The Jewish Love Affair With the Democrats

Why are Jews still wedded to the Democratic party, years after it stopped making any economic or political sense for them to remain in the marriage? It`s a question one hears often from bewildered non-Jews and Republican Jews (Democratic Jews - i.e., the vast majority of American Jews - seem oblivious to the question, let alone any possible answer).

The truth is, there is no single answer. The most commonly heard explanation, one routinely offered up in "analysis" pieces by lazy journalists and High Holiday sermons by liberal Reform rabbis, is that the liberalism espoused by the likes of a Teddy Kennedy or a Barbra Streisand comes straight from Jewish tradition - in other words, if Moses and King David and Maimonides were alive today, they`d all be dues-paying members of the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way and the National Organization for Women.

Such nonsense is belied by the fact that the more Orthodox a particular Jewish neighborhood or community, the more likely it is to vote for Republican candidates. Conversely, areas with a heavy concentration of secular and assimilated Jews vote almost without exception for liberal Democrats. If the explanation cited above held any water, the opposite would be true.

Another line of reasoning one encounters is that Jews gravitated to the Democratic party because the party best served their interests. Since that answer is not nearly as off the wall as the first, let`s take a little swing down memory lane and see what we can find.

Surprising as it might seem from our vantage point, the Jews who came to the U.S. prior to the great waves of immigration from Eastern Europe tended to look askance at the Democratic party, which was identified in the popular mind with Tammany-style political bossism, support for slavery, and an agrarian populism that often seemed indistinguishable from the rawest anti-Semitism.

That attitude changed with the arrival of the Eastern European Jews who crowded into the big cities at the turn of the century and quickly learned that their very livelihoods were dependent on the good will of those Tammany-like political machines, which were invariably Democratic and invariably corrupt.

Jobs and basic amenities were used as barter to purchase party loyalty, and bribery was the order of the day - the late New York senator Jacob Javits told the story of how his father loved Election Day because the saloonkeepers would pay $2 (double a day`s wages at the time) to anyone who promised to vote Democratic.

Although the dominance of the big city bosses was an inescapable fact of life for the new Jewish immigrants, the pressure to vote the party line was felt most keenly in local elections. When it came to presidential politics, Jews were far less wary of voting their conscience.

In 1916, for example, Republican candidate Charles Evan Hughes received 45 percent of the Jewish vote, and four years later Republican Warren Harding actually won a plurality among Jews - 43 percent as opposed to 19 percent for Democrat James Cox and 38 percent for Socialist Eugene V. Debs.

That last figure - nearly 4 in 10 Jews voting for the Socialist candidate - tells a story in itself, a story not to be ignored when seeking to understand Jewish voting habits. Many of the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe came to America with a passionate belief in one form or another of socialism, and those Jews tended to vote for third party left-wing candidates when offered the choice. Though their candidates were, with the exception of some local races in immigrant neighborhoods, roundly unsuccessful, Jewish socialists and communists left a seemingly indelible stamp on the collective political identity of American Jews.

Most Jews, however, whether out of political moderation or fear of wasting their vote on a long shot, cast their ballots for either Democrats or Republicans. And though the Republicans lost a significant number of votes in 1924 to the third party candidacy of Progressive Robert LaFollette, it was not until the election of 1928 that the relationship between Jews and the Democratic party became the inseparable bond that still exists nearly 75 years later.

It was in 1928 that Democratic presidential candidates first began polling landslide numbers among American Jews, as New York governor Al Smith, a Roman Catholic of immigrant stock (whose campaign manager happened to be Jewish) captured 72 percent of the Jewish vote. Despite his overwhelming Jewish support, and the equally strong backing of fellow Catholics, Smith carried only 8 states against Republican Herbert Hoover and failed to win his own home state of New York.

The nascent trend of lopsided Jewish support for Democratic presidential candidates solidified four years later when another New York governor, Franklin Roosevelt, won the votes of better than 8 in 10 American Jews. Roosevelt, whom Jews idolized more than any other politician before or since, went on to win 85 percent of the Jewish vote in 1936 and 90 percent in both 1940 and 1944.

Harry Truman was the next Democrat to benefit from Jewish party loyalty, though his share of the Jewish vote in 1948 slipped from the Rooseveltian 90 percent to a "mere" 75 percent, thanks to the third-party candidacy of Henry Wallace, whose left-wing campaign attracted those 15 percent of Jewish voters for whom Truman apparently was not liberal enough.

Whether Roosevelt or Truman was deserving of such Jewish support is a question most Jews were reluctant even to ask until relatively recently. As the journalist Sidney Zion wrote several years ago, Roosevelt "refused to lift a finger to save [Jews] from Auschwitz.... Then, in 1948, the Jews helped elect Harry Truman, who recognized Israel but immediately embargoed arms to the Jewish state while knowing that the British had fully armed the Arabs."

The Republican share of the Jewish vote - an embarrassing 10 percent in 1940, 1944 and 1948 - improved significantly in the 1950`s as Dwight Eisenhower won the support of 36 percent of Jews in 1952 and 40 percent in 1956. Eisenhower`s opponent in both elections was Adlai Stevenson, a one-term governor of Illinois whose persona of urbane intellectualism set a new standard for the type of candidate favored by Jewish liberals.

