Earlier today, Monica Showalter wrote something that puts the lie to everything leftists and other pro-terrorism factions in America have been insisting. It turns out that the civilians in Gaza are not innocent victims of their own government’s terrorism who must be relieved of the burden of Israel’s war against Hamas. Instead, 75% of them support what happened in Israel on October 7. That is a staggering number in favor of an attack that killed almost 1,500 civilians, with a majority of those killed showing signs of having been tortured before or mutilated after death (including children). But what’s amazing is that almost the same proportion of American Jews—74%—still supports the Democrat party despite its being the party of American antisemitism. It turns out that American Jews are exactly as stupid as Gazastanians are evil.
It’s long been known that American Jews are avid fans of the Democrat party. Charles Fain Lehman has written a stellar essay explaining how wedded they are to the Democrat party and how they got that way. Regarding their fealty, the numbers are impressive:
American Jews, it should be emphasized, are remarkably liberal. In Pew’s 2020 survey of Jews, 71 percent identified as Democrats, versus 26 percent as Republicans. Half of Jews describe themselves as “liberal” compared with 16 percent “conservative” and the remainder “moderate.” By these proportions, Jews are more Democratic than Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims; they are more liberal than blacks. Jews are also more Democratic than those who earn as much as the average Jewish household does.
For these Democrat Jews, Judaism isn’t about the Torah (the first five books of the Bible, with God’s moral and ritual commandments); it’s about being in alignment with Democrat party values. How did Jews get this way?
Image by Andrea Widburg using an AI-generated image.
Lehman explains that the first big wave of Jewish immigration to America came in the mid-19th century. These were German Jews who brought reform Judaism with them. Their beliefs were a fusion of the Torah and “a move toward Enlightenment rationalism…” These Jews wanted to mirror Protestantism while maintaining their unique Jewish identity. As WASPs in America moved to progressivism, so did this upper class of German-American Jews.
From 1880 through 1920, a new type of Jew came to America: Refugees from Eastern Europe whom Tzarist pogroms had terribly victimized. Many of them were socialists because they operated on a simple algorithm: The Tzar hates Jews and controls wealth. Marxism opposes the Tzar and promises to free up wealth. Therefore, we are Marxists. These poor, deluded souls had no idea that Marx hated Jews every bit as much as the Tzar and his cohorts did and could not see that two socialist leaders—Hitler and Stalin—would take this hatred to heights never seen before.
Most immigrant Jews were not socialists. They were incredibly grateful to be in America, and they were strong patriots, but their values were infused with Germanic-Jewish progressivism and Russian-Jewish socialism.
Eventually, the most important factor driving Jews into the Democrat party was the Jewish love of education. Living in a free country, they were eventually able to push past the antisemitism of the Ivies and move into education. Writes Lehman:
Jews have long had what Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan referred to as “the passion for education”; in 1955, 62 percent of Jews of college age were in school, compared with 26 percent of the general population. For many years, Jews were barred from the nation’s best schools by secret admissions policies; when they were finally admitted, the schools were quickly filled with Jewish students. In other words, Jews rose to so many positions of prominence in the postwar order through individual academic merit and the overcoming of prejudice—the liberal ideal of social mobility.
As generation after generation of Jews went to college, they kept reinforcing the leftism that became the norm in academia after WWII, with each subsequent generation hewing more to the left.
What these Jews didn’t notice, writes Lehman, is that as others in academia moved left, they followed in the footsteps of Hitler and Stalin, embracing the one leftist ideology Jews eschewed: antisemitism.
So, there you have it: Jews have a historic and ever-growing affinity for leftism in America, while leftists have an increasing dislike for Jews. That dislike hit Jews like a thunderclap after October 7. How could the people whom Jews supported over the years—the blacks (linking arms during the Civil Rights movements), the feminists (remember Betty Friedan?), and the LGBTQ+ cohort—suddenly turn against them?
I belong to a pro-Israel, Democrat-run Facebook group and every member feels betrayed. For decades, they’ve been ignoring the rising antisemitism on the left and pretending that Tlaib and Omar were anomalies rather than the new heart of the party.
But for all the betrayal, America’s leftist Jews still live in a Manichean world, one that’s starkly either good or evil. And for them, Republicans are evil and Trump is Hitler, while Democrats are good (all antisemitic evidence to the contrary) and Biden is a good man who supports Israel (never mind the hundreds of millions of dollars made available to Iran, his mealy-mouthed support for Israel now, his anti-Israel policies, and his overall hostility to the tiny Jewish nation). And that’s how you get this:
A new survey from the non-partisan Jewish Electorate Institute found that 74% of Jewish voters approve of President Biden’s handling of the war between Israel and Hamas. The survey, conducted from November 5-9 by GBAO Strategies, measured the attitudes of the American Jewish electorate in response to Hamas’s attack on Israel, the threat of antisemitism, and their preferences for the 2024 presidential election.
Respondents compared President Biden with former President Trump, both in terms of their handling of antisemitism and in a hypothetical 2024 general election. By a 39-point margin, Jewish voters said they trust President Biden more than former President Trump to fight antisemitism. In a head-to-head matchup, 68% of Jewish voters say they would support President Biden over former President Trump who would have the support of only 22% of Jewish voters – an eight-point decline in Jewish voters’ support for Trump compared to a similar poll before the 2020 election.
Jews have a reputation for being smart. That poll puts the lie to the reputation. If you are a leftist Jew, your commitment to leftism means that you have made a deliberate decision to abandon intelligence in favor of mindless partisanship. As Robin Itzler often says to me, these are the Jews who are building their own cattle cars.