Jennifer Siegel

Jennifer Siegel of the Forward has turned in another fine piece of reporting, this on the fact that Republicans count their Jewish vote in the recent election at 26 percent, while the Associated Press puts it at half that, 13 percent. Siegel shows that the Republican statisticians define Jewishness with a high bar: synagogue attendance. By leaving out the unaffiliated or the secularized, Republicans are able to contend that they are gaining Jewish numbers.

Myself I think there's something to the Republican argument. The more religious you are, the more conservative your politics tend to be. The more unaffiliated and assimilated you are, the more leftleaning. And though I'm for a big tent in terms of Jewishness, the Republican argument does touch on a significant divide: the extent to which conservative, religiously-identified Jews dominate Jewish organizational life, and the policy positions the organizations endorse. (C.f., Palestine, the Occupation; and its sequel, Iraq, the Occupation)

Jennifer Siegel in The Forward has been doing excellent reporting on the extent to which Republicans are fighting the Democratic Party for Jewish votes by questioning the Dems' support for Israel. This theme is alive in our partisan politics right now: Joe Lieberman left the Democrats in part because of the issue and now questions whether Ned Lamont is "strong" on Israel. Bill Clinton's recent appeal to Democratic dollars conspicuously says nothing about Iraq, as I reported the other day. Siegel says that the Republicans are using Cindy Sheehan and Jimmy Carter's images to tar the Democrats among Jews. I.e., being against the war and for an equitable peace in the Middle East are not in Jewish voters' interests.

This trend is fascinating for a few reasons. A, It is further evidence that the body of Jewish opinion is shifting to the right politically. I think this is partly a class issue. Jews are, overwhelmingly, privileged; and privilege tends to vote right. B, It suggests that, imshallah, the Israel issue may at last openly enter American politics, outside the pages of the Sun and the Forward and NYLRB, and Americans may get to choose; C, It is implicitly a gauntlet to Jewish Dems that being for stem cell research and abortion can no longer define the alpha and omega of the barricades of progressive politics, and D, therefore represents yet another challenge to the progressive tradition within U.S. Jewish life, symbolized by Schwerner and Goodman, to wake up and face the regressive policies they are tacitly endorsing in the Middle East.

Or, as (the sometimes-great) Leonard Fein writes in the Forward, dismissing the Israeli right: "History has tricked Arabs and Jews, in Israel and across its nebulous boundaries, into cohabitation. That, for better or worse, is their common destiny." Amen. There really isn't that much distance between Fein's view and Tony Judt's.