There is a belief, which has almost become universal in some circles of the Jewish world, that President Barack Hussein Obama harbored a kind of deeply held animosity to Jews and Israel. Some even have gone as far as to accuse him of being both anti-Semitic and pro-Islamist. Rabbi Avi Shafran of Agudas Yisrael in the US already has written in the Yeshiva World about the imprudence of this kind of rhetoric: Our Sages speak of the respect with which we as a people must approach rulers in our long Exile, and it is undoubtedly reckless to engage in the kind of public attacks that have gone on. But that is not the only problem with the rhetoric about the 44th President of the United States. The main issue is a misunderstanding of the ideological source of President Obama’s policies towards Israel and Jews living there. If this misunderstanding continues, it could negatively affect the position of the American Jewish community as well as the Jews of the Land of Israel. Thus as this Administration has left office, it behooves us to figure out what happened with President Obama on the Israel issue in order to confront similar challenges that face us as the country – especially the youth of America – are increasingly critical of Israel and with the likelihood that a person of similar views may very well occupy the White House.

I am not attempting to do so as a representative of anything and anyone other than myself. But I have a slightly different perspective than most on this man who was until this past week the President of the United States: I was one of the very few observantly Jewish former students (if not the only one) who saw Barack Obama and interacted with him for many hours in the more informal setting of the University of Chicago Law School during the class he taught on constitutional law: equal rights and equal protection under the US Constitution. This was in the “early days,” a decade before he vaulted himself into the White House as President. But his meteoric political career had already begun outside of our classroom, and shortly thereafter he was to speak at the Democratic Convention for Senator John Kerry in a speech that would make his reputation. But in the classroom he was a law school lecturer, not a politician. There, on Chicago’s South Side, in the sloping amphitheater-like classroom where he taught me nearly 20 years ago, I remember him well. He paced back and forth constantly, answering students’ questions and calling on them to answer his. He was eloquent, funny, sharp-witted, and – when someone disagreed with his vision of equal rights and equal protection – he could be cutting and sarcastic as well. He was well-liked and even admired in a starry-eyed way by many of the students in the class.

I sat in Barack Obama’s constitutional law class for months and watched his personal and friendly attitude towards Jews and how he addressed issues of anti-Semitism (the course itself was about equal protection and equal rights under the US Constitution). Despite the conspiracy theories, his issue was not in fact anti-Semitism at all. (This is not to excuse his former association with Jeremiah Wright, but the reasons for that association are different than one might think, as this article discusses.) While in office, he has publicly, frequently, and enthusiastically participated in Pesach Seders, Chanukah lightings, and other Jewish events and has even kashered the White House kitchen. He has contributed a great deal of treasure to building Israel’s military capacity. The problem is not Islamist tendencies either: He himself led the successful effort to kill Osama Bin Laden, and he has sponsored anti-ISIL and anti-Al Qaeda efforts globally. Albeit relatively feebly and ineffectually, he has supported Israeli’s efforts against the Shiite Hizbollah and has condemned and attempted to interfere militarily in the Shiite-Alawite-sponsored slaughter in Syria.

Yet undoubtedly, on the Israel-Arab conflict as well as on the matter of the Iranian existential threat to Israel, and previously in his relationship with the anti-Semitic Jeremiah Wright, he often seemed to misunderstand the pressing need to protect Jewish lives against Arab and Iranian terrorism and has been soft on understanding the persistent Islamic incitement and terrorism against Jews and the consistent Arab and Iranian denials of the Jewish right to settle the Land of Israel as well as insufficiently sensitive to antisemitism. He turns a blind eye to the unapologetically judenrein Arab areas, while pressing Israel to relinquish integrated areas of Israel where Arabs have citizenship. He has also been unwilling to label Islamist forces as a threat because of their Islamism. He only belatedly distanced himself in the year 5766 from the virulent and anti-Semitic “black nationalism” of Jeremiah Wright. These seemingly anti-Jewish and anti-Israel and lukewarm anti-Islamist stances seemed puzzling and troubling during his Administration.