Actually, Stevenson was not at all what he seemed: biographer John Barlow Martin revealed that Adlai hardly ever cracked open a book, and the historian Michael Beschloss, in a New York Times op-ed piece ("How Well-Read Should a President Be?" June 11, 2000), noted that when Stevenson died, there was just one book found on his bedside table - The Social Register.

Fortunately for politicians, perception is at least as important as reality, and John Kennedy followed in Stevenson`s footsteps as a non-intellectual who, with the help of compliant reporters and academic acolytes like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., managed to come across as a Big Thinker - in marked contrast to his well-earned reputation as an intellectual lightweight that dogged him throughout his years in Congress.

Despite the fact that his books were ghost-written (the journalist Arthur Krock was in large measure responsible for "Why England Slept," while Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen was the primary author of "Profiles in Courage") and his choice of reading material ran mainly to spy novels, Kennedy, like Stevenson, benefited from the perception that he was made of sterner intellectual stuff. This was particularly true when it came to Jewish voters, who gave Kennedy 82 percent of their votes in 1960 and continued to support him in similarly high numbers for the duration of his presidency.

There never was much doubt that Jews would vote in large numbers for Democrat Lyndon Johnson over Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 - a year when even many moderate members of his own party were high-tailing it away from the GOP`s outspokenly conservative standard bearer.

Johnson, the incumbent who assumed office upon the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, adroitly positioned himself as a man of the sensible center while Goldwater, disturbingly ambivalent about his own presidential ambitions and qualifications ("I`m not even sure I`ve got the brains to be president of the United States," he told the Chicago Tribune), seemed to delight in saying whatever he felt would most disturb the liberal reporters covering his campaign.

Goldwater`s supporters thrilled to what they perceived to be their man`s unusually blunt and honest oratory, but the rest of the country was decidedly unimpressed. Johnson was returned to office with 61.1 percent of the popular vote. Among Jews the results were even more one-sided as Johnson equaled Franklin Roosevelt in his heyday, pulling 90 percent of the Jewish vote to Goldwater`s 10 percent.

Republicans did somewhat better with Jews in 1968 when former vice president Richard Nixon, never a popular figure in the Jewish community, garnered 17 percent of the Jewish vote (actually a point down from the 18 percent he received from Jews when he ran against Kennedy in 1960).

This, too, was an easy election to predict in terms of Jewish preference, not simply because Nixon was Nixon, but more so because the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey - a classic cold war liberal whose type would become nearly extinct by the mid-1970`s - enjoyed an unusually close relationship with most of the leading organizational figures in American Jewish life.

Once again, Jews hardly reflected the thinking of the country at large, as Nixon (43.4 percent) squeezed out a victory over Humphrey (42.7 percent). George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, won 13.5 percent of the vote as a third-party candidate. (Jews gave Wallace 2 percent of their votes.)

The 1972 presidential election proved to be one of the more interesting - and instructive - elections in terms of Jewish voting behavior. During his first four years in office, Nixon had compiled a generally solid record on Israel. U.S. policymakers began to take seriously Israel`s value as an American asset in the region, and military aid to Israel rose to unprecedented levels.

Israel`s prime minister at the time, Golda Meir, was an unabashed admirer of Nixon`s, and the Israeli ambassador in Washington, a former IDF chief of staff named Yitzhak Rabin, raised the hackles of liberal Jewish organizations when he all but endorsed Nixon for a second term.

None of that seemed to matter to the bulk of American Jewry. Certainly there were defections from Democratic ranks - an organization calling itself "Democrats for Nixon" was a predominantly Jewish affair, and several wealthy big-name Jewish contributors who normally gave to Democrats were this time around writing checks to the Nixon campaign - but most Jews still feared that pulling the Republican lever would cause their right hands to lose their cunning.

Running against Nixon in 1972 was the liberal South Dakota senator George McGovern, a leading "dove" on Vietnam and a man who had not exactly carved a name for himself as a defender of Israel. McGovern exemplified the type of guilt-driven, anti-defense liberalism that captured the Democratic Party that year and would lead it to electoral disaster in four of the next five presidential elections.

"Official" Jewry - that dizzying network of committees, councils, conferences and leagues staffed by liberal flunkies whose Holy Writ is the platform of the Democratic Party and whose daily spiritual sustenance comes from New York Times editorials - was represented in the McGovern campaign by Jewish liaison Richard Cohen, who after the election returned to his job as public relations director at the American Jewish Congress, and campaign director Frank Mankiewicz, a former employee of the Anti-Defamation League.

As was the case in prior elections, Jewish organizational flunkies such as Washington fixture Hyman Bookbinder made no secret of their Democratic sympathies. Jewish celebrities were highly visible McGovern supporters: Barbra Streisand, Peter Falk, Carol King, Simon and Garfunkel, and scores of other household names enthusiastically gave their time and money to the Democratic candidate.

As Stephen Isaacs described it in his 1974 book Jews and American Politics: "despite problems with affirmative action plans-cum-quotas, the 'urban fever zone,` scatter site housing, community control of schools, an inept Democratic presidential campaign - despite all these things and more -the Jewish bloc vote did hold up" for McGovern, who won the votes of 65 percent of American Jews - this while Nixon was crushing McGovern among the general electorate with a landslide of historic proportions.

