The OTHER elephant in the room that no one is talking about on this thread is the even lower percantage of people who are white Christians in the New York area. I the country as a while, white Christians are still the vast majority. In New York, they are a distinct minority, because of the large Jewish population of the region. This heightens the perception of a distinction in the minds of the rest of the country.
What the heck does any of that mean? Hispanics are by and large Catholic which last I checked fell into the Christian category...I dont view this as a fight about CREEDS as I do a fight about legal vs. illegal immigration. What do the Jews have to do with anything?
What Hermann means is that New York has always been an "exception" in that a large portion of its white population has been ethnically AND religiously Jewish (Jews are an ethnicity as well as a faith. There are Jewish atheists, agnostics, and even Christians!). As a result, the "culture" of "white" New Yorkers has been different from the rest of the country, as has the politics.
Where I disagree with him is that the type of Christians and Europeans who settled in the northeast (Italian, Irish, Portuguese, Greek, etc.) had an even greater impact on the cultural/poltical outlook of those states than the Jewish population did, simply due to the larger numbers of the aforementioned groups. I still laugh when I met an older gentleman from western Pennsylvania who thought that New York was "majority Jewish."
What the heck does any of that mean? Hispanics are by and large Catholic which last I checked fell into the Christian category...I dont view this as a fight about CREEDS as I do a fight about legal vs. illegal immigration. What do the Jews have to do with anything?
What it means is that most white ethnics, who are overwhelmingly Catholic (Irish, Italians, Poles, Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, Ukranians, Croats), wouldn't view themselves as part of a group that also includes Jewish people (or true Protestant-Anglos), but would see themselves as distinct. White ehtnics and Protestant Anglos, who together make up the majority of the US population overall, are a distinct minority in the NYC area.
And most Hispanics in this country are not Catholic. Only around 35-40% of Hispanics in the US are part of the Catholic Church. This lack of fidelity to a Catholic identity only heightens the seperation of many Hispanics from any possible identity with the white Catholic ethnics whose neighborhoods they are frequently moving into. Even the most apostate of Italian or Irish Catholics living in an urban enclave will still want to send their kids to the parish school and will at least attend periodic sacramental functions at Church. Hispanics who have become Pentecostalists obviously won't.