
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.