Nixon defeated McGovern by a count of 60.7 percent to 37.5 percent, 49 states to 1; more tellingly as far as Jews were concerned, he won nearly 70 percent of the white vote.

Nixon did double his share of the Jewish vote from the paltry 17 percent he received four years earlier, but the startling fact remains that McGovern actually did better among Jews than Adlai Stevenson had in 1952 and 1956.

Given Nixon`s record on Israel and the plaudits of Israeli leaders, his moderate domestic agenda, and an unimpressive opponent with no strong ties to the Jewish community, the 1972 election was as clear a signal as any that it was a combination of old habits and a religious-like devotion to dogmatic liberalism that drove the majority of Jewish voters, not any primary concern for Israel or narrowly defined Jewish interests.

A year later, as the Yom Kippur War raged, Nixon went against the State and Defense Department bureaucracies and directed the massive military airlift to Israel that saved the Jewish state from near certain defeat. It should never be forgotten that had it been left up to two-thirds of American Jewish voters, the man sitting in the Oval Office during Israel`s time of unprecedented peril would have been President George McGovern.

Although it played out more than two years after the fact, the 1976 presidential campaign was overshadowed by the Watergate scandal, with voters still angry over President Gerald Ford`s pardon of his predecessor, Richard Nixon, who resigned the presidency to escape impeachment.

Ford`s Democratic challenger was Jimmy Carter, a previously little-known governor of Georgia who promised a scandal-weary nation "a government as good and as honest and as decent and as competent and as compassionate and as filled with love as are the American people."

As treacly as it sounds in retrospect, Carter`s mantra was perfect for the times, as was his much publicized "born again" religious experience and his repeated insistence to crowds along the campaign trail that he would never lie to them. In short, he was the anti-Nixon - or so he and his aides would have had the country believe.

All was not freshness and light with the Carter campaign, however. A number of voices were raised during Carter`s long march to his party`s nomination and then the White House which, taken together, should have served as an early warning signal of problems to come:

* The respected Atlanta journalist Reg Murphy, who had closely followed Carter`s political career from its humble start, flatly declared that Carter was "one of the three or four phoniest men I ever met."

* A young reporter named Steven Brill, who would go on to become a media mogul in the 1980`s and 90`s, wrote a detailed expose of Carter`s record in Georgia for Harper`s magazine. The title of the take-no-prisoners article? "Jimmy Carter`s Pathetic Lies."

* Carter speechwriter Bob Shrum, who has since achieved no small measure of renown as a major Democratic strategist, quit the campaign in disgust over what he saw as Carter`s penchant for fudging the truth. (So much for the "I`ll never lie to you" pledge.)

Shrum also disclosed that Carter, convinced that the Jewish vote in the primaries would go to Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, instructed his staff to henceforth ignore Middle East-related issues. According to Shrum, this was how Carter put it: "Jackson has all the Jews anyway....We get the Christians."

By Election Day, Carter`s wide-eyed sanctimony had begun to wear thin with American voters. What had been an immense lead over Ford in the polls throughout the summer and early fall all but evaporated, and Carter ended up with just a two point margin in the popular vote, 50 percent to 48 percent. (Such was Ford`s momentum in the final week of the campaign that pollsters agreed he likely would have won had the election taken place a couple of days after it did.)

In contrast to their fellow Americans, the preference of Jewish voters was never in doubt. Even the relatively small percentage of Jews for whom Israel and Jewish issues were top priorities - and whose knees therefore failed to automatically jerk for the Democrats - found it difficult to work up much enthusiasm for Ford, whose Mideast policy, crafted by Nixon holdover Henry Kissinger, was widely seen as reverting back to the even-handedness that had defined the U.S. stance from the late 1940`s to the early 1970`s.

Carter swept the Jewish vote 71 to 27 percent - not quite the lopsided margin that had once been the norm for Democratic presidential candidates, but several points better than George McGovern`s showing four years earlier.

Carter rewarded his Jewish supporters just weeks after assuming office by becoming the first American president to call for a "homeland" for the Palestinians - this at a time when the PLO had not even gone through the motions of rejecting terrorism or abrogating its call for Israel`s destruction. Carter`s pro-Palestinian statement set the tone for what would become an increasingly rocky relationship between his administration and the American Jewish community. For once, though, Jews were politically in sync with the rest of the country as Carter`s approval ratings plunged below those of Nixon`s at the height of Watergate.

The 1980 presidential election, like the Nixon-McGovern matchup eight years earlier, offered a clear choice between a Republican candidate who was unambiguous in his support of Israel and a Democrat whose record was something less than sterling. Only this time, the pro-Israel candidate was the challenger, former California governor Ronald Reagan, while the more problematic candidate was the incumbent, James Earl Carter.

Carter had alienated many American Jews early on in his presidency by calling for a "Palestinian homeland" and engaging in a series of confrontations with Israeli leaders. Moshe Dayan, the legendary Israeli general who at the time was serving as Prime Minister Menachem Begin`s foreign minister, recalled a particularly unpleasant meeting with Carter in Washington.

