About a week ago Steve Sailer noted that a new poll by the Kerry camp shows that Bush’s support from “Jews” is around 22%. This might be a low-balling, but nevertheless, it shows that the “Jewish Republican” is a minority orientation, something that has been typical ever since the political realignment of the New Deal when the Democrats and Republicans crystallized their modern incarnations as catch-all parties of the Left and Right. Godless has blogged about the right-ward shift of American Jews before. Since Jews start out so far Left, it is pretty easy to push them a bit to the Right (though the “Right” credentials of some of the Jewish neoconservatives do I think seem a bit shaky upon closer scrutiny).
But the problem about many of these generalizations is that we are still wedded to a concept of a unitary “Jew.” Everyone’s definition of Who Is a Jew differs. The American Jewish Identity Survey offers data to reformulate, and add a finer granularity, to these typologies. There are, roughly speaking, three important groups of Jews that I think need to be separated:
Jews by religion and ethnicity.
Jews by ethnicity of no religion.
Jews by ethnicity of another religion.
There are of course other combinations, Jews by religion but not ethnicity, but the above three are numerically preponderant. My argument is, roughly speaking, that pro-Israel stances evinced by Republicans (in comparison to Democrats) have the most salience for religiously Orthodox Jews who are already more likely to be Republican. Highly secularized nominal Jews who are mostly Democratic simply can’t be shifted very much on purely “Jewish” issues, because Jewishness is a subset rather than the centerpiece of their identity.
One of the most importance statistics one can find in the survey above is this:
“Do you agree or disagree that God exists?”
Jews by religion: (2,930,000 of total population)
Disagree strongly – 5%
Disagree somewhat – 9%
Agree somewhat – 23%
Agree strongly – 54%
(not determined) – 9%
Jews of no religion: (1,200,000 of total population)
Disagree strongly – 17%
Disagree somewhat – 6%
Agree somewhat – 29%
Agree strongly – 35%
(not determined) – 13%
Jews of other religion: (1,470,000 of total population)
Disagree strongly – 3%
Disagree somewhat – 1%
Agree somewhat – 14%
Agree strongly – 80%
(not determined) – 2%
As you can see, “Jews of other religion” (no doubt mostly Christian), pretty much track the American public, with ~5% level of unbelief (many Jews are also part of “New Religious Movements” and Eastern religions like Buddhism, which might explain those who don’t believe in God). The “Core Jewish Population,” that is, Jews who are either of Jewish religion or Jewish ethnically, and presumptively have no other religious loyalties, display a far higher level of atheism than the general public. Many of these people are the ones who react negatively to G.W. Bush’s religious background. Additionally, many moderately religious Jews also tend to react negatively toward Christian evangelical talk, but I think a key point is that non-Jewish secular people in the United States tend to be highly skeptical of the religious orientation of the Republican party (I saw a statistic in The Almanac of American Politics that 40% of people with “no religion” voted Republican, but most people who offer “no religion” as their identification are not atheists or agnostics). Secularism, the child of the gentile Enlightenment has been taken up by Jews with gusto, and it is a major element in the identities of many ethnic Jews.
I suspect that Jews who might be won over to the Republican cause are those who:
A) “Drop out” of Jewishness, that is, converts to evangelical Christianity, who after a period might not want to identify as Jews.
B) Religiously observant Orthodox Jews who still vote Democratic for local political reasons or because of a historical tie to the party.
Because of A), the tendency for Jewish converts to disappear into the population after a generation or two of intermarriage (I recently had a Mormon missionary with a Jewish last name knock on my door, he was really embarrassed when I asked him about it, as he said, “it’s a family name, I don’t know much about Judaism, my grandfather was Jewish”) means these “Jewish Republicans” will fade away as generic Republicans. As far as B), this group just isn’t numerically that large, I don’t see numbers that suggest the various shades of Orthodox Jews form any more than 10% of America’s Jewry.
Certainly Leftist anti-Israel rhetoric that starts to veer toward anti-Semitism might push Jews toward a philo-Semitic Republican party, but I think there are special conditions that need to apply here.
A) Their Jewish identity has to be strong enough to overrule their Leftist adherences. So, extremely Left and religiously observant Jews are good opportunities for Republicans, but how many hardcore religious and liberal Jews are there?
B) They have to live in an area with a high concentration of Left-wing radicals and low concentration of “Bubbas,” so that the former “threat” is more salient than the latter “igorance.”
To clarify, many Jews in small towns seem to me part of the liberal rump within the community. I speak as someone who spent my adolescence in a very conservative small town where the Jewish families would never consider aligning themselves with their Republican neighbors, who regularly preached to them and tried to “witness” to them. Israel was mildy important to my few Jewish friends, but the cultural sense of alienation from their Mormon & conservative Protestant friends was a daily reality. To give an example, a conservative Protestant preacher was spreading word among some local Baptists that Mormons and Jews grew horns at night. Something straight out of the most stereotypical depictions of conservative Protestants, but it was a reality during my high school years. I also know that the same Baptist church where these opinions were spreading was extremely pro-Israel. But my Jewish friends really didn’t give a rat’s ass about Israel when set against the fact that some of my Baptist friends were arguing pro or con about Jews in insulting fashion (there were also debates about whether blacks are descended from Ham or Cain during the lunch period).
Jewish loyalty to the Democratic party is not something essential, or part of a “group selection strategy.” Rather, it is something motivated to important personal interests and priorities. Jews are atypical Americans. Their IQs are about 15 points higher. Non-Christian Jews (that is, Jews who attend temple and those who don’t) are five times as likely to be atheists. They are often (in my experience) likely to hold strange stereotypes about conservative Christians because of lack of familiarity with them, or, if they do live by them, to have had unfortunate cultural misunderstandings that solidify their anti-Christian inclinations. Various elements of the broad coalition of groups that exist under the umbrella of the American Jewry vote Democratic for different reasons, so a assertion of the Republican party’s philo-Semitism via their pro-Israel policy prescriptions might not yield as much party-switching as one might anticipate.
Addendum: It seems to be that many of the neoconservatives are a small subset who live under the delusion that they are very numerous, that is, highly secular personally, but still expressing a strong awareness of ethnicity which they transfer to the Israeli state. I would assert that the more atheist and secular the Jew is, the more likely ethnic awareness is to drop.
Posted by razib at 02:53 PM