In what may be an urban legend, a rabbi with a luxurious beard is said to have sat on the left side in the Frankfurt Assembly during the Revolution of 1848. Asked why, he replied: “Because Jews have no right.”
Although the identification with the left first appeared among post-emancipation European Jewry, it has fully blossomed in the U.S. The attraction of Jews to the Popular Front’s “Communism is 20th-Century Americanism” ideology was a passing phase, but their love affair with the Democratic Party’s liberal ideology — from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal to Adlai Stevenson’s ethereal creed, from John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society to Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale and from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama is enduring. Around 80 percent of Jews voted for Obama in 2008 and 70 percent in 2012. Only in 1980 — in the three-cornered Ronald Reagan/Jimmy Carter/John Anderson race — did their loyalties falter slightly, with enough Orthodox Jewish voters in New York defecting to Reagan to perhaps give him the state.
Specific historical events cemented the Jewish-liberal Democratic love affair. As early as the 1920s, Al Smith, the first Catholic to run for president, became a symbol of their aspirations for Jews as well as other urban minorities. FDR — whom Rabbi Stephen S. Wise called simply “Boss” — became symbolically “the man who ended the Depression and won the war” (though not averting the Holocaust). Stylish, thoughtful JFK became a role model for second- and third-generation Jews just entering academe on a fast track. Milton Gordon in “Assimilation in American Life” (1964) argued that the mythical “American melting pot” had succeeded nowhere except on American college campuses, where Jews and Catholics and (to use the term used then) Negroes interacted without constraint or prejudice.
Ironically, not JFK but LBJ presided over the real coming-of-age of modern Jewish liberalism — its stormy rite of passage in the civil rights movement when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel jointly marched for freedom at Selma with Heschel declaring, “The Exodus is far from over.” This is really when, as Milton Himmelfarb is reputed to have put it, “Jews earned like Episcopalians but voted like Puerto Ricans.” The recent resignation of a New York rabbi with impeccable liberal credentials so that he can practice his true calling as an anti-poverty bureaucrat directly, without any further attention to religious ritual, would seem one possible conclusion for this creed.
Jews for a generation or more believed that welfare state liberalism was just Judaism-at-the-polls in somewhat the same way that the Anglican church was once called “the Tory Party at prayer.” Ostensibly, ever since the prophets, if not before, Judaism was synonymous with the helping hand for both the neighbor and the stranger. The theology behind the Jewish-liberal synthesis was usually exceedingly thin and hard to reconcile with the visceral conservatism of the talmudic rabbis who warned, “Never pray for a new king.” On the other hand, Eric Nelson’s recent provocative book, “The Hebrew Republic” (2010), has taken notions once limited to Jewish filiopietists — for example, that the Hebrew Bible inspired the American Founding Fathers — and expanded them into a learned argument that Protestant Hebrewphiles in the 17th and 18th centuries did indeed find in the Jewish Scriptures confirmation of their faith in republican government, religious tolerance and even redistribution of wealth.
Despite the tensions with segments of the Jewish community over Mideast policy, Obama still enjoys a continuing consensual union with American Jews, if no longer quite a love match. Without “progressive” Jews (who usually share his dislike for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) such as David Plouffe, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and Penny Pritzker, it’s hard to imagine Obama having become president.
Repeated predictions, ever since Reagan, that such developments as the rise of Jewish neocon intellectuals anticipated a rightward shift for Jewish voters, have turned out to be the dog that just won’t bark.
Yet having said this, all is not well with Jewish liberalism, especially on American college campuses. How times have changed from the academic melting pots celebrated by Gordon to today’s campus crucibles of polarizing “identity politics” where even students belonging to J Street U feel on the defensive and needing to make common cause with more straightforward defenders of Israel because of the excesses of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that seems to be as obsessed with “outing” young Jews as “Zionists” as was Joe McCarthy in ferreting out secret communists. Paralleling this are demands that Jewish students — including even the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors —“check their white privilege.” The further upswelling in racial and identity politics following recent events in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island, N.Y., will no doubt accelerate this trend.
Liberalism underwent a significant evolution — from its 19th-century laissez-faire incarnation to 20th-century welfare statism to which generations of Jewish immigrants and their children came to feel at home. In the 21st century, it appears to be mutating again — with an emphasis on “identity” politics along racial, religious and gender lines. The question is whether there is room for Jews under the big tent of this “new progressive” liberalism. Some old-fashioned liberals would question even whether the word “liberal” still applies.
As liberalism changes, American Jews are going to have to make some choices. America is becoming a multiracial — even “post-white” society — in which, as currently in California, there will be a majority of minorities in a generation. During the 20th century, at the same time that Jews “became white folks,” they tended to become more — not less — liberal and tolerant, as I argue in my new book with Ephraim Isaac, contrary to Karen Brodkin’s interpretive camp. Now, at least some American Jews are taking a cue from Jews of color by redefining themselves in a way that “Jew” and “white” will no longer be taken as synonymous, the way they have been for almost 100 years. Will a new norm emerge and, at the end of the process, will “Jew” and “liberal” still be taken as synonymous?
Much less dramatic but maybe of equal long-term significance, American-Jewish liberalism is losing its intellectual élan. The recent trashing of the 100-year-old New Republic by “new media” tycoon Chris Hughes — with all the respect for journalistic integrity of Orson Welles’ Charles Foster Kane — is being rightly treated as a political and intellectual tragedy for American liberalism, but those most affected are strangely reluctant to admit that it’s specifically a tragedy for American-Jewish liberalism, whose banner was carried so long and so well by Martin Peretz and Leon Wieseltier. Walter Lippmann and Walter Weyl, young progressive Jewish intellectuals, were among the founders of The New Republic. Peretz and Wieseltier — not sufficiently left for today’s new “progressives” — were its reluctant gravediggers.
Fantasies of an America without Jews (except for a few Orthodox) are not going to come to pass. But an eventual future without a vibrant Jewish intellectual subculture, wedded to liberalism, is a real possibility.
Harold Brackman is a historian and consultant to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
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