In his memoir Breakthrough, Dayan wrote that Carter berated him for what he perceived to be Israel`s intransigence. "You are more stubborn than the Arabs, and you put obstacles on the path to peace," Carter told the startled Dayan.

Carter`s animosity toward Israel was on full display during the Camp David negotiations in the fall of 1978. The president continually browbeat Begin while White House aides put out the word that the Israeli leader was the main stumbling block to Egyptian president Anwar Sadat`s noble quest for peace.

The Carter administration`s relationship with the American Jewish community reached its nadir several months prior to the 1980 election when the U.S. voted against Israel at the United Nations and Carter`s UN ambassador, Donald McHenry, clumsily tried to double-talk his way out of the ensuing controversy.

But as the presidential campaign heated up later that year, American Jews - at least the vast majority for whom voting Democratic had become the closest thing in their lives to a religious act - faced the dilemma of having to turn their backs on a Democratic president. The only viable alternative to Carter was Ronald Reagan, who was not just a Republican but a conservative Republican, which for most Jews in 1980 (and to a somewhat lesser extent today) was akin to an alien life form: an altogether unfamiliar species.

There was a third choice that year, in the person of liberal Illinois Republican congressman John Anderson, who after a dismal showing in the Republican primaries saw fit to inflict himself on the electorate as a third-party candidate in the general election. But Anderson`s chances of winning were nil, so voting for him was widely understood to be something of a protest vote, a "neither of the above" judgment on Carter and Reagan.

For many Jews who ordinarily voted Democratic, Carter`s dismal performance as president - and not just his perceived tilt against Israel - made the decision to vote for Reagan a little easier. So did the fact that Reagan was receiving support from some rather surprising sources, including the endorsement of former Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy, a virtual icon of the 1960`s antiwar movement.

On Election Day Carter was repudiated by better than half the American Jewish electorate, garnering just 45 percent of their votes. Thirty-nine percent of the Jewish vote went to Reagan, just a drop less than the 40 percent that went to Eisenhower in 1956. John Anderson, as expected, did extremely well - better than 14 percent - among Jews who were sick of Carter but could not take the step of voting Republican.

Since leaving office, Carter has been a vocal critic of Israeli policies and a staunch advocate of Palestinian nationalism. Had he won a second term, there is little doubt the Jewish state would have suffered.

Shortly before the 1980 election, Cyrus Vance, who earlier that year had resigned as Carter`s secretary of state, confirmed to then-New York mayor Ed Koch that Carter, if reelected, would "sell out" the Jews. And according to investigative journalists Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Carter, at a March 1980 meeting with his senior political advisers, angrily snapped, "If I get back in, I`m going to f--- the Jews."

A majority of American Jewish voters had deserted Jimmy Carter in 1980, leading to speculation that the Jewish community perhaps was moving away from its longtime loyalty to the Democratic party and rendering obsolete Milton Himmelfarb`s famous observation that "Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans."

But Jews would flock home to the Democratic party in 1984, preferring the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale, to the incumbent Republican president, Ronald Reagan, by a 69 percent to 31 percent margin.

The '84 election was yet another indication that a Republican presidential candidate, whether an incumbent or a challenger and no matter how strong his record on Israel, will always lose among Jewish voters when the alternative is a liberal Democrat without any pronounced or well-known hostility to Israel. Mondale, a protégé of the late Hubert Humphrey, was a former senator from Minnesota who more recently had served as Carter`s vice president during the latter`s ineffectual one-term presidency. Jews were drawn to Mondale for a number of reasons - his Humphrey connection, his New Deal liberalism, and the simple fact that he wasn`t Reagan, to whom most American Jews never took a liking, despite a dramatic improvement in U.S-Israel relations since Mondale`s old boss had been thrown out of office.

Mondale had compiled a pro-Israel voting record while in the Senate, but there were questions raised during his tenure as vice president about the depth of his commitment. He never publicly criticized any of the Carter administration`s Mideast policies that American Jews found so troubling - and worse, seemed to share Carter`s instinctive need to blame Israel for all manner of wrongdoing.

According to Ezer Weizman and Moshe Dayan, both of whom authored accounts of their intimate involvement in Israel`s negotiations with Washington during the Carter years, Mondale was a thorn in the side of the Israelis.

Dayan was particularly scathing, describing one meeting at the White House with senior American officials, Carter and Mondale included, that amounted to a non-stop scolding of Israel. Carter berated Dayan and his fellow Israeli diplomats for being "more stubborn than the Arabs" and putting "obstacles on the path to peace."

If anything, wrote Dayan, Mondale was worse than Carter: "Our talk lasted more than an hour and was most unpleasant. President Carter...and even more so Mondale, launched charge after charge against Israel."

In fact, Dayan added, Mondale could barely restrain himself: "Whenever the president showed signs of calming down and holding an even-tempered dialogue, Mondale jumped in with fresh complaints which disrupted the talk."

Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, was never shy about his affinity for Jews and Israel, which went back decades. The Nazi death-camp newsreels he viewed at the end of World War II had an especially profound effect. "From then on," he stated on more than one occasion, "I was concerned for the Jewish people."

