiment since before the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade in 1973. With the overturning of Roe in June of 2022, a sense of satisfaction at having won a long-fought battle emanated from the crowd, mingled with a sense that the war wasn’t over, as the battle over unborn life shifted from the Supreme Court to state legislatures. Shapiro addressed neither the sense of triumph nor the sense of trepidation in the crowd which filled the largest auditorium in town. His speech was long on pointless refutations of arguments in favor of abortion. The arguments were pointless because anyone with a modicum of intelligence could have refuted them handily, but more importantly because everyone in the hall was a convinced prolifer, and many had been laboring in the anti-abortion trenches from before he was born. The speech was also long on heartwarming anecdotes about his family, his wife and her objection to his beard, and other interesting but irrelevant points, which the audience lapped up nonetheless.

Missing from his speech, however, was any mention of the most significant development in prolife politics since Roe was overturned this past spring, namely, the claim by 140 Jewish organizations that abortion is a “fundamental Jewish value.” All of the major players in the pro-abortion propaganda barrage which began in New York during the late 1960s were Jewish, but this fact was never mentioned in the New York Times. The Jewish paper of record which also served as the main conduit for pro-abortion propaganda in America referred to Bernard Nathanson, who along with Lawrence Lader was the main spokesman for abortion in America at that time, as a gynecologist as if he were a scientist with no ethnic dog in this fight. The only ethnic dog which got identified was the Catholic Church, and more specifically the Catholic bishops, who were accused of imposing their religious views on everyone else whenever they defended the rights of the unborn. Because Nathanson and Lader were never identified as Jews, Jews were never identified as the main group promoting abortion.

That changed in May 2022, when the Jews responded to the leak of Justice Alito’s brief by claiming that abortion was “a fundamental Jewish value,” and that the Supreme Court, by striking down Roe v. Wade was preventing Jews from practicing their religion. What the Jews really said without knowing it was that Roe v. Wade amounted to the imposition of the Jewish religion on every citizen of the United States of America, no matter what his religion, a state of affairs which lasted for 49 years until the Dobbs decision reversed it. Leave it to the Jews to state explicitly what the goyim were too stupid to figure out on their own. This consciousness is now part of the Zeitgeist, which suddenly took a turn in the opposite direction, away from the centralization of power in Washington which was a necessary precondition for projecting imperial power onto the rest of the world after World War II, back to state legislatures, which have always been more in tune with the will of the people they represent.

Shapiro’s speech was the first Right to Life Michiana event that I had attended in some time. My wife and I had grown tired of listening to the conversion stories of prolife celebrities like Abby Johnson. A colleague who works for a prolife organization in Europe had a similar experience when he invited Ms. Johnson to speak at one of his conferences a few years back. Unlike some of the U.S. prolife organizations, his organization had comparatively limited funds but were prepared to stretch their budget to fund a trip and honorarium for Ms. Johnson. Unfortunately, Ms. Johnson asked to be flown Business Class on top of her large speaking fee (more than they had ever been asked for) as well as additional very exorbitant requests involving paying for a personal assistant. In the light of this they decided against inviting her. “It was rather disappointing,” he continued, “and reminded me of Tom Fleming’s scathing fictional account (in The Morality of Everyday Life) of a Prolife ex-abortionist speaker expecting to be remunerated at rates to keep him in the lifestyle to which he had grown accustomed."

If Shapiro were really interested in doing something about prohibiting abortion, then he, as a Jew, should have explained first of all that the Jews were mounting a significant post-Roe counterattack in states like Florida, and secondly, he should have explained to the largely Catholic crowd in South Bend the best strategy for fighting this essentially Jewish campaign. As a Jew himself and someone privy to intra-Jewish conversations, Shapiro could have shared valuable information with the goyim who came out to celebrate his presence in South Bend. But that is precisely what Shapiro did not do.

That meant that I had to bring up the issue in the Q&A following his talk, much to the annoyance of the prolifers in attendance, who were as determined as Shapiro to sweep this inconvenient fact under the rug. “Hi,” I began, “my name is E. Michael Jones, I’m the Editor of Culture Wars magazine. I’ve been involved in this fight for over 40 years. I did sidewalk counseling in front of the old abortion clinic on St. Louis Blvd., and I knew a lot of the founding people in this organization, like Virginia Black and Charlie Rice. So, I’ve been around for a while, and when Roe was overturned, suddenly there was a new wrinkle to this whole story. At this point, 140 Jewish organizations announced that abortion was a fundamental Jewish right.”

At this point, Shapiro interrupted me and launched into what the Jews call “a spiel,” which the Oxford dictionary defines as “a long or fast speech or story, typically one intended as a means of persuasion or as an excuse but regarded with skepticism or contempt by those who hear it.” The rote nature of Shapiro’s response indicated that he was very familiar with the issue which he refused to address in his talk:

It is not, I mean, I can give you the whole Jewish law breakdown right now. The bottom line is that Judaism is a prolife religion with the possibility with what we would call in the Hebrew a Hatair [sic] which is essentially a dispensation. You actually have to go to a rabbi for dispensation on an abortion. I would say that most famous rabbis in the 20th century like Rosha Feinstein, Rav Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, both of them believed in the pro-life position. There’s some fringe positions inside Judaism that suggest the opposite, but, the bottom line is that it is not a violation of religious freedom to have a neutral statute that applies criminally across all people.

