American Jews in politics
During the 20th and 21st centuries, the Republican Party has launched initiatives to persuade American Jews to support their political policies, with relatively little success.
Over the past century, Jews in Europe and the Americas have traditionally tended towards the political left, and played key roles in the birth of the labor movement as well as socialism.
Every major American city has its local "Jewish Federation", and many have sophisticated community centers and provide services, mainly health care-related.
In the election of 1976, Jewish voters supported the Democrat Jimmy Carter by 71% over the incumbent president Gerald Ford's 27%, but during the Carter re-election campaign of 1980, Jewish votes for the Democrat became relatively lower, with 45% support, with Republican election winner Ronald Reagan garnering 39%, and 14% going to the independent candidate John Anderson.
In a 2018 poll, 71% of American Jews disapproved of Donald Trump's job as president, with only 26% approving—being the lowest approving religious group among those surveyed.
Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism and married the Jewish real estate developer Jared Kushner.
The silence on this issue was probably a result of fear that the controversy would create conflict within the Jewish community due to its relative popularity at the time, though some Jews did come to play a role in the ending of slavery.
Seymour Siegel suggests that the historic struggle against prejudice faced by Jews led to a natural sympathy for any people confronting discrimination.
Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, stated the following when he spoke from the podium at the Lincoln Memorial during the famous March on Washington on August 28, 1963: "As Jews, we bring to this great demonstration, in which thousands of us proudly participate, a twofold experience - one of the spirit and one of our history ... From our Jewish historic experience of three and a half thousand years, we say: Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom.
[20] Similar tensions were aroused by the 1977 election of Menachem Begin and the rise of revisionist policies, the 1982 Lebanon War, and the continuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
At the same time, there is a significant Jewish presence in the pro-Palestinian movement, including Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler.
Although Jews are divided in their opinion of Trump's handling of the Israel–Palestine conflict,[28] polling data indicates that the vast majority of American Jews continue to support unconditional U.S. financial and military aid to Israel,[29] which is a fixture of the platforms of both major parties,[30][31] while various polling data indicate that most Americans would prefer to decrease or even halt military aid to Israel.
Although a Jewish-American lawyer named Jeffrey S. Helmreich has written that the ability of American Jews to affect this through political or financial clout is overestimated,[34] and that the primary influence lies in the group's voting patterns,[7] Jewish funding of presidential candidates for both parties is vastly disproportional to the number of Jews in the American population.
[7][41][42] A paper by Dr. Eric Uslaner of the University of Maryland disagrees, at least with regard to the 2004 election: "Only 15% of Jews said that Israel was a key voting issue.
[43] A New York Times article suggests that this movement of Jewish voters to the Republican party is focused heavily on faith-based issues, similar to the Catholic vote, which is credited for helping President Bush taking Florida in 2004.
[45] It has been suggested that running mate Sarah Palin's outspoken conservative views on social issues may have nudged Jews away from the McCain-Palin ticket.
[47] A 2007 survey of Conservative Jewish leaders and activists showed that an overwhelming majority now supports gay rabbinical ordination and same-sex marriage.
Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin's handshake with Yasir Arafat during the 13 September White House ceremony elicited dramatically opposed reactions among American Jews.
As one commentator put it, after a year of tension between Israel and the United States, "there was an audible sigh of relief from American and Jewish liberals.
Hidden deeper in this collective sense of relief was the hope that, following the peace with the Palestinians, Israel would transform itself into a Western-style liberal democracy, featuring a full separation between the state and religion.
Not accidentally, many of the leading advocates of Oslo, including Yossi Beilin, the then-Deputy Foreign Minister, cherish the belief that a "normalized" Israel would become less Jewish and more democratic.
For Jewish nationalists such as Morton Klein, the president of the Zionist organization of America, and Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, the peace treaty amounted to an appeasement of Palestinian terrorism.
They and others repeatedly warned that the newly established Palestinian Authority (PA) would pose a serious security threat to Israel.Abandoning any pretense of unity, both segments began to develop separate advocacy and lobbying organizations.
They tried to assure Congress that American Jewry was behind the Accord, and defended the efforts of the administration to help the fledgling Palestinian authority (PA), including promises of financial aid.
Working on the other side of the fence, a host of Orthodox groups, such as ZOA, Americans For a Safe Israel (AFSI), and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), launched a major public opinion campaign against Oslo.
With the community so strongly divided, AIPAC and the Presidents Conference, which was tasked with representing the national Jewish consensus, struggled to keep the increasingly shrill discourse civil.
Reflecting these tensions, Abraham Foxman from the Jewish Anti-Defamation League was forced by the conference to apologize for bad mouthing ZOA's Klein.
The Conference, which under its organizational guidelines was in charge of moderating communal discourse, reluctantly censured some Orthodox spokespeople for attacking Colette Avital, the labor-appointed Israel Council General in New York and an ardent supporter of the peace process.
Not only was the Israeli electorate divided on the Oslo accords, but so, too, was the American Jewish community, particularly at the leadership level and among the major New York and Washington-based public interest groups.
U.S. Jews opposed to Oslo teamed up with Israelis "who brought their domestic issues to Washington", and together they pursued a campaign that focused most of its attention on Congress and the aid program.