In his memoirs, Reagan declared, "I`ve believed many things in my life, but no conviction I`ve ever had has been stronger than my belief that the United States must ensure the survival of Israel."

Under Reagan, U.S. aid to Israel, both economic and military, rose to new heights, as did strategic cooperation between the two countries. Despite a series of policy disagreements between the Reagan administration and the governments of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli journalists Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman summed up the Reagan years as the "Solid Gold Era."

Once again, however, American Jews in 1984 (with the exception of several heavily Orthodox New York City neighborhoods) were above all else concerned with preserving abortion rights and keeping prayer out of public schools. Accordingly, seven out of 10 Jewish voters pulled the lever for Mondale, even as their fellow Americans were reelecting Reagan with landslide numbers, 59 percent to 40.6 percent, 49 states to 1.

The 1988 presidential election - unlike those of, say, 1972 and 1980 - was notable for its lack of sharp differentiation between the Republican and Democratic nominees on the issue of Israel and the Middle East.

For one thing, this was the first election since 1968 without an incumbent, so neither the Democratic candidate, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, nor his Republican counterpart, vice president George Bush, had a record on which to run. True, Bush had just spent eight years as second in command in an administration considered extremely friendly toward Israel, but any anecdotal evidence that leaked out during that period was not of the type to inspire confidence in him as someone with an instinctive appreciation of, and sensitivity to, the Jewish state. On Israel, as on much else, it was widely felt that Bush was no Reagan.

But Dukakis, who until he decided to run for president had given not the slightest indication that he had ever entertained a single thought about foreign policy, also was far from reassuring to the pro-Israel community. His speeches to Jewish groups raised more questions than they answered, and he seemed to view the world through the eyes of an unreconstructed McGovernite.

Dukakis, in sum, gave every impression that as president he`d be distrustful of American military power and even more fearful of using it. Not a good sign to Jews who had come to appreciate that the anti-military isolationism that defined the Democratic party in the 1970`s and 1980`s was far from being in the best interests of either the U.S. or Israel.

As noted above, it is rare for an appreciable number of American Jews to vote for a Republican presidential candidate even when the Republican is clearly more sympathetic to Israel than his Democratic opponent. It therefore came as no surprise that the returns on election night showed Bush being shellacked by Dukakis among Jewish voters, 73 percent to 27 percent, at the same time that he was easily defeating Dukakis in the country at large, 53.4 percent to 45.6 percent.

Amazingly, Bush over the next four years would find a way to squander much of his measly 1988 Jewish support. By the time the 1992 presidential campaign got under way, Bush -- who along with his secretary of state, James Baker, appeared to develop a bad case of gas at the mere mention of the word "Israel" -- had become hopelessly unpopular even with Jews normally not averse to voting Republican.

In fact, not since the Eisenhower years had relations between the U.S. and Israel been so lukewarm, and while Bush`s record on Israel was not as grim as some sought to portray it - the administration did succeed in getting the UN to rescind its infamous 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism - the close relationship and good feelings of the Reagan era were already distant memories.

Given the intense disappointment with Bush among supporters of Israel, it was hard to believe that it was just twelve years since Ronald Reagan won nearly four Jewish votes in 10 - a showing that triggered talk of widespread Jewish defections to Republican ranks - or four years since Bush himself had won 27 percent of the Jewish vote, a figure that now actually seemed quite large in light of Bush`s severely diminished standing in the Jewish community.

As it turned out, Bush lost almost half his Jewish support during his term in office, managing to hold on to just 15 percent of the Jewish vote in 1992. His Democratic challenger, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, won the backing of 78 percent of Jewish voters and Ross Perot, the loony billionaire third-party candidate, picked up the remaining 7 percent of the Jewish vote. Overall the numbers read: Clinton 43.3 percent, Bush 37.7 percent, Perot 19 percent.

Jewish voters gave Bill Clinton 78 percent of their votes in 1992 and again in 1996 - at the time the best showing by a presidential candidate among Jews since Hubert Humphrey won 81 percent of the Jewish vote in 1968 - and their love for Clinton never dimmed during the course of his tumultuous presidency.

It helped, of course, that the two Republicans against whom it was Clinton`s great fortune to run - President Bush Senior in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996 - were, in addition to being miserable campaigners, viewed by Jews in a less than sympathetic light.

But Clinton would have defeated Bush and Dole even if each had sworn to immediately move the White House to Jerusalem, for the simple reason that Israel has never been the determining factor in how most Jews vote. If it were the determining factor, Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1980 and 1984 would have received a far greater share of the Jewish vote than they did, and Clinton`s approval numbers among Jews at the end of his second term would have been appreciably lower than they were.

What made Clinton unique was that he did well, both in 1992 and 1996, with Orthodox Jewish voters, who in recent presidential elections had shown a proclivity for voting Republican due to their social conservatism and tendency to place the well-being of Israel at or near the top of their political agenda. No doubt at least some of that Orthodox support was attributable to the lack of Jewish affinity for Bush and Dole. But the truth is that a not inconsiderable number of Orthodox Jews found themselves to be just as susceptible as their secular brethren to the fatal Clinton Mystique.

