Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

In October 1972, the New York Times published a provocative article whose headline read “GOP Intensifies Drive to Attract Jews to Nixon.” Seeking to exploit Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern’s imprecise position on the Arab-Israeli conflict and his growing association with extreme elements in the Democratic Party, some of which identified Zionism as a neocolonial and racist political creed, the Republican machine worked in overdrive that year to peel off large numbers of American Jewish voters.

“After months of working through the so-called establishment in the Jewish community,” explained the Old Gray Lady, “the men running President Nixon’s reelection effort have taken their vigorous effort to increase his share of the normally Democratic Jewish vote into the neighborhoods and the streets of the cities.”


It didn’t work. The following month, McGovern won roughly two-thirds of the Jewish vote, according to exit polls. To be sure, the results suggested a sharp drop-off from the high levels of support—80 percent and more—that FDR (1932, 1936, 1940, 1944), Harry Truman (1948), JFK (1960), LBJ (1964) and Hubert Humphrey (1968) had enjoyed among American Jews, but they were on par with Jewish support for Adlai Stevenson (1952, 1956), Jimmy Carter (1976), Walter Mondale (1984) and Michael Dukakis (1988). In a year when McGovern carried just 31 percent of the white vote, Jews—a small but important portion of “white ethnic” America—stood out as an anomaly.

The example of 1972 is instructive today. Uproar over the Obama administration’s emerging nuclear agreement with Iran and the deteriorating relationship between the president and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has led to a new round of hand-wringing (for Democrats) and breathless expectation (for Republicans).

Writing in the social and political context of the 1960s, the essayist Milton Himmelfarb once famously observed, “Jews earn like Episcopalians, and vote like Puerto Ricans.” Could recent events signal an end to American Jewry’s love affair with the Democratic Party?

Probably not.

As has been the case almost every four years since the early 1970s, and much like Charlie Brown to Lucy’s football, the political media is waiting expectantly for an electoral swing. “Cracks Appear in Democratic-Jewish Alliance Over Iran Deal, Netanyahu,” the Wall Street Journal announced over the weekend. “G.O.P.’s Israel Support Deepens as Political Contributions Shift,” the New York Times added.

The problem is that we’ve been reading this headline for the better part of half a century. “The Jewish Vote” (1972). “Anti-Semitism Issue Worries Party” (1984). “Bush and Dukakis Are Engaging in Early Battle Over the Jewish Vote” (1988). “G.O.P. Courts Jews With Eye to Future” (1992). “Kemp Lines Up Solidly Behind Netanyahu” (1996). “Republicans Go After Jewish Vote” (2012).

The question is not so much why American Jewish support for Democrats dips from 80 percent to 60 percent in certain election cycles. Instead, the question is: Why are American Jews still white America’s most liberal voting bloc, well over a century since most of their immigrant ancestors set shore on Ellis Island?

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Between 1880 and 1940, the number of Jews living in the United States grew from roughly 250,000 to over 4 million, but in proportional terms, Jews never comprised more than 4 percent of the population. Despite their relatively small numbers, Jews played an outsized role in the 20th-century American political culture.

Social scientists agree that American Jews have been an unusually loyal, if small, segment of the liberal coalition since the 1930s, and indeed, there is a wealth of data in support of this observation. In the turbulent political atmosphere of the post-World War II era, Jewish liberalism manifested itself in a tolerance of political dissent, strong support of social welfare measures, faith in internationalism, and a commitment to dismantling legal and social barriers based on race, religion or ethnicity.

What historians don’t agree on are the causes of American Jewish liberalism. By one account, Jews have long venerated such qualities as learning, non-asceticism and charity, which translate in contemporary terms to liberalism. (That argument has holes in it, as the Orthodox Jews then and now tended to register a more conservative position on the political spectrum, a fact that militates against a correlation between traditional religious culture and liberalism.) Others have traced the roots of Jewish liberalism to the French Revolution, which aligned Jewish destiny with the forces of liberalism by granting Jews full rights associated with citizenship. Others, still, argue that Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the United States imported a distinct brand of East European radicalism—one mostly unrelated to Western liberalism—and that the radical politics of the working-class, largely impoverished immigrant ghetto transmuted over several generations into a moderate, liberal outlook. Still others have claimed that Jewish liberalism in its postwar context was largely a matter of self-interest, particularly as it pertained to campaigns against discrimination and prejudice.

