Oh, my -- apparently I'm a Likudnik mouthpiece of the Judeo-cons, if some e-mails and lefty bloggers (see Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias, for instance) are any indication. My postings so far are here, here, and here. Let me repeat, and then I'll leave it alone: a widespread sense of affinity for the Jews is a sociological marker of the degree of Americanization of immigrant groups. The self-image of Americans as the 'almost chosen people,' in Lincoln's words, goes back to John Winthrop admonishing his flock that they would be as a city on a hill (i.e., Zion), and both Franklin and Jefferson suggesting the new seal of the United States bear the image of Moses leading the children of Israel out of bondage. This has nothing to do with Ariel Sharon, settlements on the West Bank, or the invasion of Iraq, though it obviously has an influence on how we make Mideast policy.The immigration policy problem I pointed to is not that today's immigration will yield voters who will not be pro-Israel (though that's pretty much guaranteed). Nor is it that Hispanics are all that different from past immigrants in their views of Jews. Rather, it's that our own assimilative capacity has declined dramatically, and that the grandchildren of today's immigrants will be less Americanized than the grandchildren of the immigrants of a century ago, whether by this measure I've been discussing or others. If anyone doubts the decline in our ability to Americanize newcomers (and I mean what John Fonte calls 'patriotic assimilation,' not just writhing on the dance floor to the same filth as other Americans), I'd point you to John Miller's fine book, The Unmaking of Americans: 'If the schools miss their chance [to inculcate American language and values -- mk], un-Americanized children grow up to become un-Americanized adults -- at which point their Americanization becomes much more difficult and unlikely.' After a bitter strike in 1912, the public schools in Lawrence, Mass., developed an 'American Plan for Education in Citizenship,' which included lessons in history to teach 'love and loyalty for America' and promoted things 'which the American spirit holds dear.' Anyone care to bet that this is not on the curriculum of the L.A. Unified School District? And finally, to respond to John's point about ADL surveys (there's five of them since 1998 listed here) showing that native-born Hispanics display much lower levels of antisemitism than immigrant Hispanics. First of all, I'm not addressing antisemitism as such, and I have no doubt that the ADL would define many Christian Zionists themselves as antisemites. But more importantly, this kind of survey doesn't show quite what you think because, like similar surveys on knowledge of Spanish, they compare today's immigrants with today's native-born descendants of immigrants who arrived generations ago, when American schools and society in general were much more assimilationist. The characteristics of the grandchildren of immigrants who arrived 100 years ago tells us nothing about the characteristics of the grandchildren of today's immigrants 100 years from now.