They were impressed when Clinton pledged, at an appearance in Brooklyn during the 1992 campaign, that if elected he would install a glatt kosher kitchen in the White House as soon as he moved in. (Needless to say, when Clinton left Washington eight years later the White House still had no kosher kitchen, glatt or otherwise.)

They chuckled when Clinton, also during the 1992 campaign, sought to simultaneously ingratiate himself with New Yorkers and puncture their cultural prejudices by telling radio host Don Imus that the nickname "Bubba" was simply Southern for "mensch."

They liked the fact that he seemed to enjoy the company of Jews and appointed an unprecedented number of Jews to Cabinet and key administrative positions.

To their credit, though, large numbers of Orthodox Jews had begun to sour on Clinton by the middle of his second term, by which time it was no longer possible to pretend that his Mideast policies were not placing Israel in an increasingly untenable position.

Clinton`s apologists loved to bill him as "The Best Friend Israel Ever Had In The White House," but it was Clinton who befriended Yasser Arafat like no previous American president, having him over to the White House more than any other foreign leader. It was Clinton who crassly intervened in Israeli elections, not once but twice - unsuccessfully in 1996 when he tried to help Shimon Peres defeat Benjamin Netanyahu, and then with better luck three years later when he actually dispatched political operatives to help engineer Ehud Barak`s victory over Netanyahu.

Throughout his presidency Clinton relentlessly pushed Israel to make concessions for the sake of the "peace process," even as it became increasingly obvious that there was no real reciprocity on the other side.

And in perhaps the most disgusting display of moral equivalence ever attempted by an American president, Clinton, while on a visit to the West Bank, spoke in the same breath and sorrowful cadence of Israeli children orphaned by Palestinian terrorism - and Palestinian children whose terrorist fathers were either dead or in Israeli jails.

And yet there is every reason to believe that had Bill Clinton been on the ballot in the 2000 presidential election, American Jews would have voted in overwhelming numbers to return him to office for a third term.

With the possible exception of Orthodox voters, Jews were supportive of Clinton in a way they had not been of any American president since they paid collective and shameful obeisance to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Thirties and Forties.

To be sure, Clinton had his share of Orthodox supporters right through the end - including one prominent rabbi who appeared on the cover of The Jerusalem Report beaming like a bar mitzvah boy in Clinton`s embrace and who, even after Clinton left office in disgrace over his pardons of Marc Rich and other persons of dubious repute, continued to defend him in such venues as the Letters page of The New York Times.

But because Orthodox Jews are generally more hawkish on Israel than the American Jewish community as a whole, they were far more likely to sour on Clinton than other Jews.

For most American Jews, however, the Clinton approach to the Middle East was just fine by them. In fact, well before the Oslo accords and the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn that was supposed to herald a new age of peace between Arabs and Israelis, public opinion surveys had consistently shown a large majority of American Jews supporting negotiations with the PLO and the creation of a Palestinian state.

Given that reality, the Democratic candidate for president in 2000, Clinton`s faithful vice president Al Gore, was certain to win the Jewish vote by the overwhelming margin to which Democrats had long become accustomed. Even if Gore felt any misgivings about the way events were transpiring in the Middle East - and there is not the slightest indication that he did - he and his advisers were well aware that there was no political gain to be had from separating himself from the Clinton administration`s Middle East policy. Not when he was certain to receive at least two-thirds and probably more of the Jewish vote no matter what.

Sure enough, candidate Gore gave every indication that he intended to follow the Clinton approach of making nice to Yasser Arafat while ignoring the Palestinian Authority`s failure to abide by virtually every promise it had made at Oslo and afterward.

If there had been even the slimmest of chances that Gore`s Republican opponent, Texas Governor George W. Bush, could somehow capture more than a sliver of the Jewish vote, it was dashed when Gore, on the eve of the Democratic convention, chose Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, as his running mate.

The excitement of a Jew on a major party`s presidential ticket - of a Jew having a realistic chance of being a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States - swept through the Jewish community, causing even Jewish Republicans to reconsider their intentions. Gore`s surprise pick of Lieberman electrified American Jews and seemed to foreclose any possibility that George W. Bush would even approach the poor numbers put up among Jewish voters by his father in 1992 (15 percent) and Bob Dole in 1996 (16 percent).

As things turned out, the Lieberman selection failed to have a net positive effect among Jews. Bush got slightly more than 19 percent of the Jewish vote, an actual gain of three points from what the Dole-Kemp team had been able to muster four years before. Surprisingly to some, the Orthodox Lieberman ended up hurting Gore among the very group - Orthodox Jews - with whom he was most closely identified.

The trouble began for Lieberman when the website JewishWorldReview.com relentlessly publicized an appearance that Lieberman had made on the Don Imus radio show during which Lieberman joked about various Jewish practices and denied that Judaism banned intermarriage.

The Jewish Press featured the story on its front page, and Jewish World Review, in response to claims by the Gore campaign that Lieberman`s words had been taken out of context, posted a link to the audio clip of Lieberman`s remarks. Soon other questions began to be raised about Lieberman`s views, and then one day, seemingly out of the blue, the Lieberman camp released a statement informing journalists that Lieberman preferred to be referred to as an "observant" Jew as opposed to an Orthodox one.

