Posted on 10/03/2013 2:32:27 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A striking aspect of the new Pew survey on Jewish Americans is how liberal Jews are. Is it good for the Democrats? You bet.
Why do people vote the way to do? For swing voters, the answer is usually the state of the economy. For most, however, voting patterns are surprisingly fixed. People tend to vote for one party consistently over time. For Jewish American voters, the party of choice has been the Democratic party.
Conservatives have been trying to crack the code for a number of years on how to get Jewish voters over to their side. Based on the findings of the new "Portrait of Jewish Americans" survey from the Pew Research Center, Republicans will need to find a different key. Jews are likely going to be Democrats for the foreseeable future.
Let's start with the fact that the most important determining factor of voting pattern is partisan affiliation. If you identify as a Democrat, you are far more likely to vote Democratic than if you identify as an independent or a Republican. In this instance, 70% of Jews self-identify as leaning to or members of the Democratic party. That compares with just 49% of the American public overall who at least lean Democratic. Only 22% of Jews consider themselves as leaning Republican, compared to 39% of the overall public. Orthodox Jews, who represent no more than 10% of the United States' Jewish population, tend to make up the majority of Republican Jews.
Given their self-identification, it's unlikely that Jewish Americans will break from their Democratic ways. But a closer look at why Jews are Democratic should give Republicans further pause....
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
The New Deal moved Northern Blacks to the Democrats (though not so much that on occasion they wouldn’t support a GOP candidate). Southern Blacks, who mostly couldn’t vote, tended to stay GOP until the early ‘60s. Johnson’s signing the Civil Rights Act and the radicalization of the Black community by the late ‘60s sealed the deal, and they generally vote as a complete Democrat bloc now (to their detriment). As a result, Blacks haven’t been mainstream voters (in comparison to average voting habits) in over 50 years.
I just question that number. I believe the percentage of the prison population back then that was black was higher than the percentage of the general population that was black. The latter number was more like 10%.
I'm not saying that the percentage of blacks in the prison population today isn't higher today than it was back then, and I'm not saying that the "Great Society" didn't have negative effects on the black family. It's just that there were probably more than 12-15% blacks in the prison population back then and way more than that percentage today.
Your point is quite valid and under-valued. Good job.
Well, I have heard of the term "sermon" used in Orthodox congregations, referring to a Rabbi's speech given on the high Holy Days or on the Sabbath.
"Pulpit" is a word I don't recall hearing in any Jewish context.
Well, I’ll wade into it. My best answer is “Group Think.” Its like asking why Blacks in America consistently vote Democrat when they are being really systematically exterminated by those same people? Its hard to explain but it comes in the form of peer group pressure, the impossibility of having a civil conversation, and the almost unified reliance on MSM and NPR for news. You get lots of people systematically mislead that you just can’t set straight. Does that make any sense?
I live this every day, greeting, loving and being with Liberals who you just can’t tell the truth or you will be hounded and ostracized. I never quite understood this until I started studying Crowdsourcing. And it turns out.. groups are maintained by “conformity police.” The left has infiltrated the Jewish community and the further they from Orthodox the easier it is to get them to buy into the lies that these people are spreading. This is because of guilt. Jews who are at all religious and not orthodox feel a sense of guilt about not keeping to the law. Even when what has been settled by the Rabbi’s of 1400 - 1800 years ago is just non-functional in 2013...
Talmud is a blessing and a curse. The oral law was never to be recorded and then it was. The oral law is the “How-to” implementing code for following the Commandments in Torah. IF this how-to mismatches reality, you get craziness. If you suspend the how-to by refusing any how-to you get what happened to the Karaites who just tried to follow the law as it is written and ended up sitting in the cold and the dark every Saturday among other problems. There is still a community of Jews who hold to this though as they are deeply suspicious of the Rabbis who wrote the Talmud.
