Enough with Catty Remarks

As a candidate for office, it is never a good idea to insult an entire demographic, with at least 46 million members. More to the point, as Vance has acknowledged, the term is extremely hurtful to millions of women who wanted to have children but couldn’t — either because they never married or experienced fertility problems.

Clever people, it seems, are often too clever for their own good. Things tumble out of their mouths — often insults — faster than their censoring mechanisms can kick in. My guess is that Vivek Ramaswamy had the highest IQ of any of those participating in the Republican debates last year — Harvard summa cum laude, Yale Law School, a near-billionaire in his early 30s. Every time he opened his mouth, he looked extremely pleased with himself. Yet my reaction was inevitably to reflect that intelligence and wisdom are not a continuum, and to pray that he never comes close to the reins of power.

I’ve had that experience of being betrayed by one’s own cleverness. In the early ’90s, I was a Sunday morning speaker at the annual convention of Agudath Israel of America. My subject was the effort by the Reform movement to gain a toehold in Israel — an effort that continues until today.

One of the major arguments made by the Reform movement was that it was well suited to attach “secular” Israelis to their Jewish heritage, in a way that Orthodoxy is not. That argument, even on its own terms, was ridiculous. As the Guttman Study of Israelis’ religious practice made clear, so-called “secular” Israelis are much more likely to engage in basic Jewish rituals — candle-lighting and Kiddush on Shabbos, fasting on Yom Kippur, etc. — than are the vast majority of Reform Jews in America.