It’s a puzzle. It’s a conundrum. To use Winston Churchill’s quote about the WWII Soviets, it’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Why do Jews vote for Democrats?
Okay, I can understand why they vote against certain Republicans. For example, notwithstanding his defense of Israel, Donald Trump sometimes comes across as . . . well, let’s just say he does not come across as Albert Einstein.
A culture such as the Jews might find Trump’s social media postings and his in-person “weave” a bit off-putting. This off-putting is apparently not offset in their minds by his support for Israel.
But Trump is not the only Republican rejected by the Jews. The Jews as a group have never voted for any Republican Presidential candidate.
Never.
Was Eisenhower too dumb? This was the general in charge of Allied Forces in Europe, the bold genius who helped mastermind D-Day, and the good soldier who opened the concentration camps.
What about Richard Nixon? A man is not called “tricky” because he’s stupid. Nixon was clearly smarter than LBJ or Harry Truman.
How about Ronald Reagan? All he did was win the Cold War.
Reagan’s vice president who succeeded him, George H.W. Bush, was one of the most accomplished men in DC at that time.
The son of Bush senior, namely George W, was at least as smart as the men he ran against, Al Gore and John Kerry.
Was Mitt Romney who made zillions on Wall Street dumb? I should be so dumb.
Even Donald Trump was clearly smarter than his opponent the last two times.
The Jews voted against all of them, and every other Republican Presidential candidate. Why?
I have a theory.
Jews coming to America were much different than the ones here today. Jewish immigrants were more like the Irish or the Italian immigrants. They suffered discrimination for their ethnicity and religion (Catholicism in the case of the Italians and most of the Irish). All had heavy foreign accents that served to identify them, and the first language of the Italians and Jews was not even English.
They naturally voted for the political party that held itself out as just like them – working-class folk. The Democrats were the party that did not control the country clubs that refused to admit them.
The Irish and Italian immigrants assimilated within two generations, as most immigrants do. For example, I say I’m Scottish but the truth is that I have just one grandparent from Scotland. The rest came from here and there. Likewise, most of the Irish and Italian immigrants married outside their ethnicity and even their faith.
Today, there is no Irish vote or Italian vote, because there’s no longer a discrete Irish culture or Italian culture in America. Getting drunk on St Patrick’s Day doesn’t count, and Columbus Day has been cancelled.
But there’s still a Jewish vote, because there’s still a discrete Jewish culture. That culture is the reason that the Jews survived for thousands of years as a minority ethnic group with a distinctive non-Christian religion despite enormous pressures.
The Jews’ survival skills were forged in the furnace of Europe and, before that, the Middle East. There, they learned not to blend in because they weren’t allowed to. They learned not to marry outside their faith because nobody outside their faith would marry them.
The Jews made a virtue of this terrible discrimination and periodic pogroms. Being ostracized from mainstream culture drove them into an observance and even obsession over their own distinctive culture, religion and traditions.
You have your Christmas, they said, but we have our Hannukah. You have your New Year, but we have our Rosh Hashanah. You have your Easter, but we have our Passover.
And you have your Republicans, but we have our Democrats. In short, Jews vote for Democrats because it’s tradition.
Most traditions are good. There’s a Darwinian aspect to them; bad habits die out and never rise to the level of a tradition. In the context of Jewish culture and religion, tradition has been a very good thing, a sine qua non of these extraordinary and vulnerable people who comprise only 0.2% of the world’s population.
But I submit that the Jewish tradition of voting for Democrats is now unhealthy for them and us.
The Torah is full of traditions that may have been right for their time but are not right for the present. No longer is it appropriate for Jews to push goats off cliffs, decapitate calves, or light bonfires on mountain peaks.
Or vote blindly for barbarians who seek to destroy them. Even Tevye compromised tradition to save his people.
the Aspen beat 
Grew up with many Jewish friends. By childhood Jewish best friend and I are now I fortunately, estranged, due to politics (my family is Methodist).
I’ve been told American Jews are wedded to the the D party because politics come before religion.
