Opinion
Despite it all, America’s Jews are still voting for the Democrats
The loyalty remains strong even though they tax them and use quotas to exclude their children from the best universities
June 29, 2023 11:51
2 min read
The loyalty remains strong even though they tax them and use quotas to exclude their children from the best universities
June 29, 2023 11:51Himmelfarb’s Law holds that “Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans”. This rather blunt observation was made in the late Sixties by Milton Himmelfarb, a first-generation neoconservative intellectual. It was true for decades, but it is not now.
Himmelfarb noted that Americans tended to vote by education and income. The better-educated and higher-earning they were, the more they voted Republican. The best-educated, highest-earning religious groups in America were Jews and Episcopalians (which is what Americans call Anglicans).
Milton Himmelfarb (Photo: Handout)
The Episcopalians voted with their class interest for Nixon. The Jews, notoriously, were the exception. They voted Democratic, as if they were still the poor and urban outsiders their grandparents had been.
As if, to put it indelicately, they were like the Puerto Ricans immigrants in New York who, as Leonard Bernstein wrote in West Side Story, lived “Twelve in a room in America”.
They don’t make Episcopalians like they used to. Since the 1960s, the liberal wing of Christianity, like the liberal wing of Judaism, has lost its religion and merged into the Democratic Party. The liberal Jews were already there.
So it would be more accurate to say that Episcopalians now earn and vote like liberal Jews. Both groups epitomise “gentry liberals”, which is a polite way of saying “limousine liberals” (which is what Americans call champagne socialists).
Nor are American Jews unique in voting Democrat even though the Democrats will tax them and use quotas to exclude their children from the best universities.
Poorer households backed Donald Trump (Photo: Getty Images)
