Blacks and Jews

I came across this lovely tribute last night, probably via Jrants, and even though I'm a Republican and I didn't vote for Obama, there's no way I can deny the truth of what this says:

"As Commentary’s John Podhoretz wrote on Tuesday night: 'America, it appears, is on the verge of electing a black man as its president…. the immensity of this single cultural moment dwarfs almost any other in my lifetime. Its positive social impact is incalculable; it was only eight years ago that Al Gore traveled to Harlem to kiss Al Sharpton’s ring…. Sharpton was, at that point, by default the most important black politician in America. Obama’s ascension to the White House, if it does nothing else, may at last bring down the curtain on race hucksters like Sharpton, whose power has always been rooted in the political alienation of inner-city blacks.'
And as The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat noted, '…Obama has just been elected president of a nation in which he could have been bought and sold as a slave just generations ago. I don’t think there are any words adequate to the occasion of America electing its first black president, so I’ll just say this: This may be a bleak day for the Republican party and for conservatism, but come what may in the years ahead, it's great for our country. Barack Obama deserves congratulations tonight, but so does the nation he’s about to govern. We’ve come a long, long way.'
Oh, and those who have their bags packed and their passports ready in anticipation of the coming deluge might consider this: the election of a black man as president should make Jews feel more secure in America rather than less.
African Americans have endured infinitely greater prejudice, hardship and discrimination – slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, etc. -- than have Jewish Americans, and yet earlier this week the nation entrusted its highest office to a black man. Not only did Obama win tens of millions of white votes, he carried states where not so long ago blacks were prevented by law from using the same public facilities as whites and actually took their lives into their hands simply for attempting to exercise, as American citizens, their right to vote.
America has arrived at the point where a black man will sit in the Oval Office while his black wife will do whatever it is First Ladies do and their black children will roam the White House and play in the Rose Garden. If the country has come this far in its comfort level with and acceptance of blacks, how much more so is that the case with Jews, who already for decades now have been the nation's most successful and influential ethnic subgroup?"