Opposite of the Karaites is the Conservative/Reform/Liberal Judaism movements. These movements represent the still religious (non-secular) Jewish community and they rejected Talmud almost whole cloth in the 1800’s and the Conservative and Reform movements have slowly been walking back.
You have to put this in context. In the early 1800’s a theory called Higher Criticism was formed that showed pretty definitively that 4 distinct sources could be teased out of the text of the first 5 books of the Bible (Torah). This was kind of meant to hurt the Jewish community and it destroyed it in many ways.. but it has come to bite the Christian community just as hard. This co-incided with the age of the “Enlightenment” where “Scientism” started replacing faith in God as the ultimate source of truth and value for the elite and the educated.
We saw the rise of Spinoza’s rejection of God and the variations of Atheism and the rise of “faux” Judaism in the form of Communism. Communism replaces God with Mankind as a community and substitutes the achievement of a perfect society of the “proletariat” for the Messianic age. Much of philosophy and science have been bent toward this goal, regardless of whether the people working this call themselves Communists or not. At the front end, these social minded reformers made the lives of the beneficiaries of their programs lives better but just as we see, ultimately, Communism is implemented by tyrants who think they know better than the masses and end up deciding to kill anyone who opposes them and that gets to be one pile of people as their suffering grows. And, in spite of what ever they call this faith, Progressivism, Liberalism, Socialism, Environmentalism it keeps gaining believers and delivering misery for humans.
But, this is the issue with “faux.” or fake. Because the Bible teaches these lessons too, being kind to the stranger, providing for the sick and the needy, making sure they are treated with dignity and the same as any other person. So, certain individuals have attached themselves to the religious community and overlaid the goals of Communism/Socialism with the Biblical messages from Torah and by insisting that God is just a “concept” are able to walk away from the moral clarity of actually believing in God. They instead substitute working for “Social Justice” which isn’t at all what Torah teaches about Justice, and “Tikkun Olam” repairing the word, when they don’t have a clue just exactly what that means except, more social justice which translates into supporting the leader’s schemes to create a socialist utopia.
SO, as a group, Jews in America except for some of the Orthodox are deeply misled and working against their own interests and no one can tell them different. But, doesn’t that describe about 50% of all Americans?????
I always thought it had something to do with self-loathing, that many Jews vote Democrat because they want the kind of Hitlerian gun control that will make it easy for a future oppressive government to herd them into the boxcars. It’s like a suicide wish or something. (shrug) Whatever the reason, voting Democrat is pretty perverse to begin with, but especially irrational for Jews.
I'm with you. I will continue to support Israel and conservative Jews here in the US. The rest can go play in the street.
I agree that there is cognative dissonance on the part of the Jews. Their reaction began way before Roosevelt, before the turn of the century. It is hard to conceive, now, how ferocious, scary, all-pervasive and overt anti-Semitism was then. The Dems pretended to be slightly welcoming, whereas the Republicans didn’t bother. The mass of Jewish immigrants at the end of the 19th century were impoverished working class people. They still identify with that scenario.
I agree that there is cognative dissonance on the part of the Jews. Their reaction began way before Roosevelt, before the turn of the century. It is hard to conceive, now, how ferocious, scary, all-pervasive and overt anti-Semitism was then. The Dems pretended to be slightly welcoming, whereas the Republicans didn’t bother. The mass of Jewish immigrants at the end of the 19th century were impoverished working class people. They still identify with that scenario.
Your explanation is a good one, one I hadn’t heard before but surely part of it.
Also as a politically conservative Jew, I have a few ideas too. One is herd mentality. It’s also true in the Latino and black families I know as well, but bitterly true in Jewish families including my own (extended). Your fellow Jews from friends to family members will be VICIOUS to keep you on the plantation. Verbally skilled and full of sarcasm and bite, these people will heap scorn upon those who stray from voting lib, and encourage others to mock and insult the one who dares to think for himself as well. It is difficult to be a family member who isn’t liberal. I know this all too well. You become more tolerated than accepted at gatherings.
