The Foundations Of American Jewish Liberalism

Shows how American Jews developed a liberal political culture that has influenced their political priorities from the founding to today.

For over sixty years, Jews have ranked as the most liberal white ethnic group in American politics, figuring prominently in social reform campaigns ranging from the New Deal to the civil rights movement. Today many continue to defy stereotypes that link voting patterns to wealth. What explains this political behavior? Historians have attributed it mainly to religious beliefs, but Marc Dollinger discovered that this explanation fails to account for the entire American Jewish political experience. In this, the first synthetic treatment of Jewish liberalism and U.S. public policy from the 1930s to the mid-1970s, Dollinger identifies the drive for a more tolerant, pluralistic, and egalitarian nation with Jewish desires for inclusion in the larger non-Jewish society. The politics of acculturation, the process by which Jews championed unpopular social causes to ease their adaptation to American life, established them as the guardians of liberal America. But, according to Dollinger, it also erected barriers to Jewish liberal success. Faced with a conflict between liberal politics and their own acculturation, Jews almost always chose the latter. Few Jewish leaders, for example, condemned the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, and most southern Jews refused to join their northern co-religionists in public civil rights protests. When liberals advocated race-based affirmative action programs and busing to desegregate public schools, most Jews dissented. In chronicling the successes, limits, and failures of Jewish liberalism, Dollinger offers a nuanced yet wide-ranging political history, one intended for liberal activists, conservatives curious about the creation of neo-conservatism, and anyone interested in Jewish communal life.

This study aims to trace the relative importance of education, income, parents' politics, religiosity, and other major influences on Jews' political attitudes through direct comparison with non-Jews, distinguishing between black and white non-Jews. It aims to answer where Jews stood politically in 1988, in what areas and to what extent are Jews more liberal than other Americans, and how can this be explained - specifically to what extent do Jewish values and group interests, as understood by individual Jews, influence their political ideas. [BREAK]Questions considered included general identification along the liberal/conservative spectrum, approval of Ronald Reagan, support of the democratic party, attitudes towards Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson relating to perceptions of anti-semitism, preferences for presidential candidates (among Jesse Jackson, Mario Cuomo, Michael Dukakis, and George Bush Sr, impressions of liberal lobby groups, including the ACLU, NOW, Planned Parenthood, and the NAACP, affirmative action, social welfare programs, taxing and spending, church and state, abortion, pornography, homosexuality and 'gay rights', capital punishment, certain symbolic political issues like the confirmation battle over Robert Bork, and attitudes towards the Soviet Union and South Africa. The factors examined as an influence on views included 'political socialization' - parental politics, the role of regional concentration, education, income, and religiousity. Some reasons theorized for liberalism among Jews include: education has a disproportionately liberalizing effect on Jews, the fact that relatively fewer Jews are religious, and even for those who are religiousity is less associated with conservatism, self interest in terms of anti semitism, separation of church and state, and general tolerance for non-conformist behavior perhaps inspired by a sense of marginality. It concludes that Jewish liberalism is deeply tied to a sense of being a minority and not quite belonging lies at the heart of American Jewish identity.

