Some notes for President Obama on “the Jewish agenda” historically in presidential politics.

First, from Leonard Fein’s book, Where Are We? The Inner Life of America’s Jews (1988), in which Fein insists that American Jews vote liberal, and wrestles with the fact that they jumped from Carter to Reagan in 1980 but began to abandon Reagan in 1984:

In 1984, Ronald Reagan, widely perceived by Jews as a truly splendid friend of Israel, won less of the Jewish vote than he had in 1980. A puzzlement, and an irritating disappointment to conservative Jewish intelletuals such as David Sidorsky, who in the aftermath of the election complained that American Jews, despite their devotion to Israel’s security and Soviet Jewry, had preferred a party “antagonistic to the security needs of Israel” and given to “the most accommodationist approaches to the Soviet Union.” The historian Lucy Davidowicz summarized the neo-conservative view: “The Jewish agenda requires a strong government in the United States to insure Israel’s security. Jews who care about Israel are obliged to use their vote to that end. They did so four years ago, when for the first time in over fifty years the Democratic candidate for the Presidency, Jimmy Carter, failed to win a majority of the Jewish vote. In 1984, by contrast, a great many Jews seemed willing to ignore the drift of the Democratic party into isolationism and defeatism, not to mention the party’s embrace of Jesse Jackson, a man overtly hostile to a strong America and a strong Israel.” The year 1980 was not, then, the beginning of a trend; it was an ephemeral anomaly. Milton Himmelfarb concluded that “what misled the forecasters was the exceptionalness of 1980. It now seems clear that a big part of the 1980 Jewish vote for Reagan was the desire of many Jews to punish Carter.”

Fein’s comments on Jews punishing Jimmy Carter reminded me that Chemi Shalev in Haaretz recently wrote about Reagan actually taking Israel on. Is that why his vote dropped, from 80-84?