People don’t like to be ostracized from their friends and family. Mocking works. Low info Jewish voters, most of them, will just slide right into the “correct” beliefs, like “choice” even while not fully understanding what they are “supporting.”
Also, Jews seem to strive to be “cool” and accepted. Possibly from being “different” as children, they want to be in the popular crowd. They tend to fall for common wisdom quicker if famous people feel that way.
Liberalism is not Judaism. Conservatism and adherence to Gd’s law, as the Constitution descends from (as good as mortals can achieve), is Judaism. Our founders, especially Jefferson, were judeophiles.
It takes several loud and popular Jews in public showing the rest how life would be better the freedom way to have any impact. There aren’t many doing it. One is Dennis Prager and he is beloved among those who dare to listen.
More accurate in Hebrew I think...
A pulpit would be a “bimah”.
A Sermon would be a “ne’um”.
These terms are so common that we do not even know their origins are derived from the Church. It’s OK though...
A Jewish American Princess’s idea of visiting the countryside is roughing it one night in a hotel suite in flyover country. Jews mostly live in cities, and people that live in a commune reliably vote communist. Left vs. right affiliation is more about population density than anything else.
Yes. The fat Capitalist, brought to you by Sergei Eisenstein and the rest of the gang at SOVKINO. (You can watch STRIKE on Youtube. It is possibly one of the finest movies ever made.)
(There are plenty of Jewish Republicans however and we too are powerful and influential.)
But Jews seem to have a tradition of just the opposite in just about everything else, with American politics being the anomaly.
There are old jokes from the Jewish comedians along the lines of "Put (pick a number) of Jews in a room and you'll get (more than that number) opinions." And I've heard (what I presume to be true) family stories about a half dozen Jewish families living in a small New Jersey town in the 1920s and none of them getting along with one another.
Even in political matters, there are jokes that the multiplicity of political parties in Israel reflects the many conflicting opinions and vigorous debates that occur among relatively small numbers of Jews. Also, British Jews seem to be more divided in their allegiance to political parties.
So why are American Jews today - if we take the Pew results at face value - so far to the left? A lot of it is brainwashing and mythology passed down through the generations, starting with immigrants from pre-Soviet Eastern Europe from whom the majority of today's American Jews are descended. Leftist ideologies were popular in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century up until WWI, the period of by far the greatest Jewish immigration to the US. And that cohort of Eastern European Jewish immigrants had never experienced the ill effects of Communism up close and personal, as much later Eastern European immigrants did.
Funny . . . that's exactly how anti-Semites see the "World Zionist Conspiracy!"
There obviously are not “plenty” of Jewish republicans, there aren’t many at all, but conservative Jews barely exist.
That's funny. I've read the Book of Joshua, and I don't see any of that stuff in there.
Jews as the underdog throughout history forced them into a position where they always sought change, usually via some kind of radical or revolutionary movement. From Socialism, Communism, women's suffrage, Worker's rights, civil rights, women's rights and anti-war movements, they've always focused on changing a status quo because JEWS ARE NEVER SATISFIED with the current state of affairs.They always dream of improving something or some group (other than their own, for example, in Israel too).
The Jewish soul is programmed to "repair the world in the Kingdom of the A-mighty." The nations of the world are mired in error and idolatry. The true Jewish mission is to "compel" (in the words of Maimonides) the nations to observe the Seven Laws of the Sons of Noah. This is the one and only legitimate way Jews are supposed to express their Divinely-ordained dissatisfaction. Unfortunately, after centuries of being massacred for trying to convert chrstians or moslems they have adopted the eighteenth century European "enlightenment" ideology of Voltaire with a vengeance, making it the "Jewish" ideology.
They wanted to improve their standing in every nation they resided in. Can you blame them? Unfortunately almost all of these waves of change that they participated in backfired on them.
Jews may have tried to change all the nations they lived in (which is their job, as stated above), but I don't think they were spreading the philosophy of Voltaire or Marx in either the ancient world or the Middle Ages.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.