Israel Matzav

Tammy Bruce's defining moment and mine

I wish I remembered my defining moment as a conservative as clearly as Tammy Bruce remembers hers (Hat Tip: NY Joo via Twitter). I really do. Perhaps because my defining moment was not associated with cataclysmic world events like hers were, I don't remember it as well. But I can tell you approximately when it happened.

It was sometime in the fall of 1980. I had just returned from two years in Israel, where just a few months before I had a friend murdered in cold blood for the crime of singing Sabbath songs on the streets of Hebron on a Friday night. I started law school at NYU because that's the best school that accepted me. Until I got there, I knew nothing of NYU's politics, and that the hard Left in those days turned down Harvard and Yale for Washington Square.

I hung out with a small crowd of religious Jews. We each had our set seats in the stacks in the basement beneath the main library floor. We even managed to turn one room into a Talmud study hall. Most of the guys were my age, but were in their third year of school because they had not spent two years of Israel after college like I had. There was Mordy and Morris and Shimon and Shmeel and David (more than one) and Reuvain. And there was Mark whom I'd known since Kindergarten, but he was an upstairs kind of guy. And some others I am forgetting. Reuvain was probably the most conservative politically of all of us (and lives in Israel today). We studied Talmud and studied for exams. And there was Mrs. Carl who started hanging around the library toward the end of first semester.... Yes, I met my wife - who went to that other school uptown where I had gone to college too - when I was a first-year law student and 'didn't have time.'

Sometime during the first half of that semester (before Mrs. Carl started coming around), we became hooked on the idea that Jimmy Carter would sell Israel down the creek if he were reelected. And so, we started walking around with Ronald Reagan buttons. In Hebrew.

It took a while until someone who actually read Hebrew told the Leftists what the buttons said. And the acrimony soon followed. It's been too many years - I don't remember what was said. But that semester I became the first member of my family to vote for a Republican since my forebears landed at Ellis Island. Yes, I supported Nixon in 1972 (I had the same queasy feelings about McGovern that I had about Carter, and in response to my parents' complaints - having come of age in the '50's - that Nixon was a crook, I said 'maybe, but he's our crook'), but I was too young to actually vote then. I had voted for Carter in 1976, but I voted for Reagan in 1980, and I'm proud I did.

That's my how I became a conservative story. Tammy Bruce's story is here.

Labels: Conservatives, personal stuff

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:29 PM