Regardless, Jewish culture in the years leading up to the Great Depression was rife with socialist and radical politics. Boasting a circulation of almost 150,000, the socialist newspaper Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) was the largest foreign-language daily in the country and captured almost 40 percent of the Yiddish print market. Edited by the skilled journalist Abraham Cahan, Forverts helped to school countless immigrants in the maze of American customs and habits while also encouraging their continued devotion to trade unionism and socialism. In effect, it made good Americans of good socialists. Aiding in this process were organizations like the Arbeiter Ring (Workman’s Circle), a fraternal society that claimed 60,000 members by 1918 and drew a large portion of its membership from former bundists (Jewish socialists from Eastern Europe) and the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, a liberal-left group whose membership still stood as high as 50,000 in 1950.

Growing up in this context, the sons and daughters of Jewish immigrants were raised on a diet of unionism, socialism and radicalism. As Irving Howe recalled, “the Jewish labor movement, ranging from the garment workers unions to the large fraternal societies and small political groups, had established a tradition of protest, controversy and freedom, so that even when [various communist factions] violated this tradition, it still exerted an enormous moral power in the Jewish community and provided cover for left-wing parties.”

In the absence of a strong socialist alternative, the bulk of first- and second-generation Jews began turning in the 1920s and 1930s to the Democratic Party, which, under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, incorporated a range of liberal welfare measures into its political agenda. Because he ushered in the modern American welfare state, but also for his unshakable opposition to worldwide fascism, Jews living in the Depression era claimed Roosevelt as their political icon. As one New Yorker later recalled of his childhood years in Brooklyn, voting was “easy because everyone was for Roosevelt. The question is, were you a Communist or were you not, a socialist or not. … Everybody of that milieu, I’d say, certainly talked about it and flirted with it one way or another.”

By the early postwar era, many Reform and Conservative leaders began making a distinct argument that Judaism and contemporary liberalism were inseparable elements. Studies of synagogue sermons and pedagogical materials dating from the postwar years reveal that many second- and third-generation Jews believed that their fate was tied, and had always been tied, to the success of progressive political movements. They saw New and Fair Deal liberalism as a pragmatic adaptation of long-standing ethical traditions. While this formulation was an unconscious exercise in historical revisionism, it resonated strongly.

Further contributing to postwar Jewish liberalism were the memory of the Holocaust and the realities of Jim Crow. During this era, most major national Jewish organizations, community relations councils and religious groups coalesced around the liberal reform agenda. In direct response to widespread educational, housing and employment restrictions against African-Americans, the three major American Jewish defense groups—the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress—collaborated in a vigorous and diverse assault on racial and religious disabilities. The ADL launched a barrage of catchy television, radio and newsreel commercials to highlight the pernicious effects of bigotry, including an advertisement that featured a black youngster wiping tears from his face after being turned away from a neighborhood baseball game by a group of white boys. “What difference does it make what his race or religion is?” the spot’s caption demanded of its viewers. “He can pitch, can’t he?” The legal arm of the American Jewish Congress hired seven civil rights attorneys in 1945 and filed suits against colleges and universities, landlords, real estate agents and employers known to discriminate against minorities. Partly in response to these legal pressures, 20 states had codified fair housing and employment standards by the early 1960s.

In the classic film Annie Hall (1977), Alvy Singer (played by the writer-director Woody Allen) meets his future wife at a campaign rally for Adlai Stevenson. “You’re like New York Jewish Left-Wing Liberal Intellectual Central Park West Brandeis University,” he begins flirtatiously, “uh the Socialist Summer Camps and the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right?”

Audiences didn’t need anyone to explain why the joke was funny, because the caricature was well-supported by 40 years of voting patterns and political activism.