What, then, explains President Obama’s stances if not anti-Semitism and Islamism? Based on my experiences as a student in his class, the explanation is quite simple: his brand of radical Hyde Park liberalism. President Obama made his ideological home in an ethnically integrated neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side called Hyde Park-Kenwood, at the heart of which was the University of Chicago. Founded in part by liberal and assimilated German Jews more than a century ago, Hyde Park was well-known for being a bastion of leftist views. Indeed, so ideologically leftist was the Jewish community there that even the last Lubavitcher Rebbe, R’ Menachem Mendel Schneerson, was rumored to have ordered his emissaries no to establish themselves there (and indeed they did not do so until after his death). It was a place that voted 96% for Michael Dukakis in 1988, and equally overwhelmingly for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. But even more than that, it was a place where the ideology that characterized the Obama Administration flourished and could be be summarized by the following 4 premises: 1. Different ethnic groups needed to assimilate into one another, anything else was discrimination; 2. Singling out cultural differences was almost surely a form of bigotry; 3. Anyone who was unequal – either in power or money – was unequal due to oppression by an oppressing class; and 4. If you disagreed with 1, 2, or 3, it could get a little too personal – you were labeled a bigot or primitive and potentially bad person. And in the case of Israel, it often did get all too personal.

This kind of radical Hyde Park liberalism explains his policies in every area as follows: It is not Islamism that is a problem, because Islam is just a religion like all others, and singling Islamism out is bigotry. Meanwhile, Israel as a Jewish state is a problem because defining something as a Jewish state does not promote integration with the Arab ethnicity, and that is bigotry. Defining who is in the right, Arabs in the Land of Israel do not have their own Arab state, despite their violent struggle to achieve one against the Jewish state, and therefore the Arabs must be the ones who are oppressed and the Jews must be oppressors. That means that if the Arabs effectively ethnically cleanse the Jews from the territories under their administration as well as incite and commit terrorism against Jews, this is simply the frustration and desperation of an oppressed people. Outside of Israel, in the broader Middle East, appeasing Iran is desirable because ultimately we all just want to get along with one another and live in peace, just like people do in Hyde Park. This radical Hyde Park liberalism is indeed the ideological source of the policies enumerated above. Finally, because the Israeli government did not accept that narrative, this made them into “bad people.” (This is incidentally the same kind of worldview that considers the “Toeva community” to be “oppressed” because their lifestyle was viewed as deviant and rejected during the last millennia.)

By contrast, the Yeshiva world approaches the issues differently. We posit the Jewish view of the Torah-based right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel. We condemn the denial of the Arab population and of the Islamic State of Iran of our right to settle the Land, expressed in acts of brutal and cruel murder against Jews because they are Jews, justified by reference to Islamist calls to martyrdom and calls to “wipe Israel [and its Jews] off the map.” We posit that there are cultural and religious differences that prevent people from wanting to get along with others in the same way as they get along near the University of Chicago in Hyde Park. We affirm that it is morally right and desirable for there to be a Jewish and not multicultural state in the Land of the Israel, and that that is not bigotry but self-determination. And we deny that we are oppressors because we wish to build a Jewish land of only 6 million Jews on a tiny sliver of land amid a gigantic land-mass housing 350 million Arabs and 75 million Iranians. Indeed, if anything, we wish the Jewish State were more Jewish in its approach and less ambivalent about the robust and unapologetic application of Torah values, including in the areas of education and social issues.

In short, the Yeshiva world and Hyde Park radical liberals operate under different assumptions about the way the world works and about Jews in the Land of Israel in particular. This is the ideological source of the differences, and the more we understand the source of those differences, the more we will be able to address issues not via misdirected attacks but via addressing the fallacies of radical Hyde Park liberalism as these are used in the future against the Jews of Israel. When we understand the source as a mistaken understanding of “oppression,” we can better respond. As our Sages advise, we should know how to respond to falsehood.

Of course, despite all that I have written here, there is a far more important factor at play. As we learned first in the Egyptian Exile, and indeed in every Exile thereafter including the current one, finding favor in the eyes of non-Jewish rulers is directly related to how much favor we find in Hashem’s eyes: whether we as individuals and as a people in a deep, internal way are acting properly as Jews. To eliminate the baseless hatred and jealousies and lack of love for our fellows that lie at the heart of this long Exile. If we make an effort to do so, the results will be more effective than any efforts at what the State of Israel calls hasbara. This key point, at least, is a reason to focus far less others, whether on President Obama, or on any other President of the United States for that matter — whether those others are suffering from radical liberalism or not — and more on improving our own individual and community actions and interactions in accordance with the injunctions of our Torah itself. In short, to live with our Ribono shel Olam in a real way and without outward show, to be worthy of Him first and foremost.

David Page is an American and Israeli partner with the law firm Woolfson Weinstein & Co. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife and children and is the author of Rav Gustman: The Youngest Dayan of Vilna and the Illustrious Rosh Yeshiva in New York and Jerusalem (Artscroll 5777/2017).

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