'Blue' Jews Out Of Sync With America

By Gil Troy
The Jewish Week, November 12, 2004

The great 2004 campaign has triggered the even greater 2004 electoral hangover, especially in the “blue” states, where most America Jews live and with whom most American Jews identify. The New York Times — the bulletin board of the American elite and one of American Jewry’s primary megaphones — has led the sackcloth and ashes brigade. Following George W. Bush’s triumph, two op-ed essayists called the Bush campaign a “jihad.” Garry Wills pronounced the end of American enlightenment. Others questioned Republicans’ wisdom and integrity, while still others fretted over the fate of the republic itself.

Predictably, the fierce fight for the Jewish vote has provoked an equally fierce tug-of-war to define — and massage — the message embedded in the results. Continuing the scuffle over who supported Israel most enthusiastically, some Bushies have characterized the one in four Jews who voted Republican as Israel’s most committed supporters. Democrats countered by again noting John Kerry’s pro-Israel Senate record.

Divining the Jewish vote and Jewish attitudes is more art than science. Polling is sketchy, correlations and causations are cloudy. Still, the available data suggest that support for Israel did not divide the pro-Bush minority from the pro-Kerry Jewish majority. Surveying Ohio and Florida Jews, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz concluded that while 25 percent of Jews overall voted for Bush, 40 percent of weekly synagogue attendees voted for the president, and 69 percent of Orthodox Jews supported his re-election. By contrast, only 18 percent of Jews who rarely or never attend synagogue voted for Bush.

Just as "blue" America and "red" America reflect divergent theologies and clashing moral systems, Jewish America may be divided — albeit lopsidedly — within the “blue” between the liberal majority and a growing minority of Jews, mostly observant, who identify with moral issues and are increasingly alienated from mainstream society’s cosmopolitanism. These Jews are more terrified by liberal relativism and hedonism than by Christian messianism and moralism.

More than most Americans are willing to admit — and confounding predictions that the election would pivot on Iraq, the economy and terrorism — the 2004 campaign was about sex. Four decades after the sexual revolution began and nearly a quarter of a century after the Ronald Reagan-Moral Majority backlash, attitudes about sexual promiscuity, abortion and homosexuality remain polarizing and defining.

Most American Jews are not just "blue" Americans but true blue. Last year’s National Jewish Population Survey found that the average American Jew leads a more modern, less family-friendly lifestyle than the average American. Proportionally fewer Jews have ever been married, while Jewish women average fewer children than other American women.

More pointedly, a Hillel poll of entering college freshman two summers ago found the average Jewish student not just more liberal and libertarian than most, but also more libertine: 88 percent of Jews (compared to 52 percent of non-Jews) supported abortion; 49 percent of Jews (vs. 32 percent of non-Jews) backed marijuana legalization; and 69 percent of Jews (vs. 38 percent of non-Jews) approved of casual premarital sex. Moreover, the bulk of the Jewish population remains concentrated in large cities and in the Northeast, where attitudes about heterosexuality and homosexuality are more progressive.

By contrast, it is reasonable to speculate that the more Orthodox you are, and the more frequently you attend synagogue, the more family oriented and sexually conservative you are likely to be, no matter where in America you live.

In the simplistic hothouse of modern American politics, where “morality” is often shorthand for espousing traditional sexual mores, conservatives have cleverly seized what the liberals have foolishly ceded — the banners of morality and patriotism, as evidenced by the Republicans’ continuous success with the flag, the war, abortion and marriage.

This analysis suggests that with the Jewish vote — as with the broader population — the Republican strategy of targeting like-minded, traditionally oriented voters worked. Many of the voters mobilized for George Bush embraced his worldview more than his policies, his general stance rather than specific positions. Neither candidate won the “I love Israel more” sweepstakes; both were sufficiently pro-Israel to reassure their supporters and free them to vote as Americans, not just as Jews. (Luntz reported that only 20 percent of the “Bush Jews” attributed their support for the president to his support for the Jewish state; 55 percent actually pointed to his war on terrorism.)

This election was marked by the American people’s ongoing struggle to define a workable national sexual ethic amid the society’s sensual supermarket, with its seductions, confusion and diversity. That may explain the continuing intensity and Democratic despair. The reactions are visceral, personal; the worldviews feel mutually exclusive.

American Jews have to wonder, is the religious center imploding, are communal ties fraying, and are traditional and secular Jews as alienated from each other as Republicans and Democrats seem to be? n

Gil Troy, a native New Yorker, teaches American history at McGill University in Montreal. He is the author of “Why I Am A Zionist.” Special To The Jewish Week