The question my non-Jewish friends and acquaintances have most often asked me about Jews is: Why are so many Jews Democrats? I’ve always answered as a Jewish conservative living among the Jewish Democratic majority. However, NewsNation’s Batya Ungar-Sargon offers an insider’s take in her new book, The Jews and the Left.
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Ungar-Sargon, who’s dubbed herself a MAGA lefty, notes, “Liberal Jews will tell you that being compassionate, welcoming the stranger, bestowing charity, and taking responsibility for the indigent are all values embedded in the Jewish tradition … and they are also held by Democrats.” She traces American Jews’ lopsided attachment to the Left through their active engagement in various chapters of American history, including the labor movement, the New Deal, World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement. (Full disclosure: Ungar-Sargon was an editor of my freelance contributions when I wrote for the Forward.)
For example, writing about the labor movement, Ungar-Sargon compellingly recounts the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, as well as Jewish contributions to improving American laborers’ working conditions in the early 20th century. This reflects Ungar-Sargon’s admirable personal concern for the American working class that prompted her support for President Donald Trump. Labor attachments surely inspired some number of American Jews to become Democrats, but this became less salient over time.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal subsequently cemented many Jews’ political loyalty for decades to come. Roosevelt’s handling of European Jewry both before and during the Holocaust is more contentious, though. Ungar-Sargon writes that “many blame President Franklin D. Roosevelt for hesitating” to save Jews, though she very generously defends the president by explaining his public silence about Jews “during the early years of German persecution” as protecting them from “even worse discrimination” and believing that winning militarily would best help them. The dispute, then, isn’t about whether Roosevelt’s priorities were elsewhere — they were — but whether his approach was wise and morally defensible.
Ungar-Sargon believes Roosevelt “was better than any alternative would have been” for Jews. However, her book offers a striking counterpoint in then-Missouri Sen. Harry Truman, who participated in “a mass protest in Chicago in which he denounced the atrocities specifically against the Jews.” Comparisons to women in Roosevelt’s orbit are also unflattering to FDR. His wife, Eleanor, “twice devoted her syndicated column to the persecution of the Jews,” and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins “took on the restrictionists in the State Department repeatedly — often bitterly. In one phone call, she blasted the department over its refusal to grant Jewish refugees visas.” In hindsight, Roosevelt’s repeated inaction and unwillingness to meet with concerned Orthodox rabbis looks like a forerunner of contemporary Democratic politicians offering Jewish voters reassuring words that are rarely, if ever, backed by meaningful actions.
Ungar-Sargon also tells the story of “three zealous Christians” working at the Treasury Department who were disgusted to discover that the State Department was delaying “funding to save” French and Romanian Jews. This revelation fueled the creation of the War Refugee Board, which “would remove the work of saving Jews from the antisemitic State Department.” Those three Christians’ efforts helped save 200,000 lives, and they are clearly worth applauding.
Ungar-Sargon then turns to the Civil Rights Movement, which reaffirmed Jews’ Democratic affiliation. For Jewish field workers from the north, who’d grown up economically comfortable, “the movement gave meaning to lives made sterile by that privilege.” Meanwhile, for participating Jewish leaders, this activism “gave them a unique sense of self, a way of refusing to assimilate without committing to” Jewish practice. It was an opportunity for Jews to help fellow Americans gain “the freedoms and equality Jews enjoyed here.” Many Jews’ sense of kinship with black Americans has persisted into the present day.
Surprisingly, there is no chapter dealing with the women’s liberation movement. As Brandeis University professor emerita Joyce Antler explained on the Jewish Women’s Archive website, “In the early and mid-1960s, Jewish women — including Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and Letty Cottin Pogrebin — helped to launch second-wave feminism. Many younger Jewish women pioneered radical feminism later in the decade. In some women’s liberation collectives, as many as two-thirds to three-quarters of members were Jewish.”
Feminism and legal access to abortion have kept many Jews, especially Jewish women, tightly tied to Democrats for decades. In 2023, the Public Religion Research Institute reported that 81% of American Jews “say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.” Only Unitarian Universalists were more uniformly pro-choice at 93%.
Ungar-Sargon rightly recognizes the Six-Day War as a turning point, when Israel’s stunning victory transformed it from left-wing darling to left-wing villain. Since 1967, universities, legacy media, activist organizations, and other left-wing institutions have increasingly turned on Israel and its Jewish supporters. Yet, the majority of Jews remain Democrats. What makes so many Jews stay, even as anti-Zionism — that is, Left-coded Jew-hatred — has become a litmus test for Democrats?
As Ungar-Sargon references, there is a mistaken belief among too many Jewish Democrats (predating any podcasters) that the Right is widely antisemitic. That makes jumping ship look unappealing. But there are also other reasons Jewish Democrats want to stay put, as Ungar-Sargon explains:
“To the urban cosmopolitans who define the culture of educated Americans, being a conservative or — God forbid — a Republican is and always has been repulsive. For liberal American Jews alienated from the religion of their forefathers, abandoning the Left would have been tantamount to abandoning their Jewishness. To be a Jew was to be a Democrat and a progressive, someone deeply invested in the paternalistic, government-mandated empathic redistribution of resources and emotions, even or perhaps especially when those redistributions came at the expense of your own community.”
THE LONG HISTORY OF LEFT-WING ANTISEMITISM
Given this state of affairs, to acknowledge that the relationship between Jews and a sizable chunk of the Democratic coalition has soured can be hard. To further abandon an association long central to one’s identity can be painful. Still, outsiders may be found wondering why Jewish Democrats want to belong to a club that’s not particularly interested in keeping them as members.
Regardless of Jews’ future relationship with the Left (or Right), Ungar-Sargon wants readers to understand that Jews are an integral part of the American story. And as part of this book-length love letter to America on its 250th birthday, she wants American Jews to remember how blessed they are to be Americans. Ungar-Sargon acknowledges that resurgent Jew-hatred has reared its ugly head, but she is primarily focused on the positive: Here, Jews have nearly four centuries of deep roots, could be “founding partners,” and could enjoy religious freedom without “nullifying their Jewish identity.” That in itself is historically remarkable, worth celebrating, and worth fighting to preserve.
Melissa Langsam Braunstein (@slowhoneybee) is an independent writer in metropolitan Washington.