By claiming that the pro-abortion view was a “fringe position” inside Judaism, Shapiro ignored the fact that being proabortion was endorsed by 140 organizations representing the entire spectrum of contemporary Judaism from liberal to conservative. More importantly, Shapiro turned the discussion into a debate over Jewish religious practices which was irrelevant to the real issue, which was political. Whoever said that a Jew had to practice laws created by any one of the numerous Jewish religious sects in order to be considered a Jew? Following that absurd line of reasoning, Charles Moscowitz told me that Trotsky wasn’t a Jew. In doing so Moscowitz, like Shapiro, promoted himself to Pope of the Jews, a position which carried with it full powers of excommunication of any Jew who didn’t fit into the ideological template which justified his argument. That some Jew somewhere is prolife, and that some rabbi somewhere endorses this position is a statement I have no desire to contest. But it is irrelevant to the real issue, which is that Jews as they define themselves are overwhelmingly proabortion, so proabortion in fact that they are willing to claim that abortion is a fundamental tenet of their religion. Unlike Ben Shapiro, I am unwilling to contradict the Jews when they make statements like this. Like Charles Moscowitz, another conservative prolife Jew who takes the same position, Shapiro is forced into the unenviable position of claiming that he is the only real Jew in the room. Taking his views of Judaism as normative for all Jews, Shapiro goes on to denounce the majority of his fellow Jews as imposters, when he claims that “the Jewish organizations that are pushing this … don’t even keep Shabbat. Most of them don’t keep Kosher, most of them don’t do any of the actual Jewish statutory laws. Just here they decide to stick the thumb in the pie. It’s a ridiculous claim legally, morally, Judaically, it has very little to support it.”

Empirically, however, Shapiro’s claim is even more “ridiculous,” flying as it does in the face of a reality which he is grudgingly forced to admit as our dialogue continues.

“So,” I ask, “are these 140 Jewish organizations wrong when they say that?
“Yes,” Shapiro responded, “they are dead wrong when they say that. And….”
“Why is it that so many of them say that then?”
“Because the vast majority of Jewish organizations don’t know anything about Judaism. Honestly, this is a question I get more broadly a lot of the time. This is really more about voting, they’ll say, “Why do so many Jews vote liberal?” “Why do so many Jews vote in favor of anti-religious positions?” “Why do so many Jews support gay marriage?” “Why do many Jews support abortion?” and the answer is because the vast, vast, vast majority of Jews are non-observant in any way. Actually, it’s because Jewish identity is based on a rejection of Logos which began when the Jewish people called for the crucifixion of the Logos Incarnate after choosing the revolutionary Barabbas as their savior. That act led to the creation of the Jewish revolutionary spirit, which has determined Jewish behavior to this day on crucial issues like abortion. Rejection of Logos led to rejection of the moral law, which is the logos of human action, which then led to rejection of the social order, which meant that Jews became revolutionaries who were never happy unless they were destroying the culture of any country which allowed them to settle within its borders.

“Self-identifying as a Jew,” Shapiro continued, “doesn’t actually mean that you practice Judaism in any sort of serious fashion. It’s sort of like asking people, if you were born Catholic, and then polling Catholics, right? There are a lot of people born into a Catholic family that no longer practice Catholicism. So, if you ask a lapsed Catholic about their perspectives and then you attribute that to Catholicism, you’d be making a fairly large category error. This happens with Judaism all the time, all the time. Because the truth is that if you look at the orthodox community, the orthodox community that takes seriously Jewish law, tends to vote overwhelmingly to the right, and tends to be significantly pro-life.”

But who gave the orthodox community the right to represent the views and interests of all Jews? This is the unspoken question that Shapiro cannot answer. The unspoken assumption behind his claim is that there is a Jewish equivalent to the magisterium of the Catholic Church, which has clearly condemned abortion ever since the Didache, the compendium of Church teaching which got written down in Koine Greek in the first century AD.

The reductio ad absurdum of Catholic-Jewish dialogue on issues like abortion can be found in the writings of Catholic convert Mark Shea, who concludes that Catholics who are not pro-abortion are anti-Semitic because “A law that outlaws all abortions without exception violates the religious beliefs and rights of Jewish people.”1 Not content to leave it at that, Shea goes on to say:

The braindead assumption that “real Jews” agree 100% with conservative Christians on this and all the rest of Jews are basically just “fake liberal Jews” is one of the greatest havens for anti-Semitism in American conservative political discourse. It does not even occur to most conservative prolife Christians, in my experience, to think for one second that Jews who are pro-choice are, by the lights of their Tradition, being faithful to that tradition and not some sort of apostate they can write off and wish into hell without a thought.

This is, of course, Ben Shapiro’s position, which means that Shapiro is—at least according to Shea’s definition—an anti-Semite, as is Charles Moskowitz. Both men claim that the 140 Jewish organizations who claim that abortion is “a fundamental Jewish value” are not “real Jews,” to use Mark Shea’s phrase, proving, at least according to Mark Shea’s calculus that Shapiro and Moskowitz are, you guessed it, guilty of “anti-Semitism.” At this point…

[…] This is just an excerpt from the January 2023 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)