America's Jewish Community Deeply Divided Over Politics

By Henry Srebrnik [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Out of the 14.5 million Jewish people now in the world, 47 per cent reside in Israel. Its Jewish population is 6,841,000. It is the only country with a Jewish majority.

American Jews, at 5,700,000 make up almost 40 per cent of world Jewry, but these numbers continue to show a slow downward trend, due, among the non-Orthodox, to low birth rates, marriages with non-Jews, and assimilation. They comprise just two per cent of the American population.

The majority of Americans, living in a liberal state based on a civic form of nationhood, view states founded on ethnicity and religion as discriminatory forms of political organization.

But ethnic democracies like Israel don’t assimilate, homogenize or try to enforce the neutrality of the public domain. They are particularistic rather than universalist, and embrace the mores and values of a specific culture. Ethnic democracies grant rights to all citizens, but only insofar as those rights don’t interfere with the goal of self-determination for the dominant group.

Today, most American Jews are already secular people, who know little about “real, existing Judaism” -- that is, a knowledge of the theology and liturgy, the ability to read Hebrew (or Yiddish), and so forth.

They have converted to the liberal American creed, and it certainly takes precedence over any lingering attachment to an Israel that is increasingly seen as an ethnocracy with even elements of “theocracy.”

So Jewish Americans are splitting between two camps: less religious “universalistic” Jews who are far less interested in, or even skeptical about, Israeli political issues and “tribal” Orthodox Jews who align more with the Jewish state.

The two groups are now dramatically diverging. The nonpartisan AP VoteCast Survey of the 2020 national electorate, conducted over several days before Nov. 3, and continuing until the polls closed, included interviews with more than 110,000 people across the U.S.

(The survey was conducted online and via telephone. The margin of error was 0.6 percentage points for voters and 0.9 percentage points for non-voters, 19 times out of 20.)

AP VoteCast found that of the three per cent of the electorate that was Jewish, 68 per cent voted for Joe Biden, and 30 per cent for Donald Trump. And the two groups are dramatically split by degree of religious observance and attitudes towards Israel and Zionism.

The former care primarily about issues in American society, like immigration, health care, or human rights, while the latter pray for the coming of the Messiah to lead Jews back to the Holy Land.

Jonathan Tobin, editor in chief of the Jewish News Syndicate noted that the 2020 campaign made us realize “that the talk of two distinct warring American Jewish tribes, that neither understand nor want much to do with each other, is not a metaphor. It is a harsh reality.”

Jews constitute some of Trump’s fiercest opponents – and his most fervent supporters. Many on the left laboured for his defeat,  while those on the right thought he was not just worthy of re-election but also Israel’s best friend. In numerous Jewish neighbourhoods across America, friends and even relatives have stopped speaking to each other.

But even those liberal Biden voters might be surprised to learn that the price of their own well-being in America might one day be to give up their support, however lukewarm, for Israel and Zionism – that is, Jewish self-determination -- altogether.

The rise of a certain kind of progressivism in some corners of the left, including among the radical members in the Democratic Congressional caucus, seeks to make support for Israel a political and moral sin, linking it, however speciously, to the evils of racism. They are committed to the view that Jews are white, and that the Jewish state is an expression of “white supremacy.”

The rise of the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in colleges and elsewhere does not bode well. Its advocates consider racism inherent in the Jewish “ethnostate” and the ideology that birthed it.

It will be increasingly difficult for most Jews in America to withstand this zeitgeist shift in their social milieu. So other than the self-contained Orthodox, it is conceivable that most secular liberal Jewish Americans will eventually be assimilated into the larger culture, and this divide will wither away. Their grandchildren won’t care, and maybe won’t even know, that they are of Jewish descent.