Also troubling to many politically conservative Jews was Lieberman`s rush to disassociate himself from his long-held centrist positions. Within 48 hours of his selection by Gore, Lieberman met with various left-wing interest groups to pledge his newfound fealty and deny that he`d ever entertained so much as a moderate thought - it had all been a terrible misunderstanding, he whined to outfits like the Congressional Black Caucus.

In its editorial endorsing the Bush-Cheney ticket, The Jewish Press said of Lieberman, "Soon after he was selected as Mr. Gore`s running mate, [he] suddenly changed his stand on a whole host of matters...doubtless to bring them into line with those of the head of the ticket. Thus he became an advocate of affirmative action, gay rights and outreach to Louis Farrakhan. He no longer opposed late-term abortions and became more tolerant of Hollywood`s vulgar standards. And he became a staunch opponent of tuition vouchers."

Lieberman was far from the only problem The Jewish Press had with the Democrats; the newspaper had for years been sounding the alarm over the direction of the Clinton administration`s Middle East policy, and now the concern shifted to what the ramifications would be of a Gore presidency.

"The stark reality is that the Clinton policy of unswerving support for the Oslo process - despite the clear absence of reciprocity on the part of the Palestinians - has brought the Middle East to the brink of war," the paper warned.

In endorsing Bush, The Jewish Press stated its "fear that a Gore presidency would mean more of the same slavish obeisance to Oslo...This is not to suggest that Mr. Gore is anti-Israel, only that he seems ready to continue policies that have proven so disastrous."

We have touched in this report on some of the historical reasons usually given for the phenomenon: Immigrants falling under the sway of big city Democrat bosses and passing the legacy down to their children and grandchildren; left-wing movements, after first enticing Jews in Europe, gaining important footholds in the early 20th-century American Jewish community; Jewish Americans moving into professional fields (civil service, education, law) where voting Democrat was socially and culturally de rigueur; non-Orthodox movements within Judaism seizing on secular liberalism and confusing it with divine revelation.

We have also looked at how Jews have voted in presidential contests going back more than 80 years, noting the tedious predictability of the Jewish vote since the election of 1924 and how even when the choice comes down, as it did in 1972 and 1980, to a pro-Israel Republican versus a coolly indifferent or borderline hostile Democrat, most Jews have shown themselves to be constitutionally incapable of voting for the GOP.

But while each of the explanations we`ve cited may have its own degree of merit, and while taken together they may provide an interesting glimpse into the collective psyche of the American Jewish community, the Great Mystery of Jewish voting habits remains just that.

Some observers feel that George W. Bush -- who in his first three years as president has proved to be the most instinctively pro-Israel president ever -- is poised for an impressive showing among Jewish voters in 2004. Realistically, while Bush will no doubt receive a somewhat higher Jewish vote total than he did in 2000, history tells us that the Democratic candidate, whomever he may be, will score a decisive majority among American Jews.

The fact is, in the year 2003 -- seven decades after the New Deal and thirty years after the McGovernization of the Democratic party -- the American Jewish community, the most affluent subgroup in the country, still votes as if it's one step ahead of the bread lines and the evict notices.

Jason Maoz is senior editor of The Jewish Press. He can be reached at jmaoz@jewishpress.com

Franz Mehring

Karl Marx: The Story of His Life

Chapter One: EARLY YEARS

I. HOME AND SCHOOL

KARL HEINRICH MARX was born on the 5th of May, 1818, in Trier. Owing to the confusion and destruction amongst the official Registers in the Rhineland during the troubled times which prevailed at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, little is known with certainty about his antecedents. Even the year in which Heinrich Heine was born is still the subject of dispute.

With regard to Karl Marx, however, the situation is not quite so bad, for he was born in more peaceable times; but when a sister of his father died about fifty years ago leaving an invalid will, all the legal investigations to ascertain the lawful heirs were not able to discover the birth and death dates of her parents, that is to say, of the grandparents of Karl Marx. His grandfather was Marx Levi, but later on the Levi was dropped. This man was a Rabbi in Trier and is believed to have died in 1798. In any case, he was no longer alive in 1810, but his wife Eva Marx, nee Moses, was, and she is believed to have died in 1825.

This pair had numerous children and two of them, Samuel and Hirschel, devoted themselves to scholarly professions. Samuel, who was born in 1781 and died in 1829, became the successor of his father as Rabbi in Trier. Hirschel, the father of Karl Marx, was born in 1782. He studied jurisprudence and became an advocate in Trier. Later he became a Justizrat and in 1824 he adopted Christianity, taking the name Heinrich Marx. He died in 1838.

Heinrich Marx married a Dutch Jewess named Henrietta Pressburg whose genealogical tree showed, according to the statement of her granddaughter Eleanor Marx, a century-long line of Rabbis. Henrietta Pressburg died in 1863. Heinrich Marx and his wife Henrietta left a large family, but at the time of the testamentary investigations which provided us with these genealogical notes only four of the children were still alive: Karl Marx, Sophie the widow of an advocate named Schmalhausen in Mastricht, Emilie the wife of an engineer named Conrady in Trier, and Luise the wife of a merchant named Juta in Cape Town.

