If you want to talk about "Jews" and New York, you have to know something about Jews and New York. Otherwise, people will get offended, and worse than that, you won't get the politics at all. By and large, the people who vote for Democrats among the Jews are like the people who do so among Catholics and Protestants. They are the ones who don't go to religious services regularly. They aren't faithful to their moral duties. They have a problem with God, and don't want to follow the rules. To generalize mercilessly (but accurately), usually that's because they had a lousy relationship with their fathers, and they now have marital-fidelity problems.
The guy in the Mengele story was identified as an Orthodox Jew. That's another species. They vote 80 percent for Republicans.
Maybe some context is in order: Among Jews, as among Catholics and Protestants, there is a 15-to-20-percent group of Stalinists who will always vote Democrat, a 20-to-25 percent group who will vote conservative Republican, and a mushy group in the middle who sway with the wind. Among Jews, the mushy people sway more frequently to the Left.
It is mostly secularized Jews who work in Hollywood, in the media, and on Wall Street. Like lapsed Catholics, they hate the faith of their fathers with a passion, and as with liberals who call themselves Catholics and Protestants, they hate the 25-percent minority among their respective faiths who actually walk the walk.
Orthodox Jewish men wear yarmulkes and conservative clothing. The women all wear hats of some kind, and conventional, but rather 1950s-looking and very modest dresses. They live in their own neighborhoods so they can walk to the synagogue on Friday and Saturday nights. They have large families. They are overwhelmingly conservative and family-oriented. (Lieberman, being a social liberal, is a hopeless outlier, but he represents Connecticut.)
Another group of culturally conservative Jews is called the Hasidic Jews, who dress in long, black coats and long, flying sideburns for the men, and long dresses and headscarves for the women—copying the fashions of 18th-century Poland. They live in Hasidic neighborhoods, have a tremendous number of children, and also vote for Republicans.
Firmly on the Democratic side, there is the group of Jews called "Reform Jews," who have almost no Hebrew in their prayers. Like "A&P" Catholics, Reform Jews' attendance at services is occasional—the occasions centering around marriage, birth, death, and lavishly expensive rites of initiation. The initiation is called the Bar Mitzvah for boys. Reform Jews being mostly Lefties, they also have a Bar Mitzvah for girls, called a Bat ["Bahss"] Mitzvah. Within the Reform movement, there are the "Conservative" Jews, but don't let the name fool you. They are like the RINOs among Republicans. Both Reform and Conservative Jews are mostly pro-abortion, and most will vote for Democratic candidates, even ones who have publicly stated their support for the destruction of Israel and the killing or Babylonian captivity of all Jews worldwide—as long as the persecution is coming from the Left. To use a New York Jewish expression, "Go figure."
To complete the picture, among Left-wing Jews you read about from the nodes of New York, Chicago, Miami, Hollywood, or the academy, they may have Jewish names, they may be described in the press as "Jews," and may stick together socially. But where religious practice is concerned, they are more likely to show up at services that are Unitarian, Quaker, or Buddhist, if at all. They are exquisitely fashion-sensitive, and therefore have no monotheistic faith we would recognize. Their reverential impulses are directed solely toward global warming, recycling, abortion, and hating the U.S. military.
If we run conservative candidates who can speak from the heart, we can break the 80:20 Jewish jinx. In 1976, Jews voted 71 percent for Carter against Dole. But by 1980, they went only 45 percent for Jimmah. Reagan polled 39 percent among Jews, and John Anderson 14 percent. The next election could be just as interesting.