The distorting liberal lens tends to reduce Jewish history worldwide to the Holocaust (swiftly followed by Israelis being mean to racist Muslim stonethrowers in the West Bank) and American Jewish history to the Civil Rights movement.
Obama's proclamation of Jewish Heritage Month does so quite literally.
Many of the Jewish people who reached our Nation's shores throughout our history did so fleeing the oppression they encountered in areas around the world. Driven by the possibility of charting a freer future, they endeavored, on their own and as a community, to make real the promise of America -- in their individual lives and in the life of our country. Determined to confront the racism that kept this promise from being fully realized, many Jewish Americans found a cause in the Civil Rights Movement that -- in its call for freedom and justice -- echoed the timeless message of Exodus and the Jewish people's journey through the ages. Reflecting on the march in Selma, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once noted, "I felt my legs were praying." From the fight for women's rights to LGBT rights to workers' rights, many in the Jewish American community, drawing on lessons from their own past, have trumpeted a clarion call for equality and justice.
Now let's set aside the left-right critique of this.
The Jews did not arrive in America and then head to Selma. Jews were in America since Colonial times. And classic Jewish American history would have highlighted Asser Levy, who fought for the right to bear arms in New Amsterdam, Commodore Uriah P. Levy, George Washington's letter, Newport, Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin of the Confederacy, the Jewish settlers headed out West who helped found towns and cities, Jewish Medal of Honor winners, etc
The striking thing about Obama's summary of American Jewish history is that Jews do nothing for themselves. They show up and right away head to Selma, then they fight for gay rights. And enlist in generic liberal causes. There isn't even a specific reference to Jews fighting for their own civil rights.
And again, even without the left-right critique, in Obama's version of history, Jews don't do anything for themselves. They exist to purely and selflessly promote left-wing causes.
But the reality is that for every puffed up college student who went in for civil rights, there was a Jewish storeowner who got burned out by race riots in Brownsville or Newark. And that, in the case of Baltimore, may still be getting burned out. That's a part of history that we don't like to talk about. We're supposed to view Bernie Sanders, who never worked for a living, as a hero, while spitting on the immigrant Jewish storeowner who poured two decades of blood and sweat into a small business only to see left-wing incitement destroy it all.
American Jews aren't supposed to exist as anything except organizers in the left's coalitions. They have no history of their own. That's what Obama is really saying.