Liberals Forever?

Milton Himmelfarb’s epigram that “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans” has the virtue of being true as well as funny. It also expresses an interesting paradox. In the history of the American republic, immigrant groups have tended to vote consistently with their interests, and move rightward with affluence. But Jews are an exception. While they have moved from poverty to wealth, and from subsistence at the margins of American society to distinction and influence far out of proportion to their numbers, they remain steadfast in their loyalty to left politics and the Democratic party.

Of course, Himmelfarb’s famous phrase describes the paradox, but does not explain it. So it is up to Norman Podhoretz, who has spent much time pondering the position of American Jews, to diagnose what must seem a kind of social pathology: Why are Jews liberals? In the end, he offers a tentative explanation and professes some wonder at the phenomenon. But the argument is well worth hearing. This is a thoughtful and illuminating volume, and a compact social and political history of the Jews in the United States. It is also a succinct meditation–expressed, as no one should be shocked to discover, with style and energy–on politics as a measure of society, and on America as an ongoing experiment in democracy. Like the best works of this kind, Why Are Jews Liberals? is scarcely limited to one question.

To be sure, we are speaking here in broad generalities. Not all Jews are liberals, people vote the way they do for a variety of reasons, and every citizen has his own idea of self-interest. But the consistency with which Jews have identified with the left is a political fact of life, and very nearly impervious to changes in the status of Jews or the issues and personalities that confront voters.

In historical terms, as Podhoretz describes them, this is entirely comprehensible. The peculiar circumstances of Jewish life in Europe, and the forces which impelled the great majority of immigrants to seek refuge in 19th- and 20th-century America, taught them some early and indelible political lessons. Their civil adversaries, in the old country and new, were on the right; neither Protestants nor Roman Catholics were immune to anti-Semitism. But while the process of assimilation was, strictly speaking, swift and comprehensive for Jews, and the old social barriers breached in due course, the folk memory of oppression–instilled in experience spanning three millennia–remains strong.

To this might be added the religious dimension of Jewish liberalism, which Podhoretz acknowledges, and which is often invoked as a key to political loyalties. But religious doctrines of any kind are sufficiently elastic to explain all manner of politics. And Judaism is more than a set of religious beliefs. The self-consciousness of the Jews as a people, and as a people with a long and difficult corporate history, is not likely to be dispelled by the transitory issues of presidential politics.

Two existential factors are decisive as well. As Podhoretz explains, in one crucial decade in the mid-20th century, Jews faced fundamental questions of survival: first, in Hitler’s determination to exterminate the Jews of Europe (and presumably elsewhere, given the opportunity); and second, in the establishment of a Jewish state in the Middle East. Once again, Jewish loyalties are not difficult to explain: It was fascism which built Auschwitz; the principal American antagonists to Hitler (notably Franklin D. Roosevelt) were Democrats; and it was another Democratic president, Harry Truman, who defied his senior diplomatic counselors and recognized Israel at the moment when American recognition was most crucial.

Not everyone is bound to agree with Podhoretz about the central importance of Israel for Jewish voters: Very nearly all Jews are concerned about the security of Israel, and certain presidents have been more helpful than others to the Jewish state. Certainly Israel is an important factor for Jews when they cast a ballot. But Israeli policies can divide American Jews as much as Israelis; and Jews, like all voters, have a myriad of concerns–not least a lingering suspicion about evangelical Christianity, which they associate with the Republican party, and strong support for abortion rights.

The great value of Podhoretz’s study is not so much his enumeration of the many means by which Jews vote against their interests in a variety of bewildering ways–overlooking anti-Semitism on the left, for example, or rationalizing racial quotas–but in his notion that, in a secular environment, liberalism is itself a kind of religious faith which, in America, competes in its particulars with a fractured American Judaism. “To most American Jews,” he writes, “liberalism is not .  .  . merely a necessary component of Jewishness: it is the very essence of being a Jew.”

It is a startling insight, and Podhoretz clings to the hope that American Jews will someday awaken to its implications. They could not do better than to read and debate this brilliant, disarming, engaging work.

Philip Terzian, literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author of the forthcoming Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower and the American Century (Encounter).