When Jewish neoconservatives burst upon the political scene, many people were surprised. Conventional wisdom held that Jews were uniformly liberal. This book explodes the myth of a monolithic liberal Judaism. Michael Staub tells the story of the many fierce battles that raged in postwar America over what the authentically Jewish position ought to be on issues ranging from desegregation to Zionism, from Vietnam to gender relations, sexuality, and family life. Throughout the three decades after 1945, Michael Staub shows, American Jews debated the ways in which the political commitments of Jewish individuals and groups could or should be shaped by their Jewishness. Staub shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the liberal position was never the obvious winner in the contest. By the late 1960s left-wing Jews were often accused by their conservative counterparts of self-hatred or of being inadequately or improperly Jewish. They, in turn, insisted that right-wing Jews were deaf to the moral imperatives of both the Jewish prophetic tradition and Jewish historical experience, which obliged Jews to pursue social justice for the oppressed and the marginalized. Such declamations characterized disputes over a variety of topics: American anticommunism, activism on behalf of African American civil rights, imperatives of Jewish survival, Israel and Israeli-Palestinian relations, the 1960s counterculture, including the women's and gay and lesbian liberation movements, and the renaissance of Jewish ethnic pride and religious observance. Spanning these controversies, Staub presents not only a revelatory and clear-eyed prehistory of contemporary Jewish neoconservatism but also an important corrective to investigations of "identity politics" that have focused on interethnic contacts and conflicts while neglecting intraethnic ones. Revising standard assumptions about the timing of Holocaust awareness in postwar America, Staub charts how central arguments over the Holocaust's purported lessons were to intra-Jewish political conflict already in the first two decades after World War II. Revisiting forgotten artifacts of the postwar years, such as Jewish marriage manuals, satiric radical Zionist cartoons, and the 1970s sitcom about an intermarried couple entitled Bridget Loves Bernie, and incidents such as the firing of a Columbia University rabbi for supporting anti-Vietnam war protesters and the efforts of the Miami Beach Hotel Owners Association to cancel an African Methodist Episcopal Church convention, Torn at the Roots sheds new light on an era we thought we knew well.

How did Judaism, a religion so often defined by its minority status, attain equal footing in the trinity of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism that now dominates modern American religious life? THE AMERICANIZATION OF THE JEWS seeks out the effects of this evolution on both Jews in America and an America with Jews. Although English, French, and Dutch Jewries are usually considered the principal forerunners of modern Jewry, Jews have lived as long in North America as they have in post- medieval Britain and France and only sixty years less than in Amsterdam. As one of the four especially creative Jewish communities that has helped re-shape and re-formulate modern Judaism, American Judaism is the most complex and least understood. German Jewry is recognized for its contribution to modern Jewish theology and philosophy, Russian and Polish Jewry is known for its secular influence in literature, and Israel clearly offers Judaism a new stance as a homeland. But how does one capture the interplay between America and Judaism? Immigration to America meant that much of Judaism was discarded, and much was retained. Acculturation did not always lead to assimilation: Jewishness was honed as an independent variable in the motivations of many of its American adherents- -and has remained so, even though Jewish institutions, ideologies, and even Jewish values have been reshaped by America to such an degree that many Jews of the past might not recognize as Jewish some of what constitutes American Jewishness. This collection of essays explores the paradoxes that abound in the America/Judaism relationship, focusing on such specific issues as Jews and American politics in the twentieth century, the adaptation of Jewish religious life to the American environment, the contributions and impact of the women's movement, and commentaries on the Jewish future in America.

Uses extensive data to show that everything we think we know about the voting behavior of American Jews is wrong.

The sustained loyalty of the Jewish electorate to the Democratic Party while other ethnic voters cast their ballots elsewhere has long puzzled political pundits and chagrined Republican stalwarts. Efforts to turn the Jewish vote have thus far failed. The majority of Jewish voters continue to pull down the Democratic voting lever as if guided by some divine force. No Republican presidential candidate has won the Jewish vote since the election of Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. Since the heady years of the New Deal, Jewish liberalism has found shelter under the left wing of that party, and Jewish voters have become some of the most politically engaged citizens of the republic. American Jewish Political Culture and the Liberal Persuasion searches for the source of such political engagement, exploring the constantly adapting liberalism at the heart of American Jewish political behavior. Drawing on sociology and philosophy to inform his historical synthesis of a centuries-long, transcontinental pattern, Feingold eschews voting statistics and political theory. Instead, he tells the story of three overarching concerns that weave throughout the political priorities of contemporary American Jews: an ever-changing definition of liberalism, the hope and turmoil of Israel, and the obsession with the Holocaust. The resulting tapestry reveals a culture of great complexity and a political voice that often lacks coherence despite these consistent threads. American Jewish Political Culture and the Liberal Persuasion begins with the historical background of American Jewish politics before delving into old roots and then moving on to a thematic understanding of American Jewry’s political psyche. This exhaustive work answers the grand question of where American Jewish liberalism comes from and ultimately questions whether the communal motivations behind such beliefs are strong enough to withstand twenty-first-century America.