Thanks to his parents, whose marriage was an extremely happy one, Karl Marx, next to his sister Sophie the eldest child, enjoyed a cheerful and carefree youth. His "splendid natural gifts" awakened in his father the hope that they would one day be used in the service of humanity, whilst his mother declared him to be a child of fortune in whose hands everything would go well. However, Karl Marx was neither the son of his mother, like Goethe, nor the son of his father like Lessing and Schiller. With all her affectionate care for her husband and her children, Marx's mother was completely absorbed in her domestic affairs. All her life she spoke broken German and took no part in the intellectual struggles of her son, beyond perhaps wondering with a mother's regret what might have become of him had he taken the right path. In later years Karl Marx appears to have been on intimate terms with his maternal relatives in Holland, and in particular with his "uncle" Philips. He repeatedly refers in terms of great friendship to this "fine old boy" who proved helpful to him later on in the material troubles of his life.

Although Karl Marx's father died a few days after his son's twentieth birthday, he too seems to have observed with secret apprehension "the demon" in his favourite son. It was not the petty and fidgety anxiety of a parent for his son's career which troubled him, but rather the vague feeling that there was something as hard as granite in his son's character, something entirely foreign to his own yielding nature. As a Jew, a Rhinelander and a lawyer, he should have been thrice armed against the wiles of the East Elbian Junkers, but in fact Heinrich Marx was a Prussian patriot, though not in the wretched sense the term has to-day, but a Prussian patriot of the Waldeck and Ziegler type, saturated with bourgeois culture and having an honest belief in the "Old Fritzian" enlightenment, an "ideologue" of the type hated by Napoleon with good reason. Although the conqueror had given to the Rhenish Jews equality of civil rights and to the Rhineland itself the Code Napoleon, a jealously guarded treasure ceaselessly attacked by the Old-Prussian reaction, Marx's father hated Napoleon.

His belief in the "genius" of the Prussian monarchy was not even shaken by the fact that the Prussian government would have compelled him to change his religion in order to save his bourgeois position. This has often been cited, even by otherwise well-informed persons apparently for the purpose of justifying or at least excusing an action which requires neither justification nor excuse. Even considered from a purely religious standpoint, a man who acknowledged "a pure belief in God" with Locke, Leibnitz and Lessing no longer had any place in the synagogue and belonged rather in the fold of the Prussian State Church, in which at that time a tolerant rationalism prevailed, a so-called religion of reason which had left its mark even on the Prussian Censorship Edict of 1819.

At that time the renunciation of Judaism was not merely an act of religious emancipation, but also, and even more so, an act of social emancipation. The Jewish community as such had taken no part whatever in the great intellectual labours of the German thinkers and poets. The modest light of Moses Mendelssohn had vainly attempted to guide his "nation" into the intellectual life of Germany, and just at the time when Heinrich Marx decided to adopt Christianity a circle of young Jews in Berlin revived Mendelssohn's efforts only to meet with the same failure, although such men as Eduard Gans and Heinrich Heine were in their ranks. Gans, who was the helmsman of the venture, was the first to strike his flag and go over to Christianity. Heinrich Heine hurled a robust curse after him--"Gestern noch ein Held gewesen, ist man heute schon ein Schurke" [1] --but it was not long before Heine himself was compelled to follow his example and purchase "an entrance card into the community of European culture." Both Gans and Heine contributed their historic share to the intellectual labours of the century in Germany, whilst the names of their companions who remained loyal to the cultural development of Judaism have long since been forgotten.

Thus for many a decade the adoption of Christianity was an act of civilized progress for the freer spirits of Judaism, and the change of religion made by Heinrich Marx for himself and his family in 1824 must be understood in this sense and no other. It is possible that external circumstances determined the moment at which the change was made, but they were certainly not the cause. The breaking up of estates and farms by Jewish usurers took place on a growing scale during the agricultural crisis in the twenties and as a result it produced a violent wave of anti-Semitism in the Rhineland. In this situation it was not the duty of a man of irreproachable honesty like Marx's father to bear any share of this hatred and, having regard for his children, he would have had no right to do so. Perhaps the death of his mother, which occurred at about this time, freed him from considerations of filial piety, feelings which would have been in harmony with his whole character; or perhaps the fact that the eldest son came of school age the year the father changed his religion may have played a part in the final decision.

But whether this was the case or not, there can be no doubt that Heinrich Marx had attained that humanistic culture which freed him entirely from all Jewish prejudices, and he handed on this freedom to his son Karl as a valuable heritage. There is nothing in the numerous letters Heinrich Marx wrote to his student son which betrays a trace of any specifically Jewish traits, either good or bad. His letters are written in an old-fashioned fatherly, sentimental and rambling way and in the style prevailing in eighteenth century correspondence, when a true German gushed in love and blustered in anger. Without any trace of petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness the letters readily enter into the intellectual interests of the son whilst showing a decisive and thoroughly justifiable objection to the latter's hankerings after fame as a "common poetaster." But with all his delight in the thoughts of his son's future, the old man, with "his hair blanched and his spirit a little subdued," cannot quite rid himself of the idea that perhaps his son's heart is not as great as his brain and that perhaps it will not find room enough for those mundane but milder feelings which are so very consoling in this human vale of tears.

Karl Marx Bio

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