by Mik Moore Every four years, American Jews join their fellow citizens in watching a competition full of pageantry, pomp, and politics. Then, two months after the final medal is awarded at the Summer Olympics, we choose our president. While election outcomes can be difficult to predict, the Jewish vote is remarkably stable. Each presidential candidate begins with a solid base of support. Twenty percent of Jews line up with the Republican candidate, 60 percent with the Democratic candidate. About 20 percent are uncommitted to a particular party. When the two parties compete for Jewish support, they aren’t only targeting the 20 percent of Jewish swing voters. At only about 2 percent of the population, Jews do not make a significant difference at the ballot box. But our impact is critical: … Continue Reading
The Jewish Vote in Presidential Elections
by Jonathan D. Sarna “The Jews ... are numerous enough to defeat our ticket,” the editor of the Chicago Tribune warned in a private letter to an Illinois Congressman. The year was 1868 and Republicans worried that Jews would punish Ulysses S. Grant at the ballot box. Six years earlier, Grant had issued his infamous General Orders No. 11 expelling “Jews as a class” from his war zone for alleged violations of rules against smuggling. Although Abraham Lincoln had overturned that order, many Jews had neither forgotten nor forgiven the general. An anonymous pamphlet signed “A Jew” promised that “every Jew ... will endeavor to defeat and with God’s blessing will defeat you.” The 1868 election was the first presidential campaign to focus widespread national attention on the Jewish … Continue Reading
A Consistent Jewish Vote for 60 Years
Stunning Stability: A Consistent Jewish Vote for 60 Years by Kenneth D. Wald In 1948, two social scientists published the first scholarly study of religious group voting patterns in the United States. According to the authors, Catholics, Jews, and Baptists were Democratic by margins of two to one or better. Five denominations that we would classify as mainline Protestants were Republican by equally lopsided ratios. Although the authors did not report on black Protestants, most of whom were still forbidden to vote by Jim Crow laws, data collected at the time showed African-Americans evenly split in loyalty between the two parties. Sixty years later, the exit polls from 2008 show that almost nothing is the same. Baptists have swung across the spectrum; they and their fellow Evangelical … Continue Reading
Latest Numbers Released on U.S. Jewish Population
The North American Jewish Data Bank has released their latest estimates of the U.S. Jewish population (6,588,000). Looking in depth at several communities, the report includes comparison figures on number of families synagogue affiliated (by stream), numbers on Jewish education and numbers donating to the local federation compared to 2000. The complete report, Jewish Population in the United States 2011, is available for download. … Continue Reading
Why did American Jews Overreact to a Clever Critique of American Assimilation?
by Gil Troy American Jewry is furious. Israel-Diaspora relations are endangered. Israel’s Prime Minister is apologizing. And why? Because the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption’s campaign inviting expatriate Israelis back home, suggested, shock of shocks, that there is widespread assimilation in America, so much so that Christmas sometimes trumps Chanukkah, especially for kids; that living in English shifts your linguistic orientation away from Hebrew; and that an American might not immediately realize a girlfriend’s candle-lit apartment on Israel’s Memorial Day sets the mood for mourning not snogging. Before I lose all my American friends, let me acknowledge. Yes, the 30-second commercials were simplistic and heavy-handed. But what effective advertisement isn’t? Yes, it is awkward … Continue Reading
How Many Russian Jews Live in the U.S.?
by Paul Berger They make up about 10% of the American Jewish community, but no one is entirely sure how many Russian-speaking Jews there are in the United States. At a recent conference at Harvard University, the answer fluctuated from as high as 750,000 people to fewer than 500,000, depending on which expert took the podium. Sam Kliger of the American Jewish Committee gave the high estimate of 750,000, a figure that was subsequently endorsed by Leonard Saxe, Brandeis University’s Klutznick professor of contemporary Jewish studies. “By any account, the number of Russian-speaking Jews in the United States now probably exceeds those of Russia and Ukraine combined,” said Kliger, a sociologist who is director of Russian community affairs at AJC. “New York today is populated by more … Continue Reading
Is Jewish Identity in America Half Full or Half Empty?
by James Hyman A recent study by the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University found that there are over 6 million people who self identify as Jews in the United States. This is a lot more than we would have predicted there would be in 2011 thirty years ago. But we also know that their identity is thin, in the sense that they don't know very much about their heritage. They also don’t connect to the institutional Jewish community very much, so we call them “unaffiliated.” By that we mean that they don’t pay membership dues, or tuition, or make donations, to Jewish communal institutions. Why are so many drifting away from the institutional Jewish community? There are as many theories as there are Jewish professionals: poor quality education, not enough talented … Continue Reading
Who Are American Jews?
by Leonard Saxe As Jewish traditions go, conducting a decennial National Jewish Population Study under the auspices of the federation movement has a very short history, and it was broken when the Jewish Federations of North America decided not to support a 2010 study. For researchers, the absence of support for a study reflects the weakened state of the national Jewish polity and a lack of commitment to using systematic data. For leaders of the federation movement, the decision reflects frustration with what they perceive as quarrelsome researchers who can’t agree on whether American Jewry is flourishing or withering. More than 60 of these researchers and policy professionals gathered last week at Brandeis University for an extraordinarily open and productive discussion of how to study … Continue Reading
The 2011 Forward 50
Jane Eisner writing in The Jewish Daily Forward: Celebrate the 50 The Forward 50 is a snapshot in time, an impressionist picture of the American Jewish story during a given year. But because it’s an annual project, we also can discern subtle transformations in leadership and community over time. The Forward journalists who assemble this list pride ourselves on searching beyond the expected names and faces to elevate the impactful work of American Jews in arenas that might seem surprising. The baseball field. The concert hall. The scientific laboratory. The refugee camp. This year, the center of gravity in Jewish leadership shifted away from the conventional national lobbying groups and communal organizations and toward more innovative expressions of Jewish life. The culture category again … Continue Reading
The Innovation Sector and the Synagogue
by Ramie Arian Many who are concerned with the continued vibrancy of the Jewish community in North America will be heartened by the recent release of the 2011-12 version of Slingshot’s Resource Guide for Jewish Innovation. The Slingshot Guide highlights 60 innovative organizations - in the words of eJewishPhilanthropy.com - “that work to ensure that Jewish life isn’t left behind as the world moves forward.” Indeed, the Guide presents a rich array of exciting projects that span the diversity of the Jewish community, putting forward an inspiring portrait of the so-called “innovation sector” in Jewish life. Among the Slingshot Guide’s many notable features, one in particular stands out: the near-total absence of any mention of the synagogue. The synagogue has long been - and … Continue Reading
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