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If it’s difficult, but possible, to identify the roots of American Jewish liberalism, it’s less clear why Jews have maintained their affinity for the Democratic brand a century or more after their ancestors first set foot on Ellis Island.

In part, it’s a matter of legacy. American Jews in the postwar period weren’t entirely accurate in claiming that liberalism was a timeless attribute of Judaism. But today, it’s no stretch to claim that liberalism is a longstanding attribute of America’s Jewish community. A survey conducted by J Street in 2014 found that 45 percent of American Jews identified as liberal or progressive, 36 percent as moderate and 19 percent as conservative. These numbers diverge sharply from responses by white voters, generally.

In part, it’s also a question of class. Multiple surveys have found that Democrats perform significantly better with college-educated and more affluent white voters than with working-class white voters who have not completed college and who don’t belong to unions. While roughly 40 percent of white Americans have attained bachelor's degrees, J Street’s survey found that almost two-thirds of their respondents had completed college (and almost a third claimed some graduate education). Many scholars argue that class can be a key component of religious or ethnic identity; in this sense, American Jews may vote like other educated whites because, on the whole, they are.

By wide margins, American Jews oppose boycotts of products manufactured or grown in both Israel and the West Bank, but they also strongly support a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine. Importantly, Israel is not—or, at least, it was not in 2014—top of mind among Jewish voters. The “economy,” “health care,” “Social Security and Medicare,” “the environment,” “education” and “taxes”—domestic issues, all—far outweighed Middle East politics in influencing voters’ decisions.

If the past gives any indication, love of Israel and love of liberalism have traditionally complemented each other in American Jewish political culture. In commemoration of Passover in 1949, the Flatbush Yeshiva, a Brooklyn day school for children from Orthodox homes, sponsored an exhibition entitled “Slavery and Freedom.” According to organizers, “one of the objects on display was a model of a kibbutz in colorful clay, under the theme of Freedom. Another was a replica of a concentration camp, under the theme of Slavery. Haggadahs were displayed in many languages.” In pairing “freedom” with an Israeli agricultural collective, and “slavery” with Nazi Germany, the school’s administrators drew directly on the Holocaust, Jewish socialism and Zionism for political inspiration.

When pundits claim, inaccurately, that concern for Israel has displaced concerns over domestic issues as the driving force behind Jewish electoral behavior, they ignore the longstanding compatibility of both sentiments.

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No one can purport to gaze into a crystal ball and predict the future of American Jewish politics. Just as Jewish liberalism is very much a product of time, place, circumstance, tradition and class, it’s conceivable that, one day, circumstances will allow for an ascendant conservatism among American Jews. The relative growth of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox populations will certainly skew the political balance, as might future demographic and economic shifts.

But for the time being, it would be a mistake to equate popular Jewish opinion with the loudly stated beliefs of a few Jewish billionaires, bundlers and “community leaders” (who tend to lead national groups with which very few people ever have cause to interact or participate). Sheldon Adelson’s wealth and clout are not to be underestimated, but in his strident opposition to the Democratic Party (its Middle East policy, its domestic agenda), he is the exception, not the rule. Most American Jews remain firmly in the liberal camp and loyal to the Democratic Party.

Shortly before the 1972 presidential election, the New York Times observed, “Some issues that seemed prominent last summer appear to have declined in importance. … The issue of Israel—that is, the commitment of both candidates to Israel’s security and integrity—appears to have declined. While Mr. Nixon’s people are trying to exploit what they feel to be Mr. McGovern’s ambiguity on the issue, there is widespread confidence among many Jews that no American president would let Israel down.” As was the case then, today, most American Jews cast their votes as concerned American liberals and moderates, not as foreign proxies for the Israeli government.

But that doesn’t stop the GOP from hoping.

There’s always a place for tradition. Every year during Passover, Jews open the door in expectation of the Prophet Elijah, who will someday herald the coming of the Messiah. And every four years, the pundits await the great Jewish embrace of the Republican Party.

As it was said then, so it is said now: Next year in New Hampshire.