Antonin Scalia, Philo-Semite

INTRODUCTION by John I. Johnson: I’ve seen many references to Antonin Scalia’s (pictured) close relationship to Orthodox Jews and promotion of halacha (Jewish law) within the supposedly Gentile legal system. And after his death there have many syrupy tributes to him because of his close personal friendship with Left-wing, anti-White Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

There are presently three Jews on the Supreme Court: 33% (1/3) of the justices when Scalia was alive, 38% now. The other justices, including one Black and one Mestizo, are philo-Semites who defer to Jews racially. Michael Hoffman, the conservative Catholic who sent a condensed version of this article to his email list, wrote: “Nathan Lewin is a tireless promoter of Talmudic indoctrination of American judges and lawyers. He partnered with Antonin Scalia in symposia and conferences dedicated to enlarging the influence of rabbinic halacha over the American legal system. Mr. Lewin served in the Federal government as assistant to [anti-White Black] Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall. He has called for the killing of the parents and brothers and sisters of Palestinian suicide bombers.”

Halacha is the Jewish equivalent of Sharia law for Muslims, but of course far more harmful to the West.

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 My Memories of Nino Scalia, the Most Jewish
Gentile on the Supreme Court

by Nathan Lewin

“When there was no Jewish justice on the Supreme Court,” Antonin “Nino” Scalia told me, “I considered myself the Jewish justice.”

After Abe Fortas resigned in May 1969, there would be no Jewish justice on the court for nearly a quarter of a century, until President Bill Clinton named Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the court in 1993.

Scalia had been on the Supreme Court since Ronald Reagan appointed him in 1986, so there were seven years during which Scalia saw himself as the court’s guardian of Jewish heritage. The New York-raised judge was shocked that he had to teach his colleagues how to pronounce “yeshiva” (Chief Justice William Rehnquist called it “ye-shy-va”) and, Scalia added proudly to me, “I even told them what a yeshiva is.” …

Scalia and his wife were guests in our sukkah, and he was kind enough to meet with law school classes I brought to Washington to hear Supreme Court arguments. (Zealously liberal students who claimed not to be able to tolerate Scalia’s judicial philosophy melted into personal fans after they met and spoke with the man. Rather than meeting the cantankerous grouch they were expecting, they saw and heard from a funny, modest, gregarious and intellectually honest judge.) He also accepted my recommendations to attend and address Orthodox Jewish gatherings such as colloquia run by Chabad-Lubavitch, sessions and dinners with Agudath Israel of America, and a mass meeting at Yeshiva University where he and I discussed current issues of constitutional law and public policy. Each event was enormously successful.

We seemed to share identical views on church-state issues. Scalia did not read the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment as broadly as secular Jewish groups do. In cases I argued before the court, he voted with a court majority (against the ACLU and the American Jewish Congress) to sustain the Chabad menorah in front of Pittsburgh’s City Hall and dissented when six members of the court held that public financing of a school reserved for handicapped children in the Satmar Village of Kiryas Joel, New York, was unconstitutional aid to religion. His views on government financing of religious institutions were applauded by Orthodox Jewish groups.

Disappointment came in 1990, however, when he surprisingly wrote a majority opinion that cut the heart out of the special status that religious observance had been granted by earlier Supreme Court decisions enforcing the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Supreme Court rulings had held that religious observance could not constitutionally be abridged unless government proved a “compelling interest.” Scalia’s opinion gave religion no greater respect than any secular interest. No party or friend-of-the-court brief had asked the Supreme Court to issue such a sweeping and revolutionary ruling. A rainbow coalition of groups interested in religious freedom (including the American Jewish Congress) then asked the court to reconsider. It refused to do so.

I asked Scalia how he could possibly reconcile that 1990 decision with the 1984 vote cast, when he was a federal appellate judge, in favor of the Air Force psychologist whose religious observance compelled him to wear a yarmulke. Scalia was, as usual, entirely forthright.

“I was on a lower court then and had to follow Supreme Court precedent,” he said. “When I was on the Supreme Court, I was the one who decided what the precedent would be.”

Apart from that one significant departure, Scalia had a consistent record of supporting minority religious observance. In June 2015, when he announced the decision he wrote in favor of a Muslim applicant for a job at Abercrombie & Fitch who was unlawfully denied employment because she wore a headscarf, he called it an “easy case.”

There is universal agreement that Nino Scalia was brilliant, amazingly articulate and a real mensch. There is strong disagreement, however, over the side he chose in ideological battles. Scalia is, of course, an Italian name. If one writes it with Hebrew letters, there are two possible — albeit squarely contradictory — ways of writing Scalia. One is to use the letters sin, kaf, lamed, which are also the root of “sechel” — Hebrew for “wisdom.” The other is to use the Hebrew letters samech, koof, lamed, which are the root “sokol” — meaning “to stone.”

Some praised Nino’s wisdom; others were ready to stone him. But all must concur that he was a great man, that the United States he loved is greatly diminished by his loss, and that he greatly revered Jews and Jewish tradition.

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Source: Jewish Daily Forward and John I. Johnson