I doubt that will change.
The way I would express it (as a non-Jew) is that American Jews value tradition very highly and religion perhaps less highly. And their politics is part of their tradition, not their religion.
I emphasize that my experience with Jewish politics and Jewish religion are limited. I’m a little our of my depth.
Offhand—and I’m not a professional demographer, just an observer in the crowd—I think there’s another element at work here: political loyalties can become culturally inherited.
Black Americans voted heavily Republican for generations after the Civil War, when the Republican Party was identified with Lincoln and emancipation. That allegiance began changing during the New Deal and shifted dramatically toward the Democrats through Truman and, later, the civil-rights era.
Something similar may have happened earlier with Jewish voters. Their movement toward the Democratic Party was already well underway by the time of FDR and the New Deal, long before Truman recognized Israel in 1948. Truman’s recognition of Israel may have reinforced an existing relationship rather than created it.
In both cases, my suspicion is that once a political affiliation becomes embedded across several generations, it can take on a life of its own. People aren’t necessarily reevaluating the entire party platform every four years from scratch. Some portion of political identity is inherited—much like religion, regional identity, or rooting for the same baseball team your father rooted for.
That may actually strengthen Glenn’s “tradition” argument. The interesting question isn’t simply why a group originally chose a party. It’s why that allegiance can persist generations after the circumstances that created it have changed.
“No longer is it appropriate for Jews to push goats off cliffs, decapitate calves, or light bonfires on mountain peaks.”
Nor was it ever. Just a t when I was beginning to read you again a nd take some of your work as useful, you once e a gain show the depth of your knowledge and anslysis.
Throwing goats off cliffs, or otherwise sacrificing them, was a recognized tradition in ancient times. Hence the phrase “scape goat.” See Leviticus 16
Decapitating calves was also a Jewish tradition, and is described in the Torah. See Deuteronomy, Chapter 21, verses 1 through 9.
Bonfires were lighted on mountain peaks for the purpose of signalling the New Year. This tradition was in writing. See Mishnah (Tractate Rosh Hashanah 2:2–3)
None of this, BTW, lessens my high ragard for the Jewish faith. Some of the ancient Christian traditions are at least as bad. I mention these Jewish traditions only to illustrate that some traditions shoud go away. These did.
OY GEVALT! When you get it all figured out, please let us know!
The opposite of your theory is in fact true – the Orthodox Jewish minority that clings to tradition have in fact shifted Republican.
It is the assimilated, intermarried Jews who have a “tradition” of voting Democrat. These people vote Dem not from fearful, insular tribalism, but from the outward-facing, cosmopolitan trend of the Emancipated Jews of Germany and France. As in the “Reform” Jewish movements in Germany, in the US their assimilation strategy substituted a general, secularized “liberal humanism” for actual Judaic faith or ritual. This generalization of Judaism allowed them to join the Ethical Culture society, participate in the radical chic identity politics of the 60s, and marry the Liberal Episcopalians and other Christians they were meeting on college campuses… these were perhaps ethnic intermarriages, but there wasn’t much daylight between the partners’ beliefs and lifestyles.
And a significant chunk of Jewish immigrants had already been drawn to Socialism and its class struggle back in Europe – many out of a desperate hope that the Socialist revolution would improve the lot of Jews.
Voting Dem was – and still is – an assumed commonality in those “progressive” elites. The Jews still voting Dem are largely assimilated liberals who may still adorn their universal beliefs with ethnic Jewish knicknacks, or full-blown secular Leftists of Jewish descent, rather than practicing Jews…. that is their tribe.
Most don’t speak Hebrew, are unaffiliated with a synagogue, and have never visited Israel.
Just like their parents.
Why should these people vote on narrow Jewish interests?
Democrats are haters. Pure and simple. Doesn’t matter where the hate is directed – even at themselves. Tribalist politics uber alles.
“The Jew lends himself easily to Communism because it enables him to devote himself to a high cause, involving all of humanity, characteristics which are natural to him as a Jew” Edmund Wilson – (1895-1972)