Jewish right turn?

Weiner’s seat may tell

What to make of the Siena College bombshell poll placing Republican Bob Turner with a six-point lead -- up from a six-point deficit last month -- over Democrat David Weprin?

Does it mean the hotly contested race for the House seat vacated by sext addict Anthony Weiner is really a referendum on President Obama?

Or does it finally signal a rightward shift in Jewish voters’ reaction to liberalism’s increasingly anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian stance?

Complicating the issue: Weprin himself is an Orthodox Jew, while Turner is Catholic. Yet Weprin’s lead among Jewish voters, who make up about a third of likely voters in the 9th Congressional District, fell from 21 points to just six points in the latest poll.

As former Commentary Magazine editor Norman Podhoretz forcefully argues in his book “Why Are Jews Liberals?,” through the end of World War II it made perfect sense for Jews to be liberals. They were for the most part low on the socio-economic pole, plus anti-Semitism (including Nazism) sprang from the political right.

But ever since the Six-Day War, when Egypt’s anti-colonialist Gamal Nasser threatened to push the Jews into the sea, anti-Semitism -- or at least its modern variant, anti-Zionism -- has migrated to the left.

For decades, anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian voices have been welcomed with open arms by mainstream liberals, making the left their permanent home. Meanwhile, the right has grown solidly pro-Israel. Indeed, today the Christian right is nearly as pro-Israel as American Jews.

Obama, of course, has taken the shift to new highs, most recently asking Israel to return to the utterly indefensible pre-1967 borders.

The candidates in the 9th seem to be testing the shift in the Jewish vote: Turner charges that a vote for Weprin helps put Israel at risk and has garnered endorsements from lifelong Jewish Democrats Ed Koch and Dov Hikind, while Weprin plays to classical Jewish liberalism by charging that a vote for Turner threatens Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Jewish liberalism runs deep (Podhoretz charges it has itself become a religion for America’s nonobservant Jews), persisting even as anti-Israel, pro-tax and anti-business views have hardened on the left, and as diversity adherents, through affirmative action, have turned on its head (to the distinct disadvantage of American Jews) the once-upon-a-time liberal catechism that first attracted Jews: opportunity for all Americans regardless of race, creed or color.

Ironically, Obama’s ascendancy provides a solution. Having captured 78 percent of the Jewish vote -- higher than any group besides African Americans -- Obama’s winning the Presidency has finally enabled the liberal Jewish voter to check off a crucial item on his lifetime-things-to-do list -- putting a black man in the Oval Office.

Indeed, in the topsy-turvy world of Jewish liberalism, it’s hard to beat putting a black man in the Oval Office followed by voting against an Orthodox Jew.

However they get there, it appears that Obama’s radically anti-Israel stance, coupled with his abysmal performance on the economic front, has converted the right into the new left for a significant number of Jewish voters. But it will take several elections to see if the shift is lasting.

The anti-incumbent sentiment we saw in the 2010 elections may also be in play.

Weprin is a career politician (and political hack) who does the bidding of the Democratic machine. Turner is a successful businessman new to politics, and is rightly riding the anti-politician wave as well.

The salvation for Democrats is probably in standing up to the machines: Gov. Cuomo saw his popularity rise to 75 percent in the new poll.